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Two different groups with different agendas. The HUAC was devoted to rooting out actual communists (most famously Alger Hiss), fellow-travellers (like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles), and people protecting them (like Arthur Miller). McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.
Lumping them together discredited the work of the HUAC, it didn't rehabilitate McCarthy. After the Army-McCarthy hearings McCarthy's reputation is rightfully unsalvageable.
I'm aware.
McCarthy was, broadly speaking, utterly correct up until the Army hearings. Though frankly, the item at the Army hearings that imploded McCarthy's reputation was asking about an attorney in the office representing the Army's participation in the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG). That was what prompted the famous line "have you no decency?" The NLG was, according to a 1950 HUAC report, "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." While there are reasonable questions as to the control, or lack thereof, the Communist Party exerted on the NLG, the rebuttal to this report was delivered by NLG President of the Guild Professor Thomas Emerson, a self-described socialist. According to the NLG's own website the Communist Party "aided" in its formation, though the NLG maintains they preserved their independence. The NLG helped found the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which was a communist front. The NLG represented the Rosenbergs, who were Soviet spies, and the Hollywood 10, who were communists. A few decades later, the NLG was the primary source of funding for the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist group.
McCarthy was wrong about individual cases, granted. But his overarching point, that there was communist infiltration in the State Department? Completely accurate.
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