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"Directionally correct" is doing an immense amount of work here. McCarthy didn't say "there are a bunch of communists scattered throughout America," he made extremely specific and entirely fabricated claims about the communist leanings of people he didn't like, often ruining their reputations and careers in the process.
He claimed that "he had come into possession of shocking new evidence that 205 members of the Communist Party were still working for the State Department, even though their names had been turned over to top government officials" - He never produced any such list and or other evidence and only continuing to fabricate more (again, extremely specific) claims about nonexistent evidence (including, four years later, just repeating this same claim).
He held up Eisenhower's administration nominations on charges as vacuous as James Conant, who had purged communists from Harvard but not "thoroughly enough," or Charles Bohen, a State Department diplomat who had worked in Russia, but after thorough investigation turned up that he had served America patriotically, McCarthy tried instead to destroy his career by implying that his brother was a homosexual. In this fashion he wielded much of his investigatory power merely for the sake of holding power over the Eisenhower administration, whether holding up his nominations, or publicly accusing him of being soft on communists (all the while Eisenhower was busy coup-ing any left of center government), or famously threatening to target the entire army unless McCarthy's cronies were given preferential treatment:
The broader consequences of McCarthyism were not small potatoes - many people's lives were genuinely ruined on completely empty charges driven by a power hungry man. Hundreds were imprisoned and some 15,000 federal employees were fired on amorphous charges of being "un-American," which frequently meant things like supporting unions or having hobbies that suggested "sexual perversion"; tens of thousands more went without pay while being cleared. Lists of subversive, "forbidden" books were created with libraries literally burning those books. A climate of fear festered and settled over the nation.
We talk a lot here about the illiberalism and the dogmatism of the modern woke left. If I pointed out the wave of modern idpol cancellations often targets innocent people based on exaggerated and hysterical claims, I wouldn't be satisfied if someone responded by saying: "well, we may have ruined innocent lives and careers but we were still directionally correct - the US is shot full of racists, and many throughout the country share these concerns".
Eisenhower could have at any point condemned McCarthy's excesses, even at the most basic level of standing up for his friends and fellow WW2 heroes. He avoided doing this not because he or the establishment thought there was credence to McCarthy's claims (he thought they were ridiculous and hated McCarthy) but because he was afraid of alienating the right flank of his party and hurting his chances in the election.
By doing what Eisenhower actually did - build state capacity to do actual casework investigating communist subversion instead of tolerating politically motivated public witch hunts.
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