Yakim, I'm curious what profession your professor failed to achieve because of McCarthy? I read very few stories of those who lives were ruined. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places.

Still, the Venona papers which were released in the early 90s, while not justifying all tactics used to track down Soviet spies, do prove that there were Communist spies deep inside the US government.

http://www.nsa.gov/about/_files/cryptologic_heritage/publications/coldwar/venona_story.pdf

Documents from the former Soviet Union show that McCarthy was, indeed, correct that Soviets had infiltrated the US government, and that Alger Hiss actually a traitor. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol50no2/html_files/BK_Soviet_Espionage_8.htm