The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy

This lecture is being rescheduled due to Hurricane Ian

Wednesday, November 16 | 4:30pm | Auditorium

Larry Tye New York Times Bestselling Author

In this lecture, based on his recent book Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, Larry Tye goes in depth on how Senator Joe McCarthy learned from demagogues who came before and was the archetype for those who followed. Tye divulges the reason McCarthy’s family gave him the revealing trove of professional and personal papers that had been under lock and key for 60 years, and how his never-before-seen medical records offered a novel lens into how he lived and died.

About the Speaker

Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, released in 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In addition to his writing, Tye runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship, which helps the media do a better job reporting on critical issues like public health and pandemics, mental health and the health impacts of climate change, and racial, ethnic and gender disparities in health care. Launched in 2001 and supported by a series of foundations, the fellowship trains a dozen medical journalists a year from newspapers, radio stations, and TV outlets nationwide.

From 1986 to 2001, Tye was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe’s environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sportswriter. Before that, he was the environmental reporter at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, and covered government and business at The Anniston Star in Alabama.

Tye, who graduated from Brown University, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts.

He is now writing, for HarperCollins, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America.

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