How to write the biography of a bad man? One who is bad in the popular conception, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, the vulpine interrogator whose hearings besmirched the reputations of countless innocent government employees and public figures? It is a difficult question.

McCarthy attacked foreign policy and military establishments, questioning the loyalty of no less than Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall. During a Senate hearing broadcast on national television, McCarthy’s smearing of a young lawyer as a communist or communist sympathizer provoked attorney Joseph Welch’s famous retort: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Richard Rovere’s “Senator Joe Mc-Carthy” (1959), appearing two years after McCarthy’s death, solidified the bad man myth; Thomas Reeves’s authoritative “The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy” (1982) succinctly dispatched the myth and called Rovere’s work “more rhetorical than factual … and greeted too warmly by the senator’s bitter enemies.” Dismissing McCarthy as a demagogue, Rovere treated the senator as a charlatan who did not believe in his own cause and was concerned only with personal power.

Mr. Reeves provided a more complete portrait of the man, one that did not excuse his recklessness, but gave it a context:

Equally important was Joe’s very real belief in the internal Communist conspiracy, a passion that prompted him to stump the country as he had once covered his judicial district and then his state.The often wild enthusiasm that greeted him at these public gatherings, reinforced by tons of mail, his staff, G.O.P. colleagues, the right-wing press, and the election returns of 1950 persuaded McCarthy that he was above the petty amenities that guided the conduct of his Senate colleagues. He had the truth and was giving it to the “real Americans.” The puny politicians and scribblers who attacked him were hindering his effectiveness and hurting the country; they were unworthy of polite treatment. No one could persuade him otherwise. All suggestions by staff members and friends that he be more courteous, relaxed, and cautious were sharply rebuffed.

This is history and biography of a high order, displacing Rovere’s Richard the III-like treatment.

In “Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of American’s Most Hated Senator” (2000), Arthur Herman built on Mr. Reeves; so that now, in “Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy” (Harcourt, 224 pages, $22), Tom Wicker repeatedly refers to Mr. Reeves’s as a “sympathetic biography.” Mr. Reeves’s sympathy comes through in passages that try to put McCarthyism in perspective, such as this one:

We need to remember that during the entire period, from 1947 to 1958, no American citizens were interrogated without benefit of legal counsel, no one was arrested or detained without due judicial process, and no one went to jail without trial. As George Kennan, no admirer of the investigations, stated: “Whoever could get his case before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of justice no smaller than at any time in recent American history.” … The best and most generous estimate is that during the entire decade of the red scare, ten thousand Americans lost their jobs because of their past or present affiliation with the Communist Party or one of its auxiliary organizations. Of those who lost their jobs, two thousand worked in the government, and in perhaps forty cases McCarthy himself was directly or indirectly responsible for their being fired.

Unfortunately, Messrs. Reeves and Herman have not made much impact on Mr. Wicker, who remains stuck in a Roverian time warp, fixated on that moment in January 1957 when Mr. Wicker himself, then a young reporter, accidentally met McCarthy, then on his way down after the Senate had censured him. The genial encounter has kept Mr. Wicker from ever considering, even for a moment, that the engaging man had sides to him beyond the amiable one of Mr. Wicker’s experience.

Put aside the debate about the merit of McCarthy’s investigations of communist subversion of governmental institutions, and consider the motivations of the man – always a prime concern of biography. In this, Mr. Wicker utterly fails to be faithful to the genre.

Mr. Wicker’s conjectures are the stuff of Roverian rhetoric: “On March 21 [1950], perhaps exhilarated by the commotion he had caused and his greater Senate acceptability, or maybe by a good fight, McCarthy made his boldest charge …” The “maybes” and “if sos” proliferate: “Did McCarthy consider it a cynical part of a cynical but successful anticommunist campaign, or did he believe what he was saying about Marshall? If so, he must have believed in most of his anticommunist pronouncements.”

After the work of Messrs. Reeves and Herman, what Joe McCarthy believed is no mystery. What is still at issue is why the senator was so erratic and out of control. Mr. Wicker mentions McCarthy’s heavy drinking but never integrates that aspect of his subject’s life into a narrative.

Mr. Herman, on the other hand, presents a convincing picture of a bipolar or manic-depressive personality, exacerbated by alcoholism. Such terms do not “excuse what McCarthy did or became,” Mr. Herman concludes,but they do “give some insight into why he did what he did and when he did it.” Psychologizing away human responsibility is to be avoided, Mr. Herman realizes, but with no psychology at all Mr. Wicker flounders in his conjectures without apparently recognizing the feebleness of his effort.

Why is Mr.Wicker’s biography, based entirely on secondary sources and a few firsthand experiences of his own, necessary? Most of it could have been written in the 1950s, without the benefit of previous biographies.

crollyson@nysun.com