This is a letter Hemingway wrote to Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950. It’s one of my favorite things, and I was looking for it online the other evening to quote it in an email and couldn’t find it. So I pulled out my copy of Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 and typed it up so that next time I will find it. (Half the typos are Hemingway’s, the other half are mine.)

Honorable Senator Joe McCarthy:

My dear Senator:

Quite a number of people are beginning to get tired of you and you have possibilities of becomeing a complete stranger. If you lost limbs or your head in the action in the Pacific everyone naturally would sympathize with you. But many people are merely bored since they have seen good fighters who had it in their time. Some of us have even seen the deads and counted them and counted the numbers of McCarthys. There were quite a lot but you were not one and I have never had the opportunity to count the numbers of your wounds and get any sort of reading on the comparison with how your mouth, repeat moth, get it straight mouth, goes off.

I know you were in a fine force and you must have been wounded really badly but Senator you certainly bore the bejeesus out of some tax-payers and this is an invitation to get it all out of your system. You can come down here and fight for free, without any publicity, with an old character like me who is fifty years old and weighs 209 and thinks you are a shit, Senator, and would knock you on your ass the best day you ever lived. It might be healthy for you and it would certainly be instructive.

So you are always welcome kid, and in case you have dog blood, which I suspect, don’t resort to sopoeanas (mis-spelled) but come on down all expenses paid and if you are a small Marine you can fight any of my kids and get a reputation. I have them that weigh from 152 to 186. You can fight any one. But afterwards me.

Good luck with the good part of your investigations and, if we can take off the part of the uniform you take when you go outside, and fornicate yourself. You would have a nice fight without witnesses and then you could tell it all.

Yours always

Ernest Hemingway

Actually I don’t think you have the guts to fight a rabbit; much less a man. Am old but would certainly love to take you quick. Or to see the kids take you slow and careful.

Yours always, and with great respect for your office

Ernest Hemingway