What did Senator John F. Keenydy think of Joseph McCarthy before his fall from favor in 1957?

Answer 1

First of all, McCarthy's fall from favour occurred in 1954, with the vote to censure him; he died in 1957, still a Senator, but pretty much ruined long before then.

As the question, here's what I found on Wikipedia--

"Sen. Joseph McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family; Robert Kennedy worked on the staff of McCarthy's committee, and McCarthy dated Patricia Kennedy. In 1954, when the Senate was poised to condemn McCarthy, John Kennedy had a speech drafted calling for the censure of McCarthy but he never delivered it. When the Senate rendered its highly publicized decision to censure McCarthy on December 2, 1954, Senator Kennedy was in hospital and never indicated then or later how he would have voted. The episode seriously hurt Kennedy in the liberal community, especially with Eleanor Roosevelt, as late as the 1960 election."

Some sources I've seen state that Kennedy used his back surgery as a convenient excuse not to vote for the censure of McCarthy.