General Marshall
The Republicans have a very short memory as they continue to use the MOVEON "General Betrayus" add to attack Democrats. Back in June 1951 during the peak of the Korean War a war in which over 35,000 US Troops lost their lives extreme right wing GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Secretary of Defense 5-Star General George C. Marshall of "deliberate treason". He also claimed that General George Marshall had been a Communist Agent for the USSR since the 1930's and that he took orders directly from Moscow.
He ridiculously accused General Marshall of being responsible for the Communists taking over China and made quite a number of other false claims in his 3 hour speech delivered on the floor of the US Senate. Initially GOP Senators never condemned McCarthy for his mindless attack on General Marshall a man whose accomplishments dwarf anything General Petraeus has ever done or ever will do.
George Catlett Marshall was one of the great American statesmen of the century. He played a crucial role in international affairs from 1939 to 1951 -- the years that shaped the second half of the century. Until 1945, he was in the military service of the United States. As Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945 he was, in the words of Winston Churchill, the "true architect of victory" in the West European arena of World War II.
GOP Senator Joseph McCarthy asserted that both US Secretary of Defense General George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson were leaders of a of Communist conspiracy whose mission was to destroy the USA from within for its subjugation by the USSR.
Senator McCarthy stated that General Marshall sided with Russia by arguing for an Allied invasion of France to strike against the German forces from the west, rather than from the south of Europe. ( McCarthy failed to even mention the fact that we had also invaded Italy as well as the South of France which any fool with a map of Europe can easily figure out that both of these areas are located in Southern Europe)
GOP always wants to play the victim but what's scarier than that is that many of todays younger conservatives such as Ann Coulter seek to rewrite history and portray Senator McCarthy as a hero who was a victim instead of a demagogue. The facts are that since McCarthy was later proven correct in the 1990's on a mere handful of people out of the tens of thousands of innocent US citizens he had accused of being Communist agents Coulter and others of her ilk now want to make him into some type of a conservative martyr who was wrongly destroyed by the left. Hell he was just lucky on a few names and had no evidence on anybody. Furthermore they forget that after he accused the US Army of being a Communist organization and started naming GOP leaders as enemy red agents that his own party quickly abandoned him.