“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” – Joseph Welch, June 9, 1954
A few weeks after the conclusion of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, Joseph Welch, the Army’s lead lawyer in the compelling live drama consumed by millions of viewers via the relatively new medium of television, wrote in Life Magazine, “If you the reader, watched the hearings and found them a novel, startling and sometimes bewildering experience, you are pondering the words of a kindred soul.” Welch’s description of the entire episode was accurate, but–written as it was so closely after its end–his words did not convey the enormous impact the Army-McCarthy hearings had on American politics and culture. The most indelible moment capturing this impact occurred 56 years ago today, conveyed in a quotation by Welch (pictured left) to Senator McCarthy (pictured right) that marked the beginning of the Wisconsin senator’s rapid descent into ignominy and provided an early indication of television’s growing influence.
Joseph McCarthy was a Wisconsin native whose exaggerated military record helped him win election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1946. His first term was unremarkable until he began making frequent and inflammatory accusations of communist influence within the U.S. State Department and later in many other areas of American life. McCarthy’s charges reflected and fueled the intense Cold War fear of communism within the United States during the early 1950s and led him to become a famous, admired, and feared character. Those who had a favorable impression of McCarthy (he reached the apex of his prominence in early 1954, when according to a Gallup poll, he was viewed favorably by 50% of Americans compared to less than 30% who viewed him unfavorably) considered him a defender of American values in the face of the dangerous assault of covert communism. Those who opposed him believed that McCarthy was a reckless bully, who ruined reputations, careers, and lives with self-serving and unfounded charges of disloyalty to America. From this characterization was born the term “McCarthyism.”
The Army-McCarthy hearings centered on charges and countercharges made by the Army and two young friends and anti-communists; G. David Schine and Roy Cohn. Schine (pictured right) was a 27-year-old hotel fortune heir who had written an anti-communist pamphlet that was placed in his family’s hotels. He was introduced to Roy Cohn (pictured left), who served as the lead counsel on the McCarthy-led Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The 25-year-old Cohn had earned a reputation as a fierce communist hunter in his role in the espionage trial and conviction of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The two formed a strong friendship and traveled together to Europe to investigate possible communist infiltration in American embassies.
After Schine was drafted into the U.S. Army in November 1953, Army officials ranging from Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens to a company commander were pressured with requests and demands from Cohn that Schine be provided special privileges, including a commission, light duty, and extra leave time. McCarthy and Cohn claimed that Schine was being held “hostage” in an attempt to deter McCarthy from exposing communists within the military ranks. The Army countered that McCarthy and Cohn were inappropriately meddling in military affairs for their own personal concerns.
The hearings began on April 22 and ran until June 17. Though CBS and NBC decided against broadcasting them live, fledgling network ABC (and the now-defunct Dumont network) did, attracting an estimated 80 million total viewers and an average of 20 million a day. Viewers were constantly exposed to what the Museum of Broadcast Communications describes as, “a boorish McCarthy and a bleary-eyed Cohn against a coolly avuncular Joseph N. Welch.”
Live televised hearings had been shown before and since, but none have had the impact on shaping viewers’ perspectives as much as the Army–McCarthy hearings. The official findings resulting from the hearings noted that Cohn, but not McCarthy, had applied “unduly persistent and aggressive efforts” on behalf of Schine and the Army was also cited for not being fully cooperative with McCarthy’s subcommittee, though not specifically targeting Schine. More important that these conclusions, however, was the judgment of the American people who had just watched McCarthy in action. After the conclusion of the hearings in June 1954, McCarthy’s favorability ratings, as measured by Gallup, had sunk to 35% and the percentage of Americans who viewed him unfavorably had risen to 49%.
The moment of the hearings that proved most pivotal and memorable was an exchange between Welch and McCarthy concerning a young lawyer in Welch’s Boston law firm named Fred Fischer. In violation of a prehearing agreement between the Army and the congressional subcommittee, McCarthy described how Fischer had years earlier been affiliated with a legal organization considered by some sympathetic to communist causes. Welch responded to this attack by saying:
Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad…It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I will do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me…
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
Following his central role in the Army-McCarthy hearings, Welch continued to work as a lawyer in Boston and enjoyed some fame as a narrator of television mysteries and playing a judge in the Jimmy Stewart film “Anatomy of a Murder.” He died of a heart attack on Cape Cod in 1960 at the age of 69.
Following his two years of service in the Army, G. David Schine worked as an executive in his family’s hotel business and later as a film and record producer. He married a former Miss Sweden and Miss Universe winner, Hillevi Rombin, and together they had five children. He died at the age of 68 in 1996, when a private plane piloted by one of his sons that was also carrying his wife, crashed near Burbank, California, killing all aboard.
Roy Cohn had a prominent career as a flamboyant defense attorney and political power broker in New York City. He was disbarred by the state of New York in 1986 following conviction on professional misconduct charges. A few weeks later, Cohn, a closeted homosexual who frequently charged others with being gay and once described gay teachers as “a grave threat to our children”, died of AIDS at the age of 59.
McCarthy followed the hearings with one of most spectacular personal and professional flameouts in American history. He was censured by his Senate colleagues in December 1954, but continued to serve in the Senate and rail against suspected Communists, despite being largely ignored by growing numbers of Americans. McCarthy’s drinking intensified and he died at the age of 48 of alcohol-related liver failure. In 1957, a special election was held to fill his vacant seat in the Senate. That election was won by William Proxmire, who during the campaign described McCarthy as, “a disgrace to Wisconsin, to the Senate, and to America.”
