Mothers who never watched TV during the day
were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The television moment of the Army-McCarthy hearings that has lived in memory ever since
is the famous moment on June 9th, 1954.
When McCarthy decides to violate an agreement
that Cohn and Welch had come to before the hearings.
Roy Cohn, although of perfect draft age, had managed to avoid the Korean War
and the draft afterwards.
It was kind of astonishing.
Joe Welch said, “Fine, I will never bring up your draft status,
but we have a problem of our own.
We have a young attorney named Fred Fisher
who was a member of a communist front group while he was at Harvard Law School
and we brought him down to work on the committee.
We decided that because of his past we would send him home
and I would appreciate it if you would never bring up Fred Fisher.
Throughout most of that afternoon, Roy Cohn and Joseph Welch had been having,
you know, your basic nasty lawyerly argument
and Cohn’s OK with it.
Mr. Welch, sir, with great respect, I work for the committee here.
They know how we go about handling situations of communist infiltration
and failure to act on FBI information about communist infiltration.
May I add my small voice, sir,
and say whenever you know about a subversive or a communist or a spy,
please hurry.
Will you remember those words?
But McCarthy gets so angry at Welch’s badgering of Roy Cohn
that he blurts out the name of Fred Fisher.
In view of Mr. Welch’s request,
I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm
a young man named Fischer,
who has been for a number of years a member of an organization
which is named, oh years and years ago,
as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.
Now I have hesitated bringing that up,
but I have been rather bored with your phony requests to Mr. Cohn here.
Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel
as to do an injury to that lad.
It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr.
It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr.
It is, I regret to say, equally true
that I fear he shall always bare a scar needlessly inflicted by you.
You look at Roy Cohn’s face and you will see him go,
“Oh, my God, no, please, no.”
But McCarthy won’t stop.
He keeps attacking.
I want to say Mr. Welch,
that it has been labeled long before he became a member,
as early as 1944.
[WELCH:] Senator, may we not drop this?
I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn.
[COHN:] No, sir.
And if I did, I beg your pardon.
Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator.
You’ve done enough.
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you left no sense of decency?
You could see, Joe McCarthy going, “What did I do?
What did I do?”
Joe Welch literally has a tear in his eye.
This was seen as spontaneous.
In fact, Welch had been thinking of this for
months.
Jim St. Claire who was second in command to Joe Welch, said,
“We walked out the side door.
The door closed behind us.
He winked at me and said, ‘How did I do?’”
And they said, “Great. You did great.”
The fact that McCarthy really didn’t seem to have any sense of decency
and the fact that he had been caught publicly in lies over the course of these six weeks,
the public’s capacity to trust him,
the belief that he was engaged in this anti-communist crusade
as some sort of earnest attempt to protect American society
as opposed to a demagogic bullying spree.
At the end of it, I think all the illusions,
the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself
have effectively been dispelled.
It was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line,
“Have you no sense of decency?”
to Senator McCarthy.
That’s the moment where McCarthy incinerates himself on national TV.
It’s the moment, which the dragon that is Joseph McCarthy, is finally slain.
