June 9 marks 70 years since the moment America came back to its senses following a four-year period when a demagogue exploited fears and told lies to gain a following and wield cruel and unusual power in national politics.
It was the day a righteous man exposed a con artist and his long, ugly fraud.
On June 9, 1954, some of the most famous words ever spoken in the U.S. Senate were heard across the land, on live television: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
It was Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer, who asked that searing question of Joseph McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin who had carried out a Cold War witch hunt of suspected communists in the State Department, leaving many smeared victims in his wake.
After McCarthy’s focus shifted to suspects and security threats in the Army, Welch was hired to represent the Army at Senate hearings on the allegations.
The senator’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn. Cohn and Welch had an agreement that Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch’s law firm, would not be mentioned during the hearings. Fisher, while a student at Harvard, had belonged to an organization with alleged ties, since discredited, to communism.
But, on June 9, McCarthy could not resist. He broke the agreement and mentioned Fisher’s past.
That prompted Welch’s devastating counterattack: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. … Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do injury to that lad.”
When McCarthy tried to continue, Welch cut him off: “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?”
In the hearing room that day was New York columnist Murray Kempton, a Baltimore native who had once worked for the bygone Evening Sun. “Joe McCarthy was naked at that moment,” Kempton wrote, “and no man who ever clasped his hand and laughed with him could escape the sense that he had at that moment bathed himself in filth.”
McCarthy droned on, but Welch was finished.
“Mr. McCarthy,” he said, “I will not discuss this further with you … and if there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. … You, Mr. Chairman, may call the next witness.”
The gallery burst into applause.
“You can only measure what that applause meant,” Kempton wrote, “when you knew that two press photographers were clapping, and I have never believed before that a press photographer cared whether any subject lived or died.”
Welch’s moral clarity — standing up to a bully and liar on national television — marked the end of Joe McCarthy’s crusade and his career. “McCarthy had shown himself to all America as his worst enemy could never show him,” Kempton wrote.
McCarthy and McCarthyism had risen in February 1950 when the senator claimed to have a list of 205 communist subversives in the State Department.
A Senate committee, led by Maryland’s Millard Tydings, a Democrat, conducted a six-month investigation of McCarthy’s claims, concluded they were bogus and served only to “confuse and divide the American people … to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves.”
Tydings called McCarthy’s claims a “fraud and a hoax.”
Nevertheless, McCarthy soared to fame, gained a following and conducted numerous hearings, damaging reputations in the process. He was a Cold War opportunist. As legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow said of McCarthy: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully.”
I mention Joseph Welch’s take-down of McCarthy today because his heroic moment deserves pondering by both those old enough to remember it — or those who’ve seen the newsreel — but, especially, by those who’ve never seen or heard it.
The moment has a power like few we see today — even as good people try to stand up for decency, democracy, truth and the rule of law — because, coming as it did less than a decade after World War II, most Americans understood how their country had become a beacon of hope as a powerful democracy. “We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world,” Murrow told his CBS audience. “But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
No generation is perfect, every moment in time has its failings and tragedies. But most Americans in the era of Welch and Murrow had been united through hardship and war; they understood what would be lost with McCarthy’s unchecked demagoguery.
Seventy years later, we have a depressing wave of cynical, hard-burn politics, led by politicians and others in power who flirt with dumping democracy, who seem to think the rule of law should only apply to their enemies, who ridicule science, exploit fears and prejudices, spread lunatic conspiracy theories and eschew decency in discourse. Many know better, of course, but refuse to speak out or risk losing their positions.
We should take a lesson from 1954, the year heroic Americans stood up to the Big Lie of their time and helped the country come back to its senses.
