***
The hearings opened in the floodlit Corinthian splendor of the Senate Caucus Room shortly after 10:30 on the morning of April 22, 1954. Everything seemed to be in order. Jenkins was at the microphone. The gavel was in Mundt’s hand. McCarthy sat far to his left, at the very end of the coffin-shaped table. Nine months earlier Democratic members of the committee had begun boycotting its meetings in protest against McCarthy’s tactics, but now they were back with their minority counsel, twenty-eight-year-old Robert F. Kennedy, then known chiefly for his hostility to Cohn. Mundt exchanged banalities with John McClellan of Arkansas, the ranking Democrat;1 then he rapped for order. Mundt said, “Our counsel, Mr. Jenkins, will call the first witness.” Jenkins opened his mouth—it was enormous—but before he could speak there was an interruption. The record reads:
MCCARTHY: A point of order, Mr. Chairman; may I raise a point of order?
According to H. M. Robert’s Rules of Order, a chairman may be interrupted on a point of order, provided that the question is one of propriety under the rules. McCarthy had something else in mind. His resonant voice rose.
MCCARTHY: I have heard from people in the military all the way from generals with the most upstanding [sic] combat records down to privates recently inducted and they indicate they are very resentful of the fact that a few Pentagon politicians attempting to disrupt our investigations are naming themselves the Department of the Army…. The Department of the Army is not doing this. It is three civilians in the Army and they should be so named.
An impartial chairman would have gaveled McCarthy into silence the moment it became clear that, far from raising a procedural matter, he was making a speech. Mundt let him make it. Placidly he agreed to a preposterous McCarthy proposal: that judgment be withheld on whether the Secretary of the Army represented the Army. With that as an opening, McCarthy interrupted to make the same speech again. “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” he sang out in that tight whine. Mundt looked down the table and nodded, and Joe made his point again:
MCCARTHY: I maintain it is a disgrace and a reflection upon every one of the million outstanding men in the Army to let a few civilians who are trying, trying to hold up an investigation of Communists labelling themselves as the Department of the Army.
McClellan quietly pointed out that the 46 countercharges against the Army had been signed for the subcommittee by “Joe McCarthy, Chairman,” but Mundt ruled in favor of the Wisconsin senator. A pattern was forming. Joe would dominate the hearings as surely as though he were in the chair. Between his “points of order” and his cross-examinations, he would say everything he wanted to say. Mundt was his man, and so, it developed, was Ray Jenkins. Chosen for his supposed impartiality, the subcommittee’s special counsel openly encouraged McCarthy’s excesses, swearing him in and asking him to explain “just what the set-up of the Communists is.” To the dismay of those who had been through this so many times before, Joe produced maps mounted on easels and a pointer. At the end of his lecture he said, “There are many people who think that we can live side by side with Communists.” Eagerly Jenkins said, “What do you say about that, sir?” The answer consumed most of that afternoon. Even so, Jenkins was not done with encouraging Joe:
JENKINS: Senator McCarthy…. it is about closing time…. Now, while you have an audience of perhaps twenty or thirty million Americans… I want you to tell… what each individual American man, woman and child can do… to do their bit to liquidate the Communist party.
McCarthy’s critics were in despair. The senator seemed invincible. Nothing, not even the U.S. Army, was a match for him. By the force of his personality he was turning each session into a McCarthy melodrama, with doctored photographs, phony FBI reports, memoranda lifted from Pentagon files by the Loyal American Underground, and savage little McCarthy homilies, such as the bit of advice he attributed to one of his childhood mentors, someone called Indian Charlie, to the effect that “if one was ever approached by another person in a not completely friendly fashion, one should start kicking at the other person as fast as possible below the belt until the other person was rendered helpless.” The moment any testimony unfavorable to him began to get interesting he would rumble into the record with one of his vibrant calls for “A point of order,” or “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” and then he would be off with a digression about how “sick and tired” he was of “sitting down here” and hearing all these “packs of lies.” So one-sided were the hearings becoming that the Caucus Room audience, which had come to see a fight, cheered Senator Stuart Symington just for having the courage to talk back to Joe: “You said something about being afraid. I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that I’m not afraid of anything about you or anything you’ve got to say any time, any place, anywhere.”
No one else around the table seemed prepared to go farther than that, and of all of them the man who appeared least likely to bell the McCarthy tiger was the Army’s special counsel. Tall, portly, and birdlike, Joseph N. Welch was sixty-three, a lifelong Republican and a senior partner in the eminently respectable Boston firm of Hale and Dorr. He had undertaken this assignment for no fee. And that, said reporters, must have been why he had been chosen. Hour after hour he sat quietly with an elbow on the table, his chin in the palm of his hand or his fingers tracing the furrows on his forehead. He might have been another spectator. He let McCarthy browbeat his client, Stevens, without an objection. The few remarks he did make were almost comic in their grave courtesy. With his green bow ties, his fussy manner, and his high-pitched voice, Welch seemed more like a Dickensian solicitor than a successful American trial lawyer.
Rarely had the capital seen a man whose appearance was more deceptive. He knew the impression he conveyed and was content; at times, he had found, it was useful to be underestimated. Life on Beacon Hill and Boston Common had not prepared him for the McCarthy demimonde of bluster, intimidation and transparent lies, so Welch cocked his head and listened. His hands deep in his pockets, his toes pointed outward, he could be seen during recesses lurking on the fringes of groups, taking everything in. And when he spoke up at the hearings, as in time he did, the contrast between him and McCarthy could not have been greater. As Michael Straight put it in his Trial by Television, “McCarthy never forgot the vast audience. Welch seemed not to remember it. McCarthy spoke with contempt for the mob. Welch seemed to be conversing respectfully with one individual, and so he gained the audience’s devotion to the end.”
Bit by bit those watching Welch for this first time sensed the steel in him. He and McCarthy were the real duelists here, and their first significant encounter came on the ninth day of the hearings, when Welch cross-examined the senator over a confidential FBI letter which had found its way into McCarthy’s hands. Along the way it had been retyped, an important point because under the law the retyping of a classified document amounted to publication. Joe crouched over the microphone, tense and swarthy. Under the klieg lights a roll of flesh beneath his dark eyebrows gave his upper eyelids a slanted, demonic expression. Welch let him wait awhile. The Bostonian lolled almost puckishly on an elbow, finger crooked on the purplish veins of his cheek, his brow wrinkled as though he were looking for the first time at something which was quite incredible. Now he was ready.
WELCH: Senator McCarthy, when you took the stand you knew of course that you were going to be asked about this letter, did you not?
MCCARTHY: I assumed that would be the subject.
WELCH: And you, of course, understood that you were going to be asked the source from which you got it.
MCCARTHY:…I won’t answer that….
WELCH: Have you some private reservation when you take the oath that you will tell the whole truth that lets you be the judge of what you will testify to?
MCCARTHY: The answer is that there is no reservation about telling the whole truth.
WELCH: Thank you, sir. Then tell us who delivered the document to you!
MCCARTHY: The answer is no. You will not get the inform
ation.
Jenkins came to the senator’s rescue with the amazing opinion that McCarthy’s position was justified because he was a “law enforcing officer… ferreting out crime,” and the committee members turned to other matters. Only gradually did they and their audience realize what Welch had done. He had exposed McCarthy as an outlaw. In acknowledging his possession of the purloined letter the senator had violated a federal statute, and by refusing to answer Welch’s questions he had put himself in contempt of Congress. There was something else. His defiance of the Boston attorney had been somehow familiar. Comparing impressions at the end of that session they realized why. For four years the country had watched McCarthy bully witnesses who refused to respond to his own interrogations. He had held these people up to public scorn as “Fifth Amendment Communists,” reducing the Bill of Rights to an epithet. Now he was behaving in the same way.
Demagogues are conspicuously vulnerable to ridicule, but masters of derision are rare. Since the emergence of Cohn and Schine there had been speculation over whether their relationship was an unusual one, but no one could think of the right way to touch upon this very delicate subject. Welch found a way to do it. He had been honing the rapier of his wit since the hearings began, waiting to thrust it under McCarthy’s bludgeon. The opportunity arose in an exchange over a cropped photograph. Cohn had given Jenkins, in proof of an obscure point, what appeared to be a picture, taken at McGuire Air Force Base, of Stevens beaming at Schine. Then the original turned up. In it Stevens was smiling at someone else, who had been cropped out to produce the fake. There was a thoughtful silence in the Caucus Room. Cohn strenuously denied knowing that this picture had been cropped. He said he didn’t even know where it had come from. Welch innocently asked the witness at the time, another member of McCarthy’s staff, “Do you think it came from a pixie?”
There was a rumbling at the end of the table. The bludgeon was being raised. McCarthy asked, “Will the counsel for my benefit define—I think he might be an expert on that—what a pixie is?”
Welch’s rapier flashed: “Yes, I should say, Mr. Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.”
The chuckles were suppressed, but the giant had been wounded. From that moment forward McCarthy reserved his most venomous tones for Welch and searched for a way of retribution. On June 9, in the eighth week of testimony, he thought he had it. Cohn was in the chair at the time. Welch was asking him about the subcommittee’s hunt for subversives among Army Signal Corps employees at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey.
WELCH: Mr. Cohn, if I told you now that we had a bad situation at Monmouth, you’d want to cure it by sundown if you could, wouldn’t you?
COHN: Yes, sir.
WELCH: May I add my small voice, sir, and say whatever you know about a subversive or a Communist or a spy, please hurry! Will you remember these words?
McCarthy’s voice rose, tense and vibrant.
MCCARTHY: Mr. Chairman, in view of that question—
MUNDT: Do you have a point of order?
MCCARTHY: Not exactly, Mr. Chairman, but in view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher… who has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh years and years ago, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party….
Welch looked stricken. A hush had fallen over the table. Smiling, licking his lips, his words freighted with sarcasm, McCarthy went on:
MCCARTHY:…Knowing that, Mr. Welch, I just felt that I had a duty to respond to your urgent request…. I have hesitated about bringing that up. But I have been rather bored with your phony requests to Mr. Cohn here that he personally get every Communist out of government before sundown. Therefore we will give you the information about the young man in your own organization….
And he did, while Welch, obviously desolate, sat with his head in his hands, staring at the table before him. By now it was clear that something had gone wrong. Cohn, still at the microphone, was staring at the senator and shaking his head in silent entreaty. If anything, he seemed more distressed than Welch. But McCarthy went on to the end, shredding the reputation of someone whose very existence had not been a matter of public knowledge until now.
MCCARTHY:…Whether you knew he was a member of that Communist organization or not I don’t know. I assume you did not, Mr. Welch, because I get the impression that while you are quite an actor, you play for a laugh, I don’t think you have any conception of the danger of the Communist Party. I don’t think you would ever knowingly aid the Communist cause. I think you are unknowingly aiding it when you try to burlesque this hearing in which we are trying to bring out the facts, however.
He snickered. In that silence it was eerie. The room awaited Welch’s reply. It was long in coming; once while McCarthy was still speaking the Bostonian’s lips had formed the mute word “stop,” but now he seemed to be groping for words. To Mundt he said, leaning forward, “Mr. Chairman, under these circumstances I must have something approaching a personal privilege.” Mundt said quickly, “You may have it, sir. It will not be taken out of your time.” He, too, was upset. Everyone at the table appeared to be affected, with the exception of McCarthy, who was talking loudly to one of his aides. Welch had to begin three times before he could attract the senator’s attention. “I can listen with one ear,” McCarthy said to him. “This time,” said the Bostonian, “I want you to listen with both.” McCarthy ordered the aide to bring a clipping showing that Frederick G. Fisher had belonged to the Lawyers Guild, the proscribed organization. “I think,” said the senator, “that should be in the record.”
WELCH: You won’t need anything in the record when I have finished telling you this. 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.
He then told the television audience what insiders at the hearings already knew. Welch’s one misgiving about coming to Washington had been the possibility that because of him, someone at Hale and Dorr might be slandered. In talking to the two young assistants he had planned to bring to the capital with him he learned that one of them—Fred Fisher—had briefly belonged to the Lawyers Guild after leaving law school.2 On learning more about it, he had resigned. Welch had left Fisher in Boston, and McCarthy and Cohn, who knew of him, had agreed not to mention his name. In 1954 few worse things could happen to a man than being identified over national television as a subversive. That was what McCarthy, to pay off a score, had done to Fisher. Welch now told the full story. At the end of it he turned back to the senator.
WELCH:…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 bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
McCarthy afterward told a friend that as Welch spoke he could feel knots in his stomach. It wasn’t contrition. He was probably incapable of that. What he grasped was that he had stumbled badly, that Welch had outwitted him again. Trying desperately to regain his footing, he growled that Welch had no right to mention cruelty because he had “been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours.”
WELCH: Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild, and Mr. Cohn nods his head at me.
Cohn, in evident agony, was indeed nodding at Welch. He was also biting his lips and trembling visibly.3 He had crushed too many witnesses himself not to see what Welch was doing to McCarthy. To Cohn Welch said: “I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn.”
COHN: No, sir.
>
WELCH: I meant to do you no personal injury and if I did I beg your pardon.
Again Cohn nodded. Again McCarthy tried to shape a reply, and again Welch turned him away.
WELCH:…Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?
The senator stared into his lap, looked up, and tried one more time. He tried to ask Welch if it was not true that Fisher had been his assistant. This time the Bostonian silenced him with superb disdain.
WELCH: Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have sat within six feet of me and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have brought it out. If there is a God in heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it further. I will not ask Mr. Cohn any more questions. You, Mr. Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 107
