Army-McCarthy Hearings Anniversary

Floor Speech

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I had the pleasure of speaking yesterday while the Presiding Officer was in the chair on the 242nd anniversary of the burning and sinking of the Gaspee by Rhode Island patriots. I am here today to mark the 60th anniversary of a different event which also occurred on the same day--June 9--60 years ago. It was a pivotal moment in the history of the Senate and, indeed, of the country. It was the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings and the exchange between Joseph Welch and Joseph McCarthy that changed this city and the world.

Six decades ago, America's national mood was marked by anxiety over the looming threat of communism. The victory of World War II had given way to the gripping tension of the Cold War. Communist power was on the rise in Eastern Europe and in China. American forces were at war in Korea.

Here in Congress the House Committee on Un-American Activities worked to sniff out Communist subversion within our borders, including the infamous Hollywood black list. One man in the Senate set out to exploit the fears of that time, and he came to symbolize the fearmongering of that fretful era.

Joseph McCarthy was a relatively unknown junior Senator from Wisconsin when, in February of 1950, he delivered a speech accusing Secretary of State Dean Acheson of harboring 205 known members of the American Communist Party within the State Department.

The charge was questionable and ill-supported. But the brazen accusation struck a nerve with an anxious American public, and Senator McCarthy rocketed to fame. Thus began a chilling crusade to flush out Communist subversion--real or contrived--from every corner of American society.

McCarthy's anticommunist witch hunt seemingly knew no bounds, as he launched investigations or often just allegations of disloyalty on the part of private citizens, public employees, entire government agencies, as well as the broadcasting and defense industries, universities--even the United Nations.

In 1953, the Republican Party gained a majority in the Senate, and McCarthy ascended to the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. From those chairmanships, he dragged hundreds of witnesses before scores of hearings, publicly shaming and berating his targets. His fiery rhetoric and his remorseless mendacity intimidated critics and challengers. His accusations carried the power to destroy reputations, careers, and lives.

The effect of McCarthyism on 20th century American society was toxic. Prudent citizens shied from civic engagement. Meaningful political dissent withered. Criticism of American foreign policy evaporated. Even college campuses, our cradles of intellectual curiosity, were cowed by McCarthyism.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it ``the black silence of fear.'' Intimidated colleagues in this Chamber gave Joe McCarthy broad leeway to abuse Congress's constitutional powers of investigation and oversight. Harvard Law Dean Erwin Griswold described Chairman McCarthy's role as ``judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.''

This was the regime 60 years ago, in 1954, when U.S. Army officials accused McCarthy of exerting improper pressure to win preferential treatment for a subcommittee aide serving as an Army private. McCarthy countered that the Army accusation was retaliation for his investigations of them. The stage was set. The countercharges would be adjudicated, of course, in McCarthy's Subcommittee on Investigations.

The so-called Army-McCarthy hearings, held in a packed, smoke-filled Russell caucus room, would last 36 days and be aired on live broadcast television. Twenty million Americans tuned in during gavel-to-gavel coverage of our Nation's first great TV political spectacle--the precursor to the Watergate hearings, the Iran-Contra hearings, and the Thomas-Hill hearings.

Special counsel to the Army in those hearings was an avuncular Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch of the law firm then called Hale & Dorr. Here, in Washington, Joseph Welch was a nobody. He had no office, he had no position, he had no clout. But he was a good lawyer with a dry wit and unflappable demeanor. He also had a sense of fairness--a sense of fairness that was soon to become famously provoked by McCarthy's bullying. And he had that greatest virtue--courage--the virtue that makes all other virtues possible.

On June 9, 1954, Joseph Welch challenged Senator McCarthy's aide, Roy Cohn, to actually produce McCarthy's supposed secret list of subversives working at defense facilities. Since there likely was no such list, McCarthy needed a distraction. So he lit into an accusatory attack in a traditional McCarthyite way on a lawyer in Welch's firm, a young lawyer--indeed, an associate within the firm, Fred Fisher, a young man who was not even in the hearing room to defend himself--accusing him of various Communist associations and inclinations.

Welch responded:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.

Had Senator McCarthy been a smarter man, he would have sensed the warning in those words. But he didn't. He pressed his attack and refused to let up on young Fred Fisher. Welch angrily cut Senator McCarthy short.

Let us not assassinate the lad any further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Thirty words. If you count them, it is just 30 words. But with those 30 words, suddenly something happened, something changed. The emperor suddenly had no clothes.

There had been such an avalanche of words from McCarthy over the years--of lies, of accusations, of hyperbole. And these 30 words--these few short sentences--stopped all of that roughshod hypocrisy in its tracks.

Welch declared an end to McCarthy's questioning, and the gallery of onlookers, on behalf of a nation, burst into applause. The black-and-white footage shows McCarthy asking Roy Cohn, ``What happened?'' What happened was that a spell was broken. The web of fear woven by McCarthy over Washington, DC, began unraveling.

Near the end of the hearing, Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri faced McCarthy down. After an angry exchange, he rose and walked out to come here to vote. As Chairman Karl Mundt of South Dakota gaveled the hearing into recess, Joe McCarthy kept on railing about Communist conspiracies. As he railed on, Senators, reporters, and members of the gathered audience steadily filed out of the room, leaving him shouting. The spell was broken.

Six months later the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy. Four years later, he was dead at the age of 48. Historians agree he drank himself to death. His fall from grace and demise were nearly as rapid as his rise was meteoric, consistent with the ancient principle: Climb ugly; fall hard.

Very often--indeed, too often--political outcomes in Washington are determined by the political weight and the wealth of contesting forces vying for power. It is brute force against brute force. It makes us wonder, is that all there is to this? Is this just an arena of combat, where huge special interests lean against each other trying to shove each other around, each for their own greed and benefit?

This incident 60 years ago is an eternal lesson of what a difference one person can make. A regular American, a nobody in Washington, good at his craft, good in his character, and in the right place at the right time, a man who knew what was right, broke the fever of virulent political frenzy that had captured Washington; one private lawyer's sincere, direct outrage at a cruel attack on his young associate, a few words from a Boston lawyer who had just had enough turned the tide of history. May we never forget in this world of vast and often corrupt political forces the power of one person to make a difference.

I yield the floor.

Madam President, I note the absence of a quorum.

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