June 9, 1954: The Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (left) and Roy Cohn

June 9, 1954, 60 years ago: Senator Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin, goes too far, and the country sees it, and sees him for what he really is: A liar and a bully.

McCarthy was a Marine tail-gunner in World War II, although stories of his heroism appear to have been exaggerated, including by himself. In 1946, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and the 1st 3 years of his term (1947, 1948 and 1949) were unremarkable.

But at a "Lincoln Day" speech in Wheeling, West Virginia early in 1950, he held up a piece of paper he claimed was a list of employees of the U.S. Department of State who were active members of the Communist Party. He would repeat this charge many times, but the number would change: Sometimes, it was 205; others, it would be 57; sometimes, another number.

It made McCarthy a national celebrity, at a time when most U.S. Senators were not well-known outside their respective home States. This was before 24-hour news networks, before C-SPAN, before social media.

Conservatives jumped to his support. Liberals said he was wrong, even lying. Washington Post cartoonist Herbert Block, who signed his cartoons "Herblock," created the term "McCarthyism," in his "tower of tarbuckets" drawing.

But that was in The Washington Post, a liberal newspaper in those days. Most of the media of the time, dominated by newspapers, was overwhelmingly conservative, pro-business and anti-Communist. McCarthy was exactly what they were looking for. The new "Red Scare," following the earlier one of 1919 and 1920, was on.

The Republicans made big gains in both houses of Congress in 1950, and won control of both houses in 1952, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected President in a landslide. But even Eisenhower had to take a back seat during the '52 campaign: He had heard McCarthy make a false charge against General George C. Marshall, and ripped McCarthy for it face-to-face.

But a Republican official told "Ike" not to defend Marshall in his speech in Milwaukee, because it would make McCarthy look bad in his bid for a 2nd term. Ike dropped the mention of Marshall, McCarthy was re-elected, and Wisconsin, not really in doubt for the Republicans that year, was won by Ike.

After his Inauguration, though, Ike was determined to keep an eye on McCarthy. And when McCarthy convinced Karl Mundt of South Dakota, another "Red-baiter" and the Chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations, to hold hearings on Communist influence in the U.S. Army, the Army's greatest living ex-officer, Eisenhower, was furious, and invoked executive privilege when McCarthy demanded documents from the U.S. Department of Defense. But, as it turned out, Ike would not be directly involved in McCarthy's downfall.

On March 9, 1954, CBS News broadcast See It Now, hosted by Edward R. Murrow, who decided to expose McCarthy by broadcasting film footage of him telling bald-faced lies, and then exposing said lies. It was devastating, and it began McCarthy's fall.

In 2005, the film Good Night, and Good Luck (titled after Murrow's signoff) dramatized the broadcast and the events leading up to it. After an early screening, some people said the actor playing Senator McCarthy seemed too mean, like too much of a bully. There was no actor: They used actual footage of McCarthy, to better make the point of how bad McCarthy was -- just as Murrow did.

One week later, on March 16, 1954, what became known as "the Army-McCarthy Hearings" convened. Starting on April 22, 2 American TV networks began broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage. One, the DuMont Network, was already in financial trouble. The other, ABC, the American Broadcasting Company, had begun as a radio subsidiary of NBC, and broadcasting these hearings made them a major network for the first time. DuMont was probably doomed anyway, and ABC took their place in the "Big Three" alongside NBC and CBS.

Throughout the hearings, McCarthy issued charge after charge, and so did the man hired as legal counsel for the Committee, Roy Cohn. A whiz kid with a keen mind and a nasty disposition, he had graduated from law school at Columbia University when he was only 20 years old, and had to wait until his 21st birthday to be admitted to the New York State bar. He was appointed to the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and served as the main prosecutor for atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

That got the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended him to McCarthy. Now, only 27 years old, Cohn was the most famous lawyer in the country, and could have had a big career ahead of him had he not been Jewish. (Jacob Javits was in the House of Representatives for New York at the time, and was elected a U.S. Senator in 1956, but was never seriously considered for the Presidency.) But, unknown to the general public, Cohn was gay, and had this been exposed at the time, it would have destroyed him.

Things came to a head on June 9. Joseph N. Welch, a prominent attorney from Boston (and, it should be noted, a Republican), was senior counsel for the Army. McCarthy claimed to have a list of 130 "subversives" working in defense plants. Welch challenged McCarthy to give that list to the Defense Department and the FBI "before the Sun goes down."

McCarthy knew that his list was bullshit. And Welch knew it. And McCarthy knew that Welch knew it. So McCarthy went on the attack, saying that Welch should check on Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch's firm. Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a group that Attorney General Herbert Brownell had called "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party" in America.

Welch had wanted Fisher on his team for these hearings, but asked him if there was anything in his background that McCarthy could exploit. Fisher admitted that he had once belonged to the NLG. Welch knew this would be bad, and kept Fisher in Boston.

Welch responded to McCarthy's invocation of Fisher:

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 I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

McCarthy kept up the attack, but Welch shut him down: 

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?

Welch decided that he had had enough, and told Mundt, "Mr. Chairman, you may, if you wish, call the next witness," got up, and left the Senate Caucus Room, which burst into applause.

McCarthy was damaged, perhaps beyond repair. But it wasn't over. Another member of the Committee was Stuart Symington, Democrat of Missouri. He knew the Pentagon, because he had been Assistant Secretary of the Army during World War II, and was named the 1st Secretary of the Air Force when it was split off from the Army in 1947.

Elected to the Senate in 1952, he already had ambitions. His name was placed in nomination for President at the Democratic Conventions in 1956 and 1960, but he didn't get very far either time. As a sports note, despite being from St. Louis, he was a vocal proponent for getting a new baseball team for Kansas City, the Royals, after the Athletics moved in 1967.

Symington suggested that maybe some members of McCarthy's staff might be subversive. McCarthy called him "Sanctimonious Stu," and said, "You're not fooling anyone!"

Symington came back, and said, "Senator, the American people have had a look at you know for six weeks. You're not fooling anyone, either."

Symington was right: In January 1954, the Gallup polling organization had McCarthy with a 50 percent approval rating, with 29 percent disapproving. When the hearings concluded on June 17, it was 45 to 34 disapproving. And the hearings didn't expose one single Communist or other subversive. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy.

For those of you who are Yankee Fans: A man named Joe McCarthy managed the Yankees from 1931 to 1946, winning 8 American League Pennants and 7 World Series. However, he and the Senator appear not to have been related.

Aside from the name, the only thing that manager Joseph Vincent McCarthy and Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy seem to have had in common is heavy drinking. And even that didn't affect them the same way: The Senator died from cirrhosis just 3 years after this confrontation, at the age of 48; while the manager lived to be 90, long enough to see the Reggie Jackson Game.