In 1954, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under the temporary chairmanship of Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota, held hearings to investigate conflicting accusations between the U.S. Army and Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. Televised live by ABC without analysis or narration, the hearings lasted 36 days and generated dramatic confrontations between Senator McCarthy and Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, and especially the Army's counsel, Joseph N. Welch of Boston. The Army had charged that McCarthy and his staff, especially chief council Roy Cohn, had used undue influence to try and obtain special favors for Private G. David Schine, a member of his committee and friend of Cohn.
McCarthy counter charged that the Army's charges were a smoke screen designed to thwart McCarthy's investigation of alleged subversives at the Army base at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The dramatic highlights of the hearings, the first government hearings to be televised live, are captured in Emile de Antonio's documentary Point of Order. While a one and a half hour film cannot do justice to a hearing that lasted more than two hundred hours, what is captured is great political theater that should be required viewing for anyone who does not fully understand the danger of an unprincipled demagogue.
The key moment of the hearing, of course, was the final confrontation between Welch and McCarthy over whether or not a young attorney on Welch's staff, Fred Fisher, was a member of The Lawyer's Guild, an organization that had been labeled as a Communist front.
The moment came and went and the hearings continued, yet it was patently clear for anyone with their eyes open, that McCarthy had been severely wounded by the exchange with Welch. He was destroyed not by threats or bombast but by a gentle man with a rapier wit and an active conscience who was not afraid to stand up to a bully when other shrank away. It was a moment of truth that stands as one of the seminal moments in American politics of the 20th Century.
McCarthy counter charged that the Army's charges were a smoke screen designed to thwart McCarthy's investigation of alleged subversives at the Army base at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The dramatic highlights of the hearings, the first government hearings to be televised live, are captured in Emile de Antonio's documentary Point of Order. While a one and a half hour film cannot do justice to a hearing that lasted more than two hundred hours, what is captured is great political theater that should be required viewing for anyone who does not fully understand the danger of an unprincipled demagogue.
The key moment of the hearing, of course, was the final confrontation between Welch and McCarthy over whether or not a young attorney on Welch's staff, Fred Fisher, was a member of The Lawyer's Guild, an organization that had been labeled as a Communist front.
The moment came and went and the hearings continued, yet it was patently clear for anyone with their eyes open, that McCarthy had been severely wounded by the exchange with Welch. He was destroyed not by threats or bombast but by a gentle man with a rapier wit and an active conscience who was not afraid to stand up to a bully when other shrank away. It was a moment of truth that stands as one of the seminal moments in American politics of the 20th Century.