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"Have You No Sense of Decency": The Army-McCarthy Hearings

"Have You No Sense of Decency": The Army-McCarthy Hearings “Have You No Sense of Decency”: The Army-McCarthy Hearings Anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph R. McCarthy stepped into national prominence on February 9, 1950, when he mounted an attack on President Truman’s foreign policy agenda. McCarthy charged that the State Department and its Secretary, Dean Acheson, harbored “traitorous” Communists. McCarthy’s apocalyptic rhetoric made critics hesitate before challenging him. Those accused by McCarthy faced loss of employment, damaged careers, and in many cases, broken lives. After the 1952 election, in which the Republican Party won control of Congress, McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy then extended his targets to include numerous government agencies, in addition to the broadcasting and defense industries, universities, and the United Nations. After Secretary of the Army, Robert T. Stevens, refused to intercede to halt an overseas assignment for McCarthy’s chief consultant, G. David Schine, who had been drafted, McCarthy’s committee began a two-month investigation of the Army. Viewers saw the following dramatic encounters televised live as they occurred between McCarthy, Special Counsel for the Army Joseph N. Welch, Counselor for the Army John G. Adams, and the subcommittee’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. Although McCarthy’s power declined sharply following the hearings and the Senate voted to condemn him a few months later, scholars disagree on whether McCarthy’s appearance before a mass television audience caused his fall. Historians do, however, credit ABC-TV’s decision to broadcast the hearings live, the only one to do so, with the network’s rise to prominence.

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