Suchergebnisse

Part I. 1953: priorities -- The first confrontation -- "Don't join the book burners!" -- "You're in the army now!" -- The secretary and the senator -- The turning point -- Part II. 1954: mobilization -- "Eisenhower's first move" -- "Not fit to wear that uniform" -- Saving Robert Stevens -- Eisenhower in command -- A political D-Day -- Part III. 1954: vindication -- "A war of manuever" -- Countdown -- The Eisenhower-McCarthy hearings -- Protecting the president -- "No sense of decency?" -- Epilogue

From Grand Chute to Appleton -- Mr. McCarthy Goes to Washington. -- Wisconsin's Junior Senator -- Appointment in Wheeling -- The Tydings Trainwreck: Investigating McCarthy -- The Making of Joe McCarthy -- A St. George Deep in Dragons -- Hidden Hands and Junketeering Gumshoes -- At War with the Army -- Of "Secret Masters" and "Unheard-of Things": Censure -- Frozen in the Cold.

Exactly thirty years ago millions of Americans were fascinated by a day-time TV drama featuring the Republican Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. The Army-McCarthy hearings, called by one writer, "the greatest political show on earth," were televised by ABC from April 22 to June 17, 1954. For many it was the first opportunity to see the Senator whose name epitomized militant anti-Communism and who since 1950 had attracted more attention than the President of the United States. Few viewers could know, however, that TV's exposure would help destroy McCarthy's political career and lead to his censure by the Senate later that year.

What have become known as the "McCarthy hearings" refer to 36 days of televised investigative hearings led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954. After first calling hearings to investigate possible espionage at the Army Signal Corps Engineering Laboratories in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the junior senator turned his communist-chasing committee's attention to an altogether different matter, the question of whether the Army had promoted a dentist who had refused to answer questions for the Loyalty and Security Board. The hearings reached their climax when McCarthy suggested that the Army's lawyer, Joseph Welch, had employed a man who at one time had belonged to a communist front group. Welch's rebuke to the senator—"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"—has been called one of the most devastating lines in American history. McCarthy was censured for his conduct by the Senate a few months later, and in 1957, he died. Though he has become something of a pariah in the annals of history, the enduring value of studying and understanding the hearings that bore his name in undeniable.