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1954-1957: The Bubble Bursts
From 1950 to 1954, Joseph McCarthy was on the top. A simple sentence of his could be enough to ruin a man's career; a few kind words to the voters helped many fellow Republicans into office.
In May 1954, he got into a confrontation with the United States Army and its secretary, Robert Stevens, and the famous Army-McCarthy hearings started soon after. With a television audience of twenty million Americans, the flamboyant senator randomly fired accusations of Communism toward certain Army officers. With the assistance of his faithful aide Roy Cohn, he was able to put together enough evidence to give him at least slight credibility.
But McCarthy went too far. President Eisenhower helped the Army, his former employer, mount an impressive counter-attack. They recounted how McCarthy's former assistant and Cohn's sidekick, David Schine, had the senator gain him soft military assignments after being drafted. The press revolted as well, with Edward Murrow of early television fame showing plain, unedited clips from the hearings to show the fraud in McCarthy.
Over the span of thirty-six days, there were thirty-two witnesses, 71 half-day sessions, 187 hours of TV air time, 100,000 live observers, and two million words of testimony. Joe kept up his attacks, which gradually weakened. Every day, millions of TV sets showed McCarthy pointing his finger yet again at another man. McCarthy was obviously slipping, but he didn't give up. Then, when he was attacking an associate of Joseph N. Welch, chief attorney for the Army, Welch stood up, faced the senator, and said:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?
And with that, the hearings ended, and so did McCarthy's witch hunting career. On December 2, 1954, the senate voted 67-22 to condemn him for "conduct contrary to Senatorial traditions." The condemnation-only the third one in 165 years-noted the abuse of his Senatorial powers. After the condemnation, he tried to pass a few of bills written by him, but most senators didn't approve these, probably to avoid association with the "worst senator". He had lost his honor, and rightly so.
As a result of his lower status, he began drinking heavily. Sometimes he would be drunk for days on end. He was frequently hospitalized, and although McCarthy and his doctors claimed reasons such as abrasions or broken bones, he was really dying from alcohol-induced cirrhosis. He died on May 2, 1957, at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland of peripheral neuritis. At his family's request, there was a funeral for him in the Senate chamber, and he was buried in Appleton, Wisconsin, seven miles from his birthplace.
Joseph McCarthy was a sleazy bully. He ruined the careers of hundreds of innocent men and women to advance his own. Yet for all of the suffering he directly caused, not to mention the pervasive fear in liberal circles of being unfairly associated with Communism which he indirectly gave birth to, throughout his entire senatorial career, he never once was able to directly convict a single suspected Communist of a crime.
He was probably the most talked about senator of his time. A great many arguments have been made over this man from Wisconsin. Even today, he is still potent in the minds of America; when Alger Hiss died at age 92 on Friday, November 15, 1996, the next day the San Francisco Chronicle used an entire paragraph to describe how McCarthy used the anti-Red atmosphere created by the Hiss case to begin his infamous run.
Wrongdoings aside, he had an amazing but swift career. He went from everyday senator, to national prominence, to humiliation, and to death, all in seven years.
McCarthy played on people's fears. "The Fight For America" was nothing more than a cleverly thought-out plan that took advantage of America's hysteria about Communism during the Cold War.
mccarthy.cjb.net
blufff, how about a toast to Joe McMarthy, your role model? |
