Turning Points: The McCarthy-Army Senate Hearings

April 18, 2025

Twice in our history, Senate hearings have been powerful moments of awakenings, reckonings, and sea-changes—national pivots.

Watergate—the scandal that exposed the grey areas in our Constitution that a president like Nixon might exploit to abuse his tremendous powers and bring vengeance on his enemies, and the checks-and-balances slugfest it wrought—stretched over two years. From June 1972 (with the break-in and attempted bugging of the Democrat National Headquarters) to August 1974 when Nixon resigned (under pressure from fellow Republicans).

To write TRUTH, LIES, AND THE QUESTIONS IN BETWEEN—my docudrama look at Watergate’s impact on Americans, their relationships, belief in government and sense of agency as citizens—I zoomed in on 1973. Because that was the year Senate Watergate hearings revealed one shocking revelation after another, disclosures that forced the nation to face uncomfortable truths. Suddenly the “Watergate caper” that much of the county had before dismissed as a foolish “third-rate burglary,” a molehill the press was making into a mountain, seemed something insidious. Something to pay attention to. Something to question.

Such was the power in the 1970s of American citizens witnessing—simultaneously and for themselves—stunning confessions and lower-level staffers nervously but stoically speaking truth to power versus the belligerent dissembling by White House officials.

The same happened in 1954, when the Senate held hearings to investigate the conflicting accusations between Joseph McCarthy and the United States Army—during another fraught political era of disinformation and profound polarization. Another time of governmental purges based on unsubstantiated accusations and labeling, which would destroy the reputations and lives of thousands of Americans. All spawned by a bad-boy, weirdly mesmerizing demagogue politician. A decade little discussed, perhaps out of embarrassment for its very un-democratic practices, dehumanizing hate-filled rhetoric, and rampant censorship. But one increasingly mentioned these days because of the similarities between Trump and his lieutenants’ tactics and targets and those of McCarthyism’s Red Scare.

McCarthy’s first line of attack was to discredit and dismantle the State Department, claiming it a deep state of “liberal East Coast eggheads,” that its East European diplomatic ranks were riddled with hidden communist-sympathizers. Its staffers would be subpoenaed by his subcommittee hearings and summoned to loyalty review boards, and often dismissed purely on innuendo—on superficial “evidence” like having shown interest in Russian literature or music, signing petitions for civil rights or labor reforms, and “lifestyle choices” that McCarthy pronounced made them susceptible to blackmail and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover condemned as amoral.

A nationalist bent on ousting officials he felt overly concerned with Europe, McCarthy went after Voice of America—our foreign-language radio stations broadcasting American programming that could be picked up clandestinely by listeners caged behind Soviet Russia’s Iron Curtain, spreading hope and information about democracy. He also scrutinized cultural diplomacy efforts like art shows of American work going on loan to communist bloc nations. One was recalled because McCarthyites claimed its modern art’s blunt, realistic depictions of daily life made the U.S. look bad.

McCarthy aides removed (and even burned) some books in our U.S. Information Service Libraries—collections donated to our troops during World War II, and given to our embassy libraries afterward, to show the wide range of political opinions allowed in a democracy. 64 authors landed on that blacklist of “works to be withdrawn and (authors who) should not be subjects of feature articles or broadcasts.” Included in the list of supposedly unpatriotic writers critical of long held American values: Albert Einstein, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, and Thomas Paine whose 18^th century writings helped inspire the American Revolution. 

The trickle-down impact of McCarthyism’s invective on how American business owners treated employees or if neighbors heeded accusations against their public librarians and teachers by local “Red Hunter” groups is hard to tangibly calculate. But Cold War historians estimate that at least 12,000 Americans lost their jobs during McCarthy’s reign because of their presumed political opinions. McCarthyism’s loyalty reviews would devastate a wide range of citizens from 300 screenwriters, directors, and actors blacklisted by Hollywood to the 3,000 sailors and longshoremen fired from cargo ships and docks to the Library of Congress workers pushed out in a correlating “lavender scare” of suspected gays.

Inspired by McCarthy, national organizations like the American Legion also went after professors and teachers, labeled as especially dangerous by FBI director Hoover—who accused educators of teaching “under the guise of academic freedom...our youth a way of life that eventually will destroy the sanctity of the home, that undermines faith in God, that causes them to scorn respect for authority.”

Particularly targeted were liberal arts colleges like Sarah Lawrence and academic researchers whose work seemed to have progressive underpinnings, like Columbia Univ. anthropologist Gene Weltfish. In her case, advocating for racial equity and education inclusion at a time civil rights activism was labeled radical left and subversive. She was called in front of McCarthy’s Senate Committee to defend a pamphlet she wrote for the Army during WWII as it worked to prepare troops for fighting with allies of diverse cultures and race.

Her research, including IQ tests administered to American soldiers during WWI, found that perceived differences between the races were cultural and not biological. The most "unsettling" piece of data to the status quo from those IQ tests: some northern Blacks in the US WWI forces scored higher than southern Whites. Circulated originally by the USO, the pamphlet, The Races of Mankind, had been banned after the war. Fearful of threats to their funding, Columbia fired Weltfish. She couldn’t find another teaching post for 8 years.

BUT—on this day, (April 22^nd), 71 years ago, all three TV networks began broadcasting live, in their entirety, the hearings into Joseph McCarthy’s charge that the Army had lax security and was harboring officers known to have communist or socialist leanings. And things began to change.

The media had launched McCarthy’s political celebrity by repeating his fearmongering claims without fact-checks. They’d done so partly out of objective reporting tradition—accurately quoting an elected official’s statements without “editorializing”—leaving it to readers to parse out the politician’s veracity. And partly because McCarthy was so outrageous, he made good copy.   

So, for many Americans, those hearings were their first witnessing for themselves McCarthy’s bullying and bombastic insults, his callousness, his sanctimonious hyperbole. They also saw McCarthy and his special counsel Roy Cohn getting caught trying to enter a doctored photo and faked letter into evidence.

The crux of the fight between McCarthy and the Army stemmed from the Army finally standing up to McCarthy’s stream of false accusations against its officers—including much-decorated WWII veterans—by saying the 26-year-old Cohn had stepped up those charges to put pressure on the Army to give preferential treatment to David Schine, who’d recently been drafted. Schine was a McCarthy staffer and friend (and likely lover) of Cohn’s. 

The sickening irony—of so many federal workers losing their posts because of just the hint of homosexuality juxtaposed with the implications of Cohn’s relationship with Schine and dogged pursuit of the Army when its officials did not back down on Schine’s being drafted—was not written about at the time. Rather, it was the palpable dismay televised live and heard round the nation in Army attorney Joseph Welch’s outcry, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—when McCarthy tried to discredit him by character-assassinating his young junior law associate—that seemed to finally break McCarthy’s hold on the American psyche.

Welch’s appalled retort came in June, in the last days of the hearings. It gave resonant voice to what so many Americans who’d been harassed and smeared by McCarthyism had felt. And those who before had avoided the ripsaw of being damned through guilt by association, or facing tests of their loyalty and the moral quandary of naming names or be destroyed professionally witnessed for themselves the devastating impact on a de facto innocent bystander being targeted purely in order to get at someone else.

They didn’t like it. Suddenly, Americans seemed fed up with McCarthyism’s cruelty.

A few months later, in the November midterm elections, they voted McCarthy’s party out of power. Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress. Following their constituents’ lead, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for conduct “contrary to senatorial tradition.” He died three years later from cirrhosis of the liver.

Cohn returned to private practice in New York City, where he would later be indicted four times on charges including bribery, extortion, conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction of justice, and disbarred for “unethical, unprofessional, and particularly reprehensible conduct.” He died of AIDS in 1986.

But not before he met a young Donald Trump, who approached the legendarily combative lawyer at a party to ask how he and his father should respond to the Justice Department suing them for housing discrimination. The 46-year-old Cohn’s answer: hit back harder and countersue.

For the next 13 years, Cohn was one of Trump's closest allies, representing him in scores of contentious lawsuits.

All which raises the question: is there another Joseph Welch moment of clarity in our future?

To learn more:

1) My book on McCarthyism, SUSPECT RED

2.) McCarthyism and Roy Cohn (and connections/echoes today)

3.) The college students who fought back with a “Green Feather Movement"

4.) Librarians and “fake news” then and now

5.) Banned books and Eisenhower

For educators: a discussion guide.