Who said “Have you no sense of decency?”

A quarrel over a private

The hearings began with a dispute about one soldier. David Schine, a friend of McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, and a consultant to McCarthy’s investigations subcommittee, was drafted in 1953. The Army said Cohn had pressed it for months to give Schine special treatment. McCarthy answered that the Army was holding Schine hostage to stop his inquiry into the Army itself. The Senate decided to air the quarrel in public, with Senator Karl Mundt in the chair while McCarthy stepped aside.

From April 22, 1954, for thirty-six days, two networks, ABC and DuMont, carried the hearings live, and about twenty million Americans watched. They saw McCarthy up close for weeks: the interruptions, his cry of “Point of order!”, the papers waved at the cameras. Gallup found more Americans against him than for him while the hearings ran. Six weeks before the hearings opened, on March 9, Edward R. Murrow had turned McCarthy’s own words and film against him on CBS’s See It Now, with a line of his own: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.”

June 9, 1954

The Army’s lawyer was Joseph Welch, sixty-three, a senior partner at the Boston firm Hale and Dorr. Before the hearings he had sent home a young lawyer from his team, Fred Fisher, because Fisher had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a left-wing lawyers’ association. The two sides had agreed that Fisher’s name would stay out of the hearings.

On June 9, while Welch was questioning Cohn, McCarthy broke the agreement and told the room that Welch’s firm employed a young man who had been a member of an organization a House committee had labeled the legal bulwark of the Communist Party. Welch turned to him: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy pressed on, Welch said:

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthy tried to keep going. Welch told him he would not discuss Fisher any further and asked the chairman to call the next witness. The room fell silent, and then the gallery broke into applause.

What the record says, and what people remember

The line is often quoted as “You’ve done enough,” but the printed transcript has “You have done enough.” Welch also asked a second question, “Have you left no sense of decency?”, which many quotations leave out. The exchange survives on film; the director Emile de Antonio built his documentary Point of Order! (1964) from the hearing footage.

The censure, and what it was for

The hearings ended on June 17. A select committee under Arthur Watkins, Republican of Utah, then weighed charges against McCarthy. On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to condemn him. Every Democrat who voted said yes; Republicans split evenly, 22 to 22; the independent Wayne Morse voted yes. McCarthy answered “present.”

The resolution did not mention Fisher or Welch. It condemned McCarthy for refusing to cooperate with the Senate subcommittee that had examined his conduct in 1951 and 1952, and for his attacks during the censure process itself: he had called the special Senate session a “lynch party” and the Watkins committee the “unwitting handmaiden” of the Communist Party. Both counts end with the same words, his conduct “is hereby condemned.” The Senate did not expel him, which would have taken a two-thirds vote. He kept his seat until his death.

After the applause

The reporters stopped coming. McCarthy drank heavily and died on May 2, 1957, at forty-eight. Welch played a judge in the film Anatomy of a Murder (1959), his only screen role, and died in 1960. Decades later, the Venona cables showed that Soviet spies had been real, while McCarthy’s own lists were never proved. The name the era kept, though, was his: see What was McCarthyism?.