Army-McCarthy hearings
The Army-McCarthy hearings, which began on April 22, 1954, were a pivotal moment in American history, reflecting the intense political climate of the Cold War era. They involved Senator Joseph McCarthy, a prominent figure known for his aggressive anti-communist stance, and the United States Army. The hearings were triggered by McCarthy's inquiry into alleged communist infiltration within the Army, coupled with personal conflicts involving his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, and a draft deferment case concerning Cohn's friend, G. David Schine.
As the hearings unfolded, they garnered substantial public attention, drawing around twenty million viewers each day. McCarthy's confrontational tactics and attempts to manipulate testimony were at odds with the more composed approach of the Army's legal team, leading to notable moments of public exchange that highlighted McCarthy's bullying style. The televised proceedings showcased the influence of media on politics, as the public witnessed the Senate's internal strife and McCarthy's eventual decline in popularity.
Ultimately, the hearings culminated in McCarthy's censure by the Senate in December 1954, marking a significant turn in public perception of his methods and signaling a shift in how politicians would engage with media and public scrutiny in the future. The Army-McCarthy hearings were not only a reflection of the political tensions of the time but also a moment that reshaped American political discourse and media relations.
Army-McCarthy hearings
The Event Hearings of a Senate Government Operations Subcommittee involving charges and countercharges between the U.S. Army and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy
Date April-June, 1954
Place Washington, D.C.
The hearings marked a decline in McCarthy’s influence and an increase in the effect of television on American politics.
When the Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, 1954, recent polls had shown that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, had the support of 50 percent of the American public while another 23 percent were undecided. McCarthy had been denounced by liberal critics as he was becoming a national figure in 1950, but with little visible effect. He also had been denounced by members of his own party, notably Senator Margaret Chase Smith from Maine and Senator Ralph Flanders from Vermont, who would introduce a resolution of censure against McCarthy after the hearings. President Dwight D. Eisenhower , who sought McCarthy’s support during the 1952 elections, found McCarthy distasteful and belatedly was beginning to respond to McCarthy’s criticism of his administration. Even Vice President Richard M. Nixon, who also made his national reputation by exposing alleged subversives, was beginning to distance himself from McCarthy.
The Cold War was at its height. The Soviet Union had exploded a hydrogen bomb in 1953, only months after the United States had done so. The French-held Vietnamese city of Dien Bien Phu was about to fall to Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist troops. The Communist Party of the U.S.A. was minuscule, infiltrated by informers, and unlikely to grow, but they were feared nonetheless: For officials, attacking it was the easiest route to political popularity.
Television was a new force in American politics. The 1951 Kefauver hearings had attracted much attention where they were held, but the coaxial cable did not link most parts of the country until the political conventions of 1952, and the quality of delayed broadcasts was poor. By April of 1954, all the television networks had competing news divisions. Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now television program on CBS had exposed McCarthy’s high-handed methods on March 29, and McCarthy replied in his typical fashion on April 6: not by answering the criticisms but by making personal attacks against Murrow. Both CBS and NBC opted out of hearings coverage early on, but ABC vacated its daytime schedule in favor of complete live coverage, thereby gaining an enormous new audience.
Background
McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy M. Cohn, a lawyer who was part of the team that convicted accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg , brought to his staff G. David Schine, heir to a hotel chain. Schine received a draft notice in July, 1953, and was drafted in November. Cohn tried to get special privileges for Private Schine, putting pressure on officials such as Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens. The McCarthy committee had begun an investigation of the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, a search which soon spread to other military facilities. Secretary Stevens denied Cohn access to a facility for which he did not have a proper security badge, which Cohn took as a personal insult.
McCarthy demanded access to confidential Army personnel files, which Stevens, with the backing of the president, refused, although Stevens partially backed down on February 24, 1954. On March 9, the Army released a chronology, prepared by Stevens’s counsel John G. Adams, of Cohn’s attempts to gain privileges for Schine. The Army and McCarthy agreed to a joint airing of charges and countercharges before McCarthy’s committee, with McCarthy stepping down as chairman in place of Senator Karl Mundt. Cohn served as McCarthy’s special counsel, and Ray Jenkins served as chief counsel for the committee’s Republicans. Robert F. Kennedy , who, like his father Joseph Kennedy, had earlier been an enthusiastic supporter of McCarthy, served as counsel for the committee’s Democrats. Joseph Welch, a well-known Boston trial lawyer, assisted Counsel John G. Adams for the Army.
Millions Watch McCarthy in Action
Despite long stretches of dullness and confused legal wrangling, the thirty-six days of hearings, totaling 187 hours of television airtime, drew a daily audience of approximately twenty million viewers. Thirty-two witnesses gave countless pages of testimony. The scowling McCarthy—with his repeated interjections of “point of order, point of order”—the cool and dapper Welch, the extremely mild-mannered Stevens, and the craggy chain-smoking Jenkins became daily companions for many viewers. The attempts of McCarthy and Cohn to manipulate evidence, and McCarthy’s bullying tactics did not play well on television, especially when McCarthy fell into what may have been a carefully laid trap by Welch.
McCarthy and Welch agreed before the hearings that several areas would be off limits, including Cohn’s avoidance of the draft during World War II and the one-time membership of one of Welch’s staff, Fred Fischer, in the National Lawyers Guild—an organization that later successfully sued to get its name removed from the attorney general’s list of subversives. They also may have agreed that Welch would never mention the widely suspected homosexual relationship between Cohn and Schine. Welch became angry when a photograph was introduced to show that Stevens had been especially friendly with Private Schine without outside pressure. It showed Stevens and Schine alone, but Welch determined that it had been cropped from a larger view that showed other people, which completely changed its purported meaning. Welch tried to find out from McCarthy’s staff who had cropped the picture. When no explanation was forthcoming, Welch playfully asked if the alteration had been done by a pixie. When McCarthy asked the counsel to define the meaning of “pixie,” Welch responded that “a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?” The room rocked with laughter. The homosexual allusion was lost on most television viewers but not on Washington insiders, including McCarthy.
On June 9, McCarthy decided to bring up the matter of Fred Fischer’s former membership in the National Lawyer’s Guild. Welch replied angrily, explaining his associate’s essential innocence. Cohn tried to drop the subject, but McCarthy insisted on pursuing the matter. Welch appealed to him to stop maligning Fischer and asked, “Have you left no sense of decency?” The hearing room exploded with applause. After a sharp exchange with McCarthy near the end of the hearings, Senator Stuart Symington , a Democrat from Missouri, said, “The American people have had a look at you for six weeks. You are not fooling anyone.” Many supporters of McCarthy were still loyal, but he was now powerless to ruin people merely with accusations.
Impact
Public exposure to the methods of Senator McCarthy led to his December, 1954, censure by the Senate. The hearings also gave an indication of the increasingly important role of television in politics, signaling that politicians would have to look convincing as well as sound convincing to the American public from that time forward.
Bibliography
Cook, Fred J. The Army-McCarthy Hearings, April-June, 1954. New York: Franklin, Watts, 1971. A good brief summary of the hearings from an anti-McCarthy critic.
Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Fascinating examination of television’s role in perpetuating but also resisting McCarthy’s scare tactics.
Herman, Arthur. Joseph R. McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press, 2000. A book sympathetic to McCarthy but accurate in details.