By MIKE MAGEE
the date was June 9, 1954. This was more than a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy became chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. History shows that he had “come to public attention in 1950 with his accusations that hundreds of communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.” Clearly a psychopath, he escaped the control of the moderating voices, attacking larger and larger targets, now including the US military.
“Judge, jury, prosecutor, punisher and press agent, all in one,” so said the dean of Harvard Law. Ervin Griswold described it. In 1954, McCarthy accused the military of “lax security at its top-secret military installations” which he claimed were infiltrated by communists. The Army responded by hiring veteran Boston attorney Joseph Welch to defend itself.
Ash documentary filmmakers reported, “Mothers who never watched daytime television were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.” McCarthy’s top counsel’s right-hand man that day was a lawyer. Roy Marcus Cohn. Pragmatic, ruthless, and evil to the core, Cohn’s career was launched by McCarthy, and his tainted touch destroyed lives and weakened the United States government for three more decades, until the time of her death from HIV/AIDS in 1986.
His style and tactics are widely regarded today as the strategic scaffolding of our Executive Branch’s attempt to take over the United States government. It is not surprising that a direct attack on the control functions, values and traditions of the US military is a major wedge in these attacks. They literally have exploded last week with revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself gave the go-ahead to a “kill them all” order that ultimately affected two survivors of a rocket attack on an alleged speedboat transporting drugs.
In a 5-minute summary of the televised events of June 9, 1954, you (along with our leaders) can Witness the historic demolition of McCarthy by Welch (with Cohn as a witness): the “dragon slaying” that finally destroyed McCarthy once and for all.
Cohn had reached an agreement with Welch that McCarthy would avoid attacking a particular military man as a communist if Welch remained civil. But Welch had set a trap and intentionally goaded McCarthy into losing his temper, and on camera, he violated the agreement and “attacked the good guy,” whom an outraged Welch tearfully defended in his historic and well-prepared retort.
as a historian Thomas Doherty He recalls, “It was like the whole country had been waiting for someone to finally say this phrase: ‘Have you no sense of decency?'” As Welch lunges at his victim, Cohn wins and his dragon is slain. To which Jelani Cobb adds: “In the end, all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself, had effectively been dispelled.”
As Congress grapples with a situation that has gotten dangerously out of control, we can only hope that this time “history repeats itself.” Courage must come from within. As Martin Luther King recalled: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Mike Magee MD is a medical historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s medical industrial complex. (Greet/2020)
