Have You No Sense of Decency?: Main Idea
Have You No Sense of Decency?: Main Idea
You're a Lying, Despicable Monster
Senator McCarthy gets himself up in a snit about Welch's baiting of Roy Cohn and launches into an unrelated attack on a young attorney in Welch's law firm. It would be like if you were a kid, and your mom badgered you to clean your room for once in your life, and you responded with, "Forget it, and anyway, how about that time you burned the grilled cheese?"
Especially if she'd never made grilled cheese.
Anyway, Welch is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and disgusted by McCarthy's gratuitous attack on his young colleague. He can't believe how low McCarthy will stoop in trying to ruin the young man's reputation with an unsubstantiated allegation. You can hear the emotion in Welch's voice if you listen to one of the clips.
The thing is, he shouldn't have been shocked at all; McCarthy had been doing this kind of stuff for years.
McCarthy's side of the exchange is a pretty good portrait of power going to someone's head. McCarthy basically had only one tool in his toolbox: the smear. This solved every one of his problems until now, and at this televised hearing, he was going to bust it out one more time in what he thought was a routine investigation.
This time, it didn't work.
Questions
- What if McCarthy had been correct, and Fred Fisher, the young man he smeared, truly had Communist tendencies?
- The First Amendment permits Americans to hold and express Communist beliefs. Why was McCarthy so successful?
- McCarthy's attacks were based on deception, insinuation, and rumor, but instead of concentrating on that, Welch ultimately brought him down with an emotional plea. Should Welch have stuck with concrete facts? Was that even possible? Is it okay for reason to be eclipsed by emotion?
- If the hearings weren't televised, would they have gone differently?
Chew On This
Welch wasn't really responding to the attacks against the young lawyer; he was calling McCarthy out for years of false accusations.
Welch was just pretending to be shocked at McCarthy's smear of Fred Fisher. He knew these hearings were televised, and he wanted to have the most dramatic impact possible.
Quotes
Quote #1
Mr. Cohn, what is the exact number of Communists or subversives that are loose today in these defense plants? (Welch.24)
Welch is trying to get Roy Cohn to provide an exact figure, hoping (correctly) that the high number will be something he can ridicule. We like to tell people to just ignore bullies, but this guy went for the jugular.
Quote #2
Mr. Chairman, let's not be ridiculous. Mr. Welch knows, as I have told him a dozen times, that the FBI has all of this information. The defense plants have the information. The only thing we can do is to try and publicly expose these individuals and hope that they will be gotten rid of. (McCarthy.58)
"Publicly expose" is the operative phrase here. Being publicly exposed as a "Communist," whether you were one or not, was what everyone was terrified of. McCarthy knew it.
Quote #3
[...] in view of Mr. Welch's request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher...who has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named...as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party." (McCarthy.74)
This is the moment when McCarthy decides that any sort of reasonable debate is too much trouble, and instead changes the subject by sliming one of Welch's employees. At this point, a smear by the Scheming Senator was so dangerous that something like this meant Fisher's career was in serious jeopardy if not already completely over.
Quote #4
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. (Welch.86)
No one had ever spoken to McCarthy like this in one of these hearings. Welch had been sparring, almost playfully, but he'd just had his eyes opened. McCarthy wasn't a harmless clown, he was a ruthless demagogue, and Welch was going to bring him down.