Opinion

THE FIRST ‘REALITY SHOW’

Fifty years ago today, in a packed committee room at the U.S. Capitol, came one of the most electric moments in American political history. Indeed, it was a defining moment of the 20th century – in ways not immediately appreciated.

On June 9, 1954, in the midst of marathon hearings into a series of charges leveled against the United States Army by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a moment of high drama transfixed the nation – which was watching it all on live TV.

McCarthy had accused the Army of trying to derail his investigation into alleged security breaches that allowed communists to infiltrate the military; the Army, in turn, said McCarthy was trying to get even because the Pentagon had denied special favors to one his aides, David Schine.

Joseph Welch, a wizened old Boston lawyer who represented the Army, was relentlessly cross-examining McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn, when the senator interrupted to offer a new allegation: Welch, he said, had tried to bring along as one of his assistants a young attorney who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, then the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.

See, he was saying, even the Army’s lawyer was guilty of coddling Communists.

It was the opening for which Welch – who had already captured the nation’s attention with his patient, but persistent, needling of McCarthy and Cohn – had been waiting.

Turning to McCarthy, his eyes brimming with tears, Welch declared: “Until this moment, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Little did I dream you could be so reckless or so cruel as to do an injury to that lad.”

McCarthy interrupted again, demanding that Welch admit he had tried to “foist” the lawyer, Frederic Fisher, “on the committee.”

To which Welch replied with his classic rejoinder: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” The entire hearing room erupted in thunderous applause, and even McCarthy’s supporters immediately understood that he’d suffered a politically fatal blow.

No doubt, Welch had been upset by McCarthy’s attack. But what the TV audience did not see was Welch leaving the hearing room, tears rolling down his cheeks. As he passed a friendly reporter on his way out, he winked. Then, once he’d left the assembled cameras and journalists, he turned to an aide and asked, “Well, how did it go?”

In other words, Welch’s performance that day was far more calculated than the spontaneous burst of emotion it seemed. But then, he may have been the only one in the room who had come to understand the power of the new medium that was allowing the American people to watch it all unfold at the moment it happened.

Welch’s performance up to that point had dismayed many McCarthy foes. Murray Marder, then of The Baltimore Sun, told Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman he was certain Welch “hadn’t done his homework. He had done a terrible job of briefing himself. . . . [W]e were dying about the thing.

“But he knew something we didn’t know,” added Marder. “He didn’t intend to beat Joe as to facts; he intended to beat Joe on the stage. And we didn’t know that. So we were apprehensive as hell that he was going to blow the whole thing. And then came his moment with the theatrics – and it worked.”

History records that moment as the final nail in the coffin of McCarthy’s political career: A few months later, the Senate formally voted to condemn him; three years later, he was dead at the age of 47.

But the Welch-McCarthy exchange also marked a significant milestone: It clinched television’s power as a medium that stood as more than just a witness to history. From that monent on, broadcasting – and its powerful visual images – overtook the printed press as the principal shaper of political developments.

Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate Democratic leader, wasn’t figuring that far ahead when he pressed to have the hearings televised; McCarthy’s enemies hoped that the sight of his bullying ways would repel viewers, and it did.

ABC and the old DuMont network broadcast the hearings gavel-to-gavel. CBS and NBC ran 45 minute highlights each night. The audience wasn’t quite as large as that of the Kefauver crime hearings a few years earlier – but the impact of these broadcasts was far greater.

Over the next five decades, politicians would learn to manipulate the power of television; indeed, TV would come to dominate all public political events over the next five decades and beyond. And the indelible connection between television and politics was cemented for good on that day 50 years ago in Washington.