Mr. Welch: Senator, you won't need anything in the record when I finish telling you this. Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. When I decided to work for this Committee, I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, "Pick somebody in the firm to work under you that you would like." He chose Fred Fisher, and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case is about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, "Boys, I don't know anything about you, except I've always liked you, but if there's anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case, you speak up quick."
And Fred Fisher said, "Mr. Welch, when I was in the law school, and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers' Guild," as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, "I am Secretary of the Young Republican's League in Newton with the son of [the] Massachusetts governor, and I have the respect and admiration of my community, and I'm sure I have the respect and admiration of the twenty-five lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr." And I said, "Fred, I just don't think I'm going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out, and go over national television, and it will just hurt like the dickens." And so, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I'm a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman, may I say that Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless. He was just baiting. He has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours, requesting that Mr. Cohn before sundown get out of any department of the government anyone who is serving the Communist cause. Now, I just give this man's record and I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it had been labeled long before he became a member, as early as 1944 --
Mr. Welch: Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers' Guild.
Senator McCarthy: Let me finish....
Mr. Welch: And Mr. Cohn nods his head at me. I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn?
Mr. Cohn: No, sir.
Mr. Welch: I meant to do you no personal injury.
Mr. Cohn: No, sir.
Mr. Welch: And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.
Senator McCarthy: Let's, let's --
Mr. Welch: You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
— Senator Joe McCarthy and the army's chief legal representative, Joe Welch, in a public display that is often credited with ending Joe McCarthy's career.
1 comment:
That exchange is really something else to me. I think I read or listen to it every few months or so. One of the things that strikes me, though, is how even an exchange like that would not have ruined the Republican leadership a little as a year ago.
To a certain degree, the destruction they've wrought on themselves was so great that no further external opposition was needed.
Do you suppose that there's a difference in American politics today where that speech had the effects it had then vs. what it'd do in our current climate under similar circumstances, then?
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