No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: a Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics - Hardcover

Shogan, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566637708 ISBN 13: 9781566637701

Verlag: Ivan R Dee, Inc, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" asked attorney Robert Welch in a climactic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the phenomenon and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business—the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Robert Shogan, a former prizewinning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News; Constant Conflict; Hard Bargain; Riddle of Power; The Fate of the Union; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Robert Shogan, a former prizewinning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News; Constant Conflict; Hard Bargain; Riddle of Power; The Fate of the Union; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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NO SENSE OF DECENCY

The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American PoliticsBy ROBERT SHOGAN

Ivan R. Dee

Copyright © 2009 Robert Shogan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56663-770-1

Contents

Preface................................................ix1 The Curtain Rises....................................32 A Torch in the Troubled World........................263 Racket Buster........................................434 The Road to Room 318.................................605 St. Ed and the Dragon................................886 At War with the Army.................................1157 The Soldiering of Private Schine.....................1428 Turning the Tide.....................................1639 The Purloined Letter.................................18910 Time Out for Tears..................................20711 To the Bitter End...................................23312 Unfinished Business.................................263Notes..................................................285Bibliography...........................................299Index..................................................305

Chapter One

The Curtain Rises

With its Corinthian pilasters, marble columns, ornate ceiling, and three-tiered chandeliers, the Senate caucus room, Room 318 in what is now called the Russell Senate Office Building, resembles a mausoleum and is usually just as dreary and barren. But on Thursday morning, April 22, 1954, this cavernous space hummed with tension and overflowed with politicians, lawyers, and journalists. They had been drawn by the prospect of a power struggle that promised to be one of the most memorable of the twentieth century, now just past its halfway mark. In one corner was Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, the most feared politician in the land and perhaps the most powerful. Against him were arrayed one of the nation's proudest institutions, the Army of the United States, and along with the Army, the reigning administration of the country.

Spectators had begun collecting in the rotunda of the building before dawn. By mid-morning more than eight hundred had gained entrance past the massive oaken doors into the seventy-four-foot-long room designed to hold no more than three hundred persons. Conducting the hearings was a committee of the United States Senate, officially styled as the Special Subcommittee on Investigations, known more popularly-or just as often unpopularly-as the McCarthy Committee, after its chairman.

But no one, friend or foe, was calling it that today.

Senator McCarthy had been forced to step aside from his chairmanship. After four fractious years of stirring up trouble for others, he had ignited a firestorm that threatened to engulf this prodigious troublemaker himself. Like all the other furors initiated by McCarthy this one had begun by his choosing a target for charges of Communist subversion. But in this case his intended victim, the Department of the Army, after weeks of enduring abuse from McCarthy, had struck back and leveled charges of its own. It claimed that McCarthy had threatened to depict the Army to the country "in the worst light" unless it gave preferential treatment to a recently inducted McCarthy aide, G. David Schine. The Army alone would have made a formidable foe. But in challenging the Army McCarthy also had to reckon with the prestige and power of the Army's commander-in-chief, the thirty-second president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Since for the time being, at least, Eisenhower chose to remain in the background, it was Senator McCarthy who most commanded attention as the hearings prepared to open. During his three-year crusade against what he proclaimed to be the insidious threat of Communist subversion in America, McCarthy had made himself into the great intimidator of American politics. He had won the admiration, indeed the devotion, of millions of Americans. Other millions regarded him with scorn and derision. But even among his enemies, most-if they were honest-would admit they were too fearful of political retribution to speak against him.

Under these conditions, even as the hearings commenced, it was difficult to predict who if anyone would rise to challenge McCarthy in this public arena. But it was clear who besides McCarthy himself had the most at stake. This was Eisenhower, the most admired American of his time. Despite his plain reluctance to square off against McCarthy, Eisenhower's own advisers wondered whether he could afford not to confront the senator. Unless McCarthy was stopped, if he continued unchecked on his reckless course, he would be well positioned to wreck Eisenhower's presidency in midstream. And it was clear to everyone on both sides of this struggle that if McCarthy were ever to be taken down, it had better happen at the Senate hearings on which the curtain was about to rise.

The conflict between the Army and McCarthy was not the only troublesome news about national security that month. Ten days before the hearings opened, the country learned that Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had directed development of the atomic bomb, had been denied his security clearance and suspended by the Atomic Energy Commission. The charges against Oppenheimer included associating with Communists and opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb after President Truman had given the project a green light. Oppenheimer admitted his past Communist sympathies but denied resisting development of the H-bomb. Although he later appealed the action against him, his security clearance was never restored.

Even more ominous was the news from halfway around the world, in Indochina. There Communist Vietminh forces had laid siege to the French fortress of Dienbienphu in what many viewed as the climactic battle in the struggle to overthrow French rule of its colony. On the day the hearings opened, the French admitted that Vietminh forces had tightened their band of flesh and steel around the fortress, in preparation for a final assault. Only a week earlier, Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, in remarks he tried to keep off the record, warned the nation's newspaper editors that if France were forced to surrender Indochina, the United States might have to send its own troops there. Washington could not afford further retreat in Asia, Nixon claimed.

But in the nation's capital, all the news, no matter how portentous, was transcended by the remarkable events that were about to unfold in Room 318. Although officially designated as a legislative hearing, these proceedings would in reality be more like a trial. And when they concluded, the judgment of the participating lawmakers would be far outweighed by the opinions of millions of ordinary Americans who would function as an informal but potent jury.

Not that there was space in the hearing room for average folk. The great demand for seats from the capital's officialdom and the need to accommodate the national press corps left little room for any but officials and celebrities. Even the senators on the committee found themselves surrounded by relatives of the witnesses who would be called. The witnesses themselves were crammed in by the spectators. Aides to committee members wandered among the chairs and tables, seeking a place to work.

But there was no danger the public would be left in the dark. A glance around the room made clear why. A three-tiered platform had been constructed along the back wall of the hearing room to accommodate a battery of television...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ivan R Dee, Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1566637708
• ISBN 13: 9781566637701
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland