A recent reference to a made-up threat of ‘Death Panels’ led me to recall a famous political showdown. Legend tells us this interchange sparked the beginning of the end for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

While McCarthy was not without opponents to his paranoid demagoguery, lawyer Joseph Welch went down in history as a giant-slayer. Welch was representing the US Army at a Congressional hearing (which had become in effect another platform for McCarthy’s ongoing anti-Communist self-aggrandisement) and drew a line at an attempt to assassinate the character of one of his firm’s young lawyers, who was not even involved in the hearings.

His killer blow was the rhetorical question:

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

There’s a video of the interchange available on google video:

Worth watching, in my opinion. (Right to the end.) Transcript here.

And here’s how Language Log recalled it on June 09, 2004 …

AT LONG LAST
Today is the fiftieth anniversary of an event that should not go unremarked on Language Log: it’s exactly half a century today since a pair of well-crafted sentences rang out across a Congressional hearings room in Washington DC and began a process that was of great importance to the integrity and honor of our country:
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy was famous for his aggressive anti-communist stance, and speeches in which he claimed to be in possession of long lists of names of communists in the State department, the military, and elsewhere in government. He made full use of his position as chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Committee on Investigations. He destroyed the careers of many people by claiming that they had belonged to communist front organizations or associated with communists. His success at this owed a lot to the fact that he was able to play (as Harvard law dean Erwin Griswold put it) ‘judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.’

On June 9 in 1954, McCarthy was pursuing a somewhat peripheral vendetta against the Army over the drafting of a member of his staff. The vendetta had already dragged through over thirty days of Congressional hearings. At one point, out of sheer malice, McCarthy decided to place into the record the quite gratuitous information that the law firm representing the Army, Hale and Dorr of Boston, employed a young lawyer, Fred Fisher, who — though he was by this time a Republican — had once (in law school and for a few months thereafter) belonged to a chapter of a leftist organization, the Lawyer’s Guild.

Fisher was not even on the team that was representing the Army in the case at hand in Washington; he worked in the Hale and Dorr’s Boston office and had nothing to do with the case at hand. But his career could well be over if he was publicly smeared as a communist, and that would be a blow McCarthy could strike against the senior Hale and Dorr attorney who was representing the Army, Joseph Welch. As McCarthy launched into the speech that would place it on record that Fisher had been in the Lawyer’s Guild, Welch went on the offensive, arguing against him fiercely, castigating him personally (‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness’), begging him not to go on.

‘Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough,’ he cried; and as McCarthy showed that he was going to go on regardless, Welch added: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’…

From the moment of Welch’s eloquent and much-quoted utterance, Joseph McCarthy’s reputation started to wane, and before long it had collapsed. He lost his popularity with the public (his altercation with Welch was seen live on TV, and the newspapers the next day recorded in print for those who didn’t see it). Ultimately he was censured by his Senate colleagues. When he died three years later after a period of alcohol abuse he was a broken man.
Never was there a clearer example to show that sometimes, in the face of real evil and dangerous power, one person can stand up and win a battle with a simple speech act.

(Via Language Log.)

Read that last line again:

Never was there a clearer example to show that sometimes, in the face of real evil and dangerous power, one person can stand up and win a battle with a simple speech act.

One person. With moral courage. I find that inspiring.