At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch's attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. Amidst this controversy, McCarthy temporarily stepped down as chairman for the duration of the three-month nationally televised spectacle known to history as the Army-McCarthy hearings. The army responded that the senator had sought preferential treatment for a recently drafted subcommittee aide. Army, charging lax security at a top-secret army facility. In the spring of 1954, McCarthy picked a fight with the U.S.
Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described McCarthy's role as "judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one." As a result, McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn largely ran the show by themselves, relentlessly grilling and insulting witnesses. Republican senators also stopped attending, in part because so many of the hearings were called on short notice or held away from the nation's capital. He conducted scores of hearings, calling hundreds of witnesses in both public and closed sessions.Ī dispute over his hiring of staff without consulting other committee members prompted the panel's three Democrats to resign in mid-1953. He quickly put his imprint on that subcommittee, shifting its focus from investigating fraud and waste in the executive branch to hunting for Communists. McCarthy relentlessly continued his anticommunist campaign into 1953, when he gained a new platform as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism. McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.
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