The Gauge of Recklessness

What will probably be remembered as the most memorable scene of the McCarthy-Army hearings occurred on the 30th day. Army Counsel Joseph Welch was winding up his dogged cross-examination of Roy Cohn when Joe McCarthy caressed the McCarthy cheek with the stem of his glasses and commandeered the microphone for what sounded like just another diversion. As McCarthy got rolling, Welch sat bolt upright and stared unbelievingly at the man just six feet away across the table. The packed room hushed; Roy Cohn grimaced toward McCarthy, shook his head, and his lips seemed to form the words "No! No!" Without any warning or relevancy, McCarthy interjected the name of Fred Fisher, 32, an associate in Welch's Boston law firm, Hale & Dorr. Fisher, said McCarthy, "has been for a number of years" a member of the National Lawyers Guild, "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party." Welch, he went on, had tried to get Fisher hired as "the assistant counsel for this committee" so Fisher would have a chance to be "looking over the secret and classified material." When McCarthy had finished his harangue and turned to his paper-shuffling, Welch slowly and with great sadness spoke up: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty and your recklessness."

Fisher, said Welch, had indeed belonged to the Lawyers Guild while a law-school student and for some months thereafter. He had indeed been chosen to help prepare the Army's case, but it was never suggested (as Chairman Mundt verified) that he work for the committee. Fisher is now a leader of the Newton, Mass. Republican Club, but when he told Welch of the Lawyers Guild incident before the hearings began, said Welch, "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 ... 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 will do so. I like to think I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

"Let us assassinate this lad no further. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you left no sense of decency? If there is a God in heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good . . ."

There was a moment of profound silence, then a roll of thunderous applause. Chairman Mundt, who had always curbed such outbreaks, let the applause run its course as McCarthy stared in blank surprise. When the uproar had subsided, Joe Welch, face drained white, rose from the committee table, silently walked past McCarthy and out into a corridor where he stood alone, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief.

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