Cinema: McCarthy's Last Stand

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Point of Order. The Army-McCarthy hearings were superb political theater. In this fascinating film, a 97-minute précis of what television audiences saw at the time, the theater is heightened by intelligent and impartial editing.

The reason the Senate held the hearings is explained in a terse foreword: the Army charged that McCarthy and two members of his staff, Roy Conn and Frank Carr, had sought special favors for Private G. David Schine, one of McCarthy's assistants. McCarthy and Cohn countercharged that the Army was holding Schine as a hostage to prevent their investigation of subversion in the Army.

Then the drama begins, and it is constructed like a prizefight. In the early rounds the opponents politely feel each other out, and there is time for the referee to provide low comic relief ("Am I running this committee," Senator Mundt splutters ineffectually, "or am I not?"). In the middle rounds the opponents get down to serious slugging, and both take damaging blows—the evidence demonstrates that McCarthy attempted to blackmail the Army and that the Army then attempted to buy McCarthy off. But in the later rounds, McCarthy begins to swing wildly, and Joseph N. Welch, the Army's counsel, delicately cuts him into paper dolls. His methods are exposed as stupid, his morals as prehistoric. "At long last," Welch cries in revulsion, "at long last, sir, have you no decency left at all?"—and the spectators burst into sustained applause. In the end, the other Senators on the subcommittee turn fiercely against McCarthy. "No one is afraid of you ... in or out of jail," bellows Senator McClellan, and Senator Symington hoots: "Go see a psychiatrist." Even Counsel Cohn looks as though he longed to desert the sinking ship. As for McCarthy, he just sits there with a strange and frightening look on his face: a smile that is some how vicious, a grin like the grin of a wounded and desperate hyena. The look is the look of a very sick man, and it did more to damage McCarthy's case than any evidence introduced against him. When the hearings were finished, McCarthy was finished as a force in U.S. political life.