Susan King
·4 min read
The acclaimed Showtime limited series “Fellow Travelers” tells the decades-long love story of two closeted men, Hawk Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey) who meet in 1950s Washington. Their early days together are told against the backdrop of the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy (Chris Bauer), the notorious Republican Senator from Wisconsin, tapped into Americans increasing Cold War fears of Russia and rampant Communist infiltration in the U.S.He was a little-known junior senator who, on Feb. 9, 1950, made his notorious speech in Wheeling, West Virginia where he brandished a list of over 200 alleged Communists working in the State Department. These employers, he added, were being protected by high-ranking Communist sympathizers.
McCarthy got his desired response: nationwide publicity. He became an overnight sensation in the Senate. By 1953, McCarthy was chairman of Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations where he continued his Communist witch hunt while gaining more publicity and notoriety.
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But a few chinks in his armor appeared that same year. Three Democrats resigned from the committee; Republicans stopped attending because of McCarthy’s haphazard scheduling of hearings. According to a United States Senate blog “as a result, McCarthy and his chief counsel Roy Cohn (Will Brill) largely ran the show themselves…. Harvard law dean Ervin Griswold described McCarthy’s role as ‘judge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one.’”
McCarthy, though, made a major blunder when he decided to take on the Army in 1953 proclaiming there was Communist infiltration in the Army Signal Corp lab at Fort Monmouth. The Army countered that McCarthy had attempted to get preferential treatment for Private G.David Schine (Matt Visser) who had been a chief consultant on the subcommittee and close friend of Cohn. Because McCarthy was named by the Army, he didn’t chair the hearing
The “Army-McCarthy Hearings” were telecast for three months in 1954 on ABC and DuMont and part-time on NBC. The Army had an ace up its sleeve in Special Counsel Joseph N. Welch of the Boston law firm, Hale & Dorr. Brilliant, soft-spoken, witty and even tempered, according to History.com he “blunted every one of McCarthy’s charges. The senator, in turn, became increasingly enraged, bellowing ‘point of order, point of order,’ screaming at witnesses, and declaring that one highly decorated general was‘disgrace’ to the uniform.”
Everything came to ahead on June 9, 1954. That day, McCarthy got increasingly furious and frustrated at how Welch destroyed every argument he made.McCarthy decided to single out Frederick G. Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch’s firm whom heinitially had planned to be involved in the hearing until it was discovered he had once been in the National Lawyers Guild that had been described as “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party.”
Stunned, Welch scolded McCarthy: “Until this moment senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Senator, may we drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild…Let’s not assassinate this lad further. Senator you’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last have you left no sense of decency?”
The audience at the hearings burst into applause. Seemingly overnight, his immense popularity evaporated. The hearings ended within the week. And that December, McCarthy was condemned by the Senate for his “inexcusable,” “vulgar and insulting” conduct unbecoming a senator. He lost his power, but he kept his job. He died in 1957 at the age of 48. His death certificate listed the cause as “hepatitis acute, cause unknown. “
As for Welch, he ended up appearing as himself on several TV shows including “The Ed Sullivan Show” and made a great impression in Otto Preminger’s acclaimed 1959 courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” as a judge overseeing s particularly seamy murder case. The New York Times was impressed saying he “does an unbelievably professional job. He is delightful and ever so convincing. Mr. Preminger scored a coup in getting him.” Welch was nominated for a Golden Globe for supporting actor and a BAFTA for most promising newcomer to film. He died of a heart ailment at the age of 69 in 1960.
Three years later saw the release of the documentary about the hearings “Point of Order!” which edited the kinescopes of the hearings into a 97-minute movie.
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