During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the United States was consumed with the fear called the “Red Scare”. The byline was “A communist under every couch.”

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, kept extensive dossiers on prominent celebrities and politicians, who he suspected had communist connections.

The House UnAmerican Activities Committee conducted hearings, including Hollywood celebrities. Many were terrified of being subpoenaed to testify. Celebrities who were suspected or accused of having Communist connections were blacklisted and were unable to find work, including prominent names like Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin.

Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted hearings in the Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations. His influence and aggressiveness in conducting the hearings was so great that they are still remembered as McCarthyism.

McCarthy conducted a series of televised hearings from March through June, 1954, called the Army-McCarthy hearings. The United States Army accused McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, of preferential treatment to G. David Schine, a former McCarthy aide and friend of Cohn’s. McCarthy counter-charged that this accusation was in bad faith and in retaliation for his investigations of suspected communists and security risks in the Army.

Before of the hearing on June 9, 1954, Senator McCarthy made an agreement to not raise the association of Fred Fisher, a member of the Joseph Welch’s law firm, Hale and Dorr, with the National Lawyers Guild while at Harvard Law School. The National Lawyers Guild had been called “the legal mouthpiece of the Communist party” by U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr. Joseph Welch was chief counsel for the U.S. Army.

Senator McCarthy raised that association during the hearing that was broadcast on national television.

Joseph Welch dismissed the association as a youthful indiscretion, and attacked McCarthy for naming the young man before a nationwide television audience without prior warning or a previous agreement to do so.

Welch responded, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us. … Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that 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 would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.”

When Senator McCarthy pressed the issue, Joseph Welch responded, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

From that point, Senator McCarthy lost the upper hand in his arguments and the public opinion of the American public turned against him.

On December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy, effectively eradicating his influence. On January 3, 1955, Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas replaced McCarthy as chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations.

Following the censure of Joseph McCarthy in the Senate, the prestige of the House UnAmerican Activities Committe declined in the House of Representatives. By 1959, the committee was denounced by former President Harry S. Truman as the “most un-American thing in the country today.”

Thanks to the courage of Joseph Welch facing down Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red Scare was defused. The suspicion and fear of McCarthyism was replaced with the optimism and hope of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.