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Joseph Welch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Joseph Nye Welch (October 22, 1890 – October 6, 1960) was the head attorney for the United States Army while it was under investigation by Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for Communist activities. This investigation (known as the "Army-McCarthy Hearings") was underway when television was first becoming a common household product in the United States. It was the first time many people got a first-hand view of McCarthy.
On June 9, 1954, the 30th day of the hearings, McCarthy accused Fred Fisher, one of the junior attorneys at Welch's firm, of association (while in college) with the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a group which J. Edgar Hoover was seeking to have the U.S. Attorney General designate as a Communist front organization (see Army-McCarthy hearings). Welch wrote off Fisher's association with the NLG as a youthful indiscretion and famously rebuked:
- "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman "call the next witness." At that point, the gallery erupted in applause.
The line was used in the Robert De Niro movie Guilty by Suspicion.
These proceedings have been recorded in the documentary film Point of Order! (1964). The title is taken from a phrase that was repeated often by McCarthy during the hearings.
Welch was a partner at Hale and Dorr, a Boston law firm.
Welch played a criminal court judge in northern Michigan in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
- McCarthy-Welch Exchange: "Have You No Sense of Decency" (transcript and sound file)
- History of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr
- Joseph Welch on the cover of Life Magazine
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