Joseph N. Welch

Joseph Nye Welch (October 22, 1890 – October 6, 1960) was an American lawyer who served as the chief counsel for the United States Army while it was under investigation for alleged Communist activities by Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, an investigation known as the Army–McCarthy hearings. His confrontation with McCarthy during the hearings, in which he asked McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?", is seen as a turning point in the history of McCarthyism.

Early life Welch was born in Primghar, Iowa, on October 22, 1890, the seventh and youngest child of English immigrants Martha (Thyer) and William Welch. He attended Grinnell College and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1914, then attended Harvard Law School and graduated in 1917, magna cum laude, with the second highest grade point average in his graduating class. They had two sons, Joe and Lyndon. He enlisted in the United States Army for World War I. After joining as a private in August 1918, he applied for a commission.

Army–McCarthy hearings

On June 9, 1954, the 30th day of the Army–McCarthy hearings, Welch challenged Roy Cohn to provide U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. with McCarthy's list of 130 Communists or subversives in defense plants "before sundown". McCarthy stepped in and said that if Welch was so concerned about persons aiding the Communist Party, he should check on a man in his Boston law office named Fred Fisher, who had once belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, which Brownell had called "the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party". Welch had privately discussed the matter with Fisher beforehand and the two agreed Fisher should not participate in the hearings. Welch dismissed Fisher's association with the NLG as a youthful indiscretion and attacked McCarthy for naming the young man before a nationwide television audience without prior warning or previous agreement to do so:

When McCarthy tried to renew his attack, Welch interrupted him:

McCarthy tried to ask Welch another question about Fisher, and Welch interrupted:

At this, those watching the proceedings broke into applause. Welch's TV performance turned the tide of public and press opinion against McCarthy overnight. In July, a Republican senator introduced a motion, which passed later that year, censuring McCarthy for acts that "tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."

In his review of the film Point of Order that depicted the hearings, Vincent Canby called Welch "one of the great performers ever to appear on the small screen" whether in demanding Cohn expose the security risks in the nation's defense plants or accepting a heavily insincere compliment from Cohn, in a manner which demolished Cohn.

Acting Welch played a Michigan judge in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959). He said he took the role because "it looked like that was the only way I'd ever get to be a judge." He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Motion Picture and a BAFTA Award for Best Newcomer for the role. He also narrated the television shows Omnibus and Dow Hour of Great Mysteries. and he married Agnes Rodgers Brown in 1957. After remarrying, he moved to Harwich Port, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where he lived until his death.

Sixteen days before his 70th birthday, and fifteen months after the release of Anatomy of a Murder, Welch suffered a heart attack and died on October 6, 1960, at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

In popular culture In a 1959 television special sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, presenting a concert by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow during a tour of the Soviet Union, Welch appears in a commercial-break-replacing short film about American history showcasing Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In the 1977 NBC biopic Tail Gunner Joe, Welch was played by Burgess Meredith. In the 1992 HBO film Citizen Cohn, Welch was played by Ed Flanders. Welch's "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator" passage appears as an excerpt in the R.E.M. song "Exhuming McCarthy" on their fifth studio album, Document. A sample of Welch's line, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” is included in the JAY-Z song “Caught Their Eyes,” featuring Frank Ocean from the album 4:44.

Filmography Title Year Role Notes Anatomy of a Murder 1959 Judge Weaver