Welch turns on McCarthy: 'Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?'

By the thirtieth day of the Army–McCarthy hearings, an estimated 20 million Americans had been watching Senator Joseph McCarthy bully witnesses on live television for weeks. On June 9, 1954, McCarthy broke an informal agreement and publicly attacked Fred Fisher — a young associate at the Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr — for a past membership in the National Lawyers Guild. Army counsel Joseph N. Welch, who had privately settled the Fisher matter before the hearings began, turned on McCarthy with controlled fury: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." When McCarthy pressed on, Welch cut him off — "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" — and the gallery broke into applause. McCarthy's approval rating fell sixteen points before the summer was out…