In February 1950 in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to hold a list of 205 Communist Party members working in the State Department. When Republicans took the Senate in 1953 he chaired the Committee on Government Operations and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, hiring 26 year old Roy Cohn as chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy as assistant counsel, and hotel heir G. David Schine as chief consultant. That year the subcommittee probed alleged communist infiltration at the Army Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. When Schine was drafted as a private, the Army charged that McCarthy and Cohn sought special treatment for him, and McCarthy countered that the Army was holding Schine hostage to stop his inquiry.

McCarthy stepped aside as chairman in favor of Karl Mundt, and ABC broadcast the hearings live for 36 days from April to June 1954, with Boston lawyer Joseph N. Welch of Hale and Dorr representing the Army. On June 9, as Welch pressed Cohn, McCarthy broke a private agreement and named Welch’s young associate Fred Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, prompting Welch to ask whether he had no sense of decency. McCarthy’s approval fell from 50 percent in January to 34 percent by June, and on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him. He died in 1957 at 48.

• Cohn reportedly forged McCarthy’s signature to get Schine into the Senate’s private baths.
• Welch showed that a photo of Schine with Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens had been cropped to remove others, including Colonel Jack Bradley and McCarthy aide Frank Carr.
• Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. confirmed that a supposed 1951 J. Edgar Hoover memo McCarthy produced was neither written nor authorized by Hoover.
• After McCarthy called him sanctimonious Stu, Stuart Symington replied that McCarthy was not fooling anyone either.
• Fred Fisher went on to a highly successful legal career in Boston.