Army–McCarthy hearings
| Army–McCarthy hearings | |
|---|---|
Joseph McCarthy (left) chats with Roy Cohn at the hearings.
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| Event | Senate hearing derived from Senator Joseph McCarthy's hunt for communists in USA |
| Time | April–June, 1954 |
| Place | Washington DC, |
| Participants |
The two sides of the hearing:
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| Chairman | Senator Karl Mundt |
| Result | End of the McCarthy era |
The two sides of the hearing:
The Army–McCarthy hearings were a series of hearings held by the United States Senate's Subcommittee on Investigations between April 1954 and June 1954. The hearings were held for the purpose of investigating conflicting accusations between the United States Army and Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Army accused chief committee counsel Roy Cohn of pressuring the Army to give preferential treatment to G. David Schine, a former McCarthy aide and a friend of Cohn's. McCarthy counter-charged that this accusation was made in bad faith and in retaliation for his recent aggressive investigations of suspected Communists and security risks in the Army.
Chaired by Senator Karl Mundt, the hearings convened on March 16, 1954, and received considerable press attention, including gavel-to-gavel live television coverage on ABC and DuMont from April 22 to June 17. The media coverage, particularly television, greatly contributed to McCarthy's decline in popularity and his eventual censure by the Senate the following December.
McCarthy came to national prominence in February 1950 after giving a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed to have a list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the Communist Party. McCarthy claimed the list was provided to and dismissed by then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson, saying that the "State Department harbors a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers who are helping to shape our foreign policy". In 1953, McCarthy was reelected to a second term and the Republican Party regained control of the Senate; with the Republicans in the majority, McCarthy was made chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. This committee included the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and the mandate of this subcommittee allowed McCarthy to use it to carry out his investigations of Communists in the government. McCarthy appointed 26-year-old Roy Cohn as chief counsel to the subcommittee and future Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy as assistant counsel; reassigning Francis Flanagan to the ad hoc position of general counsel.
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