No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls and Television Takes Charge of American Politics

by Robert Shogan Author of No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings

Overview

"Have you no sense of decency, sir?" asked attorney Robert Welch in a climactic moment in the 1954 Senate hearings that pitted Joseph R. McCarthy against the United States Army, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the rest of the political establishment. What made the confrontation unprecedented and magnified its impact was its gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation. With a journalist's eye for revealing detail, Robert Shogan traces the phenomenon and analyzes television's impact on government. Despite McCarthy's fall, Mr. Shogan points out, the hearings left a major item of unfinished business—the issue of McCarthyism, the strategy based on fear, smear, and guilt by association.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566637701
Publisher:	Dee, Ivan R. Publisher
Publication date:	02/16/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robert Shogan, a former prizewinning national political correspondent for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, has also written Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal; Bad News; Constant Conflict; Hard Bargain; Riddle of Power; The Fate of the Union; and The Battle of Blair Mountain. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter 1: The Curtain Rises Chapter 2: A Torch in the Troubled World Chapter 3: Racket Buster Chapter 4: The Road to Room 318 Chapter 5: St. Ed and the Dragon Chapter 6: At War with the Army Chapter 7: The Soldiering of Private Schine Chapter 8: Turning the Tide Chapter 9: The Purloined Letter Chapter 10: Time Out for Tears Chapter 11: To the Bitter End Chapter 12: Unfinished Business Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times political correspondent Shogan (Backlash: The Killing of the New Deal, 2006, etc.) persuasively argues that the famous 1954 confrontation had a transformative effect on the nascent medium of television. The Army-McCarthy hearings pitted hard-charging anticommunist Joseph McCarthy and his chief aide, Roy Cohn, against the U.S. Army and its lead attorney, Joseph Welch. The Army accused McCarthy and Cohn of pressuring the military to give preferential treatment to a McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, while the senator countered that the accusation was being made in retaliation for his investigations into Army officials. Shogan ably recounts the many twists and turns of the hearings, including Welch's famous question to McCarthy ("Have you left no sense of decency?"), but it's his media analysis that makes the book truly interesting. Television was in its infancy in 1954, but the widely watched live broadcasts of the hearings, as well as Edward R. Murrow's televised critiques, undoubtedly helped speed the decline of McCarthy's popularity. Caught in the stark spotlight of live television, his blustering, bullying manner worked disastrously against him. "McCarthy demonstrated with appalling clarity precisely what kind of man he is," wrote James Reston in the New York Times. Shogan effectively argues that the hearings were a watershed moment for the medium of television, helping to transform it into a key shaper of American opinion. The author has written about the role of TV journalism in politics before, most notably in Bad News: Where the Press Goes Wrong in the Making of the President (2001), and his critiques remain sharp in the historical contextof the '50s. In the final chapter, he widens his view to analyze television's impact on perceptions of the Vietnam War, presidential politics and 9/11, finding a preoccupation with flash over substance that he tracks back to TV's infancy. An effective melding of political history and media criticism.

Kirkus Reviews