Nobody was surer than Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy that the Soviet Union’s successful testing of the atomic bomb in 1949 came with the help of their spies in the Manhattan Project. Certainly the capture and trial of the husband-and-wife Soviet spy team of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg two years earlier only reinforced his conviction, but on other hand a lot of evidence was already amassed to show the Rosenbergs were an exception, not the rule. McCarthy’s accusations and inquisition of professor Owen Lattimore also fell flat on their face in a Senate hearing, but he pressed on to his ultimate undoing.

On this day, April 22, in 1954, a McCarthy-sparked hearing involving an army officer got underway. David Schine was a consultant to McCarthy until the army called him up in a draft, a subtle move to de-fang the senator. McCarthy was incensed: as the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he harangued the reluctant senators to agree to a full hearing.

At McCarthy’s insistence, the hearings were televised. For 38 days, it was the television event, with two of the four television cameras in existence covering the trial. Senator McCarthy, in ever-shriller tones, continued to harangue the senators and lawyers present, at one point accusing one of the law firm of Joseph Welch, Schine’s attorney, of harboring communist sympathizers. That brought about Welch’s stinging rebuttal: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness….Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”