One set of congressional hearings helped stop the McCarthy movement. It will take more to defeat Trump.

Edward R. Murrow in 1954, the year of his famous broadcast against McCarthy. Source: KNKX

Editor’s note: this is part two of a two-part series on Trump and McCarthy. Read part one here.

In 1954, Joseph McCarthy was in a position similar to the one that Donald Trump is in now. He had control of the Republican Party, which he could order to do his bidding. Party leaders were terrified of him; his agitation of voters had helped elect a president who refused to criticize him. Like Trump, McCarthy had also engendered a resistance. Intellectuals and students across the country fought tooth and nail against his every excess. A handful of writers on the right (Peter Viereck and Russell Kirk being two of the most prominent) joined the vast majority of the left in criticizing McCarthy’s hearings, disputing his assertions, and heaping scorn on those who vilified liberals in his wake. Republican senators such as Margaret Chase Smith vociferously denounced McCarthy on the Senate floor. But for several years, it looked as if the hatred he fomented would continue with no discernible effects.

Then McCarthy went too far: he attacked the Army. The problem with McCarthy’s accusations hurled against the Army was not just that they were baseless or targeted against the same organization that had defeated the Nazis nine years prior. It was that the attack was motivated so clearly by personal spite. McCarthy wanted to punish the Army for criticizing him over unethical behavior accused towards his former aide. Because McCarthy’s attack was even flimsier and more self-serving than usual, his enemies saw an opportunity and took the first, drastic step: they united. Senator Karl Mundt, the chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, had earlier enabled McCarthy, but he allowed the hearings on the Army to proceed in a way that would provide evidence of McCarthy’s reckless wrongdoing. Mundt worked behind the scenes with Eisenhower, a former enabler, who had begun to critique McCarthy weeks before. Eisenhower and Mundt also began to work closely with Edward R. Murrow, the venerable CBS reporter who had presented a report critical of McCarthy a month before the hearings. The combination of a powerful executive branch figure, resistance in Congress, and the media helped to break the hold that McCarthy had on the country and its institutions.

The Army-McCarthy hearings gave the resistance against McCarthy a crucial weapon: a single moment that encapsulated everything Americans hated about the Wisconsin senator. The “have you no sense of decency, sir?” moment was perfect in nearly every way. Joseph Welch, the attorney for the Army at the hearings, asked McCarthy the question after weeks of testimony, making it all the more genuine. The question was captured and television and broadcast to tens of millions of Americans. With that moment, the resistance to McCarthy could focus their criticism in a way Trump’s current opponents have struggled with so mightily over the past three years. McCarthy had almost as many types of scandals as Trump, with his adultery, self-dealing, and attempts to obstruct justice, has today. But the one exchange with Welch crystallized a narrative, that of McCarthy baselessly attacking virtuous victims for his own aggrandizement, that could easily be exported to the masses.

McCarthy was finished by the Army-McCarthy hearings. On December 2, 1954, he was censured by the Republican Senate, becoming one of only nine senators to be censured in American history. Eisenhower, the rest of the Senate, and the rest of the country moved on. McCarthy served in the Senate for three more years until his death in 1957, with terrible poll numbers and no power in senatorial committees. It took a six-week series of hearings for McCarthy’s grasp on the country to slip irrevocably.

The story of McCarthy’s fall clearly resonates with the current resistance against Donald Trump. Opponents of the president need to once again bring together all of the forces that sank McCarthy six decades ago. While Trump is a president with considerably more power than McCarthy ever had, like McCarthy, he is still beholden to the powerful in American politics. Trump’s version of Eisenhower is the vast donor network that currently controls much of the Republican Party. Donors like the Koch brothers, who recently announced tepid support for working with Democrats, will not stand up and unite with either Democrats or Republicans in Congress to provoke a new Army-McCarthy hearing. They will need to be moved, most likely by an event as shocking to the country today as the Army hearings were to Americans in 1954.

The next Army-McCarthy hearing will need to be properly framed. It must be simple, a tape or a confrontation perhaps, that encapsulates Trump’s worst features in a soundbite appropriate for a 21st-century audience — perhaps a negotiation of quid pro quo with a foreign power, or Trump discussing sanctions relief in exchange for hacked emails. That soundbite then needs to be amplified through the media and through a committed Democratic Party. The work will be hard; there are no Edward R. Murrows left in today’s media ecosystem.

Lastly, the resistance against Trump must be hopeful. We must put faith in the Democratic Party and in the country’s institutions, including the media and Congress. Above all, we need to remember the McCarthy episode as a testament to the laws of politics and of history. In most instances, when a demagogic leader has built himself up with lies, deceit, and vitriol, his rise is unsustainable and he is destined to fall. It took six weeks for McCarthy to fall. How long will it take Trump?