No sense of decency : the Army-McCarthy hearings : a demagogue falls and television takes charge of American politics
"In a seminal American moment in the spring of 1954, dramatic hearings in the United States Senate pitted Joseph R. McCarthy, the Senate's great intimidator, and his slick and fearless chief counsel Roy Cohn, 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 gavel-to-gavel coverage by television. Long before CNN or C-SPAN, TV carried an ongoing news drama that captivated Americans from coast to coast. Thirty-six days of hearings transfixed the nation, sent McCarthy stumbling into the shadows, and set TV's "omnipotent eye" on course to dominate the political world." "With a veteran journalist's eye for detail, Robert Shogan re-creates the hearings and their cast of intriguing characters, and explains their enduring impact on American politics. 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 that McCarthy had ridden to prominence, as opposed to his ill-mannered personality. But television overlooked this omission, and as it went on to transform American political debate it exhibited the same shortcomings exposed by the hearings: an emphasis on razzle-dazzle and a reluctance to challenge power and authority. Still today, while television journalists often ask the hard questions of political leaders and experts, Mr. Shogan contends, too often they allow guests to dodge important issues and answer from prepared talking points. The story in No Sense of Decency thus leads to a disturbing irony: while television expedited the downfall of McCarthy, the most notorious practitioner of the politics of fear in our history, a half-century later TV's knee-jerk coverage of the 9/11 tragedy and the "War on Terror" has helped revive the paranoid strain in our political DNA."--Jacket
History
1 online resource (xii, 320 pages)
9781615780006, 1615780009
1249706378
Print version:
The curtain rises
A torch in the troubled world
Racket buster
The road to Room 318
St. Ed and the dragon
At war with the army
The soldiering of Private Schine
Turning the tide
The purloined letter
Time out for tears
To the bitter end
Unfinished business
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010