During the hearings, McCarthy failed to substantiate his claims that communists had penetrated the Army.
This statement is false. Career military officers were forced out because they agreed (and secretly cooperated) with McCarthy. Contrary to historical claims, Annie Lee Moss was a communist. She was forced to leave shortly after the hearings. What is more, the Army had already briefed the Democrats on the committee that she was a known agent. Nevertheless, the Democrats on the committee created and successfully perpetrated a legend that Moss's case was one of mistaken identity. A shameful duplicity that illustrates all the points I ticked off about Democrats in my earlier post.
He did, however, insinuate that Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale and Dorr, the law firm representing the Army, was a communist sympathizer
McCarthy did not "insinuate" anything. He said flat out that Fred Fischer was a communist. Furthermore, he made this declaration in response to a demand by Welch that McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, should have named a number of communists to the Army rather than to the committee, and the next time he was in possession of the name of a communist he should make it public.
Now the claim of the WSJ writer that McCarthy didn't prove penetration is demonstrably false just by setting the context of this claim: Welch, the counsel for the Army, was admitting that McCarthy's staff did have the names of communists, and he was faulting the Majority for failing to go to the Army with the names!
... because he'd been a member of the National Lawyers Guild at Harvard Law School. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg had also been a member of the group, which was alleged to be a communist front.
More crap.
There was no "allegation" about the National Lawyers Guild. The NLG was the legal arm of the Communist Party in the United States, and it was very well known. Welch himself recognized this, and outed Fred Fischer weeks before McCarthy did in pages of the the New York Times and sent him home because of his membership in the NLG.
Which makes his famous soliloquy about "having no decency" all the more reprehensible.
Finally, sirs, finally and at long last, it was Joseph Welch who had no decency.