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The Army-McCarthy Hearings: A Demagogue Falls And Television Takes Charge Of American Politics
Ivan R. Dee
March 2009
On Sale: February 25, 2009
336 pages ISBN: 1566637708 EAN: 9781566637701 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Have you no sense of decency, sir? asked attorney Robert
Welch in a climatic 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. But television overlooked this
portentous 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-traits that
persist today.
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