{"id":10027,"date":"2025-12-05T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T07:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=10027"},"modified":"2025-12-05T07:05:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T07:05:00","slug":"slaying-the-dragon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/?p=10027","title":{"rendered":"Slaying The Dragon"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n<\/div>\n

By MIKE MAGEE<\/p>\n

The date was\u00a0June 9, 1954<\/a>. This was over a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The history shows that he had\u00a0 \u201crocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies.\u201d Clearly a psychopath, he escaped control of moderating voices, biting off ever larger targets, including now the U.S. Army.<\/p>\n

\u201cJudge, jury, prosecutor, castigator, and press agent, all in one\u201d, was how Harvard law dean\u00a0Ervin Griswold<\/a>\u00a0described him. In 1954, McCarthy accused the army of \u201clax security at its top-secret army facilities\u201d which he claimed were infiltrated by communists. The army responded by hiring veteran Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to defend itself.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0documentarians<\/a>\u00a0reported,\u00a0\u201c<\/em>Mothers who never watched TV during the day were glued to watching the Army-McCarthy hearings.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0McCarthy\u2019s right-hand chief council that day was lawyer\u00a0Roy Marcus Cohn<\/a>. Pragmatic, ruthless, and evil to the core, Cohn\u2019s career was launched by McCarthy, and his tainted touch destroyed lives and weakened the U.S. government for three more decades, straight up to the moment of his death from HIV\/AIDS in 1986.<\/p>\n

His style and tactics are widely felt today to be the strategic scaffolding of our Executive Branch\u2019s attempted takeover of the US government. Not surprisingly, a direct assault on the control functions, values, and traditions of the US Military are a leading wedge in these attacks.\u00a0 They have literally\u00a0exploded<\/em>\u00a0in the past week with revelations that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth himself gave the go-ahead on a\u00a0\u201ckill them all\u201d<\/a>\u00a0order that ultimately engulfed two survivors of a rocket attack on an alleged drug-transporting speed boat.<\/p>\n

In a 5-minute summation of the televised events of June 9, 1954, you (along with our leaders) are able to witness the historic takedown<\/a> of McCarthy by Welch (with Cohn as witness) \u2013 the \u201cslaying of the dragon\u201d that finally destroyed McCarthy once and for all.<\/p>\n

Cohn had reached an agreement with Welch that McCarthy would avoid attacking one particular Army service man as a communist if Welch remained civil. But Welch had laid a trap, and purposefully needled McCarthy into loosing his temper, and on camera, violating the agreement and \u201cattacking the good lad,\u201d\u00a0 who an outraged Welch tearfully defended in his historic and well-prepared retort.<\/p>\n

As historian\u00a0Thomas Doherty<\/a>\u00a0recalls,\u00a0\u201cIt was as if the entire country had been waiting for somebody to finally say this line, \u2018Have you no sense of decency.\u2019\u201d\u00a0As Welch pounced on his victim, Cohn winces as his dragon is slain. To which Jelani Cobb adds,\u00a0\u201cAt the end of it, all the illusions, the comfortable illusions that McCarthy had cultivated about himself, had effectively been dispelled.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Congress grapples with a situation that has veered dangerously out of control, we can only hope that this time \u201chistory will repeat.\u201d Courage must be resourced from within. As Martin Luther King famously reminded: \u201cIn the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America\u2019s Medical Industrial Complex.<\/a> (Grove\/2020)<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By MIKE MAGEE The date was\u00a0June 9, 1954. This was over a year after Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The history shows that he had\u00a0 \u201crocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10027"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medical-article.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}