“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

I’d seen this famous exchange between Army chief counsel Joseph Welch and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy many times, but I never knew the full context behind it. PBS does a good job fleshing it out.

Welch’s calm rebuke is in my opinion one of the great moments in American rhetoric. Many things led to McCarthy’s downfall (first and foremost, his own conduct), but statements like this matter. They mattered then and they matter now.

I look forward to watching the rest of the series.