WASHINGTON _ Some 62 years ago, as a young reporter I sat at the press table in the Senate Caucus Room during the historic Army-McCarthy hearings, watching defense lawyer Joseph Welch irately walk out, memorably expressing his contempt for Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.
McCarthy had just wrongly accused a young Welch associate of belonging to "a communist front organization," seeking to smear him in the course of challenging the patriotism of an Army general. Welch declared of the vindictive Wisconsin senator: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
His dramatic words and exit, which later in 1954 contributed to McCarthy's bipartisan censure by his Senate colleagues, had an electric reprise at last week's Democratic National Convention.
A Muslim-American parent of a U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan blew a loud whistle on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. He accused him of never having read the American Constitution, in light of Trump's call for a temporary ban of Muslims and his various racist remarks.
The father, Khizr Khan, pulled a small copy from his jacket pocket and offered to lend it to Trump, as the speaker's wife stood silently and stoically at his side.
Trump characteristically took to Twitter to attack both of them, saying Khan had "no right" to launch "a vicious attack" on him when he had made many "sacrifices" in providing many jobs for others, and claiming that Mrs. Khan had been forbidden to speak. Subsequently, she broke her silence in a Washington Post article, saying she had been too overcome to do so then.
Trump's suggestion that his actions as a businessman compared with Khan's son's loss of life in the service of his country was outrageous, even by Trump's standards. The exchanges provided comparison with that 1954 scene when Joe Welch's walkout captured the broader public condemnation of McCarthy as a scandalous demagogue.
McCarthy's power and ability to rile up division and political animosity in the Senate and the public soon ebbed. By 1957, he had disintegrated into alcoholism and illness, and died in disgrace.
There's no telling yet whether Trump's bitter and defensive response to the grieving Muslim American father and mother will finally unmask him as the egocentric, ill-informed and unstable charlatan his words and actions have proved him to be.
But the incident has already triggered a pushback from a horde of older Republican leaders, including Sen. John McCain, the party's 2008 presidential nominee. He himself was derided earlier by Trump for being captured and held prisoner by the North Vietnamese.
National political conventions every four years are designed to give the party presidential nominees a vehicle to put their best feet forward and generate a headwind going into the general election. The meetings in Cleveland and Philadelphia came earlier this year, in July. So they have lengthened by a month the time for Trump and Hillary Clinton to sell themselves to an angry and even hostile electorate.
With each candidate registering record-high unfavorable ratings in the polls, the Khan-Trump exchange, with Clinton joining the condemnation of her opponent, may not prove to be a game-changer this early in the process.
But Trump's harsh defensive dismissal of that Democratic convention show-stopper plays much more into Hillary's "Stronger Together" theme in Philly than Trump's "I alone" declaration that he is the supreme problem-solver, which he so defiantly and egocentrically served up in Cleveland.
Major newspapers like the Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have now intensified investigations into various aspects of Trump's business records and his exemptions from military service on medical grounds, which kept him out of the Vietnam War.
Tuesday's Washington Post included columns by staff writers or contributors questioning not only Trump's qualifications for the presidency but also his basic stability and sanity, and the potential threat to the nation's security.
They and others have called on House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Mitch McConnell, who have endorsed Trump, to rein him in or consider belatedly the potential demise of the Republican Party unless they somehow intervene. But only three months before the election, the bull in their china shop seems increasingly out of control.
