1964 documentary Point of Order! is a strange one for a number of reasons. It’s not really a documentary at all, in some respects, but more a recut, a redux, of some blurry, black-and-white live TV footage shot by CBS of a senate hearing that had happened ten years before. Second up, it’s not really about what it purports to be about.
Ostensibly it’s a hearing into the strange case of David Schine, a private in the US Army who had become the focus of a baffling tug of war between Senator Joseph McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn on one side and the US Army, in the shape of US Secretary of the Army Stuart Symington (and his counsel), on the other.
The Army had accused McCarthy and most particularly Cohn of repeatedly trying to pressure the Army into granting privileges to Schine, then a newly recruited private, but who’d briefly worked for McCarthy and Cohn in some vague capacity as part of their ongoing investigations. Extra leave, light duties and his immediate commission as an officer is what Cohn demanded for Schine, and Cohn threatened to “wreck the Army” (or so it was said) if his guy didn’t get preferential treatment.
McCarthy and Cohn countersued, with a claim that the Army was holding Schine hostage to prevent him from rooting out communists on various Army bases.
Point of Order! isn’t really about the Schine case at all, and at various points it disappears entirely from view, but about the moment when McCarthy, whose investigations into communist infiltration into all walks of American life was at full spate, essentially grifted himself to a halt.
Emile de Antonio is credited as the director but really he’s more the editor – since the footage was all already shot – but what an editing job it is. Carefully, patiently, Antonio has sifted through about 188 hours of footage to catch McCarthy (and to a lesser extent Cohn) at work. Here’s how a witch hunt is carried out, he appears to be saying.
And what an operator sweaty, balding, seedy McCarthy is – wheedling, joking, belittling, raising false flags, digressing, making endless points of order, painting himself as the humble honest broker and the only senator in the room who’s really interested in justice. And when none of that works he stonewalls or starts insinuating that his interrogators have communist sympathies.
But. The Army guys, and their counsel, in particular homespun but diamond-sharp Joseph Welch, and the various senators manning the committee, have seen McCarthy at work before. This guy is as smart as a fox, and what a performance he puts on, but the room has his measure. You sense they are sick of him. You sense also, at various points, that they suspect he is a closeted homosexual, as Cohn was.
In one interchange about the doctoring (or not) of a photograph, Welch wonders where the photo originally came from, suggesting it might have come from a pixie. When asked by McCarthy what he means by that, Welch replies, “I should say, Mr Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?” It’s a shot across the bows from Welch, who later becomes so exasperated with McCarthy’s accusations and slurs that he eventually utters the line said to have sunk McCarthy’s career – “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Welch is the white knight in this fascinating psychodrama, the straight bat swinging at McCarthy’s skewed pitches, but it’s Stuart Symington who delivers the coup de grace. After being backed into a corner by Symington, who suggests McCarthy’s own team should also be investigated in case “subversives” lurk within, McCarthy hits back with a suggestion that to question him is suspicious in itself. Symington counters with: “Mr Chairman, apparently any time anybody says anything about anybody working for Senator McCarthy, he is smearing them and accusing them of communism.”
McCarthy and Cohn are quite a pair. Shifty McCarthy and the even shiftier Cohn (who later went on to represent Donald Trump) were however cleared of any wrongdoing but six weeks in the public gaze had destroyed McCarthy’s reputation. Though no one ranged against him in this hearing was explicitly giving McCarthy enough rope to hang himself, that’s exactly what Antoine lays out for us here, as an outcome if not a process. And it’s knuckle-gnawingly gripping watching it play out.
Point of Order! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
