THE ARMY'S counsel is easily the smoothest performer, and perhaps the ablest lawyer, in the McCarthy-Army hearings. By the merest tilt of his ample nose, Joseph Nye Welch conveys to millions of televiewers his utter disdain or disbelief; with a gentle pressure of fingertips on his lips or an amused 'sparkle in his eye, he semaphores an attack that will bruise Roy Cohn or disconcert Joe McCarthy.
Deliverance from Temptation. Though Welch is a superb actor, he is no lightweight; he has a foxy, seasoned legal mind. With 35 years of courtroom fencing behind him, Welch has a sharp eye for phonies. It was he who first recognized the doctored photograph for what it was; last week he was the first to spot McCarthy's spurious "FBI letter" (see above).
Though at 63 Joe Welch has the manner of a Louisburg Square patrician, he comes from the plainest Midwestern pioneer stock. Both his parents were English-born. Father William Welch ran away to sea at 14, wandered the world for 15 years (including a three-month hitch with the British army during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857), finally immigrated to his brother's' farm in Illinois and married the hired girl. William Welch was a simple man and good, but in his years at sea, he developed an abiding affection for the bottle. Martha Welch decided to remove him from temptation, so she transplanted her family to a farm near Primghar, Iowa, where there were no saloons. There, in 1890, Joseph, the youngest of William and Martha Welch's seven children, was born.
The Welches were poor, and as a boy Joe worked hard. His great pleasure, even then, was to slip down to the courthouse and watch the trials. "I was impressed by the fact that a lawyer could say something and then say, 'Strike it out,' " Welch recalls. "That seemed to me to be a particularly godlike quality." After two years of clerking in a real estate office, he entered Grinnell College-with $600 that he had saved. Summers, he stored up money for more education by selling state maps from door to door for $1.95 (Joe got the dollar). On foot, bicycle and horse & buggy, he traveled through the Middle West to New York and Pennsylvania each summer. "It was hateful, hard work," says Welch, but it helped him to understand people. "It ranks above, or with, my law school training in value."
Backyard Chat. Welch finished at Grinnell with a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain and a $600 Harvard scholarship in his pocket. "The night before I was to leave for Harvard Law School," he recalls, "my father and I went out back to attend to our needs before we went to bed, and then he got a drink of water at the pump and sat down stiffly. I knew that meant I was to sit down, too.
" 'Josie,' he said, 'You're going off to Harvard?'
' 'That's right.'
' 'That's a long way, ain't it?'
' 'Yes, it's a long way.'
" 'Somewheres in Michigan?'
" 'No, it's near Boston—or maybe in Boston,' I said. 'Maybe you were there while you were at sea.' Yes, he thought he was.
" 'It'll take a heap of money, won't it?'