Welch, Joseph Nye (1890–1960)

US lawyer. In 1954, as special counsel for the army, he conducted a televised duel with Senator Joseph McCarthy in congressional hearings called to consider McCarthy's allegations that evidence of an army communications spy ring had been covered up. Welch gained a clear advantage in the exchanges through his old-fashioned moral indignation as well as his legal expertise, and the Senate voted a few months later to censure McCarthy.

Welch was born in Primghar, Iowa. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1914 and Harvard Law School in 1917. He went into private practice in Boston, Massachusetts, and established a reputation as an excellent trial lawyer. Following the McCarthy case, Welch returned to private practice, emerging briefly to narrate a television series on constitutional history and to play the trial judge in the 1959 movie Anatomy of a Murder.