Joseph Nye Welch (October 22, 1890 - October 6, 1960) was the head attorney for the United States Army while it was under investigation by Joseph McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for Communist activities. This investigation was underway when television was first becoming common household products in the United States, and were the first time the country got a first-hand view of McCarthy.

After months of trials, McCarthy accused one of the junior attorneys on the case of association with the Communist party while in college, and went after the young man viciously. Welch wrote this off as childhood indiscretion and famously rebuked: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

These procedings have been recorded in the documentary film Point of Order!

McCarthy-Welch Exchange: "Have You No Sense of Decency" (transcript and sound file)

ACTING

Welch played a criminal court judge in northern Michigan in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959).