How one question changed history

Most questions vanish the moment they're answered. A few change what happens next. Looking at some well-documented examples, a pattern shows up: the questions that mattered were rarely clever. They were plain, specific, and asked at a moment when an honest answer couldn't easily be avoided.

Here are five cases. Historians would argue about how much weight any single question carried, and we've tried to say where the effect is clear and where it's debated.

1. The recording system question (1973)

On Friday, July 13, 1973, staff members of the Senate committee investigating Watergate were interviewing Alexander Butterfield, a former aide to President Richard Nixon who by then was running the Federal Aviation Administration. It was a routine background session. Donald Sanders, a lawyer on the committee's minority staff, was among those questioning him. Partway through, Sanders asked Butterfield whether there was any kind of recording system in the White House.

Butterfield's answer has been quoted ever since: "I wish you hadn't asked that question, but, yes, there is." Sanders told the minority counsel, Fred Thompson, who asked Butterfield the same question on live television on July 16.

The existence of the tapes changed the investigation. The fight over access to them ran through the courts to the Supreme Court in 1974, and the recordings that were eventually released were central to the case against Nixon, who resigned that August. The question took perhaps ten seconds to ask, in a closed-door interview that could easily have ended without it.

2. A question about decency (1954)

For four years, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin had made accusations of Communist infiltration across the federal government, damaging many careers with little evidence. In the spring of 1954, a Senate subcommittee held televised hearings on charges between McCarthy and the U.S. Army.

On June 9, 1954, McCarthy attacked a young lawyer at the firm of the Army's chief counsel, Joseph Welch, over the lawyer's past membership in a legal organization McCarthy called a Communist front. Welch cut him off and asked, in front of a national television audience, whether McCarthy had any sense of decency left. The room broke into applause.

The question didn't end McCarthy's career by itself. His standing had been falling for months, under pressure from journalists, from the Army and from senators of both parties. But the exchange is widely seen as the moment when many Americans saw the tactic plainly. In December 1954, the Senate voted 67 to 22 to censure him.

3. A question in a missile capsule (1973)

The same year as the Butterfield interview, an Air Force major in nuclear missile training, Harold Hering, asked how he could know that an order to launch came from a sane president. He was removed from training and eventually discharged. His question did not change policy at the time, and its effects are much harder to measure than the others on this list. But it has been cited ever since, including in a 2017 Senate hearing on presidential authority over nuclear weapons. We tell the full story in our article on Hering.

4. A question with a glass of ice water (1986)

After the space shuttle Challenger broke apart shortly after launch in January 1986, killing all seven crew members, President Ronald Reagan appointed a commission to investigate. One member was the physicist Richard Feynman.

The question at the center of the inquiry was whether cold weather had affected the rubber O-rings that sealed joints in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters. Temperatures on launch morning were well below those of any previous launch. During a televised hearing, Feynman squeezed a piece of the O-ring material in a clamp, dipped it in a glass of ice water, and showed that it didn't spring back. In effect he was asking a simple question in public: what happens to this material when it's cold?

The commission's report found that engineers at the booster manufacturer, Morton Thiokol, had recommended against launching in cold temperatures, that their concerns had been overruled, and that they didn't reach senior NASA decision-makers. Feynman's demonstration didn't discover the problem, which engineers already knew about. It made the problem impossible to explain away.

5. Better off than four years ago? (1980)

In the only debate between President Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, on October 28, 1980, Reagan asked viewers to consider whether they were better off than they had been four years earlier. About 80 million people watched, one of the largest audiences in debate history.

How much the question mattered is debated. Reagan won the election by a wide margin a week later, but many factors were at work, including inflation, unemployment and the Iran hostage crisis. What's clearer is the question's afterlife. Candidates of both parties have reused it in nearly every presidential race since, because it does what good questions do: it hands the listener a simple test and lets them supply the answer.

What these questions share

Put side by side, the cases show some common traits.

The questions were short and concrete. Was there a recording system? What happens to the seal in the cold? None of them needed a paragraph of setup.

Several came from people outside the center of power. Sanders was a staff lawyer, Hering a mid-career officer. Welch was a private attorney, not a senator.

Most depended on preparation or direct knowledge. Feynman had talked to engineers before the hearing, and Hering was in the very training he was asking about. Sanders was doing the slow, routine work of a staff investigator when he asked his.

And each was asked in a setting where the answer had consequences: a formal investigation, a hearing, a debate. A question asked in a room where the answer will be recorded and acted on carries more weight than the same words asked anywhere else.

That's a useful thing to remember the next time you're at a meeting, a hearing or a town hall. The most important question in the room is often the obvious one that nobody has asked yet.