Senator Russell was naturally cautious, and his responsibilities to the armed services enhanced that reserve. He did not cable Scott Lucas—cables get seen. He went into the “bubble,” the glasslike igloo in NATO headquarters, similar to the facilities in U.S. embassies, designed to shield conversation from the electronic curiosity of Soviet bugs or interceptors. From there, on the secure line, he telephoned Senator Lucas.
He gave his counsel in a calm voice. “You can’t unsay what you said, Scott. Just say at this point—if the press pushes you on it—that you meant to convey that the Democratic leadership is resolved to make any Red threat ‘futile.’ ” He went no further.
Scott Lucas wasn’t the sharpest man in the world, but Russell himself had okayed Lucas’s designation as majority leader and now he had to live with the situation. He was surprised that Lyndon Johnson from Texas, one of the ten Democratic senators at the meeting, hadn’t been shrewd enough to reformulate Lucas’s language. All he’d have had to say was “What you mean is, Scott, that we’re doing our job and are very much alert to the Communist problem.” Some son of a bitch in that room, the senator said to himself, should have known that with two dozen staff people present there was always the probability of a leak.
Senator Russell was on very close terms with General Eisenhower, and at their private dinner that night, in the lustrous candlelit dining room with the famous tapered sconces, preserved from the period when it was built for the free-spending natural son of Louis XVI, he said, “Ike, you may be hearing about the fuss kicked up by the Indianapolis Star report.” He told him the story.
Ike shook his head. “The Star talks about the Republicans hoping to get into the White House in 1952. Imagine anybody thinking there might be a Republican president elected in 1952!”
Russell laughed, raising his glass. It wasn’t easy to tell whether he was laughing at the prospect of a Republican president in 1952, as if conforming with General Eisenhower’s ingenuous remark; or whether, as a Democrat renowned for his political savvy, he was raising his glass to his private hope that the Republican candidate for president in 1952 wouldn’t be his host at dinner that night.
McCarthy was both outraged and elated by the Star’s scoop. Instead of moving directly to his next security case at the Senate hearing he decided to have a little fun with the chairman.
“Senator Tydings, before I take up the next case on the agenda today, I think we should put on the record the comments of your leader, the distinguished senator from Illinois, to the effect that your job isn’t to investigate my charges but to prove they’re insubstantial—”
“Oh, please, Senator—” the chairman’s voice was strangely conciliatory. “All you have is an unverified report in an Indianapolis paper of remarks perhaps never even made by the majority leader and certainly misinterpreted by the so-called informant.” He continued to talk about the gravity of the charges and the committee’s conscientious efforts …
McCarthy looked down at the note Harry passed over to him.
Harry had worked up a modus operandi: a) McCarthy is asked a question, or is made to suffer a point, by one of his Democratic taunters. b) Harry has a bright idea how McCarthy can answer that point or quote from material that makes an answer effective. But c) Time is required for Harry to scratch out his idea or to come up with the file or clipping from the material in front of him. d) While he is doing this, McCarthy has to stall however he can—say he didn’t hear, say he needs a parliamentary clarification, yield to a senator on the misunderstanding that that senator wanted the floor—whatever. Just so it would consume twenty, thirty seconds, perhaps one minute. e) As fast as possible, Harry would slip onto Joe’s desk surface, unnoticed except by superobservant press men, the useful document. … It worked, and Joe now had the note.
His eyes on it, Joe said, “I happen to have here, Senator, a copy of the Indianapolis Star article.” Joe was now reading through the corner of his eye Harry’s text. It was brief. Without difficulty he improvised the verbal bridge: “What Senator Lucas said, Senator, is borne out by what you said on March eighth at the beginning of these hearings. You said—” he brought Harry’s paper closer to his eyes “—what you said was ‘You’—that’s me, McCarthy—’are going to get one of the most complete investigations ever given in the history of the republic, so far as my abilities permit.’ Well, Senator, I greatly respect your abilities. You have certainly devoted a lot of time to investigating McCarthy, though there is no record of my being a loyalty or security risk—”
The chairman raised the gavel, but he did not bang it down. Not this time. He had lost the polemical round. He said simply, “Proceed with case number forty-five.”
“All right, I’ll do so. But let me remind you, Mr. Chairman, for maybe the what—fiftieth time?—that it was you, not I, who insisted that the names of these cases be read out. I was prepared simply to give them by case number. But no—and the majority leader was also very insistent on this—you insisted the names be read out. All right. Case number forty-five is one J. Daniel Umin.”
Democratic Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, a skilled attorney and former head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, leaned back. As ever, he took notes.
The third Democrat, Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, eighty-two-year-old Democrat, former governor of his state, had the habit of closing his eyes when concentrating on proceedings. He did so now, but managed also to reach for his notepad.
Bourke Hickenlooper, Republican senator from Iowa and by now staunch supporter of McCarthy, liked to peek over at the two dozen reporters (television was not permitted) with their notepads. They appeared to be concerned to record the highlights of what was going on. They would, of course, get the transcript of the day’s events from the Senate reporter, but not until later in the evening. By then they’d have filed their stories for the day. Hickenlooper looked over at Sam Tilburn of the Indianapolis Star, whose sensational story of what had been said at the Democratic caucus had raised all the fuss. You owe me one, Sam, Hickenlooper said to himself. He had called Tilburn and whispered to him the scoop on the Lucas meeting. “Hicks,” as he was called, had in turn been tipped off by a Democratic staff member who was at the closed meeting and owed Bourke Hickenlooper a return for a very big present: no less, sponsorship of the informant’s son into West Point three years ago.
Henry Cabot Lodge, the other Republican on the Tydings Committee, leaned back in the semireclining chair, somehow managing to keep his dress immaculate. His face was impassive. He spoke infrequently at the Tydings-McCarthy hearings. Though of course a loyal Republican, he managed to communicate to the reporters a certain chemical distaste for Joe McCarthy. Lodge was an unregenerate patrician. His appearance alongside McCarthy dramatized the contrast. Murray Kempton, the New York columnist, had a week or so before described McCarthy’s blue suit: “It looked as though it had been washed in clam chowder.” Senator Lodge, by contrast, dressed in formal gray with a trim white shirt. He wore a vest even in the hot summer.
On the major issue before the committee—Had government loyalty/security agencies been negligent?—Lodge was careful to be receptive to Joe’s arguments, even if they did not inflame him. He knew already who would be running against him two years later in Massachusetts for reelection as senator. He’d be facing Congressman John F. Kennedy. A great deal hung on how the Tydings Committee finally ruled. If McCarthy’s case was indefensibly empty, the whole GOP would be hurt, including him. If McCarthy made a case of some kind, the Democratic, Catholic, anti-Communist voters of Boston would look kindly on the Republican senator who had been in on the investigation supporting the heroic senator from Wisconsin.
Senator McCarthy opened the file.
“J. Daniel Umin, who was born in 1909, is by training an attorney. He worked in the State Department’s legal division until October of 1949.
“Mr. Umin, on leaving the Yale Law School, managed to evade the draft. He then went to work for the Federal Wor
kers Union. That was in 1939. The FWU has opposed loyalty/security measures steadfastly. You will remember, Mr. Chairman, that in my initial statement on federal loyalty/security practices, back on February twentieth, I identified that union, the FWU, as the union that made a dead letter out of the Civil Rights Commission’s directive when it tried to set up uniform loyalty standards during the war.
“In 1944, Mr. Umin—I do not have the information, Mr. Chairman, on just how he evaded the draft—”
Tydings interrupted. “Maybe he has only one leg, Senator?”
There was a titter from the gallery.
“Yes,” McCarthy shot back. “And maybe the Communists told him he was more valuable doing what he was doing than merely serving as one of the troops, like me.”
A sound of approval from the gallery.
“Anyway, as I was saying, in 1944, Mr. Umin was hired by the State Department. You will ask—I know, Mr. Chairman—two things. You will wonder what this has to do with loyalty/security. I told you he worked for the Federal Workers Union. And then—as I was about to tell you—he joined the National Lawyers Guild. You’ll ask: Is that presumptive grounds for disqualification as a security risk? Well—”
“Senator Green.” Chairman Tydings acknowledged the raised hand of his colleague.
“How many lawyers,” Green asked, “are members of the National Lawyers Guild, Senator?”
McCarthy looked to his right. Harry leafed open a page from his file. He whispered to the senator, who then said, “Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-one.”
“Are you saying, Senator, that no member of the National Lawyers Guild qualifies to serve in any branch of government?”
“I think this, Senator. If you join the National Lawyers Guild either you are openly sympathetic to the Communist cause, or else you haven’t figured out that it’s a Communist union. If the first, you are presumptively disloyal. If the second, you are presumptively dumb. In either case, you should not serve in government.”
Tydings: “Is that the whole of your file on Mr. Umin?”
“Oh, no, Senator. In 1948, Mr. Umin left the State Department. We don’t know whether he was fired. But we do know that there had been an investigation, and that it had been initiated two years earlier. This committee should be interested to find out: What was going on during those two years? The first of those years, Alger Hiss was still in the State Department. What was in Umin’s file, other than what I have been able to come up with, his membership in a Communist union?—”
Senator Green: “You didn’t establish that the Federal Workers Union was a Communist union—”
“What do you want me to give you, Senator? A carbon copy of instructions to the FWU from Moscow?”
“You said it followed the party line. But for all we know, J. Daniel Umin opposed their doing so.”
“And joined the National Lawyers Guild to protest its adherence to the party line? Come on, Senator.”
Senator Green pursed his lips and reached for his notebook.
“What is Mr. Umin doing right now?” Senator Lodge came in.
The chair: “Point of order, Senator.” Tydings reproached Lodge. “We do not discuss the current activities of ex-employees whose case histories in government we are examining; we don’t go into their private lives—”
McCarthy was back: “Do you call it a private activity when Mr. J. Daniel Umin, in 1948, turned up as head of the Boston committee for the election of Henry Wallace as president of the United States?”
There was a brief silence. Although it was ten minutes before the scheduled lunch hour, Senator Tydings brought down his gavel. “The committee will reconvene at two-thirty.”
Sam Tilburn, immediately after adjournment in the afternoon, put in the scheduled call to Ed Reidy. He began, “That was a nice edit you did this morning.”
“Thanks for the scoop.” Reidy’s delight with a scoop that made the Star the most quoted paper of that day was huge. “And tell whoever leaked it to you that if Scott Lucas ever uncovers who ratted to us, he/she—I know you’re not going to tell me who the informant was—can have a job at the Star.”
“Yeah. Well, my … anonymous … friend is a—valuable friend. Now you want to know about today. I mean about this afternoon—I gave you the morning rundown on the McCarthy hearing at lunch. Well, there was three more hours, same kind of thing. Wrangle, wrangle, wrangle. Joe was pretty deft today. Kept the Democrats a little off balance. Did you succeed in getting somebody to track down J. Daniel Umin?”
“Yup. He’s a lawyer in Boston, low profile since 1948. Ziggie has a contact on the Christian Science Monitor who went through their files. They don’t have any notice on a Umin since the 1948 campaign. God, what a mess. Anybody else’s name come up?”
“No. They spent at least two hours going back to the Lattimore case, even after two weeks. That’s Joe’s big hit, in my book. The Umin case brings up the reasonable-doubt business. And of course the eternal question: Did Joe at Wheeling use the term ‘two hundred and five members of the Communist Party’ or did he use a lesser figure—as he claims—and more indirect language?”
“Anything come up on that front?”
“Something pretty funny. The critics—Senator Benton, especially—have been relying on a copy of McCarthy’s speech that he gave to the broadcasting station. McCarthy said that was just draft notes. Benton says a technician insists he read the text exactly. Joe replies:
“ ‘Here is a copy of the text you said I read from. Here is a sentence from that text: “Today less than one hundred years have come under Communist domination.” Did I say that, I ask the honorable junior senator from Connecticut? Before he answers, let me ask him if he thinks I read the following words, another sentence in that text: “Today, only six years later, there are eighty million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over four hundred percent. On our side the figure has shrunk to around five hundred thousand. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed from nine to one in our favor to eight to one against us.” Does the honorable senator hold that up as a reliable text of anything anybody eversaid?’ That got a laugh, at Benton’s expense. But the serious talk had to do with loyalty/security standards.”
“That’s crucial.”
“You going to write about it?”
“I’m going to try to go one day without writing about McCarthy. Might kill me. If so, was good knowing you, Sam.”
“Requiescat in pace, Ed.”
22
A professor tries to understand
“Who is this guy McCarthy? You keep your eyes on the Washington scene, Harry. Tell me about him.”
Willmoore Sherrill paced his Fellows’ suite and addressed his protégé. Harry sat comfortably in one of the armchairs, a bottle of beer in hand.
Willmoore Sherrill taught in the political science department. He was in his late thirties, nattily dressed in a tweed coat and gray trousers, his close-cut hair graying. He was renowned for his ability to infuriate his colleagues and to engross his seminar students. Born in Oklahoma, he was raised as a child prodigy by his father, a blind Methodist minister. Beginning at age five, Willmoore read to his father for several hours every day. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma at age sixteen and two years later was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. At Oxford he concealed his surreptitious marriage, but not his political position—Sherrill was a socialist. His dissertation, written subsequently at the University of Illinois, was on John Locke. It focused on Sherrill’s endorsement of majoritarian supremacy. He believed in the relevance of the general will to democratic government. When in 1946 he was appointed associate professor at Columbia, with tenure, he had left socialism, becoming a Truman Democrat.
“McCarthy’s certainly onto something. There’s a raw nerve out there, Willmoore, and I think McCarthy is pressing it. It’s a hot public issue, I think. People are fed up. They sent Henry Wallace packing. He got what, just over one million votes? But my sens
e of it is that McCarthy is becoming a very big deal. His talk in Wheeling was a detonator.”
“Yes, that’s pretty plain now. What I’m asking you is, Do you know anything about Joe McCarthy that hasn’t been in the newspapers every day for the last two weeks? What is it about him that makes people vibrate? Is it only what he says, or is it the way he says it? Why are people listening to him who haven’t paid all that much attention to, oh, Senator McCarran, or Walter Judd, who’ve been generals in the anti-Communist movement for years? Do you know anything about him personally? Have you ever run into him, at the Political Union or anywhere else?”
“He was on campus last winter. He gave a talk. It was unusual. … ”
Harry got up from the chair and leaned back on the brick where the mantelpiece ended. He was giving fresh thought to an episode entirely trivial, he’d have thought. But perhaps no longer so, he reckoned, since the infamous Senator McCarthy was featured in it.
“We got the call from the senator’s office on a Wednesday afternoon in December. His secretary, or whoever, said that the senator would come to us—the next day, Thursday. He was giving a speech somewhere around here the night before, so it would be convenient.—You probably don’t know how the PU operates. We send out invitations in September and again in December to just about everybody in the news. McCarthy was on the general list of people we invite to speak—the list includes practically every sitting senator. That way, by inviting everybody, we get three or four. Of course, we put in a special effort to bring in the big names, which did not include Joe McCarthy. Anyway, his office said the senator could talk to us at two-thirty. We got a bulletin into the Spec that morning. The union execs got on the phone. We called a bunch of people to show up. We were pretty apprehensive—late announcement, unknown senator.
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