The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Harry listened with agonized intensity as Joe began. His heart fell when he heard the opening words, words he had not seen in the Davis text. McCarthy told his colleagues, and the world, that he would talk now about a “mysterious, powerful” figure who was part of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”

  After reading for almost three hours to an all but empty Senate chamber, Joe signaled to the Senate reporter and gave him, to enter into the record, the balance of the speech. He looked back at the couch, but Jean, Don, and Harry had left. Don and Jean, when he entered his office, pleaded the press of work as having required them to leave the Senate chamber and return to the office.

  Harry wasn’t there. He was home. He sat at his desk and stared in frustration at his notes of three nights before. He dialed Willmoore Sherrill in New York, but there was no answer. He pulled out Elinor’s number in Amsterdam. She greeted him joyously. He tried to banter with her.

  “Harry, you’re upset. What is it?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. I was just worried a little.”

  “Worried about what?”

  Harry knew he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was, really, talking to himself. “Worried about the tulip crop.”

  “Okay, okay. But really. Anything going on?”

  “Oh, just a little setback in the office. Nothing to worry about. How are the dikes? Holding?”

  The conversation loosened up, and Harry blew her kisses. He put down the telephone and started to dial Sam Tilburn, but thought better of it. He had become a friend, and Harry could talk with him about McCarthy and the entire scene absolutely confident that Tilburn would betray no confidence; confident, also, that Tilburn would listen, and advise, and—sympathize.

  But he didn’t ring Sam. There wasn’t anything further to say, he decided, than that there are good days, and bad days.

  The speech was commercially published a few months later by Devin-Adair, Inc., as a 169-page book, America’s Retreat From Victory, The Story of George Catlett Marshall, by Joseph R. McCarthy.

  31

  Acheson reflects, Did he give the wrong signals?

  Dean Gooderham Acheson sat in his office in the State Department—old wood, brightly varnished; oil paintings of a few of his predecessors; fine crystal and gilt; the Chippendale desk, at the right corner of which flew the little American flag crossed with the Great Seal of the United States. His penetrating eyes went over the briefing paper prepared by his press aide.

  His press aide was his young nephew, Ezra Black. He sat at the desk in the corner, assembling papers for his fastidious employer. Mr. Acheson had the habit of emitting little grunts, barely audible, when he read material in which he or his policies figured. It took close-in experience to distinguish a grunt that marked Mr. Acheson’s approval of what he had read from one that marked his disapproval. But Ezra had been on board over a year and knew which was which. This morning the four or five grunts were all negative, emphatically negative. Ezra had no difficulty guessing why. The secretary of state was reading a digest of remarks made the day before on the floor of the Senate that related very directly to the policies of the State Department.

  Acheson tilted back his great leather chair, mounted on the brass swivel base, and twirled his full, immaculately groomed mustache pensively. Without turning actually to look at him, he addressed Ezra. “It was perhaps not wise for me to say what I did in January about Korea. Correction. Concerning which remarks, certain deductions were made about Korea. Correction. Certain deductions were made about Korea by certain people.”

  “They’re certainly hitting you for it, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Do you have the exact words there? The digest does not give them all. Senator Ferguson is merely quoted as saying that the—I quote him—’boys’ are dying in Korea because—I quote him again—‘a group of untouchables in the State Department sabotaged the aid program.’

  “You will remember, Ezra, that the distinguished junior senator from Michigan, Mr. Ferguson, early in the spring, denounced our—I quote him—’wanton waste’—in sending, quotes, ‘everything to everybody.’ But here … ” the secretary raised his voice slightly and attempted the flat Midwestern tones of Homer Ferguson, “but here he is angry because we did not send everything to everybody. He says, according to the digest, ‘He told’—Secretary Acheson told—I told—’the world the U.S. would not interfere in Korea.’ … You have it there, Ezra, my actual text?”

  Black was flipping through a loose-leaf notebook looking for the speech at the National Press Club. It was in January, five months before.

  “What you said—”Black had found the digest—”was that Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, and the Philippines were within the defense perimeter of the United States and would be defended. Your omission in that speech of Korea—and Formosa—was immediately picked up by the press.”

  “Hmm. But of course I was correct. To describe the defense perimeter of the United States is not to say that we are not interested in, do not care about, will refuse to help, fail to defend, a particular country or geographic area outside that perimeter in particular circumstances. I am not a military man, Ezra—I don’t think of you as one, even though you were in the army during the war—”

  “Navy.”

  “Navy during the war. A defense perimeter is a boundary within which a country has to act in defense of itself. The Philippines are our westernmost base in the Pacific. That does not mean we would not defend, say, Okinawa.”

  Ezra Black was silent, his head cocked just a hair to one side.

  Acheson waited. Then: “Do you have any problem with that?”

  “Well, no, sir, not as a theoretical point. And the president did in fact immediately decide to oppose the North Koreans with military force.”

  “Yes. And I fully concurred in last week’s decision. We are resisting a specific act of aggression. This obviously would not be the time to do so, but I would expect that at the National War College and other military-academic sanctuaries free from one of Senator McCarthy’s informants—if such exist—the distinction would be observed between a place the United States has to defend, lying as it does—I cite Guam as an example—within our defense perimeter, and a place which we do not have to defend in order to defend ourselves but which we may elect to defend for a number of reasons, in this case, our commitment to oppose aggression, as also to affirm our psychological and diplomatic obligations.”

  Again Black was silent.

  Acheson’s eyes went back to his press briefing. He spoke as he read. “Did I never give you the illuminating observation by John Stuart Mill? He said, I think I have it correctly in memory, that all stupid people are conservatives, which means that the conservative party always tends to be large.”

  He returned to his briefing papers. “Mr. Wherry of Nebraska, with characteristic finesse, observed that the ‘blood’—again, of our ‘boys’—lies on my shoulders. And the tricoteuses—do you know who they were, Ezra?”

  Black nodded.

  “Well, I should hope so—the bloodsuckers—better, the blood-lustful—had help from our friend Senator McCarran.” This time the secretary did turn his chair around to face his aide. “Why doesn’t Senator McCarran leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party, Ezra? Or, for that matter, the Flat Earth Society, if they will have him?”

  He swiveled to the front of his desk, where the digest lay. “The senator says we—he is referring to us, Ezra—‘produce statesmanship at the level of the psychopathic ward.’ That is a dull-witted remark.” Again he paused. Once more he swiveled.

  “Ezra?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your silence has got to mean something.”

  “Well, sir, I understand your thinking, and your foreign policy. After all, I’m by your side day after day. But the Republicans—and
at least one Democrat—are raging mad. Whether they really blame you—blame the Truman administration—or whether they’re just making political hay, I don’t know. But I do think they have a very plausible political case.

  “Look.” The young aide seemed now almost to be pleading. “The secretary of state gives a talk in which he describes the western military perimeter, and people look at the map of the Pacific and say, ‘Korea’s not in it.’ Therefore it follows that the United States will not defend South Korea.

  “Therefore Stalin feels it’s safe to push that button, and four days after he does it, the capital of South Korea is captured.”

  “Yes, yes, Ezra. I know a little about advocacy. Ask Covington and Burling. I was their chief litigator for many years, you may remember.”

  He swiveled the chair right around, and now Black could see only the back of his head. His nephew feared the worst. That came when the secretary was especially riled. He now was especially riled and expressed himself fully.

  “I believe I am as alert as anyone to the great tensions of the day. I am perhaps more sensitive than any but a very few—”

  Black’s pencil scratched out on his pad, almost involuntarily. Oh, shit! he thought. Here we go.

  “—to the special dangers of a nuclear-armed world of mortal antagonists—”

  The telephone gave the special tone buzz. Acheson picked it up immediately. Ezra Black rose quickly—he was expected to absent himself when the president telephoned. His hand was on the doorknob when the secretary of state said, “Yes, Mr. President?”

  Ten minutes later the limousine emerged from the State Department garage and headed for the White House.

  32

  Harry writes to Elinor

  Dear Elinor. Dear, Dear Elinor:

  You can’t be serious. Come visit with you in Amsterdam “for a couple of weeks in July and August”? There is no way I could get away from Washington for two days, forget two weeks. The Tydings Report on Joe will be released sometime during those two weeks. We don’t know exactly when, but we do know it will be tough. The Tydings people are fronting for the entire Truman administration (my apologies to the ambassador! your eminent father). Everything we bring up they are prepared to shoot down, or try to. You’ve read about Owen Lattimore? They’re prepared to pass him off as a disinterested Oriental scholar. The operative premise is that, really, nobody is a Communist. Sometimes, listening to Tydings or Morgan (Ed Morgan is the committee counsel) you get the impression that Joe McCarthy made a speech in Wheeling last February charging the State Department with failing to root out all the duck-billed platypuses (platypi?) in the State Department. They really all but assume that Communists just don’t exist. Oh sure, they’ll have to acknowledge Alger Hiss, and the Gouzenko people up in Canada, and Klaus Fuchs—sometimes the evidence is just plain un-ignorable, especially if the person, like Fuchs, goes to live in the Soviet Union. (But don’t get too mad at him. All he did was give Stalin the atom bomb.) They just won’t focus on the reasonable-doubt criterion I told you about at our final (I hope not) Stork Club dinner—or was trying to tell you when the great Sherman Billingsley took over. I know you didn’t ask him to sit down with us, but you hardly drove him away. I reconstruct …

  Billingsley. “Well, it’s nice to see you two again.”

  You. “We’ve loved it, every time.”

  SB. “What’s that, little girl, a tear in your eye?”

  You. “Well, we’re going away. My father and I.”

  SB. “Going where, little girl? Your name?—”

  You. “Elinor—”

  SB. “Going where, Elinor?”

  You. “Amsterdam. My father is the new ambassador. My mother died—very suddenly—in April. So I’ve pulled out of Barnard to be with Dad.”

  Well, talk about sympathy for the bereaved! Before we were out of there we had champagne and a quickie cake with a little Dutch flag on it—where in the hell did he come up with that? Wonder what he’d have done if you said you were on your way as ambassador to Tibet? Elinor, how you gabbed with him, darling. I’m surprised you didn’t go on and tell him—after all, you wrote a paper on it—all about the Peloponnesian War …

  Oh. Sorry darling, but life here is really … distracting. We’ve got support in the Senate, but only one rock on the committee, Hickenlooper. Henry Cabot Lodge woke up one day and denounced Joe. Well, not exactly denounced, but did a lot of equivocating. From outdoors, Lattimore fires off at us every day. So do Jessup and Acheson. So, as a matter of fact, does the President. And the State Department security head, General Conrad Snow, who doesn’t know his—oh, the hell with it. And, of course, mistakes are made by Our Joe—I didn’t mean Your Joe! The Honorable Joseph Stafford, Ambassador to The Netherlands from the United States of America. Your father is an appointee of Harry Truman charged to keep Holland from sinking.—No co-optation (“Our Joe”) permitted. Know that word, honey? Co-optation? Well—look it up! (I’m teasing. It means putting someone into your camp without, really, consulting him.)

  It’s a madhouse here. Momentous event I know you’ve read about. The lady who was going to testify. The FBI verified preliminarily that she had been feeding information to two other Soviet agents. Well, as you probably know, the day she was coming in to testify, she committed suicide. Everybody blamed Joe! She wrote him a letter just before pulling the trigger, took it to the post office to mail. It was very pathetic. She said that she had worried all night about giving testimony, she knew it was the right thing to do, but in doing so she would have needed to “identify” an old friend. She said she knew she should do that but couldn’t bear to do it—so she was “going to take the problem to my maker.”

  The Drew Pearson types said McCarthy drove her to suicide. They’d never say the Communists drove anyone to suicide. … I’m going to try to find a Communist to investigate at Columbia so I can get up there and have a session with Willmoore. I need to talk to somebody about what this is all about. But one thing I know, the people out there are our people. The same ones who saw through Henry Wallace. Good night, love. Let me hear from you. Send me a tulip.

  Love, Harry

  33

  Hoover calls McCarthy to his lair

  Just after noon, Mary Haskell opened the door to Joe’s office, opened it just wide enough to permit her quiet but resolute voice to get through to him even when he was talking on the phone, which was most of the time.

  Every hour or two, depending on the special density of the telephone traffic she fielded, Mary would enter his office, her telephone-message pink slips Scotch-taped to a legal-size clipboard. These were records of the telephone calls that had come in during the interval between her last visit to Senator McCarthy and this one. She tried to assign callers the same priority she thought, if he had time to be deliberate in the matter, he would assign them. Favorite journalists; important senators; obliging government officials; generous political campaign donors; key political supporters; family; close friends. Mary knew who Joe a) needed, b) liked, and, roughly speaking, c) everyone’s rank within those headings.

  Mary’s sorting of the calls helped, but not always. Sometimes McCarthy would coast by Mary’s office and run his eyes over the master row of pink slips thumbtacked to the huge cardboard surface behind her desk, a tiny corner of it reserved for a picture of Hilda, Mary’s daughter, when she was nine.

  “Mary, why didn’t you tell me Jack Weinkopf had called?”

  “Who is Jack Weinkopf?”

  “Aw, come on. He is maybe my closest,friend.”

  “Joe, don’t play with me that way. I know your closest friends from one to one hundred, and Jack Weinkopf isn’t one of them.”

  McCarthy grinned, patted her on the back, pulled the pink slip free from its thumbtack, went back to his office, and put in a call to the soft-spoken, retiring young man, editor of the student paper at Marquette, who had interviewed him in the car a few months ago on the way to the airport.

  Today Mary opened the door slight
ly and resolutely called out his name. Joe cupped his hand over the telephone mouthpiece. “What is it, Mary?”

  “He calls himself Henry. Says you’d know that it was important.”

  McCarthy lifted his hand and talked into the receiver. “Jack, this is an emergency. Sorry. Will call you back. But not till tomorrow.” He nodded to Mary. “Put … Henry through.”

  Henry spoke, the usual calm voice. “Just confirming our date, Senator. At six-oh-five I’ll be parked directly opposite the entrance to your apartment building. I’ll be in a Buick Roadmaster, dark blue.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will any reporters be following you out of the Senate building, Senator?”

  “I can shake them. See you at six-oh-five.”

  He elected to sit in the passenger seat, next to Henry, who drove carefully but with dispatch. Henry was prepared to discuss with McCarthy anything McCarthy wanted to talk about—except for his assignment. McCarthy chatted about this and that as, grateful for the air conditioner, they made their way out of Washington. But soon McCarthy was silent. Leaning over into the windshield pillar, he closed his eyes, his lips parted slightly. Joe McCarthy was asleep.

  Henry watched him closely as he approached Fredericksburg, in Virginia. He was pleased to have to nudge him awake after he had parked the car in the garage. Otherwise he’d have had to request him to put on the eyeshade for the duration of the last ten minutes of the drive to the hideaway.

  McCarthy woke quickly. He walked out of the garage and looked up at the house, well separated from the houses on either side. He felt a sudden chill. He was surprised. He wondered: Was this fear? Odd. He hadn’t had this kind of apprehension since the day he looked up across the boxing ring at Marquette at the huge black opponent his coach had decided to humble him with. He hadn’t felt anything when he saw the flak on the exposed bomber run over Bougainville. But he felt it now and knew it was not just trepidation. You must be crazy, McCarthy, to have got into this.