The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Herbert Brownell was the consummate Park Avenue lawyer, smooth, collected, resolute. “It’s this way, gentlemen. Our analysis here is that McCarthy is going down. Whatever he is able to pull, and whatever Roy Cohn comes up with isn’t going to excuse the pressures he put on the army for Schine. And McCarthy’s strategy of counterattack requires him to be more scattershot even than usual about who he is attacking. So the conclusions here—”Herbert Brownell knew exactly how to convey what he meant by “here”; the Oval Office was five steps down the hall from where they sat—“are that we should go the whole mile, unpleasant though that is.”

  Brownell turned to John Adams. “You will simply convey to Tom Coleman that, on second thought, you think it wrong to bury questions which are best left to resolution by open democratic discussion.”

  Nobody talked. There was nothing left to say. They rose, and Sherman Adams said to Stevens, “Mr. Secretary, come with me one minute. The president just wants to say hello.”

  Roy Cohn had been on the stand nine days. Joseph Welch was in no hurry. His questions were posed languidly. His half smile was almost always there, though occasionally he would exchange it for a furrowed brow and deep frown, as if he had just been notified about Pearl Harbor. It was late in the afternoon session, and Welch kept at it and at it.

  “Mr. Cohn, if I told you now that we had a bad situation at Monmouth, you would want to cure it by sundown if you could, wouldn’t you?”

  Yes, Cohn replied.

  “Mr. Cohn, tell me once more. Every time you learn of a Communist or a spy anywhere, is it your policy to get them out as fast as possible?”

  Yes.

  “Where in the hell is Welch going with this line of questioning?” Willmoore asked Harry, staring at the television set in the Fellows’ suite.

  “I don’t know. He’s fishing, it seems to me.”

  “May I add my small voice, sir,” Welch droned on, “and ask you to tell us what you know about a subversive or a Communist or a spy? Please hurry.”

  Joe McCarthy snapped.

  “Mr. Chairman, in view of that question …”

  Chairman Mundt: “Have you a point of order?”

  “Not exactly, Mr. Chairman. But in view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher, whom he recommended, incidentally, to do work on this committee, who has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party—”

  Welch looked up and over at Roy Cohn, who shielded his eyes as if to take refuge from McCarthy’s violation of the agreement Cohn had negotiated. Cohn began scratching out a note to hand to McCarthy.

  McCarthy continued. “I have hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phony requests to Mr. Cohn here that he personally get every Communist out of government before sundown. I am not asking you at this time to explain why you tried to foist Fisher on this committee. Whether you knew Fisher was a member of that Communist organization or not, I don’t know. I assume you did not, Mr. Welch, because I get the impression that, while you are quite an actor, you play for a laugh. I don’t think you have any conception of the danger of the Communist Party. I don’t think you yourself would ever knowingly aid the Communist cause. I think you are unknowingly aiding it when you try to burlesque this hearing in which we are attempting to bring out the facts.”

  There was absolute silence. All eyes turned to Joseph Welch.

  He rose slowly and with a few words ended the public career of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.”

  Joe Welch’s voice was heavy with emotion. Tears began to come down his cheek. “Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.”

  He stopped, and then leaned down to look directly into McCarthy’s face.

  “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?”

  He bowed his head and sat down. The room burst out in sustained, convulsive applause.

  McCarthy did not recover.

  64

  Army counsel Joseph Welch testifies

  Lord Herrendon nodded to the technician, as Epson liked to be called when he left his outdoor work maintaining the estate and devoted himself to milord’s VCR, computer, and fax problems. “That will do, Epson.” The showing of that tape of the Army-McCarthy hearings was arrested. “Surely, Harry, you don’t want any more? Stopping the tape now, we leave Mr. Welch in tears. Jolly effective.”

  “Yes.” Harry was seated alongside Alex, facing the television in the library, Epson in command of the remote control. “Very effective. Even after—what?—yes, thirty-seven years.”

  “Did you sense when you watched it, Harry, that it would have such an impact?”

  “No. I knew it was a very bad moment for McCarthy, but maybe my unwillingness to go right there and then to his funeral had something to do with the ridiculousness of Mr. Welch’s implications. The business about how what McCarthy had just revealed would be a scar in the young lad’s life forever. In the first place, what McCarthy said about junior lawyer Fred Fisher had already been published by the New York Times, six weeks earlier, when Welch was thinking of bringing Fisher down as assistant counsel. Anyway, that was 1954, and I had spent three years of my life going over records and interviewing and writing about and corresponding with two thousand people who had joined one Communist front or another, and unless they were real addicts, the difficulties they encountered—most of them encountered zero difficulties—just floated away. I might add—like your difficulty with the National Consumers League, if I remember that that was your … front.”

  “What about the Hollywood Ten?”

  “Alex. You are pulling my leg. By the way, recall that the Hollywood Ten had their problem two years before anybody ever heard of McCarthy. The ten Hollywood people who ended up suspended, some of them doing jail sentences for contempt, weren’t people who had joined one or two Communist fronts. They were Communists. C-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-t-s, not just people who believed in socialized medicine or in unilateral disarmament or in anti-imperialism.”

  Harry stood up. Alex could not tell if what came from him then was a sigh or just wistfulness. “It was one of Joe McCarthy’s ironic legacies that it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a Communist, because you’d be hauled up for committing McCarthyism.”

  “But the Hollywood Ten—was it established that they were Communists?”

  “Alex, you were a deep-cover agent of the Soviet Union. Your involvement with Communism was at a very private, hidden level. You weren’t even permitted to associate with known Communists—everybody knows that rule. You should remind yourself that there were actual Communists, I mean party members and explicit sympathizers; people who voted the Communist ticket. You don’t say about somebody like, oh, the singer and actor Paul Robeson, that he was a liberal activist who wanted to see both points of view. He was a believing Communist.”

  “Well, certainly the young lawyer in Mr. Welch’s firm was never a Communist?”

  “We don’t know. I assume he was not, because the single charge made against him was that he joined the National Lawyers Guild, a dumb thing to do, but there were three, four thousand lawyers who did so. Fred Fisher was one: an ex-member of the Lawyers Guild; two: He joined it when he was very young; three: He was obviously embarrassed and
repentant about it; four: He wasn’t working for the Atomic Energy Commission or for the State Department; and five: Nothing was more obvious when Welch spoke than that nobody in the entire world, let alone in the Boston legal community, was going to hurt Fisher. I never heard his name again, but I’ll bet you your castle here that he never had any trouble on account of McCarthy’s naming him. More likely he was lionized. Some scar.”

  “You may be right on that, Harry. But it was if not venal, then a very stupid thing for McCarthy to do.”

  “Incredibly stupid! But the Welch scene was drenched in cynicism. Your videotape won’t show it, but Welch wasn’t satisfied to weep in the Senate chamber for the benefit of the committee members and the television audience. He walked over, after the session, to the press gallery where the press were concentrated, and managed to weep again.”

  “Let’s get some air.” Alex Herrendon rose and walked to the window, examining the weather. His profile was sharply etched, and the conformation of his head. Harry stopped breathing for one second. … He was looking at himself, twenty years older.

  It was warm, a mild British fall. Alex took his walking stick, and father and son walked through the door.

  Alex spoke about the troubles Gorbachev was running into in Moscow. The war in Afghanistan was all but abandoned. Every day, everyone, it seemed, wanted more perestroika.

  “There’s no way they can get more glasnost.” Harry chuckled. “There isn’t any more to be had. Anybody can say anything now. God, it isn’t taking long after the Berlin Wall coming down to change the whole shape of Soviet man.”

  They completed their half-hour walk. Back in the study, Alex asked, “How much did you see of McCarthy after the Army hearings?”

  “I went down to Washington every four or five weeks. I didn’t go at dinnertime because Joe, I knew from Jeanie—we talked every week on the phone—was in pretty bad shape, waterlogged, by that time of day. I’d stop in for lunch, or even for just a visit.”

  “Did he ever talk about his mistakes?”

  “No.”

  “Did he realize that, largely on account of him, the loyalty/security situation got worse than it ever was?”

  “No. And there was something else he didn’t realize. It was that the old-guard anti-Communists, people like James Burnham, Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Christopher Emmett, Sol Levitas, had a tougher time on account of him.” Harry looked up. “I remember something very funny. Joe McCarthy was in town, this would have been late fifty-three. He was giving a lunch speech—I wrote it—to the, oh gee, I forget, some organization that met regularly; but I was there. There was standing room only. I was seated way in the back at a table with Gene Lyons. Remember him?”

  Alex replied as if to an examiner at St. Paul’s School. “Eugene Lyons, U.S. journalist posted in Moscow in the early thirties, turned away from Communism along with Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge wrote his Winter in Moscow, Lyons, his Red Decade.”

  “You have it. Well, time came for the question period. One of the guests asked something or other, and Joe answered with a pretty wild charge. I winced and whispered to Gene, ‘God. I wish he hadn’t answered that question just that way.’ He looked at me—Gene Lyons was a street-smart guy, veteran of the polemical wars. He said, ‘Nobody ever said Joe McCarthy was Abraham Lincoln.’

  “Hang on a second, let me look at that big collection of yours.”

  Harry brought back a volume of articles he had inspected a few weeks earlier. He thumbed through it. “Here is something Lyons wrote in—1954. For the American Legion Monthly. Ready?”

  “Go ahead. My recorder is on.”

  “He wrote about a meeting at Swarthmore College. It was called ‘Six Bold Men.’ That’s apparently how they designated themselves. Lyons goes on. ‘They identified themselves as “the unterrified.”‘ Their theme, I quote Lyons, was ‘calculated to prove that Americanism was not yet extinct, but that it was on its last legs.’ ” Lyons went on, Harry said, to quote Professor Henry Steele Commager: “ ‘We are now embarked upon a campaign of suppression and oppression more violent, more reckless, more dangerous than any in our history.’ Here’s Harold Ickes: ‘If a man is addicted to vodka he is, ipso facto, a Russian, therefore a Communist.’ Lester Markel—editor of the Sunday edition of the New York Times. He talked about the advent of a ‘black fear in the country brought about by the witch hunters.’

  “Gene has a nice collection here. Bertrand Russell is quoted: ‘If by some misfortune you were to quote with approval some remark by Jefferson you would probably lose your job and find yourself behind bars.’ ”

  “Does he give a source for that?”

  Harry thumbed through the rest of the article. “No. But Eugene Lyons was meticulous. He’d never get something like that wrong, let alone make it up.”

  “Is there more?”

  “Oh, yes.” Harry resumed reading. “Bernard DeVoto—Harvard historian—historian!—and regular columnist for Harper’s: ‘The hardheaded boys are going to hang the Communist label on everybody who holds ideas offensive to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, or the steering committee of the Republican Party.’ Ever heard of Lawrence Clark Powell?”

  “No.”

  “Well, he was librarian of the University of California. He wrote here for a British publication, ‘In this time of inquisitional nationalism, I know that I run a risk in confessing that I possess a French doctor’s degree and own an English car. And what dire fate I’d court when I say that I prefer English books?’ And—’When Dr. Ralph Turner, a professor of history at Yale, exposed the reign of terror to a convocation of Eastern college students, the latter, after due deliberation, voted McCarthyism a greater threat to America than Communism.’ Had enough?”

  “It rather hurts my feelings, Harry, that those students didn’t appreciate the major efforts I was making as a Soviet agent.”

  “Which reminds me to ask you—I know you were back in England in the spring of 1954: What foul deeds were you up to?”

  “I was put in the deep freeze. My KGB colonel was very concerned over the general sweep being quietly effected after the exposure of Burgess and McLean. All hell broke loose when those two took off for behind the Iron Curtain with a load of British security secrets. It wasn’t for twenty years after that, in the seventies, that anybody—including me—had any idea how many people MI5 had overlooked, who were still doing Soviet business inside the British establishment. Including the surveyor of the king’s/queen’s pictures, Sir Anthony Blount.” He paused and smiled—he was enjoying the reminiscence.

  “Yes, curious about old Blount. He called on me when I inherited my father’s title. He wished to record his special sadness at the death of his fellow socialist, my honorable father.” He laughed. “Great heavens, Harry! Do you suppose the first Lord Herrendon, my honorable father, was also a spy?”

  “We can laugh about those things now. I take it you did not talk with Blount about old times?”

  “No. I didn’t know that he was an agent, and he probably didn’t know that I had been one. But I will talk about him in my book. And you, Harry?”

  “I will too. Dad.”

  65

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1954

  The committee votes

  SEPTEMBER 1, 1954

  A second Senate committee convenes

  The Army-McCarthy hearings concluded on June 27, after nine weeks. Thirty-six sessions had been held, 187 hours of, well—jury time. Two million words filled 7,424 pages of transcript. Thirty-two witnesses testified, and a cumulative total of one hundred fifteen thousand spectators viewed live some part of the hearings in the Senate chamber. Radio and television put their loss of revenues from abandoned regularly scheduled broadcasts at ten million dollars plus.

  Exactly two months later, the committee filed its report. It was here and there factional—the Republicans saying this, the Democrats that. But there was convergence on some points. Both sides criticized Senator McCarthy’s co
nduct, though the Republicans’ language was milder. Both sides criticized Secretary Stevens for his complacent conduct in the face of Roy Cohn’s importunities, an interesting division here being that the Democrats were more vigorous than the Republicans in their criticism of Stevens. (“Why should we be surprised?” Sam Tilburn remarked to Ed Reidy in one of their near-nightly conversations on the hearings. “Stevens is a Republican secretary of the army appointed by a Republican president.”)

  Senator Potter, Republican, filed a separate report. Word had leaked that President Eisenhower, at midpoint in the hearings, had invited Potter to the White House to hear an anti-McCarthy pep talk from Vice President Richard Nixon. Potter, a double amputee in World War II, was understandably malleable in the presence of the man who had commanded him in that war and was now commander in chief. Senator Potter’s report said that “the principal accusation of each side in this controversy was borne out.” McCarthy had tolerated the behavior of Cohn, and Stevens/Adams had tolerated the behavior of Cohn: The senators were unanimous in affirming that Stevens and Adams were at fault for trying to appease Cohn rather than objecting immediately and forcefully to his requests for favors for Schine. The senators, again unanimously, criticized McCarthy for inviting all federal employees, against executive orders, to report their complaints to congressional committees.

  Senator McCarthy made no comment (this was unprecedented) on the committee’s report. Roy Cohn, who had resigned as chief counsel in anticipation of the committee’s findings, gave his own statement. “The American people … are the jury. They have given me tremendous support in this controversy. Anyone who associates himself with the cause of exposing atheistic Communist infiltration has to contend with partisan politics.”

  On the same day the findings of the special Senate committee on Army-McCarthy were released, still another special Senate subcommittee convened. This one was headed by Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, and its mandate was to resolve whether Joseph Raymond McCarthy, by (alleged) misbehavior dating back to the Tydings Committee investigations and going forward to his questioning of General Ralph Zwicker should be censured by the Senate. Short of expulsion, the heaviest levy available to the Senate.