The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  66

  Joe McCarthy and Jean, in Wisconsin; vacationing

  The following day, speaking in the Senate chamber, Senator Fulbright said of his colleague, “His abuses have recalled to the minds of millions the most abhorrent tyrannies which our whole system of ordered liberty and balanced power was intended to abolish.”

  Senator McCarthy, intercepted by a reporter at an airport, commented that he no longer paid any attention to anything said by Senator Halfbright. Within the week, Freedom House, founded by the late Wendell Willkie, a former Republican presidential candidate, added a comment to the heavy library of evaluations of the senator. “[McCarthy is] a man who is ever ready to stoop to false innuendo and commit as dangerous an assault on democracy as any perpetrated in the propaganda of the Communists.” The widow of the president against whom Mr. Willkie had run said that Senator McCarthy’s investigating tactics “look like Mr. Hitler’s methods.” And FDR’s successor, former president Harry Truman, said simply that Mr. McCarthy’s problems were “pathological” and that he was a “character assassin.”

  The day after the report of the Army-McCarthy subcommittee was filed, Joe and Jean McCarthy left Washington for a vacation at an undisclosed destination.

  On reaching the secluded lakeside house close to Joe’s native Appleton, Jean made a careful decision. She wouldn’t say anything to Joe about his drinking until the third day. He needed desperately whatever physical repose he could get from two days of sleeping and relaxing at the isolated and ingeniously appointed summer cottage of a friend, Milwaukee manufacturer Bill Brady. Irene Brady had detached an old retainer from the city with instructions that she must cook for the McCarthys, keep the house tidy, stay out of their way in her own room with her own television, and under no circumstances report where she was, or with whom, to friends or family. That was easy. Thelma, an ardent supporter of the senator, welcomed enthusiastically the prospect of “looking after our Joe McCarthy for a few days.”

  Jean had packed several books, rigorously excluding any book that so much as touched on the problems of the postwar world. She had a novel or two by Jane Austen and by Trollope, plus Gone with the Wind, which neither she nor Joe had read, and two murder mysteries by Agatha Christie. On the morning after their arrival she took a book to the terrace and began reading. There was a pier on the lake, and the water was at midsummer warmth. Joe pulled out a long bamboo pole from the garage, some fishing line, and affixed to the hook a piece of raw bacon. He whooped with delight when, a few minutes later, he brought up a sunfish. He caught three more in the succeeding hour and brought them in to Thelma, insisting that she fry them for lunch, never mind that she had prepared a steak. “Steaks last forever, Thelma. Save the steak for dinner.”

  With lunch, Joe had three Bloody Marys. Pursuant to her resolve, Jean said nothing. She would wait until the next day. Then, she said to herself sternly, she would be tough!

  After lunch, Joe napped for an hour, read listlessly in one of Jean’s novels, and joined her for a half hour’s walk up toward the main road and back. At five he turned on the early news hour. Half the figures in Wisconsin shown in the news were men and women he knew from his industrious cultivation of Wisconsin voters. But there was no reference to McCarthy. At six he explored the networks. Once again, no mention. At six-thirty, highball in hand, he looked at the television, dialed around, but had no satisfaction from what he saw and heard. He turned the television off and gave the operator the number in New York for Harry Bontecou, who was quickly on the line. He chatted contentedly with Harry. He spoke of the Army-McCarthy hearings (“Pretty much predictable, I think. Roy thought so too”). And then about the censure committee.

  “Did you see it coming, Harry?” Oh sure, Harry had replied. The Gillette committee, set up to investigate McCarthy’s behavior against Tydings in the Maryland campaign, had withered away irresolutely.

  “You know, Joe, some senators, like Flanders and Symington, hadn’t forgotten that whole business.” And then the conduct of McCarthy when questioning General Zwicker revived senatorial sentiment that their colleague deserved a heavy personal rebuke (some senators wished for more than that). Republican members of the Army-McCarthy committee maneuvered desperately not to let the Zwicker business overwhelm the investigation bearing on Army/ Adams/Cohn/Schine. The Democrats agreed, but at a price. Republican members had to promise to endorse yet another committee, specifically mandated to look into McCarthy’s behavior.

  “Joe, you got to have first-class counsel on this one. You’ve got a lot of the Senate aroused against you, and you can see the heavy hand of the White House in this fight. I know you recommended to Roy that he have counsel and he turned you down, and he was wrong and you were right.”

  Traditionally, McCarthy would have scorned the idea that he needed counsel at his side in his public life. But Joe McCarthy was tired. The fourth drink of the evening, which he was swallowing as he talked to Harry, did not revive him, not as drinks used to do.

  Harry moved quickly after noting the moment’s hesitation. “There’s a guy, you know him. He’s an up-and-coming guy: Edward Bennett Williams.”

  “Oh, sure. He defended me against Drew Pearson.”

  “He loves front-page clients. I’m friends with a law professor at Columbia who says he’s tremendous, both at trial and as a negotiator.”

  “Okay, I’ll give him a ring.” He called out, “Make a note of this, Jeanie. Call Ed Williams in the morning. Good night, Harry, hope things are okay.”

  After a half hour, Joe was finally reanimated, and had another highball. Jean watched him carefully and made her plans, apprehensive but determined, for the next day. In bed, Joe spoke of the idea of adopting a child. She fondled him and said yes, if she didn’t conceive by … Christmas, she’d initiate proceedings. “I know exactly where to go.”

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Either one.”

  “Just so long as it looks like you.”

  After breakfast, she addressed him.

  “Joe. Joe, put down the paper and listen to me.”

  He looked up. He had a powerful intuitive sense. “You going to talk to me about drinking, aren’t you, Jeanie?”

  She was startled. “Well, yes. I love you, Joe. The country needs you, Joe. But nobody’s going to have you for very long at the rate you’re going. The only thing to do, Joe, is to kick it. You’re a strong man. You can do it. You’ve got four more years in the Senate—”

  “That’s all the years I want. I may not even run again in fifty-eight.”

  “You may not be able to run in fifty-eight. Joe, you captured the attention of the American people when they were just drifting on the Communist issue. But it’s slipping away, and that’s not just because there are liberals and Commie sympathizers after you. It’s because your judgment is bad, and it’s affected by—booze!”

  She spoke the word emphatically, spoke it as though it were her worst, most vicious enemy, worse even than a nest of Communist vipers waiting to spit their poison into McCarthy’s veins.

  He walked to the sink, pulled out a bottle of vodka from the cabinet below, and poured himself a drink. “I’ll think about what you say, Jeanie. And I love you too, Jeanie. Love you a whole lot. And Jean, it isn’t that I could stop if I wanted it. It’s that I can’t stop. Even for you, Jeanie.”

  He resumed reading the Milwaukee Journal.

  67

  The censure committee begins hearings

  On September 3, Willmoore Sherrill called Harry, reaching him at the office of the American Mercury. “We did it, we did it!”

  “I thought you’d like that. It’s terrific, I think.”

  The jubilation was over the passage, the day before, of the Communist Control Act, a statute designating the Communist Party of the United States “the agency of a hostile foreign power” and declaring that, as such, it “should be outlawed.” That clarification—Was the U.S. Communist Party a domestic, independent political party, or was it an agent of
a foreign power?—affirmed the distinction Harry had defended before the Columbia Political Union in 1948, and the theoretical distinction Willmoore had been arguing in his political seminars, “Willmoore’s doctrine of clear and present objectionability,” graduate student Charles Lichtenstein had dubbed it.

  “And would you believe it?” Willmoore said. “It looks as if Congress will override Truman’s veto of the Communist Control Act. You heard anything from McCarthy?” he asked.

  “Yes, in fact. Jeanie called yesterday, and Joe came on the line, chatted a while. They’re on vacation, secluded lake in Wisconsin. He’s trying to decompress, but I think he’s having a hard time. Joe was never very good—during the time I was with him—at relaxing. The length of a horse race or a poker game was about it.”

  “I see what you mean. I see him as permanently wound up. Probably affects the booze problem. Leonard Lyons in his column yesterday wrote directly about the booze. I assume you know about it?”

  “Yes,” Harry said. “It is a problem.” He had to stop himself from warning that Willmoore had the same problem.

  “Harry, I wish you to know that you are not invited to my suite to tune in on the McCarthy censure hearings, whenever they come along.”

  “They’re not going to be televised, thank God.”

  “I hope Joe behaves between now and then. Any chance?”

  “I don’t know, Willmoore,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  McCarthy professed himself “completely satisfied” with the composition of the select committee deputized to decide whether to recommend a Senate censure. The committee chairman, Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, was a Republican conservative and also a disciplined jurist.

  But two days later the papers quoted a McCarthy speech to the American Legion of Illinois. He told the legion members that the Watkins Committee was engaged in evaluating charges from “nice little boys in the Senate” who had attacked “someone for doing the skunk-hunting job which they didn’t have the guts to do.”

  A reporter from Time magazine asked him whether he would call defense witnesses to appear before the Watkins Committee. McCarthy said that this would be a “great waste of time.” Besides, he added, some of the statements he was being censured for making he had no inclination whatever to regret. “For instance, it’s true I said Senator Flanders was senile. Obviously he is. He can prove he’s not senile if he can, and wants to.”

  The next week in Richmond he was asked whether he wished to modify his statements about Senator Hendrickson. About Senator Hendrickson, McCarthy had said that here was “the only human who ever lived so long without brains or guts.” Now he seemed to reflect pensively on the reporter’s question. Then he said that what he had said about the senator “certainly expressed my feelings then, and expresses my feelings now.”

  When the committee met, Chairman Watkins was resolved not to permit a spectacle of the kind that had been televised for nine weeks in the spring and early summer. Senator McCarthy would be permitted to speak only when testifying as a witness.

  Early in the proceedings, McCarthy challenged this ruling, even though his counselor, Edward Bennett Williams, tried to restrain him.

  Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman …

  The Chairman: Just a moment, Senator. You have filed no challenge; and, in the first place, I believe it is improper for you to do so, because we have not any jurisdiction.

  Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman, I should be entitled to know whether or not—

  The Chairman: The Senator is out of order.

  Senator McCarthy: Can’t I get committee counsel to tell me—

  The Chairman: The Senator is out of order.

  Senator McCarthy:—whether it is true or false?

  The Chairman: The Senator is out of order. You can go to committee counsel and question him later to find out. That is not for this committee to consider. We are not going to be interrupted by these diversions and sidelines. We are going straight down the line. The committee will be in recess.

  The signs multiplied, and they were unfriendly. A national poll showed McCarthy with a heavy loss of support since the close of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Fifty-one percent now disapproved of him, his popularity reduced to thirty-six percent. Columnist James Reston wrote that Joe was now like “an alley fighter in the Supreme Court.” And it wasn’t only the Watkins verdict that was hurting, Reston analyzed. “He is fenced in for the first time and he is being hurt, for regardless of what the Senate does about his case, each day’s hearing is a form of censure of its own.”

  Defense counsel Williams attempted a technical maneuver. One count in the complaint held up McCarthy’s abuse of the Gillette-Monroney Committee as itself censurable. That committee had been set up to investigate McCarthy’s activities in the campaign against Millard Tydings in 1950. Williams objected: A Senator cannot be censured, according to the Senate rules, for conduct during a previous session of Congress.

  Chairman Watkins researched the point and observed dryly the next day: “We do not agree with you.”

  Subsequent attempts by Williams to delegitimize the committee, on the grounds that it was violating basic legal principles and lacked legal authority for its procedures, were peremptorily dismissed by Chairman Watkins as “wholly immaterial.”

  That night Sam Tilburn commented to Ed Reidy, “Poor Ed Williams. He’s in alien waters. He’s used to arguing before the Supreme Court. All those arguments he’s using you can use up there, but not before a legislative committee. Those people make their own rules.”

  Williams insisted that there was no real difference between his client’s having called on federal employees to come up with deleterious information about government personnel and similar appeals from others, including the Internal Security subcommittee on which Watkins sat.

  Senator Watkins, grown impatient, snapped that at the rate they were proceeding, “We could go on for months here.” He reprimanded Williams.

  McCarthy testified that in his famous declaration he had asked only for evidence of wrongdoing, not for classified information. He refused a pointed invitation by Senator Watkins to withdraw, or at least to modify, his call of last February to federal employees.

  The subcommittee recessed on September 13 after two weeks of hearings. In just two weeks, on September 27, it issued a sixty-eight-page report.

  The country was stunned. The recommendations had been unanimously adopted. They were that McCarthy be censured on two counts. On the matter of the Gillette committee, the committee wrote of his treatment of committee member Senator Hendrickson. And on his later conduct, his treatment of General Zwicker.

  The closely reasoned report termed McCarthy’s statement about Hendrickson (no brains, no guts) “vulgar and insulting” and his conduct toward the committee “contemptuous, contumacious, and denunciatory, without reason or justification, and obstructive to legislative processes.”

  The six senators called McCarthy’s berating of Zwicker “inexcusable and reprehensible.” The committee cited a judicial decision that discussed orderly processes of legislative inquiries and then summarized, “The select committee is of the opinion that the very fact that ‘the exercise of good taste and good judgment’ must be entrusted to those who conduct such investigations places upon them the responsibility of upholding the honor of the Senate. If they do not maintain high standards of fair and respectful treatment, the dishonor is shared by the entire Senate.”

  68

  McCarthy returns to visit Whittaker Chambers

  Jean saw it coming and thought to do the one thing Joe never associated with the turmoil that otherwise moved with him wherever he went. She called Esther Chambers and asked whether she could bring Joe around. Esther came quickly back to the phone and told Jean they would both be welcome.

  McCarthy had angered Whittaker Chambers two and one-half years earlier, at the outset of President Eisenhower’s term. In the dispute over the nomination of Charles Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union, M
cCarthy had left a large trail when he set out to call on Chambers. The two men had visited for not more than an hour or two, but McCarthy had left the pursuing press with the impression that he had stayed the entire weekend in Westminster, rounding up adverse information on the nominee—about whom Chambers had no negative opinion other than that he was a member of the State Department establishment that had so consistently misread Soviet intentions. Chambers had refused many invitations to disavow McCarthy, but he had deplored, in correspondence with critically situated friends, McCarthy’s misorientation of the anti-Communist cause.

  Chambers greeted him warmly in the cold and bright November day, the leaves now mostly gone, only traces of gold and red remaining. Jean went to the kitchen to help Esther make the coffee. Esther said, “Whittaker knows what it’s like to feel down and out. You know he will be kind, don’t worry.” Jean had been on edge as the days went quickly by, the vote on censure now scheduled for early the following week.

  Jean brought up the question as they waited for the water to boil. “There have been only five votes of censure in the history of the Senate.”

  “Oh?” Esther responded.

  Jean struggled to make light of it. “Only three in this century, Esther, and two of them were for a fistfight on the Senate floor. The other was, well, complicated. It had to do with a vote on a tariff bill and whether somebody with special interests should have been brought in. It was a very distinguished senator. Hiram Bingham. Professor, archaeologist. He discovered Machu Picchu—the great Inca city in Peru.”