The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Chadinoff had stressed, in his winter seminars at the Plattling BOQ, the importance of the Dewey findings, “especially since Dewey was a man of the left. It was a terrible blow for the left intelligentsia who were fellow travelers.”

  Returning to New York, Harry’s summer reading had included Malcolm Muggeridge’s Winter in Moscow, Freda Utley’s The Dream We Lost, and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Now, Enfils’s book in hand, he turned to the chapter on the show trials of 1938. Professor Enfils stressed that it was naive to assume that the trial’s defendants were innocent, nothing more than Stalin’s victims. This paragraph in particular caught Harry’s eye.

  The commission to investigate the trials was headed by the prominent philosopher and educator John Dewey. He assembled a jury of distinguished academic figures. What they had in common was a virulent distrust of Soviet policies. Many of them, like Professor Dewey himself, had ten years earlier sympathized with the socialist ideal. Many turned away from an understanding of Soviet policies after the break between Stalin and Trotsky. It was evident from the language in which Dewey brought his indictment that the Soviet Union was being dismissed without an appropriate sense of the vicissitudes of historical evolution. It is characteristically American to apply whatever its own standards are as instantly paradigmatic for other societies. Thus if America writes a Hatch Act in 1939 protecting the political freedoms of public servants, all other societies must have a Hatch Act. What truly happened in 1938 was that evolutionary Stalinism felt the need to excrete men who were basically antagonistic to Soviet ideals. In the United States, a President Jackson could find other ways of getting rid of John C. Calhoun. But it is naive, and self-deceiving, to repudiate Joseph Stalin for exercising procedures which have been routine throughout Russian history.

  Harry left the library and went to room 302 of Earl Hall, the office of the Columbia Young Progressives. He found Tom Scott, the Progressives’ twenty-three-year-old president, tall, brown-haired, tousled, wearing thick steel-rimmed glasses, at his desk pounding a typewriter. Behind him was a huge poster of Henry Wallace, former vice president of the United States under President Roosevelt, and until only a few weeks ago secretary of commerce under President Truman. The small room’s broad shelves were crammed with brochures and pamphlets.

  It was Tom Scott who, in March, had led the student protest against the awarding of an honorary degree to Winston Churchill. Churchill had delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, denouncing Soviet practices and deeply antagonizing those who favored an accommodationist foreign policy. It had been arranged that on the way back to Great Britain, the former prime minister would stop at Columbia in order to receive a degree. The Young Progressives amassed a remarkable 1,700 student signatures protesting the degree. They were directed to retiring Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler.

  Asked to comment on the student protesters, Churchill, accepting his degree, jocularly urged Communists, “wherever they are,” to read up on the life of the “white ants—”“termites which lead a life of slavery.” He then pledged “all the moral and material forces of the British Empire to strengthen the United Nations and maintain the peace.”

  Scott looked up at Harry. “What can I do for you?”

  The telephone interrupted him. He conversed with the caller about a joint rally with Hunter College soon after the New Year. While they spoke, Harry looked at the brochures being offered by the Young Progressives, pocketing two or three.

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Yes. The Journal American said in an editorial last week that the Civil Rights Congress was a Communist front. Can you enlighten me on that?”

  “It’s a lie, of course. I hate to put it this way, but there are fascist tendencies in Washington, and they’re applauded, of course, by people like William Randolph Hearst and the warmongers.”

  “But what about the Civil Rights Congress?”

  “It’s an organization devoted to the civil rights of everybody, Negro, white, Jew, Christian, Communist. It is being reviewed by the the attorney general with the obvious design of listing it officially as a Communist front—in order to appease the ultrarightists in Congress. It’s just not true that Attorney General Tom Clark is a reliable liberal. He’s a Red scare demagogue who likes to list organizations that disagree with government policy as Communist fronts.”

  “Are they all innocent? I mean, all those organizations he has listed?”

  Scott was slowed down. “Innocent of what?”

  “Innocent of taking orders from the Communist Party?”

  Scott leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and said, “Look,—what’s your name?”

  “Harry. Harry Bontecou.”

  “Look, Harry, the Communists have certain ideals in common with other people who aren’t ‘Communists.’ They oppose imperialism, nuclear proliferation, inequality, and fascism. I can’t speak for all the outfits on the attorney general’s list, because I don’t know enough about them, but I can speak for the Civil Rights Congress. I am all for it, and I have their literature.” Scott reached over to one of the stacks in the bookcase. “You’ll see. Pretty important people back the congress. Including academics, artists, scientists.”

  Harry pocketed the brochure. Scott’s phone rang again. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then cupped the mouthpiece with his hand, looked up at Harry, and said, “This call is going to keep me busy for a while.” Harry gave a half wave with his hand. “Thanks. I’ll look the material over. See you.”

  He left the building and walked to the offices of the Spectator. He didn’t want to review the material he had collected back in his room, with Tracy looking over his shoulder. He turned first to the brochure on the Civil Rights Congress. He spotted, in the roster of sponsors, the name Pierre Enfils.

  He had had enough. He felt a rush of indignation and a hot rage. He felt he knew from Camp Plattling what kind of a world threatened. He walked back to his room. Tracy was there, typing those punchy strokes Harry had got used to. Harry sat down at his own desk at the other end of the room, facing Tracy.

  “Can I interrupt you for a minute?”

  “Yeah.” Allshott edged his typewriter toward the wall.

  “Tracy, do you know Professor Pierre Enfils?”

  Tracy was surprised. “What do you know about him?”

  “I’ve read your articles on the Gardiner Trust.”

  “Oh? I didn’t show them to you, of course—we were in competition. What did you think of them?”

  Harry’s jaw tightened. He looked directly into Tracy’s eyes. “What I think, Tracy, is that if it’s true that Enfils was intercepted on his way to a chair in the history department of Columbia, I say: Good for whoever did it—the Gardiner Trust people—President Butler—whoever.”

  “So much for academic freedom, Harry?”

  “There is also freedom to react against distortion. I’m asking you again. Do you know Professor Enfils?”

  Tracy was silent.

  “Did you get the Gardiner Trust story from him directly? Or maybe from the Civil Rights Congress? Do you know Enfils’s position on the Moscow trials?—”

  Tracy stood up abruptly. He slammed shut his desk drawer, grabbed the book on the sofa, and strode from the room.

  Harry’s heart was pounding. He took the material from the Young Progressives office and the notes he had made in the library. He put them in a manila folder and walked from their little two-desk study into the bedroom, upper and lower bunks, he shared with Tracy. He opened the door to the clothes closet and reached for the briefcase with the combination lock his mother had given him in September. He put the folder in the case and twirled the lock. His heart was still pounding. He had a feeling that he had met the enemy at very very close quarters; different, yes, from when he was fighting in Belgium, cheek by jowl with the enemy, but he felt something of the thrill and danger of the reconnaissance scout, identifying the enemy at close hand.

  11

/>   DECEMBER 1945

  McCarthy runs

  In the seven years that had gone by since McCarthy had served as judge, going then to the Marines in the Asian theater, he wrote regularly to his mother. In one letter he let it out of the bag. “The war isn’t going to last forever, Mom. And you know what I’m going to do when I get back home? Well, if you promise not to tell, I’m going to run for—”Joe then listed a half dozen political offices.

  “Scratch all of these out except one—your choice. Whichever one you choose, that’s the one I’ll go for, what I’ll do for you and Dad.” He had written down, “District Attorney … Mayor … Congressman … Governor … Senator … President.”

  “Joe is always teasing us,” Biddie McCarthy said to Tim, showing him the letter. But she kept it, and reread it the day Joe filed for the United States Senate in December 1945.

  Joe McCarthy was still in uniform when he made the decision to run in the earlier 1944 Senate race. He had planned the campaign even before his resignation from the Marines in December 1944. It amused him that he had a year earlier communicated his intention to his mother, however enigmatically. It had been nothing more than a family joke. Captain McCarthy’s last six months on duty were spent back in the United States on various mainland bases. From wherever he was stationed, he rattled such political floorboards as he had established in his race for judge and during his career as judge. He submitted his name as a candidate for the Senate against incumbent Senator Alexander Wiley, by way of warm-up, five months before he left the service. He had designed that campaign, which would never get off the ground, with the single purpose in mind of getting his name before the public. His political line boiled down to a widely distributed postcard:

  Stand by for the return to Wisconsin of Joe McCarthy—

  Circuit-Judge-to-Captain-in-combat with the Marines!

  That campaign was playtime. This campaign, aiming at November 1946, Joe McCarthy insisted, was serious. Joe McCarthy wanted to go to the Senate. On this point he was resolute even while still stationed in the Pacific. He had told Joyce Andrews he knew how to bring it off. Andrews, recovering slowly from a shrapnel wound after he had ditched his plane near Bougainville, was skeptical. “Joe, they don’t elect people like us. We got no connections, no money, no—nothing.”

  Joe reminded Joyce that he had been elected judge against long odds. “And now I have a Silver Star. That’s not nothing.”

  “Okay, Joe. You run for senator. If you’re elected, I’ll run for president.”

  Joe just smiled. It was impossible to discourage Joe McCarthy, and after a while his friends stopped trying.

  All hands at the hotel reception could see that the campaign was beginning to hum. The target was the renowned Senator Bob La Follette, incumbent, populist, legendary son of Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, founder of the Progressive Party. McCarthy had hoped it would be a three-man race, but the Progressive Party was disintegrating and being wooed by the Democrats. La Follette had decided instead to rejoin the Republican Party, listing himself as a candidate to return to the Senate on the Republican line. That meant that McCarthy needed to fight not only in the general election against a Democrat, but in the Republican primary against the formidable La Follette. When La Follette registered, all Republicans except McCarthy put aside their hopes for the Senate.

  There had been a hint of trouble ahead on the matter of the war record. At the press conference before Joe’s dinner speech a reporter from the Madison Capital Times rose and asked Joe why it was that his citation from theater commander Admiral Chester Nimitz didn’t specify the nature and cause of his leg injury.

  Joe chuckled and answered that perhaps Admiral Nimitz had other things to do. “You know, Mike,—”as ever, Joe used reporters’ first names—”we hadn’t won the war yet.”

  Joe turned then amiably to the young woman with the recording mike in her hand—a new device used to capture spontaneous exchanges and interviews for later broadcast over the radio. She read her question from a written note.

  “Judge McCarthy, you were discharged last December after only sixteen months’ service.”

  “Eighteen months,” Joe interrupted. “And I wasn’t ‘discharged.’ I resigned.”

  The reporter, her rhythm broken, stared down at her notes. “Uh, eighteen months. … That was a year ago. Then we were facing a—a costly—Nazi offensive in Belgium, and our casualties at Iwo Jima were very high. But instead of sticking to your unit in the Marine Air Force you came home and campaigned against Senator Wiley. How did you get an early discharge?”

  There was a murmur of curiosity from the audience.

  “I told you, dear, I resigned. Resigned my commission. Why? I had been hospitalized. And anyway, remember that draft regulations exempt sitting judges. I never had to go into the armed services in the first place. I was a volunteer. And I’m glad I did serve, and I’m proud of the work I did as an intelligence officer and tail gunner in action.”

  The host for the dinner to follow, the congenial Malcolm Aspic, president of the Elks Club, raised his hand. He saw nothing to be gained from more of the same. He called an end to the press conference even though there were two reporters with their hands raised. “Come on, guys, ladies. Let the candidate go. There’s a hundred people in the next room waiting to shake his hand. You all come on in with us and have a drink.” He turned to Joe and mock-whispered: “We’ll never tell on them if they go to the bar instead of paying more attention to the business of politics, will we, Joe?”

  Joe waved his hand at the four press and radio representatives, bowing his head submissively. He was telling them he had no alternative but to oblige his hosts. Y’all know how it is. … His wave conveyed that he would have preferred to stay and answer more questions.

  The first person to accost him in the crowded lounge where the drinks were served wasn’t an Elk, it was a visibly agitated Richie O’Neill. “How’m I doing?” he said to Richie. He motioned Joe to follow him to the corner of the room. Joe agreed to go, “But only if you get me a drink.”

  “Bourbon and soda for the judge”—Richie shot the directive briskly to the nearest human body. The mayor of Fond du Lac, taken for the waiter, received the bar order with some amazement, delegating it coolly to the young man on his right. Richie O’Neill’s attempt to arrest Joe’s attention was blocked by a large, bearded guest, who, drink in his left hand, put his right arm around Joe’s shoulder. “Joe, what I have to tell you is really important.” The solicitor began on the subject of the Potsdam Agreement of the preceding August and the opportunities forfeited by President Truman at the diplomatic table. It was at Potsdam, three months after the death of Hitler, two weeks before the Japanese surrender, that the great force of adamant Soviet diplomacy was experienced. On the subject of the lost freedom of Poland and other misfortunes that flowed from Potsdam and, before that, the Yalta Agreement, the guest was fluent and vociferous and impossible to shut down.

  Richie sighed with exasperation and managed to get across only the sparest message, whispered in the candidate’s ear. “Joe: Right after your speech come to my suite. Number four twenty-four. Ollie will be there.” Joe managed to hold the geopolitical strategist at bay long enough to express his genuine surprise.

  “Ollie here? How come?” Ollie Burden had been scheduled to do some money raising for Joe’s campaign at a gathering of friends of Wisconsin tycoon Tom Coleman. Why was Ollie, all of a sudden, in Madison, missing so important an opportunity? But there was no way Joe could hear Richie’s explanation in the commotion and the sound of the cocktail hour.

  Richie O’Neill had been a friend since Joe’s chicken-farming days and, ever since the campaign for judge, a dollar-a-year political adviser, now campaign chairman. O’Neill was glumly resigned to Joe’s quite extraordinary capacity to polarize. His public was not now numerous: Joe’s statewide race against Wiley the year before had been a mere formality, never arousing the interest of the Wisconsin public. His successful race for judge
seven years earlier had been in the Tenth Circuit, comprising only three counties. But within that small circle, his friends and admirers were ardent. They found him attractive, earnest, yet never boring or fanatical, courteous, and thoughtful, a life lover who animated all situations in which he involved himself. They never doubted he would move up the political ladder.

  But the stamina of his critics was at least as enduring. They had coalesced early, as critics of the tactics Joe had used in his race against Judge Werner. Miles McMillin, of the Madison Capital Times, was an early and adamant critic. “To go around and pretend that Edgar Werner was seventy-two when McCarthy knew goddamn well he was sixty-seven was infamous and unforgivable,” he said at a public gathering of Friends of Bob La Follette. The resentments festered as McCarthy prospered. The anti-McCarthy forces consolidated in their determination to block this latest effrontery of the chicken grower, his bid for an august Senate seat. The heaviest concentrations of his critics were in the editorial offices of the Madison Capital Times and the Milwaukee Journal, and now the Journal was set to blow a very loud whistle on Judge-Captain-Candidate Joe McCarthy.