The after-dinner speech went well. The preliminary routine was well established. For maybe the fifteenth time since he had declared his candidacy thirty days ago, Joe sat while the master of ceremonies, alongside, read out loud the citation from Admiral Nimitz. It didn’t matter if the masters of ceremonies had entirely different introductions in mind. Joe—or Richie—or Ollie would instruct them: This is the way it goes. And this was the citation that prompted the emergency meeting in Richie’s suite: Ollie had an advance copy of the next day’s Milwaukee Journal.
At the hotel suite Joe quieted down, but only after campaign manager Richie O’Neill demanded a stop to his animated but disjointed conversation. “Look, Joe, we’re here to listen to Ollie, who has something very important for us to hear. So let’s give him a chance, okay?”
Ollie Burden had reached the hotel in Madison just before Joe’s speech began. Ollie’s base was eighty-two miles away, in Milwaukee. There, in the morning, he had got wind of the Milwaukee Journal’s scheduled “expose,” as the paper would label it, of Judge McCarthy’s war record. It was urgent to plan a response, so he had driven nonstop to the hotel in Madison.
McCarthy’s primary attention getter was a photograph: Captain Joe McCarthy, United States Marine. He was dressed in flying gear. Tall, handsome, earnest but with a twinkle in his eyes. Clean shaven (he had eliminated his beard). Under the photo in his campaign brochure, in bold print, was the citation from Admiral Nimitz.
Ollie reached into his briefcase for the newspaper galleys and began reading.
Joe listened for a moment or two. Then he reached up to the overhead lamp that shone over the table and their tight little circle. He turned the light off. Ollie’s voice stopped abruptly. Joe turned the light back on. What he had done was as striking a gesture of irritation from Joe McCarthy as anyone present had ever seen. Joe was irritated, a lesser cause of that irritation being Ollie’s cigar smoke, which was getting at Joe’s sensitive sinus. Mostly he was irritated by the story he was being made to listen to.
“Ollie, that kind of thing always gets said about political candidates. Why’re you so red hot over this attack? And could you aim the cigar at Richie for a change?”
“Because,” Ollie said, stamping out his cigar, “this story is different. They quote two Marine officers who say that your war wound was the result of an accident on a boarding ladder at a drunken equator-crossing initiation ceremony off New Guinea. How’re we going to answer these people?”
Joe reached into his pocket and drew out the campaign circular featuring his citation. He leaned back in the armchair and took a swallow from his whiskey glass. “Okay. Let’s take it bit by bit. … I’m quoting. ‘He’—that’s me, right Ollie? Or is the Journal saying I wasn’t the Captain Joe McCarthy the citation was written about?—’He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun positions despite intense antiaircraft fire, thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the success of subsequent strikes in the area.’
“Anybody saying that’s not true?”
Joe went on. “ ‘Although suffering from a severe leg injury …’ ” Joe stopped, raised his right pants leg, and pointed at the three-inch scar. “Okay?” His voice was now singsong, as though he were giving a speech. “ ‘… he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties as Intelligence Officer in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service.’ ”
Joe turned to Ollie. “Makes me blush, Ollie.”
Ollie banged his fist on the coffee table. “I’m not doubting you, Joe. But the story quotes two guys who say they were there!”
“So they were there when we had that little fun party on shipboard. Maybe they weren’t there when I got the scar from the Jap flak. So who’s going to say they’re the only guys who were ever around when McCarthy got banged up in the Solomons? Let’s have another drink.”
He continued without a pause. “I got here—”Joe went again to his jacket pocket—”a list of political positions I’m going to run on. We’ve got to do something about veterans’ housing. That’s an A—Number-One priority. We have to figure out a way for the United Nations, if it’s going to amount to anything, to have some kind of military force at its disposal. And we’ve got to keep our eyes on the Soviet Union. Last month they took over the Hungarian oil fields at Liege, including the big Standard Oil play. There was a fellow there tonight gassing on about Potsdam. But he had a point. Looks to me like we gave away the show there.”
Ollie looked over despairingly at Richie. Suddenly he brightened. What he thought to reserve to say privately to Richie he found himself saying in front of Joe: “Richie, it’s just possible—it suddenly occurs to me—that Joe knows more about political communication than we do.”
“So?” Richie asked.
“So maybe Joe’s right. Maybe we should just—have another drink.”
They did, and many, many drinks later, it was champagne, toasting the election of Joseph R. McCarthy as United States Senator from the state of Wisconsin.
12
JANUARY 1947
Senator Joe McCarthy goes to Washington
Joe McCarthy arrived in Washington on the train, early in the morning. His arrival was in sharp contrast to the excitement of his departure. In Milwaukee there was a cheering section of his supporters, an improvised band, and something on the order of a farewell address: McCarthy would leave now his home state and dwell in Washington, looking after the affairs of the whole country.
He didn’t exactly expect a parade when the train came into Union Station. What he got was nothing. No one greeted him and his aide, Victor Johnston. Their entourage was one porter, who carried on his trailer Joe’s large bag, containing his entire wardrobe and a briefcase, and Johnston’s three bags. But at least the junior senator knew where to go, what address to give to the taxi driver. He had sent ahead Ray Kiermas, who agreed to act as McCarthy’s office manager. Better, Ray and his wife rented a two-room house and turned one of the rooms over to McCarthy. Joe would live with Ray for three years, until he got his own apartment.
Ray had been a great success, a high school dropout who worked as a milk grader and then leased a dry-goods store from his father-in-law for fifteen dollars a month. He prospered and during the war opened a locker plant. He had intended to start a real estate-brokerage business when in 1946 he was lured into the McCarthy campaign by Tom Coleman, a friend and a commanding Republican figure who had decided to help Joe McCarthy out. Ray Kiermas had been given a single commission: to supervise the mailing of a personally addressed postcard to every voter in Wisconsin. On one side, a picture of Joe McCarthy. On the other, the addressee’s name and address and the handwritten sentence, “Your vote will be greatly appreciated by Joe McCarthy.”
“Well, Ray,” McCarthy was lugging his suitcase into the house, “there are no signs here—yet!—that Washington greatly appreciates Joe McCarthy.” Ray’s wife, Dolores, whom Joe had also hired for his senate staff as a clerk, unpacked Joe’s bag, surveyed its contents, and delivered the first of what would be successive lectures over a period of six years on his perpetual disarray. Joe would wear dark blue double-breasted suits, buying them four at a time only after the first set was entirely frayed. Joe responded by tickling Dolores under the chin and sitting down on the chair at the card table he’d use as a desk. To Ray he said: “Let’s call a press conference. Tomorrow at three.”
It surprised Joe, but gratified him, that there were twenty-eight members of the communications industry there in the President’s Room of the Senate, with its tall windows, high ceiling, leather and velvet appointments, and scrubbed and polished tables. Senator McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, was thirty-eight years old, the youngest senator serving. It had been a Republican landslide, and the GOP was in charge of the House and the Senate for the first time since 1931. The demoralization among the Democrats had been such that Senator Fulbright actually sugges
ted that President Truman should acknowledge the tidal wave in sentiment, appoint a Republican secretary of state, and resign his office. By the rules of succession that then obtained, the secretary of state would succeed him to the White House—”and we can have a Republican government, which is what the people apparently want,” said Mr. Fulbright, loyal Democrat.
McCarthy joked about the Fulbright proposal as he opened his first press conference in Washington. But his affability didn’t immobilize everyone in the room. One reporter asked, “You’re a new man here. Why did you call a press conference?” Joe McCarthy said he felt he should comment on the strike by the United Mine Workers. But his recommendations on how to cope with the strike were garbled. He cited the need for authority, of the kind exercised by the military, if the situation was one of military necessity; but he disapproved, he added quickly, of the effort made in the preceding year by President Truman to nationalize the steel industry in protest against the steel strike.
Did the senator know to which committees he would be appointed? He did not know, but he hoped to serve in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. McCarthy ended the brief conference by shaking the hands of all the reporters. “He’s that way,” Sam Tilburn from Indianapolis said to a colleague as they walked out. “I’ve read up a little on him in Wisconsin. He knows everybody and likes everybody. But not everybody likes him. Bill Evjue and Miles McMillin over in Madison, they hate him. They were nicer to Hitler.”
Joe McCarthy was sworn in with a lusty cheering section in the galleries—two Pullman cars full of supporters who had traveled overnight from Madison. Joe loved it all, and loved the life of Washington. He bought an off-the-rack tuxedo and happily attended the parties he was regularly invited to by hostesses who were drawn to a young, handsome, sociable bachelor senator who, they liked to whisper it, had not so long ago been a chicken farmer.
And McCarthy continued, to the continuing dismay of Vic Johnston and Ray Kiermas, to be simultaneously a pauper and a spendthrift. He never had any money and was never without money. He loved to entertain, and soon after arriving, when Ray had temporary access to an apartment whose owners were gone for two weeks, McCarthy invited eight women members of the Senate press detachment to dinner, cooking his beloved steaks, while Dolores, acting on only an hour’s notice, brought together what she could to make a more complete meal. But that night McCarthy went back to his little room to make notes for his maiden speech.
There are hangovers after wars, when people prowl to shed light on the activity of the Merchants of Death. Joe McCarthy was not lured by the historical revisionists who thought the Second World War unprovoked, avoidable, and opportunistic. But McCarthy felt strongly that it was right to investigate profiteers. An investigation to that end had been authorized by the Seventy-ninth Congress, but now the National Defense Program Investigating Committee was scheduled to close shop. Senator McCarthy, before his press party, had spent three hours at Walter Reed Hospital chatting with veterans. He told the Senate about one of them, a Marine with both legs missing who claimed that many of his comrades had died because of “the graft and corruption which the Senate proposes to investigate.” He quoted a second veteran as saying, “What are you gentlemen there thinking about? You are the body who voted us into war. Now why do you object to investigating the graft and corruption which occurred during the war?” McCarthy lowered his voice: He did not speak, he told the chamber, on behalf of the fifteen million men who had fought in the war, “but I speak as one of them.” The Senate voted forty-nine to forty-three in favor of continuing the committee.
McCarthy was not named to the Foreign Relations Committee, but he was assigned to the Committee on Banking and Currency and given a seat on the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, a committee McCarthy would make famous.
13
President Harry Truman gives ’em hell
President Harry Truman was hopping mad. Except that he was in the Oval Office when he read the news report he’d have loosened his tie, which was a habit he had when his dander was up. Henry Wallace, his secretary of commerce, had gone and given one of those goddamn speeches about how we needed to be friendlier to the Soviet Union, and this just one week after the Soviets conscripted 400,000 teenagers, making now a total of 1.2 million, into the army.
On top of that there was the whole sense of … order. Actually, yes, the whole sense of protocol. Harry Truman believed very firmly in protocol. The buck stops here—he was proud of having said that. Well, you can’t exercise the responsibility without having the authority. It’s the president, goddamnit, who makes foreign policy, and he doesn’t need speeches from a Cabinet member telling him what to do. On top of that, it was a dumb political move, he explained to Clark Clifford, his close confidant and legal expert, whom he had summoned for compassionate company. “Half the country thinks we’ve been too sweet with the Soviet Union and that’s the reason Stalin continues to score, civil war in Greece, threats to blockade Berlin, Polish purge, the business in Turkey. … And while we work on the big scene, my own Cabinet officer goes and does it again, another of those valentines to Joe Stalin.”
Young Clark Clifford had an easy grace, and it worked well with Harry Truman. Truman knew what it was to work under an Absolute Boss: He had been schooled under the severe political tutelage of Prendergast in Kansas City. With Boss Prendergast you could be informal in your language but never really relaxed. At the relatively young age of forty, Clark Clifford was both informal and relaxed in the company of the supreme U.S. boss. Relaxed, but never, ever suggesting that his loyalty to the president was secondary. Clark Clifford could negotiate with the president, and sometimes did, but only in the sense of suggesting alternative treatments, never pleading for them. The president paid close attention to what Clifford said. What he said now was rather startling, but only because it was absolutely correct: “On the other hand, Mr. President, I guess we should all be grateful to Henry Wallace. Except for him, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are. Henry Wallace would be sitting there.”
Truman didn’t welcome references to Roosevelt-Wallace. He liked it when people referred to FDR’s bold action in 1944—enjoyed hearing about how FDR had got shed of Wallace as vice president, giving the nod to Senator Harry Truman. He liked to hear it because it was great historical drama. What he didn’t like was to reflect that his presidency was, in an odd sort of way, the doing of Henry Wallace. In the sense that but-for-Wallace-having-antagonized-FDR, Truman would not now be president of the United States. He would hope that history would say that toward the end of FDR’s third term, the president, that great and prophetic man, knew that he was ill and might not finish out a fourth term, and for that reason faced the responsibility of getting the best man possible to succeed him. And the very best man possible meant—Harry Truman.
All he said to Clark Clifford was, “Maybe it’s safe to say God was smiling at the United States when the president made that decision. Meanwhile, I’ve got to do something to clam Wallace up.”
Clifford agreed. He recalled the conversation in 1946, on the presidential train bound for Fulton, Missouri, when, late in the night, he had shared the company of the president and Winston Churchill. Churchill was out of power as prime minister, but as leader of the Opposition and heroic wartime figure, he remained the dominant voice of the English-speaking world. They had been playing poker, along with Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff; Harry Vaughan, military aide and presidential companion; Charlie Ross, press secretary; and Colonel Wallace Graham, White House physician. Churchill would shoot out a breezy little political essay as the cards were being shuffled. “You remember, Mr. President,” Clark Clifford said, “he was talking about political realism, and we knew he was going to drop that bomb the next day at Fulton, saying that there was an Iron Curtain between the Communist world and us. Back in Washington, General Marshall was a little upset, remember? And Churchill said that politics viewed in the laboratory might justify dealing with Stalin with concili
ation and understanding, but politics at another level argued against it—the people would lose their ‘weights and measures’ was the phrase he used. A nice expression for basic freedoms, I thought.”
“Yup.” Truman nodded his head. One of Clark Clifford’s strengths was that he never misunderstood a presidential signal. The signal said that their session, Clark Clifford and President Truman, was now over. The president had heard him approve of the need to do something about Henry Wallace. Now he could leave.
Former vice president Henry Agard Wallace had not enjoyed the hour—the half hour. (Could it have been only fifteen minutes?) Before that afternoon, Henry Wallace hadn’t set foot in the Oval Office for months! Secretary Wallace, just to begin with, wasn’t used to being treated that way. FDR had simply ignored him. That was one thing: Wallace had known it would be that way when he was tapped for vice president back in 1940—Wallace with his Midwest agricultural following could add a little strength to the Democratic ticket. He had already served FDR, as secretary of agriculture, and he had a broad populist appeal. So it hadn’t surprised him when, on taking office, there wasn’t much to do: His name on the ticket was what FDR wanted from him, nothing else. That kind of thing just happens to vice presidents. The historical literature is full of it, he had often consoled himself—get elected vice president and history runs out on you.
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