The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Reidy had received a Pulitzer for reporting from China, ten years before. In those reports, which centered on the great Japanese aggression against China, Reidy had emphasized the critical dependence of Japan on its supplies of oil. When President Roosevelt imposed the boycott on selling oil to Japan, Reidy prophesied that Japan would react violently. His story was filed on July 26. Five months later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  Reidy was anxious to sustain his reputation as a reliable analyst, and now he gave instructions to his Washington reporter.

  At age thirty, Sam Tilburn was a skilled Washington hand. He had lost a leg in a car accident when still a boy (his father, at the wheel, had been killed) and so did not have to give up his post as a young reporter for the Star to serve in the army. He spent the war years at his desk, in Washington. Reidy’s orders now were to stick to the McCarthy story “until the Communists and their sympathizers are run out of Washington, or until Joe McCarthy is.”

  “It’s going to be a long haul.” Tilburn held the telephone mouthpiece close to his lips to make way in a room with twenty reporters using twenty telephones. “I mean, the business of sticking to McCarthy until he shoots them or they shoot him.”

  “What about today?” Reidy was impatient. “All we got on the ticker was that he had named two suspects. Why didn’t he name more?”

  “The Senate voted to set up an investigating committee. McCarthy said he would give the names to the committee ‘in an orderly manner’—”already Tilburn was skilled at imitating McCarthy’s nasal monotone. “He blasted the living hell out of the State Department, Truman, Acheson, and of course Alger Hiss. The arch enemy on the floor was Benton. If there is an early kill, it will be Benton or McCarthy, one or the other.”

  “Who’ll head up the investigating committee?”

  “They’re talking about Millard Tydings.”

  “I forget, Tydings. Bright guy?”

  “Yeah, and knows his way around. There’s no way he’s going to be Nice-to-Joe, though he certainly isn’t going to say he’s indifferent to Communists in government. He’s up for reelection in November. Joe McCarthy—you know this; we talked about it during his senate race four years ago—has this thing about him: Give him ten minutes with six people, and if they’re not already committed, he’ll end up with three ardent fans and three guys who want to kill him.”

  “Did they land any heavy artillery?”

  “Not really. Except to insist that McCarthy had nothing new—Benton said it, also McClellan, also Douglas—that McCarthy’s cases were old stuff, that they had been reviewed and rereviewed. But Joe said, ‘Why’re they still around, then?’ Big crossfire on whether ‘they’ were still around, and of course we didn’t have the dates. … The whole thing after a while was pretty hard to follow, who they were talking about, what their numbers were on Joe’s files, how many files there were. We’re going to have to wait and see.”

  “I can wait and see until seven-fifteen, which is when my editorial for tomorrow is set in type.”

  “I know, I know, Ed. Just nurse a few ambiguities, I’d advise. On both sides. So that your faithful readers won’t be surprised if, next week, Acheson confesses he was a Communist all along. Or Joe is exposed as a total fake, resigns, and goes back to chicken farming. Anything more, Ed?”

  “No. Thanks. Will you be at the office if something comes up?”

  “Till seven-sixteen,” Ed answered.

  At 7:16 Joe was in his office, eating sent-in fried chicken with Mary Haskell and Ray Kiermas and Don Surine. Jean Kerr brought in the food and, having laid it out on the senator’s desk for him and the participants, moved back to the door. She was a relative newcomer and hadn’t been invited to the royal feast. Joe spotted her.

  “Jean? Jeanie?”

  “Yes,” the tall brunette answered, still facing the door.

  “Where the hell you going?”

  “I thought I’d let you alone, unless you need me, Senator.”

  “Need you, Jeanie? I can’t live without you, can I, Ray? Can I, Mary? You should know—you hired her because I spotted her and told you I couldn’t live without her. Right, Mary?”

  Mary came through with the expected chuckle. But she added, chicken in mouth, “He wants you in here, Jean. Grab some chicken.”

  Jeanie sat down, and Joe continued. “I had them on the run, right, Ray? Especially Benton. I think he’ll be careful from now on. Thing is, they don’t really know what I have, what we have—”

  “Easy, Joe,” Ray Kiermas said. “We’re not so sure what we have, what you have.”

  Joe McCarthy paused. “Look at those files! Hot stuff in all of them we’ve opened!”

  “Yes, Joe,” Surine interrupted. “But what we don’t know is: How many of them are still employed? We just can’t track down those names.”

  “Yup. But we have certain contacts in certain places—” Joe ostentatiously crossed himself, which always meant he was thinking about J. Edgar Hoover. “And guess who I’m going to visit on Monday.” Silence. McCarthy liked to orchestrate silences in his staff.

  “Whittaker Chambers.”

  There was something like a gasp.

  “Who’s going with you?—”Ray finally broke the silence.

  “I thought I’d take Jeanie along—”he caught her surprised smile with enormous pleasure. “I’ll want to take notes. Granted, I have to clear that.”

  “Through whom?”

  “Through Richard Nixon. Congressman Nixon. The guy who backed Chambers from the start. He’s running for the Senate in November. He stays close to Chambers, who trusts him.” Joe turned to Kiermas. “Did the Lucas people tell you when we’d be notified?”

  “Hester—Hester Ogilvie—told me the Democratic leadership was going to caucus tonight. Probably at the end of that session they’ll officially announce it: the formation of a committee to investigate the charges of Joseph R. McCarthy. Chairman—Millard Tydings. We think.”

  “I don’t care who it is,” Joe said, pushing aside his plate and opening a second bottle of beer. “I didn’t care today who asked the questions. Did I, Mary?”

  “You did all right, Senator.” She wouldn’t call him Joe when others were in the room.

  “How’m I doing, Ray?”

  “Good, Senator. Good, Joe.”

  “How’m I doing, Don?”

  “Okay. But it’s going to be a long, hard road ahead.”

  “I’m used to long, hard days at work. At the farm I got up at four.”

  “Sometimes,” Jean was now heard from, “it’s better to stay in bed.”

  McCarthy looked up at this gorgeous Irish creature. Where had Mary got her? And the three other people needed to handle the mail since Wheeling. That was a strange remark to hear. Maybe he assigned more meaning to it than he should have. “I didn’t get up too early the day I gave that speech in Wheeling, Jeanie.”

  She nodded her head.

  20

  The Senate acts

  “How’m I doing?”

  Jean Kerr knew exactly what Senator McCarthy intended when he said that. Some people ask that question—How’m I doing?—when halfway through an exercise. The pitcher looks smilingly over at the coach after striking out six in a row. He mouths those words right through the chew on his gum, in search of a valentine. The lawyer at the hasty lunch before court resumes preens for the approval of his partner and his client: “How’m I doing?”

  Joe would say those three words no matter what he was in the middle of. He might be cooking a steak (on his beloved outdoor grill). But it wasn’t as though the words were undirected, given purely as punctuation. When he asked “How’m I doing?” he was acutely aware whom the words were directed to. It mattered a whole lot what he then heard back in some cases. If it was Don Surine or Mary, Joe wouldn’t notice what they said, how they responded. He’d have expected—he’d have gotten, from friends and entourage—an affirmative of some kind, variously expressed. The words sounded the same when addre
ssed to Jeanie, but they were differently intended. He was saying, Hey, I’m Joe McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, war hero, lawyer, judge, the hottest political numero in America, and I want to know what you think of my performance.

  There were tourists out there, on the driveway outside the Capitol, looking for any recognizable face. Nobody’s picture, except for General Eisenhower’s, had appeared more often than Joe McCarthy’s in the past two months. He had mesmerized the whole country. What he charged in that speech in West Virginia was that the terrible troubles America was having all over the world were in part because enemies of America were influencing decisions. Specifically, Communists. Now he had to prove he knew what he was talking about. The Senate had voted a special investigation and named Millard Tydings of Maryland its chairman. Tydings loathed McCarthy, it was that plain. It had been a tough day at this hearing, three weeks after they began.

  Jeanie was seated on McCarthy’s right, Don Surine was driving the 1948 blue Chevy; the Senate Office Building seemed stark against the gray sky, a few drops of cold rain drifting down. Jean Kerr would not be bulldozed by the ritual call to affirm that Joe was doing just fine. Tall, beautiful, statuesque, she was very emphatic in her judgments. She had been with McCarthy only a few months, but in the office everybody knew by now that what she thought mattered most.

  “You’re holding your own, Joe. But Tydings isn’t going to let you get away with the waffling.”

  “On the numbers?”

  “On the numbers.”

  “Hell, Jeanie, that’s a phony. We’ve gone over that. Okay. So on one of the lists Esther Brunauer is number one. On another list she comes in as number twenty-seven. On my list she’s number forty-four. What Tydings and Cabot Lodge—when he’s not asleep—want to talk about isn’t, Should somebody like Esther Brunauer, who joins a Communist front every two weeks—”

  “Every two years, Joe.”

  “All right, every two years—does that matter? How many Communist fronts have you ever joined? They’re so dumb, those liberal Commie-smoochers. No. That’s not right, Jeanie, some of them, yes. But some of them know exactly what they’re doing.”

  McCarthy waved at the man with the camera, jittery with excitement at having spotted Senator Joe McCarthy himself driving out of the senators’ parking lot.

  While still waving, McCarthy instructed Don Surine not to stop for the tourist and his camera. “He already got a picture, Don. Just go ahead. Slowly.”

  He turned to Jean. And said absentmindedly, “How’m I doing?”

  “It’ll be another long night, Joe.”

  She opened the briefcase on her lap. We’ve got one hundred files to look at, and we don’t know which names Tydings is going to ask you to talk about.” She looked up from the file on her lap. “Joe, I’d cool it at the press conference. Don’t feed ammunition to Tydings.”

  “Tydings! … Baltimore blueblood, Jeanie. He’d have sided with Benedict Arnold.” Joe was an accomplished mimic. He began with Tydings’s cracked voice. He went on. Now Jean and Surine were listening to McCarthy’s version of the Grotonian accents of Dean Gooderham Acheson, Secretary of State. ‘Senator McCarthy, are you aware that General Arnold has a distinguished military record and that the charges you bring up against him are based on nothing more than rumor and that these facts have been scrutinized—’ notice, Jeanie, how he says scrroootinized? ‘—Senator McCarthy, by five different loyalty/security boards?’ ”

  Don Surine’s laughter was welcome. McCarthy began now to imitate the voice of Drew Pearson on the political gossip columnist’s weekly television show. But Jean Kerr stopped him.

  “Joe. Listen a minute. What you’re going through—three weeks behind us and God knows how many weeks ahead for us—isn’t a political after-dinner roast in Appleton. This isn’t one William T. Evjue or one Miles McMillin of the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times you’re talking to—”

  “Evjue? McMillin? Why would I talk to them? To wish them happy May Day? To congratulate them on the latest Communist putsch?” McCarthy laughed. “You know something, Jeanie, if somebody like, say, Dorothy Kenyon called the AP tonight and said, ‘I, Dorothy Kenyon—distinguished lawyer, former municipal judge, former appointee to a United Nations commission on the status of women—have decided I can’t live with my conscience any longer. I want to come clean, admit that for twenty years I have done work for the Communist Party. It was me who put the sleeping pills in Dean Acheson’s drink before he gave the statement about how Alger Hiss was the greatest American since Abraham Lincoln—”

  He interrupted himself, raising his eyes to look up at the driver’s seat. “Don. Turn the radio up—”

  The newscaster’s words flooded the car.

  “… repeatedly asked for the floor. Senator Tydings at one point gaveled Senator McCarthy into silence and instructed him not to continue to interrupt the committee’s proceedings. Senator McCarthy said he was not going to participate in ‘star chamber’ rituals. He said, ‘This isn’t a Communist trial.’ A staff member reported that Senator McCarthy was then heard to say to an aide, ‘Not yet.’ Senator Tydings gaveled him down again and called a five-minute recess. Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman revealed that Esther Brunauer’s file had been inspected as early as 1947 and that no security question had been raised when she was reappointed—”

  “Turn it off, Don. Where was I?” He chortled. “Oh, right. Evjue. McMillin. And now Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson and Herblock and the Washington Post and the New York Times and CBS and—you know, Jeanie, I’m asking you, Were they this upset when Stalin exploded an atom bomb last September? Of course not! They feel now—thanks to McCarthy, Jeanie; yes, thanks to me—that their whole show is somehow in danger.”

  He started to laugh again, then stopped: “Only it’s not a laughing matter, Jeanie, is it? How’m I doing?”

  The car pulled up to the Hilton Hotel. He would speak to the American Legion Convention at five, after his press conference.

  “You check out my speech?”

  She nodded, handing him the manila folder.

  He turned to her. “You’re so beautiful, Jeanie, I mean, on top of everything else. One of these days I’m going to make you marry me.”

  He slid his hand under her thigh and quick-squeezed her. “We’ll get the pope to fly on over and preside! Wonder if the State Department will give him a visa?” He winked. The mischievous wink that had helped to make him, according to the recent national poll, the second most admired man in America, after General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was waiting in the wings to challenge the Democratic candidate for president to succeed Harry Truman in two years.

  The doorman opened the door. McCarthy stepped out and held the door open for Jean. Three delegates from the American Legion were waiting excitedly for him. Joe McCarthy was, for them as for much of America, already Mr. Anti-Communist.

  21

  Factional politics

  “I swear,” Harry Bontecou said to Jean coming into the office on Monday, the day that marked the beginning of the ninth week of the Tydings investigation, “I never saw anything so freighted with politics as what’s going on.”

  “Welcome to Washington, Harry. Didn’t you know it would be like this?”

  “Jeanie: Why isn’t it this simple? Senator Joseph R. McCarthy has charged that the loyalty/security machinery of the federal government is not working. And his net goes wider: He says there are a lot of people around who don’t really want to prosecute the Cold War. Well: Can’t at least the first of these allegations be investigated?”

  “Sure.” Jeanie was sorting mail as she talked. “But it’s also this simple. At the end of this year there are congressional elections. At the end of 1952 there is a presidential election. The Democratic leadership wants to quiet things down. Joe’s not a tranquilizing type. Besides, he’s onto the major personnel scandal of our time. So what they want to do is: discredit him, keep things quiet, and win the elections.”

  Am I really th
at naive? Harry thought as he sat down at his desk. The phone rang. It was George Backer, Associated Press. He had met Harry at a cocktail party, introduced by Jean, who had whispered, “We leak some things through George. Nice guy. Also very useful.”

  “Have you seen the Indianapolis Star?”

  “No,” said Harry.

  “Get it,” George said. “Got to go.” He hung up.

  Senator Richard Russell, the august Democratic Party elder and chairman of the Armed Forces Committee, was in Paris on one of his periodic inspection visits of NATO. He was staying at Rocquencourt with NATO chief General Dwight Eisenhower. An aide handed him the cable from his office. It gave the text of the article.

  The Indianapolis Star story spoke of a leadership conference the Friday before at which the majority leader had addressed ten senior Democratic senators. Russell read on with dismay.

  The Star has learned that at that meeting Senator Lucas reported that the “Red scare” is a hot issue and the Republicans “want to run with it in 1952.” He said that the GOP wants to get back in the White House after twenty years, and in control of Congress after twenty-four years. Senator Lucas is reported as having said, “We got to take the whole McCarthy chapter and turn it around. Show the public there never was any reason for a Red scare.” Senator Lucas was not available to a reporter from the Star.

  The Star’s story was bylined by Washington reporter Sam Tilburn. The cable quoted the Star’s accompanying editorial. It was entitled, “Dems Prepared to Vaporize Red Scare.”

  Richard Russell winced on reading the first paragraph:

  Our source in Washington advises us that Majority Leader Scott Lucas has instructed the Democratic senators he appointed to investigate Senator McCarthy’s charges to come up with a finding that there never was a Red scare. Perhaps the Majority Leader will advise the Chinese people that the takeover by Mao Tse-tung last year was a hallucination. Since he is a thorough man, he should advise our military that the explosion of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union last year was really nothing more than a May Day fireworks display. And yes, the massing of the North Koreans in the last two weeks threatens nothing at all on the southern side of the frontier. We should be grateful that there is no reason to be scared by Red activity.