The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  —Mr. Lattimore, my information is that when Mr. Currie went away for a period of time he would ask you to take care of his mail at the White House. That question was raised during the Tydings investigation. You have most vehemently denied this. But I have seen a letter, I have a copy here, written by you to Mr. E. C. Carter of the Institute of Pacific Relations. The date on that letter is July 15, 1942. The first paragraph of it reads, “Dear Carter: Currie asked me to take care of his correspondence while he is away and in view of your telegram of today, I think I had better tell you that he has gone to China on a special trip. This news is absolutely confidential until released in the press.”

  —Well, er, I have to admit my memory lapsed on that particular point, Mr. Spivak—I think I was doing Mr. Currie merely a personal clerical favor—

  •Senator Tydings was absolutely silent. His wife watched him. Even his guests playing dominoes stopped, turning their attention to the little man with glasses asking all those questions and the other man with the little mustache, sitting opposite, answering them.

  —Mr. Lattimore, the reason Senator McCarthy has leveled his accusations is of course that he charges you with being a Communist—No no, I’m not asserting this, Professor Lattimore. I’m not asserting that you are or have been a Communist. I’m asking you questions. And of course the question most people have been asking about you is: Are you, or were you, pulling an oar for the Communists, in the Soviet Union and in China? I have here one of your books, Solution in Asia—

  •“That’s my book!” Harry said excitedly. “The book I told you about—”

  “Quiet, Harry!” Joe stopped him. “Listen.”

  —The book carries—here, on the jacket—a blurb. A brief account of what’s in the book. My information is that such accounts are provided by the book publishers but that their content is always okayed by the author. Now this blurb reads, “He—”that’s you, the author—”shows that all the Asiatic people are more interested in actual democratic practices such as the ones they can see in action across the Russian border, than they are in the fine theories of Anglo-Saxon democracies which come coupled with ruthless imperialism. … He—”that’s you, Mr. Lattimore—”inclines to support American newspapermen who report that the only real democracy in China is found in Communist areas.”

  •Dean Acheson stood up, walked to the set, and turned it off. There was silence. One counselor said, “Don’t you want to hear what Lattimore says?”

  “No,” Acheson said. “Bloody fool. And he has gready strengthened the hand of that terrible … man. Let’s get back to the subject of Korea. We must continue our efforts, gentlemen, and I am sure they will be successful, to prevent any military action there.”

  •Ed Reidy’s phone rang. “Gee … whiz! Sam. That was human slaughter. Do you figure Lattimore bailed out at all in those last ten minutes?”

  “He did as much as you can do, Ed, with those half dozen arrows sticking out of his chest.”

  “What will the Tydings people do?”

  “They’ve got a problem. But they can’t drop Lattimore. They’ll have to try to smother the whole thing with academic tributes and testimonials and hate-Joe-McCarthy talk. There’s no way they can just hand Lattimore over to Joe McCarthy.”

  “Sam, have you dug into Lattimore’s articles and books, especially in the last year or so?”

  “I’ve poked about. What’re you especially interested in, Ed?”

  “I’m wondering whether he’s made recommendations on the Korean scene. It looks real bad over there. Might be good if you poked into the Readers Guide or some of the professional journals.”

  “Will do, Ed.”

  At Mrs. Kerr’s house the telephone rang. A few minutes later it rang again. The press had tracked down Joe McCarthy.

  Jean came in from the kitchen with a bottle of champagne.

  30

  JUNE 25, 1950

  The North Koreans invade the South

  At five A.M. Korean time, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean Army invaded South Korea. Two hours later, at 5:45 P.M., New York time, the United Nations Security Council met, petitioned to do so by President Truman’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ernest A. Gross. By a stroke of luck for the U.S., Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik was boycotting the Security Council that week in protest against the Nationalist Chinese occupying the China seat—it belonged, the Soviets insisted, to mainland China, which Mao Tse-tung had conquered in the preceding year. When Secretary General Trygve Lie, after giving an up-to-the-minute report on the military crisis in Korea, initiated his resolution, Ambassador Malik was not within reach and could not therefore exercise the veto the United Nations Constitution had awarded to Russia, France, and England, along with the United States. The delegates endorsed the secretary’s cease-and-desist resolution against the North Korean Communists and in successive sessions voted a) to resist the invasion by military means, and b) to request all members of the United Nations to assist in the military effort.

  That was on Monday and Tuesday.

  On Wednesday, Senator Joe McCarthy issued a statement to the press. He charged that the terrible, disastrous war—Seoul, South Korea’s capital city, had fallen to the Communist invaders on day four—was the result of inept diplomacy by “two men, a secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and a former secretary of state and special emissary, General George Marshall.”

  These men, “informed and perhaps guided by” the Institute of Pacific Relations, which “for a long time has been a Communist-directed operation,” failed to support the Nationalists in China, “losing that great subcontinent to the Communists in October.” And now, “less than a half year later,” the Communists in North Korea—”a lethal finger of Joseph Stalin—have pitched the world into war, one more time, a mere five years since our great struggle of 1945.”

  The press everywhere featured Senator McCarthy’s comprehensive indictment of the Truman administration’s foreign policy. Telegrams poured into his office beyond any capacity of Mary Haskell to handle them—she had to enlist the help of her retired brother and his wife to cope with more than five thousand messages. McCarthy instructed Harry to call the administrative assistant of Senator Tydings to request one week’s postponement in the Tydings hearings until the Korean crisis could be assimilated; he pointed out that a moratorium would give individual senators the time to be briefed and to arrive at whatever recommendations they wished publicly, or indeed privately, to urge on President Truman.

  Senator McCarthy now found photographers and reporters stationed during all business hours outside his office. Their assignment: to cover every public movement of the senator—the whole country seemed now to want to follow, hour by hour, Joe McCarthy.

  Throughout the barrage of questions regarding his criticism of the Truman administration, nobody brought up the name Forrest Davis, and McCarthy kept his secret to himself.

  The meeting with Davis had been three weeks earlier.

  They all knew Forrest Davis, a talented and scholarly journalist associated for many years with the Saturday Evening Post, now coeditor of the conservative fortnightly The Freeman. Davis was in his late sixties. He was balding and wore what one fellow journalist described as “a little sprig on his chin.” He was happy and relaxed at the cocktail party given, that Saturday evening early in June, by Frank Hanighen. Hanighen was editor and publisher of Human Events, a weekly conservative newsletter-essay, four pages of political briefs by Hanighen followed by one four-page essay, usually written by educator Felix Morley, alternating with French essayist and philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel.

  Forrest was much at ease in the company of fellow conservatives. The headliner at that party was of course Joe McCarthy, who arrived accompanied by his young aide, Harry Bontecou. Ralph de Toledano and Karl Hess were there, the little conservative enclave in Newsweek magazine. Henry Regnery, the publisher of conservative books, modern, and classical, based in Chicago, chatted and nibbled on a cheese cracker; he was a patron of Frank Han
ighen’s Human Events. Regnery had brought along young Bill Buckley, freshly graduated from Yale, whose projected book on the ideological vectors at his alma mater Regnery had agreed to look at. C. Dickerman Williams, chief counsel for the Commerce Department, had been a law clerk in 1925 for Chief Justice William Howard Taft. He was discussing the uses of the Fifth Amendment, on which he was an authority, with Ben Mandel, former Communist official—it was he who had written out the Communist Party card for applicant Whittaker Chambers, then twenty-four years old, in 1925. Mandel was now a researcher for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. And there was Freda Utley, the British journalist, a naturalized American, author of an expose (The China Story) on the loss of China, published by Regnery. She was talkative, affectionate, a little deaf. She had a lit cigarette almost always, often between her lips, even when she spoke.

  Forrest Davis was enjoying his fourth vodka and tonic. He was a warm friend of anyone he liked and could be suicidally generous when inflamed by wine with a love of the world, which was much of the time.

  Davis was also in arrears to Putnam’s, his publisher. Putnam’s, approving his outline, had advanced Davis three thousand dollars to write a book-length, critical account of the career of George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff during the Second World War, special presidential delegate to China, and secretary of state for two years beginning in January 1947, during which time he helped to launch the Marshall Plan. That important initiative called for immediate and abundant economic aid to western Europe to help it revive after the world war.

  Working on his Marshall biography in the summer and fall of 1949, Davis ran out of time (he was several months behind on delivery date) and money. He was desperate and thought to gain a little leeway by enticing Doubleday to take an interest in the book. He approached an acquisitions editor, sending him an outline of his proposed book. He did this without consulting his agent, let alone Putnam’s. He asked for, and got, five thousand dollars. He intended to repay Putnam’s forthwith its three-thousand-dollar sum, but the press of immediate debt caused him to defer this. Still, he was confident that—his book completed—the royalties from sales would earn him more than enough to repay Putnam’s advance.

  McCarthy, drink in hand, approached Davis in a corner of the noisy room. They greeted each other and Davis winked, mentioning that he had seen Joe in the clutches of Freda Utley during the past fifteen minutes.

  “Yes,” Joe said, brushing off his jacket flamboyantly, “Freda breasted me—”he moved his own chest forward in near-body contact with Forrest, imitating Utley’s intimate aggressions when struggling through her deafness to hear cocktail chatter. “And she managed to spill her cigarette ashes down my coat.”

  Joe chuckled, patting the lapels of the jacket, then said, “But who can get mad at Freda? After what she’s been through.”

  As a young woman in England, Freda Utley had joined the Communist Party. She traveled to Moscow, met and married Arcadi Jacovelevitch Berdichevsky, a young Soviet official, and bore him a son, Jon. One night in 1933, at three in the morning, came one of those legendary knocks on the door of their apartment. Arcadi opened the door to two men in civilian clothes. They told him he was wanted “for a few hours” to give vital information.

  From that moment on, Freda never heard from him or of him again. She waged a five-year international campaign, persuading illustrious pro-Soviet British intellectuals to participate in her effort to persuade the Kremlin to disclose where her husband was. To no avail. What came then was her renunciation of Communism and her influential book, The Dream We Lost. She was now an icon in the antiCommunist movement.

  Their host, Hanighen—orderly, finicky, acerbic—had joined McCarthy and Davis in their reclusive corner. He advised Joe, with a straight face, that there was one other version of what happened in Moscow that night in 1933, namely that her husband had been relieved when the knock came, sparing him more time with Freda. McCarthy laughed heartily. He and Davis reached out to the waiter for replenishment of their drinks. Hanighen was called away by another guest.

  Davis suddenly said, “Joe, follow me, just a minute, into the next room.”

  They took their drinks into Frank Hanighen’s study and sat at a card table. McCarthy stretched out his legs. Davis leaned over to him.

  “Joe, I think the fight you’re engaged in is the most important fight of the postwar years.”

  “Well, yeah, Forrest. I know it’s important, but glad to hear from you you think the same, though I’ve known you did.”

  “Well,” Davis’s eyes were brimming with solicitude and affection, “I want to make what I think will be an important contribution to your fight. I want to give you my story on George Marshall.”

  “I know you’ve been working on a book, Forrest. But what are you suggesting, a speech based on your material?”

  Davis drew himself back. He looked now, with his goatee raised slightly, his eyes drawn down, his hands raised about his waist, like a Chinese emperor bequeathing a whole province to one of his sons. “I propose to give you the whole thing. The entire manuscript. As if you or your staff had written it. It is dynamite, Joe, an explanation of the person primarily responsible for our diplomatic problems, from Yalta to the present.”

  At eleven the following night the telephone rang in Harry’s apartment. “Joe here, Harry. I want you to come over to my place right away.”

  “You okay, Joe?”

  “I’m okay. But I got something I want you to read. Something vital. You’re young, it’s early, not even midnight.”

  Harry, at twenty-three, was indeed young, he reflected as he pulled on his pants, though he needed more sleep than McCarthy, whose legendary indifference to sleep his staff could admire, even if they did not have the same stamina.

  He found Joe excited. “This tells it all. Marshall kept Roosevelt ignorant of critical intelligence reports at Yalta. Kept the generals’ military advice away from FDR. He opened the critical pass to the Chinese Communists so they could make contact with the Russians.” Joe was now consulting his notes. “He couldn’t ‘remember’ where he was on Pearl Harbor. Couldn’t remember—chief of staff, on the day of the worst military disaster in history! Went to China and in effect starved Chiang Kai-shek to death, making the Communist victory possible.”

  “Are you saying, Joe, Forrest thinks Marshall’s a Communist?”

  “He never says that. But he says he is responsible for our collapse in the Pacific theater, with who knows what’s ahead for us in Korea.”

  “You want me to read it now?” Harry looked down at the bulky speech folder. “Gee. This thing must be fifty, sixty thousand words.”

  “I know. I spent all afternoon with it. I thought I’d use it as a speech, schedule it for day after tomorrow. But I wanted you to look at it.”

  “Sure. But, Joe, what’s the—hurry?”

  “I think you’ll know what’s the hurry after you’ve read it.”

  “Okay. I’ll do half of it tonight, half tomorrow morning. Check with you by noon.”

  “Good man, Harry. How about a nightcap?”

  “What I’ll need is strong coffee, Joe.”

  “You won’t be sleepy after you start reading this.”

  “Good night, Joe.”

  Harry called at exactly noon. “It’s a troubling story, Joe. A real icon shatterer. But how the hell are you going to read that manuscript to the Senate? It kept me reading until three, then from eight to eleven.”

  Joe was never much interested in details. “Oh, well, I’ll read fast. You agree it’s terrific stuff?”

  “Forrest Davis is a fine writer and very scholarly. But Joe, it’s not going to be easy to pass this off as just one more speech by Joe McCarthy. It’s got references to works by Churchill, Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, Robert Sherwood, Sumner Welles, Hanson Baldwin. There are sentences in it that don’t, well, don’t sound like you.”

  “Everybody knows busy senators get help with their speeches.”

&nbs
p; “I know. But senators, try to sound … authentic. There are some sentences here that … ” Harry turned to the manuscript. “Listen:

  “ ‘I am reminded of a wise and axiomatic utterance in this connection by the great Swedish chancellor Oxenstiern, to his son departing on the tour of Europe. He said: “Go forth my son and see with what folly the affairs of mankind are governed.”‘ I mean, Joe, that’s just not going to sound like something cooked up in the office—”

  “Even with a Phi Bete assistant like you?”

  “Even with a Phi Beta Kappa assistant. This sounds like a dissertation.”

  “Harry?—”Harry knew what was coming: McCarthy had made up his mind. When that happened—the mind was made up.

  “Harry, I’ve decided to give it as a speech. Now, is there anything in particular you want to tell me about it?”

  “Yes. As it stands, there isn’t one sentence in the book that says that General Marshall is a Communist sympathizer or agent. That’s got to be preserved. Don’t let anybody push you across that threshold, into saying Marshall is a Commie.”

  “Right, right. Well, get the manuscript here real fast, first thing after lunch. We’ll need the whole thing retyped. I’ve already warned Mary. She’s lining up a couple of extra hands.”

  For the next two days, the office was chaos. McCarthy wrote a letter to every member of Congress to advise that he was going to review at some length the whole Marshall record. The press was cued, and when he took the rostrum on June 14 the galleries were packed. Jean Kerr and Don Surine and Harry sat on a couch at the rear of the chamber. McCarthy began by acknowledging the heroic endeavors of his staff. “I believe most of them are in the gallery today. I salute them; they worked eighteen, nineteen, and twenty hours a day in getting the documents together.”