The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  “Do you have to say, every goddamn time, ‘your-boss-McCarthy’?”

  Willmoore looked over at his old student, only three years out on his own, so young, quick witted. His head slightly cocked, he smiled, accepting the rebuke.

  “I was saying, What does—Joe—expect to read in the Daily Worker’s denunciation of the Smith Act? ‘The Smith Act is wrong because Lenin wouldn’t have liked it and would not have passed any such act against his enemies’? Obviously the Daily Worker is going to sound like the Bill of Rights whenever it is on the subject of all those freedoms the Communists would of course eliminate if they had power. But the way McCarthy puts it, if you oppose the Smith Act you’re being managed by the Daily Worker. And so people shake their heads and say to themselves, ‘If that’s right, then maybe the Daily Worker isn’t so wrong.’ Much more of that kind of thinking and we’ve had it. He alienates a lot of the right people and all the intelligentsia except you and me, Harry.”

  “—But we do make those points,” Harry objected; still, Willmoore strode on.

  He felt it had to come up. It was one of the principal reasons he had avoided a meeting with the students.

  Roy Cohn.

  They met in January. McCarthy needed a chief counsel for the committee he would now head up, the Republicans having taken over the Senate after the November elections. Cohn, the word immediately got out, had himself masterminded a party in his honor, ostensibly given by the FBI’s Lewis Nichols. It was Harry’s first exposure to the young man who in a matter of days seemed the vortex of Joe McCarthy’s world. Senators, congressmen, journalists, made their way to McCarthy’s inner counsels often depending on Roy Cohn’s opinion of them. He anxiously assumed all the responsibilities for the committee McCarthy hadn’t specifically reserved to himself. For all that he was brilliant and quick on his feet, he showed quickly a capacity for critical misjudgment, as in his … disastrous “inspection trip” to USIA libraries abroad. Harry was loyal to his boss and stayed out of the way, but there was no way to avoid the probing of Professor Willmoore Sherrill.

  “Now tell me, who on earth is this squirt Roy Cohn, and his beautiful Greek companion, David Schine? All of a sudden the entire world learns about their travels. We read, day by day, that they have gone to Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade, Athens, Rome, Paris again, and London. The impression they mostly leave is that they’ve never read any books themselves—”

  “Roy graduated from Columbia Law School at age nineteen.”

  “So he can handle college and law school requirements. That doesn’t mean anything. I ought to know.” Willmoore had graduated from college at sixteen. “But the impression they leave—‘junketeering gumshoes,’ one London critic called them—they swoop down on overseas libraries, demand to see lists of books, refusing to tell anybody at any time what books they’re looking for. Says here,” he looked down again at his folder, “that they ‘spent seven hours in Rome commandeering the presence of the heads of every American agency in Rome,’ coming up with? Nothing. They get back to Washington, the laughingstock of the literate world, and your—McCarthy welcomes them like Lewis and Clark. I’m surprised he didn’t order a ticker-tape parade up Broadway for them. I repeat, who is this guy Cohn?”

  “He was hired just before the European trip. Protege of George Sokolsky.” Harry referred to the influential conservative, anti-Communist newspaper columnist. “Roy was on the prosecution team that nailed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Joe’s very impressed with him. Has him on as counsel to the committee.”

  “Okay. One week after Cohn and Schine come back, he—your—friend—McCarthy gives a news conference in Savannah. He says in it, according to Associated Press, that ‘several U.S. representatives and senators have known Communists on their staffs.’ So that pisses off a lot of congressmen and senators, right? Then apparently McCarthy realizes this so he simply says to the press he never, ever used the word known. Anybody believe him? Like nobody. So,” again Willmoore looked at his folder, “so they ask what Joe has to say about Bill Benton. Now Joe McCarthy had his revenge on Benton, got him defeated in Connecticut, which was super-okay by me. But the press hears from Benton that Joe should be made to give the names of these Communists who served on congressional and Senate staffs. And what does Our Joe say?”

  He read from his folder. “He says … ‘I am through paying attention to that odd little mental midget, Benton, whatever he has to say. His complete lack of intelligence makes him too unimportant to waste time on.’ ”

  Willmoore leaned back on the couch, his head almost horizontal, features frozen, as if knocked flat by a bulldozer. “You can’t say that about a guy like William Benton! You can get away with saying he’s screwy-soft on everything from public housing to the World Bank to our policy on the United Nations. But you can’t say that man—he’s a close collaborator of Robert Hutchins, he’s vice president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—you can’t say he’s a mental midget. What are sensible people, and that’s who should be on our side on the big issues, going to think? Suppose Our Joe called Einstein a mental midget—which, by the way, I think he is, every time his name shows up on the masthead of one of those peace-with-disarmament committees, even though it is putrefactive with pro-Communist history and personnel—are people going to think Einstein is dumb and McCarthy is the only person bright enough to discover this?”

  “Benton is no Einstein.”

  Willmoore stopped. He rose from the sofa. He advanced sternly on Harry. “That was truly lame, what you just said. Unbefitting a former student of mine. Obviously Benton is not Einstein. They do not have in common that they are both geniuses. They do have in common that they are, neither one of them, mental midgets. Shall we go on?”

  Harry was tired, frustrated, and hot. “What do you want me to do, Willmoore? Bat back every pitch you throw out at me? Defend everything Joe—‘my-boss-Joe’—has ever done?” He paused for just a moment. Recovered, he said quickly, “Will you give me another drink, or am I being punished for a false analogy?”

  Willmoore looked down at Harry and puffed on his cigarette. “What do you want me to do, Harry? Cut it out?”

  “Why don’t you just give me your bottom line.”

  “It is that McCarthy has now for some months been doing more damage to the anti-Communist cause than help to it.”

  “Yeah, I know, some people are saying that, Willmoore. But there’s another way of looking at it. If Joe McCarthy were crippled, how far back in the wrong direction would the other people go? Do you want to see the disappearance of an effective loyalty/security program, the collapse of organized opposition to accommodationist foreign policy—”

  “How far will the other side go with the holes Senator McCarthy has opened up for them?”

  “I get your point.” Harry drained his drink. “Now, let’s talk about other things, okay? Like, Why haven’t you been promoted to full professor? I’ve got a bunch of things on my mind, including how are you doing on your Rousseau book?”

  “I’m coming along with it, coming along.”

  Harry didn’t remind him that he had been saying that for six years. They walked out together, sometime student and teacher; companions of the mind, warm friends. Harry did not return to the subject of Joe McCarthy, and he didn’t tell Willmoore anything about his own growing reservations.

  50

  Eisenhower, in the Oval Office, is irked

  President Dwight David Eisenhower looked up from his broad Queen Anne desk in the Oval Office. He had not changed from the picture of him, so widely circulated, taken when he sat down for the first time at the presidential desk, on January 20, 1953. Presidential flag on his right, U.S. flag on his left, oil painting of George Washington behind him, his press secretary seated at his side, clipboard and secretarial pad in hand.

  President Eisenhower was a reassuring figure. A little balder than on D-Day, nine years earlier, a few more wrinkles, but nothing more
under the chin. D. D. Eisenhower, West Point, 1915, would never gain weight. “He just decided soon after we were married,” his wife, Mamie, explained to the interviewer from Life magazine one week after Ike’s election, “that he wouldn’t gain weight. That was the end of it. If he thinks he’s putting on weight, he stops eating. Some things are quite simple for Ike.”

  Handling Joe McCarthy was not a simple problem for Ike. Admirers of the general were abashed by Eisenhower’s failure, during the political campaign in the fall, to rebuff Joe McCarthy. The whole world was watching, it seemed, when the two campaigners, one running for president, the other for reelection as senator, appeared jointly in Milwaukee in 1952. How would Ike behave toward the senator who two years before had given a 45,000-word speech the tendency of which was that George Marshall was a partner in a huge conspiracy to undermine the anti-Communist world? James Hagerty, Eisenhower’s press chief, had an approach to the problem. Everyone was anticipating the meeting in Milwaukee between Eisenhower and McCarthy. What to do, how to think about, how to act in the context of, McCarthy’s famous speech about George Marshall? The answer, Hagerty held out, was: It was simply a “delirious act—”done by young Joe McCarthy without any real thought given to the charges he was making—or, rather, voicing. “Some people, General, don’t even think he ever even read it through. McCarthy spoke in the Senate chamber for a couple of hours in a monotone, then dumped the speech into the Record. And that was that.”

  Eisenhower had not been so easily put off. It was only after campaign manager and New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams deployed the language of the military that Ike bent.

  “General, it’s this simple. We have got to carry the Midwest. Joe McCarthy is God for many voters in the Midwest. They think: Here is somebody who is from our part of the world, who is really raising hell with the people in Washington who lost what in the war you set out to achieve—”

  Eisenhower had looked up sharply, his expressive face a mixture of curiosity and indignation.

  “—who lost,” Governor Adams continued, “I mean, who lost because of much of the postwar diplomacy, a war that had been brilliantly won and fought. Now there is no way you can afford to simply denounce McCarthy. Renounce your candidacy, if that’s what you want to do—you might just as well. Second worst is to appear in Wisconsin with McCarthy—there’s no way you can go to Wisconsin at all without appearing with him—he owns Wisconsin—and stand way off at one end of the stage from Joe, make it look as if he had yellow fever. Treatment of that kind would be picked up like in two seconds and every pro-McCarthy voter in the country would be furious and looking for a way to avenge Joe—”

  “So goddamnit, Adams, get to the point.”

  “My point is you have to appear side by side with him and smile at least once. And in your speech you’ve got to say something about Communists in government—”

  “I’m certainly willing to say something about that problem—”

  “Obviously not endorsing McCarthy’s specific charges, just saying it is a continuing responsibility of government to keep the Commies out, and that Truman has done a lousy job, as witness his calling Hiss a red herring.”

  “I don’t want to blast the president. Bad form.”

  “You don’t have to, don’t even have to mention him. I’ll get up a draft that handles the Truman and the McCarthy problems in the way I think it’s got to be done. … General, you know everything there is to know about fighting wars. This is a war. In the last war you made common cause with Stalin. You have to make common cause with McCarthy. At least until you get in.”

  “Jim, I remember what you and Adams told me in Wisconsin,” the president said, tapping his pencil on the desk. “I did what you thought was right. Things are different now. That son of a bitch is in my hair, what’s left of it, every day. I was never jealous of Arthur” (the reference was to Eisenhower’s younger brother) “until last week. Arthur said McCarthy was the ‘single most dangerous menace to America.’ Have I got that right?”

  “Yes, Mr. President. And he said McCarthy reminded him of Adolf Hitler.”

  “Now that was wrong of Arthur. I called, told him so. Shouldn’t play around with names like Hitler. Nobody reminds me of Hitler except Hitler. But except for that—I mean, who in the name of God does McCarthy think he is? He was exchanging—’declarations!’—with Clement Attlee last month. I don’t like Attlee much, Churchill doesn’t either, but he was prime minister and he heads up the opposition, and it isn’t McCarthy’s job to issue, what does the Vatican call them, encyclucals telling people what to do. He’s done it to the Brits on their China trade. Sometimes I think he owns the Greek merchant fleet, the way he talks about it, tells them what to do—so what do we do about this one? McCarthy says, ‘The administration has a lot to learn about the loyalty program.’ ”

  President Eisenhower sat rigid in his chair. He mused, his pencil tapping on the desk. He spoke deliberately, as if postponing a D-Day landing.

  “We’ll say nothing. One more time we’ll say nothing. One more time.”

  51

  McCarthy reviews the hidden memorandum

  Late in the afternoon, Joe was shaving. “You’ve got to do something about that late-afternoon shadow,” Jeanie had said on the second day of their honeymoon in Spanish Cay. She had made this complaint before. Perhaps ten times. But now that they were married perhaps it would be different. The other side profiteered from his rapid hair growth. “Herblock has you looking as if you hadn’t shaved for three days—”

  “Herblock is not going to clean me up if I shave five times a day.” For the Washington Post cartoonist Herblock, the pursuit of McCarthy was a holy and comprehensive cause.

  “Still, Joe. You’re going to have to try.”

  He agreed to try to remember. He had agreed before to try to remember.

  Now he was living with Jean at her mother’s house, renting from Mrs. Kerr the second-floor apartment on Third Street. McCarthy had a speech to give that night. He would elaborate his charges that the Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth was a mare’s nest of loyalty risks.

  Roy Cohn had tracked McCarthy down at Spanish Cay in the Bahamas, even though Joe’s instructions were that he was not to be disturbed “unless Alger Hiss assassinates the pope.” But Cohn was not easily deterred. Reaching McCarthy over shortwave radio in the Bahamas, Roy Cohn told him he had lined up two Signal Corps officers at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, who were willing to give testimony on loyalty risks in their division. “Very hot stuff, Joe. Serious, heavy stuff. You got to get back here. Apologies to Jeanie.”

  Jeanie was mad as hell. “Roy can’t stand to have you anywhere that doesn’t give him access to you every ten minutes.” But McCarthy was habituated to criticism of Cohn’s habits. He didn’t want to fight with Jeanie on this point, but it all added up to one more reason for him to make a big impression about the Signal Corps in his talk to the veterans convention.

  The Republicans’ sweep in 1952 gave them both houses. That meant, applying the rules of seniority, that Joe McCarthy, beginning his second term, would be handed a committee to head. He became the chairman of the Government Operations Subcommittee. This assignment gave him a broad license. The subcommittee could probe any—operation of government that caught its interest. And arrangements in the Senate were conventional: Whatever caught the interest of the chairman caught the interest of the committee. Senator McCarthy, exercising a power of subpoena, could now bring before his committee very nearly any government official he wished to hear from. There was immediate speculation on whom he would name as chief counsel.

  In January, McCarthy gave the name of Roy Cohn, the candidate of George Sokolsky.

  Sokolsky was a learned, imperious, dogged newspaper columnist sponsored by the Hearst chain. Early on he had championed McCarthy, adopted his causes, and ventilated, from time to time, opinions on positions and issues that closely corresponded with the views of McCarthy. Sokolsky was highly independent, something of a China sch
olar, and tended to condescend intellectually to McCarthy. His recommendations were never made obsequiously: George Sokolsky tended to give the impression that anyone he counseled, he was befriending. Moreover, Roy Cohn was about to lose his job. Cohn was a Democrat and as such was named an assistant U.S. attorney in New York City. But with the Republican sweep, he would have to yield his office to a Republican. He was out of a job.

  Roy Cohn was a dazzling twenty-five-year-old. He had graduated from law school at nineteen, as Harry had reminded Professor Sherrill, two years too soon to be permitted to practice. “Fifteen minutes after he became twenty-one,” one observer on the scene remarked, “Roy went from clerk-typist to assistant U.S. attorney. He managed to get everybody important to his swearing-in this side of the chief justice.” His modus operandi, everyone silently agreed, was this: He knew everybody, he passed along and occasionally husbanded secrets, and he did favors for everyone, in part by blocking further ventilation of rumors he had himself promulgated. (“What I told you about Ruth, Nathan, isn’t to go any further. I’ve told her that you know but that the secret will die with you and me.”)

  During a busy three years as assistant U.S. attorney, Roy Cohn had helped to prosecute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted in 1951, electrocuted in 1953, for conspiring to send atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Joe McCarthy never mentioned the Rosenbergs, even when he was introducing Roy at a banquet or fund-raiser. “How come?” Jeanie was asked by Bazy Tankersley. Jeanie led her to the corner of the room and explained. Six years before, soon after his first election to the Senate in 1946, McCarthy had challenged the nomination of Anna Rosenberg as assistant secretary of defense. Research established that the derogatory information by which McCarthy (and others) had been influenced came from the file of Anna Rosenberg, indeed—but an entirely different Anna Rosenberg. But in the interval, anti-Semites insinuated their conventional insinuations (anyone named Anna Rosenberg was, well, suspicious), whereupon the conventional anti-anti-Semitic press went into its own high gear. A rumor was born, which was that Joe McCarthy was motivated to go after her by anti-Semitism. No friend of Joe McCarthy, as law student, judge, Marine officer, or senatorial candidate, had remarked any trace of anti-Semitism. But McCarthy was keenly anxious to discourage any talk or charges on the subject. Sokolsky was plainspoken on the question: “It won’t hurt you to have a Jewish lawyer at your side on the committee.”