The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  “Are you talking about ‘The Underestimation of Ike’?”

  Harry turned, a broad smile on his face. “I say, Alex. You do get around. An important piece. Kempton takes a half dozen political crises, large and small, and shows how Ike handled them without ever giving off the sense that he was manipulating anybody. Did you ever run into him?”

  “Kempton?”

  “No, Ike.”

  “Never did. Did you, Harry?”

  “Oh, no. Not even close. If I had, it would have been at a large party for the senators and their principal aides. After the army dust-up—we’ll take you through that—McCarthy was dropped even from the official White House invitation list. Not even invited to the annual party for senators—No Joe.” He paused. “I like that phrase: No Joe.”

  “No, no, Ho Chin Joe.” Alex’s face brightened with the frolic. And then snapped back to normal, a trace of wistfulness there. “Ixnay. That doesn’t quite work. Does it?”

  “No. If you’re searching for the matrix, it was Ho, Ho/Ho Chi Minh—”

  Alex roared in like a trained chorister, “Is bound to win.”

  “Speaking of Ike, Alex, you are of course aware of the John Birch Society?”

  “Yes. The group founded in 1959 by Mr. Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer. It lives in the memory that Mr. Welch privately concluded that Eisenhower was an agent of the Communist Party!”

  “Yes. The John Birch Society, which he vigorously organized and which swelled to a couple of hundred thousand members in the early sixties, was founded on the thesis that critical public servants were agents of Communism. Although the general literature of the society didn’t go so far, a discreetly circulated book by founder Welch arrived at exactly that conclusion, that Ike was a secret Communist. Joe was dead two years before the John Birch Society was founded. But in a way, McCarthy was the first Bircher.”

  “Defined as what?”

  “As someone who believes that subjective intentions can be deduced from objective effects. McCarthy flirted with the notion that George Marshall was a Communist—because he had been ambassador to China and secretary of state when the Nationalists lost China to the Communists, and principal military adviser to Roosevelt and Truman when the Communists got eastern Europe. Joe wouldn’t have formulated it that way, but his reflexes were what a few years later people were calling ‘Birchite.’ ”

  Alex raised his hand; Harry should stop talking for one minute while Alex wrote down his notes.

  After dinner that night they put their work aside and played chess. Harry showed his father some moves he had been taught at Camp Plattling by Erik Chadinoff.

  “Those must have been czarist chess moves. I don’t remember even running into them. Maybe the inventor was off in Gulag.”

  Alex could do that now, a levity in which Gulag figured. For many years, he couldn’t; wouldn’t. Harry had been a little that way on the subject of McCarthy. He would never raise his name, but from time to time others did, speaking directly to him or, more often, obliquely when others were present. From almost as far back as Harry could remember, they would, in discussing McCarthy, take the shortcuts about him that finally took over altogether. But Harry would never interpose. He left the subject alone. He was feeling very good about the work he was doing, and the company he was keeping.

  57

  FEBRUARY 1954

  The Army-McCarthy hearings—an overture

  John Adams, counselor to the Department of the Army, reported, of course, to the secretary of the army. But Secretary Stevens was not decisive in thought or deed, and his public personality was so bland and tentative that no threat that came from his lips seemed quite credible. Accordingly, the call from the White House came in not to the secretary, but to John Adams, who knew instantly that he was dealing with the First Team. Sherman Adams of the White House on the phone, backed by Charles Wilson, secretary of defense, backed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of the United States.

  The call had come in that afternoon from Sherman Adams, their first contact. (“We have no alternative than to call ourselves by our first names. So—John—it’s Sherman here.”) As ever, Sherman barked out what it was he wished done, which was the way Sherman Adams governed Eisenhower’s White House. “I need to speak to you. Not at the White House, not at the Pentagon. I’ll meet you at the Madison Hotel dining room at twelve-thirty tomorrow. They have a little out-of-the way room I use. Tell the maitre d’ it’s—Sherman! who made the reservations.” That quick play on first names was as jocular as Governor Sherman Adams ever got.

  John Adams was of course prompt, but even so, the rugged Sherman Adams, with his white hair and weather-beaten face, was sitting there waiting for him. The Madison was new and formal, the waiters wearing black ties, the decorations and flowers serving to remind the patrons that they were not eating at the Hilton. He had ordered iced teas for both, without asking John his preferences. They picked out their lunch, and, with the waiter out of the room, Sherman came quickly to the point:

  “The president has had it with McCarthy. He told us to come up with two plans. One plan is: Make peace with McCarthy but get the public loyalty hearings out of the way, beginning right away with the army hearings. The second—if that doesn’t work—is make war and kill him.”

  Sherman Adams outlined the plan. He had put it together with Bernard Shanley and Henry Cabot Lodge. Lodge had lost his Senate seat to John F. Kennedy and was now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but he served simultaneously as assistant to the president. They had come up with: a proposal. If McCarthy would agree to hold all future hearings in executive, i.e., closed session, the army would agree (they hadn’t yet consulted with army secretary Robert Stevens, but that was a formality) to permit designated witnesses to give testimony, on the understanding that executive action would follow, but not publicly, and not subject to legislative review.

  “What’s the alternative?”

  “Here’s where you come in. Stevens mentioned over the phone a couple of weeks ago that Roy Cohn was driving the army crazy with his demands for special treatment for his boyfriend, David Schine. I assume that’s true, is it?”

  “Is it true? Lord Almighty, I must have had twenty calls from him myself. He wants, for David Schine, a) weekend passes—so that twenty-six-year-old Schine can ‘give critical help with the research’ for Senator McCarthy. He wants b) for Schine to be transferred from Fort Dix to Fort McNair, or some other camp within walking distance of Roy Cohn in Washington; and c) he wants Schine to be commissioned, to spare him any further ignominy as a mere private in the army of the United States.”

  “Who the hell is David Schine, anyway?”

  “He is the son of a hotel magnate. His father controls a chain, the Schine Hotels, Inc. Schine graduated from Harvard and was quickly given a sinecure by his dad. He wrote a six-page pamphlet on the meaning of Communism, which his proud dad distributed to every one of his hotel rooms.”

  “Was it any good?”

  “Superficial stuff. But either it attracted Cohn or else the author of it attracted Cohn; they came to be friends, and Cohn foisted David onto McCarthy’s staff as an unpaid researcher. The headlines came when they went off on the grand European tour to save European readers from the temptation of reading the wrong books. When he got back, I guess his draft board decided enough was enough. I never got around to finding out how he got the deferrals that kept him out until age twenty-six.”

  “Why didn’t Stevens put his foot down?”

  “Well,” John Adams let himself say about his boss, “you know Bob. But in a way he did put an end to it. A week or so ago he told me that any call coming in from Roy Cohn had to submit to a routine. The person getting the call, in his office or my office—or any office, though most of the calls come in to Bob and me—would not put him through until after Cohn was politely asked: ‘Sir, is this call on the subject of David Schine? If so, my instructions are to say the secretary (or Mr. Adams, or whoever) isn’t available.
’ ”

  “Did it work?”

  “Well, if you don’t get through, you don’t get through; so Roy hasn’t talked to either of us since then. But the most important thing Stevens did was six weeks ago. He instructed his secretary and my secretary to listen in on conversations with Cohn and make notes of what he said and what he asked for.”

  On hearing this, Sherman Adams took a gleeful gulp from his iced tea. “That dumb little bugger, he thinks he’s so bright: He didn’t watch his language over the phone? Never suspected somebody might be listening in?”

  “Suspected? If he had suspected, would he have said, which he did say—to me—that if Schine is sent overseas, he promised to ‘wreck the army’?”

  Sherman leaned back in his chair. His lips parted. A grin of satisfaction. “This is good stuff. Very good stuff. So.” He moved his empty plate away. “We’ll try the Peace Plan first. I’ll communicate it to Bob Stevens. He can take it to McCarthy. McCarthy’ll say no, I believe. He’s not so much interested in security at Monmouth as he is in getting publicity for himself.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Sherman. I’ve heard him talk about pro-Communist infiltration when there wasn’t anybody around. And Joe McCarthy is on record as saying that publicity is necessary to fuel genuine reform, and he has a point there.” He sipped his tea; he hated tea. “Though I agree with you; I doubt he’ll buy the Peace Plan.”

  The next day, McCarthy made it absolutely clear to Secretary Stevens.

  “The answer to your proposal, Bob, is no. This is a government of the people for the people.”

  The day after that, John Adams began putting together a comprehensive Roy Cohn-Army file, a record of telephone calls, Roy Cohn to officials of the Department of the Army. Subject: Private David Schine. Dates: mid-July 1953 to February 1954.

  A week later, on March 11, McCarthy told Jeanie he sensed something was up. Mary Haskell had told him Allan Sims of the New York Times had called to ask whether it would be possible to be put through to Senator McCarthy the following morning for comments on an important matter. “He wouldn’t tell Mary what the upcoming story is all about.”

  Roy Cohn too sensed that something was up. Passing him in the Senate corridor, committee member Senator Symington had said, in mysterious tones, “Roy, you’d better prepare for the cross fire.”

  The cross fire he was talking about was very evident the next day, coast to coast. The headline on the front page of the New York Times, stretched over four columns, read, “ARMY CHARGES MCCARTHY AND COHN/THREATENED IT IN TRYING TO OBTAIN/PREFERRED TREATMENT FOR SCHINE.” Every daily paper in the country carried the story, with equivalent display.

  Roy Cohn was on Meet the Press the following Sunday and on the cover of Time magazine the following week. There was the sense that D-Day was coming.

  Joe McCarthy was in New York the day the story broke. In his absence, Dirksen called together the members of the Government Operations Committee. He asked for a secret ballot on the question of whether Roy Cohn should be discharged as chief counsel. The vote was 5-1 in favor of dismissal.

  “But I have one qualification,” Senator Potter spoke up. “Cohn should be asked to resign. Otherwise it looks like star-chamber procedure. And I think we should go to Joe and just tell him how we feel about it, instead of voting behind his back.”

  When McCarthy got in from New York, Frank Carr, executive director of the subcommittee, was waiting for him. Carr, age thirty-seven, like Don Surine, had served in the FBI as an agent. He accompanied McCarthy to his desk chair, closed the door to the office, and communicated to him the action of the committee in his absence.

  “How’d he take it?” Jean, seated at her desk at the far end of the office, pulled Frank to one side when, ten minutes later, he emerged from Joe’s office.

  “He didn’t just say, No! like right away. He sat there and looked out of the window. Jean, Joe’s up against it, and he knows he is.”

  “What did he say?” Jean asked.

  “He said he’d go with it—”Jean grabbed Frank Carr’s sleeve, a breath of hope on her face—”on one condition. He said he’d go along with it provided Roy agreed. He said he wouldn’t pull the rug out from under Roy, not ever. I asked him, ‘Do you want me to tell Roy? Get his yes or no?’ Joe thought a bit and said, ‘Maybe that’s a good idea. If he heard it from me, he might think I was putting him under pressure. And Frank—you listening, Frank? We’re not going to pressure Roy.’ I said to him—I’m telling you exactly the words I used, Jean, like two minutes ago—I said, ‘Joe, I knew Roy was anxious about Schine, but thirty-seven calls to the army about him—I mean, we can’t blame the majority on the committee for getting … for being embarrassed—’ He said, ‘That’s another reason I’m not anxious to see Roy right away. I’d have to chew him out, and I don’t want to.’ ”

  Roy Cohn’s version of the events was deft, and effective with Joe McCarthy. What is going on, Cohn said, is that the army people are “holding Schine hostage.” Unless McCarthy pulled back from his investigation of the army, they’d see to it that Schine was “in effect a prisoner” at Fort Dix.

  Quickly, McCarthy’s fighting instincts were revived. He countered the army department’s blast with the charge, at an impromptu press conference—these could be had almost at any time of day, almost anywhere: McCarthy always had press waiting for him—that Cohn had simply attempted to protect Schine, who had been a “volunteer” assistant to the McCarthy committee before being drafted, from abuse by the army. McCarthy charged further that army counsel John Adams, seeking to take the heat off the army, had allegedly suggested to Cohn that the McCarthy committee investigate, instead, the air force or the navy. “Because,” Adams had said, there was “plenty of dirt there.” But there were no written transcripts in Senator McCarthy’s office, or Roy Cohn’s, of any such conversations.

  “What we mustn’t do,” Cohn urged, “is ease up. We’ve got to give them a real taste of the trouble they get into by simply … ignoring the loyalty/security question.”

  McCarthy nodded. “Let’s get back to work. And I’ll tell Sanctimonious Stu—”Joe had used that before about Senator Symington, and trotted it out again with some relish—“that if they want to fire you they’ll have to drumroll you out in a recorded committee vote with me in opposition.”

  Dirksen and Symington conferred by telephone. “I couldn’t go with that, Stu, that would really violate Senate tradition, firing Roy behind the chairman’s back.”

  “Well, if you can’t, Ev, then the idea of getting rid of Cohn is out. We’d better batten down the hatches. Meanwhile, Joe’s got General Zwicker—he’s the Monmouth general who gave us the alert in September—coming down to testify again tomorrow. That’s one more committee meeting I’m not going to attend.”

  “I’ll skip it myself,” Dirksen said.

  58

  Viewing Army-McCarthy on television

  Back in Manhattan, for what seemed the first time in years and years, Harry found it possible to notice such a thing as the coming of spring. He walked, coatless and without any sense of irretrievable time lost in doing so, from lunch at Columbia with Willmoore Sherrill, south to his newly rented apartment on Eighty-third Street, a few blocks from his mother. In the two months since leaving Washington, he considered going in the fall to law school, to which he didn’t incline but thought prudent. The royalties—from Jesse Bontecou’s book—were declining. He checked at the library and took in the publishers’ notices of forthcoming books. He winced. Everybody seemed to be coming out with new and competitive poetry anthologies. He was glad to have saved a few dollars while working in Washington. Graduate school was another possibility for the fall. His GI Bill was not entirely consumed. He spoke to Sherrill about the two alternatives. “But you know something, Harry,” the associate professor said to him one night after they had attended a Columbia Political Union debate on whether Red China should be seated in the UN, “I’m not sure you’ve got the right temperament f
or sedentary scholarship. Your blood runs pretty hot, you know that, kid?—”

  “Kid! Cut it out, Willmoore. I’m twenty-seven years old. I fought and was wounded and was promoted and was decorated in a world war. I was editor in chief of the student newspaper, junior Phi Beta Kappa, and I was three years at the right hand—make that the left hand—of the most conspicuous senator in Washington” (he wondered whether he should add to his accomplishments, “And I almost married my sister”) “—so stop this ‘kid’ stuff. Just because you graduated from college at sixteen doesn’t make everybody else a ‘kid.’ ”

  Sherrill loved such talk. But then, with the verbal anfractuosities he was so famous for, he circled the subject, Was Harry right for graduate school? “Law school, sure. You get a chance to discharge those passions of yours, though not always in behalf of people, or of causes, you are passionately attracted to. But graduate school? I’ve spent, I’d say—”Sherrill always exaggerated—“maybe ten years of my life thinking about Rousseau. I don’t think you’d want to do that.”

  “What is there left to discover in Rousseau, after your book on him?”

  Willmoore devoured such intimacies. “Are you a writer, Harry? I can’t tell yet. The stuff you did for Our Joe had to be a little formulaic; necessarily. By the way, Harry, did you invent the phrase ‘I have in my hand a photostatic copy of’? If so, I think you overdid it. You might have altered it a bit, maybe to ‘I have in my hand the original of … ’ Have you made a date with Bill Huie?” Sherrill was talking about William Bradford Huie, editor and publisher of the American Mercury, a combative and zesty monthly, anti-Communist, a little racy, occasionally philosophical. Harry had thought to apply to work there, if only until the fall term.

  “Yes, actually. Next Tuesday. These days I find I’m in no particular hurry. But there is one thing I’m going to do, no matter what.”