“Watch the hearings?”
“Yes. I couldn’t any more not watch them than turn off the tube at the sixth inning of the World Series.”
“As far as I can gather, every living human being with a television set is going to watch Joseph McCarthy versus the U.S. Army, the White House, and almost everybody else. I certainly intend to. Every now and again a seminar may get in the way. But, come to think of it, those hearings will be pretty good grist for a seminar in political theory. I have an idea—”
“I do too. Let’s watch them together.”
They raised their wine glasses and made a date for April 22, ten A.M.
Editor Huie of the Mercury liked what he met and talked to, and when lunch ended offered Harry a job as associate editor and gave the terms. Harry said he’d be glad to try it out but had to say this, that he could not begin until after the Army-McCarthy hearings were concluded. “I have to watch those.”
“Fine! That could be your first Mercury article!”
“Mr. Huie, you ought to know this. I won’t be writing about Joe McCarthy.”
Huie’s expressive face fell. “In that case I’ll pay you fifty percent of the salary I offered earlier.”
He grinned, and they shook hands.
“How long do you figure they’ll last?”
Harry said the issues had become pretty complicated. “I’d guess they might last as long as two weeks.”
Over one hundred reporters crowded into room 500 on the third floor of the Senate building. The four hundred seats in the observers’ gallery were covetously occupied.
Grave thought had been given by Chairman Karl Mundt and his counselors to rules and arrangements. On the first day, McCarthy, Cohn, and Surine would occupy the television-oriented twenty-six-foot-long mahogany table. The second table, opposite, put its users’ backs to the three stationary cameras. But on odd days they alternated, frontal television exposure being given to the adversaries: Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and counsel Joseph Welch. The subcommittee’s counsel, tall, rangy Tennessean Ray Jenkins, was stationed (immovably) on the right, with his table and the witness stand.
The seating in the comfortable Fellows’ suite of Professor Sherrill was less formal. Willmoore sat at one end of a large green felt sofa, occasionally lifting his legs up over its expanse. Harry sat in a deep red leather armchair to one side. The television screen was slightly adjusted to give them equal viewing rights. It had the neat look of a comfortable New England sitting room, but this suite was large enough for the two dozen students who came on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to take Professor Sherrill’s exacting and rewarding seminar, where the emphasis was always on sharp thought, sharply expressed.
Senator John McClellan, senior Democrat on the committee, was permitted to make a statement after Chairman Mundt’s introduction. He said, in apocalyptic accents, that the cross-complaints in the case—McCarthy vs. the Army—were “diametrically in conflict” and that he could see no possibility of reconciliation. “It will be an arduous and a difficult task, one that is not pleasant to contemplate, but it is a job that must be done.”
There were subsidiary issues, but only two that were critical. Did committee chairman McCarthy and Chief Counsel Cohn abuse their office by improper efforts to influence the army to give preferential treatment to Cohn’s friend and sometime committee associate David Schine? The countercharge was that Secretary Stevens had attempted to block the senator’s investigation of the army by threatening maltreatment of Schine and an exposure of Cohn’s pressures on the army. The second question: Did Senator McCarthy, in his handling of witness General Ralph Zwicker, employ impermissible language and levy unjustified threats?
The rules specified that the committee counsel, Mr. Jenkins, could take as long as he wished to question the witnesses, after which each member of the committee would have ten minutes to ask the witness whatever he wanted. After that, counsel for both sides had ten minutes with the witness. “All examinations in each case shall proceed without interruption except for objections as to materiality and relevancy,” the chairman explained.
“There’s not a chance Joe will abide by that rule,” Harry commented.
“I’m not sure he should,” Willmoore retorted. “He should have a chance to get into the act.”
Harry replied impatiently. “The rules already allow him—or Cohn—to examine the witnesses. The idea is to prevent endless interruptions—”
“Point of order!” they heard McCarthy bellow mere minutes after the hearing began. He would use the phrase throughout the day and (they would learn) throughout the hearings.
The telephone rang. It was Professor Peter Salinger of the law school, a personally friendly antagonist of Willmoore. He was calling to activate Willmoore’s commitment to appear in Salinger’s seminar to discuss classical forensic political argumentation, about which Willmoore had written in a professional journal. “On just that point, Peter, I’m here with a friend, taking in the McCarthy hearings—”
“And I’m here with my wife watching the same thing and trying to squeeze a little work during the breaks. Your hero is an obtrusive bastard.”
“He’s looking after your rights, Peter. Remind me to tell you about the Soviet Union. Or maybe I’ll save it for when I talk to your class.”
Salinger laughed. “Just wanted an okay date from you for the class.”
“Yes, sure, but answer me this, Peter, since you know a lot about parliamentary rules. If the rules exclude interruption except for ‘materiality and relevancy,’ who in a congressional situation is there to enforce the rule, only the chairman?”
“Yes, but your man McCarthy has, in this situation, great tactical opportunities, because materiality and relevance are hard to establish. It could theoretically be material to whether Cohn threatened Stevens that Cohn rooted for the navy in the Army-Navy game.”
“How would it be different in a courtroom?” he asked the professor of law.
“If a judge thought counsel was abusing his right to call a point of order, he could summon him to the bench to explain his point, rule it immaterial or irrelevant, and send him back to his wigwam. You do that a few times and counsel shuts up, because he’s found out he’s not getting a chance to make his point to the jury. The jury, this time around, is the television audience. And McCarthy, on asking for a point of order—as we have seen—can rattle on about any point he really wants to make.”
“Okay, I’ll be there, four P.M., April twenty-ninth.”
“Yes, we’d better get back to the Coliseum. Thanks, Willmoore.”
He turned to Harry. “Did I miss anything?”
“Just two more points of order by Joe.”
The witness before lunch was Major General Miles Reber. He was introduced as a thirty-five-year veteran and a winner of the Distinguished Service Medal. General Reber, the viewers learned, I had flown from Germany to testify about the efforts of McCarthy and Cohn to obtain a speedy commission for G. David Schine. Asked by Ray Jenkins whether he thought the recommendation of a promotion for Schine unseemly or wrong, General Reber testified that he hadn’t thought the suggestion wrong when made, but that he had thought the ensuing importunities wrong.
Senator McCarthy called for a point of order.
The committee should know, McCarthy said, that the general had a brother, Sam Reber. That Sam Reber was former acting United States high commissioner for Germany and had resigned from the State Department in July 1953, “when charges that he was a bad security risk were being made against him as a result of the investigations of this committee.” It was, McCarthy suggested, in retaliation for this exposure of his brother that General Reber now pronounced his hostile conclusions about Roy Cohn.
General Reber responded noisily, pounding his hand in his fist. “I do not know and have never heard that my brother retired as a result of any action of this committee!” There was much commotion. Senator Jackson expressed himself as appalled by Senator McCarthy’s implication.
Senator McClellan asked for a ruling on the issue, “because we may be trying members of everybody’s family involved before we get through.”
Harry focused his eyes on the screen as if to penetrate it. A young woman had appeared from the committee’s staff section. She removed carefully an assembly of papers scattered in front of Senator McClellan, who leaned a little bit to the right to give room to the clerk, whose left hand revealed a wedding ring. She replaced the senator’s single file with one with six folders. Her light hair fell forward and brushed over her chin. Someone had silently hailed her attention, because she turned quickly in the direction of the camera, her figure sideways. She was heavy with child. “That’s … that’s Robin—”
“So who’s Robin?” Willmoore asked, puffing away on his cigarette.
Harry very nearly gave way to temptation. His reply was gagged. Finally it came out, sounding flat. “She’s a girl I used to know. I guess she works now for Senator McClellan.”
“Well, pretty soon now you can send her baby a christening gift. She looks okay. Why’d you stop seeing her?”
Harry nearly choked.
He was relieved when Robin slipped out of sight of the camera just as McCarthy’s voice boomed in, “Objection, Mr. Chairman. Point of order.”
A recess was called. The committee members and witnesses and reporters and gallery and Harry and Willmoore went out for lunch.
They were back on duty at two. The hearings would last until five, with a twenty-minute recess at three-thirty.
“I’m going to have a drink. I figure we’ve earned it. Harry?”
“Coke, thanks.”
Willmoore answered the phone. “Who’s calling? … Yes. I’ll put him on.” To Harry, holding out the phone, his hand over the mouthpiece, “It’s Jean McCarthy.”
Tactfully, Willmoore took his drink into his study, closing the door.
“Hello there, Jeanie. You looked terrific on camera this morning.”
Jeanie didn’t have time to dally over pleasantries. “Harry, I really want to see you. I’d come to New York this weekend, but Joe needs me. Last night he was up with Roy and Frank until three, got up at six. It’ll be that way on through. I do so much want to spend an hour with you. Could you possibly make lunch here on Saturday, day after tomorrow?”
“Of course, Jeanie. Where, when?”
“The Monocle, twelve-thirty. Thank you, dear Harry. You are such a friend.”
Willmoore came back into the living room. They watched to the end, and made a date for the following day. At the end of Day One, the television ratings gave the Army-McCarthy hearings an astonishing public endorsement: Gallup reported that 89 percent of the television-viewing public had tuned in.
59
HANBERRY, 1991
The view of the hearings from abroad
“You were back in England, I know. Was there interest in the Army-McCarthy proceedings?”
“Well, yes there was, Harry. But not at all on the questions ostensibly at stake.”
“What do you mean, ‘ostensibly’?”
“Reading the material you’ve assembled for me in the last few days, it seems to me that several very concrete issues were at stake. The first—pure and simple—involved that extraordinary vermiform appendage, Schine. a) Did Schine in any sense govern the movements of the McCarthy machine? The army said yes—all you have to do is look at the record of Cohn’s phone calls and the threats he issued. b) Did the army, having Schine safely, so to speak, behind bars in Fort Dix, use this leverage in an attempt to get McCarthy to call off, or mitigate, his investigation?”
“Yes. That’s the first part of it, quite right.”
“The second: Was McCarthy guilty of indecorum, or even misbehavior? Did his questioning of Zwicker violate implicit codes having to do with the civility of senatorial grilling? And—I gather from the New York Times editorial in your batch yesterday—Was McCarthy in general out of control?—as witness not only what he said about General Zwicker, but what he said about various of his colleagues, notably Senators Tydings, Hendrickson, and Gillette.”
“Correct.”
“Now on your question: How were the Army-McCarthy hearings judged in Great Britain? To begin with, they occupied only four or five minutes, at the most—if memory serves—of the nightly news programs. The commentary was entirely partisan. I think it’s fair to say that there weren’t two dozen Britishers who thought McCarthy had anything whatever of interest to say. But in that connection I have something I’m sure you haven’t seen. You may wish to make some use of it. It is an exchange between our Evelyn Waugh and your Willmoore Sherrill. Waugh’s letter is included in his published work. After my conversion I saw something of Waugh. Perhaps he took an interest in me because I had inherited my father’s title.”
“Did Waugh ever take an interest in McCarthy?”
“He reviewed Richard Rovere’s blistering book Senator Joe McCarthy, which of course you’ve seen—”
“Actually, Alex, what I told you at the outset is literally true. I have not read any treatment of McCarthy, of whatever length, since he died.”
“I can’t imagine how you managed that.”
“Well, yes, there was always, still is, the odd sentence, the ubiquitous use of the term McCarthyism. But no, I didn’t read the Rovere book, and I don’t know what the pro-McCarthy people said about it.”
“Well, my situation is curious, as I said to Evelyn. I was a Soviet spy. I did have a position in Washington. Granted, not as an employee of the U.S. government, but as a Britisher, someone who was cleared by government security to attend rather important State Department briefings. And one day I was informed that the security mechanism had winced on reading my record. Had someone got wind of it—that more than two years ago I had passed a supersecret document stolen from the secretary of defense to the whole world? No. Because in the thirties I had signed a silly petition got up by a Communist front group. Does one judge McCarthyism by its failure to discover that I had passed a presidential private letter to the entire world? Or by its success in identifying me as a sometime member of one Communist front group?”
“A very interesting question. Which brings up another item you gave me yesterday—again, I hadn’t seen the numbers.”
“On loyalty/security risks and dismissal?”
“Yes. Here they are.” Harry moved the lamp arm down on the folder. “Eisenhower announced in 1954, one month before the Army-McCarthy hearings, the results of seven months’ investigations:
“Two thousand four hundred and twenty-nine ‘security’ risks found in thirty-nine federal agencies. All resigned or were fired.”
“The charges:
“Information indicating subversive activities or associations—422.
“Information indicating sexual perversion—198.
“Information indicating conviction for felonies or misdemeanors—611.
“Information indicating untrustworthiness, drunkenness, mental instability, or possible exposure to blackmail—1,424.
“Of course,” Harry said, “depending on the criteria by which these were judged, it was either a reign of terror or a much-overdue personnel reform—”
“That takes us straight into the Waugh-Sherrill question. Waugh wrote an approving review of the Rovere book for The Spectator. Sherrill spotted in that review an undertone of skepticism. He wrote Waugh—Sherrill’s letter was published with Waugh’s answer in a Waugh collection—that ‘this skepticism thrice surfaced.’ He quoted from Waugh’s review. ‘Mr. Rovere’s comments are pungent and, as far as a foreigner can judge, just. [But] one of the things which Mr. Rovere might profitably have done and does not do is follow up. There is a curious raggedness (perhaps inevitable) in the accounts of the various inquiries which seem to have ended without findings and of the various men who appear and disappear in the story without acquittal or prosecution. What has happened to everyone? I wish Mr. Rovere would rewrite the book for us ignorant islanders giving us the simple story.’
“Well, Sherrill evidently seized on this skepticism and wrote to Waugh—here, I have it: ‘You are quite right; as far as a foreigner can judge, the comments of Richard Rovere on the McCarthy years are “just.” The pity is that you are not given the whole story, whence you might judge better.’ Sherrill then offered to send other material.”
“Did he? Did Waugh read it?”
“Yes. Or he claims he did, and Evelyn was a pretty conscientious scholar. He wrote back to Sherrill, ‘McCarthy is certainly regarded by most Englishmen as a regrettable figure. Rovere makes a number of precise charges against his personal honor. Until these are rebutted, those who are sympathetic with his cause must deplore his championship of it.’ ”
Alex smiled. “Pure Waugh. But it remains for us to explore—in your own book, and in mine—whether this ‘bad character’ of Joe McCarthy had as an enduring result the discrediting of anti-Communist activity.”
“At any rate, Alex, you make it clear what was the British view of things back in those days when all of America was glued to the Army-McCarthy hearings. … Yes, I’ll have some tea. No. I will not have crumpets. Thanks.”
60
Jean McCarthy meets with Harry
Jean Kerr McCarthy walked into the restaurant alone. Though highly recognizable, with her great height, striking face, and figure, she was unrecognized this sleepy Saturday in April at a restaurant that toiled listlessly at noon, saving energy for the heavy, protracted traffic of Saturday nights. Harry was seated in a remote corner of the restaurant, in the back. She approached him and put her arms around his neck. He kissed her, and they sat down.
Would she have a drink? “No, but you go ahead, Harry.” He ordered a beer.
“It’s not going well,” Jean said.
“No, it isn’t, Jeanie.”
“Joe’s difficult. Well, I don’t have to tell you. You know,” Jean said, picking absentmindedly on a corner of a roll. “What Roy did to Joe on Schine was just plain unforgivable. And Joe knows that. Joe told me a month ago, ‘Roy thinks that Dave ought to be a general and operate from a penthouse in the Waldorf-Astoria.’ It’s terrible what Roy has done to Joe, but Joe won’t just—get him out.”
The Redhunter Page 38