“I know that, Jeanie.”
“Yes, you know that, Harry. Oh my, how we miss you. But how do you read the way it’s going?”
“I don’t see anything that can clear Roy of what he did. Call after call to the secretary of the army asking for special treatment for his—”
“Boyfriend?” Jean interrupted him. “But we don’t want to get into that, do we, Harry? I don’t want to get into that, but we’ve got a situation where Roy would call the army, get a weekend pass for Dave—‘to do important committee work’—then they’d both go to the Waldorf-Astoria and live it up, doing whatever, that’s their business, but they sure weren’t doing important work, or for that matter any work, for Joe McCarthy.” She released the roll. “… I know, I know, Joe should have put a stop to it when he found out, and even finding out late, he should have called Roy in and said, So long. But he’s very stubborn—and very loyal. Now I know that’s part of his nature. But that’s part also of what’s happened to him because of the solid, I mean solid wall of criticism, no matter what he does. If he caught a spy with a hydrogen bomb in his briefcase heading for Moscow, they’d say the same things, fake, dishonest, publicity hound, despot.”
The waiter was standing by. Jean noticed him. “Harry, will you forgive me? I don’t want any lunch. Well, okay. Give me some soup. What kind? Any kind.” Harry ordered tuna salad.
“I mean, Harry, if we live in a country that thinks Owen Lattimore is innocent after what Joe came up with, and then what the whole McCarran Committee came up with, then it’s hard to see daylight. And Joe now reacts with, you know, something like outrage about what they say about him, just routinely. Did you see Flanders yesterday?”
“It wasn’t in the Times this morning.”
“Well, maybe even they are embarrassed by it.” She reached in her pocketbook and brought out the clipping. “Read it. Don’t read it out loud, I couldn’t bear it.”
Harry pocketed it.
“Jeanie, it’s gotten all mixed up. People aren’t talking about Owen Lattimore. They’re talking about Cohn and Schine. And General Zwicker. But remember, it was Joe who spoke those words, not Roy.”
Jean leaned back in the booth. “Yes, he spoke those words. Would he have said them if Roy hadn’t been around egging him on? I don’t know.”
“They want Roy, and they’ll get him. But they also want Joe. And it doesn’t look good for him—”
She stopped him. “Let me tell you the kind of thing that happens to Joe. It won’t surprise you, after your time with him. But they come in at him from everywhere, no matter what.
“Look. Last month the Queen Mother—the present queen’s mother—”
“I know who you’re talking about, Jeanie.”
“Well, you read she was in town. All the senators were invited to a State Department reception. We got there, oh, twenty minutes late. We got in the door and we could see at the other end of the room—you know, the big reception room?—the receiving line: John Foster Dulles, the Queen Mother, the two ambassadors, a couple of other people. There were still about five or six senators and their wives waiting to go through the line. Somebody spotted Joe coming in, and presto! like that! the line was dispersed, and the Queen Mother was led to the far corner of the room. I mean, it was obvious: Dismantle the line so the Queen Mother won’t have to shake hands with the disreputable McCarthy. So what happens? Well, there wasn’t any line anymore, so Joe and I went to the corner by the entrance, and a waiter brought us drinks and hors d’oeuvres; so we’re munching on these, and I look up and—there’s the Queen Mother walking right across the huge hall toward us.” Jean ran her index finger in front of her, right to left, tracing the Queen Mother’s path. “She walked to exactly where we were and—introduced herself!
“Well, Joe behaved like a choirboy. And so he says to her nicely that based on what he had read about her travel and social schedule, “Your majesty is being given a pretty hard time.’ And she says, I kid you not, with a broad smile, ‘Not as hard a time as they’ve been giving you, Senator!’ I mean, can you beat that? Joe smiled like a baby. He’d have killed for her. We chatted maybe five minutes. The next day we got word of the headlines and the captions in the London tabloids. One of them read, ‘REDHUNTER SASSES QUEEN MOTHER.’ Another, ‘DOES JOE THINK QUEEN MOTHER IS LOYALTY RISK?’ And the Mirror, I think it was: ‘QUEEN MOTHER TRAPPED BY HATEMONGER.’ ”
She brought out her handkerchief.
Harry looked away.
An hour later Jean sipped at her cold coffee. “We’re just going to have to do the best we can. It’s good to know we’ve got friends like you, Harry. And, Harry, I understand about your leaving, I truly do. Now, listen. And this is completely my idea. I haven’t checked it with Joe. But I wouldn’t want even to mention it unless you say okay. I know that back in February you said to Joe, It’s Roy or me. If I can get Joe to back off on Roy—would you come back?”
Harry thought quickly. He knew he would never go back. But he couldn’t tell her that, not in her distress. He gripped her hand and reflected: There is no way Joe McCarthy will back off Roy Cohn in the middle of this investigation.
So he thought it all right to say, “Let’s see, then, Jeanie, see what Joe says. After all, I did quit—”
“I told you, I understand about that. And Joe does too. You’ll be a friend of ours as long as—as long as you don’t go to work for Senator Flanders!” She smiled her big Irish smile. They walked together to the door.
61
Day thirty-four of the Army-McCarthy hearings
Harry and Willmoore went out to dinner on the night of May 28 and were silent for a little while. The cocktails mobilized their spirits. They expressed, almost simultaneously, their self-disgust over the time they were giving to the Army-McCarthy hearings.
“They’re threatening to last for months.” Willmoore sighed, puffing on his cigarette. “And what do we know from watching that we—sort of—didn’t know already? And what is it we really care about? Cohn and Schine are two calamities. Joe’s jeopardized his career by getting involved with Cohn, though he was making plenty of mistakes before then. And the Cohn-Schine business precipitated some pretty ugly things: All of a sudden, McCarthy releases thirty memoranda done by his office over the months pertaining to calls from Cohn to the army, ‘official reasons’ for making the calls. What a coincidence. Each of these memos lists, in strangely similar language, the provocation for the last Cohn call. Let me practice. Date One. ‘Cohn called Stevens/Adams’—take your pick—’to say that Schine’s service would be needed to prepare for the first Monmouth hearing.’ Date Two. ‘Cohn called Stevens/Adams to say that the absence of Schine is a real encumbrance.’ Date Three. ‘Cohn called Stevens/Adams to say that the absence of Schine would not deter the committee from going forward.’ It looks—wouldn’t you agree?—as if McCarthy’s office flat invented that series of memos. Retroactively put together to account for Cohn’s thirty-odd calls to the army asking for special treatment for his pal. The question before the house, Harry, is, Why am I glued to it?”
“And why is practically everyone else in America also watching it?” Harry replied as Willmoore turned the key to his quarters after dinner. “It has a larger audience than the World Series.”
“That’s simple,” Willmoore said. “People watch soap opera, and there’s plenty of that here, though lover-boy doesn’t run off at night with the girl—wish he did—”
“Quiet a second!” Harry toiled attentively with the sound and with the vertical-hold controls on the television set. He wanted to get the nine P.M. news summary.
“I can understand why you are watching, Harry. You’re seeing every day the decomposition of someone who was the central figure in your life, engaged in what we both thought—continue to think—was a noble cause. A vital democratic society has two functions, one is inclusive—bring in the new ideas, assimilate them. The other is exclusive—reject unassimilable ideas. That’s what McCarthyism was all about for a whil
e, and what appealed to you. It’s a long way from your Paul Appleby, the federal official who said, ‘What’s the difference between the Democratic Party and the Communist Party? They’re both entitled to compete for loyalty.’ Bullshit—you’re seeing part of that cause go up in smoke. How much of it, I don’t know. I’m interested—I know, you are too—in the policy implications of this inferno. Will they rehabilitate Yalta before they’re through? And Alger Hiss?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday the St. Louis Bar Association sent a unanimous resolution to Mundt, calling for an end to the hearings. ‘For the sake of preserving the dignity of governmental processes in the United States.’ ”
“Fat chance of doing that. The prevalence of the general will was lost under President Andrew Jackson. I taught you, did I not, that Calhoun is a ranking American political theorist?”
“Yes. There was the difficulty that his ‘law of the concurrent majority’ would have preserved slavery.”
“Only as long as the general will in the individual states wanted it.”
“All the Negro would have to do was wait, right, Willmoore?”
“When you leapfrog the general will, you get things like civil wars. Right, Harry?”
“When you don’t leapfrog the general will, you get things like the prolongation of slavery, right, Willmoore?”
“You’re slow on the aspect of statecraft. You very nearly got killed in Belgium because of a failure of statecraft. Fifty million others, less lucky, did get killed. The justification for a military is to avoid military action. The great statesmen in power during the thirties fucked up. McCarthy’s doing the same thing. So’s Ike, in a way. He might have killed McCarthyism in the bud.”
“How?”
“By taking over the movement.”
“Oh, Willmoore! Cut it out. Say, are you getting any?”
“That is an insolent question. Yes. You?”
“My romantic energies got aborted a while ago.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“No. Maybe sometime.” He grinned at his old (forty-two-year-old) teacher. “You’ll be the first to know.”
But Harry knew he would never speak to anyone, ever, about Robin.
They had another drink and resolved not to mention one more time the names of McCarthy or Cohn or Stevens or Welch. Two hours later they agreed to meet at ten the next morning, in time for the next televised hearing.
62
Roy Cohn testifies
Roy Cohn took the stand on April 29, immediately after the luncheon recess. He wore a dark double-breasted suit with the wide shoulders popular during the period. His face seemed one part scowl, one part innocence betrayed. McCarthy, seated at the center of the long table he shared with critical staff members, wore his regular double-breasted blue suit. The camera caught the diminishing hair on the top of his head. On the left was the table for McCarthy committee Democratic members, with newly retained minority counsel Bobby Kennedy seated at the end. The heat in the room was from the packed galleries. No seat was empty.
The initial questioning by Ray Jenkins, the committee counsel with open coat and informal manner, and subsequent grilling by Joseph Welch, counsel for the army, with his bow tie and vest and patron’s smile sketched around his eyes, focused on the subject everyone in America would be debating for two days.
Army secretary Stevens, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, neat tie, the middle-aged Ivy Leaguer, had testified about the importunate telephone calls from Cohn, in behalf of Schine.
“We kept a very careful count and submit here to the committee a chronology of those telephone calls and the name of the officials who received them; half the time it was me, half the time army counsel John Adams … ”
In the morning break, Cohn rushed to a pay phone and dialed in to Fort Myer. Schine was on the alert.
“Stevens is making it sound like he never knew you, heard of you, except when I phoned in. But isn’t there a photo I saw somewhere that includes Stevens and you?”
Indeed there was such a photo, Schine said. He had had it framed, and it hung in his (civilian) office, in his father’s hotel in New York.
“Go get it,” Cohn said.
Schine, who had been transferred to Washington’s Fort Myer for the duration of the investigation, instructions given to the camp commander to give him freedom of movement for the duration of the hearings, called his father’s office and arranged for a clerk to fly to Washington with the framed picture in a package. Schine was there to meet the plane. He took a taxi to the Senate Office Building.
On Cohn’s instruction, he gave the packet to freshly recruited McCarthy assistant Jim Juliana, who was told to make copies. In conversation, Roy referred to “the Schine-Stevens” photograph. Juliana turned over the original to Don Surine, who was friendly with a photo technician in the building.
At the afternoon session, Cohn questioned Stevens.
“You make it sound, Mr. Secretary, as if when I telephoned you about Private Schine I was taking great liberties. But isn’t it more faithful to the record that I was pursuing a point or two that completely tied in with your own—personal relationship with Schine?”
Secretary Stevens looked up abruptly. “I have no personal relationship with Schine of any sort, sir.”
Cohn pounced. He drew from a folder a picture and asked permission to produce it as evidence.
“Permission granted,” said Chairman Mundt.
Cohn handed over an enlarged photograph, which a clerk placed on an easel. The television cameras zoomed in. It was a picture of Private Schine, standing, his army hat on, and Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens. The technician, having cropped out committee staff director Frank Carr and Fort Dix commander Colonel Bradley, had given birth to a cuddly photo of Schine—accused, by deploying his instruments Cohn and McCarthy, of threatening the very existence of the army—and Stevens—the secretary of the army, threatened by the private first class and his formidable accomplices.
“It looks like a summit conference between Russia and Luxembourg,” Harry commented to Willmoore Sherrill.
Cohn wanted to know how it was, if Secretary Stevens was really as upset as he claimed to be by the behavior of Schine et al., that the secretary should have consented to pose with beatific expression on his face next to the threatening Schine one full week after Stevens’s first memorandum detailing his impatience with the Schine question.
Joseph Welch was not pleased to see this unexpected suggestion of a camaraderie between his client and his adversary. He stared at the photograph and began asking questions about it. Roy Cohn answered them, with some sarcasm and sense of satisfaction. A full half hour went by—Where were you when it was taken? How did you get it? How do you know the date of it? Welch was getting nowhere when an aide approached him with a folder. Welch opened it and gave a triumphant howl—someone had passed up a copy of the photograph in its entirety, showing four figures, not just the two, posing.
The photograph had been cropped, Welch proclaimed.
He depicted what Cohn had done—cropping the photograph—as a dire, inexcusable attempt to deceive: “Mr. Cohn has endeavored to suggest to the committee a social familiarity. The kind of thing one might expect between two people photographed together exclusively; whereas the reality was one of those impersonal group shots in which whoever happens to be standing around becomes one of several photographed together.”
Roy Cohn answered the criticisms with obvious disdain, and the wrangle went on the full three hours. Cohn attempted to explain. The technician to whom the picture had been taken to reproduce was under the impression that Surine cared only to retrieve the Schine-Stevens part of the photograph. Welch all but laughed at what he clearly gave the impression had been a “consummated distortion and an attempted deception.”
Committee counsel Ray Jenkins asked Cohn, “You surely understand, Mr. Cohn, the difference between a photograph of two people apart, and a photograph of four people with disparate attachments? Th
e secretary was evidently visiting the camp, met by the camp commander, at the same time that Mr. Carr, on committee business, greeted Private Schine, who had worked for the committee before joining the army—”
Cohn interrupted him. “I can see the difference, Mr. Jenkins. The question is, can Mr. Welch distinguish between fraud and a wholly understandable sequence of events—”
“The witness will permit counsel to finish without interruption.”
Cohn wheeled on Mundt. “Mr. Chairman, I am very experienced in correct procedure in courtrooms.”
Mundt looked over, in dismay, at McCarthy.
At the end of the session, Cohn and McCarthy walked out of the chamber side by side. McCarthy turned to him. “You were the worst witness I ever saw in my entire life.”
Cohn appeared, as he did every night except on Saturday, at McCarthy’s home at eight. He heard then from the entire inner-court assembly: Joe, Jean, Frank Carr, Jim Juliana, David Schine. Everyone criticized Cohn’s performance, not only the fiasco with the photograph but his manner on the stand, insolent, arrogant. Frank Carr said that Roy should retain his own counsel to lead him through the proceedings, especially to stand by during the days, however many they’d be, when he would continue on the witness stand. McCarthy concurred. Cohn was shocked and affronted by the proposal. Here he was, chief counsel to the committee, a brilliant alumnus of courtroom experience—being told he really needed a good lawyer at his side to give him advice.
He asked to be allowed to think about it over the weekend.
Late on Saturday, Cohn drove by McCarthy’s house, stepped out of his car, and slipped a letter under McCarthy’s door.
The Redhunter Page 39