A half hour later, McCarthy read it and passed it on to his wife. “Amazing,” he said. “Not like Roy, not at all.”
Cohn was not only contrite about his performance, he had analyzed it.
I’ve been studying the transcript, Joe, and thinking back about yesterday and, really, it was even worse than it seems. The words alone may not appear too damaging in cold print, but a certain tone and attitude accompanied them, I know, that made me appear—well, less than self-effacing.
Cohn had gone on to outline three traits in his own behavior, quoting words he had uttered on the stand:
Arrogance: “Roy Cohn is here speaking for Roy Cohn, to give the facts.”
Self-Importance: Asked if I could produce the original photograph, I replied I could but indicated the committee had to understand that “I have an awful lot of papers and stuff to attend to and it is not in my possession.” I added confidently (and pompously), “I am sure it is under my control.”
Condescension: “I will be glad to answer any question that any member of the committee wants to ask.” I even advised Ray Jenkins how to conduct his examination of me. (“I wonder if we could do it this way: Could I give you my recollection as to exactly what I did do?”)
Having expressed his contrition, Cohn made his own demand. He did not want a lawyer. He wanted to defend himself. He knew the old saw about anyone who defends himself has a fool for a client. “I know, I know. But I have to do it.”
He made a concrete proposal. That the next night, when the inner group congregated at Joe’s house as usual to prepare for the following day, Roy was to sit as though he were the witness. “Then let everyone fire questions at me, you, Jean, Frank, Jim—treat me the way Ray Jenkins and Joe Welch treat me. Give me a rough time and let me see if I don’t satisfy you.”
Jean put the letter down. “He certainly does feel bad about yesterday.”
“Yes. Bright boy, the way he analyzes that. Well, Jeanie, we can’t order him to come in with his own counsel. But let’s give him hell when he shows up tomorrow and takes the stand in our living room.”
Joe drank to the success of the “new Roy.”
As McCarthy met with his inner team every night beginning at eight, John Adams met almost as regularly with army attorney Joseph Welch, but at six, one hour or so after the Senate sessions had concluded. Robert Stevens, army secretary, was brought to the conference when his presence was thought indispensable, which was infrequently. On June 4, Adams and Welch sat down in the conference room they had reserved at the Carroll Arms hotel.
“You’ll never guess,” Welch began teasingly as they sat down and waited for their coffee.
“What?” Adams enjoyed the manner of the celebrated New England attorney, who above all things enjoyed his own verbal pacing, whether at a conference with clients, performing before a jury, or before a body of senators and twenty million television viewers.
“I made a deal this afternoon—just now—with Big Bad Roy Cohn.”
“What’s that all about?” Adams was curious but unworried. He had had six weeks’ experience of Welch before the Senate tribunal. “What do you want me to do, Joseph, to get the details of your deal out of you? Swear you in and depose you?—What did you do for Big Bad Roy and vice versa?”
Welch explained. As they were walking away from the hearing, Cohn had signaled to him and, in a low voice, said, “I’d like to talk to you privately and off the record about something. Something I’d like from you.”
“I said to him: ‘That’s interesting, because there’s something I’d like from you.’
“We went into an empty Senate room, and I said, ‘Who goes first?’
“ ‘You go ahead, Joe. What’s on your mind?’
“I told him. You know about Fred Fisher. Remember Fred Fisher?”
“Your junior partner up in Boston? The guy who joined the National Lawyers Guild when he left law school?”
“The very one.” Joe Welch sipped his coffee. “The New York Times carried the story back in April. How they got it I don’t know. I was going to bring him down to Washington as my assistant, but he came to see me and said he had joined the National Lawyers Guild after law school for a year, and I thought, Well, that’s something I certainly do not need in an altercation with Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy. So I said, ‘Fred, you’d better sit this one out.’ … Not that I think there is a pro-Communist bone in Fred’s body. He was just carried away after law school. It was during the Henry Wallace campaign. I wouldn’t hesitate to take him anywhere else, and the New York Times story certainly hasn’t damaged his reputation in Boston. Still, here’s what went through my mind, John: If Roy’s about to ask me for a favor, which I assumed he was about to do, I might as well ask him for one—to leave Fred Fisher out of it.”
“What did he say?” Adams sipped his coffee.
“He said—sure.
“So it was now his turn. Now get this, John, and I don’t want you to laugh. I exercised my renowned self-control and didn’t laugh, not once, I swear to God.”
“Come up with it, Joe. I can’t wait.”
“Well, Cohn didn’t want me to poke around about his army record. Or rather, his non-army record. He had got an early warning signal from me.” Welch reached for the well-thumbed volumes and went back to the hearing on May 4, last month. “Here’s what I said then.”
He adjusted his glasses. “I had been fussing about with him on the stand, on the matter of Mr. Cohn’s biography, and I reached the matter of his draft status. I said I wanted to hear from him about that. He said he’d be glad to answer any question I put to him. Then I said, ‘But I hope I won’t have any questions about your draft status.’ I said, ‘I hope before we go into this matter that you will consult your file or bring it to the stand with you, so you can reel that off to us, what your whole story has been.’ He replied, ‘Whatever you want.’
“Well,” Welch leaned back in his chair, “what young Roy does not want is exactly that. After all, he works for the fighting marine, the hero of all patriotic Americans. So I just listened to him, and he explained.
“ ‘My personal story,’ he said, ‘is that’—brace yourself, John, ‘when I was a sophomore at Columbia, I fell in love with West Point.’ ”
“In love with West Point? Roy Cohn?”
“Quiet. It gets better. So, he said, he got an appointment to West Point. He was thrilled. So he goes up there to take the entrance examination. Needless to say, he whizzes through the academic part. But—he just couldn’t make it through the physical. He even told me what that physical exam requires applicants to do. I jotted it down. Sixteen push-ups, twenty-eight squat jumps, thirty sit-ups, a sixty-five-foot basketball throw, a one-hundred-forty-foot softball throw, an eight-hundred-yard run in 46.7 seconds.—John, what if it had taken Douglas MacArthur 46.8 seconds? Would we have lost the Second World War? Anyway, he was of course brokenhearted not to be entering West Point, presumably in anticipation of a full-fledged army career.”
“What then?” John Adams’s face was wreathed with a broad-gauge smile.
“He was classified one-A by the draft board. But guess what? The quota was oversubscribed. They stopped drafting young men from the New York area. The draft call in the New York area was resumed two years later. That’s two years later. When they got around to Roy Cohn, he had enlisted in the national guard as a private. He was transferred to the coast guard and then to headquarters in New York, where,” he looked down again at his notes, “he was promoted to sergeant on September 6, 1949. He was pretty soon promoted to warrant officer, and in 1952, first lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General corps. … He can’t have been very busy doing work for the coast guard or for anybody else, since during those three years he was active full-time as a civilian prosecutor.
“I didn’t comment. Cohn went on. He said some people had been imputing to him a draft-dodging background, but of course this simply was not the case and in any event had nothing whatever to do with the questions
being debated before the Senate investigating committee—”
“So you said?”
“I said okay. … It’s true that Cohn’s obvious draft dodging isn’t going to affect the issues we’re discussing—”
“I’m not so sure you’re right, Joseph. I mean, what David Schine has been up to is practically the same thing as draft dodging, so that one way of putting it is, really, whether Roy Cohn has been attempting to get for Schine the kind of treatment he got for himself—”
“Just thought of something. Do you suppose Cohn tried to fail the West Point physical?”
“Interesting. But what you just peeled off there sounds like pretty tough stuff.”
“Yes. But nothing a healthy eighteen-year-old couldn’t handle.”
“What makes you think Roy is a healthy—was a healthy—eighteen-year-old?”
Welch laughed. “I see your point. He was probably never a healthy anything. Though let’s face it, he’s pretty agile. His testimony has got a lot better since that first day.”
“Okay, so you made the deal. It can’t be any special burden to us. So Roy Cohn and Fred Fisher are scot-free, one see-no-evil-hear-no-evil about draft dodging, one indulgence for joining a Communist-run lawyers’ organization. But let’s get on to the memorandums the McCarthy office allegedly wrote after every one of Roy’s phone calls. How are you going to handle them?”
63
Tom Coleman of Wisconsin suggests a compromise
The Army-McCarthy hearings were suspended on Monday, May 17, for three days, and Harry turned, after breakfast, to his large file on Henry Wallace. He had agreed to plan for the American Mercury an article series, “Where Have They Gone?” Huie suggested a descriptive magazine inset that would attract the attention of veterans of the great political wars of 1948—Harry Truman vs. Tom Dewey vs. Henry Wallace vs. Strom Thurmond. He wrote out a lead: “What happened to the Wallace cadre? The truly important players in the Wallace campaign were members of the Communist Party or indistinguishable from members of the Communist Party. Where are they now? Did they see the light? Or are they doing something else? If so, what?”
Harry sat down to reread the articles by Dwight Macdonald in Politics and Victor Lasky in Plain Talk. Both writers, the renowned, left-oriented, highbrow Macdonald, and the right-wing journalist Lasky, had diligently documented the domination of the Progressive Party by Communists. The phone rang.
While traveling with McCarthy in Wisconsin, Harry had seen a lot of Tom Coleman, and on one trip had spent a night in his house. He was the senior Republican presence in the state, a politically active industrialist who knew, and was respected by, everyone. He had backed Joe McCarthy early in his career. Now he asked Harry to come to the Waldorf to his suite and “talk about Joe. I’ve got a specific proposal.”
“Tom, did you know I’m no longer … connected?”
“Yes, I know. And that’s one reason why I think you are just the right man to do what I have in mind.”
Forty-five minutes later, Harry was in suite 33A of the Waldorf Towers, on the same floor with General and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur, who had lived at the Waldorf ever since he lost his command in Korea. Tom Coleman greeted him, always calm, impressive, incorruptible, to the point.
“The hearings are killing the GOP. Ike is in full swing against Joe, who is losing ground. Ike is careful; he’s always careful. But he’s got Nixon in there pretty well deployed. And the polls are showing McCarthy’s attrition, down twelve points just since the hearings began. Get this as an indicator: Yesterday, Homer Ferguson—our good conservative senator from Michigan—says he will not ask Joe to come to Michigan to campaign for him. That is a shot heard ‘round the Republican world.”
“I’m not surprised, Tom.”
“Well, I’ve got a plan. Here’s the nut of it. One. Persuade Roy to resign. Two. Persuade John Adams to resign. What does this do?”
The senior statesman got up on his feet, hands in pockets, the shaft of light from the window illuminating his silver hair. “The army—and Ike—get what they—and I—and practically everyone—want: Exit Roy Cohn. What does Joe get? The resignation of Adams, which is the equivalent of an apology by the army for its stupid treatment of the Schine case. You got me?”
“I got you, Tom. Are you going to persuade the Communist Party to resign its commitment to the Soviet Union while you’re at it?”
Coleman’s was a thin smile. “Youth! The cliche is that youth will attempt anything. In my experience it’s the other way around. Youth gives up too quickly. In the last two days I’ve talked to Matthew Ridgeway. Now, he’s one hundred percent on the Stevens side. You must have caught him on TV the day he strode in, Enter army chief of staff, sits down during the whole morning right behind Stevens. Can’t make a more conspicuous affirmation than that. Anyway, I laid my plan out to him. He took his time. He thought about it. And he didn’t then say, ‘Let me check it out with Ike, Dulles, the UN, and Hollywood.’ He said: ‘Count me in. I’ll talk to Stevens.’ Yesterday morning he called me: Stevens would go with it! They both talked with Adams. He was reluctant, but said pro bono, he’d go with it.”
Then Tom Coleman laughed.
“Ever hear about the proud, rich Italian father who was looking for just the right girl to marry his only son? He hires a marriage broker. Broker comes in after three months, he says, ‘I got a beautiful match. She’s twenty, great girl. Speaks French. Father was ambassador to Great Britain, brother is an up-and-rising young congressman from Massachusetts. Father’s very rich.’ The old man thinks, then says: Not good enough. So the broker goes off and comes back in another three months. ‘This one is terrific. She’s twenty-two, very rich family, also speaks perfect French. Wonderful connections. Her older sister is queen of England. She’s very beautiful.’ The father thinks a bit, then says: ‘Okay, I’ll go with that one.’ Broker puts on coat and hat, heads for the door, says, ‘Well now, that’s half the battle!’ ”
Harry laughed. “The other half is Joe-Roy.”
“No. The other half is Joe, period. If he goes along, Roy has to go along.”
“And my job is to persuade Joe?”
“Yes. I gave it a lot of thought. You’ve been an intimate friend. You’re close to Jean. You haven’t uttered a peep since you pulled out. I think you’d be perfect. I mean, as perfect as anybody can be. If Joe wants to commit suicide, we can’t stop him.”
Harry said, “I’ll try.”
Back in his apartment, he called Mary Haskell. He could feel, over the phone, her weariness. “Last time you asked me for a private meeting with Joe you ended up quitting. Sure, Harry. I’ll set you up. Come on down. Ring me when you get to town.”
Harry thought quickly. “Mary, let me put a little edge on it. Make that a meeting with Joe and Jean?”
“Actually, that will be easier than just with Joe. He goes home at night, and for a while, before the troops move in for the agonized reappraisals, Joe and Jean are alone. They’d never mind it if Harry Bontecou showed up.”
For almost two hours it was like old times. McCarthy brightened instantly on laying eyes on Harry. Jean’s embrace was so prolonged Joe said, “Hey, Harry, that’s my wife you’re making love to!” Joe opened a bottle of champagne. (“It’s left over from the wedding!” Jean told them.) McCarthy sat down and asked after friends in New York, and said after this was all over, he planned to take Jeanie for a vacation—”a month. Maybe even more. On the lake, in Wisconsin. Maybe you could visit us, Harry? That would be great, Harry. Just sitting there in the beautiful woods, a little fishing and maybe swimming, a lot of time to read those books we pile up to read. No television. No telephone.”
Joe McCarthy seemed genuinely entranced.
“Well now, Joe, Jeanie, I’ve got a proposal, something Tom Coleman came up with. It would bring that vacation a lot closer. What Tom says is, everybody is fed up with the hearings. They go on and on and on, don’t seem to get anywhere, and he proposes a deal: Your side—you let Roy resign
. Their side—they let John Adams go. The public view: Roy is marked down for using too much muscle on behalf of David Schine. John Adams is marked down for using Schine as a bargaining weapon. The big news: The army has agreed!”
Harry looked at Joe apprehensively. There was a quick shutting of the eyelids, the tic that preceded the consolidation of McCarthy’s thought. Without looking at Jeanie, he said quietly, “I’ll go with it—provided Roy agrees.”
Then he turned to Jean. She said, softly, “Thank God you said that, Joe.”
McCarthy sighed. “I’ll take it up with Roy tonight.”
“I don’t think I’d be useful sitting at that conference, Joe.”
“No, you’re right, Harry. Have another beer and go home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
When the three regular conferees arrived at eight, Joe told Frank Carr and Don Surine that they should call it a night. “I’ve got to spend the time tonight alone with Roy.”
Roy frowned, but two hours later he agreed to go with the Coleman proposal—on the understanding that he was free to issue his own statement giving the reasons for his resignation.
The following morning, Tom Coleman, speaking to both parties, suggested that both Roy Cohn and John Adams make themselves unavailable throughout the day, to aim at a meeting at six P.M., when the papers would be signed in the presence of Chairman Karl Mundt of the investigating committee. Senator Mundt would then declare the Army-McCarthy hearings suspended sine die, opening the doors to the press.
Roy Cohn took a room in a hotel and began drafting his resignation statement.
John Adams and Secretary Bob Stevens were summoned early in the afternoon to the White House. They sat down with Sherman Adams and Herbert Brownell. The chief of staff didn’t give the sense that he was totally in command of himself, and began to talk.
“Bob, John, we, er, here at the White House, have been giving second thought to the Coleman plan. Well, Herb, you tell ‘em.”
The Redhunter Page 40