The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Esther let Jean go on. Then said, “It’s certainly not welcome news, Jean, but I don’t see why it should be, well, the end … the end of Joe’s career.”

  Esther carried the coffee and cakes to the living room. Jean prayed to herself that Joe would not ask for a drink. He didn’t. And the subject of the impending action never arose. Whittaker was telling stories and laughing. Joe was trying to laugh along with him. He did not succeed, but then Chambers deftly guided the conversation to his farm, the activity surrounding them where they sat, and on to a problem his son, John, was having with the chickens. McCarthy’s eyes brightened. He got up. He wanted, he said, to see the chickens. Chambers exchanged a quick glance with Esther, who opened the door to the chilly outside and called out to her son, busy placing winter cover on the windows of the garage.

  “John. John, dear. Would you take Senator McCarthy over and show him the chicken shed? Tell him about the problems?” Joe was outside now, and walked briskly with the young man to look in on an earlier preoccupation that had overwhelmed him, back when he was John Chambers’s age.

  The McCarthys left as the sun went down. The Chamberses waved them good-bye.

  “Senator McCarthy is through,” Whittaker Chambers told his wife as they made their way back into the house.

  That night Chambers wrote to Harry.

  He was a crushed man. I said to the senator just about this: “I want you to know something so that I shall not have to refer to it again. This farm is always a haven for you. When Washington gets too much for you, come here. I want you to know that this will always be so and has nothing to do with political differences.”

  Chambers took a longer view of the phenomenon of his afternoon visitor.

  Tell your friend Professor Sherrill, who you tell me is outspoken at Columbia on the McCarthy question, that I think it would be a mistake to perpetuate a myth of McCarthy as something he really was not. For the Left will have no trouble in shredding a myth which does not stand on reality. I am urging a decent prudence, unstinting but firm, because I believe that the tighter the Right clings to a myth which will not justify itself, the farther and faster it will be swung away from reality; will be carrying, not a banner, but a burden. Give this man, as a fighter, his due and more than his due. Hamlet has noted the penalties in giving anybody merely his due. But let the Right also know where and when to stop, what is at stake. Of course, time, the obliterator, will take care of much of this.

  69

  NOVEMBER 30, 1954

  A rally at Madison Square Garden

  The pro-McCarthy forces were by no means to be counted out. William Knowland and Democratic powerhouse Pat McCarran, both prominent in the anti-Communist movement, announced that they would vigorously fight, on the floor, the contemplated censure of Joe McCarthy. Sam Tilburn noted, without surprise, that the Hearst Press was steadfast against censure, as also the Chicago Tribune and David Lawrence’s U.S. News & World Report. The Catholic War Veterans issued a stirring manifesto, and Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin headed up a national committee to collect signatures. He arrived at Senator McCarthy’s office on the eve of a rally scheduled at Madison Square Garden with crates of folders, claiming 1.8 million names.

  The rally’s sponsors were not all crusty Catholic war veterans. They included writers, academics, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and a dozen retired generals and admirals.

  Thirteen thousand enthusiasts thronged the Garden, with balloons and confetti and a huge brass band that played John Philip Sousa music. What sounded like thirteen thousand voices joined in singing “America the Beautiful.” Eight speakers were introduced to robust applause. Former New Jersey governor and sometime secretary of the navy Charles Edison, son of Thomas, spoke of the need to continue to train on the main thing, the Communist threat. Roy Cohn spoke to tumultuous applause. But the audience was hungry for the main event, and when Senator McCarthy appeared, hand in hand with his wife, Jean, the crowd rose to its feet and cheered for ten minutes, as though at a nominating convention applauding a presidential nominee.

  McCarthy waved but appeared pale, his jowls accentuated by the floodlights. He had spent twelve days at Bethesda Naval Hospital submitting to painful treatment for an injury to his elbow. Jean, tears in her eyes, her hand waving at the receptive crowd, forced a bright smile. Admiral Crommelin begged for silence, and McCarthy finally began. Within a few seconds the Garden was silent.

  He thanked the audience. “From the moment I entered the fight against subversion back in 1950 at Wheeling, West Virginia, the Communists have said that the destruction of me and what I stand for is their number one objective in this country.”

  Cheers stopped him.

  He resumed. “Let me say, incidentally, that it is not easy for a man to assert that he is the symbol of resistance to Communist subversion—that the nation’s fate is in some respects tied to his own fate.”

  There was a smattering of applause. The participants were eager to know what he would say next.

  Two days ago, he said, Alger Hiss left jail. “Four years is how long you have to stay in jail for serving as an agent of the Soviet Union.” He went on to recount his special targets, with much emphasis on Owen Lattimore. He cited with great pride the White House’s own figures, 1,400 dismissed since his crusade began. The Watkins Committee, he declared, was “the victim of a Communist campaign,” the “involuntary agent.”

  “Thank God for ‘involuntary,’ ” Harry whispered to Willmoore, seated with him in the bleachers—

  “I would have the American people recognize, and contemplate in dread, the fact that the Communist Party—a relatively small group of deadly conspirators—has now extended its tentacles to that most respected of American bodies, the United States Senate; that it has made a committee of the Senate its unwitting handmaiden.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no! Edward Bennett Williams, in his office alone the next morning, received the news of the rally the night before. “Get me Senator McCarthy,” he told his telephone operator.

  “Joe, you—you—dumb bastard! You promised me you’d check all public statements with me the day before yesterday! I tell you what you’ve done, Joe. I had a deal made with Lyndon Johnson and Carlson and Case. They were ready to interpret the least statement you’d make about Gillette-Hendrickson-Zwicker as clearing you of censurable motivation. You’ve blown it, Joe. What got into you? Handmaidens of Communism! I mean, Joe, why, why, why?”

  “Sorry about that, Ed. But I thought it was a pretty good speech. I mean, that’s what it boils down to, isn’t it? They are handmaidens of Communism, the ones who want to vote censure, aren’t they? Look, I copied it down from the dictionary when the fuss exploded this morning. I have it here, listen. … ‘Handmaiden. Something that serves a useful subordinate purpose; piety as the handmaiden of religious faith.’ That’s what the censure senators are doing, isn’t it?”

  Ed Williams hung up on his client.

  Sunday, on Meet the Press, Senator Sam Ervin, who had remained silent during the first three days of debate, said to TV host Larry Spivak, “If Senator McCarthy didn’t really believe what he said, that was pretty solid ground for expelling him from the Senate on the grounds of moral incapacity. If McCarthy did believe what he said, then he suffers from mental delusions and mental incapacity.”

  Two days later the Senate voted 67 to 22 to “condemn” Joe McCarthy for the acts cited by the Watkins Committee. The Democrats voted unanimously against him. Senator McCarran had given up pleading for him.

  Was there a difference between “condemning” and “censuring”? a reporter asked.

  “I guess it wasn’t a vote of confidence,” Joe said, leaving his office to drive home, where he wept, uncontrollably.

  70

  APRIL 27, 1957

  Harry visits McCarthy

  Harry walked up to the door of the little house on Third and North East. Mrs. Kerr had died, so only Joe and Jean and the baby, Tierney, now lived there. Harry didn’t get down to W
ashington very often. He had left the Mercury in the fall of 1954 and was embarked now on a dissertation for NYU: subject, The Techniques of Nineteenth-Century Demagogy in England. Jeanie had said on the telephone three weeks before that Harry need never give notice when his plans brought him to Washington. “Just arrive at the door—Joe’s always here.”

  So now Harry rang the bell. He could hear the vacuum cleaner’s whish. He had to ring again to make it stop. A moment later the door opened. She was in jeans, a long apron, a bandanna tied around her head.

  “Come on in, Harry.” They embraced. “Joe’s in the study. Here, let me take your coat. Quite wrong of you, Harry, putting on a coat, beautiful spring day like this.”

  “How’s he doing?” Harry asked in a low voice.

  “Don’t worry,” Jeanie replied, her voice at natural pitch. “He can’t hear us where he is. Not too good, Harry. Doesn’t have much interest. Then there’s the usual problem. And also his sinus and stuff are bad. I want to take him to Wisconsin in the next month or two, get a real rest.”

  “From what?” Harry asked, a grain of sharpness in his voice.

  “From viewing television serials, I guess.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “It’s pretty bad.”

  “Does he get to the Senate?”

  “Once, maybe twice a week. All the stuff that has to be done is done, Ray and Mary attend to that. When it’s a matter of a vote in the Senate, Ray comes up with a senator on the other side, and they pair the vote, both senators absent but recorded. The only thing they can’t deal with is a constituent—or a professor—or a madman—or a kid—who wants to meet Senator McCarthy. They get told what you’d expect. He’s out of town. … He’s out of the office working on a project. Whatever.”

  Harry studied the face of his beautiful old confederate. There was an Irish resolution written in it: What is, is. And she would stay there if it meant the rest of her life.

  “I went with him to the office last week, just said I wanted to look around, say hello to the staff. You—I know you know—I’ve been on a leave of absence. Not supposed to clock in there anymore. My salary is next to zero. Anyway, I watched him walking down the Senate hall. Greets everybody like they’re his closest friend. You know, Harry, he hasn’t said anything—not one word—against any of the senators who voted censure—did you know that? Not one, never. Not even that white-haired old traitor Pat McCarran. There’re still one or two reporters who want to interview him. Mostly he says to them, Go talk to Don Surine, or Ray Kiermas, or Mary Haskell. He tells them—”she smiled—“that they know as much about all this stuff as he does at this point.”

  “Any speaking engagements?”

  “He gets a few requests. Almost always says yes. Then about five days before the date, he says no, not feeling up to it. He told Mike Wallace yes on Mike’s new coast-to-coast program, and two days later I had to call and say—What did I say? He was sick. Or he had to go to Geneva. I forget. Mike didn’t like it. It was his opening show. He got Jim Eastland.

  “On the regular lecture business it’s Mary Haskell who has to relay the no, and some of the people go crazy! They’ve sold a lot of tickets, they’ve taken ads in the newspaper, they persuaded the principal to introduce him, they’ve arranged for buses to bring in students from fifty miles away. Mary just says there’s nothing to be done, doctor’s orders. Sometimes it’s somebody who knows Joe personally, and sometimes they get through to this number here. When that happens I’ve got to say, ‘Joe’s asleep,’ or ‘Joe’s at the doctor’s office.’ Sometimes, if it’s somebody I know he was close to, I put Joe on. He’s very sweet always, the old Joe. Says things like with his sinus the way it is he’s not permitted to fly. They go away, after a while.”

  “A lot of visitors?”

  “Not many. Some of the old gang come in. Dirksen, Goldwater came last week, no, week before last. Forrest Davis was here just last Sunday. He and Joe had a good-old time. He stayed for dinner, and after that they watched the Ed Sullivan Show together, laughed quite a lot. You staying for lunch, Harry?”

  “You want me to do that, Jeanie?”

  “If you want. I’ll fix it for three—Tierney’s asleep upstairs. Then if you think you ought to go on after visiting with Joe, okay. If you stay for lunch, I’ll have something for you.”

  “Okay.”

  She led him into the study. Joe was seated in the armchair, the television on. He didn’t hear Jeanie until she raised her voice. He turned and saw Harry.

  “God-damnit, it’s good to see you, feller!” He rose from his seat and put his arm around Harry, who took his hand warmly.

  Jean nodded to Harry. “I’ll get back to work. See you later.”

  “It’s fine to see you, Joe.”

  McCarthy’s eyes glistened with pleasure. Then, furtively, he raised his index finger to his lips. “Shhh!” he whispered. “Follow me!”

  Harry followed Joe out of the study into the kitchen. They could hear the vacuum cleaner on the second floor. Joe bent over and opened the cabinet drawer under the sink. He ran his hand about the empty space. He stood up. His face was contorted. Surprise, indignation, resolution.

  He walked to the bottom of the staircase.

  “Jeanie? Jean-ie!”

  The vacuum stopped.

  “Yes, Joe.” The voice came down from upstairs.

  “Jeanie, it ain’t fitting what you did. That’s no way to treat Harry, come all this way from New York.”

  There was a silence. Jean came down the stairs, walked to the corner of the kitchen, reached into her pocket for a key, and used it to open her locker. She pulled out a bottle of vodka and, wordlessly, handed it to him.

  “Thank you, Jeanie.”

  She walked back upstairs. Joe turned to Harry. “Let’s go back in the study now, have a little good-old time.”

  The following Thursday, back in New York, Harry turned on the television to look at the news. The announcer gave the bulletin from the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Senator Joseph McCarthy was dead.

  71

  HANBERRY, 1991

  Harry speaks about the memorial services

  “You went to the funeral, of course. Tell me about it.”

  “Funny, the flight to Washington was overbooked that morning, and who should I bump into making a scene at the ticket counter—because there wasn’t a seat there for some filly he was traveling with? David Schine. I had trouble, that day, exchanging civilities with him. On that plane was me, dear Elena, who I married a month later, Schine, and maybe one hundred priests. I’m exaggerating, of course, but they came from all over the country.”

  “To concelebrate the mass? Or just to attend it?”

  “Both. There wouldn’t have been room that day, even at St. Matthew’s, for all the clergy at the altar. Let’s say there were fifty up there, the rest finding seats wherever they could in an absolutely packed church. The vice president came in, looking solemn. They placed Nixon in the second row. Allen Dulles of the CIA was there; what must have been the whole Congress, maybe excepting Senator Flanders, I guess; and a bunch of generals and admirals—you wouldn’t think they had been estranged by the Army-McCarthy episode. Then an incredibly moving eulogy by a monsignor. The music was something, like wrestling with death itself. (The organist was obviously a McCarthyite.) Jeanie in black lace, resolute, beautiful, stately. She did a very sweet thing. I was in maybe the tenth row, by the aisle. Walking down the aisle, solo, Vice President Nixon behind her, she spotted me. She put out her hand and brought me to her side, to walk down with her. The music turned tranquil, and we emptied out to the crowd on the street, a million cameras. Just like the old days, only they weren’t shouting out questions.”

  “Did you go on to the funeral in Appleton?”

  “No. I didn’t much want to go. When he died, four or five newspapermen and radio and TV people hunted me down, wanted to question me, Why had I resigned? et cetera, et cetera—I didn’t tell them anything, but I didn’t want
to be stuck in Wisconsin where I couldn’t have said no. They ran the Appleton funeral on TV, extraordinary outpouring. I haven’t figured it out even now; Joe went from being almost forgotten to being treated with defiant love and honor. Not quite overnight stuff: There was a quickie tribute in the Senate on the sixth of May—he died on the second—but they had a fullblown tribute in August, and you’d have thought it was George Washington who died.”

  “Any surprises?”

  “Well, yes. There were his old favorites speaking, but a lot who weren’t. What was amazing was a kind of unanimity of sentiment about how good he was to his fellow senators. A lot of them talked about Joe’s personal traits. It’s all published in a government volume. I’ve got it here. Listen to Lyndon Johnson.

  “Joe McCarthy had a rare quality which enabled him to touch the hearts and the minds of millions of his fellow men. One thing that can never be disputed is that the name of Joe McCarthy will never be forgotten. There was a quality about the man which compelled respect, and even liking, from his strongest adversaries’—”

  “Well, that just plain isn’t true. You’ve shown me what some of those adversaries said about him—and what he said about them.”

  “Yes, that’s absolutely true. But McCarthy’s attacks were always public. He never said anything mean about anybody unless there was a camera there. Strangest thing. And that personal manner got through to them, affected their personal judgment. And when Senator Johnson and those others spoke that day—there were thirty-three senators who gave tributes, half of them Democrats—they were speaking for the record, and that is what they said. Quite a few of those who spoke had voted to censure him. For instance, here’s Senator Stennis, old-guard South. ‘I was attracted to him through his intense interest in humanity and his consistent and unvarying kindness, not only towards his colleagues, but towards everyone.’ ”