Of course, he said patronizingly, the Republican administration was doing “infinitely” better than the Democrats in this respect. But there were “a few cases where our batting average is zero—we struck out.” As always he got down to cases: names, dates, figures, dossiers—the wrong ones, though his listeners couldn’t tell that. Joe said that was shameful, it was disgraceful, it made McCarthy sick way down deep inside. But there was worse. Despite admonitions from him, Eisenhower, like Truman before him, persisted in adhering to mutual aid treaties with Britain while the British insulted the memory of American boys who had fallen in Korea by trading with Peking. McCarthy’s voice rose nasally:
“Are we going to continue to send perfumed notes?… [I]t is time that we, the Republican Party, liquidate this blood-stained blunder…. [W]e promised the American people something different. Let us deliver—not next year or next month—let us deliver now…. We can do this by merely saying to our allies and alleged allies, “If you continue to ship to Red China… you will not get one cent of American money.”
Eisenhower was furious. C. D. Jackson and Paul Hoffman urged him to repudiate McCarthy as a Republican at the next presidential press conference. Hagerty agreed; so did Bryce Harlow and four other presidential assistants. But Nixon said the real victim in such a showdown would be the Republican party. It was decided that Dulles should answer McCarthy at his own press conference on December 1 with a statement that Eisenhower would approve word by word. McCarthy, the secretary said, had attacked “the very heart of U.S. foreign policy.” That policy was to treat other nations as sovereign, not to pick their trade partners or “make them our satellites.” As a real anti-Communist hard-liner—unlike McCarthy—Dulles observed that the United States must always be prepared “to retaliate with a devastating blow against the vitals of Russia,” and that it retained the capacity to do this “only because we share the well-located bases of other friendly countries.”
McCarthy was now on favorite turf. He liked nothing better than a slugging match with a Secretary of State, and he hadn’t had one for nearly a year. Besides, this was an exceptionally good time to do mischief. Eisenhower was about to confer with Churchill in Bermuda. An emotional televised appeal to the American people on the eve of the conference could go a long way toward sabotaging it and embarrassing the President. And that was in fact Joe’s next move. On the evening of December 3, as Ike was leaving for the meeting, McCarthy took the air to cry out against Englishmen who fattened their bankrolls by dealing with the murderers of U.S. soldiers. He implored “every American who feels as I do about this blood trade with a mortal enemy to write or wire the President… so he can be properly guided.” Five days later the White House acknowledged that over fifty thousand messages had been received. No one in Washington had been deceived by the moonshine about guidance. This was a straight-out contest between the two men, and the presidential spokesman who reported the mail count did not pretend otherwise. McCarthy won among letter writers, he announced, while Eisenhower held the edge among those who had sent telegrams. Since the White House receives comparatively few wires, this was an artful way of saying that the senator had overwhelmed the President.
It was at this point that it became fashionable in Washington to describe McCarthy as the second most powerful man in the country. Certainly any demagogue who could trigger that sort of response had become formidable. There were other indications that McCarthyism was approaching a new crest. In the next month, January 1954, Gallup reported that public approval of the senator had risen sixteen percentage points in the past six months. Fewer than three Americans in every ten disapproved of him. It is improbable that one in ten knew what a mountebank he was, so dexterous had he become in his manipulation of the press, but if the reactions of the man on the street can be put down to ignorance—and they probably can—those of the U.S. Senate cannot. Nowhere else was his wickedness so well known, yet in February, when the time came to vote on a $214,000 appropriation for his permanent subcommittee, the membership of the Senate was reduced to quivering jelly. Exactly one senator, Fulbright of Arkansas, had the courage to vote against it. Among those who did not find it possible to join Fulbright were Kennedy of Massachusetts, Johnson of Texas, Humphrey of Minnesota, Kefauver of Tennessee, Mansfield of Montana, Magnuson of Washington, Russell of Georgia, Long of Louisiana, Williams of Delaware, Kuchel of California, Douglas of Illinois, Lehman of New York, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. All were resolute, their characters were strong, they were enormously popular with their constituents. But they had never before encountered a prodigy like Joseph R. McCarthy.
Who believed him? Where was his strength? Who were the hard-core McCarthyites? They were Legionnaires, Minute Women, Texas millionaires, and people who felt threatened by fluoridation of public reservoirs and campaigns for mental health. They belonged to organizations like the DAR, the Sons of I Shall Return, We the Mothers Mobilize, the Nationalist Action League, and the Alert Council for America. They were anti-eggheads like Louis Bromfield, John Chamberlain, Max Eastman, James Burnham, and William F. Buckley Jr. (“McCarthyism,” Buckley wrote, “…is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”) They were fugitives from lost battles against Roosevelt legislation, the alliance with western Europe, the United Nations, the communications revolution, anti-anti-Semitism, the egalitarian passion, racial equality, the great internal migration of the 1940s, and social upheavals which were destroying the lines between the classes and the sexes, and widening those between the generations. At McCarthy rallies they sang reedily, “Nobody Loves Joe but the People,” and politicians were convinced that dark masses of troubled voters stood behind them. It was believed on Capitol Hill, in the winter of 1953–54, that eight men in the Senate owed their presence there to McCarthy support.
As the second year of the Eisenhower administration began, the junior senator from Wisconsin stood on an awesome pinnacle, and Roy M. Cohn was right up there with him. G. David Schine was missing. He had been drafted. His absence was thought unimportant in Washington. Schine wasn’t bright, like Cohn. In fact, McCarthy had secretly found him a pain in the neck. He hadn’t mentioned this to Cohn, because McCarthy needed Cohn. What he was just discovering was that Cohn needed someone, too. Cohn needed Schine.
***
Schine’s greeting from the Army had arrived in July. Apparently the blow was unexpected; he seems to have forgotten that he had even registered. Until then he and Cohn had been busy having a lively time—adjoining rooms in the Statler from Monday to Friday, merry weekends in Manhattan, and the anticipatory pleasure of planning antic forays into stodgy bureaucratic agencies. Joe, a lazy demagogue, had left the running of the subcommittee to them. They had felt, and had seemed to be, invulnerable. If no one in the capital dared strike back at them, who would? The answer was Schine’s Gloversville draft board. There was irony here. The good citizens of Gloversville were too far from the power structure to know of Schine’s mighty friends. They were also safe from a political fix: the one thing Washington feared more than McCarthy was a selective service scandal.
Cohn’s first thought was that his friend should be commissioned immediately. It was impossible; the Army, Navy, and Air Force in turn rejected Schine as unqualified. Cohn then summoned to his office Brigadier General Miles Reber, the Army’s chief of liaison on the Hill. Later Joseph N. Welch, special Army counsel, was to question Reber about that.
WELCH: Were you actually aware of Mr. Cohn’s position as counsel for this committee?
REBER: I was, Mr. Welch.
WELCH: Did that position… increase or diminish the interest with which you pursued the problem?
REBER:…I feel that it increased the interest.
WELCH: Disregarding the word “improper” influences or pressure, do you recall any instance comparable to this in which you were put under greater pressure?
REBER:…I recall no instance in which I was put under greater pressure.
The Pentagon
hadn’t taken this lightly. Indeed, to outsiders the most remarkable aspect of the Schine case was not the pressure from Cohn, but the favoritism which the military establishment had voluntarily displayed over a rich young McCarthy protégé who was, after all, only one of nearly a half-million Americans to be drafted that year. Schine’s situation had been studied by the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, two Army chiefs of staff, a vice chief of staff, the adjutant general of the Army, the commanding general of the Transportation Corps, the Air Force major general directing legislative liaison, and the judge advocate of the Navy.
At the direction of Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens, a New York textile manufacturer whose role in the affair would soon grow, two full colonels and a lieutenant colonel were ordered to reconsider the possibility that Schine might be officer material. Meanwhile the young applicant himself had begun to take an interest in the matter. The first time General Reber interviewed him, Schine was ready to raise his right hand and be sworn in as an officer right there. He was put out when Reber explained that there was more to it than that. As the general later testified, “he apparently felt that the business of filling out forms and going through with the processing was an unnecessary routine step.”
On November 3, 1953, Schine went into uniform, and after fifteen days of temporary duty in New York (“to complete committee work”) he was assigned to Company K, Fort Dix, New Jersey, for four weeks of basic training. Thanks largely to Cohn’s persistence, the case remained open. Indeed, it grew even more interesting. The Army cannot be said to have been inflexible. Unlike other recruits, Schine was given a pass almost every weekend. His limousine was allowed inside the camp to pick him up and bring him back. He was released from drill for no fewer than 250 long-distance telephone calls. One rainy day, when everybody else was on the rifle range, Company K’s commander found Private Schine goldbricking. Schine threw a comradely arm over the captain’s shoulder and explained that he had been studying logistics “to remake the military along modern lines”—an excuse which actually was accepted. Schine’s unusual ideas about how he might serve his country might, in fact, have been taken more seriously had not McCarthy, in his own talks with the Pentagon, let it be known that he did not share Cohn’s unqualified enthusiasm for Schine. In a monitored call to Stevens the senator asked the secretary, as a “personal favor,” not to assign “Dave… back on my committee.” He said that Schine was “a good boy but there is nothing indispensable about him… it is one of the few things I have seen Roy completely unreasonable about.”
John G. Adams, counselor for the Department of the Army, was now receiving the brunt of Cohn’s anger. In his phone conversations with Schine, at the camp, Cohn would learn of little ways in which his friend’s life might be made easier. He would then call Adams at any hour. Once he phoned Amherst College, where Adams was speaking, in an effort to have Schine relieved from KP duty the following day. If his suggestions were rejected, he became cross. During a heated discussion in New York he ordered Adams out of his car in the middle of three lanes of traffic, at Park Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and on January 14, 1954, when Adams told him that Schine, like 90 percent of all inductees, would probably draw overseas duty, Cohn said this would “wreck the Army” and cause Stevens to be “through as Secretary of the Army.”
By now the bizarre situation was being whispered about. In mid-December Drew Pearson ran an account of the Schine story. The following week the Baltimore Sun carried a long piece about it, and a New York Post article appeared in January. At the same time, McCarthy’s view of the Army was darkening. Goaded by Cohn, wrathful over the discharge of Peress, and spurred, perhaps, by his need for daily victories, he erupted at a subcommittee hearing in New York on February 18. The unlucky witness at the time was Brigadier General Ralph W. Zwicker, a hero of the Bulge and the commanding officer of Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. McCarthy told Zwicker that he was “not fit to wear that uniform,” that he should “be removed from any command,” and that he did not have “the brains of a five-year-old child.” When word of this reached the Pentagon, Stevens, under pressure from Ridgway, told the press that McCarthy would not be given the names of officers answerable for the discharge of Peress. Stevens deplored the “humiliating treatment” and “abuse” of Zwicker. He ordered the general not to appear before the subcommittee again, and said that he would testify instead. The secretary promptly received a phone call from McCarthy. “Just go ahead and try it, Robert,” the senator said menacingly. “I am going to kick the brains out of anyone who protects Communists!… You just go ahead… I will guarantee you that you will live to regret it.”
This was followed on February 24 by what became celebrated as “the chicken luncheon” in Dirksen’s Senate office, an attempt by senior Republicans to close the widening breach between McCarthy and the Army. Stevens found himself facing McCarthy, Dirksen, Karl Mundt and Charles Potter; Nixon was in an adjoining office. The secretary, as one reporter put it, was like a goldfish in a tankful of barracuda. Believing himself safe in the hands of these genial, sympathetic fellow Republicans, Stevens lowered his guard. All he wanted, he said, was to live and let live. Sure, he would be glad to put his name on a statement to that effect. He then did. The next thing he knew, the doors opened to admit a crowd of newspapermen. Mundt waded into them, distributing copies of the “memorandum of understanding,” which was what Stevens, disarmed by the senatorial bonhomie all around him, had just signed. Now in anguish he found that in neglecting to read the fine print he had capitulated to virtually all McCarthy’s demands. Among other things, the memorandum stipulated:
There is complete agreement that the Secretary… will give the committee the names of everyone involved in the promotion and honorable discharge of Peress and that such individuals will be available to appear before the committee. If the committee decides to call General Zwicker… General Zwicker will be available.
In the Pentagon next morning officers greeted one another by waving handkerchiefs. “Private Schine,” said one of them, “is the only man left in the Army with any morale.” The Times of London commented that “Senator McCarthy achieved today what General Burgoyne and General Cornwallis never achieved—the surrender of the American Army.” Herblock depicted Eisenhower whipping a white feather from a scabbard and saying to McCarthy, “Have a care, sir!” Palmer Hoyt of the Denver Post telegraphed Sherman Adams: FROM HERE IT LOOKS AS THOUGH STEVENS’ COMPLETE CAVE-IN HAS SPATTERED MORE MUD ON THE U.S. ARMY UNIFORM THAN HAVE ALL OUR ENEMIES IN ALL OUR WARS. A story going the rounds in Washington went, “Stevens didn’t mean to surrender to the senators. He just thought they wanted to look at his sword,” and McCarthy, brutal in triumph, told a reporter that Stevens could not have yielded “more abjectly if he had got down on his knees.”
For the next two weeks matters drifted. Republicans were huddling all over the capital. National Chairman Leonard W. Hall, having called McCarthy a “great asset” less than a month earlier, now criticized his conduct with Stevens. The President praised Zwicker at his March 3 press conference and said his administration would not stand having any official “submit to any kind of personal humiliation when testifying before congressional committees or elsewhere.” Extraordinary efforts continued to be made in the hope of accommodating Joe. All that was required of him at this point was that he show the same spirit of compromise. He wouldn’t do it. Instead he taunted the Pentagon, calling Peress the “sacred cow of certain Army brass” and saying that his investigation of the case had established “beyond any possibility of a doubt” that “certain individuals in the Army have been promoting, covering up, and honorably discharging known Communists.”
“Just damn tommyrot,” Defense Secretary Wilson replied. McCarthy was ridiculed in the Senate for the first time, by Ralph E. Flanders of Vermont: “He dons his warpaint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his warhoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist. We may assume that this represents the d
epth and seriousness of the Communist penetration in the country at this time.” Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky congratulated Flanders, and the President wrote to him: “I was very much interested in reading the comments you made in the Senate today. I think America needs to hear from more Republican voices like yours.” Attacking McCarthy still took courage, but it had begun, and the Army took heart. The senator’s impact on the military had been fearful, Hanson Baldwin wrote in the New York Times: “Its morale is depressed; discipline and efficiency leave much to be desired.” Now it was ready to go over to the counteroffensive, and the weapon it chose was the Schine affair. A strong case could be made that McCarthy and Cohn had been punishing the Army for allowing Cohn’s friend to be drafted; it was probably true, and in any event it was the weakest spot in Joe’s armor. On March 11 the Army leaked (through a Democrat) a chronology of the Schine case, including Cohn’s threat to “wreck the Army.”
Next day McCarthy countercharged that the Army had attempted to “blackmail” him into calling off his “exposure of Communists” by holding Schine as a “hostage.” Plainly a full-dress congressional investigation was needed to hear both sides. The White House hoped it would be made by the Senate Armed Services Committee—McCarthy influence was relatively weak there—but the chairman, Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts, was up for reelection in November and wanted no part of it. A mazurka of parliamentary moves followed. The Democrats tried to have it assigned to the full Senate Committee on Government Operations; their own senators there, with Margaret Chase Smith, would outnumber McCarthy’s men. The Republicans wouldn’t stand for that, however, and the only solution acceptable to all parties was foolish: the conduct of McCarthy and Cohn was to be investigated by their own subcommittee. McCarthy agreed to step down as chairman; Mundt, one of his most ardent admirers, would preside. Cohn was similarly unqualified to serve as chief counsel. The task of finding a successor for him seemed insurmountable; what was needed was an able attorney who had not expressed an opinion about McCarthy. Dirksen came up with Ray Jenkins, a Knoxville, Tennessee, trial lawyer. Procedural questions followed. Dirksen protested against public hearings, but Lyndon Johnson successfully demanded televised sessions, and McCarthy won the right of cross-examination—one he had adamantly denied to witnesses when he sat in the chair.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 106