“Of our boy Skippy railing against the reds?”
“No. Of your breaking his heart.”
Fuller paused before saying, grandly, “I lack all such intention.”
“But not all such power.”
They were both still afraid of this conversation, and knowing that Fuller could outlast her in any duel of silences, Mary got up to file a handful of Bricker clippings from the European press.
“I suppose,” she said at last, “Tim was imagining how he’d like to sit at that desk every day, be at your beck and call.” She nodded to Miss Lightfoot’s empty station.
“He’d be excellent,” replied Fuller. “Works very hard, and has his race’s gift of gab when he’s working on paper. The stammer disappears then, just as it does when he’s drunk or—I’m sure—angry, though that I’ve never seen. His handwriting is even neater than Miss Lightfoot’s.”
“Oh, you’d see him angry if he worked at that desk.” Mary kept filing as she spoke. “How do you think he’d feel taking your calls, and hearing your conversations?”
Fuller said nothing, but still would not go back inside his office. Mary knew that he wanted to make her work even harder at this, force her to stick the knife farther in, get her—where McLeod had failed—to make the needle jump.
“Wouldn’t sooner rather than later hurt him less?” she asked. “Couldn’t you let him down easily? Give him up for Lent?”
Fuller pushed his hair above his forehead, making his ashless, marble brow fully visible. He returned to his office, declaring curtly, “I’m not Catholic, Miss Johnson.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
March 10, 1954
“You’re not coming in?” Senator Potter asked Tommy McIntyre at the threshold to McCarthy’s inner office in the SOB.
“No,” said Tommy. “I’ll let Mr. Laughlin go in with you to make a record.”
Surprised as he was by Tommy’s directive, Tim was soon even more startled to feel the hard, friendly clap of Joe McCarthy’s hand on his shoulder. The chairman didn’t seem to mind his presence, taking him, perhaps, for an unpaid gopher, maybe even a page. There was nothing to do but go in and, after taking charge of Potter’s canes, sit down on a beat-up horsehair sofa, a few deferential feet from the two senators.
“Now, Charlie,” said the chairman. “I hope you haven’t let Egghead R. Murrow scare you off from all the work we’ve still got to do together.” McCarthy ran his tongue over his top front teeth, and smiled as he awaited a reply.
“I didn’t see the program,” said Potter.
Tim had watched it on Hawkins’ television. The half-hour episode of See It Now had been unrelenting, even brutal, but Hawk had fallen asleep before Murrow closed with an ominous quotation from Julius Caesar.
“I gather the fellow doesn’t like me,” said the chairman, flashing another smile and twirling his big horn-rimmed glasses above the blotter. McCarthy was nervous, Tim realized, though only for moments at a time. At the doorway, when he realized he’d hit Tim’s shoulder far too hard, a look of tenderness had crossed his face and then instantly vanished, been left for dead in the space of a second.
“Well,” said Potter, who sat in a chair beside the desk, “my old aide Jones is throwing you plenty of bouquets up in Maine. ‘A great American, a great patriot, doing a great job.’” He tried smiling, but couldn’t manage it; there wasn’t enough mischief in him.
McCarthy, however, roared with laughter. “You never should have let him go, Charlie! I’m not sure I could get even Roy to put it so well.”
“Jones has also been saying some things, not so flattering, about Margaret Smith,” added Potter, just above a mumble. “‘A nice lady but for her left-wing ideas.’ Stuff like that.”
McCarthy shrugged, but Potter managed to warm to the topic of Jones, even if it wasn’t the subject he’d come in with. “In his speeches up there, Bob now talks about having been a ‘member of the committee.’”
McCarthy again laughed things off. “There’s a go-getter! You should have kept him and given him a raise!”
“He seems to be doing pretty well up there for a guy who’s no longer pulling in the eighty-five hundred a year I used to pay him.”
“He hasn’t gotten a dime from me, Charlie.”
The smile was gone, and the “m” in “dime” came out as a prolonged, electrical buzz, the way McCarthy would have sent it through a radio microphone.
“Joe, I got a report last night from across the river.”
There was no need to explain further. Everyone had been hearing rumors of the “Adams chronology,” a timeline prepared at the Pentagon by the army counsel, detailing all the pressures exerted on Schine’s behalf by McCarthy and Cohn.
“That prick Nixon wouldn’t be behind this, would he?” When it came to exposing Communists, McCarthy liked to call the veep a Johnny-leave-early, an ambitious young man who’d traded his once-raucous sound truck for the smooth sedan of Eisenhower moderation, a vehicle he now thought he could ride to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“No, Joe,” continued Potter, as sternly as he could. “I got this report from Wilson. He sent it to me himself.”
Surely, Tim thought, even Potter knew that the secretary of defense had not dispatched this dynamite without a direct order from the White House.
McCarthy tried to stare down his interlocutor, but Potter managed to continue: “I’m disturbed by what I see in it.” He sounded like the social worker he’d once been, regretfully forced to confront a relief recipient with reports of misbehavior.
The senator from Wisconsin would have none of it: “Charlie, you and I and the rest of the committee need to get back to finding Communists. We should be getting Scott McLeod the rest of his job back.” The “Ms” and the “Ns” were buzzing.
“Joe,” said Potter, delivering the line he must have rehearsed the hardest, “Roy Cohn needs to be fired.”
Tim recalled the look on Cohn’s face when the committee counsel had been on the phone screaming to John Adams about Dave Schine’s having to “eat shit” in basic training. Had that remark gotten typed into the “Adams chronology,” which Potter was nervously rolling and unrolling in his hands? Tim had no more than a second to ponder the question; the room’s sudden, inescapable drama was the hurricane sweeping McCarthy’s face, stirring up the expression that must have greeted General Zwicker a few minutes into his testimony.
“Senator Potter, believe it or not, I have some friends among the press. Men like Winchell and George Sokolsky. Jews. Strong, right-thinking Jews who have a clear sense of what communism actually is. They’re a minority among their own people, from whom they take considerable abuse. They won’t be pleased to see you and your friends go after Roy, who’s the youngest and the finest and the strongest of this minority within a minority. Winchell has a microphone, Senator. And Sokolsky has a thousand of Hearst’s printing presses. Go after Roy Cohn and they’ll go after you, Senator. In fact, I’ll make sure they do.”
Tim gripped both of Potter’s canes as if they might actually be needed to beat McCarthy back. And yet he could hear that the secretary sitting outside next to Tommy had not so much as interrupted her typing in response to the boss’s bellow. She seemed to realize that the fierce-sounding storm would actually be a quick shower, not worth opening an umbrella for.
But McCarthy was not quite through. “Everybody’s money comes from someplace, Senator. Even yours. Everybody’s people come from someplace.” McCarthy indicated the outer office with a raise of his chin. Was Tommy, Tim suddenly wondered, a former Communist? He looked toward Potter for some confirmation of the possibility. The senator did not respond. His courage, Tim realized, was of a purely physical kind; when Potter looked into the boiling face of his colleague, he appeared calmer than when he merely glanced at the carpet.
Then the sun broke through. McCarthy relaxed his chin and smiled. He shook his head. “Oh, hell, Charlie. I don’t give a damn about Schine. He’s just a dumb, good-looking kid hoping to
get laid even more than he already does. I think he figures coming home with a few scalps and a few headlines will accomplish whatever his face and his old man’s money can’t.” Potter said nothing, not even when one last cloud scudded across the chairman’s face. “But Roy worries about him,” said McCarthy. “And I’m not going to get rid of Roy.”
What, Tim wondered—trying to think like Tommy—did Cohn have on McCarthy? It couldn’t just be, as McCarthy was now saying, that “the Communists would take more comfort from Roy’s being fired than they have from anything since Roosevelt recognized Russia twenty years ago.” Nobody, thought Tim, not even Cohn, could be that smart or indispensable. Everybody said Bob Kennedy would have done just as well, been just as ferocious, if McCarthy had given him the counsel’s job. Joe Kennedy had wanted it for his son, but McCarthy, who’d even dated one of Kennedy’s daughters, had feared being tainted with the old ambassador’s anti-Semitism, something he couldn’t afford when the committee was investigating so many Jews. And so the job had gone to Cohn.
“Have a drink, Charlie.”
The chairman, smiling again, now appeared to take Potter’s silence for consent. It was settled; Roy would stay. And since the bottles in the glass-doored bookcase were all the way across the room, McCarthy reached a few easy inches for his briefcase, unsnapping its metal tabs and taking out a fifth of Jim Beam. He looked at Tim and laughed: “Are you old enough, son?” The “n” didn’t buzz. McCarthy may already have had a liquid lunch, but he was fully himself—playing to the room, not the radio. Tim smiled and shook his head, declining as politely as he could, while wondering if Tommy’s hatred of McCarthy might not spring from this alone, the drinking, the loathing a reformed drunk has for an active one. No, Tim decided, it wasn’t enough of an explanation, any more than Cohn’s talent for fighting communism could explain McCarthy’s determination to keep him around.
While the chairman, still smiling, took a drink by himself, the junior senator from Michigan sat in silence for a last few seconds. But then—perhaps only, Tim thought, because he feared Tommy’s displeasure—Potter found his voice and seeded the clouds for McCarthy’s next mood-storm: “We can get the army to fire John Adams, too, Joe. We can make it look like a trade, with fault on both sides. But unless Roy goes, this whole thing is going to have to be investigated, maybe even in front of television cameras.”
McCarthy’s smile disappeared, but no thunder issued from behind the new clouds on his visage. He seemed to be considering the possibility those cameras would present him, how they might be a risk worth taking if he could bend the hearings in his own direction, change their subject once the lights came up and the lenses opened. For the moment, however, it seemed he would err on the side of caution. “You tell your new friend Wilson to keep that report to himself from now on. We’ve got files of our own. We’ve got typewriters, too. You tell him that, Charlie.”
The meeting was over, and by all appearances McCarthy, now on his feet, was judging it a success. He reached into the office refrigerator for three small wheels of Wisconsin cheese, one for Tim, one for Potter, and one for Tommy McIntyre. All of them, the chairman included, were soon exiting Room 428 and walking down the corridor.
“Did you hear Flanders on the floor yesterday?” asked McCarthy. “It was better than Murrow and all that Julius Caesar crap. Listen to this,” he said, urging them to slow down while he pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. McCarthy began quoting the Vermont senator’s remarks: “‘In this battle of the agelong war’—I guess he means against the Communists—‘what is the part played by the junior senator from Wisconsin? He dons his war paint. He goes into his war dance. He emits his war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink army dentist.’”
McCarthy’s laughter bounced off the walls of the SOB. At the landing of the staircase, by the blue-and-white peppermint-stick columns, he said goodbye to his visitors with a high, enthusiastic wave that parted the halves of his unbuttoned jacket and revealed the holstered pistol beneath.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
March 19, 1954
Whenever the radio played “Secret Love,” Tim believed for a few moments that he had something in common with other Americans in the throes of romance. The song had been riding the airwaves for weeks, and it made him feel more normal than furtive, at least until Doris Day reached the tune’s happy ending. Right now, late on a Friday night when he was home alone working, the song seemed more than he could stand, so he turned the dial and arrived, almost immediately, at the sound of Joe McCarthy, speaking live from Milwaukee about the Democratic party’s “twenty years of treason, twenty years of betrayal.” Along with roars of approval from a hotel banquet room, the microphones were picking up traces of a “Joe Must Go!” chant from the opposing rally outside.
“Tonight,” McCarthy intoned, “I shall place before the greatest of all juries, the American people, an indictment of twenty counts, picked at random.”
The “m” buzzed through the mesh of the Philco.
McCarthy’s text and the protesting chant competed like the parallel columns Tim was constructing on a legal pad. The crux of the charges and countercharges already seemed pretty clear to the public: the army, through its secretary Robert Stevens and counsel John Adams, was claiming that all sorts of extravagant pressure had been brought to bear by Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohn to make Private David Schine’s life in the service a kind of holiday; on the contrary, the senator and Cohn continued to assert that the army was holding Schine “hostage”—preventing him from continuing to assist the committee and threatening the young man with overseas duty as a means of getting McCarthy to call off his probe into the army’s tolerance of subversives at Fort Monmouth.
But if the crux was clear, a farrago of detail still swirled underneath it. Tim looked at the columns he was composing for Tommy McIntyre and Senator Potter, and wondered if he’d ever master their contradictions:
ARMY CLAIMS (ADAMS CHRONOLOGY)
McCARTHY MEMORANDA
Dec. 9: Adams says he complained to Sen. McC about Roy C’s behavior and threats re Schine.
Dec. 9: Confidential memo from Roy C to Sen. McC: “John Adams said today…that he had gotten specific information for us about an Air Force base where there were a large number of homosexuals. He said he would trade us that information if we would tell him what the next Army project was that we would investigate.”
Jan. 11: Adams visits Cohn’s office. Claims Cohn said Stevens is “through” as Army Sec’y if Schine gets sent overseas.
Jan. 14: Memo from Roy C to Sen. McC: “John Adams has been in the office again…said this was the last chance for me to arrange that law partnership in New York which he wanted. One would think he was kidding, but his persistence on this subject makes it clear he was serious. He said he had turned down a job in industry at $17,500 and needed a guarantee of $25,000 from a law firm.”
Sitting amidst piles of newspapers from the past two weeks, Tim decided that the whole thing was impossible, like some assignment from the nuns requiring you to cross-connect the Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Cardinal Virtues. Was Cohn in love with Schine, or was Adams in love with money? A week ago, Tommy McIntyre had had Tim compose Senator Potter’s statement demanding that everybody be put under oath to sort things out, and four days after that, meeting in executive session, the committee had agreed—beginning in a few weeks, in front of television cameras—to investigate itself.
Tim was growing accustomed to the circularity of all this, and to the possibility that truth might be reachable only by riding on wheels within wheels. Did McCarthy have something on Tommy McIntyre (“Everybody’s people come from someplace”), and did Tommy also have something on Potter? Something to account for his ever-greater command of the senator’s office? Since the afternoon when the three of them experienced McCarthy’s wrath and bonhomie, Tommy had been so busy that Tim had had no chance to question the older man about his political past. When McIntyre slowed d
own enough for even a short snatch of conversation, he talked in riddles, sententiae, and snippets of poetry.
Closing his eyes and breathing in the woody aroma of the hardware store below, Tim tried to reestablish the concentration required for his parallel columns, but was stopped by the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
“You need a TV, Skippy.”
As soon as he came in, Fuller pointed to the radio, from which McCarthy’s consonants continued to buzz. Slightly and thrillingly drunk, he sat down on the edge of the desk and nodded toward an especially ugly picture of Cohn in the Evening Star. “Without a TV,” said Fuller, “you missed him on Meet the Press last Sunday. Trust me: he’s not as sweet as he looks.”
He took off his suit jacket—all the warm, nearly spring night required—and extracted from it a white card, which he handed to Tim. “For your information,” he said. “Forwarded from Bar Harbor by the paterfamilias.” The card invited the holder to the Maine state Republican convention, set for the first and second of April. “According to Father,” Fuller explained, “your Mr. Jones’s supporters are urging that he be allowed to speak to the delegates along with ‘Magrit.’” He pronounced Mrs. Smith’s name with an old Mainer’s accent.
Tim mentioned the latest that he’d heard in the office. “Jones is now giving speeches that refer to himself as a ‘member of the committee’! He used to just say he ‘sat in’ once in a while.”
Fuller flipped through the stack of newspapers on the desk until he found Monday’s Washington Post. “Good boy,” he said. “Glad to see you’re sometimes trading up from the Star, if only a small bit.” As Hawkins looked for the correct page, Tim considered the praise he’d just been given, which was really a piece of the tutelage that sometimes confused him—as when Hawkins suggested he get himself something better than the Van Heusen shirt he’d regarded as a splurge to begin with.
“Here it is,” said Hawkins, pointing to a column by the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart. “‘The uncensored Adams chronology is also understood to contain an indication that Cohn was receiving substantial financial assistance from Schine, while he was threatening to “wreck the army” in order to make his rich friend’s life more comfortable.’”
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