The Redhunter (23 page)

A sound of approval from the gallery.

“Anyway, as I was saying, in 1944, Mr. Umin was hired by the State Department. You will ask—I know, Mr. Chairman—two things.
You will wonder what this has to do with loyalty/security. I told you he worked for the Federal Workers Union. And then—as
I was about to tell you—he joined the National Lawyers Guild. You’ll ask: Is that presumptive grounds for disqualification
as a security risk? Well—”

“Senator Green.” Chairman Tydings acknowledged the raised hand of his colleague.

“How many lawyers,” Green asked, “are members of the National Lawyers Guild, Senator?”

McCarthy looked to his right. Harry leafed open a page from his file. He whispered to the senator, who then said, “Three thousand
eight hundred and ninety-one.”

“Are you saying, Senator, that no member of the National Lawyers Guild qualifies to serve in any branch of government?”

“I think this, Senator. If you join the National Lawyers Guild either you are openly sympathetic to the Communist cause, or
else you haven’t figured out that it’s a Communist union. If the first, you are presumptively disloyal. If the second, you
are presumptively dumb. In either case, you should not serve in government.”

Tydings: “Is that the whole of your file on Mr. Umin?”

“Oh, no, Senator. In 1948, Mr. Umin left the State Department. We don’t know whether he was fired. But we do know that there
had been an investigation, and that it had been initiated two years earlier. This committee should be interested to find out:
What was
going on
during those two years? The
first
of those years, Alger Hiss was still in the State Department. What was in Umin’s file, other than what I have been able to
come up with, his membership in a Communist union?—”

Senator Green: “You didn’t establish that the Federal Workers Union was a Communist union—”

“What do you want me to give you, Senator? A carbon copy of instructions to the FWU from Moscow?”

“You said it followed the party line. But for all we know, J. Daniel Umin opposed their doing so.”

“And joined the National Lawyers Guild to protest
its
adherence to the party line? Come
on,
Senator.”

Senator Green pursed his lips and reached for his notebook.

“What is Mr. Umin doing right now?” Senator Lodge came in.

The chair: “Point of order, Senator.” Tydings reproached Lodge. “We do not discuss the current activities of ex-employees
whose case histories in government we are examining; we don’t go into their private lives—”

McCarthy was back: “Do you call it a private activity when Mr. J. Daniel Umin, in 1948, turned up as head of the Boston committee
for the election of Henry Wallace as president of the United States?”

There was a brief silence. Although it was ten minutes before the scheduled lunch hour, Senator Tydings brought down his gavel.
“The committee will reconvene at two-thirty.”

Sam Tilburn, immediately after adjournment in the afternoon, put in the scheduled call to Ed Reidy. He began, “That was a
nice edit you did this morning.”

“Thanks for the scoop.” Reidy’s delight with a scoop that made the
Star
the most quoted paper of that day was huge. “And tell whoever leaked it to you that if Scott Lucas ever uncovers who ratted
to us, he/she—I know you’re not going to tell me who the informant was—can have a job at the
Star.”

“Yeah. Well, my … anonymous … friend is a—valuable friend. Now you want to know about today. I mean about this afternoon—I
gave you the morning rundown on the McCarthy hearing at lunch. Well, there was three more hours, same kind of thing. Wrangle,
wrangle, wrangle. Joe was pretty deft today. Kept the Democrats a little off balance. Did you succeed in getting somebody
to track down J. Daniel Umin?”

“Yup. He’s a lawyer in Boston, low profile since 1948. Ziggie has a contact on the
Christian Science Monitor who
went through their files. They don’t have any notice on a Umin since the 1948 campaign. God, what a mess. Anybody else’s
name come up?”

“No. They spent at least two hours going back to the Lattimore case, even after two weeks. That’s Joe’s big hit, in my book.
The Umin case brings up the reasonable-doubt business. And of course the
eternal question: Did Joe at Wheeling use the term ‘two hundred and five members of the Communist Party’ or did he use a lesser
figure—as he claims—and more indirect language?”

“Anything come up on that front?”

“Something pretty funny. The critics—Senator Benton, especially—have been relying on a copy of McCarthy’s speech that he gave
to the broadcasting station. McCarthy said that was just draft notes. Benton says a technician insists he read the text exactly.
Joe replies:

“ ‘Here is a copy of the text you said I read from. Here is a sentence from that text: “Today less than one hundred years
have come under Communist domination.” Did I say that, I ask the honorable junior senator from Connecticut? Before he answers,
let me ask him if he thinks I read the following words, another sentence in that text: “Today, only six years later, there
are eighty million people under the absolute domination of Soviet Russia—an increase of over four hundred percent. On our
side the figure has shrunk to around five hundred thousand. In other words, in less than six years, the odds have changed
from nine to one in our favor to eight to one against us.” Does the honorable senator hold that up as a reliable text of anything
anybody
ever
said?’ That got a laugh, at Benton’s expense. But the serious talk had to do with loyalty/security
standards.”

“That’s crucial.”

“You going to write about it?”

“I’m going to try to go one day without writing about McCarthy. Might kill me. If so, was good knowing you, Sam.”

“Requiescat in pace, Ed.”

“Who is this guy McCarthy? You keep your eyes on the Washington scene, Harry. Tell me about him.”

Willmoore Sherrill paced his Fellows’ suite and addressed his protégé. Harry sat comfortably in one of the armchairs, a bottle
of beer in hand.

Willmoore Sherrill taught in the political science department. He was in his late thirties, nattily dressed in a tweed coat
and gray trousers, his close-cut hair graying. He was renowned for his ability to infuriate his colleagues and to engross
his seminar students. Born in Oklahoma, he was raised as a child prodigy by his father, a blind Methodist minister. Beginning
at age five, Willmoore read to his father for several hours every day. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma at age
sixteen and two years later was awarded a Rhodes scholarship. At Oxford he concealed his surreptitious marriage, but not his
political position—Sherrill was a socialist. His dissertation, written subsequently at the University of Illinois, was on
John Locke. It focused on Sherrill’s endorsement of majoritarian supremacy. He believed in the relevance of the general will
to democratic government. When in 1946 he was appointed associate professor at Columbia, with tenure, he had left socialism,
becoming a Truman Democrat.

“McCarthy’s certainly onto something. There’s a raw nerve out
there, Willmoore, and I think McCarthy is pressing it. It’s a hot public issue, I think. People are fed up. They sent Henry
Wallace packing. He got what, just over one million votes? But my sense of it is that McCarthy is becoming a very big deal.
His talk in Wheeling was a detonator.”

“Yes, that’s pretty plain now. What I’m asking you is, Do you know anything about Joe McCarthy that hasn’t been in the newspapers
every day for the last two weeks? What is it about him that makes people vibrate? Is it only what he says, or is it the way
he says it? Why are people listening to him who haven’t paid all that much attention to, oh, Senator McCarran, or Walter Judd,
who’ve been generals in the anti-Communist movement for years? Do you know anything about him personally? Have you ever run
into him, at the Political Union or anywhere else?”

“He was on campus last winter. He gave a talk. It was unusual. … ”

Harry got up from the chair and leaned back on the brick where the mantelpiece ended. He was giving fresh thought to an episode
entirely trivial, he’d have thought. But perhaps no longer so, he reckoned, since the infamous Senator McCarthy was featured
in it.

“We got the call from the senator’s office on a Wednesday afternoon in December. His secretary, or whoever, said that the
senator would come to us—the next day, Thursday. He was giving a speech somewhere around here the night before, so it would
be convenient.—You probably don’t know how the PU operates. We send out invitations in September and again in December to
just about everybody in the news. McCarthy was on the general list of people we invite to speak—the list includes practically
every sitting senator. That way, by inviting everybody, we get three or four. Of course, we put in a special effort to bring
in the big names, which did not include Joe McCarthy. Anyway, his office said the senator could talk to us at two-thirty.
We got a bulletin into the
Spec
that morning. The union execs got on the phone. We called a bunch of people to show up. We were pretty apprehensive—late
announcement, unknown senator.

“He arrived by cab at the theater. Gerry Fillmore—he’s the president—and I were there to meet him. He got out of the cab,
about five feet ten, on the heavy side, big, pleasant face, big grin, big ears, hard handgrip. He paid the cab, picked up
his briefcase, and said, ‘Well, gentlemen, where’s the crowd?’

“We took him to lunch at the faculty club. He ordered a minute steak and a beer and talked—you know, Willmoore, I don’t remember
what
he talked about—yes, it was about veterans’ housing. There were six of us, and we just bantered about this and that. Then
we walked over to Miller Theatre. It was embarrassing.”

“Nobody there?”

“Practically nobody. Maybe twenty guys. But WKCR—”the student radio station—”sent a reporter, and he had the lectern wired
in. McCarthy’s speech went out on the air.”

“What did he talk about?”

“Again, vets’ housing; there was some stuff on the Malmedy massacre. Nothing that stuck in the memory. The next day the
Spec
gave the speech about two inches of space.” Harry paused.

“There was one amusing bit. He was winding up his talk. WKCR had obviously allocated exactly a half hour. McCarthy didn’t
know that, of course. He was just winding down. He began the closing bit. ‘I believe in God’—”Harry imitated the senator’s
high-pitched monotone—”the student announcer’s voice came in. He had earphones on and was speaking in a real low voice into
the mike, but everybody could hear it, ‘
The views you have heard do not represent the views of station WKCR
’ Everybody broke out laughing. Including McCarthy. He finished the I-believe-in-God sentence, going on to flag and country.
He was very polite, good-natured about the turnout. Left no impression, except—a nice guy.”

Sherrill took it all in and made one of his characteristic turns, famous among his seminar students: turning from the recounting
of an event in the news to theoretical speculation. Sherrill had moved politically since his strenuous opposition to the Wallace
movement in 1947 and 1948. That opposition had led him not so much to the Republican Party as to a defiant conservatism centered
on his respect for the general will. When two years later ten Communist Party leaders were convicted for belonging, as Communists,
to a movement that sought to overthrow the government, Columbia’s political science department scheduled a faculty meeting
to deplore and protest the verdict and, indeed, the Smith Act itself. Going around the table, one after another of the tenured
professors expressed grave concern over the Smith Act. When it was Willmoore Sherrill’s turn to comment, he had said (the
word spread quickly), “There’s an old colored gentleman
who looks after my Fellows’ suite. He said to me this morning, ‘Professor, is it true there’s people who want to overthrow
the government by force and violence?’

“I said, ‘Yes, that’s true, Jamieson.’

“He said, ‘Well, Professor, why don’t we just run them out of town?’ ”

Sherrill turned to his distinguished colleagues. “I think Jamieson has a more sophisticated understanding of democratic theory
than any of you gentlemen.”

“My guess—”Willmoore Sherrill was pursuing the theme over a second glass with his talented student, “is that Senator McCarthy
is going to cause a hell of a row.”

At his seminar the next day, Professor Sherrill encouraged a discussion on the theme of what he called “clear and present
objectionability.” He asked the students to consider the question whether, under a bill of rights, a society could satisfactorily
formulate language that allowed the majority to say to an unassimilable minority: “ ‘
We don’t want you in our society.
’ We can tinker with ways of saying
why
we don’t want you—the clear-and-present-danger business. But the problem is like obscenity—how do you define it? Answer:
You can’t define it. But a free society isn’t satisfied if there isn’t any language around to convey what it is it
doesn’t want
to tolerate. Communists and fellow travelers,” he told the students, “are urging something the people don’t want. How do
they talk back conclusively? Isn’t that what Joe McCarthy is saying: that the Communists are
illicit
members of the American society?”