The Redhunter (31 page)

JUNE 25, 1950

At five
A.M.
Korean time, on June 25, 1950, the North Korean Army invaded South Korea. Two hours later, at 5:45 P.M., New
York time, the United Nations Security Council met, petitioned to do so by President Truman’s ambassador to the United Nations,
Ernest A. Gross. By a stroke of luck for the U.S., Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik was boycotting the Security Council that
week in protest against the Nationalist Chinese occupying the China seat—it belonged, the Soviets insisted, to mainland China,
which Mao Tse-tung had conquered in the preceding year. When Secretary General Trygve Lie, after giving an up-to-the-minute
report on the military crisis in Korea, initiated his resolution, Ambassador Malik was not within reach and could not therefore
exercise the veto the United Nations Constitution had awarded to Russia, France, and England, along with the United States.
The delegates endorsed the secretary’s cease-and-desist resolution against the North Korean Communists and in successive sessions
voted a) to resist the invasion by military means, and b) to request all members of the United Nations to assist in the military
effort.

That was on Monday and Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Senator Joe McCarthy issued a statement to the press. He charged that the terrible, disastrous war—Seoul, South
Korea’s capital city, had fallen to the Communist invaders on day
four—was the result of inept diplomacy by “two men, a secretary of state, Dean Acheson, and a former secretary of state and
special emissary, General George Marshall.”

These men, “informed and perhaps guided by” the Institute of Pacific Relations, which “for a long time has been a Communist-directed
operation,” failed to support the Nationalists in China, “losing that great subcontinent to the Communists in October.” And
now, “less than a half year later,” the Communists in North Korea—”a lethal finger of Joseph Stalin—have pitched the world
into war, one more time, a mere five years since our great struggle of 1945.”

The press everywhere featured Senator McCarthy’s comprehensive indictment of the Truman administration’s foreign policy. Telegrams
poured into his office beyond any capacity of Mary Haskell to handle them—she had to enlist the help of her retired brother
and his wife to cope with more than five thousand messages. McCarthy instructed Harry to call the administrative assistant
of Senator Tydings to request one week’s postponement in the Tydings hearings until the Korean crisis could be assimilated;
he pointed out that a moratorium would give individual senators the time to be briefed and to arrive at whatever recommendations
they wished publicly, or indeed privately, to urge on President Truman.

Senator McCarthy now found photographers and reporters stationed during all business hours outside his office. Their assignment:
to cover every public movement of the senator—the whole country seemed now to want to follow, hour by hour, Joe McCarthy.

Throughout the barrage of questions regarding his criticism of the Truman administration, nobody brought up the name Forrest
Davis, and McCarthy kept his secret to himself.

The meeting with Davis had been three weeks earlier.

They all knew Forrest Davis, a talented and scholarly journalist associated for many years with the
Saturday Evening Post,
now coeditor of the conservative fortnightly
The Freeman.
Davis was in his late sixties. He was balding and wore what one fellow journalist described as “a little sprig on his chin.”
He was happy and relaxed at the cocktail party given, that Saturday evening early in June, by Frank Hanighen. Hanighen was
editor and publisher of
Human Events,
a weekly conservative
newsletter-essay, four pages of political briefs by Hanighen followed by one four-page essay, usually written by educator
Felix Morley, alternating with French essayist and philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel.

Forrest was much at ease in the company of fellow conservatives. The headliner at that party was of course Joe McCarthy, who
arrived accompanied by his young aide, Harry Bontecou. Ralph de Toledano and Karl Hess were there, the little conservative
enclave in
Newsweek
magazine. Henry Regnery, the publisher of conservative books, modern, and classical, based in Chicago, chatted and nibbled
on a cheese cracker; he was a patron of Frank Hanighen’s
Human Events.
Regnery had brought along young Bill Buckley, freshly graduated from Yale, whose projected book on the ideological vectors
at his alma mater Regnery had agreed to look at. C. Dickerman Williams, chief counsel for the Commerce Department, had been
a law clerk in 1925 for Chief Justice William Howard Taft. He was discussing the uses of the Fifth Amendment, on which he
was an authority, with Ben Mandel, former Communist official—it was he who had written out the Communist Party card for applicant
Whittaker Chambers, then twenty-four years old, in 1925. Mandel was now a researcher for the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. And there was Freda Utley, the British journalist, a naturalized American, author of an expose
(The China Story)
on the loss of China, published by Regnery. She was talkative, affectionate, a little deaf. She had a lit cigarette almost
always, often between her lips, even when she spoke.

Forrest Davis was enjoying his fourth vodka and tonic. He was a warm friend of anyone he liked and could be suicidally generous
when inflamed by wine with a love of the world, which was much of the time.

Davis was also in arrears to Putnam’s, his publisher. Putnam’s, approving his outline, had advanced Davis three thousand dollars
to write a book-length, critical account of the career of George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff during the Second World
War, special presidential delegate to China, and secretary of state for two years beginning in January 1947, during which
time he helped to launch the Marshall Plan. That important initiative called for immediate and abundant economic aid to western
Europe to help it revive after the world war.

Working on his Marshall biography in the summer and fall of 1949, Davis ran out of time (he was several months behind on delivery
date) and money. He was desperate and thought to gain a little leeway by enticing Doubleday to take an interest in the book.
He approached an acquisitions editor, sending him an outline of his proposed book. He did this without consulting his agent,
let alone Putnam’s. He asked for, and got, five thousand dollars. He intended to repay Putnam’s forthwith its three-thousand-dollar
sum, but the press of immediate debt caused him to defer this. Still, he was confident that—his book completed—the royalties
from sales would earn him more than enough to repay Putnam’s advance.

McCarthy, drink in hand, approached Davis in a corner of the noisy room. They greeted each other and Davis winked, mentioning
that he had seen Joe in the clutches of Freda Utley during the past fifteen minutes.

“Yes,” Joe said, brushing off his jacket flamboyantly, “Freda breasted me—”he moved his own chest forward in near-body contact
with Forrest, imitating Utley’s intimate aggressions when struggling through her deafness to hear cocktail chatter. “And she
managed to spill her cigarette ashes down my coat.”

Joe chuckled, patting the lapels of the jacket, then said, “But who can get mad at Freda? After what she’s been through.”

As a young woman in England, Freda Utley had joined the Communist Party. She traveled to Moscow, met and married Arcadi Jacovelevitch
Berdichevsky, a young Soviet official, and bore him a son, Jon. One night in 1933, at three in the morning, came one of those
legendary knocks on the door of their apartment. Arcadi opened the door to two men in civilian clothes. They told him he was
wanted “for a few hours” to give vital information.

From that moment on, Freda never heard from him or of him again. She waged a five-year international campaign, persuading
illustrious pro-Soviet British intellectuals to participate in her effort to persuade the Kremlin to disclose where her husband
was. To no avail. What came then was her renunciation of Communism and her influential book,
The Dream We Lost.
She was now an icon in the antiCommunist movement.

Their host, Hanighen—orderly, finicky, acerbic—had joined McCarthy and Davis in their reclusive corner. He advised Joe, with
a
straight face, that there was one other version of what happened in Moscow that night in 1933, namely that her husband had
been
relieved
when the knock came, sparing him more time with Freda. McCarthy laughed heartily. He and Davis reached out to the waiter
for replenishment of their drinks. Hanighen was called away by another guest.

Davis suddenly said, “Joe, follow me, just a minute, into the next room.”

They took their drinks into Frank Hanighen’s study and sat at a card table. McCarthy stretched out his legs. Davis leaned
over to him.

“Joe, I think the fight you’re engaged in is the most important fight of the postwar years.”

“Well, yeah, Forrest. I
know
it’s important, but glad to hear from you you think the same, though I’ve known you did.”

“Well,” Davis’s eyes were brimming with solicitude and affection, “I want to make what I think will be an important contribution
to your fight. I want to give you my story on George Marshall.”

“I know you’ve been working on a book, Forrest. But what are you suggesting, a speech based on your material?”

Davis drew himself back. He looked now, with his goatee raised slightly, his eyes drawn down, his hands raised about his waist,
like a Chinese emperor bequeathing a whole province to one of his sons. “I propose to give you the whole thing. The entire
manuscript. As if you or your staff had written it. It is dynamite, Joe, an explanation of the person primarily responsible
for our diplomatic problems, from Yalta to the present.”

At eleven the following night the telephone rang in Harry’s apartment. “Joe here, Harry. I want you to come over to my place
right away.”

“You okay, Joe?”

“I’m okay. But I got something I want you to read. Something vital. You’re young, it’s
early,
not even midnight.”

Harry, at twenty-three, was indeed young, he reflected as he pulled on his pants, though he needed more sleep than McCarthy,
whose legendary indifference to sleep his staff could admire, even if they did not have the same stamina.

He found Joe excited. “This tells it
all.
Marshall kept Roosevelt ignorant of critical intelligence reports at Yalta. Kept the generals’ military advice away from
FDR. He opened the critical pass to the Chinese Communists so they could make contact with the Russians.” Joe was now consulting
his notes. “He couldn’t ‘remember’ where he was on Pearl Harbor. Couldn’t
remember
—chief of staff, on the day of the worst military disaster in history! Went to China and in effect starved Chiang Kai-shek
to death, making the Communist victory possible.”

“Are you saying, Joe, Forrest thinks Marshall’s a Communist?”

“He never says that. But he says he is responsible for our collapse in the Pacific theater, with who knows what’s ahead for
us in Korea.”

“You want me to read it now?” Harry looked down at the bulky speech folder. “Gee. This thing must be fifty, sixty thousand
words.”

“I
know.
I spent all afternoon with it. I thought I’d use it as a speech, schedule it for day after tomorrow. But I wanted you to
look at it.”

“Sure. But, Joe, what’s the—hurry?”

“I think you’ll know what’s the hurry after you’ve read it.”

“Okay. I’ll do half of it tonight, half tomorrow morning. Check with you by noon.”

“Good man, Harry. How about a nightcap?”

“What I’ll need is strong coffee, Joe.”

“You won’t be sleepy after you start reading this.”

“Good night, Joe.”

Harry called at exactly noon. “It’s a troubling story, Joe. A real icon shatterer. But how the hell are you going to read
that manuscript to the Senate? It kept me reading until three, then from eight to eleven.”

Joe was never much interested in details. “Oh, well, I’ll read fast. You agree it’s terrific stuff?”

“Forrest Davis is a fine writer and very scholarly. But Joe, it’s not going to be easy to pass this off as just one more speech
by Joe McCarthy. It’s got references to works by Churchill, Cordell Hull, Henry Stimson, Robert Sherwood, Sumner Welles, Hanson
Baldwin. There are sentences in it that don’t, well, don’t
sound
like you.”

“Everybody knows busy senators get help with their speeches.”

“I know. But senators, try to
sound …
authentic. There are some sentences here that … ” Harry turned to the manuscript. “Listen:

“ ‘I am reminded of a wise and axiomatic utterance in this connection by the great Swedish chancellor Oxenstiern, to his son
departing on the tour of Europe. He said: “Go forth my son and see with what folly the affairs of mankind are governed.”‘
I mean, Joe, that’s just not going to sound like something cooked up in the office—”

“Even with a Phi Bete assistant like you?”

“Even with a Phi Beta Kappa assistant. This sounds like a dissertation.”

“Harry?—”Harry knew what was coming: McCarthy had made up his mind. When that happened—the mind was made up.

“Harry, I’ve decided to give it as a speech. Now, is there anything in particular you want to tell me about it?”

“Yes. As it stands, there isn’t
one
sentence in the book that says that General Marshall is a Communist sympathizer or agent.
That’s got to be preserved.
Don’t let
anybody
push you across that threshold, into saying Marshall is a Commie.”

“Right, right. Well, get the manuscript here real fast, first thing after lunch. We’ll need the whole thing retyped. I’ve
already warned Mary. She’s lining up a couple of extra hands.”

For the next two days, the office was chaos. McCarthy wrote a letter to every member of Congress to advise that he was going
to review at some length the whole Marshall record. The press was cued, and when he took the rostrum on June 14 the galleries
were packed. Jean Kerr and Don Surine and Harry sat on a couch at the rear of the chamber. McCarthy began by acknowledging
the heroic endeavors of his staff. “I believe most of them are in the gallery today. I salute them; they worked eighteen,
nineteen, and twenty hours a day in getting the documents together.”