The Redhunter (34 page)

He had to have found her out.
She held her breath. … Either that or Joe was going to tell her he was dying of cancer … or—but no. If he had cancer, he’d
have been told it by a doctor. If he had gone to a doctor, Mary would have made the appointment, and that hadn’t happened.
It had to be the other.

Oh, my goodness. (Mary never used the name of the Lord in vain.) After all these years.

To her surprise, Joe was punctual. He gave her a fleeting peck on her forehead. “Well, what’ll it be for you, Mary? Your usual
Singapore sling?”

“My usual Coke, Senator.”

Joe ordered a gin and tonic and a Coke. He spoke of his experiences on the television interview with the CBS Washington anchorman
Gus Attlee. “Okay guy, Mary. We must be nice to him. He’s a youngish guy—”

She interrupted him. “Joe, what’s on your mind?”

He drank. “Mary, were you a Communist?”

“Yes.” She twined the paper napkin around her fingers. “I joined up sophomore year at college. Married a Communist; he worked
for the
Daily Worker.
We had Hilda, got divorced in 1931, came to Washington.
Igor went to Spain to fight against Franco. He was captured and shot. I never heard again from anyone in the party.”

“When you were in the party, what did you do?”

“Mostly I passed out leaflets at student meetings. We distributed a lot of them in November, at election time.”

“That’s sort of—all you did?”

“Yes, Joe. I didn’t try to influence foreign policy.” But she regretted the crack. “Sorry about that. You asked the right
questions. … You going to fire me, Joe?”

He leaned across, put his hands on either side of her head, and kissed her on the cheek.

“No. But I want you to do something for me, Mary. I want you to write me a letter describing everything you did as a Communist,
when you became one, when you quit, why you quit.”

She nodded.

“But Mary, here’s the most important thing. I want you to date that letter to me December 1946.” He winked at her. “You know,
Mary, I always run a thorough security check on everybody I hire.”

“Of course, Joe. That’s always been your rule. Joe,” her smile was weary but affectionate, “how’m I doing?”

“You’re doing just great, Mary. You
are
just great.”

The finding of the Tydings Committee surprised no one, but the language used surprised everybody. The report read not like
conclusions to an investigation but like a bill of indictment against the senator who had brought the charges.

The committee report was made public on July 17. McCarthy’s office had received page proofs only twenty-four hours before.
He called out from his office through the open door to Mary when the package of page proofs arrived. “You all go ahead and
read it first. Just tell me this. It’s not unanimous, right?”

Mary called back. The report had the signatures of the three Democratic senators. “Hickenlooper and Lodge weren’t even shown
it. Naturally, they’ve refused to sign it.”

When a half hour later Mary brought it in, he looked up at her. She turned her face away.

“That bad?”

She walked out of the room.

As agreed, Sam Tilburn telephoned Ed Reidy in Indianapolis after he had read the report and made a few phone calls.

“Let me give you the tone of it, Ed, by reading you two sentences. McCarthy’s campaign is, quotes, ‘a fraud and a hoax perpetrated
on the
Senate of the United States and the American people … perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruth in the
history of this republic. For the first time in our history, we have seen the totalitarian technique of the “big lie” employed
on a sustained basis.’ Unquote.”

“Sam, how they going to get away with language like that?”

“Hickenlooper and Lodge have already renounced it. Lodge wants a brand-new investigation of McCarthy’s charges and the whole
loyalty/security picture. As an example of distortion, all you have to read is the section on Owen Lattimore. But what comes
from it is just … a smell. A plain old cover-up.”

“A brand-new investigation! What I tried just now over the phone was a sigh. Did you pick it up?”

“Yes, Ed, I know, I know, nightmare time. But it seems to me your editorial lead is obvious. The Tydings Committee didn’t
investigate the charges—they completely cleared Lattimore, by the way—they set out to reject McCarthy’s charges. The full
Senate will have to vote on whether to accept the report. I doubt we’ll see a single Republican voting in favor. And let’s
see what kind of a public reception Joe gets tomorrow—he’s making a big speech in Baltimore.”

“Call you back after I read the wire-service report.”

Harry got an extra copy from Andrew Ely, Senator Taft’s administrative assistant. He took it home, and on the way to his floor,
scooped up his mail. There was an airmail from Elinor.

He sat down and looked at his watch and took a minute to survey the scene. A one-bedroom apartment, a living room that looked
more like a study than a lounge. It funneled into the tiny kitchen. To economize on space, Harry had the newly bought television
in the kitchen mounted on a lazy Susan. He could swivel it and watch it sitting at his desk or on one of the two armchairs—or
while preparing a meal. He had three photographs plopped about: one (his mother, his father, Harry at age ten) on the desk;
a second (Harry at Columbia, sitting as editor of the
Spectator,
his first day in office!) on a bookcase; the third (Elinor boarding the
Nieuw Amsterdam
with her father) also on the bookcase. He thought to himself: If ever he got two days in a row with nothing to do, and could
come up with a loose two hundred dollars,
he’d probably spend the time and the money replacing his boarding-house khaki-colored curtains, which reminded him of Camp
Wheeler.

The news would come in at six. He turned on the television set to CBS and turned down the sound. He’d turn it up when the
news he especially cared about today came on. He put the report down on one side of his typewriter, which he kept on the coffee
table where he liked to work. He opened the letter. After he read the first paragraph, he put it down, went into the little
kitchen, and poured himself some bourbon. He looked about in the freezer compartment for some loose ice, but there wasn’t
any. He didn’t have the energy to pull out the tray and disgorge the cubes. He took his glass, brought it to the table, and
sat down.

The television images turned to the news and flashed a photograph of Joe McCarthy. Harry didn’t turn up the sound. He stared
at the typewriter, the letter on one side, the report on the other. Which should he go through first?

What the hell, he’d go first with Tydings. The first paragraph of Elinor’s letter said she had become engaged. He could wait
to read the closing paragraph of the letter.

At the Admiral Fell Inn in Baltimore, Senator McCarthy faced a full house. He was speaking not to the American Legion or to
the Veterans of Foreign Wars; this was a hotel-keepers convention. There were a half dozen reporters and a television news
camera there. How would he respond to the historic rebuke of the Tydings majority? How would the crowd respond to him?

After dinner he rose to speak.

“I’m glad to be in your company tonight. A perfect night to celebrate shelter!”

There was a big laugh.

But quickly McCarthy got serious. “The words we most remember about Pearl Harbor were President Roosevelt’s. Recall, he spoke
of a day that ‘would live in infamy.’ Well, today was an infamous day in the Senate of the United States.”

McCarthy denounced the committee findings. They constituted an “invitation” to Communists and fellow travelers to come into
the government or stay in the government without any fear that there
would be action to uproot them. He itemized the backgrounds of some of his targets, and contrasted their treatment by the
“Democrat report” of the committee. He felt the listeners tuning in on his indignation. His speaking voice as ever in monotone,
even so he passed on his mounting scorn and bitterness. Toward the end, the assembly of professional hotel keepers and their
wives, much excited that their dinner speaker was the same man featured on the front pages of every newspaper in the country,
were rallied to McCarthy’s banner.

“When things get very bad, ladies and gentlemen, very, very bad, then we have to pay for grave mistakes, pay with the blood
of young American soldiers, which is being shed this minute, while we speak, in Korea. We won a great world war just four
and one-half years ago. We defeated enemies on both sides of the globe. We developed a nuclear weapon. Four and one-half years
under the leadership of President Truman and Dean Acheson and the State Department. What have we got? We have lost Poland
and Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia and Romania and East Germany. The Communist Party threatens to take over in Italy and to paralyze
France. China, almost one billion people, has been taken by the ruthless Communist dictatorship. The Soviet Union has got
the nuclear weapon, stolen by spies right from American laboratories. In Korea, I say, they are dying. And in Washington,
three senators invited to investigate these colossal events end up—talking about the sins of—Joe McCarthy.”

The applause was huge, beginning in indignation with the committee, changing gradually to sympathy for its victim, their speaker.
The occupants at the first table rose to their feet clapping. In a minute all 450 guests were standing.

McCarthy told the television interviewer that the voters in Baltimore had one very direct opportunity to speak back to Millard
Tydings. He was Maryland’s senator.

“They can vote him out of office in November.”

In November the voters did just that.

Harry reflected. Joe is riding high, he thought. It was
stupid
of Tydings to write a report so egregiously distorted. Would he complete the reading of Elinor’s letter? He turned to the
last paragraph. Nice, warm, but, really, formalities. He knew he had to write her back, and
made his way to the typewriter. He began to stroke out a few words, but quickly he stopped. He’d have to wait.

How long? An hour? A day? Two?—before he got her out of his mind, the girl-of-his-dreams while at Columbia. He had thought
the separation would be intolerable, but he had lived McCarthy minute after minute after hour after hour after day after month.
He thought back on her calm invitation to go to Holland to spend—a few weeks, was it? Perhaps his letter then had caused that
little—tectonic shift he had felt in the ensuing weeks, the phasing down of letters that in June had been coming three or
four times every week. There had been more space spent, in the last few weeks, on public affairs. That meant she was progressively
disinclined to talk about herself—or about Harry. He thought she too was distracted, by diplomatic life, even as he was distracted
by political life. But Elinor was not the kind of girl who could do without a real boyfriend. In New York, though they had
dated continuously, he had never got her so to speak full-time. What she wanted, needed, was a full-time boyfriend. Had she
found someone in the American Embassy?

Or was it a Dutch boy?

He closed his eyes and began typing, with sure fingers. “Dear Elinor.” Not “My darling Elinor,” not this time around. “I was
stunned//// I was shocked//// I was surprised and saddened/// I was shaken by your letter. You must write and tell me more
about the wretched young (?) man who has taken you away from me. What can I say? Would you like me to write you a speech about—what?
But I could write a speech about how you are the most entrancing girl in New York. In Holland. You are in my thoughts. All
love, Harry.”

He went back to his whiskey bottle, but this time he paused to shake out some ice.

He was surprised, and comforted, to find his mind wandering a bit, wandering from Elinor—and wandering from Joe McCarthy.
He looked over at his bookcase. He’d do a chapter from Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
It was always,
always
instructive.