The Redhunter (41 page)

“So?” Harry, sipping his coffee, leaned down to view it.

“If a beachhead were established by the Nationalist Chinese in Shanghai and the railroad was bombed—interdicted—that beachhead
could become the capital of the resistance movement. This is a
can-do
proposition, Harry!”

Harry looked over to the wall clock. He rubbed his eyes. The clock said the time was 3:15. He checked his own watch.
“Goddamnit,
Joe, it’s
three-fifteen
in the morning!”

“Yeah, I know, I’m really sorry about that. But I just couldn’t keep it to myself, the idea—I’m talking about
the liberation of China!”

Harry turned to the staircase. “Make that call for eight o’clock, Joe.”

It was a tough job, Harry said to himself as he switched on the coffeepot with his left hand, turning the pages on the Gillette-Monroney
questionnaire. But
goddamnit,
Bontecou. Stop complaining. I’m riding with a great historical figure. McCarthy’s not the kind of person who would have permitted
Keelhaul—those were Erik Chadinoff’s words to him only last week. Willmoore Sherrill had published a paper backing McCarthy.
James Burnham’s
The Web of Subversion,
giving a scholar’s reading of the systematic infiltration of government by the Communists, was on the presses. The Senate
Internal Security Subcommittee had scheduled extensive hearings on the Institute of Pacific Relations, the primary academic
support system for the Chinese Communists. Its dominating presence—Owen Lattimore.

Harry had to do what he could. He brought his coffee and a banana to the coffee table and began reading the Gillette-Monroney
complaints.

Dean Acheson was cutting up newspapers in his law office at Covington and Burling. However fastidiously he discharged his
duties as a practicing lawyer, his mind was on other things, not least his reputation as secretary of state during the last
four years of Harry Truman’s presidency. His daily stimulant—“If you can call it that,” he remarked to his partner and close
friend Harold Epison, “the daily ingestion of poison I inflict on myself—”was what he referred to with some scorn as “the
McCarthy page” in the morning’s newspaper. He had been reluctant to evidence a formal interest in the unspeakable senator.
But in fact he read all references to him and, though only when out of sight, collected choice items voraciously. He had taken
to scissoring out clippings from newspapers (when his secretary wasn’t in the room) and tossing them into his briefcase. But
after a few weeks he decided that it would be better to undertake his project in a more orderly way. That was when he told
his secretary, “Miss Gibson, it is possible that when I do my memoirs I shall have in them a chapter on the … grotesqueries
of Senator McCarthy. For that reason, I shall ask you to clip out of the papers those articles or editorials I designate with
the initial
M.
These are to be clipped and put in a manila folder, in the bottom drawer—”he pointed down from where he sat—”over there.”

Day after day, week after week, month after month, the folder
grew in size. The methodical Mr. Acheson took to classifying the entries according to his estimate of their ranking. “M-O-3”
parsed as “McCarthy-Outrageous-3rd level.” “M-P-1” parsed as “McCarthy-Preposterous-1st level.” He had other categories, including
“T” (for treasonable) and “L” (for laughable). He also reserved a classification for criticisms of McCarthy that he especially
savored. His very favorites earned, as one would expect, a “1,” whence “M-C-1.” Such a discovery in a morning paper would
put him in a very good mood, and sometimes he would even drop a quick note of commendation to the author. When Senator Benton
said of McCarthy that he was a “hit-and-run propagandist of the Kremlin model,” Mr. Acheson had filed the remark as an M-C-2
and dropped a note to Benton, “Bill, nice score today on McMenace. Well done.”

This morning’s reference to McCarthy by Drew Pearson in his column had caused him to glow. “What he is trying to do is not
new. It worked well in Germany and in Russia; all voices except those officially approved were silenced in those lands by
intimidation.” But he decided against dropping a note to Pearson. He would not wish to run the risk of Pearson’s quoting him.
He could hardly countenance any public appearance of an ongoing contention between
Dean Good-erham Acheson/ Yak/ Secretary of State and Joe McCarthy/ Chicken Farmer/ Marquette
—wherever Marquette was—/
Junior Senator from
—a state that had lost its senses.

He had dined the week before with defeated Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Dean Acheson enjoyed the company
of Stevenson but thought him indecisive. Acheson relished the story Adlai had told him, over drinks at the Metropolitan Club,
about the dinner with President Truman. The president was then living across the street at Blair House, while the White House
was being rebuilt. Truman had summoned him when Stevenson was still governor of Illinois.

“I walked in the door, and the president said, I mean just after barely saying hello, he said, ‘Adlai, I want you to run for
president. You should announce the third week in April’—this dinner was in January 1952, Dean—‘and say that you will seek
a leave of absence as governor of Illinois.’

“I told him I was very flattered by the suggestion, but that I was committed to run for reelection as governor of Illinois—”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t even
acknowledge
what I had said. He went on and talked about this and that but at dinner repeated
exactly
the same instructions—I was to run for president, announce the third week in April, et cetera. I gave him the same answer.
After dinner he walked me to the door and, you guessed it, said the identical thing one more time, and I gave back the identical
answer. Then you know what he said, Dean? ‘The trouble with you, Adlai, is you’re so
indecisive!
’“

They both laughed.

Then Acheson had looked up.

“You know, Adlai, the president was quite correct; you
are
indecisive.”

But at least Adlai wasn’t equivocal about McCarthy. Acheson had given an M-C-1 to Adlai’s designation of McCarthyism before
the press club as a “hysterical form of putrid slander” and as “one of the most unwholesome manifestations of our current
disorder.”

When Harold Epison came into the office of his senior colleague just after five, it was in order to spend an hour on the appeal
he was shepherding to the appellate division on behalf of their client, the Kingdom of Iran. But he began by asking Dean whether
he had seen the reference to McCarthy—”I caught it in the
New York Daily News,
which I sometimes see. It wasn’t in any of the Washington papers—”by Owen Lattimore?

No, Acheson hadn’t seen it.

“Somebody apparently asked Lattimore after a speech what he thought of McCarthy. He said—I have this in memory, Dean!—McCarthy
is “a base and miserable creature.”

“That is a thoughtful summary,” Acheson said. He then paused. “Rather a pity it was done by Owen Lattimore. He is not exactly
a disinterested party on the McCarthy question. As a matter of fact, Harold—obviously to go no further—it hurts me to say
this—I think that miserable creature was substantially right on Lattimore. … But that hardly vitiates the soundness of Lattimore’s
summary on McCarthy.” He made a mental note to write down Lattimore’s characterization and slip it into his folder.

“You may be interested to know, Harold, that a few Republicans, who are well situated, think McCarthy has gone far enough.”

“Surely the question is, What does Ike think?”

Acheson turned his heard slowly, as if to say that the words he would now say were sacredly confidential.

“He is, I am, I think, reliably informed, prepared to move. … That is enough on that subject.”

“I agree, Dean. How’re you getting on with your book?”

“I write every night, five times a week. I try to do five hundred words a day.”

“Have you got a title for it yet?”

“Yes. I’m going to call it
A Democrat Looks at His Party.
We’ve lost a lot of spirit in the Democratic Party in the year since Ike came in. Of course there’s a lot of disequilibrium
in the country. You will find, Harold, that this is always so after a society completes a major effort—in this case, winning
a world war. Churchill’s defeat was a symptom of that kind of—letting your breath out. The surprise here was that Mr. Truman
defeated Dewey. But that also meant that the opposition never got a chance to exercise its muscles. Not until Ike’s victory
in 1952.”

“So your book is intended to do what?”

“To put the Democratic Party back on its feet, as the civilized party, the intelligent party. A worthwhile project, wouldn’t
you agree?”

“Of course. But you know, Dean, I hope you will confront head-on the foreign-policy problem. I agree with everything you say
about Senator McCarthy. You know that. But it is a fact that we had to fight a war in Korea that President Eisenhower ended—”

“Yes. The war ended officially five months after Eisenhower was elected—and three months after Stalin died.”

“Dean, you are being the advocate now. We Democrats did get into that war, we did—I know you hate that word—’lose’ China—”

“You are correct that we have to focus very carefully on what is happening in the Soviet Union. We don’t know what the triumvirate
that’s in power now, Khrushchev, Bulganin—I continue to refer to it as a triumvirate, though they executed Beria a week ago,
good riddance. What the successors to Stalin are going to do we don’t know, but there are no signs they are giving up their
commitment to rule the world. But yes, I
am
ready to say this, with great care: I will show you the draft of that chapter. I will say that it is correct that the Communists
can’t be allowed to go any further. Well, didn’t Mr. Truman say that? By engaging them in Korea?

“But the challenge will be to distinguish between the right kind of anti-Communism and McCarthy’s anti-Communism. A big difference.
Harold, did you see what Henry Reuss said about McCarthy the other day? Reuss was a Democratic contender against McCarthy
in 1952, you may remember. I think I may just have a copy of the clipping.”

Acheson leaned over and pulled out the bottom left drawer on his desk. “He said, Reuss said, ‘Senator McCarthy is a tax-dodging,
character-assassinating, racetrack-gambling, complete and contemptible liar.”

Acheson’s face brightened. He gave the closest he ever gave to a giggle. “I wish I had said that, Harold.”

The morning paper, left as usual on the steps of the house in Georgetown by the delivery car, was scooped up by Robin before
her father’s appearance that Sunday morning. (“He likes to ‘sleep in’ on Sundays,” Robin had told Harry. She pronounced the
words “sleep in” as her father did, with a trace of discomfort and resignation. Alex had spent many years in America but scrupulously
avoided “vernacular argot,” as he once described any idiomatic expression that came into use after his graduation from Columbia
in 1926.)

“I leafed through the paper, sipping my coffee.
Then I saw it.
I panicked,” she told Lucy McAuliffe, her friend and confidante at Senator McMahon’s office.

“What did you do?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. I actually thought of destroying that whole section of the paper and hoping Dad wouldn’t notice.
Fat chance I’d get away with it. He might not notice the missing section of the paper. But there must be ten girls my age
in the Brit/ State/DOD departments he works with, girls I’ve known and still do.
Somebody
is going to pass the word around that it was me with Senator McCarthy at the racetrack. I don’t know how many people would
tease my dad about it, but I can guess
somebody
would. What I did do was pull a jacket out of the closet and walk into the street. I decided I needed to give him time. I
didn’t want to be right there at the kitchen
table while he was reading the paper. I walked to the Lauinger library and tried to start in on
War and Peace.”