The Redhunter (45 page)

“Now that’s just plain
stupid!
And it argues against the case McCarthy has been trying to make for two years.
Obviously
the
Daily Worker
is going to sound like the Bill of Rights, the Magna Carta, and the Areopagitica when it opposes the Smith Act—which is designed
to tattoo and disable American Communist leaders. What did your boss McCarthy—”

“Do you have to say, every
goddamn
time, ‘your-boss-McCarthy’?”

Willmoore looked over at his old student, only three years out on his own, so young, quick witted. His head slightly cocked,
he smiled, accepting the rebuke.

“I was saying, What does—Joe—
expect
to read in the
Daily Worker
’s denunciation of the Smith Act? ‘
The Smith Act is wrong because Lenin wouldn’t have liked it
and would not have passed any such act against his enemies’?
Obviously
the
Daily Worker
is going to sound like the Bill of Rights whenever it is on the subject of all those freedoms the Communists would of course
eliminate if they had power. But the way McCarthy puts it, if you oppose the Smith Act you’re being managed
by the
Daily Worker
. And so people shake their heads and say to themselves, ‘If that’s right, then maybe the
Daily Worker
isn’t so wrong.’ Much more of that kind of thinking and we’ve had it. He alienates a lot of the right people and
all
the intelligentsia except you and me, Harry.”

“—But we do make those points,” Harry objected; still, Willmoore strode on.

He felt it had to come up. It was one of the principal reasons he had avoided a meeting with the students.

Roy Cohn.

They met in January. McCarthy needed a chief counsel for the committee he would now head up, the Republicans having taken
over the Senate after the November elections. Cohn, the word immediately got out, had himself masterminded a party in his
honor, ostensibly given by the FBI’s Lewis Nichols. It was Harry’s first exposure to the young man who in a matter of days
seemed the vortex of Joe McCarthy’s world. Senators, congressmen, journalists, made their way to McCarthy’s inner counsels
often depending on Roy Cohn’s opinion of them. He anxiously assumed all the responsibilities for the committee McCarthy hadn’t
specifically reserved to himself. For all that he was brilliant and quick on his feet, he showed quickly a capacity for critical
misjudgment, as in his … disastrous “inspection trip” to USIA libraries abroad. Harry was loyal to his boss and stayed out
of the way, but there was no way to avoid the probing of Professor Willmoore Sherrill.

“Now tell me, who on earth is this squirt Roy Cohn, and his beautiful Greek companion, David Schine? All of a sudden the entire
world learns about their travels. We read, day by day, that they have gone to Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade,
Athens, Rome, Paris again, and London. The impression they mostly leave is that they’ve never read any books themselves—”

“Roy graduated from Columbia Law School at age nineteen.”

“So he can handle college and law school requirements. That doesn’t mean anything.
I
ought to know.” Willmoore had graduated from college at sixteen. “But the impression they leave—‘junketeering gumshoes,’
one London critic called them—they swoop down on overseas libraries, demand to see lists of books, refusing to tell anybody
at any time what books they’re looking for. Says here,” he looked down again at his folder, “that they ‘spent seven hours
in Rome commandeering the presence of the heads of every American agency in Rome,’ coming up with? Nothing. They get back
to Washington, the laughingstock of the literate world, and your—McCarthy welcomes them like Lewis and Clark. I’m surprised
he didn’t order a ticker-tape parade up Broadway for them. I repeat, who
is
this guy Cohn?”

“He was hired just before the European trip. Protege of George Sokolsky.” Harry referred to the influential conservative,
anti-Communist newspaper columnist. “Roy was on the prosecution team that nailed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Joe’s very impressed
with him. Has him on as counsel to the committee.”

“Okay. One week after Cohn and Schine come back, he—your—friend—McCarthy gives a news conference in Savannah. He says in it,
according to Associated Press, that ‘several U.S. representatives and senators have
known
Communists on their staffs.’ So that pisses off a lot of congressmen and senators, right? Then apparently McCarthy realizes
this so he simply says to the press he never,
ever
used the word
known
. Anybody believe him? Like nobody. So,” again Willmoore looked at his folder, “so they ask what Joe has to say about Bill
Benton. Now Joe McCarthy
had
his revenge on Benton, got him defeated in Connecticut, which was super-okay by me. But the press hears from Benton that
Joe should be made to give
the names
of these Communists who served on congressional and Senate staffs. And what does Our Joe say?”

He read from his folder. “He says … ‘I am through paying attention to that odd little mental midget, Benton, whatever he has
to say. His complete lack of intelligence makes him too unimportant to waste time on.’ ”

Willmoore leaned back on the couch, his head almost horizontal, features frozen, as if knocked flat by a bulldozer. “You can’t
say
that about a guy like William Benton! You can get away with saying he’s screwy-soft on everything from public housing to
the World Bank to our policy on the United Nations. But you
can’t say
that man—he’s a close collaborator of Robert Hutchins, he’s vice president of the University of Chicago, chairman of the
board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica—you can’t say he’s a
mental midget
. What are sensible people,
and that’s who should be on our side on the big issues, going to think? Suppose Our Joe called Einstein a mental midget—which,
by the way, I think he is, every time his name shows up on the masthead of one of those peace-with-disarmament committees,
even though it is
putrefactive
with pro-Communist history and personnel—are people going to think Einstein is dumb and McCarthy is the only person bright
enough to discover this?”

“Benton is no Einstein.”

Willmoore stopped. He rose from the sofa. He advanced sternly on Harry. “That was
truly
lame, what you just said. Unbefitting a former student of mine.
Obviously
Benton is not Einstein. They do not have in common that they are both geniuses. They do have in common that they are, neither
one of them, mental midgets. Shall we go on?”

Harry was tired, frustrated, and hot. “What do you want me to do, Willmoore? Bat back every pitch you throw out at me? Defend
everything Joe—‘my-boss-Joe’—has ever done?” He paused for just a moment. Recovered, he said quickly, “Will you give me another
drink, or am I being punished for a false analogy?”

Willmoore looked down at Harry and puffed on his cigarette. “What do you want
me
to do, Harry? Cut it out?”

“Why don’t you just give me your bottom line.”

“It is that McCarthy has now for some months been doing more damage to the anti-Communist cause than help to it.”

“Yeah, I know, some people are saying that, Willmoore. But there’s another way of looking at it. If Joe McCarthy were crippled,
how far back in the wrong direction would the other people go? Do you want to see the disappearance of an effective loyalty/security
program, the collapse of organized opposition to accommodationist foreign policy—”

“How far will the other side go with the holes Senator McCarthy has opened up for them?”

“I get your point.” Harry drained his drink. “Now, let’s talk about other things, okay? Like, Why haven’t you been promoted
to full professor? I’ve got a bunch of things on my mind, including how are you doing on your Rousseau book?”

“I’m coming along with it, coming along.”

Harry didn’t remind him that he had been saying that for six years. They walked out together, sometime student and teacher;
companions of the mind, warm friends. Harry did not return to the subject of Joe McCarthy, and he didn’t tell Willmoore anything
about his own growing reservations.

President Dwight David Eisenhower looked up from his broad Queen Anne desk in the Oval Office. He had not changed from the
picture of him, so widely circulated, taken when he sat down for the first time at the presidential desk, on January 20, 1953.
Presidential flag on his right, U.S. flag on his left, oil painting of George Washington behind him, his press secretary seated
at his side, clipboard and secretarial pad in hand.

President Eisenhower was a reassuring figure. A little balder than on D-Day, nine years earlier, a few more wrinkles, but
nothing more under the chin. D. D. Eisenhower, West Point, 1915, would never gain weight. “He just decided soon after we were
married,” his wife, Mamie, explained to the interviewer from
Life
magazine one week after Ike’s election, “that he wouldn’t gain weight. That was the end of it. If he thinks he’s putting
on weight, he stops eating. Some things are quite simple for Ike.”

Handling Joe McCarthy was not a simple problem for Ike. Admirers of the general were abashed by Eisenhower’s failure, during
the political campaign in the fall, to rebuff Joe McCarthy. The whole world was watching, it seemed, when the two campaigners,
one running for president, the other for reelection as senator, appeared jointly in Milwaukee in 1952. How would Ike behave
toward the senator who two years before had given a 45,000-word speech the tendency
of which was that George Marshall was a partner in a huge conspiracy to undermine the anti-Communist world? James Hagerty,
Eisenhower’s press chief, had an approach to the problem. Everyone was anticipating the meeting in Milwaukee between Eisenhower
and McCarthy. What to do, how to think about, how to act in the context of, McCarthy’s famous speech about George Marshall?
The answer, Hagerty held out, was: It was simply a “delirious act—”done by young Joe McCarthy without any real thought given
to the charges he was making—or, rather, voicing. “Some people, General, don’t even think he ever even read it through. McCarthy
spoke in the Senate chamber for a couple of hours in a monotone, then dumped the speech into the
Record
. And that was that.”

Eisenhower had not been so easily put off. It was only after campaign manager and New Hampshire governor Sherman Adams deployed
the language of the military that Ike bent.

“General, it’s this simple. We have got to carry the Midwest. Joe McCarthy is God for many voters in the Midwest. They think:
Here is somebody who is from our part of the world, who is really raising hell with the people in Washington who lost what
in the war you set out to achieve—”

Eisenhower had looked up sharply, his expressive face a mixture of curiosity and indignation.

“—who lost,” Governor Adams continued, “I mean, who lost because of much of the
postwar
diplomacy, a war that had been brilliantly won and fought. Now there is no
way
you can afford to simply denounce McCarthy. Renounce your candidacy, if that’s what you want to do—you might just as well.
Second worst is to appear in Wisconsin with McCarthy—there’s no way you can go to Wisconsin at all without
appearing
with him—he owns Wisconsin—and stand way off at one end of the stage from Joe, make it look as if he had yellow fever. Treatment
of that kind would be picked up like in two seconds and every pro-McCarthy voter in the country would be furious and looking
for a way to avenge Joe—”

“So goddamnit, Adams, get to the point.”

“My point is you have to appear side by side with him and smile at least once. And in your speech you’ve got to say something
about Communists in government—”

“I’m
certainly
willing to say something about
that
problem—”

“Obviously not endorsing McCarthy’s
specific
charges, just saying it is a continuing responsibility of government to keep the Commies out, and that Truman has done a
lousy job, as witness his calling Hiss a red herring.”

“I don’t want to blast the president. Bad form.”

“You don’t have to, don’t even have to mention him. I’ll get up a draft that handles the Truman and the McCarthy problems
in the way I think it’s got to be done. … General, you know everything there is to know about fighting wars. This is a war.
In the last war you made common cause with Stalin. You have to make common cause with McCarthy. At least until you get in.”

“Jim, I remember what you and Adams told me in Wisconsin,” the president said, tapping his pencil on the desk. “I did what
you thought was right. Things are different now. That son of a bitch is in my hair, what’s left of it, every day. I was never
jealous of Arthur” (the reference was to Eisenhower’s younger brother) “until last week. Arthur said McCarthy was the ‘single
most dangerous menace to America.’ Have I got that right?”