The Redhunter (51 page)

McCarthy, twirling his glass in his hand, was silent. He looked truly sad. “Harry, what are you saying? I mean, I’m
glad
to talk these things over with you. That’s always true, for how long? How long has it been?”

“Since June 1950. Three and a half years.

“I got to leave you, Joe.”

McCarthy was staggered. He stared ahead, then finished his drink. Then struggled for his old composure.

“I can’t stop you.” He forced a grin. “I suppose I could rescind the Thirteenth Amendment—remember? The guarantee against
involuntary servitude? That’s what the Lippmann types think I’d want to do. But—just to sort of
explore
the question: What would I have to do to make you change your mind? Other than—take a vow of silence?”

“Dismiss Roy Cohn.”

McCarthy looked up. He had heard those words before, just yesterday. He knew that was what Ray Kiermas really wanted. What
Mary Haskell wanted. What Jeanie
really
wanted. Yet he seemed astonished at hearing the suggestion put in just that way.

“Roy’s a terrific counselor and, er, aide.”

“I’ve watched him carefully. He gives bad, bad advice.”

“Harry, I mean, I couldn’t just—fire Roy. It would, I mean, it would be, you know, disloyal.”

“That’s not the right word, Joe. You’d just be saying to him: ‘I’ve got to get different advice from what I’ve been getting.’
That kind of thing happens all the time, the sense that you’ve got to have a different set of people advising you.”

McCarthy was shaking his head. He refilled his glass and drank deeply. He stared down at the glass in his hand. “I just can’t
do
that, Harry—”

The doorbell rang. Harry sprang up to open it. It was Pulliam, escorted by an aide. Harry led them into the room.

“I was just leaving, Mr. Pulliam.”

“Nice to see you again, Harry.” He turned to Joe—Eugene Pulliam would never address a senator by his first name. “Good evening,
Senator. I see you have a start on me!” He looked down at the tray and said to his aide, “George, order me a Budweiser beer.”

He sat down. McCarthy looked around, slowly: Was Harry still there?

“Harry?”

“Yes, Senator.”

“I’ll be in touch with you tomorrow.”

Harry replied, with some emphasis, “You can reach me at home, Senator, any time you want.”

Pulliam dismissed his aide, told him to return at 8:30. Harry, walking out of the room, overheard him starting in. “Now Senator,
on this business of inviting all federal employees to …”

McCarthy’s voice interrupted him. “Gene, sorry, I forgot to tell Harry something, something for the office. Just wait a minute.”

He overtook Harry halfway down the hall to the elevator. “Harry, on that speech you’re working on.” But his voiced edged down,
and now his eyes were moist. “Harry, please don’t leave me.”

Harry couldn’t look at him.

McCarthy grabbed him by the shoulders and forced Harry’s face toward him. Harry’s tears were running down his face. McCarthy
bowed his head. He put one hand on Harry’s right hand, the other on Harry’s upper arm. He squeezed them both tightly. “Harry,
I do need you, I really do need you.”

But then he shook his head abruptly, loosed his grip on Harry, and went back to the door, to Eugene Pulliam.

The next day, everything happened. The
New York Times
had got hold of a transcript of the closed hearing with General Zwicker and printed every word of it. The paragraphs Harry
had pointed out to Sam Tilburn were set in boldface type. Willard Edwards, the
Chicago Tribune
correspondent in Washington, was a staunch supporter of McCarthy and a friend of both the senator and Harry. He called Harry
on the telephone and asked if they might lunch “at one, one-thirty. I’ll pick you up. I’ve got to be at the White House press
conference at ten.”

Harry hadn’t even finished reading the
Times
stories when the telephone rang again. It was Jean Kerr McCarthy, calling from New York. … She
must
see him.

Jean Kerr McCarthy had assigned herself a personal mission. She needed Harry. Needed him for Joe. She had to bring him around.

Harry sensed immediately her purpose.

She went right on, ignoring his stuttered demurral. “I’m in bad shape to press for a meeting with you, Harry, because I won’t
be able to move from Fort Monmouth, which means nights in New York, for two or three days. That’s how long we expect the hearings
up here to take. Is there any chance you could get up here?”

Harry said it would be “terribly hard” to make the round trip to New York immediately. This was difficult to bring off. He
couldn’t
plead that he was behind in his work. Jeanie knew the burdens on every member of the staff: It was her job to distribute the
work. Harry hadn’t yet filed his formal resignation with Ray Kiermas, and he wasn’t going to leave Joe in a bind. He’d finish
up the talk he had been preparing for Joe to give in Los Angeles, though the way the news was crowding in, Harry couldn’t
be confident that Joe could get away to go on a thirteen-hour plane trip to California. The hesitation in his voice was picked
up by Jeanie: Maybe better, she thought quickly, to put off a meeting with Harry for two or three days.

“I see the problem, Harry. But let’s try to schedule a meeting in the next few days.” The interval might, just to begin with,
permit Harry to get off what Joe had described to her over the telephone as his “moral high horse.” She had no intention of
disparaging Harry’s motives for quitting (she had got the story from Joe, but she moved it about in her mind, and came up
with a plausible version she was confident of). But she wanted very badly to succeed in her mission, which was to keep Harry
on the staff.

She had told Joe two years ago, “Harry is all decency, tough but
decent,
which figures; that’s why he wants to fight the Communists.” And she hadn’t disguised from Joe in the past months that she
thought Roy Cohn was blundering. So now her objective was: Persuade Harry to change his mind. A better prospect of achieving
this—her mind raced forward and came to the conclusion: She’d have a better chance if she
didn’t
make him come up to New York. Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey, virtually next door, was the pressure cooker of the Zwicker problem.

“I’m going to try to be back in Washington on Wednesday. You know something, Harry,” … Jean’s voice was now the out-of-the-office
voice of the statuesque, elegant woman who liked all the normal things, including kings and queens, “I’m kind of anxious to
go to the reception for the Queen Mother. I’ve been a fan of hers a long, long time. Joe promises to make time to go. So maybe
after that, or better—how about lunch Thursday? Can we make that a firm date?”

“Sure, Jeanie. Sure.”

“Please don’t get discouraged, Harry, I couldn’t bear it.”

What could he say? “We’ll fight the good fight, Jeanie.”

Then, later in the morning came the presidential press conference. Two hundred and fifty-six reporters were panting to hear
President Eisenhower denounce Joe McCarthy. Harry, at home, listened eagerly over the radio (presidential press conferences
were not shown on live TV). Eisenhower’s voice came over, calming, firm, confident. He was speaking from a text, it was easy
to deduce. He went right to the subject on everyone’s mind. He said that the case of Major Irving Peress had been mishandled
and that reforms were under way to prevent such a thing from happening again. He explained that the promotion to major had
been routine, automatic: seven thousand doctors and dentists were promoted during the same fortnight. He then said that the
administration had never wished any employee to “violate his convictions or principles” when appearing before a congressional
committee. But neither did the administration think it right for a federal employee to “submit to any kind of personal humiliation
when testifying before congressional committees or elsewhere.” That was the sentence that caught the attention of the press.

In the question period, individual reporters all but begged the president to discuss directly Senator McCarthy’s call to the
federal employees, and the revelations of the
New York Times
that morning about his treatment of General Zwicker. The president declined to say anything more.

The announcer then reported that Senator McCarthy was preparing a “comment” on the presidential press conference that would
be broadcast as soon as available—”Stay tuned,” the CBS announcer said.

Willard Edwards arrived at Harry’s apartment seconds later. He whisked Harry off to La Colie, where, breathless, Willard told
the story of what had then happened.

“I knew Joe would rush to answer the White House based on notice that he was going to be criticized. Now get this: As soon
as the president had read out his statement, I beat it out of the White House and flagged a cab to go to Joe’s office to tell
him the president
hadn’t mentioned
his name, had obviously deleted it from the early draft prepared for him. By the time I got there, Mary had the full text.
She had taken down in shorthand from the radio what Ike actually said. Before she finished doing that, somebody in the office
had handed
Joe an Associated Press bulletin on Ike’s statement, which
just plain falsely
said that Ike had attacked Joe.

“So what happens? Joe takes his prewritten reply and adds a fiery first sentence. I barrel into Joe’s office, read Joe’s statement,
and holler out
“Hold the presses!”
I tell Joe I was physically there, and Ike had sounded pretty conciliatory. ‘You’re crazy,’ Joe says, and shoves the AP dispatch
at me. Mary says,
‘Quiet, gentlemen,’
and pulls up her typescript. Joe reads it quickly and acknowledges that the AP was wrong, that they had gone with a different
draft, or whatever.

“So—he gives instructions to delete the let’s-go-to-war sentence from his opening paragraph. But there are three reporters
outside yelling their heads off, and Mary doesn’t have time to retype it, so she just pencils out the deleted sentence, and
the office gives out the text to the reporters with the bad sentence penciled out. But on the radio, just now—on my way to
you!—the newscaster quoted it
whole
—”

“Quoted the sentence Joe deleted?”

“Yeap.” He brought out a copy of the McCarthy response to the president from his briefcase and passed it over to Harry.

Harry’s eyes traveled to the critical sentence. It read, “Far too much wind has been blowing from high places in defense of
this Fifth-Amendment Communist army officer.”

Harry was dismayed. His eyes traveled back to the paragraph before the deletion.

I think that the joy of the critics will be short-lived. When the shouting and the tumult die, the American people and the
president will realize that this unprecedented mudslinging against the committee by extreme left-wing elements of the press
and radio was caused because another Fifth Amendment Communist in government was finally dug out of the dark recesses and
exposed to public view.

Willard Edwards, disconsolate, chattered on.

Harry did not tell him about his resignation.

Harry thought the day intolerable, but it was not over. At four, Sam Tilburn rang him. “I called you at the office. They said
you were working at home. Harry, this is for the record. The paper wants a comment
from you on the army’s release of the Cohn-Schine telephone calls to the army secretary’s office.”

“The what?”

“You don’t know about it?”

Harry hadn’t heard. Sam gave him a rundown. A record of dozens of telephone calls to the secretary of the army by Cohn asking
for special treatment for David Schine. The news would break the next day. Sam had an early copy.

“Sam, I simply had no wind of this.”

“Okay, let’s go off the record. Looking at it from here, the sequence is pretty clear to me. One. President Eisenhower meets
the press and says nothing really tough about Joe McCarthy. But two, General Eisenhower, who of course has been told by his
army secretary about the Cohn phone calls, has meanwhile told the army people to put the evidence all together and—hand it
out to the press for publication the next day. That’s pretty good generalship, don’t you think, Harry? That strikes me as
Ike’s Hiroshima bomb. And your boy Roy made it all possible.”