The Redhunter (53 page)

A week later, on March 11, McCarthy told Jeanie he sensed something was up. Mary Haskell had told him Allan Sims of the
New York Times
had called to ask whether it would be possible to be put through to Senator McCarthy the following morning for comments on
an important matter. “He wouldn’t tell Mary what the upcoming story is all about.”

Roy Cohn too sensed that something was up. Passing him in the Senate corridor, committee member Senator Symington had said,
in mysterious tones, “Roy, you’d better prepare for the cross fire.”

The cross fire he was talking about was very evident the next day, coast to coast. The headline on the front page of the
New York Times,
stretched over four columns, read, “
ARMY CHARGES MCCARTHY AND COHN/THREATENED IT IN TRYING TO OBTAIN/PREFERRED TREATMENT FOR SCHINE
.” Every daily paper in the country carried the story, with equivalent display.

Roy Cohn was on
Meet the Press
the following Sunday and on the cover of
Time
magazine the following week. There was the sense that D-Day was coming.

Joe McCarthy was in New York the day the story broke. In his absence, Dirksen called together the members of the Government
Operations Committee. He asked for a secret ballot on the question of whether Roy Cohn should be discharged as chief counsel.
The vote was 5-1 in favor of dismissal.

“But I have one qualification,” Senator Potter spoke up. “Cohn should be asked to resign. Otherwise it looks like star-chamber
procedure. And I think we should go to Joe and just tell him how we feel about it, instead of voting behind his back.”

When McCarthy got in from New York, Frank Carr, executive director of the subcommittee, was waiting for him. Carr, age thirty-seven,
like Don Surine, had served in the FBI as an agent. He accompanied McCarthy to his desk chair, closed the door to the office,
and communicated to him the action of the committee in his absence.

“How’d he take it?” Jean, seated at her desk at the far end of the office, pulled Frank to one side when, ten minutes later,
he emerged from Joe’s office.

“He didn’t just say, No! like right away. He sat there and looked out of the window. Jean, Joe’s up against it, and he knows
he is.”

“What did he
say
?” Jean asked.

“He said he’d go with it—”Jean grabbed Frank Carr’s sleeve, a breath of hope on her face—”on one condition. He said he’d go
along with it provided Roy agreed. He said he wouldn’t pull the rug out from under Roy, not ever. I asked him, ‘Do you want
me to tell Roy? Get his yes or no?’ Joe thought a bit and said, ‘Maybe that’s a good idea. If he heard it from me, he might
think I was putting him under pressure. And Frank—you listening, Frank? We’re
not
going to
pressure
Roy.’ I said to him—I’m telling you exactly the words I used, Jean, like two minutes ago—I said, ‘Joe, I knew Roy was anxious
about Schine, but
thirty-seven calls
to the army about him—I mean, we can’t blame the majority on the committee for getting … for being embarrassed—’ He said,
‘That’s another reason I’m not anxious to see Roy right away. I’d have to chew him out, and I don’t want to.’ ”

Roy Cohn’s version of the events was deft, and effective with Joe McCarthy. What is going on, Cohn said, is that the army
people are “holding Schine hostage.” Unless McCarthy pulled back from his investigation of the army, they’d see to it that
Schine was “in effect a prisoner” at Fort Dix.

Quickly, McCarthy’s fighting instincts were revived. He countered the army department’s blast with the charge, at an impromptu
press conference—these could be had almost at any time of day, almost anywhere: McCarthy always had press waiting for him—that
Cohn had simply attempted to protect Schine, who had been a “volunteer” assistant to the McCarthy committee before being drafted,
from abuse by the army. McCarthy charged further that army counsel John Adams, seeking to take the heat off the army, had
allegedly suggested to Cohn that the McCarthy committee investigate, instead, the air force or the navy. “Because,” Adams
had said, there was “plenty of dirt there.” But there were no written transcripts in Senator McCarthy’s office, or Roy Cohn’s,
of any such conversations.

“What we mustn’t do,” Cohn urged, “is ease up. We’ve got to give them a real taste of the trouble they get into by simply
…
ignoring the
loyalty/security question.”

McCarthy nodded. “Let’s get back to work. And I’ll tell Sanctimonious Stu—”Joe had used that before about Senator Symington,
and trotted it out again with some relish—“that if they want to fire you they’ll have to drumroll you out in a recorded committee
vote with me in opposition.”

Dirksen and Symington conferred by telephone. “I couldn’t go with that, Stu, that would really violate Senate tradition, firing
Roy behind the chairman’s back.”

“Well, if you can’t, Ev, then the idea of getting rid of Cohn is out. We’d better batten down the hatches. Meanwhile, Joe’s
got General Zwicker—he’s the Monmouth general who gave us the alert in September—coming down to testify again tomorrow. That’s
one more committee meeting I’m not going to attend.”

“I’ll skip it myself,” Dirksen said.

Back in Manhattan, for what seemed the first time in years and years, Harry found it possible to notice such a thing as the
coming of spring. He walked, coatless and without any sense of irretrievable time lost in doing so, from lunch at Columbia
with Willmoore Sherrill, south to his newly rented apartment on Eighty-third Street, a few blocks from his mother. In the
two months since leaving Washington, he considered going in the fall to law school, to which he didn’t incline but thought
prudent. The royalties—from Jesse Bontecou’s book—were declining. He checked at the library and took in the publishers’ notices
of forthcoming books. He winced. Everybody seemed to be coming out with new and competitive poetry anthologies. He was glad
to have saved a few dollars while working in Washington. Graduate school was another possibility for the fall. His GI Bill
was not entirely consumed. He spoke to Sherrill about the two alternatives. “But you know something, Harry,” the associate
professor said to him one night after they had attended a Columbia Political Union debate on whether Red China should be seated
in the UN, “I’m not sure you’ve got the right temperament for sedentary scholarship. Your blood runs pretty hot, you know
that, kid?—”

“Kid! Cut it out, Willmoore. I’m twenty-seven years old. I fought and was wounded and was promoted and was decorated in a
world war. I was editor in chief of the student newspaper, junior Phi Beta
Kappa, and I was three years at the right hand—make that the left hand—of the most conspicuous senator in Washington” (he
wondered whether he should add to his accomplishments, “And I almost married my sister”) “—so stop this ‘kid’ stuff. Just
because you graduated from college at sixteen doesn’t make everybody else a ‘kid.’ ”

Sherrill loved such talk. But then, with the verbal anfractuosities he was so famous for, he circled the subject, Was Harry
right for graduate school? “Law school, sure. You get a chance to discharge those passions of yours, though not always in
behalf of people, or of causes, you are passionately attracted to. But graduate school? I’ve spent, I’d say—”Sherrill always
exaggerated—“maybe ten years of my life thinking about Rousseau. I don’t think you’d want to do that.”

“What is there left to discover in Rousseau, after your book on him?”

Willmoore devoured such intimacies. “Are you a writer, Harry? I can’t tell yet. The stuff you did for Our Joe had to be a
little formulaic; necessarily. By the way, Harry, did you invent the phrase ‘I have in my hand a photostatic copy of’? If
so, I think you overdid it. You might have altered it a bit, maybe to ‘I have in my hand the original of … ’ Have you made
a date with Bill Huie?” Sherrill was talking about William Bradford Huie, editor and publisher of the
American Mercury,
a combative and zesty monthly, anti-Communist, a little racy, occasionally philosophical. Harry had thought to apply to work
there, if only until the fall term.

“Yes, actually. Next Tuesday. These days I find I’m in no particular hurry. But there is one thing I’m going to do, no matter
what.”

“Watch the hearings?”

“Yes. I couldn’t any more not watch them than turn off the tube at the sixth inning of the World Series.”

“As far as I can gather, every living human being with a television set is going to watch Joseph McCarthy versus the U.S.
Army, the White House, and almost everybody else. I certainly intend to. Every now and again a seminar may get in the way.
But, come to think of it, those hearings will be pretty good grist for a seminar in political theory. I have an idea—”

“I do too. Let’s watch them together.”

They raised their wine glasses and made a date for April 22, ten
A.M.

Editor Huie of the
Mercury
liked what he met and talked to, and when lunch ended offered Harry a job as associate editor and gave the terms. Harry said
he’d be glad to try it out but had to say this, that he could not begin until after the Army-McCarthy hearings were concluded.
“I have to watch those.”

“Fine! That could be your first
Mercury
article!”

“Mr. Huie, you ought to know this. I won’t be writing about Joe McCarthy.”

Huie’s expressive face fell. “In that case I’ll pay you fifty percent of the salary I offered earlier.”

He grinned, and they shook hands.

“How long do you figure they’ll last?”

Harry said the issues had become pretty complicated. “I’d guess they might last as long as two weeks.”

Over one hundred reporters crowded into room 500 on the third floor of the Senate building. The four hundred seats in the
observers’ gallery were covetously occupied.

Grave thought had been given by Chairman Karl Mundt and his counselors to rules and arrangements. On the first day, McCarthy,
Cohn, and Surine would occupy the television-oriented twenty-six-foot-long mahogany table. The second table, opposite, put
its users’ backs to the three stationary cameras. But on odd days they alternated, frontal television exposure being given
to the adversaries: Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens and counsel Joseph Welch. The subcommittee’s counsel, tall, rangy
Tennessean Ray Jenkins, was stationed (immovably) on the right, with his table and the witness stand.

The seating in the comfortable Fellows’ suite of Professor Sherrill was less formal. Willmoore sat at one end of a large green
felt sofa, occasionally lifting his legs up over its expanse. Harry sat in a deep red
leather armchair to one side. The television screen was slightly adjusted to give them equal viewing rights. It had the neat
look of a comfortable New England sitting room, but this suite was large enough for the two dozen students who came on Tuesday
and Thursday afternoons to take Professor Sherrill’s exacting and rewarding seminar, where the emphasis was always on sharp
thought, sharply expressed.