The Redhunter (54 page)

Senator John McClellan, senior Democrat on the committee, was permitted to make a statement after Chairman Mundt’s introduction.
He said, in apocalyptic accents, that the cross-complaints in the case—McCarthy vs. the Army—were “diametrically in conflict”
and that he could see no possibility of reconciliation. “It will be an arduous and a difficult task, one that is not pleasant
to contemplate, but it is a job that must be done.”

There were subsidiary issues, but only two that were critical. Did committee chairman McCarthy and Chief Counsel Cohn abuse
their office by improper efforts to influence the army to give preferential treatment to Cohn’s friend and sometime committee
associate David Schine? The countercharge was that Secretary Stevens had attempted to block the senator’s investigation of
the army by threatening maltreatment of Schine and an exposure of Cohn’s pressures on the army. The second question: Did Senator
McCarthy, in his handling of witness General Ralph Zwicker, employ impermissible language and levy unjustified threats?

The rules specified that the committee counsel, Mr. Jenkins, could take as long as he wished to question the witnesses, after
which each member of the committee would have ten minutes to ask the witness whatever he wanted. After that, counsel for both
sides had ten minutes with the witness. “All examinations in each case shall proceed without interruption except for objections
as to materiality and relevancy,” the chairman explained.

“There’s not
a chance
Joe will abide by that rule,” Harry commented.

“I’m not sure he should,” Willmoore retorted. “He should have a chance to get into the act.”

Harry replied impatiently. “The rules already allow him—or Cohn—to examine the witnesses. The idea is to prevent endless interruptions—”

“Point of order!”
they heard McCarthy bellow mere minutes after the hearing began. He would use the phrase throughout the day and (they would
learn) throughout the hearings.

The telephone rang. It was Professor Peter Salinger of the law school, a personally friendly antagonist of Willmoore. He was
calling to activate Willmoore’s commitment to appear in Salinger’s seminar to discuss classical forensic political argumentation,
about which Willmoore had written in a professional journal. “On just that point, Peter, I’m here with a friend, taking in
the McCarthy hearings—”

“And I’m here with my wife watching the same thing and trying to squeeze a little work during the breaks. Your hero is an
obtrusive bastard.”

“He’s looking after your rights, Peter. Remind me to tell you about the Soviet Union. Or maybe I’ll save it for when I talk
to your class.”

Salinger laughed. “Just wanted an okay date from you for the class.”

“Yes, sure, but answer me this, Peter, since you know a lot about parliamentary rules. If the rules exclude interruption except
for ‘materiality and relevancy,’ who in a congressional situation is there to enforce the rule, only the chairman?”

“Yes, but your man McCarthy has, in this situation, great tactical opportunities, because materiality and relevance are hard
to establish. It could theoretically be material to whether Cohn threatened Stevens that Cohn rooted for the navy in the Army-Navy
game.”

“How would it be different in a courtroom?” he asked the professor of law.

“If a judge thought counsel was abusing his right to call a point of order, he could summon him to the bench to explain his
point, rule it immaterial or irrelevant, and send him back to his wigwam. You do that a few times and counsel shuts up, because
he’s found out he’s not getting a chance to make his point to the jury. The jury, this time around, is the television audience.
And McCarthy, on asking for a point of order—as we have seen—can rattle on about any point he really wants to make.”

“Okay, I’ll be there, four
P.M.,
April twenty-ninth.”

“Yes, we’d better get back to the Coliseum. Thanks, Willmoore.”

He turned to Harry. “Did I miss anything?”

“Just two more points of order by Joe.”

The witness before lunch was Major General Miles Reber. He was introduced as a thirty-five-year veteran and a winner of the
Distinguished Service Medal. General Reber, the viewers learned, I had flown from Germany to testify about the efforts of
McCarthy and Cohn to obtain a speedy commission for G. David Schine. Asked by Ray Jenkins whether he thought the recommendation
of a promotion for Schine unseemly or wrong, General Reber testified that he hadn’t thought the suggestion wrong when made,
but that he had thought the ensuing importunities wrong.

Senator McCarthy called for a point of order.

The committee should know, McCarthy said, that the general had a brother, Sam Reber. That Sam Reber was former acting United
States high commissioner for Germany and had resigned from the State Department in July 1953, “when charges that he was a
bad security risk were being made against him as a result of the investigations of this committee.” It was, McCarthy suggested,
in retaliation for this exposure of his brother that General Reber now pronounced his hostile conclusions about Roy Cohn.

General Reber responded noisily, pounding his hand in his fist. “I do not know and
have never heard
that my brother retired as a result of
any
action of this committee!” There was much commotion. Senator Jackson expressed himself as appalled by Senator McCarthy’s
implication. Senator McClellan asked for a ruling on the issue, “because we may be trying members of everybody’s family involved
before we get through.”

Harry focused his eyes on the screen as if to penetrate it. A young woman had appeared from the committee’s staff section.
She removed carefully an assembly of papers scattered in front of Senator McClellan, who leaned a little bit to the right
to give room to the clerk, whose left hand revealed a wedding ring. She replaced the senator’s single file with one with six
folders. Her light hair fell forward and brushed over her chin. Someone had silently hailed her attention, because she turned
quickly in the direction of the camera, her figure sideways. She was heavy with child. “That’s … that’s Robin—”

“So who’s Robin?” Willmoore asked, puffing away on his cigarette.

Harry very nearly gave way to temptation. His reply was gagged.
Finally it came out, sounding flat. “She’s a girl I used to know. I guess she works now for Senator McClellan.”

“Well, pretty soon now you can send her baby a christening gift. She looks okay. Why’d you stop seeing her?”

Harry nearly choked.

He was relieved when Robin slipped out of sight of the camera just as McCarthy’s voice boomed in, “Objection, Mr. Chairman.
Point of order.”

A recess was called. The committee members and witnesses and reporters and gallery and Harry and Willmoore went out for lunch.

They were back on duty at two. The hearings would last until five, with a twenty-minute recess at three-thirty.

“I’m going to have a drink. I figure we’ve earned it. Harry?”

“Coke, thanks.”

Willmoore answered the phone. “Who’s calling? … Yes. I’ll put him on.” To Harry, holding out the phone, his hand over the
mouthpiece, “It’s Jean McCarthy.”

Tactfully, Willmoore took his drink into his study, closing the door.

“Hello there, Jeanie. You looked terrific on camera this morning.”

Jeanie didn’t have time to dally over pleasantries. “Harry, I really want to see you. I’d come to New York this weekend, but
Joe needs me. Last night he was up with Roy and Frank until three, got up at six. It’ll be that way on through. I do so much
want to spend an hour with you. Could you possibly make lunch here on Saturday, day after tomorrow?”

“Of course, Jeanie. Where, when?”

“The Monocle, twelve-thirty. Thank you, dear Harry. You are such a friend.”

Willmoore came back into the living room. They watched to the end, and made a date for the following day. At the end of Day
One, the television ratings gave the Army-McCarthy hearings an astonishing public endorsement: Gallup reported that 89 percent
of the television-viewing public had tuned in.

HANBERRY, 1991

“You were back in England, I know. Was there interest in the Army-McCarthy proceedings?”

“Well, yes there was, Harry. But not at all on the questions ostensibly at stake.”

“What do you mean, ‘ostensibly’?”

“Reading the material you’ve assembled for me in the last few days, it seems to me that several very concrete issues were
at stake. The first—pure and simple—involved that extraordinary vermiform appendage, Schine. a) Did Schine in any sense govern
the movements of the McCarthy machine? The army said yes—all you have to do is look at the record of Cohn’s phone calls and
the threats he issued. b) Did the army, having Schine safely, so to speak, behind bars in Fort Dix, use this leverage in an
attempt to get McCarthy to call off, or mitigate, his investigation?”

“Yes. That’s the first part of it, quite right.”

“The second: Was McCarthy guilty of indecorum, or even misbehavior? Did his questioning of Zwicker violate implicit codes
having to do with the civility of senatorial grilling? And—I gather from the
New York Times
editorial in your batch yesterday—Was McCarthy in general out of control?—as witness not only what he said about General
Zwicker, but what he said about various of his colleagues, notably Senators Tydings, Hendrickson, and Gillette.”

“Correct.”

“Now on
your
question: How were the Army-McCarthy hearings judged in Great Britain? To begin with, they occupied only four or five minutes,
at the most—if memory serves—of the nightly news programs. The commentary was entirely partisan. I think it’s fair to say
that there weren’t two dozen Britishers who thought McCarthy had anything whatever of interest to say. But in that connection
I have something I’m sure you haven’t seen. You may wish to make some use of it. It is an exchange between our Evelyn Waugh
and your Willmoore Sherrill. Waugh’s letter is included in his published work. After my conversion I saw something of Waugh.
Perhaps he took an interest in me because I had inherited my father’s title.”

“Did Waugh ever take an interest in McCarthy?”

“He reviewed Richard Rovere’s blistering book
Senator Joe McCarthy,
which of course you’ve seen—”

“Actually, Alex, what I told you at the outset is literally true. I have not read any treatment of McCarthy, of whatever length,
since he died.”

“I can’t imagine how you managed that.”

“Well, yes, there was always, still is, the odd sentence, the ubiquitous use of the term
McCarthyism
. But no, I didn’t read the Rovere book, and I don’t know what the pro-McCarthy people said about it.”

“Well, my situation is curious, as I said to Evelyn. I
was
a Soviet spy. I
did
have a position in Washington. Granted, not as an employee of the U.S. government, but as a Britisher, someone who was cleared
by government security to attend rather important State Department briefings. And one day I was informed that the security
mechanism had winced on reading my record. Had someone got wind of it—that more than two years ago I had passed a supersecret
document stolen from the secretary of defense to the whole world? No. Because in the thirties I had signed a silly petition
got up by a Communist front group. Does one judge McCarthyism by its failure to discover that I had passed a presidential
private letter to the entire world? Or by its success in identifying me as a sometime member of one Communist front group?”

“A very interesting question. Which brings up another item you gave me yesterday—again, I hadn’t seen the numbers.”

“On loyalty/security risks and dismissal?”

“Yes. Here they are.” Harry moved the lamp arm down on the folder. “Eisenhower announced in 1954, one month before the Army-McCarthy
hearings, the results of seven months’ investigations:

“Two thousand four hundred and twenty-nine ‘security’ risks found in thirty-nine federal agencies. All resigned or were fired.”

“The charges:

“Information indicating subversive activities or associations—422.

“Information indicating sexual perversion—198.

“Information indicating conviction for felonies or misdemeanors—611.

“Information indicating untrustworthiness, drunkenness, mental instability, or possible exposure to blackmail—1,424.

“Of course,” Harry said, “depending on the criteria by which these were judged, it was either a reign of terror or a much-overdue
personnel reform—”

“That
takes us straight into the Waugh-Sherrill question. Waugh wrote an approving review of the Rovere book for
The Spectator
. Sherrill spotted in that review an undertone of skepticism. He wrote Waugh—Sherrill’s letter was published with Waugh’s
answer in a Waugh collection—that ‘this skepticism thrice surfaced.’ He quoted from Waugh’s review. ‘Mr. Rovere’s comments
are pungent and,
as far as a foreigner can judge, just
. [But] one of the things which Mr. Rovere might profitably have done and does not do is follow up. There is a curious raggedness
(perhaps inevitable) in the accounts of the various inquiries which seem to have ended without findings and of the various
men who appear and disappear in the story without acquittal or prosecution. What has happened to everyone? I wish Mr. Rovere
would rewrite the book for us ignorant islanders giving us the simple story.’