The Redhunter (56 page)

“How?”

“By taking over the movement.”

“Oh, Willmoore! Cut it out. Say, are you getting any?”

“That is an insolent question. Yes. You?”

“My romantic energies got aborted a while ago.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No. Maybe sometime.” He grinned at his old (forty-two-year-old) teacher. “You’ll be the first to know.”

But Harry knew he would never speak to anyone, ever, about Robin.

They had another drink and resolved not to mention
one more time
the names of McCarthy or Cohn or Stevens or Welch. Two hours later they agreed to meet at ten the next morning, in time for
the next televised hearing.

Roy Cohn took the stand on April 29, immediately after the luncheon recess. He wore a dark double-breasted suit with the wide
shoulders popular during the period. His face seemed one part scowl, one part innocence betrayed. McCarthy, seated at the
center of the long table he shared with critical staff members, wore his regular double-breasted blue suit. The camera caught
the diminishing hair on the top of his head. On the left was the table for McCarthy committee Democratic members, with newly
retained minority counsel Bobby Kennedy seated at the end. The heat in the room was from the packed galleries. No seat was
empty.

The initial questioning by Ray Jenkins, the committee counsel with open coat and informal manner, and subsequent grilling
by Joseph Welch, counsel for the army, with his bow tie and vest and patron’s smile sketched around his eyes, focused on the
subject everyone in America would be debating for two days.

Army secretary Stevens, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, white shirt, neat tie, the middle-aged Ivy Leaguer, had testified about
the importunate telephone calls from Cohn, in behalf of Schine.

“We kept a very careful count and submit here to the committee a chronology of those telephone calls and the name of the officials
who received them; half the time it was me, half the time army counsel John Adams … ”

In the morning break, Cohn rushed to a pay phone and dialed in to Fort Myer. Schine was on the alert.

“Stevens is making it sound like he never knew you, heard of you, except when I phoned in. But isn’t there a photo I saw somewhere
that includes Stevens and you?”

Indeed there was such a photo, Schine said. He had had it framed, and it hung in his (civilian) office, in his father’s hotel
in New York.

“Go get it,”
Cohn said.

Schine, who had been transferred to Washington’s Fort Myer for the duration of the investigation, instructions given to the
camp commander to give him freedom of movement for the duration of the hearings, called his father’s office and arranged for
a clerk to fly to Washington with the framed picture in a package. Schine was there to meet the plane. He took a taxi to the
Senate Office Building.

On Cohn’s instruction, he gave the packet to freshly recruited McCarthy assistant Jim Juliana, who was told to make copies.
In conversation, Roy referred to “the Schine-Stevens” photograph. Juliana turned over the original to Don Surine, who was
friendly with a photo technician in the building.

At the afternoon session, Cohn questioned Stevens.

“You make it sound, Mr. Secretary, as if when I telephoned you about Private Schine I was taking great liberties. But isn’t
it more faithful to the record that I was pursuing a point or two that completely tied in with your own—personal relationship
with Schine?”

Secretary Stevens looked up abruptly. “I have no personal relationship with Schine of any sort, sir.”

Cohn pounced. He drew from a folder a picture and asked permission to produce it as evidence.

“Permission granted,” said Chairman Mundt.

Cohn handed over an enlarged photograph, which a clerk placed on an easel. The television cameras zoomed in. It was a picture
of Private Schine, standing, his army hat on, and Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens. The technician, having cropped out
committee staff director Frank Carr and Fort Dix commander Colonel Bradley, had given birth to a cuddly photo of Schine—accused,
by deploying his
instruments Cohn and McCarthy, of threatening the very existence of the army—and Stevens—the secretary of the army, threatened
by the private first class and his formidable accomplices.

“It looks like a summit conference between Russia and Luxembourg,” Harry commented to Willmoore Sherrill.

Cohn wanted to know how it was, if Secretary Stevens was really as upset as he claimed to be by the behavior of Schine et
al., that the secretary should have consented to pose with beatific expression on his face next to the threatening Schine
one full week after Stevens’s first memorandum detailing his impatience with the Schine question.

Joseph Welch was not pleased to see this unexpected suggestion of a camaraderie between his client and his adversary. He stared
at the photograph and began asking questions about it. Roy Cohn answered them, with some sarcasm and sense of satisfaction.
A full half hour went by—Where were you when it was taken? How did you get it? How do you know the date of it? Welch was getting
nowhere when an aide approached him with a folder. Welch opened it and gave a triumphant howl—someone had passed up a copy
of the photograph in its entirety, showing four figures, not just the two, posing.

The photograph had been cropped, Welch proclaimed.

He depicted what Cohn had done—cropping the photograph—as a dire, inexcusable attempt to deceive: “Mr. Cohn has endeavored
to suggest to the committee a social familiarity. The kind of thing one might expect between two people photographed together
exclusively; whereas the reality was one of those impersonal group shots in which
whoever
happens to be standing around becomes one of several photographed together.”

Roy Cohn answered the criticisms with obvious disdain, and the wrangle went on the full three hours. Cohn attempted to explain.
The technician to whom the picture had been taken to reproduce was under the impression that Surine cared only to retrieve
the Schine-Stevens part of the photograph. Welch all but laughed at what he clearly gave the impression had been a “consummated
distortion and an attempted deception.”

Committee counsel Ray Jenkins asked Cohn, “You surely understand, Mr. Cohn, the difference between a photograph of two people
apart, and a photograph of four people with disparate attachments? The secretary was evidently visiting the camp, met by the
camp commander,
at the same time that Mr. Carr, on committee business, greeted Private Schine, who had worked for the committee before joining
the army—”

Cohn interrupted him. “I can see the difference, Mr. Jenkins. The question is, can Mr. Welch distinguish between fraud and
a wholly understandable sequence of events—”

“The witness will permit counsel to finish without interruption.”

Cohn wheeled on Mundt. “Mr. Chairman, I am very experienced in correct procedure in courtrooms.”

Mundt looked over, in dismay, at McCarthy.

At the end of the session, Cohn and McCarthy walked out of the chamber side by side. McCarthy turned to him. “You were the
worst
witness I ever saw in my entire life.”

Cohn appeared, as he did every night except on Saturday, at McCarthy’s home at eight. He heard then from the entire inner-court
assembly: Joe, Jean, Frank Carr, Jim Juliana, David Schine. Everyone criticized Cohn’s performance, not only the fiasco with
the photograph but his manner on the stand, insolent, arrogant. Frank Carr said that Roy should retain his own counsel to
lead him through the proceedings, especially to stand by during the days, however many they’d be, when he would continue on
the witness stand. McCarthy concurred. Cohn was shocked and affronted by the proposal. Here he was, chief counsel to the committee,
a brilliant alumnus of courtroom experience—being told he really needed a good lawyer at his side to give him advice.

He asked to be allowed to think about it over the weekend.

Late on Saturday, Cohn drove by McCarthy’s house, stepped out of his car, and slipped a letter under McCarthy’s door.

A half hour later, McCarthy read it and passed it on to his wife. “Amazing,” he said. “Not like Roy, not at all.”

Cohn was not only contrite about his performance, he had analyzed it.

I’ve been studying the transcript, Joe, and thinking back about yesterday and, really, it was even worse than it seems. The
words alone may not appear too damaging in cold print, but a certain tone and
attitude accompanied them, I know, that made me appear—well, less than self-effacing.

Cohn had gone on to outline three traits in his own behavior, quoting words he had uttered on the stand:

Arrogance: “Roy Cohn is here speaking for Roy Cohn, to give the facts.”

Self-Importance: Asked if I could produce the original photograph, I replied I could but indicated the committee had to understand
that “I have an awful lot of papers and stuff to attend to and it is not in my possession.” I added confidently (and pompously),
“I am sure it is under my control.”

Condescension: “I will be glad to answer any question that any member of the committee wants to ask.” I even advised Ray Jenkins
how to conduct his examination of me. (“I wonder if we could do it this way: Could I give you my recollection as to exactly
what I did do?”)

Having expressed his contrition, Cohn made his own demand. He did not want a lawyer. He wanted to defend himself. He knew
the old saw about anyone who defends himself has a fool for a client. “I know, I know. But I have to do it.”

He made a concrete proposal. That the next night, when the inner group congregated at Joe’s house as usual to prepare for
the following day, Roy was to sit as though he were the witness. “Then let everyone fire questions at me, you, Jean, Frank,
Jim—treat me the way Ray Jenkins and Joe Welch treat me. Give me a rough time and let me see if I don’t satisfy you.”

Jean put the letter down. “He certainly does feel bad about yesterday.”

“Yes. Bright boy, the way he analyzes that. Well, Jeanie, we can’t order him to come in with his own counsel. But let’s give
him hell when he shows up tomorrow and takes the stand in our living room.”

Joe drank to the success of the “new Roy.”

As McCarthy met with his inner team every night beginning at eight, John Adams met almost as regularly with army attorney
Joseph Welch,
but at six, one hour or so after the Senate sessions had concluded. Robert Stevens, army secretary, was brought to the conference
when his presence was thought indispensable, which was infrequently. On June 4, Adams and Welch sat down in the conference
room they had reserved at the Carroll Arms hotel.

“You’ll never guess,” Welch began teasingly as they sat down and waited for their coffee.

“What?” Adams enjoyed the manner of the celebrated New England attorney, who above all things enjoyed his own verbal pacing,
whether at a conference with clients, performing before a jury, or before a body of senators and twenty million television
viewers.

“I made a deal this afternoon—just now—with Big Bad Roy Cohn.”

“What’s
that
all about?” Adams was curious but unworried. He had had six weeks’ experience of Welch before the Senate tribunal. “What
do you want me to do, Joseph, to get the details of your deal out of you? Swear you in and depose you?—What did you do for
Big Bad Roy and vice versa?”

Welch explained. As they were walking away from the hearing, Cohn had signaled to him and, in a low voice, said, “I’d like
to talk to you privately and off the record about something. Something I’d like from you.”

“I said to him: ‘That’s interesting, because there’s something I’d like from
you
.’

“We went into an empty Senate room, and I said, ‘Who goes first?’

“ ‘You go ahead, Joe. What’s on your mind?’

“I told him. You know about Fred Fisher. Remember Fred Fisher?”

“Your junior partner up in Boston? The guy who joined the National Lawyers Guild when he left law school?”