The Redhunter (57 page)

“The very one.” Joe Welch sipped his coffee. “The
New York Times
carried the story back in April. How they got it I don’t know. I was going to bring him down to Washington as my assistant,
but he came to see me and said he had joined the National Lawyers Guild after law school for a year, and I thought, Well,
that’s something I certainly do not need in an altercation with Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy. So I said, ‘Fred, you’d better
sit this one out.’ … Not that I think there is a pro-Communist bone in Fred’s body. He was just carried away
after law school. It was during the Henry Wallace campaign. I wouldn’t hesitate to take him anywhere else, and the
New York Times
story certainly hasn’t damaged his reputation in Boston. Still, here’s what went through my mind, John: If Roy’s about to
ask me for a favor, which I assumed he was about to do, I might as well ask him for one—to leave Fred Fisher out of it.”

“What did he say?” Adams sipped his coffee.

“He said—sure.

“So it was now his turn. Now get this, John, and I don’t want you to laugh. I exercised my
renowned
self-control and didn’t laugh, not once, I swear to God.”

“Come up with it, Joe. I can’t wait.”

“Well, Cohn didn’t want me to poke around about his army record. Or rather, his non-army record. He had got an early warning
signal from me.” Welch reached for the well-thumbed volumes and went back to the hearing on May 4, last month. “Here’s what
I said then.”

He adjusted his glasses. “I had been fussing about with him on the stand, on the matter of Mr. Cohn’s biography, and I reached
the matter of his draft status. I said I wanted to hear from him about that. He said he’d be glad to answer any question I
put to him. Then I said, ‘But I hope I won’t have any questions about your draft status.’ I said, ‘I hope before we go into
this matter that you will consult your file or bring it to the stand with you, so you can reel that off to us, what your whole
story has been.’ He replied, ‘Whatever you want.’

“Well,” Welch leaned back in his chair, “what young Roy does
not
want is exactly that. After all, he works for the fighting marine, the hero of all patriotic Americans. So I just listened
to him, and he explained.

“ ‘My personal story,’ he said, ‘is that’—brace yourself, John, ‘when I was a sophomore at Columbia, I fell in love with West
Point.’ ”

“In love with West Point?
Roy Cohn
?”

“Quiet. It gets better. So, he said, he got an appointment to West Point. He was
thrilled
. So he goes up there to take the entrance examination. Needless to say, he whizzes through the academic part. But—he just
couldn’t make it through the physical. He even told me what that physical exam requires applicants to do. I jotted it down.
Sixteen push-ups, twenty-eight squat jumps, thirty sit-ups, a sixty-five-foot
basketball throw, a one-hundred-forty-foot softball throw, an eight-hundred-yard run in 46.7 seconds.—John, what if it had
taken Douglas MacArthur 46.8 seconds? Would we have lost the Second World War? Anyway, he was of course
brokenhearted
not to be entering West Point, presumably in anticipation of a full-fledged army career.”

“What then?” John Adams’s face was wreathed with a broad-gauge smile.

“He was classified one-A by the draft board. But guess what? The quota was oversubscribed. They stopped drafting young men
from the New York area. The draft call in the New York area was resumed two years later. That’s
two years
later. When they got around to Roy Cohn, he had enlisted in the national guard as a private. He was transferred to the coast
guard and then to headquarters in New York, where,” he looked down again at his notes, “he was promoted to sergeant on September
6, 1949. He was pretty soon promoted to warrant officer, and in 1952, first lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General corps.
… He can’t have been very busy doing work for the coast guard or for anybody else, since during those three years he was active
full-time as a civilian prosecutor.

“I didn’t comment. Cohn went on. He said some people had been imputing to him a draft-dodging background, but of course this
simply was not the case and in any event had nothing whatever to do with the questions being debated before the Senate investigating
committee—”

“So you said?”

“I said okay. … It’s true that Cohn’s obvious draft dodging isn’t going to affect the issues we’re discussing—”

“I’m not so sure you’re right, Joseph. I mean, what David Schine has been up to is practically the same thing as draft dodging,
so that one way of putting it is, really, whether Roy Cohn has been attempting to get for Schine the kind of treatment he
got for himself—”

“Just thought of something. Do you suppose Cohn
tried
to fail the West Point physical?”

“Interesting. But what you just peeled off there sounds like pretty tough stuff.”

“Yes. But nothing a healthy eighteen-year-old couldn’t handle.”

“What makes you think Roy is a healthy—was a healthy—eighteen-year-old?”

Welch laughed. “I see your point. He was probably never a healthy anything. Though let’s face it, he’s pretty agile. His testimony
has got a lot better since that first day.”

“Okay, so you made the deal. It can’t be any special burden to us. So Roy Cohn and Fred Fisher are scot-free, one see-no-evil-hear-no-evil
about draft dodging, one indulgence for joining a Communist-run lawyers’ organization. But let’s get on to the memorandums
the McCarthy office allegedly wrote after every one of Roy’s phone calls. How are you going to handle them?”

The Army-McCarthy hearings were suspended on Monday, May 17, for three days, and Harry turned, after breakfast, to his large
file on Henry Wallace. He had agreed to plan for the
American Mercury
an article series, “Where Have They Gone?” Huie suggested a descriptive magazine inset that would attract the attention of
veterans of the great political wars of 1948—Harry Truman vs. Tom Dewey vs. Henry Wallace vs. Strom Thurmond. He wrote out
a lead: “What happened to the Wallace cadre? The truly important players in the Wallace campaign were members of the Communist
Party or indistinguishable from members of the Communist Party. Where are they now? Did they see the light? Or are they doing
something else? If so, what?”

Harry sat down to reread the articles by Dwight Macdonald in
Politics
and Victor Lasky in
Plain Talk
. Both writers, the renowned, left-oriented, highbrow Macdonald, and the right-wing journalist Lasky, had diligently documented
the domination of the Progressive Party by Communists. The phone rang.

While traveling with McCarthy in Wisconsin, Harry had seen a lot of Tom Coleman, and on one trip had spent a night in his
house. He was the senior Republican presence in the state, a politically active industrialist who knew, and was respected
by, everyone. He had backed Joe McCarthy early in his career. Now he asked Harry to come
to the Waldorf to his suite and “talk about Joe. I’ve got a specific proposal.”

“Tom, did you know I’m no longer … connected?”

“Yes, I know. And that’s one reason why I think you are just the right man to do what I have in mind.”

Forty-five minutes later, Harry was in suite 33A of the Waldorf Towers, on the same floor with General and Mrs. Douglas MacArthur,
who had lived at the Waldorf ever since he lost his command in Korea. Tom Coleman greeted him, always calm, impressive, incorruptible,
to the point.

“The hearings are killing the GOP. Ike is in full swing against Joe, who is losing ground. Ike is careful; he’s always careful.
But he’s got Nixon in there pretty well deployed. And the polls are showing McCarthy’s attrition, down twelve points just
since the hearings began. Get this as an indicator: Yesterday, Homer Ferguson—our good conservative senator from Michigan—says
he will not ask Joe to come to Michigan to campaign for him. That is a shot heard ‘round the Republican world.”

“I’m not surprised, Tom.”

“Well, I’ve got a plan. Here’s the nut of it. One. Persuade Roy to resign. Two. Persuade John Adams to resign. What does this
do?”

The senior statesman got up on his feet, hands in pockets, the shaft of light from the window illuminating his silver hair.
“The army—and Ike—get what they—and I—and practically everyone—want: Exit Roy Cohn. What does Joe get? The resignation of
Adams, which is the equivalent of an apology by the army for its stupid treatment of the Schine case. You got me?”

“I got you, Tom. Are you going to persuade the Communist Party to resign its commitment to the Soviet Union while you’re at
it?”

Coleman’s was a thin smile. “Youth! The cliche is that youth will attempt anything. In my experience it’s the other way around.
Youth gives up too quickly. In the last two days I’ve talked to Matthew Ridgeway. Now, he’s one hundred percent on the Stevens
side. You must have caught him on TV the day he strode in, Enter army chief of staff, sits down during the whole morning right
behind Stevens. Can’t make a more conspicuous affirmation than that. Anyway, I laid my plan out to him. He took his time.
He thought about it. And he
didn’t then say, ‘Let me check it out with Ike, Dulles, the UN, and Hollywood.’ He said: ‘Count me in. I’ll talk to Stevens.’
Yesterday morning he called me: Stevens would go with it! They both talked with Adams. He was reluctant, but said pro bono,
he’d go with it.”

Then Tom Coleman laughed.

“Ever hear about the proud, rich Italian father who was looking for just the right girl to marry his only son? He hires a
marriage broker. Broker comes in after three months, he says, ‘I got a beautiful match. She’s twenty, great girl. Speaks French.
Father was ambassador to Great Britain, brother is an up-and-rising young congressman from Massachusetts. Father’s very rich.’
The old man thinks, then says: Not good enough. So the broker goes off and comes back in another three months. ‘This one is
terrific. She’s twenty-two, very rich family, also speaks perfect French. Wonderful connections. Her older sister is queen
of England. She’s very beautiful.’ The father thinks a bit, then says: ‘Okay, I’ll go with that one.’ Broker puts on coat
and hat, heads for the door, says, ‘
Well now,
that’s
half
the battle!’ ”

Harry laughed. “The other half is Joe-Roy.”

“No. The other half is Joe, period. If he goes along, Roy has to go along.”

“And my job is to persuade Joe?”

“Yes. I gave it a lot of thought. You’ve been an intimate friend. You’re close to Jean. You haven’t uttered a peep since you
pulled out. I think you’d be perfect. I mean, as perfect as anybody can be. If Joe wants to commit suicide, we can’t stop
him.”

Harry said, “I’ll try.”

Back in his apartment, he called Mary Haskell. He could feel, over the phone, her weariness. “Last time you asked me for a
private meeting with Joe you ended up quitting. Sure, Harry. I’ll set you up. Come on down. Ring me when you get to town.”

Harry thought quickly. “Mary, let me put a little edge on it. Make that a meeting with Joe and Jean?”

“Actually, that will be easier than just with Joe. He goes home at night, and for a while, before the troops move in for the
agonized reappraisals, Joe and Jean are alone. They’d never mind it if Harry Bontecou showed up.”

For almost two hours it was like old times. McCarthy brightened instantly on laying eyes on Harry. Jean’s embrace was so prolonged
Joe said, “Hey, Harry, that’s my wife you’re making love to!” Joe opened a bottle of champagne. (“It’s left over from the
wedding!” Jean told them.) McCarthy sat down and asked after friends in New York, and said after this was all over, he planned
to take Jeanie for a vacation—”a month. Maybe even more. On the lake, in Wisconsin. Maybe you could visit us, Harry? That
would be great, Harry. Just sitting there in the beautiful woods, a little fishing and maybe swimming, a lot of time to read
those books we pile up to read. No television. No telephone.”