The Redhunter (60 page)

“Did you see it coming, Harry?” Oh sure, Harry had replied. The Gillette committee, set up to investigate McCarthy’s behavior
against Tydings in the Maryland campaign, had withered away irresolutely.

“You know, Joe, some senators, like Flanders and Symington, hadn’t forgotten that whole business.” And then the conduct of
McCarthy when questioning General Zwicker revived senatorial sentiment that their colleague deserved a heavy personal rebuke
(some senators wished for more than that). Republican members of the Army-McCarthy committee maneuvered desperately not to
let the Zwicker business overwhelm the investigation bearing on Army/ Adams/Cohn/Schine. The Democrats agreed, but at a price.
Republican members had to promise to endorse yet another committee, specifically mandated to look into McCarthy’s behavior.

“Joe, you got to have first-class counsel on this one. You’ve got a lot of the Senate aroused against you, and you can see
the heavy hand of the White House in this fight. I know you recommended to Roy that he have counsel and he turned you down,
and he was wrong and you were right.”

Traditionally, McCarthy would have scorned the idea that he needed counsel at his side in his public life. But Joe McCarthy
was tired. The fourth drink of the evening, which he was swallowing as he talked to Harry, did not revive him, not as drinks
used to do.

Harry moved quickly after noting the moment’s hesitation. “There’s a guy, you know him. He’s an up-and-coming guy: Edward
Bennett Williams.”

“Oh, sure. He defended me against Drew Pearson.”

“He loves front-page clients. I’m friends with a law professor at Columbia who says he’s tremendous, both at trial and as
a negotiator.”

“Okay, I’ll give him a ring.” He called out, “Make a note of this, Jeanie. Call Ed Williams in the morning. Good night, Harry,
hope things are okay.”

After a half hour, Joe was finally reanimated, and had another highball. Jean watched him carefully and made her plans, apprehensive
but determined, for the next day. In bed, Joe spoke of the idea of
adopting a child. She fondled him and said yes, if she didn’t conceive by … Christmas, she’d initiate proceedings. “I know
exactly where to go.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Either one.”

“Just so long as it looks like you.”

After breakfast, she addressed him.

“Joe. Joe, put down the paper and listen to me.”

He looked up. He had a powerful intuitive sense. “You going to talk to me about drinking, aren’t you, Jeanie?”

She was startled. “Well, yes. I love you, Joe. The country needs you, Joe. But nobody’s going to have you for very long at
the rate you’re going. The
only
thing to do, Joe, is to kick it. You’re a strong man. You can do it. You’ve got four more years in the Senate—”

“That’s all the years I want. I may not even run again in fifty-eight.”

“You may not be
able
to run in fifty-eight. Joe, you captured the attention of the American people when they were just
drifting
on the Communist issue. But it’s slipping away, and that’s not just because there are liberals and Commie sympathizers after
you. It’s because your judgment is bad, and it’s affected by—
booze!
”

She spoke the word emphatically, spoke it as though it were her worst, most vicious enemy, worse even than a nest of Communist
vipers waiting to spit their poison into McCarthy’s veins.

He walked to the sink, pulled out a bottle of vodka from the cabinet below, and poured himself a drink. “I’ll think about
what you say, Jeanie. And I love you too, Jeanie. Love you a whole lot. And Jean, it isn’t that I could stop if I wanted it.
It’s that I can’t stop. Even for you, Jeanie.”

He resumed reading the
Milwaukee Journal
.

On September 3, Willmoore Sherrill called Harry, reaching him at the office of the
American Mercury
. “
We did it, we did it!
”

“I thought you’d like that. It’s terrific, I think.”

The jubilation was over the passage, the day before, of the Communist Control Act, a statute designating the Communist Party
of the United States “the agency of a hostile foreign power” and declaring that, as such, it “should be outlawed.” That clarification—Was
the U.S. Communist Party a domestic, independent political party, or was it an agent of a foreign power?—affirmed the distinction
Harry had defended before the Columbia Political Union in 1948, and the theoretical distinction Willmoore had been arguing
in his political seminars, “Willmoore’s doctrine of clear and present objectionability,” graduate student Charles Lichtenstein
had dubbed it.

“And would you believe it?” Willmoore said. “It looks as if Congress will override Truman’s veto of the Communist Control
Act. You heard anything from McCarthy?” he asked.

“Yes, in fact. Jeanie called yesterday, and Joe came on the line, chatted a while. They’re on vacation, secluded lake in Wisconsin.
He’s trying to decompress, but I think he’s having a hard time. Joe was never very good—during the time I was with him—at
relaxing. The length of a horse race or a poker game was about it.”

“I see what you mean. I see him as permanently wound up. Probably
affects the booze problem. Leonard Lyons in his column yesterday wrote directly about the booze. I assume you know about it?”

“Yes,” Harry said. “It is a problem.” He had to stop himself from warning that Willmoore had the same problem.

“Harry, I wish you to know that you are
not
invited to my suite to tune in on the McCarthy censure hearings, whenever
they
come along.”

“They’re not going to be televised, thank God.”

“I hope Joe behaves between now and then. Any chance?”

“I don’t know, Willmoore,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

McCarthy professed himself “completely satisfied” with the composition of the select committee deputized to decide whether
to recommend a Senate censure. The committee chairman, Senator Arthur Watkins of Utah, was a Republican conservative and also
a disciplined jurist.

But two days later the papers quoted a McCarthy speech to the American Legion of Illinois. He told the legion members that
the Watkins Committee was engaged in evaluating charges from “nice little boys in the Senate” who had attacked “someone for
doing the skunk-hunting job which they didn’t have the guts to do.”

A reporter from
Time
magazine asked him whether he would call defense witnesses to appear before the Watkins Committee. McCarthy said that this
would be a “great waste of time.” Besides, he added, some of the statements he was being censured for making he had no inclination
whatever to regret. “For instance, it’s true I said Senator Flanders was senile. Obviously he is. He can prove he’s
not
senile if he can, and wants to.”

The next week in Richmond he was asked whether he wished to modify his statements about Senator Hendrickson. About Senator
Hendrickson, McCarthy had said that here was “the only human who ever lived so long without brains or guts.” Now he seemed
to reflect pensively on the reporter’s question. Then he said that what he had said about the senator “certainly expressed
my feelings then, and expresses my feelings now.”

When the committee met, Chairman Watkins was resolved not to permit a spectacle of the kind that had been televised for nine
weeks
in the spring and early summer. Senator McCarthy would be permitted to speak only when testifying as a witness.

Early in the proceedings, McCarthy challenged this ruling, even though his counselor, Edward Bennett Williams, tried to restrain
him.

Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman …

The Chairman: Just a moment, Senator. You have filed no challenge; and, in the first place, I believe it is improper for you
to do so, because we have not any jurisdiction.

Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman, I should be entitled to know whether or not—

The Chairman: The Senator is out of order.

Senator McCarthy: Can’t I get committee counsel to tell me—

The Chairman: The Senator is out of order.

Senator McCarthy:—whether it is true or false?

The Chairman:
The Senator is out of order
. You can go to committee counsel and question him later to find out. That is not for this committee to consider. We are not
going to be interrupted by these diversions and sidelines. We are going straight down the line. The committee will be in recess.

The signs multiplied, and they were unfriendly. A national poll showed McCarthy with a heavy loss of support since the close
of the Army-McCarthy hearings. Fifty-one percent now disapproved of him, his popularity reduced to thirty-six percent. Columnist
James Reston wrote that Joe was now like “an alley fighter in the Supreme Court.” And it wasn’t only the Watkins verdict that
was hurting, Reston analyzed. “He is fenced in for the first time and he is being hurt, for regardless of what the Senate
does about his case, each day’s hearing is a form of censure of its own.”

Defense counsel Williams attempted a technical maneuver. One count in the complaint held up McCarthy’s abuse of the Gillette-Monroney
Committee as itself censurable. That committee had been set up to investigate McCarthy’s activities in the campaign against
Millard Tydings in 1950. Williams objected: A Senator cannot be censured, according to the Senate rules, for conduct during
a previous session of Congress.

Chairman Watkins researched the point and observed dryly the next day: “We do not agree with you.”

Subsequent attempts by Williams to delegitimize the committee, on the grounds that it was violating basic legal principles
and lacked legal authority for its procedures, were peremptorily dismissed by Chairman Watkins as “wholly immaterial.”

That night Sam Tilburn commented to Ed Reidy, “Poor Ed Williams. He’s in alien waters. He’s used to arguing before the Supreme
Court. All those arguments he’s using you can use up there, but not before a legislative committee. Those people make their
own rules.”

Williams insisted that there was no real difference between his client’s having called on federal employees to come up with
deleterious information about government personnel and similar appeals from others, including the Internal Security subcommittee
on which Watkins sat.

Senator Watkins, grown impatient, snapped that at the rate they were proceeding, “We could go on for months here.” He reprimanded
Williams.

McCarthy testified that in his famous declaration he had asked only for evidence of wrongdoing, not for classified information.
He refused a pointed invitation by Senator Watkins to withdraw, or at least to modify, his call of last February to federal
employees.

The subcommittee recessed on September 13 after two weeks of hearings. In just two weeks, on September 27, it issued a sixty-eight-page
report.

The country was stunned. The recommendations had been
unanimously
adopted. They were that McCarthy be censured on two counts. On the matter of the Gillette committee, the committee wrote
of his treatment of committee member Senator Hendrickson. And on his later conduct, his treatment of General Zwicker.

The closely reasoned report termed McCarthy’s statement about Hendrickson (no brains, no guts) “vulgar and insulting” and
his conduct toward the committee “contemptuous, contumacious, and denunciatory, without reason or justification, and obstructive
to legislative processes.”

The six senators called McCarthy’s berating of Zwicker “inexcusable and reprehensible.” The committee cited a judicial decision
that discussed orderly processes of legislative inquiries and then summarized, “The select committee is of the opinion that
the very fact that ‘the exercise of good taste and good judgment’ must be entrusted to those who conduct such investigations
places upon them the responsibility of upholding the honor of the Senate. If they do not maintain high standards of fair and
respectful treatment, the dishonor is shared by the entire Senate.”