The Redhunter (13 page)

“Scratch all of these out except one—your choice. Whichever one you choose, that’s the one I’ll go for, what I’ll do for you
and Dad.” He had written down, “District Attorney … Mayor … Congressman … Governor … Senator … President.”

“Joe is always teasing us,” Biddie McCarthy said to Tim, showing him the letter. But she kept it, and reread it the day Joe
filed for the United States Senate in December 1945.

Joe McCarthy was still in uniform when he made the decision to run in the earlier 1944 Senate race. He had planned the campaign
even before his resignation from the Marines in December 1944. It amused him that he had a year earlier communicated his intention
to his mother, however enigmatically. It had been nothing more than a family joke. Captain McCarthy’s last six months on duty
were spent back in the United States on various mainland bases. From wherever he was stationed, he rattled such political
floorboards as he had established in his race for judge and during his career as judge. He submitted
his name as a candidate for the Senate against incumbent Senator Alexander Wiley, by way of warm-up, five months before he
left the service. He had designed that campaign, which would never get off the ground, with the single purpose in mind of
getting his name before the public. His political line boiled down to a widely distributed postcard:

Stand by for the return to Wisconsin of Joe McCarthy—

Circuit-Judge-to-Captain-in-combat with the Marines!

That campaign was playtime. This campaign, aiming at November 1946, Joe McCarthy insisted, was serious. Joe McCarthy wanted
to go to the Senate. On this point he was resolute even while still stationed in the Pacific. He had told Joyce Andrews he
knew how to bring it off. Andrews, recovering slowly from a shrapnel wound after he had ditched his plane near Bougainville,
was skeptical. “Joe, they don’t elect people like us. We got no connections, no money, no—nothing.”

Joe reminded Joyce that he had been elected judge against long odds. “And now I have a Silver Star. That’s not nothing.”

“Okay, Joe. You run for senator. If you’re elected, I’ll run for president.”

Joe just smiled. It was impossible to discourage Joe McCarthy, and after a while his friends stopped trying.

All hands at the hotel reception could see that the campaign was beginning to hum. The target was the renowned Senator Bob
La Follette, incumbent, populist, legendary son of Bob La Follette of Wisconsin, founder of the Progressive Party. McCarthy
had hoped it would be a three-man race, but the Progressive Party was disintegrating and being wooed by the Democrats. La
Follette had decided instead to rejoin the Republican Party, listing himself as a candidate to return to the Senate on the
Republican line. That meant that McCarthy needed to fight not only in the general election against a Democrat, but in the
Republican primary against the formidable La Follette. When La Follette registered, all Republicans except McCarthy put aside
their hopes for the Senate.

There had been a hint of trouble ahead on the matter of the war record. At the press conference before Joe’s dinner speech
a reporter from the
Madison Capital Times
rose and asked Joe why it was that his citation from theater commander Admiral Chester Nimitz didn’t specify the nature and
cause of his leg injury.

Joe chuckled and answered that perhaps Admiral Nimitz had other things to do. “You know, Mike,—”as ever, Joe used reporters’
first names—”we hadn’t won the war yet.”

Joe turned then amiably to the young woman with the recording mike in her hand—a new device used to capture spontaneous exchanges
and interviews for later broadcast over the radio. She read her question from a written note.

“Judge McCarthy, you were discharged last December after only sixteen months’ service.”

“Eighteen months,” Joe interrupted. “And I wasn’t ‘discharged.’ I resigned.”

The reporter, her rhythm broken, stared down at her notes. “Uh, eighteen months. … That was a year ago. Then we were facing
a—a costly—Nazi offensive in Belgium, and our casualties at Iwo Jima were very high. But instead of sticking to your unit
in the Marine Air Force you came home and campaigned against Senator Wiley. How did you get an early discharge?”

There was a murmur of curiosity from the audience.

“I told you, dear, I resigned. Resigned my commission. Why? I had been hospitalized. And anyway, remember that draft regulations
exempt sitting judges. I never had to go into the armed services in the first place. I was a volunteer. And I’m glad I did
serve, and I’m proud of the work I did as an intelligence officer and tail gunner in action.”

The host for the dinner to follow, the congenial Malcolm Aspic, president of the Elks Club, raised his hand. He saw nothing
to be gained from more of the same. He called an end to the press conference even though there were two reporters with their
hands raised. “Come on, guys, ladies. Let the candidate go. There’s a
hundred
people in the next room waiting to shake his hand. You all come on in with us and have a drink.” He turned to Joe and mock-whispered:
“
We’ll
never tell on them if they go to the bar instead of paying more attention to the business of politics, will we, Joe?”

Joe waved his hand at the four press and radio representatives,
bowing his head submissively. He was telling them he had no alternative but to oblige his hosts. Y’all know how it is. … His
wave conveyed that he would have preferred to stay and answer more questions.

The first person to accost him in the crowded lounge where the drinks were served wasn’t an Elk, it was a visibly agitated
Richie O’Neill. “How’m I doing?” he said to Richie. He motioned Joe to follow him to the corner of the room. Joe agreed to
go, “But only if you get me a drink.”

“Bourbon and soda for the judge”
—Richie shot the directive briskly to the nearest human body. The mayor of Fond du Lac, taken for the waiter, received the
bar order with some amazement, delegating it coolly to the young man on his right. Richie O’Neill’s attempt to arrest Joe’s
attention was blocked by a large, bearded guest, who, drink in his left hand, put his right arm around Joe’s shoulder. “Joe,
what I have to tell you is
really
important.” The solicitor began on the subject of the Potsdam Agreement of the preceding August and the opportunities forfeited
by President Truman at the diplomatic table. It was at Potsdam, three months after the death of Hitler, two weeks before the
Japanese surrender, that the great force of adamant Soviet diplomacy was experienced. On the subject of the lost freedom of
Poland and other misfortunes that flowed from Potsdam and, before that, the Yalta Agreement, the guest was fluent and vociferous
and impossible to shut down.

Richie sighed with exasperation and managed to get across only the sparest message, whispered in the candidate’s ear. “Joe:
Right after your speech come to my suite. Number four twenty-four. Ollie will be there.” Joe managed to hold the geopolitical
strategist at bay long enough to express his genuine surprise.

“Ollie here? How come?” Ollie Burden had been scheduled to do some money raising for Joe’s campaign at a gathering of friends
of Wisconsin tycoon Tom Coleman. Why was Ollie, all of a sudden, in Madison, missing so important an opportunity? But there
was no way Joe could hear Richie’s explanation in the commotion and the sound of the cocktail hour.

Richie O’Neill had been a friend since Joe’s chicken-farming days and, ever since the campaign for judge, a dollar-a-year
political adviser, now campaign chairman. O’Neill was glumly resigned to Joe’s quite extraordinary capacity to polarize. His
public was not now
numerous: Joe’s statewide race against Wiley the year before had been a mere formality, never arousing the interest of the
Wisconsin public. His successful race for judge seven years earlier had been in the Tenth Circuit, comprising only three counties.
But within that small circle, his friends and admirers were ardent. They found him attractive, earnest, yet never boring or
fanatical, courteous, and thoughtful, a life lover who animated all situations in which he involved himself. They never doubted
he would move up the political ladder.

But the stamina of his critics was at least as enduring. They had coalesced early, as critics of the tactics Joe had used
in his race against Judge Werner. Miles McMillin, of the
Madison Capital Times,
was an early and adamant critic. “To go around and pretend that Edgar Werner was seventy-two when McCarthy knew goddamn well
he was sixty-seven was infamous and unforgivable,” he said at a public gathering of Friends of Bob La Follette. The resentments
festered as McCarthy prospered. The anti-McCarthy forces consolidated in their determination to block this latest effrontery
of the chicken grower, his bid for an august Senate seat. The heaviest concentrations of his critics were in the editorial
offices of the
Madison Capital Times
and the
Milwaukee Journal,
and now the
Journal
was set to blow a very loud whistle on Judge-Captain-Candidate Joe McCarthy.

The after-dinner speech went well. The preliminary routine was well established. For maybe the fifteenth time since he had
declared his candidacy thirty days ago, Joe sat while the master of ceremonies, alongside, read out loud the citation from
Admiral Nimitz. It didn’t matter if the masters of ceremonies had entirely different introductions in mind. Joe—or Richie—or
Ollie would instruct them: This is the way it goes. And this was the citation that prompted the emergency meeting in Richie’s
suite: Ollie had an advance copy of the next day’s
Milwaukee Journal.

At the hotel suite Joe quieted down, but only after campaign manager Richie O’Neill demanded a stop to his animated but disjointed
conversation. “Look, Joe, we’re here to listen to Ollie, who has something very important for us to hear. So let’s give him
a chance, okay?”

Ollie Burden had reached the hotel in Madison just before Joe’s
speech began. Ollie’s base was eighty-two miles away, in Milwaukee. There, in the morning, he had got wind of the
Milwaukee Journal’s
scheduled “expose,” as the paper would label it, of Judge McCarthy’s war record. It was urgent to plan a response, so he
had driven nonstop to the hotel in Madison.

McCarthy’s primary attention getter was a photograph: Captain Joe McCarthy, United States Marine. He was dressed in flying
gear. Tall, handsome, earnest but with a twinkle in his eyes. Clean shaven (he had eliminated his beard). Under the photo
in his campaign brochure, in bold print, was the citation from Admiral Nimitz.

Ollie reached into his briefcase for the newspaper galleys and began reading.

Joe listened for a moment or two. Then he reached up to the overhead lamp that shone over the table and their tight little
circle. He turned the light off. Ollie’s voice stopped abruptly. Joe turned the light back on. What he had done was as striking
a gesture of irritation from Joe McCarthy as anyone present had ever seen. Joe
was
irritated, a lesser cause of that irritation being Ollie’s cigar smoke, which was getting at Joe’s sensitive sinus. Mostly
he was irritated by the story he was being made to listen to.

“Ollie, that kind of thing
always
gets said about political candidates. Why’re you so
red hot
over this attack? And could you aim the cigar at Richie for a change?”

“Because,” Ollie said, stamping out his cigar, “this story is different. They quote
two
Marine officers who say that your war wound was the result of an accident on a boarding ladder at a drunken equator-crossing
initiation ceremony off New Guinea. How’re we going to
answer
these people?”

Joe reached into his pocket and drew out the campaign circular featuring his citation. He leaned back in the armchair and
took a swallow from his whiskey glass. “Okay. Let’s take it bit by bit. … I’m quoting. ‘He’—that’s me, right Ollie? Or is
the
Journal
saying I wasn’t the Captain Joe McCarthy the citation was written about?—’He obtained excellent photographs of enemy gun
positions despite intense antiaircraft fire, thereby gaining valuable information which contributed materially to the success
of subsequent strikes in the area.’

“Anybody saying that’s not true?”

Joe went on. “ ‘Although suffering from a severe leg injury …’ ”
Joe stopped, raised his right pants leg, and pointed at the three-inch scar. “Okay?” His voice was now singsong, as though
he were giving a speech. “ ‘… he refused to be hospitalized and continued to carry out his duties as Intelligence Officer
in a highly efficient manner. His courageous devotion to duty was in keeping with the highest traditions of the naval service.’
”

Joe turned to Ollie. “Makes me blush, Ollie.”

Ollie banged his fist on the coffee table.
“I’m
not doubting you, Joe. But the story quotes
two
guys who say they were
there!
”

“So they were there when we had that little fun party on shipboard. Maybe they weren’t there when I got the scar from the
Jap flak. So who’s going to say they’re the only guys who were ever around when McCarthy got banged up in the Solomons? Let’s
have another drink.”

He continued without a pause. “I got here—”Joe went again to his jacket pocket—”a list of political positions I’m going to
run on. We’ve got to do something about veterans’ housing. That’s an A—Number-One priority. We have to figure out a way for
the United Nations, if it’s going to amount to anything, to have some kind of military force at its disposal. And we’ve got
to keep our eyes on the Soviet Union. Last month they took over the Hungarian oil fields at Liege, including the big Standard
Oil play. There was a fellow there tonight gassing on about Potsdam. But he had a point. Looks to me like we gave away the
show there.”

Ollie looked over despairingly at Richie. Suddenly he brightened. What he thought to reserve to say privately to Richie he
found himself saying in front of Joe: “Richie, it’s just possible—it suddenly occurs to me—that Joe knows more about political
communication than we do.”