The Redhunter (14 page)

“So?” Richie asked.

“So maybe Joe’s right. Maybe we should just—have another drink.”

They did, and many, many drinks later, it was champagne, toasting the election of Joseph R. McCarthy as United States Senator
from the state of Wisconsin.

JANUARY 1947

Joe McCarthy arrived in Washington on the train, early in the morning. His arrival was in sharp contrast to the excitement
of his departure. In Milwaukee there was a cheering section of his supporters, an improvised band, and something on the order
of a farewell address: McCarthy would leave now his home state and dwell in Washington, looking after the affairs of the whole
country.

He didn’t exactly expect a parade when the train came into Union Station. What he got was nothing. No one greeted him and
his aide, Victor Johnston. Their entourage was one porter, who carried on his trailer Joe’s large bag, containing his entire
wardrobe and a briefcase, and Johnston’s three bags. But at least the junior senator knew where to go, what address to give
to the taxi driver. He had sent ahead Ray Kiermas, who agreed to act as McCarthy’s office manager. Better, Ray and his wife
rented a two-room house and turned one of the rooms over to McCarthy. Joe would live with Ray for three years, until he got
his own apartment.

Ray had been a great success, a high school dropout who worked as a milk grader and then leased a dry-goods store from his
father-in-law for fifteen dollars a month. He prospered and during the war opened a locker plant. He had intended to start
a real estate-brokerage business when in 1946 he was lured into the McCarthy campaign by Tom Coleman, a friend and a commanding
Republican
figure who had decided to help Joe McCarthy out. Ray Kiermas had been given a single commission: to supervise the mailing
of a personally addressed postcard to every voter in Wisconsin. On one side, a picture of Joe McCarthy. On the other, the
addressee’s name and address and the handwritten sentence, “Your vote will be greatly appreciated by Joe McCarthy.”

“Well, Ray,” McCarthy was lugging his suitcase into the house, “there are no signs here—yet!—that
Washington
greatly appreciates Joe McCarthy.” Ray’s wife, Dolores, whom Joe had also hired for his senate staff as a clerk, unpacked
Joe’s bag, surveyed its contents, and delivered the first of what would be successive lectures over a period of six years
on his perpetual disarray. Joe would wear dark blue double-breasted suits, buying them four at a time only after the first
set was entirely frayed. Joe responded by tickling Dolores under the chin and sitting down on the chair at the card table
he’d use as a desk. To Ray he said: “Let’s call a press conference. Tomorrow at three.”

It surprised Joe, but gratified him, that there were twenty-eight members of the communications industry there in the President’s
Room of the Senate, with its tall windows, high ceiling, leather and velvet appointments, and scrubbed and polished tables.
Senator McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, was thirty-eight years old, the youngest senator serving. It had been a Republican
landslide, and the GOP was in charge of the House and the Senate for the first time since 1931. The demoralization among the
Democrats had been such that Senator Fulbright actually suggested that President Truman should acknowledge the tidal wave
in sentiment, appoint a Republican secretary of state, and resign his office. By the rules of succession that then obtained,
the secretary of state would succeed him to the White House—”and we can have a Republican government, which is what the people
apparently want,” said Mr. Fulbright, loyal Democrat.

McCarthy joked about the Fulbright proposal as he opened his first press conference in Washington. But his affability didn’t
immobilize everyone in the room. One reporter asked, “You’re a new man here. Why did you call a press conference?” Joe McCarthy
said he felt he should comment on the strike by the United Mine Workers. But his recommendations on how to cope with the strike
were garbled. He cited the need for authority, of the kind exercised by the military, if the situation was one of military
necessity; but he disapproved, he
added quickly, of the effort made in the preceding year by President Truman to nationalize the steel industry in protest against
the steel strike.

Did the senator know to which committees he would be appointed? He did not know, but he hoped to serve in the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee. McCarthy ended the brief conference by shaking the hands of all the reporters. “He’s that way,” Sam Tilburn
from Indianapolis said to a colleague as they walked out. “I’ve read up a little on him in Wisconsin. He knows everybody and
likes everybody. But not everybody likes him. Bill Evjue and Miles McMillin over in Madison, they
hate
him. They were nicer to Hitler.”

Joe McCarthy was sworn in with a lusty cheering section in the galleries—two Pullman cars full of supporters who had traveled
overnight from Madison. Joe loved it all, and loved the life of Washington. He bought an off-the-rack tuxedo and happily attended
the parties he was regularly invited to by hostesses who were drawn to a young, handsome, sociable bachelor senator who, they
liked to whisper it, had not so long ago been a chicken farmer.

And McCarthy continued, to the continuing dismay of Vic Johnston and Ray Kiermas, to be simultaneously a pauper and a spendthrift.
He never had any money and was never without money. He loved to entertain, and soon after arriving, when Ray had temporary
access to an apartment whose owners were gone for two weeks, McCarthy invited eight women members of the Senate press detachment
to dinner, cooking his beloved steaks, while Dolores, acting on only an hour’s notice, brought together what she could to
make a more complete meal. But that night McCarthy went back to his little room to make notes for his maiden speech.

There are hangovers after wars, when people prowl to shed light on the activity of the Merchants of Death. Joe McCarthy was
not lured by the historical revisionists who thought the Second World War unprovoked, avoidable, and opportunistic. But McCarthy
felt strongly that it was right to investigate profiteers. An investigation to that end had been authorized by the Seventy-ninth
Congress, but now the National Defense Program Investigating Committee was scheduled to close shop. Senator McCarthy, before
his press party, had spent three hours at Walter Reed Hospital chatting with veterans. He told the Senate about one of them,
a Marine with both legs missing who
claimed that many of his comrades had died because of “the graft and corruption which the Senate proposes to investigate.”
He quoted a second veteran as saying, “What are you gentlemen there thinking about? You are the body who voted us into war.
Now why do you object to investigating the graft and corruption which occurred
during
the war?” McCarthy lowered his voice: He did not speak, he told the chamber, on behalf of the fifteen million men who had
fought in the war, “but I speak as one of them.” The Senate voted forty-nine to forty-three in favor of continuing the committee.

McCarthy was not named to the Foreign Relations Committee, but he was assigned to the Committee on Banking and Currency and
given a seat on the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, a committee McCarthy would make famous.

President Harry Truman was hopping mad. Except that he was in the Oval Office when he read the news report he’d have loosened
his tie, which was a habit he had when his dander was up. Henry Wallace, his secretary of commerce, had gone and given one
of those goddamn speeches about how we needed to be friendlier to the Soviet Union, and this just one week after the Soviets
conscripted 400,000 teenagers, making now a total of 1.2 million, into the army.

On top of that there was the whole sense of … order. Actually, yes, the whole sense of protocol. Harry Truman believed very
firmly in protocol. The buck stops here—he was proud of having said that. Well, you can’t exercise the responsibility without
having the authority. It’s the president, goddamnit, who makes foreign policy, and he doesn’t need speeches from a Cabinet
member telling him what to do. On top of that, it was a dumb political move, he explained to Clark Clifford, his close confidant
and legal expert, whom he had summoned for compassionate company. “Half the country thinks we’ve been too sweet with the Soviet
Union and that’s the reason Stalin continues to score, civil war in Greece, threats to blockade Berlin, Polish purge, the
business in Turkey. … And while we work on the big scene, my own Cabinet officer goes and does it again, another of those
valentines to Joe Stalin.”

Young Clark Clifford had an easy grace, and it worked well with
Harry Truman. Truman knew what it was to work under an Absolute Boss: He had been schooled under the severe political tutelage
of Prendergast in Kansas City. With Boss Prendergast you could be informal in your language but never really relaxed. At the
relatively young age of forty, Clark Clifford was both informal and relaxed in the company of the supreme U.S. boss. Relaxed,
but never, ever suggesting that his loyalty to the president was secondary. Clark Clifford could negotiate with the president,
and sometimes did, but only in the sense of suggesting alternative treatments, never pleading for them. The president paid
close attention to what Clifford said. What he said now was rather startling, but only because it was absolutely correct:
“On the other hand, Mr. President, I guess we should all be grateful to Henry Wallace. Except for him, you wouldn’t be sitting
where you are. Henry Wallace would be sitting there.”

Truman didn’t welcome references to Roosevelt-Wallace. He liked it when people referred to FDR’s bold action in 1944—enjoyed
hearing about how FDR had got shed of Wallace as vice president, giving the nod to Senator Harry Truman. He liked to hear
it because it was great historical drama. What he didn’t like was to reflect that his presidency was, in an odd sort of way,
the doing of Henry Wallace. In the sense that but-for-Wallace-having-antagonized-FDR, Truman would not now be president of
the United States. He would hope that history would say that toward the end of FDR’s third term, the president, that great
and prophetic man, knew that he was ill and might not finish out a fourth term, and for that reason faced the responsibility
of getting the best man possible to succeed him. And the very best man possible meant—Harry Truman.

All he said to Clark Clifford was, “Maybe it’s safe to say God was smiling at the United States when the president made that
decision. Meanwhile, I’ve got to do something to clam Wallace up.”

Clifford agreed. He recalled the conversation in 1946, on the presidential train bound for Fulton, Missouri, when, late in
the night, he had shared the company of the president and Winston Churchill. Churchill was out of power as prime minister,
but as leader of the Opposition and heroic wartime figure, he remained the dominant voice of the English-speaking world. They
had been playing poker, along with Admiral William Leahy, chief of staff; Harry Vaughan, military aide and presidential companion;
Charlie
Ross, press secretary; and Colonel Wallace Graham, White House physician. Churchill would shoot out a breezy little political
essay as the cards were being shuffled. “You remember, Mr. President,” Clark Clifford said, “he was talking about political
realism, and we knew he was going to drop that bomb the next day at Fulton, saying that there was an Iron Curtain between
the Communist world and us. Back in Washington, General Marshall was a little upset, remember? And Churchill said that politics
viewed in the laboratory might justify dealing with Stalin with conciliation and understanding, but politics at another level
argued against it—the people would lose their ‘weights and measures’ was the phrase he used. A nice expression for basic freedoms,
I thought.”

“Yup.” Truman nodded his head. One of Clark Clifford’s strengths was that he never misunderstood a presidential signal. The
signal said that their session, Clark Clifford and President Truman, was now over. The president had heard him approve of
the need to do something about Henry Wallace. Now he could leave.