The Redhunter (21 page)

“Who’ll head up the investigating committee?”

“They’re talking about Millard Tydings.”

“I forget, Tydings. Bright guy?”

“Yeah, and knows his way around. There’s no
way
he’s going to be Nice-to-Joe, though he certainly isn’t going to say he’s indifferent to Communists in government. He’s up
for reelection in November. Joe McCarthy—you know this; we talked about it during his senate race four years ago—has this
thing about him: Give him ten minutes with six people, and if they’re not already committed, he’ll end up with three ardent
fans and three guys who want to kill him.”

“Did they land any heavy artillery?”

“Not really. Except to insist that McCarthy had nothing
new
—Benton said it, also McClellan, also Douglas—that McCarthy’s cases were old stuff, that they had been reviewed and rereviewed.
But Joe said, ‘Why’re they still around, then?’ Big crossfire on whether ‘they’
were
still around, and of course we didn’t have the dates. … The whole thing after a while was pretty hard to follow, who they
were talking about, what their numbers were on Joe’s files, how many files there were. We’re going to have to wait and see.”

“I can wait and see until seven-fifteen, which is when my editorial for tomorrow is set in type.”

“I know, I know, Ed. Just nurse a few ambiguities, I’d advise. On both sides. So that your faithful readers won’t be surprised
if, next week, Acheson confesses he was a Communist all along. Or Joe is exposed as a total fake, resigns, and goes back to
chicken farming. Anything more, Ed?”

“No. Thanks. Will you be at the office if something comes up?”

“Till seven-sixteen,” Ed answered.

At 7:16 Joe was in his office, eating sent-in fried chicken with Mary Haskell and Ray Kiermas and Don Surine. Jean Kerr brought
in the food and, having laid it out on the senator’s desk for him and the participants,
moved back to the door. She was a relative newcomer and hadn’t been invited to the royal feast. Joe spotted her.

“Jean? Jeanie?”

“Yes,” the tall brunette answered, still facing the door.

“Where the hell you going?”

“I thought I’d let you alone, unless you need me, Senator.”

“Need you, Jeanie? I can’t live without you, can I, Ray? Can I, Mary? You should know—you hired her because I spotted her
and told you I couldn’t live without her. Right, Mary?”

Mary came through with the expected chuckle. But she added, chicken in mouth, “He wants you in here, Jean. Grab some chicken.”

Jeanie sat down, and Joe continued. “I had them on the run, right, Ray? Especially Benton. I think he’ll be careful from now
on. Thing is, they don’t really know what I have, what we have—”

“Easy, Joe,” Ray Kiermas said. “We’re not so sure what we have, what you have.”

Joe McCarthy paused. “Look at those files! Hot stuff in all of them we’ve opened!”

“Yes, Joe,” Surine interrupted. “But what we don’t know is: How many of them are still employed? We just
can’t
track down those names.”

“Yup. But we have certain contacts in certain places—” Joe ostentatiously crossed himself, which always meant he was thinking
about J. Edgar Hoover. “And guess who I’m going to visit on Monday.” Silence. McCarthy liked to orchestrate silences in his
staff.

“Whittaker Chambers.”

There was something like a gasp.

“Who’s going with you?—”Ray finally broke the silence.

“I thought I’d take Jeanie along—”he caught her surprised smile with enormous pleasure. “I’ll want to take notes. Granted,
I have to clear that.”

“Through whom?”

“Through Richard Nixon. Congressman Nixon. The guy who backed Chambers from the start. He’s running for the Senate in November.
He stays close to Chambers, who trusts him.” Joe turned to Kiermas. “Did the Lucas people tell you when we’d be notified?”

“Hester—Hester Ogilvie—told me the Democratic leadership was going to caucus tonight. Probably at the end of that session
they’ll
officially announce it: the formation of a committee to investigate the charges of Joseph R. McCarthy. Chairman—Millard Tydings.
We think.”

“I don’t care who it is,” Joe said, pushing aside his plate and opening a second bottle of beer. “I didn’t care today who
asked the questions. Did I, Mary?”

“You did all right, Senator.” She wouldn’t call him Joe when others were in the room.

“How’m I doing, Ray?”

“Good, Senator. Good, Joe.”

“How’m I doing, Don?”

“Okay. But it’s going to be a long, hard road ahead.”

“I’m used to long, hard days at work. At the farm I got up at four.”

“Sometimes,” Jean was now heard from, “it’s better to stay in bed.”

McCarthy looked up at this gorgeous Irish creature. Where
had
Mary got her? And the three other people needed to handle the mail since Wheeling. That was a strange remark to hear. Maybe
he assigned more meaning to it than he should have. “I didn’t get up too early the day I gave that speech in Wheeling, Jeanie.”

She nodded her head.

“How’m I doing?”

Jean Kerr knew exactly what Senator McCarthy intended when he said that. Some people ask that question—How’m I doing?—when
halfway through an exercise. The pitcher looks smilingly over at the coach after striking out six in a row. He mouths those
words right through the chew on his gum, in search of a valentine. The lawyer at the hasty lunch before court resumes preens
for the approval of his partner and his client: “How’m I doing?”

Joe would say those three words no matter what he was in the middle of. He might be cooking a steak (on his beloved outdoor
grill). But it wasn’t as though the words were undirected, given purely as punctuation. When he asked “How’m I doing?” he
was acutely aware whom the words were directed to. It mattered a whole lot what he then heard back in some cases. If it was
Don Surine or Mary, Joe wouldn’t notice what they said, how they responded. He’d have expected—he’d have gotten, from friends
and entourage—an affirmative of some kind, variously expressed. The words sounded the same when addressed to Jeanie, but they
were differently intended. He was saying, Hey, I’m Joe McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, war hero, lawyer, judge, the
hottest political numero in America, and I want to know what you think of my performance.

There were tourists out there, on the driveway outside the Capitol,
looking for any recognizable face. Nobody’s picture, except for General Eisenhower’s, had appeared more often than Joe McCarthy’s
in the past two months. He had mesmerized the whole country. What he charged in that speech in West Virginia was that the
terrible troubles America was having all over the world were in part because enemies of America were influencing decisions.
Specifically, Communists. Now he had to prove he knew what he was talking about. The Senate had voted a special investigation
and named Millard Tydings of Maryland its chairman. Tydings loathed McCarthy, it was that plain. It had been a tough day at
this hearing, three weeks after they began.

Jeanie was seated on McCarthy’s right, Don Surine was driving the 1948 blue Chevy; the Senate Office Building seemed stark
against the gray sky, a few drops of cold rain drifting down. Jean Kerr would not be bulldozed by the ritual call to affirm
that Joe was doing just fine. Tall, beautiful, statuesque, she was very emphatic in her judgments. She had been with McCarthy
only a few months, but in the office everybody knew by now that what she thought mattered most.

“You’re holding your own, Joe. But Tydings isn’t going to let you get away with the waffling.”

“On the numbers?”

“On the numbers.”

“Hell, Jeanie, that’s a phony. We’ve gone over that. Okay. So on one of the lists Esther Brunauer is number one. On another
list she comes in as number twenty-seven. On
my
list she’s number forty-four. What Tydings and Cabot Lodge—when he’s not asleep—want to talk about isn’t, Should somebody
like Esther Brunauer, who joins a Communist front every two weeks—”

“Every two years, Joe.”

“All right, every two years—does
that
matter? How many Communist fronts have
you
ever joined? They’re so dumb, those liberal Commie-smoochers. No. That’s not right, Jeanie, some of them, yes. But some of
them know exactly what they’re doing.”

McCarthy waved at the man with the camera, jittery with excitement at having spotted Senator Joe McCarthy himself driving
out of the senators’ parking lot.

While still waving, McCarthy instructed Don Surine not to stop
for the tourist and his camera. “He already got a picture, Don. Just go ahead. Slowly.”

He turned to Jean. And said absentmindedly, “How’m I doing?”

“It’ll be another long night, Joe.”

She opened the briefcase on her lap. We’ve got one
hundred
files to look at, and we don’t know which names Tydings is going to ask you to talk about.” She looked up from the file on
her lap. “Joe, I’d cool it at the press conference. Don’t
feed
ammunition to Tydings.”

“Tydings! … Baltimore blueblood, Jeanie. He’d have sided with Benedict Arnold.” Joe was an accomplished mimic. He began with
Tydings’s cracked voice. He went on. Now Jean and Surine were listening to McCarthy’s version of the Grotonian accents of
Dean Gooderham Acheson, Secretary of State. ‘Senator McCarthy, are you aware that General Arnold has a distinguished military
record and that the charges you bring up against him are based on nothing more than
rumor
and that these facts have been scrutinized—’ notice, Jeanie, how he says
scrrooo
tinized? ‘—Senator McCarthy, by five different loyalty/security boards?’ ”

Don Surine’s laughter was welcome. McCarthy began now to imitate the voice of Drew Pearson on the political gossip columnist’s
weekly television show. But Jean Kerr stopped him.

“Joe.
Listen
a minute. What you’re going through—three weeks behind us and God knows how many weeks ahead for us—isn’t a political after-dinner
roast in Appleton. This isn’t one William T. Evjue or one Miles McMillin of the Madison, Wisconsin,
Capital Times
you’re talking to—”

“Evjue? McMillin? Why
would
I talk to them? To wish them happy May Day? To congratulate them on the latest Communist putsch?” McCarthy laughed. “You
know something, Jeanie, if somebody like, say, Dorothy Kenyon called the AP tonight and said, ‘I, Dorothy Kenyon—distinguished
lawyer, former municipal judge, former appointee to a United Nations commission on the status of women—have decided I can’t
live with my conscience any longer. I want to come clean, admit that for twenty years I have done work for the Communist Party.
It was me who put the sleeping pills in Dean Acheson’s drink before he gave the statement about how Alger Hiss was the greatest
American since Abraham Lincoln—”

He interrupted himself, raising his eyes to look up at the driver’s seat. “Don. Turn the radio up—”

The newscaster’s words flooded the car.

“…
repeatedly asked for the floor. Senator Tydings at one point gaveled Senator McCarthy into silence and instructed him not
to continue to interrupt the committee’s proceedings. Senator McCarthy said he was not going to participate in ‘star chamber’
rituals. He said, ‘This isn’t a Communist trial.’ A staff member reported that Senator McCarthy was then heard to say to an
aide, ‘Not yet.’ Senator Tydings gaveled him down again and called a five-minute recess. Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman
revealed that Esther Brunauer’s file had been inspected as early as 1947 and that no security question had been raised when
she was reappointed
—”

“Turn it off, Don. Where was I?” He chortled. “Oh, right. Evjue. McMillin. And now Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson and Herblock
and the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
and CBS and—you know, Jeanie, I’m asking you, Were they
this
upset when Stalin exploded an atom bomb last September? Of course not! They feel now—thanks to McCarthy, Jeanie; yes, thanks
to me—that their whole show is somehow in danger.”

He started to laugh again, then stopped: “Only it’s not a laughing matter, Jeanie, is it? How’m I doing?”

The car pulled up to the Hilton Hotel. He would speak to the American Legion Convention at five, after his press conference.

“You check out my speech?”

She nodded, handing him the manila folder.

He turned to her. “You’re so beautiful, Jeanie, I mean, on top of everything else. One of these days I’m going to make you
marry me.”

He slid his hand under her thigh and quick-squeezed her. “We’ll get the pope to fly on over and preside! Wonder if the State
Department will give him a visa?” He winked. The mischievous wink that had helped to make him, according to the recent national
poll, the second most admired man in America, after General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was waiting in the wings to challenge
the Democratic candidate for president to succeed Harry Truman in two years.