The Redhunter (33 page)

SB. “Going where, Elinor?”

You. “Amsterdam. My father is the new ambassador. My mother died—very suddenly—in April. So I’ve pulled out of Barnard to
be with Dad.”

Well, talk about sympathy for the bereaved! Before we were out of there we had champagne and a quickie cake with a little
Dutch flag on it—where in the
hell
did he come up with that? Wonder what he’d have done if you said you were on your way as ambassador to Tibet? Elinor, how
you gabbed with him, darling. I’m surprised you didn’t go on and tell him—after all, you wrote a paper on it—all about the
Peloponnesian War …

Oh. Sorry darling, but life here is really …
distracting.
We’ve got support in the Senate, but only one rock on the committee, Hickenlooper. Henry Cabot Lodge woke up one day and
denounced Joe. Well, not exactly denounced, but did a lot of equivocating. From outdoors, Lattimore fires off at us every
day. So do Jessup and Acheson. So, as a matter of fact, does the President. And the State Department security head, General
Conrad Snow, who doesn’t know his—oh, the hell with it. And, of course, mistakes are made by Our Joe—I didn’t mean Your Joe!
The Honorable Joseph Stafford, Ambassador to The Netherlands from the United States of America. Your father is an appointee
of Harry Truman charged to keep Holland from sinking.—No co-optation (“Our Joe”) permitted. Know that word, honey? Co-optation?
Well—
look it up!
(I’m teasing. It means putting someone into your camp without, really, consulting him.)

It’s a madhouse here. Momentous event I know you’ve read about. The lady who was going to testify. The FBI verified preliminarily
that she had been feeding information to two other Soviet agents. Well, as you probably know, the day she was coming in to
testify, she committed suicide. Everybody blamed Joe! She wrote him a letter just before pulling the trigger, took it to the
post office to mail. It was very pathetic. She said that she had worried all night about giving testimony, she knew it was
the right thing to do, but in doing so she would have needed to “identify” an old friend. She said she knew she should do
that but couldn’t bear to do it—so she was “going to take the problem to my maker.”

The Drew Pearson types said McCarthy drove her to suicide. They’d never say the Communists drove anyone to suicide. … I’m
going to try to find a Communist to investigate at Columbia so I can get up there and have a session with Willmoore. I need
to
talk
to somebody about what this is all about. But one thing I know, the people out there are
our
people. The same ones who saw through Henry Wallace. Good night, love. Let me hear from you. Send me a tulip.

Love, Harry

Just after noon, Mary Haskell opened the door to Joe’s office, opened it just wide enough to permit her quiet but resolute
voice to get through to him even when he was talking on the phone, which was most of the time.

Every hour or two, depending on the special density of the telephone traffic she fielded, Mary would enter his office, her
telephone-message pink slips Scotch-taped to a legal-size clipboard. These were records of the telephone calls that had come
in during the interval between her last visit to Senator McCarthy and this one. She tried to assign callers the same priority
she thought, if he had time to be deliberate in the matter, he would assign them. Favorite journalists; important senators;
obliging government officials; generous political campaign donors; key political supporters; family; close friends. Mary knew
who Joe a) needed, b) liked, and, roughly speaking, c) everyone’s rank within those headings.

Mary’s sorting of the calls helped, but not always. Sometimes McCarthy would coast by Mary’s office and run his eyes over
the master row of pink slips thumbtacked to the huge cardboard surface behind her desk, a tiny corner of it reserved for a
picture of Hilda, Mary’s daughter, when she was nine.

“Mary, why didn’t you tell me Jack Weinkopf had called?”

“Who is Jack Weinkopf?”

“Aw, come on. He is maybe my closest,friend.”

“Joe, don’t
play
with me that way. I know your closest friends from one to one hundred, and Jack Weinkopf isn’t one of them.”

McCarthy grinned, patted her on the back, pulled the pink slip free from its thumbtack, went back to his office, and put in
a call to the soft-spoken, retiring young man, editor of the student paper at Marquette, who had interviewed him in the car
a few months ago on the way to the airport.

Today Mary opened the door slightly and resolutely called out his name. Joe cupped his hand over the telephone mouthpiece.
“What is it, Mary?”

“He calls himself Henry. Says you’d know that it was important.”

McCarthy lifted his hand and talked into the receiver. “Jack, this is an emergency. Sorry. Will call you back. But not till
tomorrow.” He nodded to Mary. “Put … Henry through.”

Henry spoke, the usual calm voice. “Just confirming our date, Senator. At six-oh-five I’ll be parked directly opposite the
entrance to your apartment building. I’ll be in a Buick Roadmaster, dark blue.”

“Okay.”

“Will any reporters be following you out of the Senate building, Senator?”

“I can shake them. See you at six-oh-five.”

He elected to sit in the passenger seat, next to Henry, who drove carefully but with dispatch. Henry was prepared to discuss
with McCarthy anything McCarthy wanted to talk about—except for his assignment. McCarthy chatted about this and that as, grateful
for the air conditioner, they made their way out of Washington. But soon McCarthy was silent. Leaning over into the windshield
pillar, he closed his eyes, his lips parted slightly. Joe McCarthy was asleep.

Henry watched him closely as he approached Fredericksburg, in Virginia. He was pleased to have to nudge him awake after he
had parked the car in the garage. Otherwise he’d have had to request him to put on the eyeshade for the duration of the last
ten minutes of the drive to the hideaway.

McCarthy woke quickly. He walked out of the garage and looked up at the house, well separated from the houses on either side.
He felt
a sudden chill. He was surprised. He wondered: Was this fear? Odd. He hadn’t had this kind of apprehension since the day he
looked up across the boxing ring at Marquette at the huge black opponent his coach had decided to humble him with. He hadn’t
felt anything when he saw the flak on the exposed bomber run over Bougainville. But he felt it now and knew it was not just
trepidation.
You must be crazy, McCarthy, to have got into this.

“Please follow me, Senator.”

Henry walked ahead. McCarthy followed him by a step or two. When they reached the door he saw the number 322 on the side in
polished brass. The door opened from the inside, Joe stepped in and saw a middle-aged man, formally dressed, who looked at
Henry and exchanged nods with him.

“Upstairs, please, Senator,” Henry said.

McCarthy followed him. At the end of the hall Henry put his hand into his jacket pocket. McCarthy thought he heard a faint
buzz. The door opened. Henry beckoned him in. He walked into a comfortably appointed office, a small sofa on his left, small
sofa on his right, scenic lithographs on the walls, and J. Edgar Hoover sitting behind the desk, in shirtsleeves.

The director came around, dismissed Henry with a spare flick of his fingers, shook McCarthy’s hand, motioned him to the couch,
and returned to his desk. He came immediately to the subject.

“Sorry about the ruse. I had to lure you here. And I had to do it in a hurry.

“Joe, I’ve given you quite a lot of help through channels in the past few months since our initial meeting. Now you’ve got
to do something for me. I think I better put it to you straight, Joe. I
require
your cooperation.”

McCarthy began to bristle. He was in awe of the power of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, but he was too confident of the sway
he now had over the entire country to be treated like a—plebe.

“Edgar,” he said, venturing into territory very few others had penetrated. Who else called J. Edgar Hoover Edgar? Since schooldays?
“You know what I think of you. And I am very indebted to you. But I have the pulse of the American people on this business,
and they look to me—”

“Joe. Stop. I know all that. I was the first person in Washington to
recognize your special effect on the American people. But listen to what I have to say. First, we’re sitting, right now, in
this room, inside an electronic bubble. It’s constructed just like the bubbles in the embassies, except that this is decorated
to look like a regular office. No bugging can go on here, and nobody sees who comes into the office. No human being knows
what you and I are talking about. Nobody will know.”

“So where we going, Edgar?”

“We have informants. You know that. Chambers, Hede Massing, Elizabeth Bentley. You know all that. We had the goods on Julius
Rosenberg, on Alger Hiss.”

“I don’t get it. If so, why did the president refer to the Hiss case as a red herring?”

“President Truman obviously didn’t think Hiss was an agent.”

“I still don’t get it.”

“The situation is that bad, that serious. The president doesn’t believe the Communist infiltration is that deep.”

“You’re telling me the president doesn’t believe Chambers and the rest?”

“How do
you
read it? It helps to remember that the president never met a Communist until he went to Potsdam. He does not know how difficult
the security question is.”

“Why are you telling
me?”

Hoover paused. Then lifted his eyeglasses a fraction of an inch.

“Because there were two men on your list last Tuesday who must not on
any account
be pursued by you. They are Ted Levinson and Michael Gazzaniga. You are to cease any further mention of them, and you are
to direct your staff—in such a way as not to excite suspicion, I hardly need tell you—to discontinue
any
interest in them.”

McCarthy looked up at the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, his chin brawny, his fists tightly closed. Instinctively
he transposed the scene. It was a heavy-deal poker game. He and J. Edgar Hoover were players, with great stakes moving here
and moving there.

He crossed his legs. “I understand, Edgar. But it’s right for me to say: What are you offering me in return?”

“Silence.”

“Silence on what?”

“Silence on Mary.”

“Mary … Mary who?”

“Mary Haskell, your principal secretary. She is a security risk.”

“Mary Haskell?
My
Mary Haskell, who runs my office?”

“She was a member of the party when you hired her.”

When Joe McCarthy left the house, he and “Edgar” had a deal.

Though Mary Haskell was an intimate figure in Joe McCarthy’s operations, she was never a part of his informal life. That was
simply the way it was, and that was the way Mary wanted it to be. At the end of a long, tiring day in the office she’d return
to her apartment a few blocks away and mostly just let the air around her still her nerves. There were a lot of books on her
shelves, and she regularly brought home diversionary reading, in particular modern novels, from the library around the corner.
Early in July, Mary had acquired a small television set, but she would turn it on only at hours when she could be certain
she wouldn’t be staring at Joe McCarthy or his enemies. Or, for that matter, his friends.

At one corner of her library she kept her college textbooks. At the end of sophomore year at CCNY in New York she had married,
become pregnant, and quit college. During the day she nursed Hilda, at night she attended secretarial school, learning Gregg
shorthand. Her husband, Igor, was a typesetter at 30 Union Square. He was employed by the
Daily Worker.
She and Igor divorced when Hilda was nine.

There were no suitable jobs to be had in New York, but in Washington the expansive federal government of President Roosevelt
created a considerable need for secretarial help, so she and Hilda moved there in 1931. Hilda was grown and married when Mary
went to work in the office of Wisconsin senator La Follette in 1942. The defeated senator rose above the bitterness of his
humiliation and offered his successor guidance about staffing his office. “I can make your office life significantly smoother
and happier. What you do—Joe—” Senator La Follette found it hard to call him “Joe”; on the other hand, he found it harder
to call him “Senator” “—is take on Mary Haskell, age
forty-five, skilled in shorthand and the smoothest, ablest office manager in town. And a very nice lady.”

McCarthy liked her instantly. She became his den mother, amanuensis, expediter of all enterprises and overseer of problems
coming in from whatever quarter. She appeared to have no other life, though she kept the picture of her daughter prominently
displayed. The office seemed to be her life, and its tenant, her special charge.

Today she was surprised to find the handwritten note on her desk from Joe. He must have scratched it out and left it there
when she had gone out for a quick lunch. Joe McCarthy communicated with Mary Haskell thirty-five times every day, mostly over
the intercom: Why a written note? It said simply, “Mary, I need to see you alone. I’ll go from my television date at WRC-TV
to the Phoenix hotel. If I don’t hear back from you, that means you’re okay to meet me at the bargrill at 6:30. J.”