The Redhunter (59 page)

Alex replied as if to an examiner at St. Paul’s School. “Eugene Lyons, U.S. journalist posted in Moscow in the early thirties,
turned away from Communism along with Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge wrote his
Winter in Moscow
, Lyons, his
Red Decade
.”

“You have it. Well, time came for the question period. One of the guests asked something or other, and Joe answered with a
pretty wild charge. I winced and whispered to Gene, ‘God. I wish he hadn’t answered that question just that way.’ He looked
at me—Gene Lyons was a street-smart guy, veteran of the polemical wars. He said, ‘Nobody ever said Joe McCarthy was Abraham
Lincoln.’

“Hang on a second, let me look at that big collection of yours.”

Harry brought back a volume of articles he had inspected a few weeks earlier. He thumbed through it. “Here is something Lyons
wrote in—1954. For the
American Legion Monthly
. Ready?”

“Go ahead. My recorder is on.”

“He wrote about a meeting at Swarthmore College. It was called ‘Six Bold Men.’ That’s apparently how they designated themselves.
Lyons goes on. ‘They identified themselves as “the unterrified.”‘ Their theme, I quote Lyons, was ‘calculated to prove that
Americanism was not yet extinct, but that it was on its last legs.’ ” Lyons went on, Harry said, to quote Professor Henry
Steele Commager: “ ‘We are now embarked upon a campaign of suppression and oppression more violent, more reckless, more dangerous
than any in our history.’ Here’s Harold Ickes: ‘If a man is addicted to vodka he is, ipso facto, a Russian, therefore a Communist.’
Lester Markel—editor of the Sunday edition of the
New York Times
. He talked about the advent of a ‘black fear in the country brought about by the witch hunters.’

“Gene has a nice collection here. Bertrand Russell is quoted: ‘If by some misfortune you were to quote with approval some
remark by Jefferson you would probably lose your job and find yourself behind bars.’ ”

“Does he give a source for that?”

Harry thumbed through the rest of the article. “No. But Eugene Lyons was meticulous. He’d never get something like that wrong,
let alone make it up.”

“Is there more?”

“Oh, yes.” Harry resumed reading. “Bernard DeVoto—Harvard historian—
historian!
—and regular columnist for
Harper’s:
‘The hardheaded boys are going to hang the Communist label on everybody who holds ideas offensive to the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, or the steering committee of the Republican Party.’ Ever heard of Lawrence
Clark Powell?”

“No.”

“Well, he was librarian of the University of California. He wrote here for a British publication, ‘In this time of inquisitional
nationalism, I know that I run a risk in confessing that I possess a French doctor’s degree and own an English car. And what
dire fate I’d court when I say that I prefer English books?’ And—’When Dr. Ralph Turner, a professor of history at Yale, exposed
the reign of terror to a convocation of Eastern college students, the latter, after due deliberation, voted McCarthyism a
greater threat to America than Communism.’ Had enough?”

“It rather hurts my feelings, Harry, that those students didn’t appreciate the major efforts I was making as a Soviet agent.”

“Which reminds me to ask you—I know you were back in England in the spring of 1954: What foul deeds were you up to?”

“I was put in the deep freeze. My KGB colonel was very concerned over the general sweep being quietly effected after the exposure
of Burgess and McLean. All hell broke loose when those two took off for behind the Iron Curtain with a load of British security
secrets. It wasn’t for twenty years after that, in the seventies, that anybody—including me—had any idea how many people MI5
had overlooked, who were still doing Soviet business inside the British establishment. Including the surveyor of the king’s/queen’s
pictures, Sir Anthony Blount.” He paused and smiled—he was enjoying the reminiscence.

“Yes, curious about old Blount. He called on me when I inherited my father’s title. He wished to record his special sadness
at the death of his fellow socialist, my honorable father.” He laughed. “Great heavens, Harry! Do you suppose the first Lord
Herrendon, my honorable father, was also a spy?”

“We can laugh about those things now. I take it you did not talk with Blount about old times?”

“No. I didn’t know that he was an agent, and he probably didn’t know that I had been one. But I will talk about him in my
book. And you, Harry?”

“I will too. Dad.”

SEPTEMBER 1, 1954

SEPTEMBER 1, 1954

The Army-McCarthy hearings concluded on June 27, after nine weeks. Thirty-six sessions had been held, 187 hours of, well—jury
time. Two million words filled 7,424 pages of transcript. Thirty-two witnesses testified, and a cumulative total of one hundred
fifteen thousand spectators viewed live some part of the hearings in the Senate chamber. Radio and television put their loss
of revenues from abandoned regularly scheduled broadcasts at ten million dollars plus.

Exactly two months later, the committee filed its report. It was here and there factional—the Republicans saying this, the
Democrats that. But there was convergence on some points. Both sides criticized Senator McCarthy’s conduct, though the Republicans’
language was milder. Both sides criticized Secretary Stevens for his complacent conduct in the face of Roy Cohn’s importunities,
an interesting division here being that the Democrats were more vigorous than the Republicans in their criticism of Stevens.
(“Why should we be surprised?” Sam Tilburn remarked to Ed Reidy in one of their near-nightly conversations on the hearings.
“Stevens is a Republican secretary of the army appointed by a Republican president.”)

Senator Potter, Republican, filed a separate report. Word had leaked that President Eisenhower, at midpoint in the hearings,
had invited Potter to the White House to hear an anti-McCarthy pep talk from Vice President Richard Nixon. Potter, a double
amputee in
World War II, was understandably malleable in the presence of the man who had commanded him in that war and was now commander
in chief. Senator Potter’s report said that “the principal accusation of each side in this controversy was borne out.” McCarthy
had tolerated the behavior of Cohn, and Stevens/Adams had tolerated the behavior of Cohn: The senators were unanimous in affirming
that Stevens and Adams were at fault for trying to appease Cohn rather than objecting immediately and forcefully to his requests
for favors for Schine. The senators, again unanimously, criticized McCarthy for inviting all federal employees, against executive
orders, to report their complaints to congressional committees.

Senator McCarthy made no comment (this was unprecedented) on the committee’s report. Roy Cohn, who had resigned as chief counsel
in anticipation of the committee’s findings, gave his own statement. “The American people … are the jury. They have given
me tremendous support in this controversy. Anyone who associates himself with the cause of exposing atheistic Communist infiltration
has to contend with partisan politics.”

On the same day the findings of the special Senate committee on Army-McCarthy were released, still another special Senate
subcommittee convened. This one was headed by Senator Arthur V. Watkins of Utah, and its mandate was to resolve whether Joseph
Raymond McCarthy, by (alleged) misbehavior dating back to the Tydings Committee investigations and going forward to his questioning
of General Ralph Zwicker should be censured by the Senate. Short of expulsion, the heaviest levy available to the Senate.

The following day, speaking in the Senate chamber, Senator Fulbright said of his colleague, “His abuses have recalled to the
minds of millions the most abhorrent tyrannies which our whole system of ordered liberty and balanced power was intended to
abolish.”

Senator McCarthy, intercepted by a reporter at an airport, commented that he no longer paid any attention to anything said
by Senator Halfbright. Within the week, Freedom House, founded by the late Wendell Willkie, a former Republican presidential
candidate, added a comment to the heavy library of evaluations of the senator. “[McCarthy is] a man who is ever ready to stoop
to false innuendo and commit as dangerous an assault on democracy as any perpetrated in the propaganda of the Communists.”
The widow of the president against whom Mr. Willkie had run said that Senator McCarthy’s investigating tactics “look like
Mr. Hitler’s methods.” And FDR’s successor, former president Harry Truman, said simply that Mr. McCarthy’s problems were “pathological”
and that he was a “character assassin.”

The day after the report of the Army-McCarthy subcommittee was filed, Joe and Jean McCarthy left Washington for a vacation
at an undisclosed destination.

On reaching the secluded lakeside house close to Joe’s native Appleton, Jean made a careful decision. She wouldn’t say anything
to Joe about his drinking until the third day. He needed desperately whatever physical repose he could get from two days of
sleeping and relaxing at the isolated and ingeniously appointed summer cottage of a friend, Milwaukee manufacturer Bill Brady.
Irene Brady had detached an old retainer from the city with instructions that she must cook for the McCarthys, keep the house
tidy, stay out of their way in her own room with her own television, and under no circumstances report where she was, or with
whom, to friends or family. That was easy. Thelma, an ardent supporter of the senator, welcomed enthusiastically the prospect
of “looking after our Joe McCarthy for a few days.”

Jean had packed several books, rigorously excluding any book that so much as touched on the problems of the postwar world.
She had a novel or two by Jane Austen and by Trollope, plus
Gone with the Wind
, which neither she nor Joe had read, and two murder mysteries by Agatha Christie. On the morning after their arrival she
took a book to the terrace and began reading. There was a pier on the lake, and the water was at midsummer warmth. Joe pulled
out a long bamboo pole from the garage, some fishing line, and affixed to the hook a piece of raw bacon. He whooped with delight
when, a few minutes later, he brought up a sunfish. He caught three more in the succeeding hour and brought them in to Thelma,
insisting that she fry them for lunch, never mind that she had prepared a steak. “Steaks last forever, Thelma. Save the steak
for dinner.”

With lunch, Joe had three Bloody Marys. Pursuant to her resolve, Jean said nothing. She would wait until the next day. Then,
she said to herself sternly,
she would be tough!

After lunch, Joe napped for an hour, read listlessly in one of Jean’s novels, and joined her for a half hour’s walk up toward
the main road and back. At five he turned on the early news hour. Half the figures in Wisconsin shown in the news were men
and women he knew from his industrious cultivation of Wisconsin voters. But there was no reference to McCarthy. At six he
explored the networks. Once again, no mention. At six-thirty, highball in hand, he looked at the television, dialed around,
but had no satisfaction from what he saw and heard. He turned the television off and gave the operator the number in New York
for Harry Bontecou, who was quickly on the
line. He chatted contentedly with Harry. He spoke of the Army-McCarthy hearings (“Pretty much predictable, I think. Roy thought
so too”). And then about the censure committee.