THE CONGRESS: Busy Man

In Washington last week, Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy was busier than a terrier in a cow barn. Wherever there was news, there was Joe.

McCarthy the investigator took his place in the Senate hearing room where the Hoey subcommittee, of which he is a member, grilled Bill Boyle. McCarthy was stern with witnesses. “Don’t be coy with me,” he snapped at Boyle’s friend Max Siskind. But in mid-session, McCarthy had to leave. “I happen to be testifying myself,” he explained.

McCarthy the Witness. McCarthy was off to a downtown law office, where he was giving a pretrial deposition in the libel suit brought against him by Columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson was also suing for $250,000 damages for “unprovoked physical assault” during a party at the Sulgrave Club.

In his deposition, Pearson related: “McCarthy greeted me with a sort of mock effusiveness . . . He said, ‘I’m really going to take you apart on the Senate floor tomorrow . . . I’m really going to tear you to pieces . . .’ He kept badgering me.” Finally, said Pearson, he asked McCarthy: “Joe, how is your income-tax case coming along? When are they going to put you in jail?” “He jumped up, put his thumb and index finger behind my nerves in the back of my cranium right here, and gouged me as hard as he could and said, ‘You come out. We will settle this.'” Later, related Pearson: “I was about to pay the hat-check boy, when McCarthy came up . . . pinned my arms down, swung me around, and proceeded to kick me in the groin with his knee . . . He said, ‘Keep your hands out of your pockets; no firearms, no guns . . .’ He said, ‘Take that back about my income taxes.’ I tried to get away from him . . . McCarthy broke loose and swung on me with the flat of his hand.”

When Joe arrived, Pearson’s attorney started in on his income taxes. In the years 1946 through 1949, McCarthy had reported an overall loss every year. “How did you live, Senator?” asked the attorney. Roared McCarthy: “None of your business . . . Pearson is suing because I have exposed him as a mouthpiece of the Communist Party.” Just then, a summons came for a Senate roll call on the tax bill. McCarthy snapped up his briefcase and stalked out.

McCarthy the Accuser. Next day, McCarthy was back in a more familiar role. Flourishing a pink-covered brief of “documentary evidence,” he appeared before a Foreign Relations subcommittee to oppose the confirmation of Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup as a U.S. delegate to the U.N. General Assembly. His “documentary evidence” would prove his charge that Jessup “has a great affinity for Communist causes,” said McCarthy.*

McCarthy produced photostats showing Jessup’s name on letterheads of organizations which, years later, had been declared subversive by a legislative committee. A typical McCarthy exhibit was an invitation to a dinner sponsored by the American Russian Institute. What was the extent of Jessup’s affiliation? Said McCarthy: “I do not know . . . This is just part of the history, a small part of it, understand. If this were the only evidence, I certainly would not be in here.” Commented Arkansas’ William Fulbright: “I can’t follow you that if these individual cases don’t amount to anything, if you put a lot of them together that makes it amount to something . . . The fact that there were a number of zeros doesn’t make it amount to one if you put them all together.”

McCarthy the Orator. Too pressed for time to finish his testimony, McCarthy hopped into a plane and headed for Santa Fe to address a gathering of 17 Republican state chairmen from the Rocky Mountain and Midwestern states. This also got him out of town as a Rules subcommittee opened hearings on the resolution of Connecticut’s Senator William Benton demanding his expulsion from the Senate.

Benton spent more than two hours explaining what he called the real issue: “Whether Senator McCarthy has borne false witness . . . practiced calculated deceit and falsehood.”

Benton’s case suffered from the same fault as McCarthy’s. As Benton admitted, “no one of these charges would be enough. It is a pattern of behavior over the years.”

From New Mexico, McCarthy resorted to jeering. “I wouldn’t take the time to answer Connecticut’s odd little mental midget who is used as a megaphone for the Communist party-line type of smear.” Instead, he orated for more than an hour to the assembled Republicans. Many of them had opposed inviting him. But after hearing Joe reiterate his familiar charges and watching him flourish “documentation,” the delegates stood and cheered. At meeting’s end, the 17 state chairmen unanimously and formally pledged McCarthy their support as Joe hustled off for more speechifying at the annual dinner of Pennsylvania’s V.F.W. in Harrisburg.

At week’s end, 24 Republican Senators, headed by Iowa’s Bourke Hickenlooper and New Hampshire’s Styles Bridges, rallied to McCarthy’s side with a manifesto. “There is evidence that no man can criticize our Government today and escape intemperate reprisals,” the Republicans noted. “We shall rally to the defense of any persons against whom reprisals are directed . . . We shall fight to guarantee that in the difficult days ahead, no man’s voice shall be silenced.” There was a 25th signer: McCarthy.

*Last week the President’s Loyalty Review Board reviewed Jessup’s case and found “there is no reasonable doubt of his loyalty.”