Standard Effort

Few events of the 1952 campaign had aroused more advance excitement than Joe McCarthy's long-heralded blast at Adlai Stevenson's record on Communism. Stevenson himself warned the nation that it was about to hear "the most magnificent smears of all times." Other Democrats said that McCarthy was planning to make vicious personal accusations, and thereby gave him invaluable publicity along with a fascinating aura of evil. But when the day finally came this week, the Wisconsin Senator failed to live up to the Democratic billing. His nationwide TV broadcast was a standard McCarthy effort, no more and no less.

"Tonight," announced Joe, "I shall give you the history of the Democrat candidate for the presidency, who endorses and would continue the suicidal Kremlin-directed policies of this nation." McCarthy referred to Wilson Wyatt, "Stevenson's personal manager . . . former head of the leftwing Americans for Democratic Action [who] condemned the Government's loyalty program in most vicious terms ..." He attacked a top Stevenson aide, Writer Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for an anti-religion paragraph in a review of Whittaker Chambers' Witness.

Bernard DeVoto, "another Stevenson speech assistant," said McCarthy, once "denounced the FBI as nothing but 'college-trained flatfeet,' and said 'I would refuse to cooperate with the FBI.' "

Attacking Stevenson directly, McCarthy cited Rear Admiral Adolphus Staton (USN ret.) concerning a conference the admiral had with Stevenson during World War II at a time when the Democratic candidate "had been assigned the task of enforcing the . . . law which ordered the removal of Communists from the radio aboard our ships." Staton's statement as quoted by McCarthy: "Stevenson said that he could not see that we had anything at all against them and stated that we should not be hard on the Communists."

McCarthy displayed his usual tendency to imply conclusions more sweeping than his facts warranted and he once, in referring to Stevenson, said, "Alger--pardon me--I mean Adlai," a McCarthy trick that he has used several times before.

The speech would hardly change the course of the campaign. Partisans of either side could balance it off against some of Harry Truman's recent efforts.

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