The Oak & the Ivy

(See Cover) By the evening of Thursday, Feb. 25, 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy, after a fortnight of mounting frenzy, had built the smallest of molehills into one of the most devastating political volcanoes that ever poured the lava of conflict and the ash of dismay over Washington. Joe, the stoker, was still disorganized but quick-witted, charging in and out of his Senate office, snatching up telephones, rushing to the Senate floor to answer quorum calls, dictating statements to reporters. As he dashed about, his office staff lost track, believed a rumor that he had emplaned for New York. Then Joe stomped in from the corridor, stuffed a briefcase, said "Come on" to a waiting reporter and hurried out. Behind them came a job seeker from Wisconsin, carrying the briefcase.

Home from the Hill. The three got into the Senator's air-conditioned Cadillac (a wedding gift from Texas admirers) and started for Joe's new home (bought by his mother-in-law ) a few blocks away. The Senator had not yet figured out the best way to drive to his house, and he had to circle a block before he found the alley to the back door. He stumbled up the four brick steps, found a key, entered, groped for a light switch. In the dark, the Wisconsin job seeker banged into the door.

The kitchen was bright with the newest gadgets, and brighter still for a load of groceries that Jean McCarthy, his adoring wife, had ordered by long distance from her hospital bed in New York. Joe and the reporter walked through a dining room stacked high with boxes, perhaps 200 of them -wedding presents that the busy McCarthys (married last September have not got around to opening.

In a green living room, still only half-furnished, the Senator sank tiredly into a big red chair, but the time to relax was not yet. He waved toward a television set facing him. As Joe gave directions, the reporter flipped from channel to channel until he found a newscast. Again Joe heard the statement put out a few hours before at the White House by his latest victim. Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, with the "100% approval" of the President of the U.S. The Senator heard his own brash characterization of the Stevens statement as "completely false." He waved the TV off.

Meanwhile, the job seeker from Wisconsin knew what to do. Digging into the groceries, he started to get dinner. He found some frozen pork chops, which he broiled (he is not looking for a cook's job), a fine Maryland ham, a Wisconsin cheese, some bourbon, some seltzer.

The phone began to ring. Between 7 p.m. and 11 it rang 100 times. The Senator took perhaps one call in ten, some times listening for a moment and then saying. "The Senator is not here." The doorbell began to ring. During the evening, some 20 or 30 people trooped in and out. They did not have appointments: most seemed to have no specific business. They came, as it were, out of the woodwork, as they always come to hover around a man of power. Some got the Senator in a corner and talked earnestly to him. Some wandered into the kitchen and sampled the bourbon. Some just stood around. Between conversations and phone calls, the Senator ate dinner in the kitchen. The broiler of pork chops, having eaten his fill, made a serious pitch for a job, but the Senator promised nothing.

A Scandal's Ingredients. Several times during the evening, the Senator sank exhausted into his chair, muttering, "I'm getting old." He is 44. His digestion is bad, and he has sinus trouble. But he is not slowing down, and he is decidedly not mellowing.

His plunging, weaving drive had the nation in an uproar, and the top levels of Government had been turned from other duties in the vain attempt to pull him down. All he started with was a charge against a New York City dentist and some testimony against a onetime cook in a Government cafeteria. McCarthy's work -and the ineptitude of his opponents -had fashioned these meager materials into a major scandal that seriously embarrassed the President of the U.S., almost forced the Secretary of the Army to resign, drove more serious news off the front pages of the U.S., and shocked the world. The Times of London sat its ever-present sense of history upon its journalistic knee, and intoned: "Senator McCarthy this afternoon achieved what General Burgoyne and General Cornwallis never achieved -the surrender of the American Army." It was not that spectacular -but it was bad enough.

The Fatal Pattern. How did it begin? Was McCarthy out to get the U.S. Army? And, if so, why?

McCarthy has no such broad goals or plans. He does not look far ahead. He buzzes from one little investigation to another, drawn by tips from Government employees "worked up" by a staff of investigators headed by Roy Cohn, 26-year-old counsel for the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, of which McCarthy is chairman. In the course of these headline-hunting forays, McCarthy's manner and methods bring him into conflict with people more highly placed than those under attack. Most of McCarthy's famed struggles have begun as encounter battles, unplanned by either side. Joe, a master of the impromptu thumb-in-eye school of fighting, has come out on top in most of these scuffles, especially when his opponents tried to appease him, or spar with him, or attacked too hastily without a careful eye for the second half of McCarthy's one-two punch.

Last week's tangle with the Army began in typical fashion, and was marked by both appeasement and gross carelessness, on the part of his adversary.

Last year McCarthy got into an investigation of subversives at Fort Monmouth, N.J. He showed that there had been a substantial penetration by Communists at Monmouth during World War II; he made a case for his charge that security measures were still not strictly enforced. The Monmouth investigation was not much of a headlinemaker. McCarthy began to get bored with it.

Probing the Stork Club. Meanwhile, the Army finally got around to drafting a prominent member of McCarthy's staff, G. (for Gerard) David Schine, 26, son of J. Myer Schine, wealthy hotel-chain owner (Miami Beach's Roney Plaza and Los Angeles' Ambassador). McCarthy seemed a little bored with Schine and not too sorry to lose him. But Roy Cohn thinks the world of Schine, and McCarthy considers Roy Cohn one of the brightest young men he has met. Cohn set out to use McCarthy's superlative nuisance value to make Army life easier for Draftee Schine.

According to an Administration official, requests for special treatment of Private Schine poured in from McCarthy's office. Whether or not Cohn's badgering was effective. Schine led the life of a golden boy at Fort Dix, N.J. Under the pretext of having work to do for McCarthy, Private Schine got extra weekend passes and after-hours passes during his recruit training. Reports reached the Army that Schine's "investigating" work was often conducted at his penthouse apartment in New York's Waldorf Towers, and at such niteries as the Stork Club and "21." At camp, Schine's name only once appeared on K.P. duty lists; Schine's squad leader made his bed and cleaned his rifle.

During McCarthy's hunt for Communists at Fort Monmouth, Army emissaries to McCarthy warned, as quietly as they knew how, that perhaps the Schine affair had gone too far. McCarthy interpreted this as a blackmail threat and tape-recorded the conversations. Then he told his committee, according to Army officials, "The Army is holding Schine hostage to get me to lay off." Cohn had kept a careful eye open for Army cases. When his bellicose boss renewed his interest in the Army, Cohn handed him the Peress case (see box). McCarthy used it on a recent speaking tour, but it attracted little interest. Then it began to boil up. not because McCarthy discovered anything new. but because others made a series of mistakes.

"Fighting Bob." Army Secretary Stevens wrote McCarthy an appeasing letter which confessed the Army's bungling in the Peress case and pledged correction of the procedures which brought it about. Unappeased, McCarthy .called Brigadier (General Ralph Zwicker, commander of Camp Kilmer, N.J., where Peress had been stationed, to the stand. Zwicker, trying to protect his superiors, gave some answers that were less than candid. McCarthy, lashing out, made the outrageous suggestion that Zwicker, an officer with a line combat record, was "not fit to wear that uniform." Zwicker had been insulted, although not publicly pilloried; the hearing was closed, and the insults first came to light through Army channels.

Secretary Stevens, getting from Zwicker an affidavit of what had happened at the closed hearing, was enraged by Zwicker's story of McCarthy's abuse. Without waiting for a transcript of the testimony. Stevens publicly ordered Zwicker not to testify at the next hearing and announced that he would appear in Zwicker's place. McCarthy, warming up, accepted the challenge. Stevens' statement was so worded as to give many the impression that he would shield all Army officers from questioning by McCarthy. Such a position would have scant legal basis and would be unacceptable to the vast majority of Senators, Republican or Democratic.

On Washington's Birthday, both Stevens and South Dakota's Republican Senator Karl Mundt, a member of the McCarthy committee, were due at Valley Forge, Pa. to receive Freedom Foundation awards. Stevens offered Mundt a ride in his Army plane. In flight. Senator Mundt cautioned Stevens to get and read the transcript of Zwicker's testimony before he went any further in counterattacking McCarthy. The angry Stevens replied that the transcript might have been altered. Mundt assured him that the stenotype notes could be read by an expert.

When Stevens said he was determined to blast McCarthy anyway, Mundt asked: "Are you going to the basic issue involved? Are you going to step between the Senate of the U.S. and your officers?" Mundt answered his own question: "Bob, it is a most unfortunate issue. Joe's worst enemies would support him on this one. I think that would lick you hopelessly."

Stevens, missing the point, said: "I'm just going to take the position that they can't abuse my officers." Mundt explained that Senators would read Stevens' stand as a demand for some kind of censorship over Senate committees, and warned, "That's something for you to think about pretty carefully."

At Valley Forge, Stevens won the hearts of Army officers (and the nickname. "Fighting Bob") when he said: "I intend to accept responsibility . . . pleasant or unpleasant ... I intend to support the loyal men and women of our Army."

An Incidental Witness. Meanwhile, McCarthy was in nearby Philadelphia to receive an award. He said, "I was too temperate" in his remarks to Zwicker. Michigan Republican Senator Charles Potter reached McCarthy by phone in Philadelphia, got him to call off another hearing of Zwicker, which was scheduled for the next day.

Bustling Roy Cohn, in McCarthy's absence, decided to keep the heat on the Army by bringing up the next day a subversion charge against an Army employee. Members of the committee, who had been letting McCarthy go it alone, showed up next morning. For two Democratic committee members, it was the first hearing since they bolted the committee last summer. The witness, a onetime FBI plant in the Communist Party, testified that a woman named Annie Lee Moss was a Communist in 1945.

Annie Lee Moss had been a Pentagon cafeteria custard cook; in 1950 she was promoted to communications clerk in the Pentagon. The Army's reply to McCarthy was that though she worked in the Teletype room, she handled no uncoded secret information. Nevertheless, she had passed a security check. Next day Mrs. Moss, bundled to the temples in a heavy overcoat, appeared and shuffled painfully to the witness chair. McCarthy decided she was too sick to testify, waved her away, saying: "The witness is of no importance."

What was chiefly of importance to McCarthy at that point was to keep up the pressure on the Secretary of the Army, a job that the case of Annie Moss helped to do. The main engagements in the McCarthy-Stevens struggle were fought in a series of ten meetings.

Meeting No. 1. To his Capitol hideaway. Vice President Nixon invited Senate Republican Leader William Knowland, Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, Army Lawyer John G. Adams, Deputy Attorney General William P. I Rogers. Stevens and two White House: aides. This group (except for Stevens): believed that Stevens would get the worst of it if he had to face McCarthy in open hearing as scheduled. The Nixon meeting:

P: Told Stevens frankly that the Army looked weak on the Peress case record, that McCarthy would surely shift the! issue from Zwicker back to Peress.

P: Decided to ask McCarthy to reach an agreement in private and call off his public confrontation with Stevens. This assignment was handed to Dirksen.

P: Decided to work up a new set of rules for investigating committees to keep McCarthy's one-man show within bounds.

P: Agreed to keep President Eisenhower; out of the fracas for the time being.

Meeting No. 2. From Nixon's hideaway, Dirksen strolled over to Mundt's office, where he found Joe McCarthy, Said Dirksen: "Joe, would you sit down and talk it over? There is nothing to lose." It took some persuading to break; down the obdurate McCarthy, but at; length he agreed. Mundt phoned Stevens, suggesting lunch the next day. Stevens assented -and he made the fantastic mistake of taking literally Mundt's request, not to tell "anyone" about the date.

Meeting No. 3. Next day, in Stevens' Pentagon office, Assistant Defense Secretaries Struve Hensel and Frederick Seaton were advising the Secretary how to handle McCarthy at the still-scheduled public hearing. Suddenly Stevens marched out without telling Hensel, Seaton or anyone else that he was going to a meeting with McCarthy and without taking an adviser with him. At this point, the press of the world had Stevens poised, in fighting pose, ready to take on the Wisconsin slugger.

Meeting No. 4. Bob Stevens, a man-of-good-will trained in a family textile business, walked with Karl Mundt into the Capitol's room P-54. Later, a Washington quipster observed that when Stevens entered the room, he was "like a goldfish in a tank of barracuda." Meeting No. 4 featured fried chicken, peas, french fries, head-of-lettuce salad and Joe McCarthy. Also present: Dirksen, and later, Potter. Stevens started with a complaint about McCarthy's abuse of Zwicker. Retorted McCarthy: How could the Army explain the court-martialing of "a poor, brainwashed G.I."* in contrast to the honorable discharge it handed to a "Fifth Amendment Communist" -Peress?

The words forecast the kind of slugging tactics that McCarthy might use on Stevens in an open hearing. Fighting Bob barked back: "I'm not going to have my officers browbeaten." McCarthy snapped back with another attack on Zwicker: "I'm not going to sit there and see a supercilious bastard sit there and smirk."

Conciliator Mundt broke in: "Joe, you're not dealing with Dean Acheson any longer. Let's look to the future." This remark was the turning point of Meeting No. 4; it led to Stevens' next big mistake. The discussion shifted to a friendly, businesslike tone, which lasted half an hour. The Senators appealed to Stevens to help preserve party solidarity by avoiding a televised clash with McCarthy which could only, they said, help the Democrats. Soothing words by a mellifluous Dirksen and smiles from McCarthy somehow convinced Bob Stevens that he had the committee's promise of better future treatment for Army officers. The change of tone became, in Stevens' mind, an important feature of the meeting. Unhappily, this was not recorded anywhere except in Stevens' mind.

Mundt sat down at a typewriter and pecked out a "Memorandum of Understanding." Its four points:

1) "Communists must be rooted out."

2) Stevens will order completion of the Army's investigation of the Peress case; make "everyone involved" available as witnesses before McCarthy's committee.

3) Zwicker's appearance before the committee will be temporarily postponed.

4) Stevens' appearance before the committee was "canceled."

Except for one minor clause, inserted by Stevens, the document's language was wholly the Senators'. Nowhere was anything said about better treatment for Army witnesses. But Bob Stevens, thinking he had won at least a stalemate from McCarthy, left Meeting No. 4 with no copy of the agreement, but with relief to the point of elation written on his face.

During the meeting, noise from a throng of newsmen in the corridor attracted the attention of Vice President Nixon, who was in his hideaway office next door. It was his first inkling of the critical discussions in room P-54.

Meeting No. 5. Back in the Pentagon, Acting Defense Secretary Roger Kyes, who had been on a trip, moved in on the situation by joining Meeting No. 5, which included Stevens, Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway, Hensel and Seaton. Abuse of officers would stop, Stevens complacently told the others. Ridgway stepped forward, congratulated Stevens with an emotional handshake. Some of those present suspected the Secretary's mistake. Their suspicions were confirmed when, later, they read the press dispatches which told them what he had eaten along with the fried chicken.

The dispatches clicked out the news that Stevens had "capitulated to McCarthy." At first, the Secretary thought the statements were outrageous distortions by newsmen. As more dispatches came in, he grew worried and rattled, started calling White House aides for reassurance. Then he heard that McCarthy had told a newsman that he, Stevens, could not have given in "more abjectly if he had got down on his knees." According to some men whom Stevens called that night, the Secretary was so shocked and shaken that he sobbed into the phone.

Around and around the Pentagon's corridors, embittered wisecracks were exchanged (e.g., "Private Schine is the only man in the Army today with any morale"). Within hours, Fighting Bob was no more; the Army brass was calling him "Retreating Robert."

But the Pentagon never gives up a fight as long as a good pressagent remains to lead the charge. In the Army's hour of woe, the opening paragraphs of the statement Stevens would have made to the McCarthy committee the next day were leaked out: "I am here today to defend an officer of the U.S. Army . . . who was humiliated in a hearing before this committee . . . because he was carrying out my orders. I am here because I feel the integrity of the entire Army is involved." But Bob Stevens was not destined to be there: he never spoke his brave words in the presence of Joe McCarthy, and the release of his prepared statement only emphasized the depths of his humiliation.

The defeat's full impact landed on the world's doorstep with the morning newspapers. Editorial writers, who had been championing Stevens all week, denounced him. Cried the Richmond News Leader: "Mr. Stevens has . . . contributed to the delusion that McCarthy bestrides this nation like some Colossus, while petty men walk about under his huge legs." Said the New York Times's Pundit Arthur Krock: "Officials who get into a slugging match with McCarthy had best be sure in advance that they have loyal seconds in their corners, a Sunday punch in both fists and the stamina to stay to the finish."

After this low point, the anti-McCarthy side rallied, and gained a little ground.

Meeting No. 6. Amid reports that Stevens was about to resign, Nixon, Rogers and White House aides went into Meeting No. 6. They drafted a statement which they hoped to get McCarthy and his committee Republicans to issue. Dirksen was summoned to the White House, where he chatted briefly with the President, who said: "I'd like to see if you can do this."

Meeting No. 7. Dirksen picked up the draft statement from its authors, repaired to the Senate cloakroom, where he huddled in Meeting No, 7 with McCarthy, Mundt and Potter. But the draft asked Joe to do three things he would obviously never consent to: 1) admit that he had abused Zwicker, 2) agree that Stevens had been given assurances of McCarthy's future good conduct, and 3) hint that calling Army officers in the Peress case might not be necessary.

McCarthy would agree only to a statement which called Stevens an able and friendly fellow. Since this would prove nothing, the White House said not to bother with further negotiations.

Meeting No. 8. Stevens and his Pentagon advisers met and drafted another statement. Acting Secretary Kyes, a massive man of massive will, took charge. He summoned Stevens to his office and said: "We're going to the White House." Kyes and Stevens crossed the Potomac, joined the still-cerebrating Meeting No. 5, which was now augmented by Presidential Chief of Staff Sherman Adams and others. While the conferees in the Cabinet Room sweated over their draft, President Eisenhower was practicing pitch shots on the nearby White House lawn. When Meeting No. 6 had finished its labors, it found Ike in his second-floor study and brought him the statement. The President strengthened the language in one spot, gave it his "100% approval."

Meeting No. 9. In the office of Press Secretary James Hagerty, Stevens read his statement to reporters while Kyes towered over him and Hagerty, a strong anti-McCarthy man, worked hard to keep his choler down. Stevens said that he had been misinterpreted; he wanted to make it clear that "I shall never accede to the abuse of Army personnel [or] to them being browbeaten or humiliated. I do not intend to allow them to be deprived of . . . counsel." He added that he had assurances from members of McCarthy's committee that "they will not permit such conditions to develop in the future."

Meeting No. 10. The last of the week's series, Meeting No. 10, was a press conference in Joe McCarthy's office, assembled as the Stevens statement hit the wires. The phone rang. A newsman took down the Stevens text and read it to McCarthy, who uttered a dirty phrase. Stevens had landed a punch with the use of the word "browbeaten." McCarthy, who usually reacts at once, lapsed into two minutes of silence. When he spoke, it was slowly and deliberately: "I've very carefully explained to the Secretary that he is the Secretary and not running the committee. He knows that Zwicker was not denied counsel. He never asked for counsel ... I agree that no one should be browbeaten before any committee, and the Secretary should have gone a step further and said nobody should be murdered before a committee either."

Had there been any assurances from the committee? "That's completely false, completely false," growled McCarthy. Had Stevens capitulated at the fried-chicken lunch? With a broad grin. Joe rasped coyly: "On the record? Absolutely not." As he said it. he playfully kicked a reporter under the table.

Shortly after the press conference broke up, McCarthy handed his briefcase to the Wisconsin job seeker and trundled off to the house on Third Street, N.E., for chops and company.

Next day McCarthy made a typical switch to milk & honey. "There are no differences," he said, between him and either Stevens or the White House. There was just one point to make clear: he would continue to expose Communists and crooks "even if it embarrasses my own party." And with this tight-lipped understatement, a week of throwing eggs at electric fans came to an end. The Republican Party sat down to take the omelet out of its hair and assess the damage.

Unfading Avenger. The party was well smeared. McCarthy's support of Eisenhower in 1952 implied to McCarthy's followers an end of what Joe now calls "20 years of treason." But his continued attacks on the State Department, on the Information Service and, above all, on the Army and Bob Stevens, a thorough Republican, give Democrats a chance to mock: "One more year of treason."

To anti-McCarthy Republicans, Eisenhower's election implied a promise to end McCarthy's prominence in national politics by ending any suspicion that Communists in Government were still coddled. But McCarthy is more prominent than ever before.

He broke with Eisenhower when Harvard's James Conant was appointed High Commissioner to Germany and the rift has been widening ever since. Harry Truman, who knows how to use a thumb himself, introduced "McCarthyism" into the Harry Dexter White case, and Joe made the speech in which he tried to set himself up as the issue in the 1954 congressional elections, an issue which Eisenhower has emphatically said he does not want. Eisenhower & Co. have failed to make McCarthy fade away, and that failure is going to hurt in the fall of 1954 if it has not been corrected.

The brouhaha with Stevens hurt McCarthy as well as the party. Even men who approved of McCarthy resented his attacks upon the Army. They sensed the basic unfairness of the contest: the law of the land requires an officer of the U.S. armed forces to be a gentleman, but there is no such restriction upon a U.S. Senator.

Even the Chicago Tribune deserted McCarthy in the Stevens fight, saying: "Senator McCarthy will better serve his cause if he learns to distinguish the role of investigator from the role of avenging angel . . . There was ... no reason to doubt the general's good faith. There is nothing ... to suggest that he was a party to a conspiracy to protect Communists . . . Senator McCarthy's behavior toward General Zwicker . . . has injured his cause of driving the disloyal from the Government service." The Tribune, no doubt, will return to the McCarthy corner, but its editorial was a sharp warning that no large group of Republicans will put up with all of his methods.

With Government Money. But what has McCarthy to lose? He is not running for President. He has no organized following to nourish and protect. His Senate seat is safe for five more years. He runs unhandicapped by responsibility and even by the heavier forms of ambition. What he thirsts for is what he got last week -a sense of personal power, personally wielded, a centripetal force that brings men to his doorstep and makes responsible officers of Government turn in their tracks before his onslaught. A President cannot do that. A Senator, McCarthy's kind of Senator, can.

Of late, there has been much nervous talk of McCarthy as a serious reactionary leader backed by Texas millionaires. It is true that some Texas millionaires are fascinated by McCarthy, partly because they like his politics, partly because he is a lively fellow.

But he is less enthralled by them than they by him. He does not need their money. He has not much of his own, and he does not seem to care. The Government supplies the money he needs -$214,000 of it this year for his investigation committee. And liberal Democratic Senators joined in voting the money.

McCarthy will be around for a while. Opportunity keeps knocking, and McCarthy, the opportunist, will be there to fling wide the door.

On his office wall, a framed anonymous quotation says: "Oh, God, don't let me weaken. Help me to continue on. And when I go down, let me go down like an oak tree felled by a woodsman's ax."

The ax that will cut down McCarthy's power will have to be a lot sharper than those in the hands of Stevens & Co. last week. That mighty oak must be approached with caution; it is covered with Toxicodendron radicans, i.e., poison ivy.

* A reference to Corporal Edward Dickenson, the Virginia mountain boy who, as a war prisoner in Korea, defected to Communism, but then changed his mind and chose freedom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.