The Self-Inflated Target

(See Cover)

It was nearly midnight when a fast-moving, youthful figure muffled in a trench coat bounced up the steps and rang the doorbell at Joe McCarthy's brightly lighted house on Capitol Hill. The door opened to admit Roy Cohn, 27, the chief counsel of McCarthy's Permanent Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. A few moments later, Cohn emerged with McCarthy, and the two talked in low tones as they walked Joe's five-month-old Doberman pinscher up and down C Street.*

McCarthy had summoned Cohn because he had just learned that the newspapers were about to get the text of an Army report that they had been anticipating for days. While they talked, newsservice teletypes were clacking out, for the morning papers, the Army's sensational charge: Roy Cohn had threatened to "wreck the Army" in an attempt to get special treatment for one Private G. David Schine. Cohn's close friend and erstwhile colleague on the McCarthy committee staff. The inference was strong that much of the Army's recent trouble with the McCarthy committee (TIME, March 8) had come about because the Army refused to knuckle under to Counsel Cohn on behalf of Private Schine.

In time for the afternoon editions, McCarthy and Cohn fired a counterblast: the Army had tried to "blackmail" the committee into calling off its investigation of Communists, the Army had tried to use Private Schine as "a hostage," and Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens had urged the committee to leave the Army alone and "go after the Navy, Air Force and Defense Department" instead.

The Kingmaker. McCarthy's voice never faltered and Cohn's chin never quivered as they set off their counterbattery fire. But the reckless fury of their salvos proved that Joe McCarthy stood pinpointed as never before in his public life. Nobody was challenging his rights as a Senator. Nobody was attacking his license to hunt Communists. But the Army, in taking aim, could not have been more menacing. It had drawn a careful bead on the one-man subcommittee's real brain, the precocious, brilliant, arrogant young man whom McCarthy had come to regard as indispensable--"as indispensable." said Joe, "as I am." And Roy Cohn, thanks to a lifetime process of self-inflation, presented a lovely target.

Cohn, a chunky (5 ft. 8 in., 160 Ibs.), hazel-eyed dynamo type with deceptively sleepy eyelids, carefully slicked hair, is a man of extraordinary talents. Gifted with a sharp, retentive mind and a photographic memory, he also has the innate political cunning of the kingmaker. As Joe's committee counsel, he moves around the room at a dogtrot, speaks like a machine gun. He is relentless with witnesses, scornful of weaknesses, nerveless before criticism, and contemptuous of all Senators on the subcommittee save McCarthy. With good reason, Joe calls Roy Cohn "the most brilliant young fellow I have ever met."

"A Great Treat." "Roy has deserved a spanking since he was a child," says an old friend of the Cohn family, "but I doubt if he ever got one in his whole life." Roy's father, Albert Cohn, is a judge in the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court, a onetime protege of the late Boss Ed Flynn, and a power in the Democratic Party. In his teens, Roy would amaze his friends by putting in a spur-of-the-moment telephone call to the mayor's office and talking briefly to "Bill" (O'Dwyer). Once, when Roy was invited to go along on an excursion supervised by the father of one of his chums, the father got a telephone call from Roy's mother. "You're in for a great treat," she said. "Roy's going with you. He's such a smart boy and knows so much about so many things. I'm sure you'll get a lot of pleasure out of him and probably learn a lot from him, too."

Roy was smart enough to get his degree at Columbia Law School at 20; his political connections got him a job as clerktypist ($1,765 a year) in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York while he champed around waiting to turn 21 so he could be admitted to the bar. On the day he was admitted--May 27, 1948--he was sworn in as an assistant U.S. attorney ($3,397 a year), He soon became a specialist in subversive activities, performing ably and energetically as a staff lawyer on such cases as the William Remington perjury trial, the Rosenberg trial and the big New York trial of top Communist leaders. He had also given auspicious evidence of a trait that still rankles his associates: contempt of all but the top boss. In 1950 his boss, U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, made 23year-old Roy Cohn his confidential as sistant.

The Pressures of Ambition. In New York Roy learned the uses of publicity and began to build a personal claque of Hearst reporters and syndicated columnists (among them: George Sokolsky, Walter Winchell). Fittingly, the newspapers were tipped in advance that he was being transferred to Washington as a special assistant to Attorney General James McGranery in September 1952.

His first day on the job was memorable because: 1) he was ceremoniously sworn in right in the Attorney General's private office (actually no new oath was necessary ); 2) after one departmental press release announced his coming but neglected to mention his title, a second was issued to correct the oversight; 3) three Department of Justice juniors were evicted from their office so it could become Roy's private office; 4) he demanded a private cable address (denied) and a private telephone line to his old office in New York (also denied).

Cohn prepared the indictment of Owen Lattimore on charges of perjury, but his career in the Justice Department is best remembered for his testimony before a House subcommittee investigating the State and Justice Departments' foot-dragging in the investigation of U.S. Communists on the United Nations staff. Cohn blandly implied that most of his bosses had opposed him on making public the grand jury's findings. The subcommittee report exonerated Attorney General McGranery and his staff and noted, with an acuity remarkable in a public document: "Cohn left [the subcommittee] with the impression that he is an extremely bright young man, aggressive in the performance of his duties and probably not free from the pressures of personal ambition."

Cohn stayed in the Justice Department through the Truman Administration. Attorney General Herbert Brownell ignored his gambits for a better job there, so he turned to his many admirers on Capitol Hill. On January 14, 1953, Roy Cohn resigned from Justice to become chief counsel to McCarthy's subcommittee, at $11,700 a year.

Ingredient for Palship. Cohn's important Manhattan legal friends had been telling him for a long time that he should meet young David Schine, the son of J. Myer Schine, multimillionaire owner of a string of hotels and theaters. Cohn's old boss, Irving Saypol, got Dave and Roy together at a luncheon in a restaurant in downtown Manhattan in 1952. Dave Schine turned out to be a pleasant, articulate young man with the build and features of a junior-grade Greek god. The two 25-year-olds were soon cutting a wide swath through Manhattan's best restaurants and nightclubs. Dave had plenty of money (and, for that matter, Roy was drawing down $20,000 a year from a private law partnership, in addition to his salary). More important to their palship, Dave wanted to be a Communist investigator, and he regarded Roy as just about the smartest man he ever knew.

The Schine family had put Dave through the best of Eastern schools (Fessenden to Andover to Harvard), where he got good grades--even though he irritated his schoolmates by his Cadillac standard of living and his bandleader's mannerisms. His Harvard career was interrupted by a hitch in the seagoing Army Transport Service. Soon after graduation (class of '49), Dave was installed as president of Schine Hotels, Inc., although his father kept tight control of the operations. Dave distinguished himself by writing a remarkably succinct pamphlet, Definition of Communism, and father Schine saw to it that copies were as prominent in Schine hotel rooms as the Gideon Bible.

Junketeering Gumshoes. In February 1953, Dave went to work for Roy on the McCarthy committee staff as an unpaid consultant on psychological warfare. Two months later, the team of Cohn & Schine got top billing on two continents as they breezed through U.S. Information Service posts in Europe in 18 days, "to see if there's waste and mismanagement and to pin down responsibility," as Roy put it.

Their trip was an outrageously brash performance, but it got results of a sort. In Frankfurt, Cohn charged that Theodore Kaghan, in the U.S. High Commissioner's Public Affairs Division, had "once signed a Communist Party petition." Kaghan jeered at Cohn & Schine as "junketeering gumshoes." Two weeks later, Kaghan was called home by the State Department and fired.

Back in Washington, Roy and Dave became inseparable; they plowed through the Voice of America investigation together, and Roy cheerfully shared credits with Dave. They would fly down to Washington from New York on Monday, take adjoining rooms at the Statler Hotel for the week, then fly back on Friday night for a weekend of nightclubbing. (Favorite haunt: the Stork Club's Cub Room.) At McCarthy's wedding last September, Cohn pushed Schine into a family wedding picture (much to Joe's annoyance). This idyllic state of gamboling was suddenly interrupted last summer by the harsh note of a bugle: Gerard David Schine was about to be drafted into the U.S. Army.

A Bad Light. What happened next has now largely been told in biting bureaucratese in the Army's report released last week (see box). Roy Cohn accepted Dave Schine's draft as a personal challenge. He enlisted McCarthy's aid in trying to get Schine a commission. When this failed, Roy personally extended the long arm of the U.S. Senate to protect Dave during his enlisted service.

For a time Roy succeeded remarkably well. Orders went out from the Secretary of the Army's office to the commanding general at Fort Dix that Private Dave Schine was to get night and weekend passes during his eight weeks of basic training. The word was passed down the line that Schine was a VIP, and every weekend a chauffeur-driven Cadillac would whisk him away from his comrades-in-arms (who get a weekend pass about four times in the eight weeks). Only once did Schine pull K.P. duty. One afternoon his squad leader hastily called a group of G.I.'s to clean stoves. After the detail was formed, the squad leader groaned: "Oh, my God! I've picked Schine! What in hell am I going to do?" Later he apologized: "Gee, the light was bad, Schine. I didn't know it was you."

Private Schine (who accepted the rough and the smooth with good grace) suddenly found his privileges curtailed. The Army report made it clear that whole brigades of high Army brass had wasted a disturbing amount of time over Schine. And it had even more interesting personal facets:

1) Joe McCarthy secretly disliked Schine because he was a publicity grabber;

2) McCarthy, when alone with Adams or Stevens, urged them to draft Schine and give him no special privilege at all;

3) McCarthy, in Roy Cohn's presence, or after a session with Cohn, sang an entirely different tune. The implication was embarrassingly clear that, if the Army report was accurate, Kingmaker Roy Cohn had arrived at a new dimension of influence.

"Roy Denies Everything." Michigan's Charlie Potter, one of the four Republicans on McCarthy's subcommittee, was the first Senator on Capitol Hill who got a copy of the Army report, two days before the press did. Clutching it in his hand with one of his canes (he lost both legs in World War II combat), Potter went to the Senate cloakroom and got Illinois' Ev Dirksen and South Dakota's Karl Mundt, both GOP members of the subcommittee, to come off the floor. Potter showed them the report and, his voice all but strangled in anger, insisted that the subcommittee meet at once and fire Roy Cohn. Dirksen and Mundt urged caution.

Potter caught up to McCarthy later in the afternoon and demanded that McCarthy call a meeting of the subcommittee. McCarthy refused, said he might be able to get around to it the following week. But that night, after a Republican banquet in the plush Sulgrave Club, the four Republicans caucused informally, and McCarthy said he would talk to Cohn. Next day he reported back: "Roy denies everything categorically. You haven't seen the other part of the story." They agreed that they would meet in the committee's office on Friday, confront Roy Cohn with the report and decide what to do next.

But on Friday morning, the Army's report broke (leaked first by a Democrat, whom the Army had thoughtfully provided with a copy). By noon, without so much as a nod to the rest of the committee, McCarthy and Roy held their press conference, and they released "the other side of the story."

Appalling Accusations. The "other side" took the form of eleven interoffice memos, purported to have been written in the last six months by McCarthy or Cohn or the subcommittee's executive director, Francis Carr. Several memos bore the same dates as entries in the Army's report. For example, on January 14, the day the Army said Cohn promised to "wreck the Army" if Schine were sent overseas, a "Roy Cohn" memo to "Senator McCarthy" said: "John Adams has been in the office again. He said that if we keep on with the hearings on the Army, and particularly if we call in those on the Loyalty Board who cleared Communists, he will fight us in every way he can."

Scattered through the memos were other accusations that:

P: Army Counselor Adams offered on December 9 to trade "specific information about an Air Force base where there were a large number of homosexuals" for information on what Army project the committee planned to investigate next.

P: Adams told Cohn in January that "this was the last chance" for Cohn to arrange a law partnership for Adams in New York, with a guaranteed annual fee of $25,000.

When McCarthy's memos clattered in on the Pentagon news tickers, the Army and Defense Department went into a classic Pentagon flap: nobody had planned on a McCarthy-Cohn counterattack. Stevens rushed through the corridors in a high state of anguish, dodging roaming bands of reporters while he sought the counsel of his public-relations advisers. It was dusk before he and Adams had their full replies drafted. As for urging McCarthy to go after other services, said Stevens, "anyone who knows me would know that such a charge is fantastic." Adams stood unequivocally on the Army report, called the charges of blackmail "fantastic and false," and issued a blanket denial of all other charges (which he would not expand when reporters pressed him on the $25.000 question).

Self-Investigation? As the great hue & cry continued, McCarthy was giving his all to save Cohn. Senator Potter wanted to fire Cohn as soon as the committee could meet, but McCarthy refused to call a meeting. Even McCarthy's old friend Dirksen was outraged when McCarthy broke his agreement to hold a meeting before making any statements.

McCarthy flew off to Manitowoc, Wis. (with a copy of a Western pocketbook, Fight or Run, displayed under his arm) for a weekend speech. There, characteristically, he hinted that he had a ."secret witness" to bear out his charges against Army Secretary Stevens. This week he was back in Washington, blandly offering to testify under oath before his own subcommittee, with Karl Mundt occupying the chair. But one formidable objection to any investigation by McCarthy's subcommittee was spotlighted when Roy Cohn was the guest on NBC's Meet the Press show Sunday. Under questioning, Cohn admitted that somebody on the committee staff (Cohn did not know who) had got the members of the staff to sign loyalty pledges to Cohn (two refused). An investigation in the hands of a prepledged staff could hardly be considered impartial.

Despite the shot & shell bursting around his head, Cohn had not lost his composure. He blinked his eyes and observed to a reporter: "What's Joe got to worry about? He's got about five more years in the Senate, and they sure like him in Wisconsin." As for Cohn himself: "I'll be around Capitol Hill in this job a long time yet."

* Joe's dog. still without a name, is on a diet of a quart of cottage cheese a day.

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