Between Rounds

In his verbal slugfest with the Eisenhower Administration, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the onetime Marquette University light-heavyweight boxer, had taken a solid punch on the jaw. Last week Senator McCarthy's committee colleagues moved in to separate the assailants. Taking advantage of the bell, Slugger McCarthy took off as scheduled on a Midwestern speaking tour, hoping that a change of pace and of subject would help him recover from damage done by the Army's chronicle of the case of Private David Schine. But the bell came too late to avert physical exhaustion: two days later Joe McCarthy was stricken with a virus laryngitis and a lively fever.

Needed: a Referee. The Schine case had clearly forced the issue of who was lying, McCarthy or Army Secretary Robert Stevens. McCarthy denied that he and his 27-year-old counsel, Roy Cohn, had demanded special treatment and numerous petty favors for Draftee Schine. He lashed back with desperate countercharges, e.g., the Army was using Schine as a "hostage" to "blackmail" him and, to take the heat off itself, had offered tips on "dirt" in the other services. Stevens denied the countercharges.

The Senators of McCarthy's committee decided to settle the controversy by investigating I) the Army's investigation of Roy Conn's activities on behalf of Schine, and 2) McCarthy's countercharges. McCarthy stepped down as chairman, freely admitting that he had "prejudged" the case since he had questioned Cohn and was "fully satisfied" that no "unfair influence" had been used. South Dakota's amiable, rotund Karl Mundt reluctantly accepted an "unwelcome promotion" to the chair after failing to persuade the Armed Services Committee that it should arbitrate the incendiary political dilemma.

Mundt's inquiry, the committee decided, will be "to the exclusion of all other hearings," i.e., McCarthy may not begin new probes until the committee has finished scrutinizing his own activities. Senator McCarthy, declining to disqualify himself completely, will continue as a committee member; and Counsel Cohn, though removed from any part in the proceedings except as a witness, will continue on the committee's payroll.

Karl Mundt's first act as chairman was to order the files in the Schine case put under lock & key. Then he and Arkansas' John McClellan, the committee's senior Democrat, hoping at least to move the brawl off the political street corner and into the controlled conditions of the rope-bound ring, set about finding a referee--a fair-minded lawyer with unassailable reputation to take Cohn's place as chief counsel. As the search went on, Joe McCarthy headed for Chicago.

The Snakes & I. At the Irish Fellowship Club's St. Patrick's Day dinner, McCarthy took his cue from the toastmaster, who said the Senator was driving the snakes from America. McCarthy snorted: "The snakes didn't like St. Patrick's methods, and the Communists don't like mine." Fighting to divert attention from Cohn and Schine, whom he did not mention, McCarthy blasted out at various villains whom he identified as "eggheads," "deluded liberals," "the left-wing press," "the jackal pack," "Pentagon politicians."

Next day, in a speech at the stockyards' Saddle and Sirloin Club, McCarthy found new villains: CBS Newscaster Edward R.

Murrow (see RADIO & TV) and Chase National Bank Chairman John J. Mc-Cloy, ex-U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. From the stockyards, McCarthy traveled to Milwaukee, where the strain of his frenzied infighting caught up with him.

At the home of an old friend, Private Detective Otis Gomillion, McCarthy lost his voice and took to bed. The doctor advised canceling his next night's speech, but early in the afternoon McCarthy, in a soaking .sweatshirt, was up and poring over notes of what he would tell the Young Republicans celebrating their party's centennial.

The party's birthday became McCarthy's rally as he issued a 20-count "indictment" of Adlai Stevenson as "attorney for the defense," i.e., the Democrats. Sample counts: in postwar Italy, Stevenson had "connived" to put Communists in the Italian government and to bring Communist Togliatti back from Moscow; the Democrats helped Russian arms shipments to the Chinese Reds by "forcing the opening of the Kalgan mountain pass into Manchuria." After each count, McCarthy asked rhetorically: "How plead you, Adlai? Guilty or not guilty?" Gradually the Young Republicans caught on, and cries of "guilty" resounded. When reporters went to Adlai Stevenson, he said he would not get down to McCarthy's level by commenting. But he did comment on the charge of conniving in Italy: It was "the first I heard of it ... At that time I had never heard of Togliatti."

Fiddler's Green. Back in Washington the Senate Armed Services Committee called Defense Secretary Charles Wilson to the stand to discuss the lessons of the case of Army Dentist Irving Peress. The question was what to do with drafted doctors who cannot be commissioned because they resort to the Fifth Amendment, but cannot be held as enlisted men because of a recent Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.

Wilson's solution: change the law to permit doctors to serve as privates rather than encourage draft dodgers to use the Fifth Amendment.

At every turn, the hearing veered toward the Cohn-Schine case. When this happened, Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall, the committee's chairman, seemed to quake as he coaxed his colleagues to stay on the subject of doctors and off a subject that might provoke Joe McCarthy to campaign against him in Massachusetts this fall. Saltonstall's Armed Services Committee was a much more appropriate body to investigate the Army-McCarthy row than McCarthy's own group, but Saltonstall backed away from the task. Also apparent at the hearing was a growing weariness in Washington of the whole affair. Missouri's Democrat Stuart Symington asked Wilson if there weren't more important things to do in the H-bomb age than worry about a dentist. Chortled "Engine Charlie" Wilson: "If you feel like you're fiddling while Rome burns, I do too."

This week Joe McCarthy made one thing clear: he would not be fiddling while he and his men were burning. He served notice that he would recommend lie detector tests for all witnesses, including himself. "I have complete confidence in this scientific instrument," said he.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans showed any disposition to keep McCarthy on the ropes. He'd be back when he got his second wind.

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