Out of the Hills

The nation's capital, observed the Mundt committee's new counsel, Samuel Sears, is a "jungle." Last week, although Sears was eager to explore the bewildering terrain, the committee sent him home to his old Boston pastures.

After five days of ballooning doubt about Sears's suitability for the job of digging out the facts in the McCarthy-Army dispute, the Senators decided that he had not come clean with them on his past record of pro-McCarthy activity. What finally pricked the bubble of senatorial doubt was an incident of extraordinary lapse of memory by Sam Sears, who apparently was having trouble distinguishing senatorial trees amid the Washington jungle growth.

Arkansas' Democratic Senator John McClellan asked Sears how his answers to McClellan's questions the week before jibed with newspaper accounts of his pro-McCarthy record. Blurted Sears: "Why, Senator, I don't even remember meeting you before."

Slapping his forehead in astonishment, acting Committee Chairman Karl Mundt cried, "Good Lord, Mr. Sears, late Friday you walked into this room with John McClellan and [Senator "Scoop"] Jackson. They introduced you to the other committee members."

Down the Road a Piece. That ended the Sears interlude; before it adjourned for lunch, the committee had his resignation. The problem then was to find a replacement. Two days before, Mundt had telephoned Illinois' Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, a committee member, in Huntsville, Tenn., asked him to rush back to Washington for the Sears showdown. Dirksen told Mundt that an important celebration prevented his immediate return: the first birthday of his only grandson, Darek Dirksen Baker.

The delay was fortunate for the Mundt committee, for on Darek's birthday Senator Dirksen found the committee a new lawyer, thus averting a further search which might again indefinitely postpone the investigation.

In Huntsville, Dirksen related later, "I looked down the road a bit and wondered, 'Where do we go from here?' I was planting shrubbery . . . and his name popped into my mind." The name was that of Knoxville Lawyer Ray H. (for Howard) Jenkins, who in 1940 had managed the unsuccessful senatorial campaign of Darek's other grandfather, Republican Congressman Howard Baker.

On visits to Tennessee during the last four years, Dirksen had met Jenkins, whom he described as "just about the best trial lawyer in East Tennessee." Big (6 ft. 3 in., 195 lbs.), rawboned Lawyer Jenkins was a Taft Republican in 1952. But at the G.O.P. Convention, Jenkins urged the Taft-controlled Tennessee delegation to switch to Ike. "Let's get behind somebody who can win," he pleaded. Last week's check of Jenkins' record by newsmen and the committee seemed to bear out his statement that he has never publicly expressed opinions about McCarthy.

Six Hundred Murders. Born on the North Carolina side of the Great Smokies, Ray Jenkins is a mountain lad whose family moved to Tellico Plains, Tenn. half a century ago. In 1916, Ray did a stint along the Mexican border as an Army top sergeant, became a Navy seaman in World War I. Leaving Tellico Plains, Jenkins set off on the legal career which has since brought him 600 homicide cases, a reputation for forensic flamboyance and membership in Knoxville's fashionable Cherokee Country Club. In 1939, he made a short-lived try for Congress, the next year managed the state's Willkie campaign.

Last week Dirksen chatted at length with Jenkins at the Knoxville airport, next day summoned him to Washington.

Ray told his law partner, Erby Jenkins (no kin), "I feel like I can't refuse to just fly up and talk to them about it." He packed his bag and left his native hill country to plunge into the Washington jungle.

His wiry, short-cropped hair abristle, Jenkins quickly made a good impression on the committee. The Senators signed him up and ushered him before a throng of newsmen. When, in mid-conference, a bell sounded for a Senate vote, Jenkins told Mundt that he did not need the chairman's chaperonage in the presence of the press. "I can satisfy them," said Jenkins, and he did.

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