The Terror of Tellico Plains
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For the twelfth day, Secretary of the Army Robert Ten Broeck Stevens sat, grey-faced, before the stare of the television cameras. Across a crouched pack of news photographers, he faced the glower of Senator Joe McCarthy. The Secretary's right eye blinked irregularly and his right cheek twitched as he tried to follow the curves and hooks in McCarthy's questions. Using all of his formidable tricks of crossexamination, the Senator was trying to confuse the Secretary into a key admission: he wanted Stevens to say that McCarthy & Co. had never "threatened" the Army in an effort to get special treatment for G. David Schine, the drafted McCarthy consultant.
Suddenly, from the center of the investigation committee's table, there came a voice that sounded somewhat like the tired moan of a laryngitic lion. Ray Jenkins, the committee's special counsel, abruptly interrupted the Senator from Wisconsin and took over the questioning. In the next ten minutes, while McCarthy squirmed, scribbled, glared and tried to interrupt, Jenkins led Stevens through a sharp series of questions and answers that brought the Army's case back into clear focus after days of obfuscation.
The Intertwined Pattern. Had not Roy Cohn, McCarthy's chief counsel, proclaimed a "declaration of war" against the Army? He had. Had not Cohn said the McCarthy committee "would investigate the Army from now on?" He had. Did Stevens regard that as a threat? He did.
Jenkins: Did you have in mind at that time that many different requests had been made of you by some members of the McCarthy investigating committee for preferences of Schine?
Stevens: I had it in mind.
Q: Including a direct request from the Senator for a commission for Schine?
A: Yes, sir ...
Q: I believe you . . . stated that in addition to ... 65 telephone calls there were 19 personal contacts by the McCarthy investigating committee with reference to Schine. Is that correct?
A: That is right . . .
Q: Then in the light of those personal contacts and those telephone calls, were those words uttered by ... Mr. Cohn, weighty words in your mind, and conveying a threat . . . against the Army . . .?
A: That's right.
As Jenkins led Stevens on through the heart of the Army case, McCarthy broke in ("Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman . . . Just a minute! Just a minute! Just a minute!"), frantically trying to shut off Stevens' testimony. Chairman Karl Mundt ruled that Jenkins' questions were proper. The big man from Tennessee went on.
Jenkins: I'll ask you whether or not in those telephone conversations there were discussions not only with reference to Schine but with reference to the McCarthy investigating committee's work at Fort Monmouth. Were those two subjects discussed in the same conversations?
Stevens: Yes, they were . . .
Q: So that the conversations with reference to the investigation of Monmouth and with reference to Schine were intertwined, so to speak, in one telephone conversation . . .?
A: Yes, sir ...
Q: Now, Mr. Secretary, is that why you say that you regard the whole thing, all of these contacts ... as constituting one pattern ... of unfair or unusual requests for preferences for Schine . . .?
A: That is correct.
Five Unfitted Hats. The minutes that Counsel Jenkins spent bringing Secretary of the Army Stevens out of the woods on that day last week were probably his finest moments since the hearings began. The episode was not a show of partisanship on Ray Jenkins' part; it was a sharp illustration of his firm determination to bring some order out of a welter of confusion. Throughout much of the investigation Jenkins has not been eminently successful in accomplishing that worthy purpose. But he has a job in which success is not easily attained.
In the 162-year history of congressional investigations,* few men have found themselves in the midst of so complicated a situation. Jenkins is called upon to wear five hats, and not one of them is an exact fit. One moment the Army is the plaintiff and Jenkins represents it; quickly the Army is in the defendant's role and Jenkins speaks for it again. He performs the same double service for the McCarthy group. In addition, he must sit as a judge on legal points. There has been nothing like it since Alec Guinness played eight parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Another complicating factor is the lack of a clear objective in the present hearings. Most congressional investigations, for the record at least, are aimed toward a legislative result.* But in the inquiry
Jenkins is trying to navigate, only three possible ultimate results are apparent, and none is legislative. They are: 1) perjury charges,
2) the political demise of one or more principals,
3) public education.
In this situation Ray Jenkins must hold an impartial course, and impartiality is hard to prove. When he was conducting his direct examination of Secretary of the Army Stevens, a woman wired him:
YOU ARE FAIR AND IMPARTIAL. MAY GOD GIVE YOU STRENGTH. When he put on one of his other hats, and began a vigorous cross-examination of the Secretary, the woman sent a second message: DISREGARD WIRE ASKING GOD TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH.
Both sides of the case have already protested Jenkins' vigorous crossexamination. At one point, Stevens' counsel Joseph Nye Welch spoke up: "Mr. Jenkins, this is not a murder trial; you are examining the Secretary of the Army . . . This witness is entitled to at least ordinary courtesy." Within a few hours, during cross-examination of Private Schine, Joe McCarthy was saying: "I want to make a very strong point of order that this is the most improper exhibition I have ever seen."
At about that stage of the proceedings Washington correspondents, who had been skeptical, began to believe Jenkins' statement that he was neutral--a man who had come out of the Tennessee hills to get the truth.
Can & Lum. It is literally true that Ray Howard Jenkins came out of the hills, but that was twoscore years ago. He was born in 1897 at Unaka, on the
North Carolina side of the Great Smokies. His father, Columbus Sheridan Jenkins, known to his friends as "Lum," was a country doctor. By the time Ray was eleven, the family had moved across the mountains to Tellico Plains, Tenn. (pop. 833), in the wild-boar country. At that early date Ray had already begun to show respect for the value of evidence. When he sneaked away to take a forbidden swim, he found that his wet hair always gave him away. He had his head shaved; today, he wears a crew cut.
From his early boyhood, Ray always wanted to have a job of some kind, although he did not have to work. At times this was embarrassing to the comfortably situated Jenkins family. One crisis came when Grandfather John Canada Jenkins, a revenuer known to his friends as "Can," came to Tellico Plains with his second bride. Widowed in middle age, Can had written to seven matrimonial agencies, had wooed and won a mail-order bride from Kentucky, and planned to bring her to Tellico Plains on the Sunday morning ,train. At the time, Ray was running a shoeshine stand in the town square where Can and his bride would surely pass in the surrey on the way from the station. Ray was ordered to take that day off because Can didn't want his bride to know she had married a man whose grandson shined shoes. The boy didn't want to give up a whole day's profits, so he worked until he heard the train whistle, then folded up his stand and hid around the corner. After Can and his bride passed, Ray went back to work.
A few years later, when Ray was spending his summers working in a lumberyard in Tellico Plains, one of his co-workers was another lanky Monroe County boy named Estes Kefauver. Estes was a lumber handler, hoisting it into freight cars. Ray was a grader, checking lumber as it was piled in the cars. Says Tennessee's Senator Kefauver: "I was always kind of envious of him. He could stay in the boxcar where it was cool; I had to stay out in the sun."
Before the McCarthy v. Army hearings, Jenkins' most important connection with the military was a stint in the Army on the Mexican border in 1916, another stint in the Navy during World War I. He thought about becoming a professional baseball pitcher (he had a wicked spit-ball), but he kept his eye on the law. Always a top scholar, he passed the bar examinations a year before he finished at the University of Tennessee's law school. One of his first jobs in a law office, like the assignment that brought him onto the national scene, had to do with an investigation. He was an older attorney's leg man in the investigation of mismanagement at the Knoxville General Hospital. Result of the investigation: a thorough shake-up at the hospital.
Roar & Croon. Around the courthouses of East Tennessee, Jenkins soon became known as a great trial lawyer. Although he makes most of his income ($60,000 last year) from civil suits, his Tennessee fame has come from criminal cases. In his 34 years of practice, he has been on one side or the other (usually the defense) in some 600 homicide cases. There was hardly a murder or rape case in Knoxville in the past 20 years without Ray Jenkins on one side or the other.
Watching Jenkins perform at the committee table in Washington, the U.S. television audience will not see him at his best. His most spectacular performances are his final arguments to juries. He pulls his big (6 ft. 3 in., 195 lbs.), rawboned frame out of his chair, opens his coat, loosens his tie, unbuttons his shirt collar, strides up and down before the jury box. At times he laughs, then he sneers, and then he seems to be on the verge of tears; first his voice roars out of the courtroom and echoes through the corridors, then it is a barely audible croon. Before he is through, the sweat is rolling down in rivers on his face and dripping from his chin to the floor. His style has gained him a nickname: "The Terror of Tellico Plains'.'
One of Jenkins' most publicized cases was his defense of Ed McNew, a camera-shy professional bondsman accused of shooting at a Knoxville newspaper photographer. The photographer produced a solid piece of evidence to support a charge of assault with intent to kill: a clear picture of McNew shooting at him. After postponing the case as long as possible, Jenkins produced McNew (who had been in an automobile accident) on a stretcher. A nurse and a doctor stood by, interrupting McNew's testimony to administer medications. After McNew faintly testified that photographers had hounded him, Jenkins argued that McNew had a "mental explosion" when one cameraman finally caught up with him. Said the jury: not guilty.
Two years ago, in a case that was followed tensely in Tennessee, Jenkins defended a Negro youth who had stabbed a white man to death. The prosecution contended that the boy had stabbed his victim in the back, and asked the death penalty. Jenkins proved that the white man was the aggressor, that he suddenly turned his back to get another weapon just as the fatal blow struck. The jury took only a few minutes to acquit the boy.
From such cases Jenkins draws a basic part of his philosophy: "You can always defend a man who kills a bully. You make the jury so damned mad that they want to dig up the body and kill the s.o.b. all over again."
The Barking Dog. The references to espionage in the current investigation are not Jenkins' first brush with that subject. 'In 1950 he was appointed by a federal judge to defend Alfred Dean Slack, who was accused of delivering secret information from the Holston Ordnance Works at Kingsport, Tenn. to a Communist agent. On advice of counsel, Slack pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 15 years. Then he appealed, contending that Jenkins had not advised him properly. The Circuit Court, ruling that Jenkins had done his job well, gave him an unusual accolade. Said the opinion: " [Jenkins] has earned and enjoys a fine reputation for professional ethics and personal integrity, and is generally regarded as one of the ablest trial lawyers in Tennessee . . ."
Jenkins was about to go to court in a case involving a barking dog* when he was called to Washington to handle the case involving Joe McCarthy. An old acquaintance, Illinois' Senator Everett Dirksen, had suggested him for the job. After the call came, Ray broke the news to Partners Erby and Aubrey Jenkins (brothers, but no kin to Ray) with the preface: "The most fantastic thing has happened."
Many Washington politicians and pundits thought it fantastic that a man of Jenkins' profession and stature had not formed an opinion on Senator Joe McCarthy. But in Knoxville, this was not hard to understand. During his working hours, Jenkins is a busy lawyer absorbed in his cases; during weekends, he is a gentleman farmer who likes to roam over his 520 acres on the Little Tennessee River, rejoicing in his herd (150 head) of Herefords. In the fall he never misses a University of Tennessee football game, wears the same lucky green tie to every one. (Says he: "I'd rather go to a Tennessee game without my pants than without that tie.") Aside from the farm and football, his chief recreation is spinning yarns about his courtroom experiences. Such a man could easily avoid being intense about McCarthy.
In East Tennessee, Jenkins' debut as a national television personality was an exciting event. One of the Knoxville television stations reversed its policy and went on the air before noon. At the county courthouse a television set was set up in a domestic-relations-court office and the shades were drawn. Out at Tellico Plains, Mayor Charles Hall put a set in a storage room next to his furniture store, lined up boxes, benches and chairs, drew an overflow crowd.
At the Jenkins' red brick mansion in fashionable Sequoyah Hills, where there had been no television set until the week that the call came from Washington, Mrs. Eva Jenkins watched with fascination. In their 28 years of marriage, she had never before seen her husband trying a case. After a few days of TV, she flew to Washington to watch him in person.
Lessons in Washington. While she was in the capital, Eva Jenkins saw little of her husband outside the hearing room. He was working an 18-hour day, holding conferences, interviewing witnesses, and studying the case after the public sessions ended. At first there was more homework than he was able to do. He had arrived in Washington with astonishingly little knowledge of the issues, procedures and pitfalls. One example of his lack of background : he did not realize that there was serious dispute about the merit of whether Joe McCarthy's headline-grabbing hearings at Fort Monmouth had been harmful. At first, Jenkins' questioning was based on the assumption that McCarthy's Fort Monmouth foray was a great service to the U.S., but he soon dropped that line in favor of an impartially open mind on the point.
While he learned fast, Jenkins missed a lesson or two. McCarthy's doctored picture, which he accepted at face value, should have made him wary of all McCarthy exhibits. Yet a week later he accepted McCarthy's phony "FBI letter" with the assumption that it was authentic. As the letter furor mounted, he grew more cautious. He gave no one, not even McCarthy or Chairman Mundt, warning that he planned to call McCarthy to the witness stand.
As a congressional investigation counsel, Jenkins has had to overcome some of his normal techniques. In this case he is supposed to expedite and clarify; sometimes he seems to drop back into the criminal lawyer's bent for diverting and throwing dust. His flowing language is sometimes confusing and his booming courtroom voice hit the microphones so hard that electricians installed a special guard to keep his mouth at least two inches away. At first, while points of order mounted to disorder, he seemed to be waiting for the judge to stop the nonsense, not realizing that he could prompt Chairman Mundt to bang the gavel.
What Next for Ray? Now that he has been televised to national prominence, politicians in Washington and Tennessee are asking: What next for Ray Jenkins? He probably stands a chance of gaining more than any other participant in the hearings (but not financially: he is being paid $225 a week). At home, Republicans have already begun urging him to run for the U.S. Senate this year against his old lumber-loading pal Estes Kefauver. Jenkins can have the G.O.P. nomination for the asking.
A lifelong Republican, Jenkins has dabbled a bit in politics (e.g., Tennessee manager for Wendell Willkie in 1940), but his name has never been on a ballot. He was a Taftman until the 1952 G.O.P. convention began, and then he flew to Chicago and urged the Tennessee delegation to get behind Eisenhower, "a man who can win." His present attitude about politics is expressed in a characteristically long and rolling comment, which begins: "Apparently my friends are much more interested in my running for the U.S. Senate than I am . . . It's conceivable that the time may come when I feel I could be of service to my country by seeking public office." This seems to add up to one word: maybe.
The maybe has not escaped Estes Kefauver, who knows what television can do for a man. Last week Estes and Mrs. Jenkins met on the plane to Knoxville. The Senator was going down to make a speech. Mrs. Jenkins was going back to open their house for Tennessee's "historical homes pilgrimage." (The mansion was built by her father, the late Dr. W. S. Nash, an eminent Knoxville surgeon.) In his casual way, Senator Kefauver allowed that Washington really wasn't a very pleasant place for a Senator's family. All those social affairs to attend, whether one wanted to or not. And friends moving away just when one has begun to count on them. A hard life, actually.
This may have been a smart bit of early-stage campaigning by Kefauver, but there is no reason to think that it was effective. It is not likely that Ray Jenkins, having burst upon the national scene, will retreat to the courtrooms of East Tennessee, never to assault a network microphone again. Jenkins is a man with a natural flair for politics. In the lobbies and dining rooms of Washington he shakes hands, signs autographs, and pats children just as readily as does his old pal Estes. If he could arouse enough Tennesseans to believe that Kefauver has marched too often with the Yankee liberals, Jenkins might become U.S. Senator from Tennessee.
Estes Kefauver can talk all he wants about how hot it is in the sun and how shady in the boxcar, but he had better not complain too much about life in Washington.
* Secretary Stevens may find some (if only a little) consolation in the fact that the granddaddy of all congressional investigations was directed at an Army chief. In 1792 the House established the first congressional investigating committee in U.S. history to probe the massacre of Major General Arthur St. Clair's Indian-fighting army near the Ohio-Indiana border. St. Clair, whose command of 2,000 had been largely "purchased from prisons, wheelbarrows and brothels at $2 a month," resigned his commission, but was eventually exonerated. By remarkable coincidence, a direct descendant of the general, Boston lawyer James St. Clair, is assistant counsel for Secretary Stevens.
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