Censure upon Censure

This week Utah's Republican Senator Wallace Bennett took up where the Watkins committee left off and authored a resolution proposing the censure of Joe McCarthy for behavior in the very recent past. The Bennett resolution said that Joe's reference to the Watkins committee as a Communist "handmaiden" and his description of the Senate censure debate as a "lynch bee" were "contrary to good morals and senatorial ethics and tend to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the constitutional processes of the Senate and to impair its dignity." Bennett's conclusion: "Such conduct is hereby condemned, and the Senator from Wisconsin is there fore censured."

Such a resolution, coming from a strongly conservative Senator, was a setback to the hopes of Joe's hard-core Senate followers, whose latest gambit had been to promote talk that McCarthy, if censured, might bolt the G.O.P. to head a third party in 1956. Joe's scramble for martyrdom and his appeal over the Senate to the people were cited as evidence of the walkout possibility. It was fairly obvious that Wallace Bennett was one Re publican who held scant fear about Joe's defection.

Not to be discouraged by resolutions from Bennett or anybody else were the Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Justice (TIME, Nov. 29), whose efforts on Joe's behalf continued apace. Last week T.M.A.M.J. announced that it would take some ten days for a Manhattan accounting firm to tally the names on anti-censure petitions. Boys of grade-school age waved the Ten Million's petitions on New York sidewalks, and a Catholic parent wrote New York's Cardinal Spellman complaining that a nun in a Tuckahoe parochial school was soliciting signatures from fifth-grade pupils.

Counter-petition groups also began to appear, e.g., the League of Twenty Million Americans for the Censure of Mc Carthy, started in Palmer, Mass, by Mrs. Winifred Swanson, a 30-year-old housewife who had never before belonged to anything but a sewing circle.

But the man who headed the Select Senate Committee that recommended cen sure was not to be swayed by the hue and cry of either the Ten Million or the Twenty Million. Said Utah's Republican Senator Arthur Watkins: Joe's censure should be decided by facts, not by a nationwide counting of noses.

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