Punch & Counterpunch

For a few moments one morning last week, Secretary of Labor Maurice Tobin acted like the man who was all prepared to deliver the Administration's Sunday punch at Joe McCarthy. Scowling grimly into the microphone, he launched into a 30-minute speech before 12,000 delegates to the 52nd national encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, meeting in Manhattan's Astor Hotel.

"The way some Americans have been acting," said Tobin, "you'd think this country dropped the Bill of Rights along the way some place . . . Unless a man is to be given a fair trial in a courtroom, unless his accusers are prepared to supply concrete evidence against him, he ought not to be made the butt of irresponsible slander, particularly from the privileged sanctuary of the Senate of the U.S. . . . If a [man] makes slanderous charges against his countrymen, he ought to be made either to prove them or bear the consequences . . ."

Commando Tactics. But there, anticlimactically, Maurice Tobin dropped the subject. He scrupulously avoided mentioning Joe McCarthy by name. He barely skirted the real case against McCarthyism--the technique of innuendo and slippery half-truths that deliberately confuses ends and means. And, with his glancing blow, he gave McCarthy's supporters just the right opening for a burst of commando tactics. Before Tobin could walk off the platform, a delegate grabbed a floor microphone. Over the loudspeakers his voice boomed out: "I demand that we invite Comrade McCarthy here to give us the other side of this story."

The proposal brought an upwelling of boos. But V.F.W. Commander in Chief Charles C. Rails of Seattle quickly shouted: "I appoint you a committee of one to extend the invitation." That afternoon Joe McCarthy was reached by telephone in Boise, Idaho, where Joe was winding up a western stump tour. Joe accepted on the spot, that night boarded an airliner for Manhattan.

Shirt Sleeves. Behind a police motorcycle escort, he rolled up to the Astor the next afternoon, just 20 minutes behind schedule. There was a great cheer as he strode to the platform of the Astor ballroom and flung a big brown briefcase beside the rostrum. Grinning broadly, Joe plunged extemporaneously into an hour and a quarter's attack on Communism in Government, broken only momentarily at the halfway mark when he took off his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves.

For Maurice Tobin, McCarthy had magnanimous indulgence: "A fine young gentleman* who was ordered to do a job, and he did that job." Then, diving frequently into his brown bag for a black photostat, a picture, or a wad of congressional transcript, he turned his buckshot on his archenemies, Secretary of State Acheson, Defense Secretary Marshall, and U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Philip Jessup. He set the veterans whooping when he offered to take his case against Acheson and Jessup "to a jury of twelve men and twelve women . . . if the President's spokesmen can find a way to get them into court." If the jury found McCarthy's charges untrue, he would resign from the Senate, said he, provided that, if the jury agreed with him, "that whole motley crowd will resign."

Foreign Uniform. For his coup de grace, McCarthy pulled out of his bag a life-size photograph of a man in a foreign military uniform. This he identified as one Gustavo Duran, who once held a "top job" in the State Department (aide to Latin American Expert Spruille Braden, 1943-46), and now works for the United Nations Secretariat. The blur of McCarthy rhetoric implied that Duran had been a member of the Russian secret police in Europe, and his photograph was right there to prove it. (What Joe actually said was: Duran was head of something called "S.I.M." in Europe, which was "a counterpart of the Russian secret police.") Duran's reply to the charge, which was first made five years ago: he was Spanish-born, naturalized in 1942; the picture was taken in Spanish uniform, when he was fighting in the Republican army (and not the Red-sponsored international brigade); McCarthy's charges were simply "a translation of an article in Arriba, official organ of the Falange party of Franco Spain, published in June 1946."

Nonetheless, McCarthy left his listeners gasping at his bravery when he challenged Duran, Jessup, Acheson & Co. to sue him for libel, since "there is no immunity that surrounds this podium here today." But again the McCarthy tongue had been quicker than the ear. In cold transcript, his apparently offhand statements turned out to be well protected by testimony already in the legislative record, or phrased behind a lawyer's calculated vagueness.

It was a good bet that nobody would be dragged before a "jury of twelve men and twelve women." But it was just as clear that in a fight with a man wearing brass knuckles, a glancing blow was worse than no blow at all.

* Tobin is 50, and McCarthy's senior by nine years.

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