Weighed in the Balance

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"Man is born to do something," says restless Joe McCarthy. Joe is doing something. His name is in headlines. "McCarthyism" is now part of the language. His burly figure casts its shadow over the coming presidential campaign. Thousands turn out to hear his speeches. Millions regard him as "a splendid American" (a fellow Senator recently called him that). Other millions think McCarthy a worse menace than the Communist conspiracy against which he professes to fight.

McCarthy does not face some questions which the nation cannot evade:

1) Precisely what has McCarthy done?

2) Is his effect on the U.S. good or bad?

3) Does he deserve well of the republic, or should he be treated with aversion and contempt?

The Charge. McCarthy's jump from obscurity to the national limelight began nearly two years ago, when he made a speech in Wheeling, W. Va. He said: "I have here in my hand a list of 205, a list of names made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Next day in Salt Lake City, he declared: "I hold in my hand the names of 57 card-carrying Communists" working in the State Department. Ten days later, on the Senate floor, he cited 81 "cases," particularly "three big Communists." Said McCarthy: "While there are vast numbers of other Communists with whom we must be concerned, if we can get rid of these big three, we will have done something to break the back of the espionage ring within the State Department."

In a nation that had finally learned (without any help from McCarthy) that it was locked in a life-or-death struggle with world Communism, these charges were as grave as any that could be made. The underlying accusation was that its State Department was harboring Communists, knew they were Communists, and was doing so deliberately. To investigate these charges, the Senate set up a committee headed by conservative Democrat Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland.

McCarthy, who had said that he "held in his hand" the names of 205 Communists then in the State Department, did not give the Tydings committee the names of 205. He did not give it the names of 57. He did not produce the name of even one Communist in the State Department.

Logically, that failure might have been expected to end the rocketing flight of Joe McCarthy. That it was a beginning, not an end, is partly explained by McCarthy's personality. Another man, humiliated by failure to produce evidence he said he held, would have retreated and wiped a bloody nose. McCarthy, who was a boxer in college, says: "I learned in the ring that the moment you draw back and start defending yourself, you're licked. You've got to keep boring in." This is not necessarily true of either boxing or politics--but Joe McCarthy thinks it is true.

He bored in, hitting low blow after low blow. He set up a barrage of new accusations which caught the headlines, drawing attention away from the fact that he had not made good on his original charge. He even began to produce some names. But most of the men he has named never were in the State Department. His most sensational charge was that he knew the name of "the top Soviet espionage agent" in the U.S. The man so accused turned out to be Owen Lattimore, a Johns Hopkins professor and writer on Far Eastern affairs. Lattimore, in fact, had great influence in U.S. academic and journalistic circles dealing with the Far East. He was an important factor in leading the U.S. toward policies which many Americans regard as tragically wrong.

But that was not what McCarthy said about Lattimore. He said that Lattimore was "the top Soviet espionage agent"--and to this day McCarthy has not produced a scrap of evidence indicating that Lattimore was a spy or in any way disloyal. The question of whether Lattimore's analysis of the Far East was correct or incorrect--which is still a highly relevant and important question--does not interest

Joe. Such questions have no appeal to demagogues.

The Files. Before the Tydings committee, Joe demonstrated the technique that he still uses: kicking up a storm of denunciation and then shifting his ground. When he first made his charges, he explained: "Everything I have here is from the State Department's own files." When the Tydings committee asked for proof, Joe set up a chant: "Get the files. If you do, you will find that every word I have said is the truth." Harry Truman refused to let the committee have the files, on the sound ground that it was necessary to protect the reputations of those who might be subsequently cleared.

Joe's chant became deafening. How could he supply the proof without the files? Then Truman changed his mind. Before McCarthy even saw what the State Department turned over to the committee, he pronounced it "a phony offer of phony files." The files had been "raped," he cried. Tydings had the FBI send over a copy of all investigative reports it had; two security officers checked, and found everything there. But Tydings carelessly announced that the FBI had checked the files. McCarthy promptly got a letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover saying that the FBI itself had not made the check. Tydings then had the FBI check in person. But Joe insisted that, by the time the FBI got there, the damning papers had been sneaked back.

Finally, when the Democratic majority brought out a report denouncing his charges as "a fraud and a hoax on the American people," Joe was ready. "Whitewash," he cried.

Tydings made the mistake of underestimating Joe McCarthy. He bickered impatiently with Joe, defended the Administration at every turn, including some points where it was not readily defensible.

Tydings was up for re-election to a seat he had held since 1926. Franklin Roosevelt in 1938 vainly tried to beat Tydings on the ground that he was too conservative. McCarthy, by accusing Tydings of sympathy for Communism, succeeded where Roosevelt had failed. The campaign against Tydings included a faked photograph showing Tydings and Communist Earl Browder cheek by jowl. On other occasions, Joe has said: "You have to play rough if you are going to root out this motley crew."

The Score. The Tydings defeat made Joe a power. If he could successfully smear one of the most conservative and best entrenched Senators, was any man safe from his furious onslaught?

The Reds in Government, if any, were safe. After nearly two years of tramping the nation, shouting that he was "rooting out the skunks," just how many Communists has Joe rooted out? The answer: none. At best, he might claim an assist on three minor and borderline cases which Government investigators had already spotted. Joe tries to include himself in by saying: "We got Alger Hiss out, we got

Marzani out, Wadleigh, George Shaw Wheeler and a few others." McCarthy had nothing to do with any of them. Hiss was flushed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Wadleigh, like Hiss, was named by Whittaker Chambers. Judith Coplon (who was employed in the Justice Department) was arrested by the FBI. Marzani was uncovered by the State Department's own loyalty investigation in 1946. George Shaw Wheeler was never in the State Department, but with the U.S. Military Government in Germany; he was denounced by Michigan's Representative George A. Dondero in 1947 and eased out while facing an Army checkup.

The Nerve. On such a miserable showing as an exposer of Reds, how has Joe McCarthy created such an uproar and kept it roaring? A large part of the answer is that Joe McCarthy in 1950 had hit a highly sensitive public nerve. When McCarthy first spoke up, Hiss, whose case Truman had called "a red herring," had just been convicted, and Acheson had declared: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." The U.S. people had just begun to realize fully the malevolence of the enemy they faced. Abroad, the West had suffered a grievous setback in the loss of China to Communism.

The public, quite correctly, thought that someone must be to blame. Joe McCarthy went into the business of providing scapegoats. It was easier to string along with Joe's wild charges than to settle down to a sober examination of the chuckleheaded "liberalism," the false assumptions and the fatuous complacency that had endangered the security of the U.S. That he got a lot of help from the Administration spokesmen who still insist that nothing was wrong with U.S. policy helps to explain McCarthy's success--although it in no way excuses McCarthy.

Joe, like all effective demagogues, found an area of emotion and exploited it. No regard for fair play, no scruple for exact truth hampers Joe's political course. If his accusations destroy reputations, if they subvert the principle that a man is innocent until proved guilty, he is oblivious. Joe, immersed in the joy of battle, does not even seem to realize the gravity of his own charges. On countless rostrums, he has in effect accused Ambassador at Large Philip Jessup and Secretary of State Acheson of treason. This is a crime punishable by death in the U.S. Asked what he would do with Jessup if he were in charge, McCarthy has a simple answer: "Fire him." When he met Acheson in a Senate elevator, Joe grinned, introduced himself, and shook hands as if the meeting were a cordial encounter between rival baseball managers.

Tramp Dog. Outside the political arena, McCarthy is an ingratiating and friendly fellow. "He comes up to you with tail wagging and all the appeal of a tramp dog," said one colleague. "And he's just about as trustworthy." Joe was liked and respected in college, liked and respected in the Marines, liked and respected in his home town. Within five minutes or so, everyone he meets is calling him "Joe." At 41, he has a candid eye for a pretty girl, but he has never married. "I can't work at politics if I can't stay away from supper when I want to," says Joe. He dotes on children, to whom he talks gravely as equals.

Burly, hamhanded, McCarthy has a furious physical energy. He is always in a hurry. He rushes through a newspaper in five minutes, looking just for items of special interest or use to him; he has little general curiosity. His pockets are always stuffed with notes which he can't find, and he can never keep a comb or a pencil or a handkerchief.

A two-fisted drinker who holds his liquor very well, McCarthy does not smoke. He detests cigars. Joe always begins a lunch or dinner speech by coughing raucously into his fist, saying: "Before I begin [cough-cough], I want to ask So & So [cough-cough] just what he has been smoking. It reminds me of my days back on the farm." This serves a double purpose: it gets a laugh, and all head-table smokers stub out their cigars.

McCarthy's idea of a meal is steak, very well done. "Cremate it," he tells the waiter. He almost always has steak for dinner, often for breakfast. He rarely eats lunch, but when he does, he is likely to order steak. He keeps irregular hours, gets up late, goes to bed usually long after midnight. A favorite McCarthy recreation is poker, but many find playing with him too nerve-racking, and somewhat like opposing him in politics. In seven-card stud, McCarthy will raise, raise again and then again without even bothering to look at his hole cards. Said one opponent: "You get to the point where you don't care what McCarthy's got in the hole--all you know is that it's too costly to stay in the game."

In Washington, Joe lives with his office manager Ray Kiermas and his wife. He gets back to Wisconsin about every two weeks, usually to give speeches. There he lives with the Urban P. Van Susterens in Appleton. Van, a lawyer and proprietor of a fleet of taxis, managed Joe's last campaign. Last time he got back to Appleton, Joe arrived, as usual, in the middle of the night. He went into the kitchen, dumped some baking soda into his hand, threw it into his mouth, and washed it down with cold water. Margery Van Susteren winced. Next, he took off his coat and tie and shoes, dropping them where he happened to be. Joe has no interest in clothes. After every road trip, hotels send on clothing he has forgotten.

Joe seldom misses Sunday Mass, although he sometimes cannot pass up a steak on Friday. A dogged churchgoer, Joe calls himself "a good Catholic, but not the kiss-the-book, light-the-candle Catholic."

Smart Boy. Joseph Raymond McCarthy, who always signs himself plain Joe McCarthy these days, was born on a farm in Grand Chute, a few miles north of Appleton. One of seven children, he quit school early, parlayed 50 chickens into a flock of 10,000, but lost nearly all of them one winter when he came down with pneumonia and turned over his flock to some friends. At 18 he wangled a job as manager of a grocery store in nearby Manawa (pop. 990).

Joe's merchandising methods showed the instincts of a born political campaigner. He walked up & down the country roads, calling on farmers. Soon his store became a town meeting place. On Saturday nights, other Manawa grocers were so lonely that they would come over to help Joe wait on the crowds.

Joe's landlady, Mrs. Osterloth, nagged at him to go back to school. "You're smart, McCarthy, you're smart," she insisted. Joe went back. With typically furious energy he signed up for 16 subjects, and finished the four-year high-school course in one year.

At Marquette, Joe started in engineering, switched to law. A slugging, savage attacker, he became the college boxing champion. He worked as short-order cook, sold gravestones and calking compound, worked in a filling station until 1 a.m. On the campus he was president of his class one year, a perennial chairman of events, and he knew everybody's name.

The Judge. After only four years as a lawyer, Joe decided to run for circuit judge, at the age of 29. He made few speeches, but he met every farmer in the district. His specialty was sick cows. He would get the cow's symptoms, drive on to the next farm and ask the farmer what he would do for a cow with those symptoms. He kept a Dictaphone in his car, and as he drove away he would dictate a letter to the first farmer, giving the second farmer's advice as Joe's own. Both farmers would be flattered by his attention. He would get a little careless and refer to "my 89-year-old opponent"--though the rival candidate, who had served for 24 years, was only 73. Joe won handily.

Justice in Judge McCarthy's court was breezy, informal and swift. As an appellate judge observed: "There was some bad law practiced in Joe's court, and there were some good decisions--which is what happens in all lower courts." When he went on the bench, Joe practically memorized the three volumes of Jones's rules of evidence. He always made a great show of citing his reasons for a ruling, was rarely reversed. Curiously, Senator McCarthy seems never to have understood the spirit of fair play behind the rules that Judge McCarthy memorized.

After Pearl Harbor, Judge McCarthy took leave of absence and signed up with the Marines. McCarthy's war record was good but not spectacular, and he has made the most of it. He shipped overseas as an intelligence officer with a scout-bombing squadron. Nearly ten years older than most of his squadron, "Father Mac" was very popular, always scrounging beer and extra food for his unit, organizing sports, starting bull sessions. Joe volunteered to defend enlisted men, and boasts of how many courts-martial he beat for his clients.

The Hero. As an intelligence officer, Joe often went along on missions in the rear gunner's seat. He had his picture taken there, and saw that it made Wisconsin papers. Joe used to shoot up everything in sight, on the theory that any coconut tree might hide a Jap. He hated to see a crew come home with any ammunition left. On his tent, marines hung a sign: "Protect the coconut trees--Send McCarthy back to Wisconsin."

In 1944 Joe, having finished his overseas tour of duty, campaigned in Wisconsin as "TailGunner Joe" against Senator Alexander Wiley, and lost. Early in 1945 Joe applied for discharge and got it.

McCarthy had entered the Marines a poor man. He had sold everything he owned for $3,000, turned most of it over to a broker to buy International-Great Northern Railroad bonds on margin. This investment prospered. When he returned he sold out, switched to other securities, pledged them at an Appleton bank, and played the market with the borrowed money. From 1946 to 1949, McCarthy paid no state income tax. In each year, his listed losses or interest payments exceeded his taxable income. Asked how he lived, McCarthy snaps: "Who I borrow from is none of your damned business."

Re-elected circuit judge without contest, Joe in 1946 brashly decided to take on Senator Robert ("Young Bob") La Follette in the Republican primary. He tells about meeting Phil La Follette, who asked Joe how he ever expected to beat his brother. Said Joe (as he tells it): "We've got 42 guys who are built like Bob and who have rubber masks which look exactly like him. They are going to travel the state, walking down main streets bumping into people hard and indignantly asking them who they think they are, bumping into a United States Senator." McCarthy laughs: "I'll bet he still isn't sure whether I was ribbing him." Joe beat Young Bob by a slim 5,000 votes.

"Doing Something." Nobody in Washington paid much attention to the new Senator from Wisconsin, not even after McCarthy invited eight women reporters to dinner and cooked them fried chicken himself. Joe wanted to "do something." He had a horror of Senators who quietly tended their fences and got safely re-elected term after term. He took an interest in ending sugar rationing, in the five-percenters, got himself appointed vice chairman of a joint committee on housing, and became known as a friend of the real-estate lobby.

He showed little practical interest in the fight against Communism. He voted for 7 out of 16 of the amendments to limit the scope or cut the amount of ECA and other foreign aid bills. This year, he voted for a $500 million cut in the Mutual Security Act extending military and economic aid to Europe. Commented a fellow Republican Senator: "McCarthy simply has never been in the picture. He's off on that stuff of his own."

McCarthy never answers criticisms, just savagely attacks the critic. Anyone who voices reservations about his methods is blasted as a "defender of Communists." The Senate resolution of Connecticut's William Benton asking his ejection charges McCarthy with misrepresentation, deception and outright perjury. Last week a subcommittee of Senators decided that the charges warranted a full investigation. McCarthy's response: the committee is trying to throw him out of the Senate "because of my" fight against Communism.

He regularly tries to intimidate reporters by going over their heads to their bosses. When he denounced Drew Pearson (who is not always careful in his own accusations) as a "Kremlin mouthpiece," he demanded that Pearson's radio sponsor, Adam Hat Stores, Inc., drop him immediately, and urged the public to boycott Adam hats. The company dropped Pearson as promptly as the voters of Maryland had dropped Tydings--apparently fearing that their customers would do what McCarthy suggested.

To get action that fast gives a man a sense of power. McCarthy's infatuation with his own crusade has showed signs recently of being stronger than his sense of what his audience will stand. Last summer, when he spent three hours accusing General George Marshall of conspiracy to "make common cause with Stalin," all but three Senators walked out on him.

On the Hustings. West of the Alleghenies, Joe McCarthy is still bamboozling audiences. On the speaker's platform he has a sweat-stained, shirtsleeved earnestness. He stumbles, mixes his grammar, bangs the lectern hard with his fist. He dives into a huge briefcase for "documentation." He flourishes affidavits, reads from congressional hearings, waves photostats. "Listen to this, if you will--unbelievable!", he cries.

A favorite McCarthy victim these days is Gustavo Duran. Joe flourishes a picture of Duran taken during the Spanish Civil War in what he says is "the uniform of the S.I.M.--the counterpart of the Russian secret police." He then says that Duran's American citizenship was rushed through, that he was "promoted" by the State Department to the U.N. in 1946. "And what do you think he was doing there today? Unbelievable as it is, his task was to screen displaced persons and decide which would make good, loyal Americans!"

The true story of Duran is remarkable --but nothing like McCarthy's version. Duran was a Spanish composer of music who fought in the Spanish Republican Army, rising to command of a corps. As the Spanish Loyalists split into Communist and anti-Communist factions, Duran, never a Red, was definitely and clearly antiCommunist. When defeat came, he was smuggled out of Spain on a British warship. He married an American, became a citizen in four months more than the time required by law, worked for the U.S. Government in Cuba during World War II, tracking down Axis and Communist agents. For the past five years, Duran has been working for the U.N., where he has never had anything to do with screening refugees entering the U.S. The uniform in which McCarthy shows Duran is that of the Spanish army, not of any secret police. McCarthy knows all this--but his audiences do not.

Ends & Means. Some have argued that McCarthy's end justifies his methods. This argument seems to assume that lies are required to fight Communist lies. Experience proves, however, that what the anti-Communist fight needs is truth, carefully arrived at and presented with all the scrupulous regard for decency and the rights of man of which the democratic world is capable. This is the Western world's greatest asset in the struggle against Communism, and those who condone McCarthy are throwing that asset away. As the New York Times put the case: "He has been of no use whatever in enabling us to distinguish among sinners, fools and patriots, except in the purely negative sense that many of us have begun to suspect that there must be some good, however small, in anybody who has aroused Senator McCarthy's ire."

A very practical danger lies in this inevitable, negative reaction to McCarthy. The Administration supporters have gradually come to see that they could make capital out of "McCarthyism." If anybody criticizes the judgment of any State Department official in his past or present analysis of Communism, the cry of "McCarthyism" is raised. This McCarthyism in reverse was apparent last week in the

Senate hearings over the confirmation of Ambassador Jessup. Harold Stassen had been careful to say that he was raising no question of Jessup's loyalty or his affiliations; he was simply questioning Jessup's past record of judgment. One observer quickly concluded that Stassen was "the rich man's McCarthy," presumably because McCarthy had also attacked Jessup --on different and far shakier grounds.

On the other hand, a larger share of responsibility for the confusion of McCarthyism belongs to those Republican leaders who have either openly encouraged McCarthy or failed to disavow him, in the belief that he was making votes. Republican Senate Leader Kenneth Wherry recently declared that McCarthy had done the U.S. a "great service." Even Ohio's Robert A. Taft came to McCarthy's defense when Truman described Joe as "a Kremlin asset."

In less McCarthyesque language, McCarthy can be summed up this way:

1) His antics foul up the necessary examination of the past mistakes of the Truman-Acheson foreign policy.

2) His constant imputation of treason distracts attention from the fact that patriotic men can make calamitous mistakes for which they should be held politically accountable.

3) There are never any circumstances which justify the reckless imputation of treason or other moral guilt to individuals in or out of office.

4) McCarthy's success in smearing Tydings and others generates fear of the consequences of dissent. This fear is exaggerated by the "liberals" who welcome McCarthyism as an issue; but the fear exists--and it is poison in a democracy.

Two Kinds of Bad Sentries. More than Joe McCarthy went into the making of McCarthyism. It would never have become a force if mistakes of policy had not led the U.S. into a position that alarmed the public. Long before McCarthy, the U.S. had been slipping into the lazy fallacy that all ideas, policies and political systems are approximately equal--a state of mind very different from the valid principle that all men have a right to express their ideas, however bad. Part of the U.S. public, overtolerant of bad ideas, was a sucker for McCarthy's bigoted effort to prove that bad policy must be the work of evil, traitorous men.

In the vital debates of the day, this charge is totally irrelevant. But it is an irrelevance that compels attention. Like a man busily shooting off firecrackers in a legislative hall, McCarthy may not be persuasive, but he must be dealt with before any debate at all can progress.

Some of the sentries of the republic were asleep after the war--and some are still drowsy. The finding that they were not traitors does not answer the charge that they were bad sentries.

And the drowsy sentry is no worse sentry than the one who maliciously cries wolf, shoots up the coconut trees, and keeps the camp in a state of alarm and confusion.

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