"The Abuse That I Took"

Faced with a Republican-backed move to bobtail the Army-McCarthy hearings, Committee Chairman Karl Mundt sighed over the prospect of continuing with "this miserable business." But Mundt reluctantly cast the deciding vote against the motion when Army Secretary Robert Stevens said curtailment would be unfair. The decision to go on with public hearings cleared the way for an important witness: Army Counselor John Adams, who had acted as the Army's liaison man with the McCarthy investigating subcommittee.

Adams' voice was low, often inaudible to committee members, but his words were precise and devastating in their detail as he told of repeated attempts by Joe McCarthy & Co. to get preferential Army treatment for Private G. David (Golden Boy) Schine.

The Ride. Last Dec. 17, for example, Adams had lunch in downtown Manhattan with McCarthy, Subcommittee Staff Director Frank Carr and Committee Counsel Roy Cohn, the most lordly 27-year-old since Alexander of Macedon. Adams suggested that they discuss the Schine matter.

Recalled Adams: "That started a chain of events, an experience similar to none which I have had in my life.

"Mr. Cohn became extremely agitated, became extremely abusive. He cursed me and then Senator McCarthy. The abuse went in waves. He would be very abusive, and then it would kind of abate and things would be friendly for a few moments. Everybody would eat a little more, and then it would start in again. It just kept on.

"I was trying to catch a 1:30 train, but Mr. Cohn was so violent by then that I felt I had better not do it and leave him that angry with me and that angry with Senator McCarthy because of a remark I had made. So I stayed and missed my 1:30 train. I thought surely I would be able to get out of there by 2:30 . . . I missed the 2:30 train also."

Trying desperately to catch a 3:30 train, Adams accepted a ride in Cohn's car. The surges of anger were still coming, said Adams, but were directed mostly at Senator McCarthy, who, two or three times during the ride, asked Adams to see about a New York assignment for Private Schine.

Unable to make a left turn at an intersection, Cohn kept on driving. Said Adams: "I. complained to Mr. Cohn. I said, 'You are just taking me away from the station,' and in a final fit of violence he stopped the car in the middle of four lanes of traffic and said, 'Get there however you can.' So I climbed out of the car in the middle of four lanes of traffic . . . ran across the street and jumped into a cab to try to make the 3:30 train." The committee room was breathless with suspense as Committee Counsel Ray Jenkins asked the inevitable question: Did Adams catch the 3:30 train? Replied John Adams: "The 3:30 train was ten minutes late, so I made it." Then he added: "Mr. Carr told me a few days later that he didn't think I should feel badly about the way I was put out of the car because he said I should have seen the way Senator McCarthy left the car a few blocks later"--in front of the Waldorf-Astoria.

The Judges. Summing up the pressures brought against him by Cohn on Schine's behalf, Adams said: "If you would pile together all of the abuse that I had from all the other members of Congress and all of the other congressional employees over a period of five years, it would not compare to the abuse that I took over this situation."

While Adams testified, Joe McCarthy's attitude ranged from lofty indifference, as he sipped milk and flipped the pages of a newspaper, to deep interest, as he furiously scribbled notes on 3-by-5 index cards. At his side sat Roy Cohn, now whispering, now scowling, now grimacing and turning up the whites of his eyes, now managing a pained smile. On McCarthy's other side was Frank Carr, his pudgy face impassive, the silent man of the hearings.

In cross-examination Counsel Jenkins and committee members sought to show that Adams had tried to bring an end to McCarthy's investigation of Army Communism by 1) ingratiating himself with Joe and Cohn, 2) using Schine as a "hostage," and 3) when these efforts failed, threatening to make public a report on the McCarthy-Cohn-Carr efforts to get favors for Schine unless Joe changed his mind about issuing subpoenas for members of the Army loyalty board.

It was on the third charge that Adams suffered the heaviest damage. In the midst of his crossexamination, a remarkable transformation took place: three of the men who were sitting as judges in the hearings--Republican Committee Members Dirksen, Mundt and Potter--suddenly became witnesses.

Bureaucratic Blackmail? Fluttering his eyelashes at the television cameras, Illinois' Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen was placed under oath and told how John Adams and White House Aide Gerald Morgan came to his office last Jan. 22 to urge against the subcommittee's calling Army loyalty panelists. It was then, Dirksen said, that he heard for the first time of the Cohn-Schine matter. Although he could not say that Adams actually tried to use the Cohn-Schine report as a club, Dirksen said that he had a "vague" recollection of "hints" in that direction, all of which caused him much "distress of spirit."

South Dakota's Senator Mundt, smilingly bemoaning his failure to wear his blue "television shirt," offered similar testimony about a talk he had with Adams alone on Jan. 22. Mundt said that he had been uneasy about the "juxtaposition" in which Adams placed the loyalty board plea and the Cohn-Schine affair. Mundt said that he had thought the topics were "entirely unrelated." Michigan's Senator Potter testified along the same lines about a conversation with Deputy Army Counselor Lewis Berry.

The impression given by the Senators' testimony was that Adams had used the Cohn-Schine report to attempt a form of bureaucratic blackmail. But Adams had a different explanation of how the Schine case came to be coupled with the subpoenas to the Army loyalty board.

Under direct examination Adams had told of Cohn's intense eagerness to get Schine assigned back to New York. On Jan. 18, said Adams, he talked long distance with Cohn, then on vacation in Boca Raton, Fla., and passed on the unwelcome word that Schine would be at Camp Gordon for from two to five months.

"How Can I?" When Cohn heard this news, Adams said, it "was obvious to me that he was very upset. I asked him if he intended to continue his vacation in Florida--he had only been there about a day or two days--and he said something to me to the effect then about 'How can I, when this has happened?' "

The very next morning, Adams was told by Frank Carr that loyalty board members would be called to testify. Said Adams: "I objected to it very strenuously. I pointed out to him that we had discussed this matter many times, and that there had been an informal understanding, in so far as I knew, that this matter would not become an issue. I pointed out to him Mr. Stevens left for the Far East just two days ago, or a day ago, and now this develops. I asked him why it happened.

"He said there was nothing he could do about it, that Mr. Cohn had returned the night before at 8:50 p.m. from Florida, which is just 6 1/2 hours after he talked to me on the telephone from Boca Raton, and there was nothing that Carr could do about it."

Because of this, Adams said, when he went to visit Senators Mundt and Dirksen, the matters of the loyalty board and of the Cohn-Schine case were so linked in his mind that he believed the one was the direct result of, and reprisal for, the other.

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