Off the Hook

For a year Joe McCarthy had been making ominous sounds about investigating the most secret of U.S. Government units, the Central Intelligence Agency. During the McCarthy v. Army hearings, he told millions of televiewers that the CIA represented the "worst situation" so far as Communist infiltration was concerned. Last week, after a 17-day vacation off the coast of Mexico, Joe McCarthy got back to Washington and intimated that his committee will not probe the CIA after all. His reason: a Hoover Commission task force, headed by General Mark Clark, is going to study the agency.

This was McCarthy-style reasoning in full bloom. Far different from McCarthy's kind of investigation, the Hoover Commission study will be concerned primarily with CIA structure and administration. Joe McCarthy was merely using the Hoover Commission announcement to slip off the hook. He had lost his enthusiasm for an investigation of CIA for two good reasons: 1) he is not ready to wage another major battle with the Eisenhower Administration, which would vigorously resist a McCarthy invasion of CIA, and 2 ) he would not have the support of two key Republican members of his committee. South Dakota's Karl Mundt and Illinois' Everett Dirksen: who had finally balked at McCarthy's plan to attack CIA.

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