The Redhunter (18 page)

FEBRUARY 9, 1950

Joe McCarthy never ducked the political party speech assignments. Lincoln’s Birthday was a great ritual day for the GOP, just
the right day for political oratory, poignant, fiery, nostalgic, orotund, challenging, the more of everything the better.
When the GOP chairman made out the roster for Lincoln’s Birthday, 1950, he was careful to stroke lobbies scattered about the
country that clamored for special attention.

The year was heavy with political passion. It was generally thought that Harry Truman’s victory in 1948 had been something
of a fluke. Republican pols agreed that they had lost the White House because, as Representative Everett Dirksen put it with
characteristic color, “We were hit by a concatenation of forces.” What had happened was a spunky performance by Truman, who
denounced the “do-nothing Eightieth Congress,” summoning the legislators back to the sweaty capital to stare, poutful but
noncompliant, at Truman’s agenda.

That and (Everett Dirksen would concede in private conversation) a self-indulgent, vapid campaign by challenger Thomas E.
Dewey of New York. “The future lies before us” was a Dewey line much quoted by the derisory legions left desolate by his failure
to recapture the White House for the GOP, which went now for the
fifth
consecutive time to the Democrats.

Internationally, Europe was slowly rebuilding, but the looming figure was Joseph Stalin. He had lost his bid to win Italy
in the 1948 election,
but Communism continued to threaten, there and in France; and the captive nations, as they were now regularly referred to,
despaired of liberation. In New York City there were clots of Romanians and Bulgarians, Poles and Lithuanians and Latvians,
Estonians and Czechoslovakians who did what they could, which was not much, to keep a candle lit in memory of the forgotten
purpose of the war declared by Great Britain against Germany on September 3, 1939—to maintain Polish independence. All liberty
or prospect of it had been forfeited to an Iron Curtain.

There were Republican activists in the House of Representatives. Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, the minority leader, had
a long memory. California’s Richard Nixon was the rising star who had played the critical role in the House Committee on Un-American
Activities’ development of the historical case against diplomat-bureaucrat Alger Hiss, now convicted of perjury or, in effect,
of treason. That case, the most prolonged and dramatic in American postwar political history, had decisively divided the community,
the common man persuaded of his guilt, much of the academic class and the social elite committed, in the name of the integrity
of the New Deal, to his innocence.

But mostly, Lincoln’s Birthday cities put in to hear a GOP senator. It was the job of the GOP chairman to match postulant
cities to individual senators. It was in the first week of February that Senator Joe McCarthy learned that he was to speak
at Wheeling, West Virginia.

“Where is Wheeling?”

“Well, Joe,” Mary Haskell responded. She was his gray-haired, no-nonsense office manager, with the wry smile. “Wheeling, West
Virginia, is about eight hundred miles east southeast of Appleton, Wisconsin, and about the same size.”

“You have a nice way of clamming me up, Mary.”

“I wish I could patent it.”

“I guess the date is absolutely fixed?”

“It is absolutely fixed. You gave your word in January you’d accept whatever assignment the GOP gave you. West Virginia is
Democratic country and in 1948 went for Truman. Tom Sweeney is a peppy Republican chairman in Wheeling, and the newspaper
will give you good coverage.”

He was met at the airport in Wheeling by Tom Sweeney, a businessman who had run unsuccessfully for the Senate and now served
as local GOP head. He ushered McCarthy into his Buick Roadmaster and, driving off, asked what he was going to talk about.
He had two speeches in his briefcase, the senator said, one on public housing, the second on the loyalty issue.

“Do you talk about Fuchs in the loyalty speech?”

“Yes,” said McCarthy. He made reference to Klaus Fuchs, arrested early in the month for stealing atomic secrets from Los Alamos
and passing them to a Soviet spy ring. Four days earlier, President Truman had announced his intention to build a hydrogen
bomb. The Soviets had got off an atomic explosion in August the year before. “Is there any secret left that hasn’t been stolen
from us?” Sweeney wanted to know. And added quickly, “Did you see the polls, Senator?”

Joe: “Which polls?”

“A
Fortune
poll says ten percent of the U.S. think the Communist Party is close to wielding decisive power, that there is nowhere we
can effectively stop them anymore.”

“Ten percent isn’t many. Only what, twenty-four, twenty-five million?”

“No, but thirty-five percent think the party is growing and that Communists are exercising control in key government posts.”

“My speech on the loyalty issue charges that there are Communists in government, known to the secretary of state to
be
Communists, who were nevertheless undischarged.”

“That’s the speech you got to give us, Joe. And station WWVA is ready to broadcast it. Have you got a spare copy?”

They pulled into the hotel. McCarthy plopped his briefcase on the registration desk and, while Sweeney was checking him in,
pulled out a thirteen-page speech.

He didn’t immediately release his hold on it. “This is very important stuff, Tom. I thought maybe of holding it for Reno—that’s
actually Lincoln’s birthday, Thursday.”

“I’d really like to have you give it tonight. It’s an important day for us.”

McCarthy loosened his grip on the manuscript. What the heck. The people in Reno wouldn’t know he had already given it in Wheeling.
And vice versa.

He went up to his suite. He had got used to being given a suite when he spoke here and there—the way to treat a senator. Different
from what he had got used to
running
for the Senate, let alone for judge! He welcomed the difference as he took off his shirt and, in his underclothes, fiddled
with his manuscript. He found it providential that, above his king-size bed, there was a framed photograph of Abraham Lincoln,
looking dolorous as ever. An appropriate expression, McCarthy thought, for February 1950. A hundred years ago all they had
to worry about was slavery and the Missouri Compromise. But it was time to go to work. He dressed, and soon the phone rang.
They were ready for him.

His talk was written out in rough draft, thirteen pages, just under a half hour. But he spoke grave words, and he felt the
lift of the audience, at once that of alarm and that of satisfaction at being told what it was that would explain it all.
He had a sense of it, that his message, this time around, would resonate.

There would be very long and heated debates over exactly what he said that night. The radio station that broadcast his talk
erased the tape the next morning, routine practice. Nobody questioned the thrust of what he said. “I have here in my hand
a list of—[205?]—[57?]—a list of names that were 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.” Later, Joe McCarthy said he had spoken
of “loyalty risks.” Whatever the exact wording, his speech to 275 members of the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club in the
Colonnade Room of the McClure Hotel charged that United States foreign policy was being affected by the operations of men
and women disloyal to the United States and tolerated by their employers.

Joe McCarthy’s Eastern Airlines DC-4 wouldn’t arrive back in Washington from Wheeling until just before noon. He’d have twenty-four
hours before leaving for his two other Lincoln Day speeches, both in Nevada. From his hotel room he called Mary Haskell at
the office, just after nine. She told him he had several calls, mostly from reporters. “I’ll give you the call slips when
you come in. But you may want to call back Tom Coleman, maybe from the hotel before you go to the airport.”

“Tom always gets priority.”

“Yes. But he pays for it, dear Tom,” Mary said. “Your number one Wisconsin backer, Tom. He put the call in himself. He’s at
home. Got the number?”

Joe said he did, and put in the call. It was the first time he had submitted to an interrogation concerning last night’s speech.
He’d need to practice saying it more succinctly, he reflected fifteen minutes later.

“Yes. Yes, Tom. I did say that. I said there are Communists—loyalty risks—in the State Department and almost certainly everywhere
else. I have the list. … I actually have
two
lists. One list is made up of people acknowledged by Jimmy Byrnes—yes, when he was secretary of state, 1946—as loyalty risks
but haven’t been fired. … What? Right. Right. They hadn’t been fired when Byrnes wrote that letter—… Are they fired now? …
Yes. I
know
it’s been four years. But we know how the State Department is, especially under Red Dean Acheson—… Yes, the other list is
more current, Bob Lee’s list. Bob is with House Appropriations—How do I know they’re still there? Tom, Tom, you
do
remember that Truman in 1948 froze all congressional investigations into executive personnel—denied us access to
all
the security files. So the assumption is they’re all
still there.
… Yes, I’ll make that clear. I’ll be talking in Reno tomorrow, same general pitch. … Good, Tom. Give my love to Josephine.”

One week later Joe was back in his office. It was Marge on the switchboard, yet again, maybe the tenth time since he had come
in. “Mr. Tom Sweeney, Senator. Says you told him to call you.”

McCarthy sighed—he had been interrupted ten times in the hour he had set aside to read the three morning papers.

But he liked the excited pep in Sweeney’s voice, and reacted to it by saying, “How’m I doing, Tom?”

“That was a shot heard ‘round the world, Joe.”

“You’re telling me, Tom. It’s total war.”

“And we’ve got to win this one, Joe.”

“Yeah, we do. But you know what, Tom, I got to sign off. Another phone’s ringing, and I got to take that call.” It was only
Mary Haskell, but she plopped a dozen phone slips on his desk.

Immediately after he had landed in Washington, Joe McCarthy began to walk toward the baggage room behind the airport’s ticket
counters. A man stepped in front of him. He was tall, of middle age, and wore a heavy winter coat and a fedora. He extended
a card in his hand. “Excuse me, Senator. I’m Agent Danielson, FBI. I’ve been instructed to hand you this letter. Director’s
office.”

McCarthy nodded and put the letter in his pocket. “Thanks. I’ll read it in the cab.” Joe took the envelope and shook the hand
of Agent Danielson.

“Dear Senator McCarthy,” he read as the taxi drove off with directions to take him to the Capitol.

It is most important that I speak with you concerning the speech you gave last night at Wheeling. I will need 1–2 hours with
you. I suggest we meet at an address I will subsequently give you either between four and six, or, if you would care to have
dinner, between six and eight. Please confirm with Miss Lalley, at DUpont 4226.

Joe McCarthy had never laid eyes on the legendary head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But he knew something of the
director’s singular power and prestige. Everybody knew of them. Through Hoover’s office every security file was processed,
though
the State Department and the National Security Agency had their own investigators. “And whatever you do,” senatorial colleague
Karl Mundt from South Dakota had told him when first Joe checked in to Washington as a freshly elected senator, “don’t cross
J. Edgar. Yes, he’s a great American. We all know that. But there isn’t anybody in town he can’t make trouble for, and that
includes—”Mundt doffed his hat to the White House as, driving down Pennsylvania Avenue, they passed it by.

Joe confided the summons to his office intimates, Mary Haskell, aide Jean Kerr, and assistant Don Surine. He would go, of
course. He wondered which of the options to take.