The Redhunter (32 page)

Harry listened with agonized intensity as Joe began. His heart fell when he heard the opening words, words he had not seen
in the Davis text. McCarthy told his colleagues, and the world, that he would talk now about a “mysterious, powerful” figure
who was part of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture
in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving
of the maledictions of all honest men.”

After reading for almost three hours to an all but empty Senate chamber, Joe signaled to the Senate reporter and gave him,
to enter into the record, the balance of the speech. He looked back at the couch, but Jean, Don, and Harry had left. Don and
Jean, when he entered his office, pleaded the press of work as having required them to leave the Senate chamber and return
to the office.

Harry wasn’t there. He was home. He sat at his desk and stared in frustration at his notes of three nights before. He dialed
Willmoore Sherrill in New York, but there was no answer. He pulled out Elinor’s number in Amsterdam. She greeted him joyously.
He tried to banter with her.

“Harry, you’re upset. What is it?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I was just worried a little.”

“Worried about what?”

Harry knew he wasn’t getting anywhere. He was, really, talking to himself. “Worried about the tulip crop.”

“Okay, okay. But really. Anything going on?”

“Oh, just a little setback in the office. Nothing to worry about. How are the dikes? Holding?”

The conversation loosened up, and Harry blew her kisses. He put down the telephone and started to dial Sam Tilburn, but thought
better of it. He had become a friend, and Harry could talk with him about McCarthy and the entire scene absolutely confident
that Tilburn would betray no confidence; confident, also, that Tilburn would listen, and advise, and—sympathize.

But he didn’t ring Sam. There wasn’t anything further to say, he decided, than that there are good days, and bad days.

The speech was commercially published a few months later by Devin-Adair, Inc., as a 169-page book,
America’s Retreat From Victory, The Story of George Catlett Marshall,
by Joseph R. McCarthy.

Dean Gooderham Acheson sat in his office in the State Department—old wood, brightly varnished; oil paintings of a few of his
predecessors; fine crystal and gilt; the Chippendale desk, at the right corner of which flew the little American flag crossed
with the Great Seal of the United States. His penetrating eyes went over the briefing paper prepared by his press aide.

His press aide was his young nephew, Ezra Black. He sat at the desk in the corner, assembling papers for his fastidious employer.
Mr. Acheson had the habit of emitting little grunts, barely audible, when he read material in which he or his policies figured.
It took close-in experience to distinguish a grunt that marked Mr. Acheson’s approval of what he had read from one that marked
his disapproval. But Ezra had been on board over a year and knew which was which. This morning the four or five grunts were
all negative, emphatically negative. Ezra had no difficulty guessing why. The secretary of state was reading a digest of remarks
made the day before on the floor of the Senate that related very directly to the policies of the State Department.

Acheson tilted back his great leather chair, mounted on the brass swivel base, and twirled his full, immaculately groomed
mustache pensively. Without turning actually to look at him, he addressed Ezra. “It was perhaps not wise for me to say what
I did in January about
Korea.
Correction. Concerning
which remarks, certain deductions were made about Korea. Correction. Certain deductions were made about Korea by certain
people.”

“They’re certainly hitting you for it, Mr. Secretary.”

“Do you have the exact words there? The digest does not give them all. Senator Ferguson is merely quoted as saying that the—I
quote him—’boys’ are dying in Korea because—I quote him again—‘a group of untouchables in the State Department sabotaged the
aid program.’

“You will remember, Ezra, that the distinguished junior senator from Michigan, Mr. Ferguson, early in the spring, denounced
our—I quote him—’wanton waste’—in sending, quotes, ‘everything to everybody.’ But here … ” the secretary raised his voice
slightly and attempted the flat Midwestern tones of Homer Ferguson, “but here he is angry because we did not send
everything
to
everybody.
He says, according to the digest, ‘He told’—Secretary Acheson told—I told—’the world the U.S. would not interfere in Korea.’
… You have it there, Ezra, my actual text?”

Black was flipping through a loose-leaf notebook looking for the speech at the National Press Club. It was in January, five
months before.

“What you said—”Black had found the digest—”was that Japan, the Ryukyu Islands, and the Philippines were within the defense
perimeter of the United States and would be defended. Your omission in that speech of Korea—and Formosa—was immediately picked
up by the press.”

“Hmm. But of course I was correct. To describe the
defense perimeter
of the United States is not to say that we are not
interested in,
do not
care
about,
will
refuse to help,
fail to defend,
a particular country or geographic area outside that perimeter in particular circumstances. I am not a military man, Ezra—I
don’t think of you as one, even though you were in the army during the war—”

“Navy.”

“Navy during the war. A defense perimeter is a boundary within which a country
has
to act in defense of itself. The Philippines are our westernmost base in the Pacific. That does not mean we would not defend,
say, Okinawa.”

Ezra Black was silent, his head cocked just a hair to one side.

Acheson waited. Then: “Do you have any problem with that?”

“Well, no, sir, not as a theoretical point. And the president did in fact immediately decide to oppose the North Koreans with
military force.”

“Yes. And I fully concurred in last week’s decision. We are resisting a specific act of aggression. This obviously would not
be the time to do so, but I would expect that at the National War College and other military-academic sanctuaries free from
one of Senator McCarthy’s informants—if such exist—the distinction would be observed between a place the United States
has
to defend, lying as it does—I cite Guam as an example—within our defense perimeter, and a place which we
do not
have to defend in order to defend ourselves but which we may
elect
to defend for a number of reasons, in this case, our commitment to oppose aggression, as also to affirm our psychological
and diplomatic obligations.”

Again Black was silent.

Acheson’s eyes went back to his press briefing. He spoke as he read. “Did I never give you the illuminating observation by
John Stuart Mill? He said, I think I have it correctly in memory, that all stupid people are conservatives, which means that
the conservative party always tends to be large.”

He returned to his briefing papers. “Mr. Wherry of Nebraska, with characteristic finesse, observed that the ‘blood’—again,
of our ‘boys’—lies on my shoulders. And the
tricoteuses
—do you know who they were, Ezra?”

Black nodded.

“Well, I should hope so—the bloodsuckers—better, the
blood-lustful
—had help from our friend Senator McCarran.” This time the secretary did turn his chair around to face his aide. “Why doesn’t
Senator McCarran leave the Democratic Party and join the Republican Party, Ezra? Or, for that matter, the Flat Earth Society,
if they will have him?”

He swiveled to the front of his desk, where the digest lay. “The senator says we—he is referring to
us,
Ezra—‘produce statesmanship at the level of the psychopathic ward.’ That is a dull-witted remark.” Again he paused. Once
more he swiveled.

“Ezra?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Your silence has got to mean something.”

“Well, sir, I understand your thinking, and your foreign policy. After all, I’m by your side day after day. But the Republicans—and
at least one Democrat—are raging mad. Whether they really blame you—blame the Truman administration—or whether they’re just
making political hay, I don’t know. But I do think they have a very plausible political case.

“Look.” The young aide seemed now almost to be pleading. “The secretary of state gives a talk in which he describes the western
military perimeter, and people look at the map of the Pacific and say,
‘Korea’s not in it.’
Therefore it follows that the United States will not defend South Korea.

“Therefore Stalin feels it’s safe to push that button, and four days after he does it, the capital of South Korea is captured.”

“Yes, yes, Ezra. I know a little about advocacy. Ask Covington and Burling. I was their chief litigator for many years, you
may remember.”

He swiveled the chair right around, and now Black could see only the back of his head. His nephew feared the worst. That came
when the secretary was especially riled. He now was especially riled and expressed himself fully.

“I believe I am as alert as anyone to the great tensions of the day. I am perhaps more sensitive than any but a very few—”

Black’s pencil scratched out on his pad, almost involuntarily. Oh, shit! he thought. Here we go.

“—to the special dangers of a nuclear-armed world of mortal antagonists—”

The telephone gave the special tone buzz. Acheson picked it up immediately. Ezra Black rose quickly—he was expected to absent
himself when the president telephoned. His hand was on the doorknob when the secretary of state said, “Yes, Mr. President?”

Ten minutes later the limousine emerged from the State Department garage and headed for the White House.

Dear Elinor. Dear,
Dear
Elinor:

You can’t be
serious.
Come visit with you in Amsterdam “for a couple of weeks in July and August”? There is no
way
I could get away from Washington for two days, forget two weeks. The Tydings Report on Joe will be released sometime during
those two weeks. We don’t know exactly when, but we do know it will be tough. The Tydings people are fronting for the entire
Truman administration (my apologies to the ambassador! your eminent father). Everything we bring up they are prepared to shoot
down, or try to. You’ve read about Owen Lattimore? They’re prepared to pass
him
off as a disinterested Oriental scholar. The operative premise is that, really,
nobody
is a Communist. Sometimes, listening to Tydings or Morgan (Ed Morgan is the committee counsel) you get the impression that
Joe McCarthy made a speech in Wheeling last February charging the State Department with failing to root out all the duck-billed
platypuses (platypi?) in the State Department. They really all but assume that Communists just don’t
exist.
Oh sure, they’ll have to acknowledge Alger Hiss, and the Gouzenko people up in Canada, and Klaus Fuchs—sometimes the evidence
is just plain un-ignorable, especially if the person, like Fuchs, goes to live in the Soviet Union. (But don’t get too mad
at him. All he did was give Stalin the atom bomb.) They just won’t
focus
on the reasonable-doubt criterion
I told you about at our final (I hope not) Stork Club dinner—or was trying to tell you when the great Sherman Billingsley
took over. I
know
you didn’t ask him to sit down with us, but you hardly
drove him away.
I reconstruct …

Billingsley. “Well, it’s nice to see you two again.”

You. “We’ve
loved
it, every time.”

SB. “What’s that, little girl, a tear in your eye?”

You. “Well, we’re going away. My father and I.”

SB. “Going where, little girl? Your name?—”

You. “Elinor—”