The Redhunter (58 page)

Joe McCarthy seemed genuinely entranced.

“Well now, Joe, Jeanie, I’ve got a proposal, something Tom Coleman came up with. It would bring that vacation a lot closer.
What Tom says is, everybody is fed up with the hearings. They go on and on and on, don’t seem to get anywhere, and he proposes
a deal: Your side—you let Roy resign. Their side—they let John Adams go. The public view: Roy is marked down for using too
much muscle on behalf of David Schine. John Adams is marked down for using Schine as a bargaining weapon. The big news: The
army has agreed!”

Harry looked at Joe apprehensively. There was a quick shutting of the eyelids, the tic that preceded the consolidation of
McCarthy’s thought. Without looking at Jeanie, he said quietly, “I’ll go with it—provided Roy agrees.”

Then he turned to Jean. She said, softly, “Thank God you said that, Joe.”

McCarthy sighed. “I’ll take it up with Roy tonight.”

“I don’t think I’d be useful sitting at that conference, Joe.”

“No, you’re right, Harry. Have another beer and go home. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

When the three regular conferees arrived at eight, Joe told Frank Carr and Don Surine that they should call it a night. “I’ve
got to spend the time tonight alone with Roy.”

Roy frowned, but two hours later he agreed to go with the Coleman proposal—on the understanding that he was free to issue
his own statement giving the reasons for his resignation.

The following morning, Tom Coleman, speaking to both parties, suggested that both Roy Cohn and John Adams make themselves
unavailable throughout the day, to aim at a meeting at six
P.M.
, when the papers would be signed in the presence of Chairman Karl Mundt of the investigating committee. Senator Mundt would
then declare the Army-McCarthy hearings suspended sine die, opening the doors to the press.

Roy Cohn took a room in a hotel and began drafting his resignation statement.

John Adams and Secretary Bob Stevens were summoned early in the afternoon to the White House. They sat down with Sherman Adams
and Herbert Brownell. The chief of staff didn’t give the sense that he was totally in command of himself, and began to talk.

“Bob, John, we, er, here at the White House, have been giving second thought to the Coleman plan. Well, Herb, you tell ‘em.”

Herbert Brownell was the consummate Park Avenue lawyer, smooth, collected, resolute. “It’s this way, gentlemen. Our analysis
here is that McCarthy is going down. Whatever he is able to pull, and whatever Roy Cohn comes up with isn’t going to excuse
the pressures he put on the army for Schine. And McCarthy’s strategy of counterattack requires him to be more scattershot
even than usual about who he is attacking. So the conclusions here—”Herbert Brownell knew exactly how to convey what he meant
by “here”; the Oval Office was five steps down the hall from where they sat—“are that we should go the whole mile, unpleasant
though that is.”

Brownell turned to John Adams. “You will simply convey to Tom Coleman that, on second thought, you think it wrong to bury
questions which are best left to resolution by open democratic discussion.”

Nobody talked. There was nothing left to say. They rose, and Sherman Adams said to Stevens, “Mr. Secretary, come with me one
minute. The president just wants to say hello.”

Roy Cohn had been on the stand nine days. Joseph Welch was in no hurry. His questions were posed languidly. His half smile
was almost always there, though occasionally he would exchange it for a furrowed brow and deep frown, as if he had just been
notified about Pearl Harbor. It was late in the afternoon session, and Welch kept at it and at it.

“Mr. Cohn, if I told you now that we had a bad situation at Monmouth,
you would want to cure it by sundown if you could, wouldn’t you?”

Yes, Cohn replied.

“Mr. Cohn, tell me once more. Every time you learn of a Communist or a spy anywhere, is it your policy to get them out as
fast as possible?”

Yes.

“Where in the hell is Welch going with this line of questioning?” Willmoore asked Harry, staring at the television set in
the Fellows’ suite.

“I don’t know. He’s fishing, it seems to me.”

“May I add my small voice, sir,” Welch droned on, “and ask you to tell us what you know about a subversive or a Communist
or a spy? Please hurry.”

Joe McCarthy snapped.

“Mr. Chairman, in view of that question …”

Chairman Mundt: “Have you a point of order?”

“Not exactly, Mr. Chairman. But in view of Mr. Welch’s request that the information be given once we know of anyone who might
be performing any work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher,
whom he recommended, incidentally, to do work on this committee, who has been for a number of years a member of an organization
which was named, oh, years and years ago, as the legal mouthpiece of the Communist Party—”

Welch looked up and over at Roy Cohn, who shielded his eyes as if to take refuge from McCarthy’s violation of the agreement
Cohn had negotiated. Cohn began scratching out a note to hand to McCarthy.

McCarthy continued. “I have hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phony requests to Mr. Cohn
here that he personally get every Communist out of government before sundown. I am not asking you at this time to explain
why you tried to foist Fisher on this committee. Whether you knew Fisher was a member of that Communist organization or not,
I don’t know. I assume you did not, Mr. Welch, because I get the impression that, while you are quite an actor, you play for
a laugh. I don’t think you have any conception of the danger of the Communist Party. I don’t think you
yourself would ever knowingly aid the Communist cause. I think you are unknowingly aiding it when you try to burlesque this
hearing in which we are attempting to bring out the facts.”

There was absolute silence. All eyes turned to Joseph Welch.

He rose slowly and with a few words ended the public career of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who
went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us.”

Joe Welch’s voice was heavy with emotion. Tears began to come down his cheek. “Little did I dream you could be so reckless
and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to
be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.”

He stopped, and then leaned down to look directly into McCarthy’s face.

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
Have you no sense of decency?”

He bowed his head and sat down. The room burst out in sustained, convulsive applause.

McCarthy did not recover.

Lord Herrendon nodded to the technician, as Epson liked to be called when he left his outdoor work maintaining the estate
and devoted himself to milord’s VCR, computer, and fax problems. “That will do, Epson.” The showing of that tape of the Army-McCarthy
hearings was arrested. “Surely, Harry, you don’t want any more? Stopping the tape now, we leave Mr. Welch in tears. Jolly
effective.”

“Yes.” Harry was seated alongside Alex, facing the television in the library, Epson in command of the remote control. “Very
effective. Even after—what?—yes, thirty-seven years.”

“Did you sense when you watched it, Harry, that it would have such an impact?”

“No. I knew it was a very bad moment for McCarthy, but maybe my unwillingness to go right there and then to his funeral had
something to do with the ridiculousness of Mr. Welch’s implications. The business about how what McCarthy had just revealed
would be a scar in the young lad’s life forever. In the first place, what McCarthy said about junior lawyer Fred Fisher had
already been published by the
New York Times
, six weeks earlier, when Welch was thinking of bringing Fisher down as assistant counsel. Anyway, that was 1954, and I had
spent three years of my life going over records and interviewing and writing about and corresponding with two thousand people
who had joined one Communist front or another, and unless they were real
addicts, the difficulties they encountered—most of them encountered zero difficulties—just floated away. I might add—like
your difficulty with the National Consumers League, if I remember that that was your … front.”

“What about the Hollywood Ten?”

“Alex. You are pulling my leg. By the way, recall that the Hollywood Ten had their problem two years before anybody ever heard
of McCarthy. The ten Hollywood people who ended up suspended, some of them doing jail sentences for contempt, weren’t people
who had joined one or two Communist fronts. They were
Communists
. C-o-m-m-u-n-i-s-t-s, not just people who believed in socialized medicine or in unilateral disarmament or in anti-imperialism.”

Harry stood up. Alex could not tell if what came from him then was a sigh or just wistfulness. “It was one of Joe McCarthy’s
ironic legacies that it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a Communist, because you’d be hauled
up for committing McCarthyism.”

“But the Hollywood Ten—was it established that they were Communists?”

“Alex, you were a deep-cover agent of the Soviet Union. Your involvement with Communism was at a very private, hidden level.
You weren’t even permitted to
associate
with known Communists—everybody knows that rule. You should remind yourself that there were
actual
Communists, I mean party members and explicit sympathizers; people who voted the Communist ticket. You don’t say about somebody
like, oh, the singer and actor Paul Robeson, that he was a liberal activist who wanted to see both points of view. He was
a
believing
Communist.”

“Well, certainly the young lawyer in Mr. Welch’s firm was never a Communist?”

“We don’t know. I assume he was not, because the single charge made against him was that he joined the National Lawyers Guild,
a dumb thing to do, but there were three, four thousand lawyers who did so. Fred Fisher was one: an
ex
-member of the Lawyers Guild; two: He joined it when he was very young; three: He was obviously embarrassed and repentant
about it; four: He wasn’t working for the Atomic Energy Commission or for the State Department; and five:
Nothing
was more obvious when Welch spoke than that nobody in the
entire world
, let alone in the Boston legal community, was going to hurt Fisher. I never heard his name again, but I’ll bet you your castle
here that he never had any trouble on account of McCarthy’s naming him. More likely he was lionized. Some scar.”

“You may be right on that, Harry. But it was if not venal, then a very stupid thing for McCarthy to do.”

“
Incredibly
stupid! But the Welch scene was drenched in cynicism. Your videotape won’t show it, but Welch wasn’t satisfied to weep in
the Senate chamber for the benefit of the committee members and the television audience. He walked over,
after the session
, to the press gallery where the press were concentrated, and managed to weep again.”

“Let’s get some air.” Alex Herrendon rose and walked to the window, examining the weather. His profile was sharply etched,
and the conformation of his head. Harry stopped breathing for one second. … He was looking at himself, twenty years older.

It was warm, a mild British fall. Alex took his walking stick, and father and son walked through the door.

Alex spoke about the troubles Gorbachev was running into in Moscow. The war in Afghanistan was all but abandoned. Every day,
everyone, it seemed, wanted more perestroika.

“There’s no way they can get more glasnost.” Harry chuckled. “There isn’t any more to be had. Anybody can say anything now.
God, it isn’t taking long after the Berlin Wall coming down to change the whole shape of Soviet man.”

They completed their half-hour walk. Back in the study, Alex asked, “How much did you see of McCarthy after the Army hearings?”

“I went down to Washington every four or five weeks. I didn’t go at dinnertime because Joe, I knew from Jeanie—we talked every
week on the phone—was in pretty bad shape, waterlogged, by that time of day. I’d stop in for lunch, or even for just a visit.”

“Did he ever talk about his mistakes?”

“No.”

“Did he realize that, largely on account of him, the loyalty/security situation got worse than it ever was?”

“No. And there was something else he didn’t realize. It was that the old-guard anti-Communists, people like James Burnham,
Max Eastman, Eugene Lyons, Christopher Emmett, Sol Levitas, had a
tougher time on account of him.” Harry looked up. “I remember something very funny. Joe McCarthy was in town, this would have
been late fifty-three. He was giving a lunch speech—I wrote it—to the, oh gee, I forget, some organization that met regularly;
but I was there. There was standing room only. I was seated way in the back at a table with Gene Lyons. Remember him?”