KENNEDY AND McCARTHY

...Of the two approaches, Kennedy preferred the second...

...First of all, they were concerned about his family and friends...

...So much for the record...

...Another reason, however, was much more personal...

...Nonetheless Kennedy never spoke up for or against McCarthy...

...While the press waited outside the door, Kennedy stood his ground...

...In neither case, however, was the vote recorded, and Kennedy was not one of the ten Senators to stand up to be recorded against the bill...

...On the issue of McCarthy himself, he took no stand...

...They occupied the very summit of the liberals' hierarchy of values...

...His father may have been a New Dealer under Roosevelt, but he had also made his millions through financial speculations, and he was close to Joe McCarthy, and to Herbert Hoover, Robert A. Taft, and other conservatives and isolationists...

...The Wisconsin Senator had been a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy for some time, visiting him in Hyannis Port and talking with him on his yacht, and the son had known him primarily through his father...

...Perhaps the fairest and most objective analysis of that phase of the record of the Democratic candidate for President was written by James MacGregor Burns, professor of political science at Williams College and author of John Kennedy: A Political Profile...

...finally the Committee agreed to ask the Justice Department to comment on the constitutionality of citing Lamont...

...The Senate majority leader, Republican Leader Knowland, hotly opposed to the resolution, moved the establishment of a select committee to consider the charges...

...By mid-1954, he was continuously on crutches...

...I think McCarthyism is a question on which public officials must stand up and be counted," she told them...

...Roosevelt on that score...

...I was caught in cross currents and eddies...

...Kennedy did not feel free, he said, to base his vote on the "long-past misconduct" of McCarthy, to which neither he nor Flanders had publicly objected at the time...

...McCarthy sneered at the traditions, orderly procedures, and Senatorial good manners that Kennedy valued so highly...

...The issues swirling around McCarthy came to a head in August, 1954...

...On the other hand: One—On clear issues of civil liberties, Kennedy voted against McCarthy...

...It was all right to experiment on social and economic matters, liberals felt, but impermissible to tamper with the basic liberties of the Bill of Rights, for only if those liberties remained secure could the free processes of government remain open for the detection and correction of error...

...I didn't...

...Later that year, in writing a newspaper review of Richard Rovere's Senator Joe McCarthy, he mentioned that the nation had "recovered its health" from the "McCarthy contagion" and that Rovere could expect the "usual stream of abusive, venomous letters from the still-vibrant cult of McCarthy admirers...

...Because McCarthy had attacked the honor and dignity of the Senate...

...The verdict went against McCarthy 67 to 22, with only a small band of Republicans, and not a single Democrat, staying with him...

...Giving McCarthy the benefit of the doubt, the censure committee rejected charge after charge brought in by Flanders and the liberals...

...It was a rare press interview or television panel on which the question was not asked...

...Although Kennedy was appointed to McCarthy's Government Operations Committee, the members did not meet as a full unit often enough to bring the two men into frequent contact in the Senate—it was the Committee's subcommittee on investigations that conducted the notorious hearings...

...The New Bedford (Mass...

...with immigrants' hatred for Russian control of their countries, as in the case of the Polish-Americans...

...Such was Kennedy's "reasonable indictment" of his McCarthy position from the perspective of five years...

...It was only later that I got into the stream of things...

...he was reappointed as counsel for the Democratic minority when it returned in 1954 after boycotting McCarthy...

...So I was rather in ill grace personally to be around hollering about what McCarthy had done in 1952 or 1951 when my brother had been on the staff in 1953," Kennedy says...

...The pain became unbearable...

...His chapter on Kennedy and McCarthy is condensed below with his permission and by arrangement with Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., publishers of the biography.— The Editors...

...His Republican colleagues had looked on, half in loathing at the Senator's dishonesty and vulgarity, half in sheepish admiration of the trouble he caused Democrats...

...The year 1954 should have been the happiest in Jack Kennedy's life...

...But, in later years, some brought in a verdict against Kennedy...

...Kennedy was often away in Massachusetts or elsewhere on political errands...

...Kennedy voted against an immunity bill designed to compel waiver of a witness' rights under the Fifth Amendment, as he had also voted against a similar bill the year before...

...The worst aspect of 1954, however, was the drift of things in the Senate...

...she demanded of friends of Kennedy who interceded for him...

...The issue involved "neither the motives nor sincerity of the junior Senator from Wisconsin," he said...

...During 1954 the pain in his back became almost unbearable...

...Some people have their liberalism 'made' by the time they reach their late twenties," he said almost wistfully...

...Kennedy, moreover, had not hidden his disesteem for liberals who seemed to follow what he considered a doctrinaire "line...

...At McCarthy's home town of Ap-pleton, where there is now a memorial to the late Senator, who died in 1957, a questioner in the audience asked Kennedy to comment on Mrs...

...To ease his pain, he installed a rocking chair in his office and a couch for lying flat, but still to little avail...

...Actually, it was probably the unhappiest...

...He evaded an answer when he returned to the Senate in the spring of 1955...

...But if so, neither he nor the liberals would admit it...

...By arrangement with Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc...

...He was still in the hospital when the censure motion finally came to a vote on December 2. He was listed as "absent by leave of the Senate because of illness...

...Flanders, a mild-mannered Vermont Republican who was slow to boil but could boil hard, felt that McCarthy posed a supreme moral issue...

...But there was to be no showdown in the Senate that day on Flanders' resolution of censure...

...But it still seemed a straddle for some, and, following publication of Profiles in Courage, reporters passed around the remark that Kennedy should have shown less profile and more courage...

...In his correspondence he straddled the fence...

...Among the Senate liberals, Humphrey and Symington, for example, also approved the Lamont citation...

...We are not asked to vote for or against Senator McCarthy...

...His censure resolution was no legal document, but an expression of outrage...

...Two—On issues that seemed to Kennedy to involve the drawing of a fine line between the claims of individual liberty and the claims of national security, he gave priority to the latter...

...Some Republicans had predicted that a victory for their party would be the best way to deal with the Wisconsin Senator...

...There was no question where Kennedy stood on groceries...

...Still, Kennedy had not made the flat denunciation of McCarthy that liberals demanded...

...indeed, it was a fighting faith for which many a man would die if necessary...

...He had sat through the debate on McCarthy in increasing physical distress...

...Kennedy voted for an amendment to the Subversive Activities Control Act to establish a commission to recommend a coordinated program for security screening of persons in defense activities, and to eliminate duplication in existing programs...

...Vulgar, bullying, crude, cynical, dishonest, McCarthy represented the mucker element in politics that Kennedy had fought in Massachusetts...

...During his first year in the Senate, Kennedy's personal relations with McCarthy were not close, but they were amicable...

...It is questionable whether Kennedy at this time truly understood the intensity of the liberals' commitment to civil liberties...

...McCarthy was disconcerted...

...Probably in no single area of the country could more open and violent feeling for McCarthy be found than in Boston...

...he voted his conviction on issues of McCarthyism and let it go at that...

...Kennedy felt that McCarthy was entitled to a specific indictment...

...He was newly married and he was coming into his own in the Senate...

...I believe that a public servant must clearly indicate that he understands the harm that McCarthyism did to our country and that he opposes it actively, so that one would feel sure he would always do so in the future...

...That is really the guts of the matter...

...the committee did censure McCarthy, and the censure stuck in the Senate, with heavy cost to the Wisconsin Senator...

...During his quest for the Vice Presidency and later the Presidency, a sharp question from the audience on the McCarthy issue was the one thing that could ruffle his ordinarily immaculate composure...

...Standard-Times was still solidly in his corner, and there was the special case of the Boston Post...

...On the one hand and the other hand: One—In blocking the Flanders motion, Kennedy voted against the liberal anti-McCarthy bloc and in favor of setting up a censure committee...

...he took pains to remind the libertarians of the needs of security and the McCarthyites of the claims of liberty and due process...

...He remained there several months...

...Such hopes were quickly dashed...

...On July 31, after the electric drama of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Ralph Flanders had brought in a resolution of censure: "Resolved, That the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin is unbecoming a member of the United States Senate, is contrary to Senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned...

...The question was still bobbing up when Kennedy made a campaign tour of McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin in April 1959...

...Two—If censure had come to a vote in August, Kennedy would have spoken and voted for it, on the narrow basis of the "honor and dignity of the Senate...

...He tried a number of recommended remedies but nothing seemed to work...

...The civil-liberties creed was not part of his family tradition or his early environment...

...What are the facts on the verdict against Kennedy...

...Kennedy entered the hospital for surgery on his back...

...And they held a fixed position there...

...The main basis of the censure had been changed, however, from the long-standing charges against McCarthy for general misconduct to a list of specific statements he had made about members of the censuring committee...

...His mixed record on McCarthyism was the number one issue for most liberals, and some of these had influence in national conventions...

...For there on one side were civil libertarians—some entrenched in academic halls, many of them Democrats —and high-minded Republicans appalled at McCarthy's destructiveness to their country and party...

...He had evaded the McCarthy issue in his 1952 campaign and ever since...

...By 1954 liberals in Massachusetts felt they had some justifiable suspicions about Kennedy...

...The very storm that Kennedy deplored made a showdown inevitable...

...The intensity of the struggle offended him...

...But again, his stand reflected the pressures in him more than those on him...

...As soon as the Senate recessed, he went to Hyannis Port for rest...

...but where did he stand on civil liberty...

...Anti-McCarthy Senators followed, in general, two different lines of attack on McCarthy...

...A few weeks before the 1956 convention, he indicated approval for the censure action of the Senate...

...They could not ignore, however, McCarthy's dishonorable treatment of Senators and Senate committees...

...on the other, "practical" Republicans who saw McCarthyism as a bridge to groups who had been "captive" to the Massachusetts Democrats, particularly the Irish, who seemed to be attracted to McCarthyism...

...A showdown over McCarthy would also mean a showdown for Kennedy...

...Liberals were troubled also by some of Kennedy's political allies...

...The fact remains that nothing has caused Kennedy more trouble in recent years than his failure to vote on the final censure...

...The central clue to Kennedy's position on the question is this: He was shaping his liberalism by fits and starts, out of his experience with concrete problems...

...He tended to view McCarthy more as a procedural problem than a moral one...

...For three years he had bedeviled the Truman Administration and the Democratic Party with charges of laxness on security measures and of pro-Communism...

...Partly out of sheer pride or stubbornness...

...and with low sensitivity to the civil-liberties tradition...

...he could not throw himself into the battle as so many Americans and even his fellow Senators were doing...

...But mainly because the old pressures within him are still operative to some extent, even though on concrete civil liberties issues, such as the loyalty oath required of students requesting federal loans, he has taken a strong civil-libertarian position...

...Certainly to some extent...

...His brother Bob was a member of the McCarthy staff...

...The Senate record is clear...

...Mrs...

...It must be pointed out, however, that the attitude of American Catholics was by no means always pro-McCarthy...

...A week after opposing the immunity bill a second time, Kennedy voted to cite Corliss Lamont for contempt of Congress...

...At this time, the Senate was considering measures to strengthen efforts against domestic Communists...

...When Kennedy first came to the Senate in January, 1953, McCarthy was nearing the zenith of his career...

...he does not want to give the impression of taking flight from a position that he feels was a considered one...

...How did Kennedy deal with these competing views...

...Why did Kennedy take the censure stand that he did...

...Democracy," Maury Maverick said, "equals groceries plus liberty...

...The other anti-McCarthy line, finally taken by the censure committee itself, was a more legalistic and technical one...

...Still he would vote for censure...

...From John Kennedy: A Political Profile © 1959, 1960 by James MacGregor Burns...

...White House decisions, she has said, should not be in the hands of "someone who understands what courage is and admires it, but has not quite the independence to have it...

...According to Washington observers, the Flanders motion might well have failed...

...With some irritation he said that his civil-liberties record was clear and "I am not ready to accept any indictment from you or Mrs...

...Kennedy himself received such a letter on his review from a St...

...He had been willed the heritage of economic liberalism, "the groceries," but not the heritage of liberty...

...In a way, this is curious, because McCarthy symbolized everything Kennedy personally detested...

...Why not...

...his father was a friend of McCarthy...

...Why, then, did Kennedy take such a narrow position on a matter that to many Americans was the transcendent moral issue of their time...

...He could not ignore it—for the liberals would not let him, nor would the journalists...

...Perhaps that was wrong in McCarthy's case—perhaps we were not as sensitive as some and should have acted sooner...

...McCarthyism, in short, years after McCarthy's death, was the "issue that would not die...

...he charged that McCarthy was attacking Lamont on the basis of his writings and that this was unconstitutional...

...Bob Kennedy worked for the subcommittee from January to August, 1953, when he resigned following altercations with Roy Cohn...

...To them, freedom of speech and of conscience were not simply worthy policies to be placed on a par with other desirable principles of government...

...Nor could he vote for censure in order to conciliate foreign opinion...

...The couple bought a $125,000 house in Virginia, but Jacqueline at times felt rather lonely there...

...Two—On appointments McCarthy favored, Kennedy voted against him...

...How has he dealt with the issue in the intervening years...

...On almost every policy issue involving McCarthyism, Kennedy voted against McCarthy...

...However, he did not take a public stand from 1950, when McCarthy first made McCarthyism a public issue, to 1954, when the Senate finally voted censure, or, indeed, for a long time thereafter...

...It was strongest in areas such as Kennedy's old Congressional district, where it tied in with Roman Catholic hostility to Communism...

...He evaded the issue, but he did not contradict himself...

...Kennedy recognizes this today...

...At a Press Club Gridiron dinner for Kennedy, costumed reporters sang to the tune of Clementine: "Where were you, John—where were you, John, When the Senate censored Joe...

...still he felt no better...

...A more grievous situation was Kennedy's health...

...he, too, is aware now that the issue will not die...

...Although very much in love, the young couple found adjustment difficult under the trying circumstances of a politician's life...

...It was not enough, she said, to uphold the vote of the Senate...

...It is almost certain that if present he would have voted for censure on the same narrow grounds as he had planned to do in August...

...That is a reasonable indictment that falls on me as well, although I was completely out of sympathy with McCarthy and had no close relationship with him, particularly after I voted against him on several occasions...

...Kennedy and Republican Leverett Saltonstall were among the seventy-five Senators who favored Knowland's postponement measure, which would also mean a postponement of Kennedy's own speech...

...Published by John Fox, and avidly pro-McCarthy, the Post had supported Kennedy in 1952 and still said nice things about him occasionally...

...Kennedy sat through most of the tempestuous debate in the Senate but spoke only once...

...There would be a showdown—but Kennedy was not to be part of it...

...Kennedy decided to vote for the censure resolution, but not on Flanders' terms...

...McCarthy had violated the proprieties and written and unwritten rules of the Senate...

...he has chosen to occupy a place on the liberal side of center in American politics and has left the more adventurous civil-liberties frontiers to Humphrey and Stevenson, who have staked out the territory...

...The verdict was in on McCarthy, and he never again would be a power in the Senate...

...This was to correct a misstatement by a pro-McCarthy Senator about the Annie Lee Moss case...

...Kennedy and McCarthy The Issue That Would Not Die by JAMES MacGREGOR BURNS One of the most widely discussed and least understood episodes in Senator Kennedy's career is the role he played, and did not play, during the McCarthy era...

...He had never found a ready-made philosophy of liberalism that encompassed the vital combination...

...One reason was his view that since the main indictment of McCarthy turned on his contempt for due process and fair play, any counterattack on McCarthy must scrupulously conform to proper procedures...

...He could take a compromise position in letters to correspondents, but how would he vote when the showdown came...

...The McCarthy era, in the long run, may have contributed to the maturing and deepening of Kennedy's own liberalism...

...By 1952 Republicans were scrambling all over one another to enlist McCarthy's help in the election...

...A liberal group opposed the move because it feared that the psychological moment to chastise McCarthy would be lost...

...I cannot be sure of the political future of anyone who does not willingly state where he stands on the issue...

...But Bobby was never one of McCarthy's intimates...

...Partly out of a sense of futility...

...He should be curbed as a lawbreaker, but only after all due procedures were followed...

...Why had he not gone on record when he returned to the Senate...

...Kennedy's judgment today on his McCarthy stand illustrates the fundamental attitudes that separated him from the libertarians for whom McCarthyism was the supreme issue: "The whole McCarthy episode must be judged in the perspective of the atmosphere which has always prevailed in the Senate, where most members are reluctant to judge personally the conduct of another...

...And rarely had civil liberties in America been so threatened, liberals felt, as by the ruthless thrust of McCarthyism...

...On the one hand: One—On motions involving McCarthy's own perquisites, such as funds for investigation committees, Kennedy voted for McCarthy, as did almost every other Senator...

...It was something he had met in later years, mainly at Harvard, and even then the great questions of the time were not civil liberties, but economic and social reform at home and intervention abroad...

...Soon McCarthy, now chairman, and, in effect, dictator, of the Government Operations Committee and of its investigations subcommittee, was actually sharing with President Eisenhower power over foreign policy and military administration...

...Roosevelt, in particular, was critical of his position...

...But what Kennedy sees as a decisive reason for his stand may still not be the basic one...

...But a majority vote against McCarthy in August, if it could have been mustered, might have been at least as damaging...

...Roosevelt's judgment that he had been soft on McCarthyism...

...In a speech prepared for delivery but never given, Kennedy carefully distinguished his position from that taken by the liberal bloc...

...Was it political expedience...

...The struggle spilled over into every corner of American politics, and in no state more than in Massachusetts...

...indeed, the liberal Catholic magazines Commonweal and America had early taken a strong anti-McCarthy stand, as had many individual Catholics, in particular, leading Catholic intellectuals...

...It was charged that he had been weak and evasive about McCarthy and about McCarthyism and should have officially notified the Senate as to his stand on censure even though he could not leave the hospital to vote, or he could have had his vote "paired" with that of another absent Senator planning to vote the other way, as did all the rest of the absent Senators...

...It was clear by mid-1954 that the upper chamber was headed for a showdown over McCarthy and his tactics...

...Designed as a substitute for harsher anti-Communist measures that were pending, the amendment failed...

...The American civil-liberties heritage was a faith, renewed through time by Socrates and Milton, John Stuart Mill and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes...

...Three—Kennedy was ill and did not, and physically could not, vote on the final censure, nor did he give any indication of his views...

...He was consistent in his noncommit-ment, but to many this was just another way of saying he was shillyshallying...

...In Committee, however, Kennedy had fought the citation...

...Eventually, that agency adjudged it constitutional, and Kennedy voted for it in the Senate...

...While not unduly concerned about his prospects in 1958, he could never forget the intensity of the pro-McCarthy feeling back home, nor would his McCarthyite correspondents allow him to...

...Kennedy was not scared stiff of McCarthy, but he did respect his power to make trouble in Massachusetts if he set his mind to it...

...Kennedy was not worried about his own reelection, which would not come up until 1958 anyway, but he hated being directly involved in the violent controversy...

...Louis man who said that in praising the book he had become a discredit to the Catholic Church...

...Partly out of political expediency...