Return to Sanity?
ECKARDT, W. V.
RETURN TO SANITY? By W V Eckardt WASHINGTON, D. C. ONLY A FEW MONTHS AGO, 50 per cent of the American people, including the Republican National Committee, considered McCarthyism at worst a...
...Welch, the Army counsel, now and then drops a hint of future perjury proceedings...
...It has shifted the balance in Congressional mail, the Gallup Poll, the utterances of the Republican National Committee, and the attitude of the President...
...But, before they knew it, the public itself was in control and the hearings could not be stopped...
...If that is so, neither the Army nor the White House can rightly claim any credit, even though McCarthy is trying to blame them...
...Nor was Cohn's remark the first of its kind by a Congressional investigator...
...The Senators, too, have mentioned this possibility, and there are rumors that the Department of Justice is seriously scrutinizing the transcripts of the hearings...
...For a while, calculated indiscretions from these raw police files were not leaked but poured by McCarthy's friends in Government security offices to McCarthy's friends in the press...
...in the President's view, committed "reprehensible disloyalty" when he supplied the Senator with confidential information had many predecessors...
...has had its effect...
...The Democratic Senators on the subcommittee show little inclination to cope with the symptoms of a national malaise...
...Section 793 of the Espionage Act, as applicable to McCarthy's possession of the spurious FBI document, is also said to give the Attorney General grounds for possible criminal proceedings...
...They revealed no aim beyond showing a Senator's perhaps undue concern for the fate of a private...
...He had practiced his great skill at dialectic distortion with equal fervor on graduates of the Jefferson School...
...as Senator McCarthy pointed out, selected excerpts from FBI reports only recently served the political purposes of the Attorney General...
...The unidentified Army officer who...
...A much smaller percentage saw it as a festering boil which has infected the American body politic in a far worse manner than the Communist splinters which originally caused its phenomenal growth...
...The question remains whether the Republican party really wants to lose McCarthy...
...Many who think better of the Republican party than it often does itself have long urged this course...
...When he does, his intonation is as kindly and endearing as if he were speaking of a possible invitation to a tea party...
...The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been moved to deny that FBI reports were ever used for political purposes...
...Today, thanks to television, a huge audience is witnessing the "methods" right in their own living rooms, and there is good reason to hope that the junior Senator from Wisconsin will end in the doghouse...
...Like the Republicans, the Democrats have contributed little to putting McCarthy on the skids...
...And McClellan, while often sharp and visibly aroused, apparently hasn't quite decided whether it is wise to hurt a wounded beast unless you can surely move in to kill...
...McCarthy openly bragged of his "pro-American underground" within the Voice of America and publicly encouraged the employes of other branches of the State Department's information service to form similar groups...
...An Army general had been publicly insulted on the ground that his brother had retired from his high State Department position...
...Harvard and West Point...
...Stuart Symington merely warms a broad judicious fence...
...But this diagnosis lacked popular conviction, because the disease, while producing serious functional nervous disorders, did not show any tangible symptoms of the drastic kind our world is accustomed to: There were no armed thugs or concentration camps...
...At this writing, though, it is hard to conceive that there ever will be a clear-cut verdict...
...They have done even less to aid or comfort McCarthy's GOP opponents...
...Of course, their ultimate verdict, if one is actually rendered, may atone for this sin of omission...
...But, new or not, the current TV production, which unintentionally is summarizing the sordid history of McCarthyism...
...A photograph had been tampered with in full view of the world and a 15-page confidential report miraculously transformed into a three-page signed letter...
...They strenuously pulled any number of curtains to hide the spectacle from public view...
...Because the 50 per cent seemed to be satisfied that any methods were justified, there was reason to fear that McCarthy might end up in the White House...
...After the first fortnight, he attempted to change his manner and dropped his cantankerous points of order...
...It also has worried McCarthy...
...Colonel McCormick and other charter members of the new "For America" movement in Chicago are meanwhile busy organizing a fitting, logical home for the Senator...
...Secretary Stevens and his staff were obviously unprepared to do anything drastic...
...A number of important GOP leaders still maintain that the tedious hearings, not McCarthy, are bad for their party...
...Nor have McCarthy's GOP colleagues, who would formally have to instigate legal charges against their chairman and/or their staff, shown any disposition to get that rough...
...The country was painfully aware of a demagogue's private espionage net within the Government...
...In fact, McCarthy's isolation in a traditional lunatic-fringe movement would undoubtedly hasten a gradual return to sanity...
...Cohn of the subcommittee staff and an Army employe named Adams...
...Henry Jackson injects his pleasant personality with more youthful elan than purpose...
...To the GOP's everlasting discredit, it literally took the United States Army and its insulted generals to force the two apart...
...Its hasty withdrawal was the first indication of the Eisenhower Administration's eagerness to help McCarthy...
...By W V Eckardt WASHINGTON, D. C. ONLY A FEW MONTHS AGO, 50 per cent of the American people, including the Republican National Committee, considered McCarthyism at worst a noisy but effective purgative of subversive poisons in our system...
...Not so long ago...
...By the time the President refused to permit testimony on the January 21 deliberations of his advisers, the children of America were chanting "point of order" as a prankish threat...
...No intended surgery of a dangerous infection could have been so messy: The Army readily admitted to having coddled McCarthy and all but accepted the Senator's notion that the affair was only a squabble between a Mr...
...Tn his many inquisitions, the Senator had amply demonstrated his irony-dripping nasal snarl...
...Officially, the Democrats are holding that McCarthy is a Republican problem...
...Disgruntled employes were further encouraged to feed McCarthy's mill when the new administration early in 1953 withdrew a key Voice of America directive which indicated disapproval of voluntary cooperation with members of a Senator's staff...
...But if this Administration were to make a decisive, clear-cut move, it would be the first time...
...The surgery, once begun, had to continue...
...This seemingly harmless act put the Crusade on a muddy track which led, via the security-dismissal "numbers game," to a dangerous demoralization of the Civil Service and a good portion of our scientific brainpower...
...Thus, most discussions inevitably revolved around the famous "methods...
...The less-than-50-per-cent cheered, though they knew that the TV cameras had revealed nothing that was not known while McCarthy was still considered an asset to the "Crusade...
...He had made many irrelevant excursions into the remote relationships of his victims...
...But if the McCarthy-Army row threatens Republican loss at the polls, it hardly deserves to be a Democratic gain...
...What can safely be expected now is that the Senator and the Republican party will at last part company...
...He now makes open appeals to the "great jury-the millions of people in the TV audience...
...The great manipulator of mass opinion finds himself yielding to public opinion...
...Even before Roy Cohn made his alleged remark that he had full access to FBI files, there was much reason to suspect that unevaluated portions of the Bureau's reports were finding their way to Capitol Hill...
...Why, Robin Hood might soon become respectable again...
...Yet, by the time the White House threw its shadow across the Senate Caucus Room, the boil had been opened...
...With that obvious exception, the source of these reports was quite clearly other than the FBI itself...
...The Republicans should surely be able to find ways of fighting Communism which are more conducive to the orderly functioning of our two-party system...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 23
