The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT Footloose in The Capitol By William E. Bohn First, the layout of the McCarthy show. You enter a gleaming marble hall—six great columns on each side. As you cross the auditorium,...
...Two of them had just arrived by motor from Texas and the others had flown in from Minnesota the previous night...
...Both bubbling pairs had come to help Joe...
...This hassle is purely political...
...Every piece of testimony goes to prove that each party is bent on putting the other in a hole...
...His curiously juvenile grin comes only when he fancies he has proven himself a hell of a fellow by scoring a point, or when he is patting people on the back with the verve of a political expert...
...Both of them will go to the Senate floor...
...It must add up to many thousands...
...On the spot, you take in the whole show in one look...
...They had written countless letters to their Joe...
...The spirit which made it possible to draw these youngsters for thousands of miles will still be here...
...One might guess from this contrast that the Republicans are sure of success and the Democrats of failure...
...And the Democrats, unless they commit some horrible blunder or run into unbelievable hard luck, are sure to come out on top...
...The Democrats and the Army men do practically none...
...Toward the other side, you have the special guests...
...He pulls the girls—and plenty of boys—from every quarter of the continent...
...Practically all the Democrats and many of the Eisenhower Republicans will vote for the minority report...
...At the front, of course, is the great table round which are ranged the cast of this national performance —with McCarthy at one end and Jenkins at the other...
...You see the four Republicans, the three Democrats, Jenkins, McCarthy, Cohn, Welch...
...But during that hilarious lunch I let that bother me not a bit...
...On the screen, you get a close-up of McCarthy's smirk, of Roy Cohn's scowl...
...It is only when you think of it as a play, a show, a national drama, that you begin to feel better...
...McCarthy hunches his heavy shoulders forward, has practically no neck, and keeps his lips tight-pressed while he talks in a buzzing, dragging bass...
...They are ushered in by the ever-patient police, they stare for ten or fifteen minutes, then Paw says to Maw: "Come on, let's get out of here...
...And it is just possible that my rollicking friends may have learned something...
...The parties are evenly divided...
...There will, of course, be a majority and a minority report...
...When they sat there in the actual presence of the sacred image, they fairly drooled with delight every time he started one of his halting, grinding speeches...
...Suddenly, I became aware of the fact that I was surrounded by four charming girls...
...Throughout an exciting lunch, I listened to their tales...
...Joe will be gone...
...Cohn is young, black, shiny and mean-looking...
...People sweat as if they were in a subway rush, but they have seen publicity's crowning glory...
...It is a dreary business, only now and then illuminated by a patriotic flash from one of the defending Democrats...
...In a few years...
...The majority view of this business will have behind it only the McCarthy Republicans...
...Jenkin's ridgy face operates like a mask about the dark and sharp-cornered orifice which is his mouth...
...Dirksen and Mundt look like enormously inflated infants—they would be in place in a Macy parade...
...Army will have no more chance than the goat which was driven into the wilderness...
...They are, of course, sharply defined...
...What strikes you instantly is the contrast, first, between the Republicans and the Democrats, and, second, between the Army men and the McCarthy contingent...
...As a showman, the fellow is something...
...Some, of course, remain, listen carefully and estimate the bearing of each piece of evidence on the basic issues...
...But what I am driving at is the advantage of seeing all these superb actors in one enormous eyeful...
...They had watched every day's performance on television...
...The Republicans, including McCarthy and Cohn, do a good deal of grinning...
...Once, I found myself sitting with the "peasants...
...On the floor, Senator McCarthy and his attack on the U.S...
...The difference is in scope...
...There are all the publicity-conscious faces which have grown so familiar to 28 million televiewers...
...I wish I could obtain some estimate of the number of patient and wide-eyed citizens who wind their way in and out of this public exhibition in the course of an average day...
...Four aisles give access to the seats and to the generous open space at the rear...
...The seats in the rear half of this palatial hall are reserved for what I heard called the "peasants...
...Yet, the fact is that the Republicans have practically no chance of winning this fight...
...As you cross the auditorium, you have the newspapermen seated about tables at your right...
...Against the farther wall, to your left as you face forward, are the mechanisms of publicity: TV machines, movie cameras, radio outfits...
...Actually it is better—much better...
...To the devoted TV fan, the question is: How can the view in person be better than the show which you see on your own screen...
...But most onlookers are sightseers in the most primitive sense...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 25
