McCarthy on Trial:
ECKARDT, W. V.
Joe may be censured, but Vice President Nixon has already stolen his smear-brush and is wielding it mightily McCarthy on Trial By W. V. Eckardt WASHINGTON, D.C. IT IS IRONIC that the Senate...
...Once Flanders had made his courageous blast, however, the business of coming to grips with McCarthy suddenly became inescapable...
...Senator Arthur V. Watkins, an arch-conservative Republican from Utah, and his five colleagues--Republicans Frank Carlson of Kansas and Francis Case of South Dakota, and Democrats Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado, John C. Stennis of Mississippi, and Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina--adopted a strict set of court rules and stuck by them...
...It is, of course, precisely this un-Senatorial demeanor which has finally got McCarthy in trouble with his colleagues...
...McCarthy said plainly that he opposed the election of Republican Clifford Case as Senator in New Jersey...
...Most of the sizable amount of money which McCarthy still refuses to account for was donated to him for the purpose of "fighting Communism...
...They...
...Nixon himself, of course, made prodigious use of it this fall, although it gained him little more than a Presidential letter of praise...
...Only thus can his ranting about a "Senate lynching bee" and the "imbecilic ruling" of the Watkins Committee be explained...
...And controlled it must be if confusion and vigilantism over Communism are to give way to the moderation in our affairs for which the people so obviously voted early this month...
...But if McCarthy acknowledges this verdict at all, he apparently considers it merely a temporary setback to be recouped with redoubled vituperative effort...
...Whether it was from pusillanimity or conviction, Secretary Dulles's ouster of John Paton Davies, on the eve of the censure debate, could only encourage the McCarthyites...
...It summarized them into thirteen charges, reduced these to five, and, after ten days of hearings, on September 27 recommended censure on two of them...
...Davies, a veteran diplomat, happens to be one of the few Americans who possess the rare combination of experience in both China and Russia...
...His occasional comments during the election campaign were buried as deep as page 80 of the New York Times or page 46 of the Washington Post and Times Herald...
...McCarthy's possession and "doctoring" of a secret Army Intelligence document based on FBI information, which figured so prominently in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, was also sidestepped...
...But now, again, his name blackens every newspaper in big headline type...
...Republican defeat at the polls, as he well knows, has further weakened President Eisenhower's hold, on his party...
...Case appears to have won--most likely because of a substantial sympathy vote given him in protest against the vicious attacks on his personal integrity...
...For six weeks, McCarthy seemed almost forgotten...
...Yet, he wasn't even given the opportunity to resign...
...At any rate, the latest of a spate of Senate committees which dealt exclusively with Mr...
...and again the accustomed sing-song spouts forth invectives like a somewhat scared adolescent who feels obliged to provoke a barroom brawl...
...Republicans who hold with their President that the divisive Red issue should at last be buried appear much in the minority...
...Joe intends to take full advantage of it...
...As long as the task of protecting our Government from subversion and treason is deliberately muddled by partisan politics...
...It wasn't planned that way by any means...
...The Eisenhower notion that the Republican party should stand for more than endless rehash of the charge of Democratic "softness toward Communism" is still getting little encouragement even from Cabinet members...
...He lost this test of strength...
...McCarthyist demagoguery can hardly he controlled...
...The Democrats in the Senate gladly agreed to this procedure...
...The newly-elected "coalition government" will indeed be torn by a cold war if one partner continues to accuse the other of treason...
...By the time this article appears, it may already be clear just how they hope to accomplish this end...
...IT IS IRONIC that the Senate resolution to censure Joe McCarthy, which is, after all, intended to force him from the center of our political stage, has actually brought him out of the wings and into the limelight again...
...The struggle for power revolves around McCarthy, or at least around the political meaning of what McCarthy represents...
...Nixon when they advocate abolishing some of the overlapping headline-hunting investigating committees...
...again, his spasmodic grin, which somehow never sparks the cold glance under those long eyelashes, flashes across our television screens at every newscast...
...This inexplicable, harsh and untimely act would hardly indicate that the Eisenhower faction can win this intra-party struggle...
...The party itself and its leaders in the Senate wanted no part of it...
...But Senator Ralph E. Flanders's lonely and impassioned outburst almost inadvertently gave direction to a historic necessity which the Republican party chief, President Eisenhower, undoubtedly saw but had failed to direct...
...Actually, there appears to be good cause to assume that the majority of the people have rejected McCarthyism, or, more specifically, the Red issue, in our political life...
...But obviously the Vice President and his friends feel that this outcome was due to too little, rather than too much, use of what Adlai Stevenson called "smut, smear and slander...
...But it gave McCarthy the benefit of "doubts," mainly on the ground that a Senator may, after all, be entitled to such information...
...But if, as Walter Lippmann said recently, McCarthy wages his fight nominally against the Communists, ostensibly against the Democrats, and really against Eisenhower, the current Senate debate involves McCarthy's manners only little more than nominally...
...Having admitted that ultimate Senate censure seems inevitable, he has now taken it upon himself to try to undermine the authority of the Senate in the public mind...
...In his case, too, the McCarthy technique seems repudiated at the polls...
...Eisenhower's summer residence, Colorado, it is safe to assume that Nixon had little to do with it...
...Oddly, Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens's very recent letter to McCarthy on the subject of the honorable discharge of Major Irving Peress is still ludicrously defensive and confused...
...By citing in detail how McCarthy "contemptuously and contumaciously" refused to answer six specific charges in the report, the Watkins Committee made it pretty obvious that there must have been solid substance to the charges...
...Nixon dished out his most generous portions of Red tar in the Mountain States, but Democrat James Murray won in Montana and ex-Senator Joseph O'Mahoney won in Wyoming...
...It will try to minimize the risk of losing McCarthy's devoted friends by lighting for a glowing resolution of praise for his "fight against Communism...
...He was declared loyal...
...People who feel strongly that McCarthy has done great damage to the prestige of the United States may have been disappointed that the Watkins Committee confined itself to the damage done to the prestige of the United Stales Senate...
...While the Republicans won in Idaho and in Mr...
...McCarthy himself seems to count on being rapped on the knuckles--but not hard enough to impair his further usefulness to the party...
...Its report is meticulously, even pedantically judicious...
...The Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections under Senator Guy M. Gillette, it will be recalled, concerned itself with Senator McCarthy's financial affairs...
...The select committee, composed of six of the less conspicuous Senators, whose performance everyone anticipated only with trepidation, produced a masterpiece of fair and honest investigative work...
...The appointment of a select Senate committee to investigate the censure charges was meant primarily as an expedient to that end...
...The Select Committee to Study Censure Charges carefully sorted out a hodgepodge of forty-odd alleged instances of misconduct...
...They seem united in their understanding of the real issue in the Senate censure debate...
...McCarthy knows that a good many Republicans, led by Vice President Nixon, seem determined to hang on to the Communist issue as a weapon in the 1956 Presidential campaign...
...The best the GOP Senate leaders could do was to defer the matter until after the election...
...The Committee thus adroitly avoided a showdown on the complex question of the separation of powers...
...It really brings to the fore the bitter struggle for power within the Republican party...
...Its report, published in January 1953, was officially unavailable during McCarthy's heyday...
...Senator McCarthy has apparently chosen reckless attack as his defense...
...He sees at least a chance of getting away with this if he can prove himself indispensable to his own party...
...But the fact that the Watkins Committee did not involve itself in these matters of state does not mean that the dry, stern and--for all his archaic rigidity--rather personable Watkins lacked courage in tackling McCarthy...
...It ostensibly deals with the good name of the Senate...
...McCarthy did not see its way clear, for instance, to condemn him for his appeals to his "loyal American underground" within the Executive Branch of the Government...
...The Committee felt that McCarthy had "committed a grave error" in offering to disclose the document, but recognized "mitigating circumstances" in that he was then under the strain of investigations by the Mundt Committee...
...Nor will Eisenhower's determined peace policy work unless there is a climate of confidence and tolerance in this nation which permits of better understanding of the real problem posed by international Communism...
...Defendant was represented by counsel...
...And then another rather unexpected event occurred...
...for the most part, did not relish the thought of having to lake a public stand on McCarthy just before facing the voters...
...If McCarthy has indeed gone too far to be rescued, the Nixon faction may coldly cut off the man for the sake of usurping the "ism...
...All three were soundly beaten--although it must be added that Kersten's Wisconsin seat has changed hands frequently in the past...
...The Watkins Committee's recommendation to reprimand McCarthy for ignoring a Senate subcommittee and abusing its members carries with it a further implication...
...The Watkins Committee was equally forthright in calling McCarthy's treatment of General Ralph Zwicker "reprehensible," making it quite clear that the General had every right to yield to the Presidential order rather than to McCarthy's insistence on crucifying the Pentagon for losing track of one pink Army dentist...
...It could not do otherwise and doubtless did well in attempting to get at the core of a national malaise by using the tangible club rules of the Senate as a yardstick, rather than the philosophical precepts of democracy...
...In Oregon, which hasn't seen a Democratic Senator in 42 years, Democrat Richard Neuberger came out on top...
...The Democrats appear to judge the meaning of the elections more accurately than Mr...
...Its outcome, they know, affects the very soul of the Republican party and thus, in the long run...
...Hence, the men in the Nixon camp seem determined to salvage McCarthyism...
...It found the demagogue guilty not of lowering our political ethics and stirring up a witches' brew of hysteria in times of crisis, but of conduct unbecoming a Senator...
...Cross-examination was vigorously practiced...
...the future of the two-party system...
...It acknowledged that McCarthy "incited" Federal employes to bring him confidential information for use against their superiors...
...At any event, the Democrats are fully aware that they--and the nation--have little to gain if McCarthy is subdued only to hand the smear-brush to Vice President Nixon...
...Only three Congressional candidates campaigned openly on the virtues of McCarthy-ism: Charles J. Kersten in Wisconsin, Kit Clardy in Michigan, and Fred E. Busbey in Illinois...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 47
