SYMBOLS OF U. S. CONFLICT

...Mike Monroney of Oklahoma started following McCarthy's trail in the Maryland campaign...

...Even Sen...

...Of great significance also is the fact that McCarthy and McCarran can be voted the "worst" Senators despite their daily prominence in the American press...

...For the GOP, McCarthy had paid off, not only in the defeat of Sen...

...The final draft-UMT bill went farther than expected in meeting the Administration's demands...

...Meanwhile, denied legal counsel through a McCarran maneuver, the Monroney subcommittee was taking weeks and weeks to complete its inquiry into the Maryland story...

...The Monroney subcommittee came through with its report, and it turned out to be unanimous...

...The Senator from Wisconsin came back to Washington a potential claimant for a Vice-Presidential spot with the Taft Republicans...

...In this manner, Lattimore could be dragged in again and Gen...

...Of greatest significance is the sharp split over an evaluation of Taft— both fourth "best" and fourth "worst"—who in 1948 was at the top of the "best" in two such magazine polls...

...But as a ravaging split in popular and political sentiment, threatening all other policies in which any of the principals were involved, the Mac-Arthur controversy was nailed to a formal agenda and investigated to death by the most tireless and effective operator in the U. S. Senate, Richard B. Russell of Georgia...

...And his veteran colleagues have discovered, if the press has not, that they can work with this man billed as a stormy petrel in 1948...

...The first session of the 82nd has borne out the predictions of bitter wrangling made after the Republican gains of 1950, but despite that fact there were conspicuous exceptions to the normal pattern of deadlock...

...Robert Taft, Ohio Republican...

...No such courage as Russell displayed in the MacArthur hearings has animated the Senate in meeting the issues constantly raised by McCarthy and his formidable Democratic colleague from Nevada...

...Paul Douglas of Illinois and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, both Democrats...

...Smith and Hendrickson, McCarthy now declared, had prejudged the issue of the Maryland probe and should have "disbarred" themselves from serving with Monroney...

...The personality change suffered by Sen...

...Willoughby, a fantastic Prussianlike character, with white suit and a British accent, proved a willing witness, so much so that he sat down with McCarran the day before his public appearance and prepared the whole performance right down to a script...

...The five best, said a majority of these 128, were Sens...

...Only these limitations, it appears to this correspondent, can account for the fact that Sen...

...This achievement has been the more noteworthy because of the confused state of opinion in both houses on American policies in the Far East...

...Homer Ferguson of Michigan, prepared to revive the Wisconsin Senator's campaign against the State Department...

...McCarran, whose power in the Senate far exceeds McCarthy's, has had no such comeuppance at the hands of a colleague...

...In the course of his speech, he pointed to the fact that McCarthy had a more tender regard for the criminals under scrutiny by the Kefauver Committee than for employes of the United States government...

...Expedient Democrats had poured money into Nevada to reelect the man who had scarcely ever voted with them in 1950 and who was author of the McCarran "internal security" bill Truman had vetoed courageously but futilely...

...It is not so much the Senator from Wisconsin as it is McCarthyism that has made news at this session, and much of the news has been created by the void in which Congress has left its conscience...

...Margaret Smith's courageous speech, Kefauver offered resolutions in the Senate to protect citizens from being smeared with impunity in committee hearings and on the floor...

...McCarthy and McCarran returned to Washington after the 1950 elections surfeited both with victory and self-esteem...

...The Administration's record there will be a GOP target next year, whatever the intervening developments, and only the doubtful outcome at Kaesong for a time stayed the Republican orators...

...And the foreign aid bill, despite the heavy cut, got a Congressional reception that confounded a host of gloomy prognosticators...

...In 1950 Mrs...

...Richard Russell, Paul Douglas, Estes Kefauver, and Hubert Humphrey —which have attracted wide attention...

...As a long-term debate, that controversy has not been finally resolved because it is a built-in byproduct of the events in Korea...

...Humphrey speeches on the floor are fewer, but only his strong constitution has enabled him to keep up the pace he has set himself in spadework...

...The Senator himself then walked into the larger battleground of the MacArthur hearings, taking it upon himself to destroy the man whose testimony had certainly tended to destroy MacArthur, Secretary of Defense George Marshall...

...Two events served to keep McCarthy temporarily under wraps, while McCarran, with the eager assistance of Republican Sen...

...Two anti-Truman Southerners, Senators Harry Byrd and A. Willis Robertson of Virginia, stuck to the Senate floor to answer this latest effort of McCarthy's, out of loyalty to a great Virginian, Marshall...

...The Nevadan trusted the fact that headlines about IPR officials would seem like headlines about the Administration's Far Eastern experts...

...Before going to Washington Mr...

...As Washington correspondent for The Progressive Lowry has done a series of portraits of major figures in Congress —Sens...

...Homer Cape-hart of Indiana and John Bricker, Ohio, on the RFC, to the down-the-line vote that kept the MacArthur hearings from being transformed into a circus performance...

...Hendrickson had been one of six Republican Senators to join her...

...Marshall's long record as a "conspirator...

...Sen...

...Douglas MacArthur's role as antagonist to the Truman Administration might be exploited...

...Outside the Senate he himself avoided calling them "Communists," but made a great point of daring the press associations to name them with such an identification implied...

...For every legislative contest on the floor there has been either a more dramatic or a more unseemly row in the committee rooms...

...Investigations have served every purpose from preparing the 1952 campaign to resolving momentous questions of national policy...

...His internal security subcommittee has proved symbolic of the major trend in the 82nd Congress—thrashing about in the weeds rather than going down the highroad...

...But the blockbuster fired that day by the Senator from Wisconsin proved a damp squib, and almost two-thirds of the tirade was never uttered by McCarthy but only entered in the Congressional Record...

...Taft since his 1950 victory in Ohio is one of the most discussed subjects in Washington, but only one factor—his intense concentration on 1952—draws any general agreement...

...With the help of a coterie of implacable Truman haters, McCarthy prepared a 169-page diatribe on Gen...

...The MacArthur hearings not only contributed to a second look at Europe's importance, but resolved one of the most dangerous political controversies ever to hit the American people...

...Smith had written a "Declaration of Conscience" blasting the use of Senatorial immunity to foster "fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance...

...The other was the quiet earnestness with which freshman Democrat Sen...

...It was unimportant, when all was over, that not even the private institute, to say nothing of the State Department, had been featured in the hearing, and that the only American whose name came out in the testimony was that of a dead woman, Agnes Smedley...

...all other Democrats for closed...

...Some day U. S. political history may use the Smith-McCarthy duel as just another illustration of how tyranny must be absolute if it is to survive...

...Smith's proclaimed determination "not to permit intimidation" was an expression of Americanism long needed in the Senate...

...McCarthy had suffered his greatest discomfiture in 1950 in the case of Owen Lattimore, who was not even a Government employe but had been billed by McCarthy as the architect of the nation's Far Eastern policy...

...His one-girl brain trust, Jean Kerr, promptly recovered from severe injuries which had kept her out of Washington, and returned to Capitol Hill in a wheelchair to praise everything McCarthy had contributed to the campaign against Tydings, even to the fraudulent picture of the Maryland Democrat and Communist Earl Browder...

...MacArthur, McCarran, and McCarthy—these three names, in one way or another, will remain as symbols of the 82nd Congress' first session...

...In these terms, Russell of Georgia can not be outclassed or even put as low as "fifth best...

...If one recalls the relations between the United States and its European allies in January, it is safe to say, in September, that the major achievement of the 82nd's first session has been to consolidate a sweeping politico-military coalition of the Atlantic community...

...Kefauver's true claim to a top spot, however, is the multiplicity of his legislative interests and his constant defense of civil liberties against the inroads made by McCarran and McCarthy...

...The sober question has been raised in Washington whether the bitter election contest building up for 1952 can pass into history without irreparable divisive effects...

...When Monroney's committee announced that it was ending open hearings on the Maryland mess McCarthy came blustering out of his corner...

...Magazine polls on the U. S. Senators ordinarily seek to pick the "most effective" legislator...

...Moreover, members of Congress have resorted to a third forum—the air waves—to a degree never before approached...

...Wheat to India, labor, taxes, psychological warfare, social security, anti-trust—he has ranged over the entire legislative field in 1951...

...This is a significant grouping...

...A review of Senate accomplishments in this first session of the 82nd shows how much depended on Russell's energy and his consummate parliamentary skills...

...And like all newspaper readers, they change their stereotypes on news personalities only with great difficulty...

...Douglas of Illinois, a giant in both intellect and energy, has leaped to national prominence in his freshman term, and without the spotlight turned on freshman Kefauver by the crime investigation...

...There were mutterings even in the Taft camp about this new eruption from the GOP cellar...

...For one of the most newsworthy developments in the Senate of the 82nd Congress has been Humphrey's mastery of effective behind-the-scenes work in committee session and outside conferences...

...Lowry taught English literature at the University of Illinois...

...Whatever McCarthy had dreaded from the Maryland election inquiry had not materialized...

...His theme was characteristically McCarthy and offensive...

...The troops-to-Europe debate, the MacArthur hearings, the arms aid bill, the European visit of nine Senators—all contributed to this important development...

...McCarran's avowed purpose, worked out with the subcommittee's ranking Republican, Michigan's Ferguson, was to bolster McCarthy's charges of Communism in the Government, and particularly in the State Department, and to wrap them up, as McCarthy had tried to do, with the Government's Far Eastern policies...

...To know McCarthy and McCarran is apparently not to admire them...

...Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat, was named "eleventh worst" in the Pageant poll...

...Other personalities figured in its accomplishments...

...No ordinary score-card, not even the well-worn one used by Harry Truman, will ever sum up the achievements and failures of the first term of this 82nd Congress...

...But the support finally given the Eisenhower project reflects at the same time a majority acceptance of the views of the Joint Chiefs' in the W. McNEIL LOWRY has a front row seat at most of the major developments in Washington, where he is chief of the Washington Bureau for the four dailies in Florida, Georgia, and Ohio owned by former Gov...

...Truman is actually going to run on the Fair Deal record, as it now appears he will, he could spell it out more clearly with a Truman-Humphrey ticket...

...There were two other dominant trends, familiar before but now extensively cultivated—investigations and party-line votes...

...If Mr...

...The case had ended with the execution of the two principal spies at the hands of the Japanese government...

...Richard Russell, Georgia Democrat...

...James Cox...

...Millard Tydings in Maryland, but in the Midde West and Far West...

...III A last footnote from the illuminating Pageant poll—and a dreary one...

...MacArthur, McCarran, McCarthy —these figures of passion and division will remain symbols of a Congressional session charged with bitterness and frustration...

...MacArthur hearings—that the crucial theater, where almost all risks are justified, is not Korea...

...The tendency to party-line splits ran from the outrageous "minority report" of GOP Sens...

...McCarran and Ferguson and Willoughby succeeded in making ten-year old espionage against America's enemy, Japan, sound like espionage against the United States, and in leaving the impression that Willoughby, who came on the scene four years after the spies were hanged, had corralled the whole crew single-handed...

...All accomplished actors, Sens...

...Not until the 1952 election, if then, can the passion be allayed...

...II The low water mark of the McCarran hearings came when Mac-Arthur's former intelligence officer, Gen...

...All Republicans and Democrat McCarran voted for open hearings...

...Friend McCarran, therefore, began not with "Communists in government" but with the Institute for Pacific Relations, a private association long involved in the passionate controversy over Chinese-American interests...

...Two days after Sen...

...Margaret Smith's speech following McCarthy's "minority report" was one of the shortest of the session...

...Midway through the session, Pageant magazine sent out "best" and "worst" voting cards on the U. S. Senators which were answered by only 128 of the 743 accredited newsmen in the capital...

...But it will remain memorable for two things: its effect on McCarthy, and its utter destruction of the complacent view shown throughout the session by at least 92 U. S. Senators, that it is either futile or self-belittling to attack McCarthy-ism...

...Washington correspondents, if they do not watch themselves, can become as infected with the spirit of the Senate club as the Senators on the floor...

...Wayne Morse, Oregon Republican...

...Margaret Smith of Maine and Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey joined three Democrats in labeling McCarthy's part in Butler's victory over Tydings as offensive to common decency...

...One was the MacArthur row, which temporarily muffled even McCarthy...

...McCarthy learned that some State Department employes were up for security clearance review, and after unsuccessfully browbeating the Department to name more than two, he repeated his 1950 performance on the floor—this time with an alleged list of 29...

...Therefore, Sens...

...Robert A. Taft of Ohio has, for the time being, bowed before the prevailing winds from Paris...

...The five "best" in the Pageant poll are five of the biggest men in the Senate and all men strongly animated by principle...

...The four worst, from bottom to top, were McCarthy, William E. Jenner, Indiana Republican, McCarran, and Taft...

...As symbols, MacArthur, McCarran, and McCarthy have all been evocative of passion — hate, fear, suspicion, or vanity...

...Republican Sens...

...McCarthy had to stand alone in making a "minority report" to the upper house...

...Charles Willoughby, was brought to the stand to testify about a Russian espionage movement against Japan prior to World War II...

...Under McCarthy's vic-torius chariot there has been a rock no bigger than a pebble, but it has twice deflected the vehicle from its course...