Fifties (10 page)

The real scandal in all this was the behavior of the members of the Washington press corps, who, more often than not, knew better. They were delighted to be a part of his traveling road show, chronicling each charge and then moving on to the next town, instead of bothering to stay behind to follow up. They had little interest in reporting how careless he was or how little it all meant to him. It was news and he was news; that was all that mattered. “McCarthy was a dream story,” said Willard Edwards, of the
Chicago Tribune.
“I wasn’t off page one for four years.” Edwards, with his paper’s permission, helped supply names, did research for speeches, and even wrote drafts of some speeches. Rarely did reporters make McCarthy produce evidence. Rarely, in the beginning, did they challenge him. Once at a press conference in Madison, Miles McMillin, a columnist and an editorial writer on the
Journal,
a paper that had taken on McCarthy, rose to ask him to name names. “You’ve charged that there are Communists at the
Journal,
” McMillin said. “Name one.” McCarthy remained silent. The silence continued. At the press table Art Bystrom, an AP reporter and a friend of McCarthy, said, “Come on, let’s get on with it.” “Shut up!” Bob Fleming, another
Journal
reporter, told Bystrom. “I’m not going to answer that question if we sit here all day,” McCarthy said. So the reporters sat there for fifteen minutes of silence, until McCarthy got up and left the room.

He was particularly skillful at making charges in smaller towns, where the local AP representative would pick it up and use it and it would become news even if it was not the truth. After all, a senator had said it. He knew how to use the mechanics of the journalists’ profession against them; he knew their deadlines, when they were hungriest and needed to be fed, and when they had the least time to check out his charges. George Reedy, who had to cover him for the United Press and thus had to match many an AP story, found the experience so odious that he decided to get out of journalism. “Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator,” Reedy said. He was nothing if not obliging: He had signals for the regulars to let them know there was a reception/press conference, with whiskey, in his room later, or that he wanted to go out with them for dinner. If they needed a story, he was always willing to give them a charge or two. If they wanted to know what the Republican leadership was thinking on other issues, he was perfectly willing to call Bob Taft from his office and ask him a few questions while reporters listened in on an open receiver.

There was no coherent plan to his work. At one point, a New
York publisher called Murrey Marder of
The Washington Post
to ask him to write a book about McCarthy’s secret plan to become President. “Joe,” Marder answered, “doesn’t have a plan about who he’s going to have lunch with tomorrow. He never has any plans.” It was a relentless search for headlines; every day there had to be a new charge, a new accusation.

Nor was McCarthy alone. The Republican reactionaries had been arriving in Washington for some time; some, like McCarthy, had come to the Senate in the class of ’46, and others in 1948. But because of McCarthy’s success with red-baiting, the 1950 election was particularly ugly. Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, a Democratic patrician, had dared to go after McCarthy. Tydings, using a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, investigated McCarthy’s charges and called them a “hoax and a fraud ... an attempt to inflame the American people with a wave of hysteria and fear on an unbelievable scale.” Tydings paid with his Senate seat; McCarthy went after him with money from Texas oilmen, and he was successful.

In Florida, George Smathers beat his mentor, Senator Claude Pepper, in an unbelievably ugly primary: “Joe [Stalin] likes him and he likes Joe,” said Smathers. In California, Richard Nixon, who studied Smathers’s race against Pepper, defeated Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas in a campaign that was virtually a case study in red-baiting. Even in New York in an unsuccessful Senate race against Herbert Lehman, John Foster Dulles said of his opponent: “I know he is no Communist, but I also know that the Communists are in his corner and that he and not I will get the 500,000 Communist votes that last year went to Henry Wallace in this state.” In Illinois, Everett Dirksen defeated Senator Scott Lucas, promising to clean house on Communists and fellow travelers. The Republicans had found their issue and the Democrats were clearly on the defensive.

“The primitives,” Dean Acheson called them. Truman was blunter: “The animals,” he branded them. They were the Midwestern and Far Western isolationists who were eager to exploit the issue of domestic Communism. With the fall of Chiang they had their red meat. They included: Knowland of California, who would later so exasperate Eisenhower that the President claimed he confounded the age-old question “How stupid can you get?”; Mundt of Indiana, who, after a friend of Hiss’s apparently committed suicide by jumping out a window, answered a reporter’s request for more names of Communists by answering, “We’ll name them as they jump out of
windows”; Hugh Butler of Nebraska, who told his supporters in 1946, “If the New Deal is still in control of Congress after the election it will owe that control to the Communist Party”; Bill Jenner of Indiana, who called George Marshall a traitor and charged when Truman fired MacArthur that “this country is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by Agents of the Soviet Union”; Bricker of Ohio, voted the worst senator in the same poll; Wherry of Nebraska, famous for such bloopers as referring to Vietnam as “Indigo China”; and Welke of Idaho, who fancied himself a professional-baseball scout and maintained that he had never met a ball player who was a Communist. That such men rallied to McCarthy was not surprising. What
was
surprising was that perhaps the most elegant and principled Republican in the Senate, Robert Taft, bent during the early months of McCarthyism.

It sometimes seemed during that period that there were two Tafts—one the thoughtful conservative who was uneasy with the coming of America the superpower and its growing obsession with anti-Communism. That Taft had voted against NATO and other programs that were part of the effort to check the Soviets in Europe. In his speeches, he systematically downplayed the Soviet military threat, and he often scolded the administration for inflated rhetoric about the Communist danger, which he said was provocative to the Russians. He feared the dynamic of the Cold War would turn America into the policeman of the world, transforming it from a democracy to an imperial power, a role, he believed, for which we were ill suited.

Then there was the other Taft, who could exploit the fall of China and attack the administration for being soft on Communism. He spoke of sending the Navy to help Chiang and of giving military aid in China as he would not in Europe. Slowly, he came to use the issue of domestic subversion. He referred to people in the State Department who were “liquidating” the Chinese Nationalists, and he said that State “was guided by a left-wing group who have obviously wanted to get rid of Chiang and were willing at least to turn China over to the Communists for that purpose.” He voted against confirmation of George Marshall as secretary of defense.

For men like Taft the use of the Communist issue was a way of gaining some revenge after years in which the Democrats had portrayed Republican domestic policies as cold and heartless. Taft himself had been the target of unusually cruel assaults, which portrayed him as a pawn of the rich.

Two pieces of literature used against Taft were particularly
nasty. One was a booklet mocking his life. Supposedly, as a small boy in the Philippines, he had been stung by a jellyfish. “This too,” went the book, “must have made a deep impression on Taft. It may have been the start of his fear, distrust and dislike of all foreigners, of immigrants, of all things that are not demonstrably third generation American.” That set the general tone.

In addition, labor did a comic book entitled, “The Robert Alphonso Taft Story.” One and a half million copies were printed. It portrayed Taft as the spoiled child of the rich, a weak, unpopular boy, poor at athletics, who never had to work and ended up serving the rich, particularly a fat, greedy man named J. Phineas Moneybags. It was the crudest kind of propaganda, and characterized the political-economic undercurrents of the time. Even a genuine conservative intellectual was viewed as an evil cartoon figure by the left, while the right saw the New Deal merely as a front for Communism.

Taft was hardly unaware of the pact with the devil he forged when he sided with McCarthy. The liberal columnist Doris Fleeson criticized Taft for that support, and he berated her and other columnists for making too much of McCarthy. She was stunned by his rage: “You smear me and try to destroy me.... There are 96 Senators. Why pick on me?” It was a low moment in an otherwise highly principled career.

Economic conservative he might have been, but he had always been a good man on civil liberties. The Wheeling speech had caught Taft by surprise—McCarthy was not a man to clear his speeches with anyone—and he was not entirely pleased by it. Nevertheless he saw its value: Domestic subversion was a hot issue, and it
worked
for the Republicans. If McCarthy had found no Communists, he should not despair, Taft advised. He should “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one,” he added. Despite private doubts, which he expressed to a few close friends and his family, his public support gradually became clear. McCarthy, he said, was like “a fighting marine who risked his life to preserve the liberties of the United States. The greatest Kremlin asset in our history has been the pro-Communist group in the State Department who surrendered to every demand of Russia at Yalta and Potsdam, and promoted at every opportunity the Communist cause in China until today Communism threatens to take over all of Asia.”

As far as such men as Acheson were concerned, he had joined the “primitives.” Acheson later liked to joke about the awkward ballet that Taft would go through in order not to have his photograph taken next to him at Yale Corporation meetings. Old friends
were sure that he was uneasy with his new course, that he took no pleasure in it. But, as Rovere later wrote, Taft confronted McCarthy like an alcoholic fighting the bottle: It was bad but irreversible.

America’s obsession with the Cold War was so great that it finally convinced Mike Hammer to stop chasing the garden variety of gangsters and corrupt pols and concentrate instead on stopping domestic Communist subversion. Hammer was the toughest guy in pulp fiction, the creation of a writer named Mickey Spillane, whose phenomenal success heralded a vast change in the economics of book publishing. Spillane’s virtually instantaneous success at once titillated and terrified the world of genteel hardback-book publishers. When Spillane’s first book,
I, the Jury,
was accepted at Dutton, the editor warned his superior, “It isn’t in the best of taste but it will sell.” Spillane sold reasonably well in hardcover, 15,000 copies at his best (or, as someone once noted, about 3,000 copies a dead body). His real success came in his paperback sales, which averaged between 2.5 and 3 million on his first six books.

The formula was straight out of pulp fiction from the twenties and thirties: a lot of action and, of course, violence, all the dialogue spoken in tough-guy vernacular, and a lot of tantalizing sexual innuendo. Hammer was a straight, honest private eye who had soured on a real world of corrupt cops, cruddy DAs, and judges who had sold out. He was the avenger, the man who took justice into his own hands, a man who, in the words of Kenneth Davis, author of a book on the paperback revolution,
Two-Bit Culture,
“shot first and asked questions later.”

Even a beautiful woman couldn’t stop Hammer’s patented brand of trigger-happy justice. At first Mike is enchanted by Charlotte, the villain of
I, the Jury
(“Okay, minx, will you marry me?” “Oh, Mike, yes. Yes, I love you so much”). Would there be nuptials? Not bloody likely, as Charlotte is revealed as the killer. When Hammer confronts her in the final scene, she is not above using her physical charms to dissuade him from his sworn duty. Hammer does hesitate: “Charlotte. Charlotte the beautiful. Charlotte the lovely, Charlotte who loved dogs and walked people’s babies in the park. Charlotte whom you wanted to crush in your arms and feel the wetness of her lips. Charlotte of the body that was fire and life and soft velvet and responsiveness. Charlotte the killer.”

Sensing that she’s having an effect on Hammer, Charlotte unzips
her skirt and lets it drop to the floor to reveal “transparent panties. And she was a real blonde.” But he is not a man to be put off even by a beautiful woman. There will be no trial, he tells her, no jury. “No, Charlotte, I’m the jury now, and the judge, and I have a promise to keep. Beautiful as you are, as much as I almost loved you, I sentence you to death.”

But Charlotte has one more move.
“Her thumbs hooked in the fragile silk of the panties and pulled them down. She stepped out of them as delicately as one coming from a bathtub. She was completely naked now, a suntanned goddess giving herself to her lover ...”
She leans forward to kiss Mike. But Mike is not one to let a beautiful woman stand between him and justice. Kaboom. He draws and fires his .45. “Her eyes were a symphony of incredulity, an unbelieving witness to truth. Slowly she looked down at the ugly swelling in her naked belly where the bullet went in. A thin trickle of blood welled out.” As Charlotte dies, she asks Mike one last question: “‘How c-could you?’ I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in. ‘It was easy,’ I said.”

With that, a hungry audience could hardly wait for the next Spillane/Hammer. Out they came, as if mass-produced, sometimes more than one a year:
My Gun Is Quick
and
Vengeance Is Mine
in 1950,
The Big Kill
and
One Lonely Night
(and
The Long Wait,
not a Mike Hammer book, but featuring a detective who was clearly a Hammer doppelganger) in 1951, and
Kiss Me Deadly
in 1952. Spillane was nothing less than a one-man literary industry. Terry Southern noted that in 1956, when Alice Payne Hackett wrote her informative book
Sixty Years of Best Sellers,
of the ten best-selling fiction titles in American publishing, seven were by Spillane—a remarkable feat, and even more remarkable when one considered that at the time Spillane had written only seven books.