Fifties (9 page)

As development of the hydrogen bomb proceeded, someone asked Albert Einstein, whose original equations had paved the way to the atomic age, how the Third World War would be fought. Einstein answered glumly that he had no idea what kind of weapons would be used in the Third World War, but he could assure the questioner that the war after that would be fought with stones.

THREE

T
HE MCCARTHY ERA WAS
about to begin. Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin, stepped forward on Thursday, February 9, 1950, to lend his name to a phenomenon that, in fact, already existed. He was the accidental demagogue. On that day he gave a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, as part of a Lincoln Day weekend celebration. Almost casually, he claimed that there were Communists in the State Department and that they controlled American foreign policy. As one of the reporters who knew him well noted later, McCarthy himself had no idea that his speech would prove so explosive. Otherwise, speculated reporter Willard Edwards of the
Chicago Tribune,
he would have taken along at least one of a handful of right-wing reporters who tutored him and helped him write his speeches. Also, he would have picked a bigger town than Wheeling and a more prominent group
than the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club. His line about Communists in the State Department was a throwaway. In the middle of a speech, he said, “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.” That began it. Frank Desmond, a reporter for
The Wheeling Intelligencer,
put the statement in his story. Later that night, Norman Yost, his managing editor, who worked as a stringer for the Associated Press, read Desmond’s story and phoned in a few paragraphs to the AP office in Charlestown. The AP man in Charlestown called Yost back a little later. Was it really
205
Communists? Yost said he would check with Desmond. Yes, Desmond said, 205 was the right figure. The story moved over the AP wire on Thursday night and made the Friday papers. The circus had begun.

From Wheeling, McCarthy flew west to Denver, where he held an airport press conference and said that he would be glad to show them his list of Communists but that it was in his suit which was on the plane (
The Denver Post
ran a photo of McCarthy on page one that day with a cutline that said “Left Commie List In Other Bag”). Then he went to Salt Lake City, where he made new charges. On Saturday morning, he arrived in Reno, where he was to give a speech that night under the auspices of his colleague Nevada republican George (Molly) Malone. Working as a political reporter for the
Reno Gazette
at that time was a young man named Frank McCulloch (later a distinguished reporter and editor for
Time
) and his colleague Edward Olsen of the A.P. They had read the wire stories from Wheeling and Salt Lake and knew something was up. There was a certain vagueness to McCarthy’s accusations, and they set out to pin him down. They went to the airport, and McCarthy, whom they had never met before, wrapped his arms around Olsen’s and McCulloch’s shoulders as if they were old pals he’d played poker with the night before. Senators were supposed to be distant and aloof. McCarthy was not. Everything about his manner implied that the two reporters had passed some kind of men’s-club muster. McCarthy and McCulloch, it turned out, were both ex-Marines. That helped them to bond. That afternoon they found McCarthy in Molly Malone’s office in the Sierra Pacific Power Building. He was on the phone to his staff. Any other member of the Senate, McCulloch thought, would have thrown them out immediately, but McCarthy seemed pleased to have
them there, as if they were part of what was happening. He was very excited, because he was getting names: “That’s great, great,” he was saying as he wrote down a name. “You gotta give me more names.” McCulloch slid around behind the desk, the better to see what McCarthy was writing down. McCarthy made no attempt to block his view. “Howard Shipley,” McCarthy wrote, and then, alongside it, the notation “HARVARD ASTR.” “I want more names,” McCarthy said. “You have to give me more names.” He wrote down a few more names. Soon he was off the phone. “What the hell does HARVARD ASTR mean?” McCulloch asked. “A Harvard astrologer,” McCarthy answered. Were these men Communists? both reporters asked. “You come to the meeting tonight and you’ll find out,” McCarthy answered. He gave them a copy of a telegram he was sending to Truman listing fifty-seven people, he claimed, who were either card-carrying Communists or loyal to the Communist party. They stayed there with him for about an hour, questioning him about how many names were on his list and whether they were actually Communists. His answers were less than precise. But it seemed to McCulloch that McCarthy planned to name four Communists that night, and McCulloch wrote a story along that line. Finally, the meeting broke up. McCulloch went to a phone, and though it was a Saturday, he managed to find an official at Harvard. “What do you know about a Professor Howard Shipley?” he asked. “He’s a scientist of some kind there.” There was a long pause, and the official said that there was no Howard Shipley at Harvard. You’ve got to have a Howard Shipley, McCulloch insisted. Well, said the official, perhaps there was some confusion over the name because there was a
Harlow Shapley on the Harvard faculty, an astronomer.
Oh, thought McCulloch. I think we have a problem here.

That night they found McCarthy’s speech a disturbing performance. The hall was filled and McCarthy knew how to play the crowd, almost, thought McCulloch, how to orchestrate it. He named four people, including Shapley, but neither Olsen nor McCulloch could tell what he was accusing them of. Were they Communists? Were they Communist sympathizers? Were they, in the rather broad phrase he was to use later that night, people who had furthered the purpose of Communism? His words were deliberately vague. (They were only the first among many to find out how hard it was to pin him down. “Talking to Joe was like putting your hands in a bowl of mush,” said George Reedy, who covered him for the United Press.) The number, McCulloch noticed, had gone from 205 to 57 to 4. Or
had it? The senator’s skill, McCulloch sensed, was the ability to imply a great deal more than he was actually saying.

So that night they grabbed him again and went out to the Mapes Hotel, which was then Reno’s finest. At the top-floor bar, the three of them drank and argued and drank some more. McCulloch, who as a journalist had seen many men and women who drank heavily, never before or after saw anyone drink so much so quickly. A round of drinks would arrive. A quick argument ensued about whether the number of Communists was 4 or 57. Five minutes later, another set of drinks arrived, followed by more arguments. Were they Communists or men who served the purposes of Communists? Then another round of drinks, all bourbon and water. Well, goddamn, McCarthy was saying. They had heard him—it was simple. Those people out there in the audience hadn’t had any trouble understanding him. No, it wasn’t that simple, the two journalists argued. They weren’t sure what he had actually said. Then they had more drinks. This all took place in the space of perhaps a half hour. “I’m not saying they’re Communists,” McCarthy said. They were getting noisier now, but noisy in some strange way, filled with good-fellowship. They must, McCulloch later thought, have seemed like three college roommates at a reunion. There was no antagonism on McCarthy’s part, even as Olsen kept badgering him. McCarthy had promised earlier in the day to produce the evidence. Where was it? McCarthy dug into his pockets looking for his lists. He could find no list. Suddenly, McCarthy accused them of stealing his lists. More arguing followed, as did more drinks. Charley Mapes, owner of the Mapes, materialized and told them if they did not hold it down, they were going to have to leave. Getting thrown out of the best hotel in Reno was not easy, McCulloch thought. A few more drinks followed. No names were produced. McCulloch left that night sure that it was a con, that McCarthy did not care at all about Communists. It was all a show, but one thing was real—the desire to be a pal. McCarthy loved the good-fellowship that being a celebrity produced, and he was, McCulloch decided, brilliant at creating an aura of instant friendship.

McCarthy’s carnival-like four-year spree of accusations, charges, and threats touched something deep in the American body politic, something that lasted long after his own recklessness, carelessness, and boozing ended his career in shame. McCarthyism crystallized and politicized the anxieties of a nation living in a dangerous new era. He took people who were at the worst guilty of political naïveté and accused them of treason. He set out to do the unthinkable, and it turned out to be surprisingly thinkable.

The problem with America, he was saying, was domestic subversion, as tolerated and encouraged by the Democratic party. China had fallen, not because the forces of history were against the old feudal regime, which was collapsing of its own weight. Rather, it was because of Soviet military and political hegemony. If events in the world were not as we wanted them, then something conspiratorial had happened. No matter that most of his closest colleagues, isolationists all, had voted against varying foreign-aid bills, had rushed to cut back American standing-troop levels, and under no circumstance wanted to send troops to fight in Asia. It was a rare free shot in politics. His message was simple: The Democrats were soft on Communism. With that, he changed the nature of American politics. Our control of events was limited because sinister forces were at work against us.

Democrats would spend the next thirty years proving that they were not soft on Communism, and that they would not lose a country to the Communists. Eleven years after McCarthy’s censure by the Senate, Lyndon Johnson would talk to his closest political aides about the McCarthy days, of how Truman lost China and then the Congress and the White House, and how, by God, Johnson was not going to be the President who lost Vietnam and then the Congress and the White House.

McCarthy was, in Richard Rovere’s phrase, the political speculator who found his gusher. He was perfectly positioned by dint of his own roots and his constituency: He was an Irish Catholic, who had been urged to take up the issue by an official at Georgetown University, and he had a large German-American population in his home state of Wisconsin, where much of the population accepted the world as defined by the oracle of the region—Colonel Robert McCormick, publisher of the
Chicago Tribune.
When some criticism of McCarthy’s attacks began to grow, naturally enough in the East, John Riedl, the managing editor of the
Appleton
(Wisconsin)
Post Crescent,
said, “We don’t want a group of New Yorkers and Easterners to tell us whom we are going to send to the Senate. That is our business and it is none of theirs.”

McCarthy was shrewd, insecure, and defensive—the poor Irish kid from the wrong side of the tracks in Appleton, Wisconsin, who fought his way out and made it to the Senate. He liked to boast of himself as a back-alley fighter. Others touched the same raw nerve at the same time, but it was McCarthy who had the instincts, the intuition, and perfect pitch to know how to exploit the issue best. He had a wonderful sense of the resentments that existed just beneath the surface in ordinary people, for he himself burned with those same
resentments. Class distinctions were critical; he hated the social snobbery, implied or real, in men like Acheson and Hiss. They often seemed more important to him than the issue of Communism. In one of his first speeches after Wheeling, he hammered away at those “bright young men with silver spoons in their mouths.” In fact, anti-Communism was peripheral. He had few names of his own: Essentially, he was being fed covertly by Hoover and the FBI. The names, by and large, tended to be fellow travelers from the thirties.

McCarthy was a serious drinker who soon turned into a full-fledged alcoholic. He would gulp down a water glass filled with Scotch in one swallow and then chase it with bicarbonate of soda. As his drinking escalated he would eat a quarter-pound stick of butter, which he claimed helped him hold his liquor. He was, said his old friend from Appleton, Ed Hart, “the town drunk in businessman’s clothes.”

The alcohol masked massive insecurities. He was almost pathetically eager to please. He loved nothing more than being one of the boys. After berating vulnerable witnesses during the day, he could not wait to go out and be the reporters’ pal as they all went out to dinner. It was as if this were all a game and they were in it together. “If you want to be against McCarthy, boys,” he told two reporters at an impromptu press conference, “you’ve got to be a Communist or a cocksucker.” Then he roared with laughter. He seemed bothered when reporters kept him at a distance, not participating in the good-fellowship of the tour. He loved to call up his old friends in Wisconsin and, using the operator as a go-between, ask if they would accept a collect call from Dean Acheson in Washington. “He was,” said Senator Paul Douglas, who, like many others, was attacked by him viciously and then immediately befriended as if nothing had happened, “like a mongrel dog, fawning over you one moment and the next moment trying to bite your leg off.”

He had a talent for imagining conspiracy and subversion. Others, like Bill Jenner of Indiana, had tried it in the past but failed. McCarthy understood the theater of it all, and he was for a brief time a marvelous actor. He knew instinctively how to brush aside the protests of his witnesses, how to humiliate vulnerable, scared people. In the end, he produced little beyond fear and headlines. After a thousand speeches and a thousand charges, the last thing in the world he could probably have recognized was a real Communist or a real spy ring. Perhaps the best epitaph for him came during the Eisenhower years, when he made his fateful and fatal attack on the United States Army, coming up in the end with one left-wing dentist who had been promoted by mistake. The Republican senator Ralph Flanders said contemptuously, “He dons his war paint. He goes into
his war dance. He emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink dentist.”