Hoping Against Hope

Although the great McCarthy spy hunt had produced more headlines than facts, the headlines were big enough and black enough to give the Democratic Party the jitters. For one thing, there was always the awful prospect that McCarthy might turn up one case that he could make stick. If that one turned out to be anything like the case of Alger Hiss, one was all it would take.

In public, the Democrats tried to look only outraged. In private, they also looked worried, and many a politico said gloomily that even if McCarthy found no culprit, he had still hurt the Democratic Party with all his hue & cry. At Key West, President Truman called in newsmen to try to repair the damage. After passing out hamburgers and lemonade, he turned the full weight of his office against the Senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy's charges, said the President, talking a little extremely himself, had become the greatest asset the Kremlin now had in the cold war.

Furthermore, said the President, McCarthy was not the only culprit. He accused the whole Republican policy committee of seizing on the investigations as a means of destroying bipartisan foreign policy. Still swinging wildly, he compared such an act during a cold war to shooting U.S. soldiers in the back during a hot war. The chief offenders, besides McCarthy, said Harry Truman, were New Hampshire's Styles Bridges and Nebraska's Kenneth Wherry, Republican floor leader.

"These Little Men." Secretary of State Dean Acheson called a press conference too, one that was notable for the way in which State, instead of trying to defend Owen Lattimore, did its best to disassociate itself from him. Acheson said he didn't think that he had even met the man.

Some Republicans wanted no part of McCarthy. Former Secretary of State Henry Stimson urged the Congress not to encourage "the noisy antics" of "these little men." McCarthy, said Stimson, "is not trying to get rid of known Communists in the State Department; he is hoping against hope that he will find some."

A good many other Republicans seemed to be hoping the same thing, but some held back for fear that McCarthy's charges --once discredited--might boomerang to their political disadvantage.

Ten Strike? By last week McCarthy, a plunger by instinct, knew that he was facing the gamble of a political lifetime. Much of the nominally Republican press in his own state was beginning to take another look at McCarthy's own reputation, as long as reputations were being discussed. There was a lot to talk about: his destruction of public records in a case he had tried as circuit judge (and which he had dismissed for the curious reason that the applicable law was due to expire six months later); his granting to two cronies of quickie divorces; his failure to file a state tax return on more than $30,000 of income for 1943 on the grounds that he was a nonresident (although he was still a state judge on leave with the Marines and getting ready to enter the senatorial primary); his refusal to resign as a judge, as the state constitution required, before entering the Senate race.

But McCarthy was banking on the fact that no one could get hurt politically by crying Communist. Said a Republican politico in Wisconsin last week: "I don't care if he doesn't prove that there's one Commie in the State Department. He's doing a lot of good. He'll scare those guys out of the Government." Said Frank P. Zeidler, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee: "Joe has hit the ten strike. He's unbeatable now. He's a Northern Huey Long."

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