Silly Numbers Game

For frenzied weeks, Wisconsin's Senator Joseph McCarthy had kept the Democrats in an agony of uncertainty. But last week they plucked up courage. Eleven weeks had gone by since he told a Salt Lake City audience: "I have here in my hand the names of 57 card-carrying Communists now in the State Department and known to Acheson," and McCarthy had not yet produced the name of a single card-carrying Communist. In a bitter, shouting uproar on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Scott Lucas declared: "The time has come to call a spade a spade . . . Not a shred of evidence has been presented--not a shred."

McCarthy had been a hard man to pin down. By the time one of his charges fell flat, McCarthy was noisily charging something else. But the Democrats nailed him neatly on one point. In Wheeling, W. Va., radio transcripts showed that McCarthy had said there were 205 Communists in State. But McCarthy had put in the Congressional Record what he declared to be a copy of that speech, and in it he had listed the number at 57.

For three hours the Senators tried to get a straight answer from McCarthy on whether he had said 205 or not. Four times West Virginia's Matt Neely demanded: "Will the Senator answer yes or no?" Ducking and dodging a flat answer McCarthy finally said: "Let us be done with this silly numbers game . . ." Rejoined Neely: "It is obvious that someone ... is lying as deliberately and outrageously as Ananias."

Concession. At that point, McCarthy was just about reduced to the 81 "very dangerous individuals and bad policy risks" on which he had settled as a basis of continuing his campaign against the State Department. Then Chairman Millard Tydings of the investigating committee prepared to pull that out from under him. He had learned, Tydings announced, that McCarthy's list was two years old. The cases had been investigated by four committees of the Republican 80th Congress. Michigan's Republican Representative Bartel Jonkman had voiced his conclusions to the House: "I want the members to know that there is one department in which the known or reasonably suspected subversives, Communists, fellow travelers, sympathizers . . . have been swept out. That is the Department of State."

In the face of such a record, Harry Truman found it politic last week to yield a point. Because the State Department's files of these 81 had been examined by Congress prior to the establishment of the loyalty program, he was opening them again to the Tydings committee. McCarthy promptly changed that it was a "phony offer of phony files."

Rebuttal. But McCarthy had shown signs of shifting from his "bad 81" too. Instead he had offered to let his case against the State Department stand or fall on Professor Owen Lattimore of Johns Hopkins University. Again last week Lattimore took the stand in rebuttal, there showed himself a match for McCarthy--or the Daily Worker--in the technique of the vituperative smear. McCarthy, he said, was a "professional character assassin," Budenz "... a twisted and malignant personality."

Lattimore's Union Square methods served to conceal rather than display the more effective side of his case. In the quieter passages of his prepared statement, he cited instance after instance in his writings where he had differed from the party line, where he criticized the Russians, where he had praised Chiang Kaishek, even when criticizing Chiang's advisers ("I . . . shall never change my view of him as a great man of his time" . . .). He flourished testimonials from 170 fellow scholars, including Harvard's famed Law Professor Zechariah Chafee who characterized McCarthy's methods as "a barbarian invasion."

So far, McCarthy had charged much, but had proved not one case. But there was little doubt of the political effectiveness of his methods. At week's end, McCarthy rushed out to Chicago, was greeted by the Midwest Council of Young Republicans with shouts and pounding applause as he denounced "the complete moral degeneration of what should be the greatest nation on earth." Cried McCarthy: "We can no longer stand idle as the prancing mimics of the Moscow party line sell us short." Said Convention Chairman Max Wildman: "The Midwest might well be proud of Representatives like this."

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