The Cloak & the Dagger

One day last week ailing, 62-year-old Dennis Chavez, whose political roots are firm and fast in heavily Catholic New Mexico, rose in the Senate for one of his infrequent speeches. "Mr. President," said he, "for the first time in my 19 years in Congress, I make the deliberate point of referring to my religion. I speak as a Roman Catholic."

Because the Catholic Church is unalterably opposed to Communism, he said, any man "who claims he is a Catholic is accorded special attention and authority when discussing Communism." Therefore he felt bound to protest "not only as a Catholic but as an American when I feel that the church ... is being used by an individual as a shield and a cloak."

The man in the cloak, said Dennis Chavez, is Senator Joe McCarthy's key witness, ex-Communist editor-turned-convert, Louis Francis Budenz, "who has now been elevated to the unique position of America's No. 1 professional witness in all matters concerning loyalty, patriotism and political reliability." Actually, said Chavez cuttingly, Budenz had led a life of "bawdy personal excesses," had three children by his present wife before marrying her in 1945, and had been arrested 21 times "before he joined the Communists in 1935 at the tender age of 44 ...

"I believe in clemency for sinners, but with repentance should go humility, not hypocrisy . . . My ancestors brought the cross to this hemisphere. Louis Budenz has been using the cross as a club."

Then, while he was in the neighborhood, the Senator fired a spray of buckshot over his shoulder at all renegade Communists. "It has become the fashion to lionize and extol the ex-Communist in America today," said he. "Ex-Communists are treated as heroes of the republic. They are rushed to forums from which to denounce good citizens who always opposed Communism, but refused to make merchandise of their patriotism."

Joe McCarthy was not on the Senate floor when Chavez spoke, but, never at a loss for words, he soon answered: "Poor Dennis Chavez" was a "dupe" in an Administration plot. An angrier retort came from the Very Rev. Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., president of Fordham University, where Budenz teaches economics. Senator Chavez, said Father McGinley, had been guilty of slander, hypocrisy, cowardliness and "personal vilification . . . even lower than that reached in the columns of the Daily Worker." Budenz had Fordham's "full confidence . . . The Senator had the effrontery, moreover, to pose as a Catholic while publicly enacting this vicious offense against Christian charity." Replied Chavez: "I'll depend on my Creator's judgment on that."

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