Joe's Blunder

The Senate subcommittee investigating the right of Joe McCarthy to hold his Senate seat was doing just fine--carefully accomplishing nothing, in the proper election-year spirit--if Joe had only had the sense to keep quiet. But McCarthy bulled his way into the act, charging that the subcommittee was "dishonest," that its expenses were "picking the pockets of the taxpayers." That led to a heated debate in the Senate last week on whether or not to continue the investigation.

Instead of discussing the charges against him (e.g., had he deliberately lied during his attacks on the State Department?), McCarthy quickly confused the debate with his usual oratorical dust storm. He had "no confidence" in the subcommittee, he said, but he added with wondrous logic that it ought to continue its work as a matter of principle. Then, as usual, he counterattacked: he challenged the Senate to order a similar investigation of his favorite enemy, Senator William Benton, the "odd little mental midget" from Connecticut, whose charges originally prompted the Senate to investigate McCarthy.

After demanding, among other things, an examination of Benton's income-tax returns, McCarthy hurried off to catch a plane. His tactics spared the Senate the embarrassment of a showdown on the issue; it unanimously (60 to 0) ordered the Gillette subcommittee to continue investigating McCarthy and referred the Benton case to the full committee. But McCarthy's enemies were delighted, nevertheless; they thought they had caught their man in a serious blunder. They figured it would be easier for the subcommittee to go ahead with a businesslike investigation of Republican McCarthy if it were also looking into the case of Democrat Benton. And by demanding an investigation of Benton's income-tax returns, McCarthy had opened the way for the subcommittee to investigate his own somewhat complicated income-tax affairs.

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