A Word for Joe

Four years ago this week, an obscure Wisconsin Senator named Joe McCarthy turned up in Wheeling, W.Va. to claim that he had "here in my hand" the names of 205 Communists in the State Department. Left-wing Democrats picked Joe as a nice fat target and right-wing Republicans helped build him into a hero. Last week, at Washington's National Airport, McCarthy stepped out of his Texas-donated Cadillac with his bride on his arm. stepped into the Plymouth Oil Co.'s private DC-3 and headed off on a nine-speech tour, which the Republican National Committee hoped would be influential in swinging the 1954 elections.

Joe's first stop was Charleston, W.Va., where, on a cold, wet night, he drew a good crowd of 2,800 to an auditorium that had seats for 3,517. Next stop was Canton. Ohio, where he drew 4,000 to an auditorium built for 6,000--competing with bad weather and a championship high-school basketball game. From there he went on to Mt. Clemens, Mich., then to a jampacked, impassioned session with 1,000 of his fellow Wisconsinites in Madison's Eagles Hall. Sample McCarthy extravagance: "The Democratic label is now the property of men who have been unwilling to recognize evil or who bent to whispered pleas from the lips of traitors . . . men and women who wear the political label stitched with the idiocy of a Truman, rotted by the deceit of an Acheson, corrupted by the Red slime of a White." Joe worked hard to make his audiences (mostly middle-aged and middle-class), local newspapers and local politicos completely McCarthy-conscious. He rarely mentioned the President, and he ignored the Administration's accomplishments, but carried on his guerrilla campaign to get the Administration to cut off all aid to allies trading with Red China. "The question to be determined in this fall's election is," said he, "whether we are going to use American dollars indirectly to finance the blood trade."

But most of all, as Joe swung west to his climactic dates in Los Angeles and Dallas this week, he was talking about himself, making it clear all along the way that he is trying to make McCarthy the key to the 1954 elections, just as he had promised he would, in his Harry Dexter White speech last November.

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