The Rising Chorus

For Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the week began about like any other week since McCarthy became an ism. There was an accusation here and a headline there, intermittent spatters of mud and an occasional old tomato. Hardly anyone heard the ominous creaking around the eaves of the house of McCarthyism. Then the roof fell in.

Joe McCarthy's real trouble began behind the closed door of President Dwight Eisenhower's office. When Republican congressional leaders began to leave after their regular Monday conference with the President, he asked them to sit down again. For the next 45 minutes, Dwight Eisenhower, his chin jutting, insisted that McCarthy must no longer be allowed to pass himself off as spokesman for the Republican Party.

The President proposed that Vice President Richard Nixon be selected to make the Republican reply to the attacks of Adlai Stevenson, although McCarthy had rushed in with his demand for free radio and television time. Before the meeting ended, the President phoned Republican National Chairman Leonard Hall and passed the word: the spokesman was Nixon. It was a studied repudiation of Senator McCarthy.

The Hardest Blow. At the President's further urging, the Republican policy committee of the Senate brought out suggestions for changes in committee rules, designed to restrict McCarthy's reckless hunt for headlines. The changes--chiefly designed to prevent McCarthy from conducting one-man hearings--might not be enough to hold him in line, but they were important because they showed the attitude of the responsible Republican leadership. Sound, clear, public voice was given to that attitude by Vermont's Republican Ralph Flanders in a speech on the Senate floor (see Col. 2) and by Pres ident Eisenhower.

But the week's hardest blow came from the U.S. Army in its charge that McCarthy and Roy Cohn, his committee counsel, had conducted one of the most outrageous operations in the history of political pressure cooking. Before the week was out, even such staunch conservative Republicans as Michigan's Senator Charles Potter and Illinois' Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen were throwing verbal brickbats at McCarthy.

The Clearest Voices. Ever since Joe McCarthy made his famed speech in Wheeling, W. Va. on Feb. 9, 1950, he has had a highly vocal host of enemies. But their cries of protest have never been so effective as the rising chorus of last week. The reason was clear. A new force had joined in the battle against McCarthy. It included many respected, conservative Republicans whom McCarthy could not call "extreme left-wing bleeding hearts." What they said had real effect with millions of U.S. citizens who had been inclined to overlook McCarthy's tactics because he was opposing Communism.

A good example of the shift was an editorial which appeared one morning last week in Eugene Pulliam's Arizona Republic, formerly a staunch defender of McCarthy: "The political obituary of . . . McCarthy . . . is being written in the news stories that greet--and disgust--Americans almost every morning these days . . . Here is a man who had a great opportunity for service to his nation and who is spoiling it miserably."

In a poll taken before last week, Pollster George Gallup found that McCarthy's popularity had dropped four percentage points since January. There was no doubt that it plummeted rapidly last week. Joe McCarthy had been hit hard, harder than at any time since the beginning of his strange rise to popularity and power.

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