Black, White & Khaki

The heart of the Army's original case against Senator McCarthy was the charge that his kind of investigation and pressure dishonored and demoralized the men in uniform. Last week the hearings saw some of those men on the witness stand.

The General. Seven rows of ribbons bedecked the broad chest of Major General Cornelius E. Ryan, commanding general of Fort Dix, a veteran of both World Wars.

"You look to me," Committee Chairman Karl Mundt told Ryan, "like the sort of fellow who would be pretty hard to get any preferential treatment under." The general evidently wanted to confirm the Senator's opinion of him. He said Schine did not get preferential treatment in the sense that things were made easy for him. But, he added, "if granting Private Schine passes to work on committee business was preferential treatment, he certainly got preferential treatment."

Ryan left no doubt that, despite the passes, he was trying to make a soldier out of Trainee Schine. The general explained that after Schine's first month he canceled the private's weekday passes because "a man cannot go off the post in the evening until 11 or 12 o'clock at night, night after night, and still do the work that he is supposed to do . . . I felt it was my duty to this young man, to his parents, the men that served with him and their parents, to see that [he was] . . . in complete possession of his faculties when he was handling the munitions, rifles, carbines, grenades and other articles of war . . . I was concerned about the possibility of an accident in which Private Schine might be killed."

The Lieutenant. Nevertheless, Schine was absent from Fort Dix part or all of 43 days or nights during his first 75 days in the Army, although the average draftee was given passes on only nine of those days. This was illustrated by two charts that the Army presented. One chart used solid black squares on a calendar to show Schine's absences. The other used white squares with black borders to show normal absences by an average recruit.

Senator McCarthy looked at the charts, charged that they were phony, accused the Army of giving Schine "black marks" for the same routine events that were indicated in white or omitted on the average man's chart. When Ryan's aide, 1st Lieut. John B. Blount, who was wounded on Old Baldy in Korea, followed his chief to the stand, McCarthy asked him about the black and the white. Blount's answer rocked the hearing room with laughter. Said he: "In my opinion, the reason that it was done was just for comparative purposes, just like in a prize fight on television, one of the fighters wears dark trunks and one of the fighters wears light trunks." McCarthy gave Blount a verbal tip of the hat: "I can see why you were selected as an aide to the general."

The Captain. To Captain Joseph Miller, Schine's first company commander, McCarthy was less friendly. Miller, a com bat medic in World War II, a platoon leader in Korea, described life with Schine in restrained terms, but showed signs of inward boiling when McCarthy baited him by calling his testimony "drivel."

Within an hour after Schine reported to him for duty, Miller related, the private suggested that the captain might want "to make a little trip to Florida." Miller cut him off in midsentence, admonishing him that "it was improper for officers to accept any kind of favors . . . from trainees." One rainy day, when Schine's company was on the firing range, Miller spotted Schine sitting in the cab of a truck. Schine explained that he was "studying logistics."

The Colonel. Roy Cohn's fit of anger at Fort Monmouth, when he was excluded from the radar laboratory, was recounted by Colonel Kenneth E. BeLieu, aide to secretary Stevens. "I thought he was blowing his top," said the colonel, a veteran of five European campaigns and of Korea, where he lost his left leg.

"Did you have a trepidation that something serious and dire was going to happen to the Army?" Chairman Mundt asked. Replied the colonel: "I have always been of the opinion that the American Army can take care of itself, but I don't like to see somebody take a hold of it and try to do something to it."

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