Advice from an Indian

The statistics: 187 hours in session during 36 days; 2,000,000 words transcribed onto 7,424 pages; 27 witnesses and a cumulative total of 115,000 spectators in the hearing room; and $1,250,000 in TV costs. The results: much public disgust, some public education, especially on the subject of how Senator Joe McCarthy operates.

Fifteen minutes before the Army-McCarthy hearings ended. Michigan's Senator Charles Potter made an effort to sum up. He passed a mimeographed statement around the hearing room. McCarthy grabbed a copy, gawked at it with astonishment, and rushed it by messenger around the table to his friend from Illinois, Senator Everett Dirksen. Promptly, Dirksen blew a stream of earnest, oily words into Potter's ear. Charlie merely smiled.

Shift of Balance. Said Potter's statement, in part: "I am convinced that the principal accusation of each side in the controversy was borne out by testimony . . . The testimony of witnesses of both sides was saturated with statements which were not truthful ... I believe there may have been subornation of perjury ... I shall propose dismissal of those employees who have played top roles on both sides . . . There should never have been at any time any conversation about a commission or the military status of one of its [the committee staff's] members by anyone but the person concerned. On the other hand, top executives of the Army should never have encouraged this sort of thing and should have put an end to the discussions for their own protection . . . The staff of the subcommittee will have to be overhauled ... I believe a criminal case against some of the principals might be developed if the case were taken to a grand jury room where the testimony would have to be repeated without others being present."

Neither side should haye been surprised by Potter's statement. In World War II Potter rose from private to major, was wounded three times. In the Colmar pocket, both of his legs were blown off by, an enemy land mine. With that record behind him, Potter could reasonably find it difficult to sympathize either with faltering Army leadership or with efforts to make two peacetime years of Army life bearable for high-living Private Gerard David Schine.

Potter's statement seemed to shift the 4-3 balance on the committee in favor of the Democrats and might result in a majority report that recommended the firing, among others, of Committee Counsel Roy Cohn, a result which McCarthy would find most distasteful.

Rule of Conduct. Three days after the hearings ended. Assistant Defense Secretary Struve Hensel offered an explanation of what they had been all about.

He filed with Committee Chairman Karl Mundt an affidavit saying that McCarthy had admitted to him that he had no grounds for his sensational charges against Hensel. made just before the hearings began. Seven weeks ago, Hensel related, the Senator offered to withdraw the charges against Hensel if it could be done without making McCarthy seem a "damn fool." Hensel asked why he had made the charges in the first place. According to Hensel. McCarthy "replied that he followed a maxim taught to him by an Indian named 'Charlie' with whom he had worked on a farm. Charlie, according to Senator McCarthy, urged the rule of conduct that if one was ever approached by another person in a not completely friendly fashion, one should start kicking at the other person as fast as possible below the belt until the other person was rendered helpless. Senator McCarthy stated that he followed that principle in this case." Americans might long remember the Indian named Charlie. If Hensel was right, Charlie explained how the hearings had come about. In fact, he explained how Joe McCarthy himself had become a national figure.

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