The Passing of McCarthy

There was one overpowering thought that Bridget McCarthy drove home to her seven children. "Man was born to do something," she told them time and again in the McCarthy farm home near Appleton, Wis. Last week, in the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Md., her fifth-born, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, overtaken by cirrhosis of the liver, received the last rites of his Roman Catholic faith and a scant 62 minutes later died at 48. It was clear from the headlines that rang around the world that Joe McCarthy had indeed done something.

In the U.S. Senate his colleagues eulogized him with spirit and sincerity, preferring to remember his friendly, good-humored fellowship, his personal warmth, his ever-ready refrigerator and ever-open bottle. Across the U.S. the editorial writers noted his passing, and even his professional journalistic enemies seemed sorry, in a way, to see him go. Manila and Madrid praised him, London and Paris derided him, Moscow fumed at him. Harry Truman said that he was "very sorry." Dwight Eisenhower extended "profound sympathy" to the widow, sent around a personal message as well.

But Joe McCarthy, who once told a friend that in his dying hour he would hope to fix his mind on some image of personal glory, might have judged himself a failure in the last twelve months of his life. For in Joe McCarthy's mind, "to do something" meant only one thing: to push himself to power amid the cheers of the crowd. And having pushed himself too far, too fast, too ruthlessly, he fell near to oblivion and a restless frustration that his close friends say contributed to his last illness.

The List. Joe McCarthy ambitiously drove into the national scene when he was elected a U.S. Senator in 1946. He had been a good light-heavyweight boxer in college (Marquette '35), never walked away from a fight. In Washington he was puzzled to find that many of his colleagues were fence-straddlers, compromisers. Such an attitude, he told a reporter one day, was defeating to a man whose purpose was to "do something." Forgoing the opportunity to busy himself with any important legislation that might have drawn public notice, Joe languished in the Senate for about three years.

In 1950 he found what he needed. Stories of Soviet espionage abounded; the long fingers of Communism had been caught all too convincingly in Washington ; the nation, only recently run through the shattering experience of the Alger Hiss trial, was nervous. In Wheeling, W. Va. Joe McCarthy stood before a Lincoln Day audience, waved a piece of paper and cried with melodramatic certainty that "I have here in my hand" a list of Government employees known by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to be members of the Communist Party. Later listeners said McCarthy put the total of the list at 205; Joe denied it, said his total was 57. Newsmen, many of them defensive about Acheson's State Department, pumped their outrage into their stories, pumped Joe McCarthy right into a permanent place on Page One.

Haled before a special congressional committee chaired by Maryland's veteran Democratic Senator Millard Tydings, Senator McCarthy replied with thousands of words of obfuscation and counterattack, identified not a single Communist Party member in the Government. The Tydings committee called his charges "a fraud and a hoax." The Truman Administration was part of the history of "20 years of treason," McCarthy insisted--as he kept on making headlines.

Then Joe turned publicity to political profit. He took off after Millard Tydings, helped smear Tydings into defeat in what a Senate investigating committee later called a "despicable back-street type of campaign." Among Government employees and officials--even among his own Senate colleagues--the McCarthy legend grew, and with it the fear that opposition to McCarthy's crusade would turn him upon them as he had turned on Tydings, for in Joe's book, a McCarthy critic was either a Communist or a fool.

The Whiplash. Explosively, furiously, he swept into this confused arena. Having struck out at General George C. Marshall ("a man so steeped in falsehood, who has recourse to the lie whenever it suits his convenience . . ."), he even prevailed upon Candidate Dwight Eisenhower to eliminate from a 1952 campaign speech in Milwaukee a paragraph defending Marshall.

His crusading momentum carried him to the high point of a crashing primary victory in 1952, and then, to general surprise, he fell some 100,000 behind the Eisenhower ticket in the election. Nonetheless Joe returned to Washington, made it clear that he was no man to be trifled with. Failing in an attempt to block the confirmation of Harvard's President James B. Conant as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. Joe swung again at Ike's Ambassador-designate to Russia, Charles E. Bohlen. He battled away against such respected party leaders as Bob Taft, demanded that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles be called to testify under oath on the Bohlen nomination. Here, Joe got the first whiplash of defeat. This proposal, said Bob Taft in measured tones, is ''ridiculous." It was soon afterward that Joe cast his lot irrevocably against his own party. In a stinging statement he lumped Ike's first year in office with those of his predecessors; now, he said, it was "20 or 21 years" of treason.

The Web. From then on the showdown was inevitable. In early 1954, as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Joe joined battle with the Army over a none-too-bright McCarthy staffer named G. David Schine, of the millionaire Schine hotel family. Army Draftee Schine, Joe charged, was being used by the Army as a hostage to keep the McCarthy committee from finding out, among other things, why a brigadier general named Ralph Zwicker had permitted the honorable discharge of a Red-tinted Army dentist named Irving Peress. For 36 days televised hearings made Joe's nasal rhythms, his low-pitched interruptions, his trademark phrases the stock of every mimic in the nation.

In the limelight sat McCarthy's chief aide, clever Roy Cohn, who, with his buddy Dave Schine, had earned the name "Junketeering Gumshoe" on his "investigating" trips abroad; Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens, the "nice guy" who had muddled his way into a political web; the shrewd, smooth-talking Senators Ev Dirksen and Karl Mundt; the lantern-jawed Tennessean Ray Jenkins, who as committee counsel peppered away at all comers; and adept, relaxed Boston Lawyer Joe Welch, attorney for the Army.

It was the cunning of Joe Welch that ultimately led to McCarthy's undoing in the public eye. Toward the end of the hearing a caged McCarthy attacked Lawyer Welch's young associate for once having belonged to the National Lawyers Guild. Slowly Joe Welch turned to McCarthy and said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" In one moment of silence, as the words echoed in millions of homes, Joe McCarthy was through as crusader.

The End. In the summer of 1954 a committee under Utah's Republican Arthur Watkins met to determine whether Joe McCarthy should be censured. This time the hearings were quieter, and Joe had neither public microphone nor TV camera to amplify his techniques. Methodically the committee studied its evidence. In December the U.S. Senate took the rare and unusual step of condemning one of its members (67-22) on two counts: 1) abusing the subcommittee that investigated him in 1951-52, and 2) attacking the Watkins committee in a way that impaired the Senate's integrity and dignity.

Joe had known the answer long before. Throughout the hearings he ate little, often showed up in the Senate chamber disarrayed and unsteady of voice. Following the Senate's condemnation, many of his colleagues ignored him, and his close friends could sense that he was in deep emotional distress.

More and more he spent his time away from his office and the Senate floor, preferred to devote himself increasingly to his new wife Jean--his attractive ex-office assistant--and their adopted baby daughter, now five months old. Joe appeared frequently at the hospital in Bethesda, was treated for a variety of ills. He lost weight, with his wife's devoted help tapered off on drinking after doctors told him that he had cirrhosis of the liver. But it was too late to go back: Joe McCarthy was a sick man. Once capable of frenetic energies, he found that a single Senate speech (a lone, weak attempt to prevent the promotion of an old target, Ralph Zwicker, to major general) was so exhausting that he had to rest.

A new kind of quietude shrouded his life. He was lonely and plainly beaten. To one elderly companion he allowed that he almost hoped he would get beaten in the 1958 campaign for reelection. "Jean and I," he mused, "have enough money for a small cattle spread in Arizona. I might open a little law office for friends and neighbors with my books and degree right on the place."

But Joe's physical affliction drove him down another path. When, without fanfare, Joe McCarthy journeyed again to Bethesda last week, it was for the last time.

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