The Cohn Version

MCCARTHY by Roy Cohn. 292 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

In the fantastic days of the Army-McCarthy hearings, they would sit head-to-head in the Senate caucus room, the brooding, heavy-browed Senator and the soft-cheeked, puffy-eyed young lawyer, exchanging eager whispers or concerned glances. Now and again the Senator would raise a rasping voice to plead a "point of order." Now and again the young counsel would scuttle through his papers for a sharp question or a deft answer.

That was 14 years ago, and Senator Joe McCarthy has been dead for eleven of them. Lawyer Roy Cohn, now 41 and more a New York business entrepreneur than an attorney, still has some sharp questions and deft answers. In McCarthy, a loyal but stubbornly wrongheaded book, the Senator's onetime lieutenant tries to use those questions and answers to memorialize his old boss as a "courageous man who fought a monumental evil"--a feat that just might, of course, extend a little virtue-by-association to himself.

As an exercise in justification, McCarthy does not succeed. It is nevertheless a revealing and fascinating book, exposing its author as a man still skilled at innuendo and doublethink. Cohn employs these skills in a brief that is fat with incident and quotation--incident that is sometimes only remotely relevant, and quotation that is usually favorable. One of Cohn's own statements is devastating enough: he writes that McCarthy "bought Communism [as an issue] in much the same way as other people purchase a new automobile."

Off-Camera. Cohn wrote the book from what he claims to be "the perspective of years," but in looking back over his 19 "incredible months" with the Senator, he writes like a man who has remembered everything and learned nothing. Recalling his library-raiding tour of USIS offices in Europe with G. David Schine, he admits that it might have been unnecessary to remove Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, but he still implies that John K. Fairbank's commendable classic, The United States and China, is somehow subversive--and quotes a paragraph out of context to prove it.

Nearly half the book is given over to the Army-McCarthy hearings. Cohn's retelling, though, is more dialectic than discussion, and its only virtue is that it provides yet another unedifying glimpse behind the Senate caucus-room scenes. More interesting is his sentimental portrait of the off-camera McCarthy. Here is Joe hiding four dozen toys for visiting children; Joe eating cheeseburgers in fancy restaurants; Joe giving a plane ride to an antagonistic correspondent; Joe, in defeat after censure, slumping in a chair to watch a TV soap opera.

In Cohn's view McCarthy was more sinned against than sinning. "It's grisly," McCarthy whimpers to Cohn in one passage. "They're yelling at the cop who got the goods on the murderer. They don't give a damn about the murder--they only want to know how the cop got the proof." Like McCarthy, Roy Cohn thinks that his boss had "the goods," and on that excuse, grandly dispenses with any debate concerning such matters as due process and character assassination. That is the grisliest fact of all.

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