INVESTIGATIONS: The Oak & the Ivy

  • Share
  • Read Later

(2 of 9)

A Scandal's Ingredients. Several times during the evening, the Senator sank exhausted into his chair, muttering, "I'm getting old." He is 44. His digestion is bad, and he has sinus trouble. But he is not slowing down, and he is decidedly not mellowing.

His plunging, weaving drive had the nation in an uproar, and the top levels of Government had been turned from other duties in the vain attempt to pull him down. All he started with was a charge against a New York City dentist and some testimony against a onetime cook in a Government cafeteria. McCarthy's work−and the ineptitude of his opponents−had fashioned these meager materials into a major scandal that seriously embarrassed the President of the U.S., almost forced the Secretary of the Army to resign, drove more serious news off the front pages of the U.S., and shocked the world. The Times of London sat its ever-present sense of history upon its journalistic knee, and intoned: "Senator McCarthy this afternoon achieved what General Burgoyne and General Cornwallis never achieved−the surrender of the American Army." It was not that spectacular−but it was bad enough.

The Fatal Pattern. How did it begin? Was McCarthy out to get the U.S. Army? And, if so, why?

McCarthy has no such broad goals or plans. He does not look far ahead. He buzzes from one little investigation to another, drawn by tips from Government employees "worked up" by a staff of investigators headed by Roy Cohn, 26-year-old counsel for the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee, of which McCarthy is chairman. In the course of these headline-hunting forays, McCarthy's manner and methods bring him into conflict with people more highly placed than those under attack. Most of McCarthy's famed struggles have begun as encounter battles, unplanned by either side. Joe, a master of the impromptu thumb-in-eye school of fighting, has come out on top in most of these scuffles, especially when his opponents tried to appease him, or spar with him, or attacked too hastily without a careful eye for the second half of McCarthy's one-two punch.

Last week's tangle with the Army began in typical fashion, and was marked by both appeasement and gross carelessness, on the part of his adversary.

Last year McCarthy got into an investigation of subversives at Fort Monmouth, N.J. He showed that there had been a substantial penetration by Communists at Monmouth during World War II; he made a case for his charge that security measures were still not strictly enforced. The Monmouth investigation was not much of a headlinemaker. McCarthy began to get bored with it.

Probing the Stork Club. Meanwhile, the Army finally got around to drafting a prominent member of McCarthy's staff, G. (for Gerard) David Schine, 26, son of J. Myer Schine, wealthy hotel-chain owner (Miami Beach's Roney Plaza and Los Angeles' Ambassador). McCarthy seemed a little bored with Schine and not too sorry to lose him. But Roy Cohn thinks the world of Schine, and McCarthy considers Roy Cohn one of the brightest young men he has met. Cohn set out to use McCarthy's superlative nuisance value to make Army life easier for Draftee Schine.

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9