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3) Zwicker's appearance before the committee will be temporarily postponed.
4) Stevens' appearance before the committee was "canceled."
Except for one minor clause, inserted by Stevens, the document's language was wholly the Senators'. Nowhere was anything said about better treatment for Army witnesses. But Bob Stevens, thinking he had won at least a stalemate from McCarthy, left Meeting No. 4 with no copy of the agreement, but with relief to the point of elation written on his face.
During the meeting, noise from a throng of newsmen in the corridor attracted the attention of Vice President Nixon, who was in his hideaway office next door. It was his first inkling of the critical discussions in room P-54.
Meeting No. 5. Back in the Pentagon, Acting Defense Secretary Roger Kyes, who had been on a trip, moved in on the situation by joining Meeting No. 5, which included Stevens, Army Chief of Staff Matthew Ridgway, Hensel and Seaton. Abuse of officers would stop, Stevens complacently told the others. Ridgway stepped forward, congratulated Stevens with an emotional handshake. Some of those present suspected the Secretary's mistake. Their suspicions were confirmed when, later, they read the press dispatches which told them what he had eaten along with the fried chicken.
The dispatches clicked out the news that Stevens had "capitulated to McCarthy." At first, the Secretary thought the statements were outrageous distortions by newsmen. As more dispatches came in, he grew worried and rattled, started calling White House aides for reassurance. Then he heard that McCarthy had told a newsman that he, Stevens, could not have given in "more abjectly if he had got down on his knees." According to some men whom Stevens called that night, the Secretary was so shocked and shaken that he sobbed into the phone.
Around and around the Pentagon's corridors, embittered wisecracks were exchanged (e.g., "Private Schine is the only man in the Army today with any morale"). Within hours, Fighting Bob was no more; the Army brass was calling him "Retreating Robert."
But the Pentagon never gives up a fight as long as a good pressagent remains to lead the charge. In the Army's hour of woe, the opening paragraphs of the statement Stevens would have made to the McCarthy committee the next day were leaked out: "I am here today to defend an officer of the U.S. Army . . . who was humiliated in a hearing before this committee . . . because he was carrying out my orders. I am here because I feel the integrity of the entire Army is involved." But Bob Stevens was not destined to be there: he never spoke his brave words in the presence of Joe McCarthy, and the release of his prepared statement only emphasized the depths of his humiliation.