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Meeting No. 10. The last of the week's series, Meeting No. 10, was a press conference in Joe McCarthy's office, assembled as the Stevens statement hit the wires. The phone rang. A newsman took down the Stevens text and read it to McCarthy, who uttered a dirty phrase. Stevens had landed a punch with the use of the word "browbeaten." McCarthy, who usually reacts at once, lapsed into two minutes of silence. When he spoke, it was slowly and deliberately: "I've very carefully explained to the Secretary that he is the Secretary and not running the committee. He knows that Zwicker was not denied counsel. He never asked for counsel ... I agree that no one should be browbeaten before any committee, and the Secretary should have gone a step further and said nobody should be murdered before a committee either."
Had there been any assurances from the committee? "That's completely false, completely false," growled McCarthy. Had Stevens capitulated at the fried-chicken lunch? With a broad grin. Joe rasped coyly: "On the record? Absolutely not." As he said it. he playfully kicked a reporter under the table.
Shortly after the press conference broke up, McCarthy handed his briefcase to the Wisconsin job seeker and trundled off to the house on Third Street, N.E., for chops and company.
Next day McCarthy made a typical switch to milk & honey. "There are no differences," he said, between him and either Stevens or the White House. There was just one point to make clear: he would continue to expose Communists and crooks "even if it embarrasses my own party." And with this tight-lipped understatement, a week of throwing eggs at electric fans came to an end. The Republican Party sat down to take the omelet out of its hair and assess the damage.
Unfading Avenger. The party was well smeared. McCarthy's support of Eisenhower in 1952 implied to McCarthy's followers an end of what Joe now calls "20 years of treason." But his continued attacks on the State Department, on the Information Service and, above all, on the Army and Bob Stevens, a thorough Republican, give Democrats a chance to mock: "One more year of treason."
To anti-McCarthy Republicans, Eisenhower's election implied a promise to end McCarthy's prominence in national politics by ending any suspicion that Communists in Government were still coddled. But McCarthy is more prominent than ever before.
He broke with Eisenhower when Harvard's James Conant was appointed High Commissioner to Germany and the rift has been widening ever since. Harry Truman, who knows how to use a thumb himself, introduced "McCarthyism" into the Harry Dexter White case, and Joe made the speech in which he tried to set himself up as the issue in the 1954 congressional elections, an issue which Eisenhower has emphatically said he does not want. Eisenhower & Co. have failed to make McCarthy fade away, and that failure is going to hurt in the fall of 1954 if it has not been corrected.
The brouhaha with Stevens hurt McCarthy as well as the party. Even men who approved of McCarthy resented his attacks upon the Army. They sensed the basic unfairness of the contest: the law of the land requires an officer of the U.S. armed forces to be a gentleman, but there is no such restriction upon a U.S. Senator.