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Even the Chicago Tribune deserted McCarthy in the Stevens fight, saying: "Senator McCarthy will better serve his cause if he learns to distinguish the role of investigator from the role of avenging angel . . . There was ... no reason to doubt the general's good faith. There is nothing ... to suggest that he was a party to a conspiracy to protect Communists . . . Senator McCarthy's behavior toward General Zwicker . . . has injured his cause of driving the disloyal from the Government service." The Tribune, no doubt, will return to the McCarthy corner, but its editorial was a sharp warning that no large group of Republicans will put up with all of his methods.
With Government Money. But what has McCarthy to lose? He is not running for President. He has no organized following to nourish and protect. His Senate seat is safe for five more years. He runs unhandicapped by responsibility and even by the heavier forms of ambition. What he thirsts for is what he got last week−a sense of personal power, personally wielded, a centripetal force that brings men to his doorstep and makes responsible officers of Government turn in their tracks before his onslaught. A President cannot do that. A Senator, McCarthy's kind of Senator, can.
Of late, there has been much nervous talk of McCarthy as a serious reactionary leader backed by Texas millionaires. It is true that some Texas millionaires are fascinated by McCarthy, partly because they like his politics, partly because he is a lively fellow.
But he is less enthralled by them than they by him. He does not need their money. He has not much of his own, and he does not seem to care. The Government supplies the money he needs−$214,000 of it this year for his investigation committee. And liberal Democratic Senators joined in voting the money.
McCarthy will be around for a while. Opportunity keeps knocking, and McCarthy, the opportunist, will be there to fling wide the door.
On his office wall, a framed anonymous quotation says: "Oh, God, don't let me weaken. Help me to continue on. And when I go down, let me go down like an oak tree felled by a woodsman's ax."
The ax that will cut down McCarthy's power will have to be a lot sharper than those in the hands of Stevens & Co. last week. That mighty oak must be approached with caution; it is covered with Toxicodendron radicans, i.e., poison ivy.
* A reference to Corporal Edward Dickenson, the Virginia mountain boy who, as a war prisoner in Korea, defected to Communism, but then changed his mind and chose freedom.