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"Roy Denies Everything." Michigan's Charlie Potter, one of the four Republicans on McCarthy's subcommittee, was the first Senator on Capitol Hill who got a copy of the Army report, two days before the press did. Clutching it in his hand with one of his canes (he lost both legs in World War II combat), Potter went to the Senate cloakroom and got Illinois' Ev Dirksen and South Dakota's Karl Mundt, both GOP members of the subcommittee, to come off the floor. Potter showed them the report and, his voice all but strangled in anger, insisted that the subcommittee meet at once and fire Roy Cohn. Dirksen and Mundt urged caution.
Potter caught up to McCarthy later in the afternoon and demanded that McCarthy call a meeting of the subcommittee. McCarthy refused, said he might be able to get around to it the following week. But that night, after a Republican banquet in the plush Sulgrave Club, the four Republicans caucused informally, and McCarthy said he would talk to Cohn. Next day he reported back: "Roy denies everything categorically. You haven't seen the other part of the story." They agreed that they would meet in the committee's office on Friday, confront Roy Cohn with the report and decide what to do next.
But on Friday morning, the Army's report broke (leaked first by a Democrat, whom the Army had thoughtfully provided with a copy). By noon, without so much as a nod to the rest of the committee, McCarthy and Roy held their press conference, and they released "the other side of the story."
Appalling Accusations. The "other side" took the form of eleven interoffice memos, purported to have been written in the last six months by McCarthy or Cohn or the subcommittee's executive director, Francis Carr. Several memos bore the same dates as entries in the Army's report. For example, on January 14, the day the Army said Cohn promised to "wreck the Army" if Schine were sent overseas, a "Roy Cohn" memo to "Senator McCarthy" said: "John Adams has been in the office again. He said that if we keep on with the hearings on the Army, and particularly if we call in those on the Loyalty Board who cleared Communists, he will fight us in every way he can."
Scattered through the memos were other accusations that:
¶ Army Counselor Adams offered on December 9 to trade "specific information about an Air Force base where there were a large number of homosexuals" for information on what Army project the committee planned to investigate next.
¶ Adams told Cohn in January that "this was the last chance" for Cohn to arrange a law partnership for Adams in New York, with a guaranteed annual fee of $25,000.