In his verbal slugfest with the Eisenhower Administration, Joseph Raymond McCarthy, the onetime Marquette University light-heavyweight boxer, had taken a solid punch on the jaw. Last week Senator McCarthy's committee colleagues moved in to separate the assailants. Taking advantage of the bell, Slugger McCarthy took off as scheduled on a Midwestern speaking tour, hoping that a change of pace and of subject would help him recover from damage done by the Army's chronicle of the case of Private David Schine. But the bell came too late to avert physical exhaustion: two days later Joe McCarthy was stricken with a virus laryngitis and a lively fever.
Needed: a Referee. The Schine case had clearly forced the issue of who was lying, McCarthy or Army Secretary Robert Stevens. McCarthy denied that he and his 27-year-old counsel, Roy Cohn, had demanded special treatment and numerous petty favors for Draftee Schine. He lashed back with desperate countercharges, e.g., the Army was using Schine as a "hostage" to "blackmail" him and, to take the heat off itself, had offered tips on "dirt" in the other services. Stevens denied the countercharges.
The Senators of McCarthy's committee decided to settle the controversy by investigating I) the Army's investigation of Roy Conn's activities on behalf of Schine, and 2) McCarthy's countercharges. McCarthy stepped down as chairman, freely admitting that he had "prejudged" the case since he had questioned Cohn and was "fully satisfied" that no "unfair influence" had been used. South Dakota's amiable, rotund Karl Mundt reluctantly accepted an "unwelcome promotion" to the chair after failing to persuade the Armed Services Committee that it should arbitrate the incendiary political dilemma.
Mundt's inquiry, the committee decided, will be "to the exclusion of all other hearings," i.e., McCarthy may not begin new probes until the committee has finished scrutinizing his own activities. Senator McCarthy, declining to disqualify himself completely, will continue as a committee member; and Counsel Cohn, though removed from any part in the proceedings except as a witness, will continue on the committee's payroll.
Karl Mundt's first act as chairman was to order the files in the Schine case put under lock & key. Then he and Arkansas' John McClellan, the committee's senior Democrat, hoping at least to move the brawl off the political street corner and into the controlled conditions of the rope-bound ring, set about finding a referee—a fair-minded lawyer with unassailable reputation to take Cohn's place as chief counsel. As the search went on, Joe McCarthy headed for Chicago.
The Snakes & I. At the Irish Fellowship Club's St. Patrick's Day dinner, McCarthy took his cue from the toastmaster, who said the Senator was driving the snakes from America. McCarthy snorted: "The snakes didn't like St. Patrick's methods, and the Communists don't like mine." Fighting to divert attention from Cohn and Schine, whom he did not mention, McCarthy blasted out at various villains whom he identified as "eggheads," "deluded liberals," "the left-wing press," "the jackal pack," "Pentagon politicians."