(2 of 3)
Next day, in a speech at the stockyards' Saddle and Sirloin Club, McCarthy found new villains: CBS Newscaster Edward R.
Murrow (see RADIO & TV) and Chase National Bank Chairman John J. Mc-Cloy, ex-U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. From the stockyards, McCarthy traveled to Milwaukee, where the strain of his frenzied infighting caught up with him.
At the home of an old friend, Private Detective Otis Gomillion, McCarthy lost his voice and took to bed. The doctor advised canceling his next night's speech, but early in the afternoon McCarthy, in a soaking .sweatshirt, was up and poring over notes of what he would tell the Young Republicans celebrating their party's centennial.
The party's birthday became McCarthy's rally as he issued a 20-count "indictment" of Adlai Stevenson as "attorney for the defense," i.e., the Democrats. Sample counts: in postwar Italy, Stevenson had "connived" to put Communists in the Italian government and to bring Communist Togliatti back from Moscow; the Democrats helped Russian arms shipments to the Chinese Reds by "forcing the opening of the Kalgan mountain pass into Manchuria." After each count, McCarthy asked rhetorically: "How plead you, Adlai? Guilty or not guilty?" Gradually the Young Republicans caught on, and cries of "guilty" resounded. When reporters went to Adlai Stevenson, he said he would not get down to McCarthy's level by commenting. But he did comment on the charge of conniving in Italy: It was "the first I heard of it ... At that time I had never heard of Togliatti."
Fiddler's Green. Back in Washington the Senate Armed Services Committee called Defense Secretary Charles Wilson to the stand to discuss the lessons of the case of Army Dentist Irving Peress. The question was what to do with drafted doctors who cannot be commissioned because they resort to the Fifth Amendment, but cannot be held as enlisted men because of a recent Circuit Court of Appeals ruling.
Wilson's solution: change the law to permit doctors to serve as privates rather than encourage draft dodgers to use the Fifth Amendment.
At every turn, the hearing veered toward the Cohn-Schine case. When this happened, Massachusetts' Leverett Saltonstall, the committee's chairman, seemed to quake as he coaxed his colleagues to stay on the subject of doctors and off a subject that might provoke Joe McCarthy to campaign against him in Massachusetts this fall. Saltonstall's Armed Services Committee was a much more appropriate body to investigate the Army-McCarthy row than McCarthy's own group, but Saltonstall backed away from the task. Also apparent at the hearing was a growing weariness in Washington of the whole affair. Missouri's Democrat Stuart Symington asked Wilson if there weren't more important things to do in the H-bomb age than worry about a dentist. Chortled "Engine Charlie" Wilson: "If you feel like you're fiddling while Rome burns, I do too."
This week Joe McCarthy made one thing clear: he would not be fiddling while he and his men were burning. He served notice that he would recommend lie detector tests for all witnesses, including himself. "I have complete confidence in this scientific instrument," said he.