(2 of 7)
Six times the subcommittee asked McCarthy to appear before it to testify. He consistently refused to appear, and roundly abused the subcommittee by letter and public statement. Time and again he called the subcommittee "completely dishonest"; time and again he charged that, by using public funds to investigate him, it was "guilty of stealing just as clearly as though the members engaged in picking the pockets of the taxpayers and turning the loot over to the Democrat National Committee."
"Intemperate & Unworthy." After it had inspected the record, questioned McCarthy and considered the case, the Watkins committee reached a firm conclusion: "The failure of the junior Senator from Wisconsin to accept repeated invitations . . . to appear was obstructive of the processes of the Senate . . . It is the opinion of the Select Committee that when the personal honor and official conduct of a Senator of the United States are in question before a duly constituted committee of the Senate, the Senator involved owes a duty to himself, his state, and to the Senate to appear promptly and cooperate fully."
Having thus stated the basic principle, the committee turned to McCarthy's specific acts: "The conduct of the junior Senator from Wisconsin toward the subcommittee was contemptuous . . . disregarding entirely his duty to cooperate . . . making it impossible for [the subcommittee] to proceed in orderly fashion or to complete [its] duties . . . Such language directed by a Senator toward a committee of the Senate pursuing its authorized functions is clearly intemperate, in bad taste, and unworthy of a member of this body . . . If Senator McCarthy had any justification for such denunciation of the subcommittee, he should have presented it at these hearings. His failure to do so leaves his denunciation of officers of the Senate without any foundation in this record."
Here, the Watkins committee paused to take particular note of McCarthy's denunciation of New Jersey's Senator Hendrickson, a member of the Privileges and Elections Subcommittee. When he learned that Republican Hendrickson had joined Democrats Thomas Hennings of Missouri and Carl Hayden of Arizona in signing the report, McCarthy snarled that the New Jersey Senator was "a living miracle, in that he is without question the only man in the world who has lived so long with neither brains nor guts."
To the Watkins committee this was the worst kind of abuse: "Any Senator has the right to question . . . or condemn an official action of the body of which he is a member, or of the constituent committees which are working arms of the Senate, in proper language. But he has no right to impugn the motives of individual Senators responsible for official action, nor to reflect upon their personal character for what official action they took. If the rules and procedures were otherwise, no Senator could have freedom of action to perform his assigned committee duties. If a Senator must first give consideration to whether an official action can be wantonly impugned by a colleague as having been motivated by a lack of the very qualities and capacities every Senator is presumed to have, the processes of the Senate will be destroyed."