As the Watkins committee put the finishing touches on the report that may finish Senator McCarthy as a major force in U.S. politics, TIME and LIFE Correspondent Emmet John Hughes cabled from London an estimate of the harm McCarthy had done to U.S. policy in Europe. Wrote Hughes:
No special session of the U.S. Senate—only the common sense and alerted conscience of the American people —can justly weigh one sober charge against Senator Joseph McCarthy. The charge is: more deeply than any living American, he has hurt his country's chances to rally the peoples of Europe against Communism.
The American in Europe in the year 1954 needs but a few weeks or even days to know the sense of Europe's opinion on the subject. A full year here produces evidence that is sickeningly sufficient. From Moscow to London, from Bremen to Bari, the disgust of Europe is as plain and great as the cost to America, although perhaps not matching the comfort to the Soviet Union.
A few witnesses can swiftly sketch the indictment:
There was the Intourist guide in Kiev, giving me a steely grin of mock solicitude a few minutes after we met and murmuring: "And do you think Senator McCarthy will really be able to prove your last President was a traitor secretly helping us?"
∙ There was the smirk of Hjalmar Schacht, in his neat office in Düsseldorf, insinuating politely: "Perhaps now you realize that it is not so easy for a people to get rid of demagogues just by wishing them to go away, no?"
∙ There was a brave young German veteran who had risked his life trying to assassinate Hitler, carrying as his scars a twisted arm, a wooden leg and a tormented disenchantment with America: "How do you think Germans like myself, always orating about your splendid freedom, felt when those itinerant clowns, Cohn and Schine, came through Germany ticking off your Foreign Service officers for their purging? Can you imagine how loud the Nazis laughed about 'the American way' of doing things?"
∙ There was my French friend, exclaiming fiercely:"Do not tell me that McCarthy cares any more than Malenkov about freedom of thought—or about the future of my country."
∙ There are the Roman editor and the London advertising executive who used very similar phrases to describe the timidity of conservative forces in their respective countries. "You know," said one, "one of the main drags on them in contemplating any kind of anti-Communist action is just that they all twitter and shudder with nervousness lest they get associated with McCarthyism."
∙ The threads of such individual testimony weave larger truths. First and clearest of these is the fact that, except for the morbidly pleased ex-Nazis and ex-Fascists, the only Europeans who discuss the Wisconsin Senator with contented smiles are the Communists.