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Five Unfitted Hats. The minutes that Counsel Jenkins spent bringing Secretary of the Army Stevens out of the woods on that day last week were probably his finest moments since the hearings began. The episode was not a show of partisanship on Ray Jenkins' part; it was a sharp illustration of his firm determination to bring some order out of a welter of confusion. Throughout much of the investigation Jenkins has not been eminently successful in accomplishing that worthy purpose. But he has a job in which success is not easily attained.
In the 162-year history of congressional investigations,* few men have found themselves in the midst of so complicated a situation. Jenkins is called upon to wear five hats, and not one of them is an exact fit. One moment the Army is the plaintiff and Jenkins represents it; quickly the Army is in the defendant's role and Jenkins speaks for it again. He performs the same double service for the McCarthy group. In addition, he must sit as a judge on legal points. There has been nothing like it since Alec Guinness played eight parts in Kind Hearts and Coronets.
Another complicating factor is the lack of a clear objective in the present hearings. Most congressional investigations, for the record at least, are aimed toward a legislative result.* But in the inquiry
Jenkins is trying to navigate, only three possible ultimate results are apparent, and none is legislative. They are: 1) perjury charges,
2) the political demise of one or more principals,
3) public education.
In this situation Ray Jenkins must hold an impartial course, and impartiality is hard to prove. When he was conducting his direct examination of Secretary of the Army Stevens, a woman wired him:
YOU ARE FAIR AND IMPARTIAL. MAY GOD GIVE YOU STRENGTH. When he put on one of his other hats, and began a vigorous cross-examination of the Secretary, the woman sent a second message: DISREGARD WIRE ASKING GOD TO GIVE YOU STRENGTH.
Both sides of the case have already protested Jenkins' vigorous crossexamination. At one point, Stevens' counsel Joseph Nye Welch spoke up: "Mr. Jenkins, this is not a murder trial; you are examining the Secretary of the Army . . . This witness is entitled to at least ordinary courtesy." Within a few hours, during cross-examination of Private Schine, Joe McCarthy was saying: "I want to make a very strong point of order that this is the most improper exhibition I have ever seen."
At about that stage of the proceedings Washington correspondents, who had been skeptical, began to believe Jenkins' statement that he was neutral—a man who had come out of the Tennessee hills to get the truth.
Can & Lum. It is literally true that Ray Howard Jenkins came out of the hills, but that was twoscore years ago. He was born in 1897 at Unaka, on the
North Carolina side of the Great Smokies. His father, Columbus Sheridan Jenkins, known to his friends as "Lum," was a country doctor. By the time Ray was eleven, the family had moved across the mountains to Tellico Plains, Tenn. (pop. 833), in the wild-boar country. At that early date Ray had already begun to show respect for the value of evidence. When he sneaked away to take a forbidden swim, he found that his wet hair always gave him away. He had his head shaved; today, he wears a crew cut.