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Many Washington politicians and pundits thought it fantastic that a man of Jenkins' profession and stature had not formed an opinion on Senator Joe McCarthy. But in Knoxville, this was not hard to understand. During his working hours, Jenkins is a busy lawyer absorbed in his cases; during weekends, he is a gentleman farmer who likes to roam over his 520 acres on the Little Tennessee River, rejoicing in his herd (150 head) of Herefords. In the fall he never misses a University of Tennessee football game, wears the same lucky green tie to every one. (Says he: "I'd rather go to a Tennessee game without my pants than without that tie.") Aside from the farm and football, his chief recreation is spinning yarns about his courtroom experiences. Such a man could easily avoid being intense about McCarthy.
In East Tennessee, Jenkins' debut as a national television personality was an exciting event. One of the Knoxville television stations reversed its policy and went on the air before noon. At the county courthouse a television set was set up in a domestic-relations-court office and the shades were drawn. Out at Tellico Plains, Mayor Charles Hall put a set in a storage room next to his furniture store, lined up boxes, benches and chairs, drew an overflow crowd.
At the Jenkins' red brick mansion in fashionable Sequoyah Hills, where there had been no television set until the week that the call came from Washington, Mrs. Eva Jenkins watched with fascination. In their 28 years of marriage, she had never before seen her husband trying a case. After a few days of TV, she flew to Washington to watch him in person.
Lessons in Washington. While she was in the capital, Eva Jenkins saw little of her husband outside the hearing room. He was working an 18-hour day, holding conferences, interviewing witnesses, and studying the case after the public sessions ended. At first there was more homework than he was able to do. He had arrived in Washington with astonishingly little knowledge of the issues, procedures and pitfalls. One example of his lack of background : he did not realize that there was serious dispute about the merit of whether Joe McCarthy's headline-grabbing hearings at Fort Monmouth had been harmful. At first, Jenkins' questioning was based on the assumption that McCarthy's Fort Monmouth foray was a great service to the U.S., but he soon dropped that line in favor of an impartially open mind on the point.
While he learned fast, Jenkins missed a lesson or two. McCarthy's doctored picture, which he accepted at face value, should have made him wary of all McCarthy exhibits. Yet a week later he accepted McCarthy's phony "FBI letter" with the assumption that it was authentic. As the letter furor mounted, he grew more cautious. He gave no one, not even McCarthy or Chairman Mundt, warning that he planned to call McCarthy to the witness stand.