The Hellfire Club(68)
Charlie’s eyes flickered with a memory. “Kefauver told me something about McCarthy siding with Nazis once? Against U.S. interrogators?”
“Oh, yes,” said Smith. “This was before he took up the cause of demonizing the State Department; he was still, I believe, looking for an issue to make him famous. He took over a committee hearing he wasn’t even a member of, vilifying the U.S. interrogators as anti-German. Didn’t get much press here, but in occupied Germany it was huge. I think McCarthy was even getting information for his smears from Communists in Germany at the time. He left an envelope from a Red behind in committee, once, as I recall. Just unbelievable. And none of it was true. Ray Baldwin was the chairman of the committee and McCarthy attacked him too, accused him of trying to whitewash U.S. war crimes. Baldwin resigned, he was so exhausted and demoralized. He was a good man. Served in the navy in World War One. A judge. Good Republican. But our leaders just sat back and watched it all happen.”
“Good Lord,” Charlie said.
“There’s a lesson there, of course,” Smith said. “When a rat pokes his head up from the sewer, he needs to be hit on the head with a shovel immediately. You cannot just sit back and think, Well, it’s just one rat or That’s somebody else’s problem. Because it’s never just one rat, and it eventually becomes your problem.” And with that, she patted Charlie on the arm again. “Well, I’ll go back to my seat now. Lovely to run into you, Charlie.”
With a wave of her hand, the senator nodded good-bye to Charlie and he watched as she slowly, steadily made her way to the rear of the train.
A train delay in Wilmington, Delaware, and a midtown Manhattan traffic jam prevented Charlie from ringing his parents’ doorbell until just after ten p.m. Standing at the top of the front stoop, he could hear his father stumbling down the brownstone stairs before the door swung open to reveal the man himself. He met his son with a scowl and a powerful aromatic punch of scotch.
“Your mother’s asleep,” he snarled by way of greeting. Charlie knew well this side of his father—three sheets to the wind, obviously had a bad day at work but wouldn’t want to talk about it, tired, surly. “You could have called first.”
Winston Marder’s paternal instincts were strong enough for him to reach for Charlie’s briefcase and carry it up to the living room on the second floor, where a television set provided the only illumination. “Murrow’s going after McCarthy,” his father said. Charlie sat on the couch, and together the two watched as Murrow, in his calm and careful way, eviscerated the Wisconsin Republican, destroying his lies one by one, from the relatively inconsequential ones to a blatantly misleading claim McCarthy had made about Adlai Stevenson toward the end of the 1952 presidential campaign.
“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve,” Murrow intoned at the end of the broadcast. “The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it—and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”
Murrow ended the broadcast with his signature “Good night and good luck.”
Winston Marder emitted a sound that was something between a snore and a scoff. Charlie looked at him, surprised, having been impressed by Murrow’s monologue, though he did wonder what had taken the journalist so long. Plenty of his peers had been going after McCarthy for years. Muckraking columnist Drew Pearson had been such a persistent critic, rumor had it, that McCarthy had once punched him so hard he’d flown into the air. Journalist Jack Anderson had written a scathing investigative biography of McCarthy in 1952, and one year later cartoonist Walt Kelly started mocking the Wisconsin senator in his popular Pogo comic strip, depicting him as a menacing, shotgun-toting bobcat with disdain for social mores and the U.S. Constitution. Still, Charlie knew Murrow’s taking such a stand was significant. These words were coming from a dignified journalist on the giant platform he enjoyed, the cautious, highly rated CBS. Everyone has his own timeline for heroism, Charlie supposed.
“So?” Charlie asked.
“McCarthy’s a drunk but he’s not wrong about everything,” said Winston. “Alger Hiss was a spy. The Rosenbergs were spies. There are Soviet spies throughout the government. In the schools, in universities. Yeah, McCarthy’s a blowhard and a liar, but isn’t the Communist menace a bigger deal than whatever nonsense he says at rallies? I guess I just don’t see why everyone is giving McCarthy much attention. Just ignore him.”
“He’s impossible to ignore. He’s become this…planet…blocking the sun. And whatever points he makes that have validity are blotted out by his indecency and his lies and his predilection to smear. On the Hill, he’s all they talk about. Kefauver, Margaret Chase Smith.”
“Of course, he’s embarrassing. But even when Smith gave her big fancy speech attacking McCarthy, she noted the Truman administration had been sitting on their asses and doing nothing while Commies began swarming the U.S. like locusts.” He paused and looked more carefully at Charlie. “Did you not even pack a bag? Just the briefcase?”
“Yeah, this trip is a little spur-of-the-moment.” He didn’t mention Margaret’s current whereabouts, since he knew his folks wouldn’t approve.