G-Man, page 66
The most important of these new staffers was Roy Cohn, an awkward but energetic young lawyer out of New York, personally recommended by several members of Hoover’s old Stork Club crowd. The son of a well-off New York judge, Cohn was pudgy, brainy, and never quite at ease. He had rushed through childhood, enrolling in Columbia University at sixteen and emerging three and a half years later with both an undergraduate degree and a law degree. Like Hoover, he went straight into government work, performing clerical tasks at the district attorney’s office while he waited to turn twenty-one. At that point, he was finally able to take the bar exam and become an assistant U.S. attorney. During his first months on the job, Cohn had worked on the Smith Act prosecutions at Foley Square. From there, he moved on to the position of confidential assistant to U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol, the prosecutor in the Rosenberg case. Cohn had questioned David Greenglass during the Rosenberg trial, earning a reputation as a relentless but well-informed interrogator. Hoover may have seen something of himself in Cohn’s precocious rise: here was another young man brimming with legal talent, personal ambition, and a passion for anticommunism.[9]
Cohn frequented the Stork Club and 21, where he eased his way into the confidence of Hoover’s friends Leonard Lyons and Walter Winchell. Like Hoover, Cohn made a practice of passing along gossip and insider tips, experimenting with the reputation-shredding methods that would come to define his career. As a young gay man struggling to conceal his desires, he also may have found some of the same relief and acceptance that Hoover did in the Stork Club’s live-and-let-live atmosphere. Among the men Cohn got to know during these years was G. David Schine, the handsome blond son of hotel magnate Junius Myer Schine. Hoover knew the elder Schine from winter vacations in Miami, where the Schine family owned several luxury hotels. In New York, David Schine and Cohn became “very, very close friends,” in the words of Cohn’s aunt, as well as regular nightclub companions. Just how close they were became a matter of speculation once Cohn joined McCarthy’s staff and plunged into a Washington scene still in the throes of the Lavender Scare. In 1952, not long after meeting Cohn, Schine composed an eight-page pamphlet describing the nefarious history of global communism, subsequently distributed in Schine hotels “as a public service” and cited as justification for Cohn to hire Schine as a consultant to the McCarthy Committee. Despite the pamphlet’s many inaccuracies, Hoover claimed to “have read it and enjoyed it tremendously.” His praise was a testament less to the pamphlet’s quality than to Schine’s status as a member of his social network.[10]
Hoover met Cohn himself in 1952, in the midst of wrangling over communist-related grand jury matters. According to Cohn, he had been trying to contact Hoover for weeks when suddenly the director called out of the blue and invited him over for a private chat. “Within ten minutes I was seated across the desk from him,” Cohn recalled. It turned out to be a meeting of the minds, with Cohn complaining about the blindness and foot-dragging of the Truman administration and Hoover promising to back him up if he ran into trouble. At the time, Cohn was working in Washington as special assistant to Attorney General James McGranery, who assigned him to coordinate with the FBI on communist investigations and to serve as an all-around fixer if things went wrong. When Elizabeth Bentley started drinking heavily and got mixed up with an abusive boyfriend, it was Cohn who stepped in to set the man straight. Cohn also played a role in the attempted perjury prosecution of Owen Lattimore, the last gasp in the legal saga of McCarthy’s “top” Soviet agent. All of which made Cohn an obvious candidate when McCarthy started asking around for another lawyer to help run his Senate committee. Cohn was thrilled when both Hoover and Nixon showed up for a party celebrating his appointment—“heady wine,” as he later wrote, for a twenty-five-year-old just beginning to test the promise of life in Washington.[11]
* * *
—
As committee chairman, McCarthy adopted the hit-and-run style he had introduced back in 1950: a bold (if vague) accusation, followed by a quick turn to another target if and when objections were raised. Now, though, he had subpoena power, a substantial budget, and an expanded professional staff to help him. For his committee’s first target he selected Voice of America, the State Department’s worldwide radio operation, established during the war to promote American interests and spread American values around the world. On February 16, less than a month into the Eisenhower administration, the McCarthy Committee opened hearings in New York (predictably, at the Foley Square courthouse) and began calling up witnesses. To prove his claim that Voice of America was in cahoots with the communists, he focused on the fact that two of its transmitters were located on sites with considerable atmospheric interference. “Would not the best way to sabotage that [pro-American] voice be to place your transmitters within that magnetic storm area, so that you would have this tremendous interference?” he demanded of a Voice of America engineer as the klieg lights glared and the cameras rolled. And so it went, week after week, from February into March, a parade of witnesses pummeled and then dismissed by the indignant senator.
Throughout it all, McCarthy continued to praise Hoover, and to hint at cooperation between his committee and the FBI. During the Voice of America hearings, he grilled New York Post editor James Wechsler, a former Young Communist League member, about the newspaper’s frequent criticisms of Hoover: “Have you ever, in your editorial columns, over the last 2 years, praised the FBI?” At hearings on alleged subversion in the Government Printing Office, McCarthy attacked the organization’s leadership for failing to heed Hoover’s warnings: “Man, you had the FBI report! What more did you need?” In September 1953, he published an article in The Evening Star extolling the virtues of coordination between congressional committees and the FBI. He cited Hoover’s 1947 HUAC testimony, in which the director had outlined the committees’ unique powers. He also pronounced Hoover “one of the most competent and outstanding men in Washington.”[12]
Hoover was not so enthusiastic about McCarthy, but he remained open to working with the senator during the early months of the Eisenhower administration. If anything, Hoover seems to have wanted to save McCarthy from himself. In May, he met with McCarthy to discuss J. Robert Oppenheimer, the esteemed scientist and father of the atom bomb, whose left-leaning affiliations had frequently been noted. McCarthy wanted to hold hearings on Oppenheimer but Hoover warned him that “there were several other committees in Congress which probably might resent his taking on this investigation.” When the conversation veered into a discussion of Hank Greenspun, the Las Vegas editor who had exposed the rumors of McCarthy’s homosexuality, Hoover offered similar advice. Rather than sue Greenspun, a situation that might attract undue attention to the issue, Hoover suggested that the senator hand the matter off for confidential inquiry by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, now safely in Republican hands. McCarthy professed to find the idea “well worth while exploring,” more in deference to Hoover than in admiration for the rival Senate body.[13]
The one jarring note that summer came from a situation that should have drawn them further together: McCarthy’s decision to staff his committee with former FBI men. The committee’s new staff director, Frank Carr, had been working for the FBI when McCarthy lured him away, always a black mark in Hoover’s book. Worse still, the growing number of FBI employees on McCarthy’s staff began to inspire questions about whether the fix was in—whether Hoover was indeed allowing McCarthy access to FBI files, as critics had long suggested. Hoover worried about both perception and reality. “Ex-agents trying to make good on the committee job are not going to drop an iron curtain on their past knowledge of Bureau cases, informants, etc.,” he admitted. In July, he sent Nichols to meet with McCarthy and explain why hiring Carr was a bad idea. When McCarthy’s secretary (soon to be his wife), Jean Kerr, came to plead the case back to Hoover, he reiterated that the presence of FBI men “would, no doubt, be seized upon by critics of the Senator and of the FBI as a deliberate effort to effect a direct ‘pipe line’ into the FBI.” Hoover warned that the Bureau would have to be “far more circumspect in all of its dealings with the McCarthy Committee” if the appointment went through. When McCarthy went ahead and hired Carr anyway, Hoover cut them off altogether.[14]
Hoover’s decision that summer to stop sharing information with McCarthy put the FBI ahead of most Republican politicians, including Eisenhower, who expressed their private displeasure with McCarthy but feared to take any action. And even Hoover did not go so far as to critique the senator in public. That August, he found himself with McCarthy at the Del Charro, playing shuffleboard and sipping drinks by the pool. When cornered by a local reporter about his opinion of his fellow hotel guest, Hoover delivered a qualified but not unsympathetic statement. “Certainly, he is a controversial man,” he said, citing the senator’s background as an ex-Marine, “amateur boxer,” and Irishman to explain his combative style. He nonetheless declared McCarthy “earnest” and “honest” in all endeavors, unfairly criticized by the forces that tended to surface “whenever you attack subversives of any kind.”[15]
* * *
—
Even after McCarthy’s denunciation of his “Republican friends” that November, Eisenhower held out hope that the party would find a way to bring McCarthy back into the fold. McCarthy made the task impossible. During the fall of 1953, after his return from the Del Charro, he initiated hearings into alleged security lapses at Fort Monmouth, the New Jersey army base where Julius Rosenberg and members of his ring had been stationed during the war. In early 1954, he homed in on the case of Irving Peress, an army dentist who had gone to college with Rosenberg and moved in communist circles. Though army higher-ups had ordered Peress dismissed, he had been accidentally promoted to the position of major, a bureaucratic lapse that McCarthy framed as evidence of lax procedures toward communists. “Who promoted Peress?” he demanded, calling up General Ralph Zwicker, the highly decorated commander of New Jersey’s Camp Kilmer, where Peress had once been stationed. When Zwicker refused to say who was responsible for the decision, McCarthy berated him as no better than a Fifth Amendment communist, “not fit to wear that uniform”—accusations all but designed to alienate Eisenhower, a career army man.[16]
It was only at this point, with the army under attack and McCarthy doubling down on his critique of fellow Republicans, that Eisenhower determined the White House could no longer stay above the fray. In early March 1954, he learned that Edward R. Murrow, the revered CBS broadcaster, planned a full half-hour program dedicated to unmasking McCarthy’s methods. In conjunction with that, the president initiated his own full-court press against the senator. On March 8, Eisenhower authorized Nixon to begin preparing an anti-McCarthy speech. On March 9, Republican senator Ralph Flanders denounced McCarthy from the Senate floor as a traitor to “the Republican family.” And on March 11, Eisenhower quietly approved the army’s release of a report accusing McCarthy and Cohn of trying to strong-arm military officers in order to obtain favorable treatment for the now-drafted David Schine—accusations that would soon result in the “Army-McCarthy hearings” and produce the final agonizing episodes of McCarthy’s career.
The fallout from these events has since become a well-worn morality tale of how the Eisenhower administration brought a dangerous rogue senator to heel. Less often noted is how critical the FBI was to the administration’s anti-McCarthy strategy. In going after McCarthy, Eisenhower worried that the Republicans would lose control of the anticommunist issue, and that the White House itself would be tainted with the “soft on communism” charge. To “take [the] Red play away from McCarthy,” as Eisenhower put it, the White House set out to promote Hoover as the nation’s model anticommunist: the serious, responsible, professional alternative to McCarthy. In a televised speech in April, Eisenhower warned that certain unnamed figures had “greatly exaggerated” the threat of communism. To the degree that such fears were justified, however, the nation could rest assured that Hoover was already on the job. “Our great defense against those people is the FBI,” Eisenhower declared, labeling Bureau agents “a great bulwark” against communism. A few days later, at the president’s urging, Brownell delivered a follow-up address “bragging on [the] FBI,” in Eisenhower’s words. In that speech, Brownell renewed his call for “powerful constitutional weapons” to aid the FBI in its work—and thus to sideline Joe McCarthy.[17]
With such enthusiastic backing from the administration, there was little question about which side Hoover would choose. On April 9, he wrote to Eisenhower to express a humble desire to live up to the “support and confidence” outlined in the president’s broadcast. “I think it will go down in history as one of the greatest speeches made by any President of the United States,” he wrote.[18]
* * *
—
On the morning of April 22, 1954, back in the Senate caucus room, General Miles Reber took the stand as the first witness in the Army-McCarthy hearings, a political pageant of such intensity and animosity that it made the Tydings Committee (the Senate’s original anti-McCarthy effort) look like a garden party. According to Reber, even as McCarthy had been railing about Fort Monmouth and suspicious pink dentists, Cohn had been quietly pressuring the army on behalf of his friend David Schine, who had been drafted into service. At first, Cohn had sought a reserve officer’s commission, in hopes of saving Schine from overseas combat. When that failed and Schine entered the army as a private, Cohn demanded outrageous privileges for his friend, including regular weekend passes and freedom from kitchen duty. The hearings were supposed to determine whether there was any connection between Cohn’s desire to get what he wanted and McCarthy’s decision to target the army for investigation.[19]
Hoover knew all about Cohn and Schine and the army, a situation that had been the subject of Washington gossip for months. Back in 1950, as a favor to Schine’s father, Hoover himself had made inquiries about the young man’s draft status, offering the services of the New York field office in a failed bid to help Schine secure a naval officer’s commission. Three years later, once Schine joined McCarthy’s staff, Hoover had continued to approach the situation with sympathy. The first reports about Cohn’s behavior began to trickle in toward the end of 1953, as Bureau contacts passed along concerns “that Senator McCarthy could be placed in such an embarrassing spot if news ever leaked out that the senator and Cohn were endeavoring to obtain special privileges for Schine.” By early 1954, as the news indeed started to leak, agents were reporting that Cohn seemed to be calling army representatives “at all hours of the night,” threatening that “we’ll make it tough for you” unless the army did what he wanted. Hoover remained loyal to Schine as long as he could. As late as February, well after the FBI knew what Cohn was doing, Hoover agreed to serve as a character reference for Schine, who was then making a bid for assignment to the military police. Once the hearings began, he quickly changed positions.[20]
As the chief subject of controversy, McCarthy himself could not chair the Army-McCarthy hearings, though they were being conducted under the auspices of his own subcommittee. Leadership fell instead to Karl Mundt, the pipe-smoking senator from South Dakota and the committee’s second-ranking Republican. Like Nixon, Mundt had gotten to know Hoover as a member of HUAC, entering into the anticommunist fray long before being elected to the Senate. By 1954, the two men were on a first-name basis, but their relationship was not without tension. In March, just before the start of the hearings, the FBI received news that Mundt had told a newspaper of the FBI’s quiet arrangements with congressional committees. Hoover dispatched Lou Nichols to have a “heart to heart talk” with the senator about the need to keep all Bureau cooperation confidential. Mundt pledged his fidelity while acknowledging, according to Nichols, that “with a friendly administration and with a friendly Attorney General, perhaps [the FBI] did not need Congress as much as we might on other occasions.” That insight—that the FBI was once again working with the White House as well as Congress—helped to shape what happened next.[21]
The Army-McCarthy hearings were televised in full. On their screens, Americans saw a belligerent, intoxicated Senator McCarthy, temporarily relieved of his committee chairmanship, acting more in the role of defendant than prosecutor. At his side was Roy Cohn, whose grimaces, eye rolls, and occasional bouts of laughter let viewers know what he thought of the proceedings. From start to finish, the hearings were suffused with innuendo about Cohn’s outsize affection for Schine: “You and David Schine have been what we might call warm, personal friends, have you not?” army counsel Joseph Welch asked during one round of questioning, suggesting that they “have perhaps double dated together?” Brought in from Boston to represent the army, the bow-tied, patrician Welch turned out to be surprisingly effective on television, his sly humor a sharp contrast with Cohn’s petulance and McCarthy’s bombast.
For the first few weeks of the hearings, nobody paid much attention to the FBI—just as Hoover preferred. Then, on May 4, without any advance warning to Hoover, McCarthy pulled from his ever-growing pile of papers a 1951 letter in which the FBI director warned the leadership of Fort Monmouth about a serious communist infiltration problem in their ranks. McCarthy had made no mention of such a letter during his weeks of hearings on the Fort Monmouth situation during the fall. Now, with Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens in the witness chair, McCarthy sought to prove that the army had known about the danger lurking at Fort Monmouth and failed to act. The dramatic revelation threatened to turn the hearings back against the army. McCarthy’s transparent suggestion, moreover, was that the secretary was going after Cohn and McCarthy for exposing the army’s missteps.
