Haynes Johnson Interview (2005): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 5 of 8
Let's look at particular individuals. [Some people], to use the famous phrase of President Kennedy, were "profiles in courage." He, in this set of events, was not a profile in courage, correct? He was one of the people who, when we come to the end of the story, did not [stand up for what is right]. What was his calculation? Let's talk about a couple of these people.
Many of the portraits of the characters of this story, to me, are so fascinating. The Kennedy family, old Joe Kennedy, the patriarch, was very close to Joe McCarthy. He was anti-communist, he'd do anything he could, he raised money for McCarthy, he saw the communist conspiracy as a great threat to America. He took Joe McCarthy with him to Hyannisport, playing with the children, and down to Florida. McCarthy dated one of the girls, Pat. Jack had been in the Pacific, and everything in old Joe's life was to make Jack the President of the United States. Jack was then, at that point, embarking on running for the Senate. That was the springboard, from the House of Representatives to the Senate. He was running against a scion of Massachusetts, highly favorite, Henry Cabot Lodge, who was then Eisenhower's national campaign manager. McCarthy could have tipped the balance, and old Joe did not want McCarthy, a fellow Irish Catholic, war veteran of World War II, to campaign against Jack Kennedy, Irish Catholic war hero in a state with a large Irish Catholic population. And even though McCarthy campaigned all over the country for other Republican candidates, he never entered Massachusetts.
There are stories that I can't prove. McCarthy's staff believed that Kennedy gave him $100,000 or ...
The old man?
The old man, yeah.
So, we don't know, but the fact we do know is that Jack Kennedy won his Senate seat and the springboard to the presidency, Eisenhower carried Massachusetts by 270,000 votes, and Kennedy won by 70,000. Kennedy acknowledged later to Arthur Schlesinger that McCarthy -- Schlesinger asked him, "Why didn't you take on McCarthy when you two were in the Senate?" He said, "Hell, half of my constituents think he's a hero." And so, he stayed back. There was no profile in courage. In fact, John Kennedy was the only senator not to be recorded when McCarthy eventually was censured by his colleagues.
Margaret Chase Smith from Maine, the true profile in courage ...
Yes, she really was. And if there's anything -- I hope people read what happened. She was a wonderful back-bencher from Maine, a Republican, the only woman at that point ever to be elected to the Senate in our history, a conservative, not by today's definition, but just proper -- prim, and so forth. She started out liking McCarthy, supporting him, but became more troubled the more she watched him. Guilt by association, hurling these false charges, dividing the country, using the Senate as a cloak of immunity to make these outrageous -- and he did, on the floor of the Senate -- he would attack people of being communist lackeys, and so forth. And there was no way you could sue him for libel because they cloaked themselves in immunity from libel suits.
She watched and watched and saw this process, and became more and more disturbed, and then crafted what is to me still the single greatest eloquent speech in my lifetime, in Washington D.C. It was called the "Declaration of Conscience," and it is a signal profile in courage. She talked about the dangers of demagogues -- she didn't use McCarthy's name -- by fear and calumny and bigotry, and dividing us, and with hatred, and using the cloak of the Senate to do all these things. She got seven other colleagues to support her, Republicans. She gave this great, memorable, wonderful speech. You thought for a moment there might have been a change, but McCarthy just sneered and dismissed it. He said, "Oh, that's Margaret Chase -- she's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." And within a period of weeks, literally weeks, sad to say, those other senators who had supported her dropped away and they never challenged McCarthy, and she was alone. That to me is one of the tragic but noble moments in American history.
I'm going to show your book again. It's a real page-turner, and I want
to recommend it very much to our audience. 
There
was a section that I want you to talk about here relating to the columnist
Drew Pearson. There was a confrontation between Pearson and McCarthy. Pearson
was a columnist who had gone after McCarthy for some of his corruption, they
met at a party and I must say -- describe what happened, because the story
reaches a new level here, because this is not a demagogue or a politician,
this is a man who crosses over the edge.
This is a man, vicious and brutal, capable of actual physical, terrifying assaults on other human beings, and he would boast about it afterwards. This confrontation between Drew Pearson, the most popular muckraking columnist, I guess you would say, but also widely known for his radio broadcasts of the time. He had been very critical of McCarthy, and they happened to meet at the private Sulgrave Club in Washington D.C., off Dupont Circle. McCarthy comes up to him and starts taunting him, taunting him, says, "Drew, I'm going to ruin you in the Senate, I'm going to give a speech under the cloak of immunity, I'm going to destroy you, and your wife will -- I'll prove that you're a communist." He went on and on and on. And he kept doing this during the dinner. At one point, he reached over and puts his hand -- McCarthy was very strong -- behind Pearson's neck, and Pearson -- this pain shot through him. It was a horrible night.
Finally it was over, and Pearson goes down to the cloak room to pay the hat check person for his coat, and all of a sudden McCarthy comes up behind him, spins him around and kicks him twice in the groin, wham!, wham!, and Pearson doubles over, and he says, "This is what you're going to get," and so forth. At that point, Nixon, who was just a new senator, comes along and says, "Let a Quaker stop this fight." And McCarthy said, "No, I'm not ... " -- and then McCarthy reaches over and slaps Pearson so hard that Nixon later described, "I thought he was going to kill him."
And then McCarthy goes out with [Nixon] -- Pearson pretends that he's all right and he goes out and they find their car and they drive off, and McCarthy that night calls -- boasts -- calls two people, one in Appleton, Wisconsin, a judge, Greta Van Susteren's father, as a matter of fact, Irvin Van Susteren, and he calls the editor of the Washington Times Herald, a very conservative paper at the time, and boasts, "I kicked Drew Pearson in the groin" -- that's not the phrase he used.
McCarthy boasted throughout his career that he learned how to fight in Wisconsin from an "Indian Charlie," a member of an Indian tribe. He said, "Here's what you have to learn. When you have an opponent you start kicking him in the groin and keep kicking and kicking until there's nothing left in the groin, until you win." He boasted of this to his fellow senators in private hearings. I mean, that's the other side of Joe McCarthy, absolutely brutal, monstrous. And he was a strong, very powerful man. That's what he was capable of.
When I read the scene, I thought of Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers On a Train" where Bruno, the mad psychotic, actually attacks someone at a party and goes over the edge, and that's when ...
I wish I had remembered that because that's exactly what it was! That was the other side of McCarthy. He could be very charming and gregarious and back-slapping, and then he could turn on you instantly and he'd destroy you, and not only destroy you with attacks of disloyalty and communism but physical assaults. So, this was a very, very disturbed person and a dangerous person.
Next page: The Decline of McCarthy
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