Battle of the Billygoats

Hostesses who play the old Washington society game of inviting mutual enemies to the same party seldom stir up anything more exciting than pointed remarks and a few hard looks. But Miss Louise Tinsley Steinman, 27, daughter of Publisher J. Hale Steinman of Lancaster, Pa., got sensational results in the game last week. She asked both Columnist Drew Pearson and his mortal enemy Senator Joe McCarthy to a little dinner she was giving at the fashionable Sulgrave Club.

Both guests had been hating each other at a distance for some time--Pearson because of McCarthy's character-daubing attacks on people Pearson likes, McCarthy because of Pearson's character-daubing attacks on him. The action started before the entree, and it had a certain air of grandeur: in their line, Pearson & McCarthy are the two biggest billygoats in the onion patch, and when they began butting, all present knew history was being made.

Fog of Battle. The Senator was the aggressor. He announced at once that he was going to blast Pearson's hide off with a Senate speech the very next day, and he kept jumping up during dinner to repeat the announcement. Finally Pearson asked him how his Wisconsin income-tax case was progressing (the state is ordering McCarthy to explain his nonpayment of last year's taxes). Forthwith the burly Senator grabbed the 6-foot columnist by the neck and invited him outside to fight. Pearson agreed. They were duly separated, but when Pearson went to the cloakroom McCarthy followed, and pinned the columnist by the arms.

For a moment both combatants glared, strained, breathed noisily and attempted to knee each other. Then they were separated again, by Senator Richard Nixon of California, who happened by. Next day McCarthy announced that he had slapped Pearson with his open hand and knocked him down. McCarthy's pal, Radiocaster Fulton Lewis Jr., solemnly reported that the Senator had lifted the columnist "three feet off the floor" with a solid punch delivered while rising from a sitting position. Pearson announced that the Senator had kicked him in the groin twice in a manner that no fight referee would tolerate, but didn't hurt him.

The Mudball. The battle had only begun. Joe McCarthy, one of the great mudslingers of his day, rose in the Senate: with a fiercely patriotic air that Henry Clay might have envied (though almost all the seats were empty), he let Pearson have it. The first 17 pages of his typed script were devoted to quotes from 44 people (including Presidents Roosevelt and Truman) who had called Pearson a liar.

After this, the Senator wound up and fogged in his big mudball: Pearson was not only a "greedy, degenerate liar" with a "perverted mentality" but was also a tool of Moscow, fiendishly intent on destroying "the very heart of this Republic." Pearson, he said, was not a card-carrying party member, but he got secret orders from the Reds through an associate, David Karr, whom McCarthy identified as a former writer for the Communist Daily Worker. Furthermore, he cried, Columnist Pearson had been assigned the job of ruining General Douglas MacArthur.

Pearson, a $300,000-a-year capitalist type with a clear anti-Communist record, was thrown on the defensive in this headbutting session, if only because it seemed to make his $5,000-a-week radio sponsor, Adam Hats, slightly nervous (the Senator implied that anyone who bought an Adam Hat was aiding & abetting Moscow). Pearson cried that the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and even the President of France had applauded him for fighting Communism. He dared McCarthy to repeat the charges outside the libel-proof citadel of the Senate. McCarthy, who knows a lot about libel himself, ignored the invitation.

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