Hercules at the Mike

Joe McCarthy had nothing whatever to do with the Harry Dexter White case. Nevertheless, he horned in last week and posed as the Hercules of this and all other exposures of Communists in the Government. As usual, the door was opened for McCarthy by "a McCarthy baiter. Harry Truman gave the Wisconsin Senator his opening by using a well-worn anti-anti-Communist technique; he denounced Attorney General Herbert Brownell's handling of the White case as "McCarthyism."

An Attack on Ike. With that to go on, Joe McCarthy demanded and got from timid radio and TV networks a free half hour (worth an estimated $300,000 at commercial rates) to answer Truman's "attack upon me." But what the Wisconsin Senator said about White and Truman was much less interesting than what he said about the Eisenhower Administration.

The new Administration, McCarthy charged, has not done enough to fight Communism. He wanted to know why John Paton Davies Jr., who tried "to put Communists and espionage agents in key spots in the Central Intelligence Agency," is still a "high official" of the State Department. This was a standard McCarthy twister. Davies, now counselor of the U.S. embassy in Lima, Peru, once got into trouble with the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee because of testimony that he had recommended Communists for

Government posts. Finally, General Walter Bedell Smith, then chief of the Central Intelligence Agency and now Under Secretary of State, set the record straight. He told the Loyalty Review Board in secret session that Davies had been asked by the CIA to find some Communists whom the agency could use in its work.

One Man's Issue. In his nationwide radio-TV speech, Joe McCarthy flatly opposed Eisenhower's expressed hope that the Communists-in-Government problem will be handled so well that it will not be a major issue in the 1954 elections. McCarthy, who has built his career on that issue and cannot afford to have it die. indicated that he thought the President's attitude was "well-meaning" but not wise. He had a main issue of his own to propose for 1954: McCarthy.

If the people believe in getting rid of Reds, he said, "then their answer is to keep the Republicans in power so we may continue to clean out the Augean stables." He identified himself as the chief stable boy: "Now Democrat office seekers . . . have been proclaiming that McCarthyism is the issue in this campaign. In a way, I guess, it is, because Republican control of the Senate determines whether I shall continue as chairman of the investigating committee."

In Georgia's Augusta National Golf Club, Dwight Eisenhower slept through McCarthy's speech. When reports about it came in, the President kept his temper and his silence. But almost everyone around him agreed that, in the face of McCarthy's challenge, Eisenhower's McCarthy problem will have to be solved soon. Presidential aides, long divided on Administration policy toward McCarthy, were still divided. A small minority, determined to preserve party harmony, was against an open battle at this point. A majority thought that the time had come for Dwight Eisenhower to give the back of his hand to Hercules.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.