The Dispensable Man

Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy once called Roy Cohn indispensable in the Senate's effort to ferret out Communists -"as indispensable." the Senator said, "as I am." Last week, however, the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. Joe McCarthy, chairman, dispensed with the services of the indispensable Mr. Cohn.

Time for Memoirs. Cohn's career as chief counsel ended at a subcommittee luncheon in the old Supreme Court chamber. Even before the steak and French fried potatoes were served, McCarthy announced Cohn's resignation. Later, he scowled at reporters over the dishes and rumbled that Cohn's departure was "a great victory for the Communists."

Actually. Cohn's forced resignation was a victory for Michigan's Republican Senator Charles Potter, who had demanded dismissals on both sides of the Army-McCarthy row. So far. Potter has failed to hit his Army target. Counselor John G. Adams. ("If we fired John G.," a top Pentagon official said, "it would look like a deal with McCarthy, and the people are tired of McCarthy deals.") But on the subcommittee Potter's vote, plus those of the three Democrats, made up a 4-3 majority that could give Cohn his walking papers.

Glumly. Cohn returned to his Manhattan law practice, promised to do spare-time work for McCarthy's cause, and (at 27) dashed off his memoirs for the Hearst papers. McCarthy insisted that he would never be able to hire another counsel like Cohn. No one disputed him on that.

Time for Explanations. For the moment McCarthy saved two other staff aides, both denied security clearance by the Defense Department. The two:

> Donald Surine, 37, who was summarily fired by the FBI in 1950 for his eccentric handling of a white-slavery case. The subcommittee majority seemed dead set against Surine, who serves McCarthy as a devoted bellhop, chauffeur and muscleman, so the Senator switched him from the staff to his Senate payroll.

> Thomas W. LaVenia, 43, who took leave from the U.S. Secret Service in 1944 and never returned to duty, after reports that as an agent at Hyde Park in 1943 he spent much time and money in bars with questionable associates. LaVenia's story last week to a special session of the subcommittee was that he had secretly been assigned a playboy role to help round up ten people suspected of plotting against President Roosevelt.

"Everyone thought I had gone on the bum," he said.

There was another problem. As a Brooklyn youth in 1936, LaVenia was vice president of the American Law Students Association--and McCarthy himself had denounced the association in 1950 as a Communist-front "affiliate." Said LaVenia: he had really been working against the party-liners.

When LaVenia finished, the subcommittee decided to keep him on the job (but away from classified documents).

Time for a Stand. McCarthy's troubles of the week were not confined to his staff. Vermont's persistent Republican Senator Ralph Flanders was determined that the Senate take a stand on "the problem presented by the junior Senator from Wisconsin." Realizing that he lacked the votes to remove McCarthy from committee chairmanship, Flanders changed his motion to a simple vote of censure.

From outside the Senate, Flanders won the support of a group of 23 top businessmen, labor leaders and educators, e.g., Publisher John Cowles (Des Moines Register & Tribune), Movie Producer Samuel Goldwyn, Financier Lewis W. Douglas (chairman. Mutual Life of New York). They wired every U.S. Senator (except McCarthy himself) urging a favorable vote "to curb the flagrant abuse of power by Senator McCarthy."

This week the Senate is scheduled to vote on the Flanders motion: "Resolved, that the conduct of the Senator from Wisconsin ... is unbecoming a member of the United States Senate, is contrary to senatorial traditions, and tends to bring the Senate into disrepute, and such conduct is hereby condemned."

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