Mundt Committee Reports

This week, after a brief vacation at a La Jolla, Calif, resort (where his visit coincided, as it did last year, with that of J. Edgar Hoover), Joe McCarthy returned to Washington to face the Watkins investigation of his past deeds, and to hear the Mundt committee's verdict on his scrap with the Army. The verdict was not clear-cut.

The Mundt committee's seven Senators had agonized day after day over shadings of opinions. In the end they settled on two reports: a majority report, signed by the four Republicans, a minority report, signed by the three Democrats. The two reports differed somewhat in appraising the behavior of Army Secretary Robert Stevens and Counselor John Adams. And while the Democrats rapped McCarthy, the Republicans merely chid him.

Both reports agreed that G. David Schine's contribution as a "consultant" to McCarthy's Communist-hunting committee was negligible, and, therefore, as the Democratic report was at pains to emphasize, efforts to spring him from Army duty were unjustified. Both reports, despite their tonal distinctions, agreed that McCarthy himself was to blame for not putting the brakes on Roy Cohn's efforts to get favors for his friend Schine.

Harassment Strengthened. Although Michigan's Charles Potter signed the Republican report, he also attached a separate opinion that sharpened some of his colleagues' judgments, adopted some of the Democrats' jabs, and added a few incisions of his own. Among Potter's points:

P: McCarthy's "support and backing of Mr. Cohn and his often-repeated confidence in him provided all that was necessary to give full strength and authority . . . to any project undertaken by Mr. Cohn . . . There is no indication that [McCarthy] regarded Mr. Cohn's actions as constituting usurpation."

P: Cohn "used the full power of his position . . . to obtain preferential treatment for [Schine] . . . Mr. Cohn was unrelenting to the point of harassment to give impetus to his requests in behalf of Mr. Schine . . . His unreasonableness in the matter of the concessions he asked for Mr. Schine was conceded by [McCarthy]."

P: Stevens "showed a lack of competency in this matter which at times suggested bewilderment. He did not grasp the far-reaching and deleterious effects of such indecision on Army personnel . . . Vacillation and appeasement were evident in many of his actions . . . He harbored the hope that termination of investigation of [the Army] could be accomplished by this method . . . The problem of Mr. Schine should not have been permitted to go beyond preliminary examination of Mr. Schine's qualifications, or lack thereof, and a firm decision based on established regulations."

P: Adams "attempted to influence the course of the subcommittee's investigation . . . Compromise and equivocation in this case did great damage, and Mr. Adams must share the blame."

Chaos Penalized. Charlie Potter concluded by turning from the Schine case to the serious issue that McCarthy raised during the hearings over his doctored letter containing stolen, secret FBI data. Said Potter: "In any court of law, introduction of this classified information, offered without disclosure that it had been lifted from a valid document, would have brought about swift penalties from the bench. I disagree with Senator McCarthy on his invitation to Government employees to initiate leaks of classified material to him when in their individual judgment such a course of action might be of public benefit. Taken literally, response to his invitation could wreck the entire security system and result in chaos and anarchy."

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