Steps Going Down

Since he was publicly censured last December, the junior Senator from Wisconsin has been a virtual stranger on Capitol Hill. He hardly ever turns up at committee meetings, and his appearances in the Senate chamber are rare indeed. Last week the vibrant voice of Joe McCarthy was heard once more, in a blistering attack on President Eisenhower and the forthcoming Big Four meeting.

"The Administration," cried Joe, "is fashioning the free world's worst defeat since the end of World War II." The President and his advisers were now determined that the U.S. would "play the role of straight man to the Soviet Union." Such "creeping madness" has created "a mental atmosphere every bit as lethal to the free world's cause as an atomic fallout."

Senate Minority Leader William Knowland, in the past a staunch supporter of McCarthy and a frequent foe of Eisenhower's foreign policy, was visibly agitated by the speech. When McCarthy sat down. Bill Knowland stood up.

"I would not want this opportunity to pass," he announced, "and . . . appear to give the impression that I subscribe to [McCarthy's] point of view . . . We are not bankrupt in our negotiating power . . . The President [will] do everything possible to protect the vital interests of the country and of the free world [at the Geneva Conference]." Then he urged united support of the President and of the Geneva meeting.

When Knowland had finished, McCarthy was disgruntled but unchastened. "I think, Bill," he said sadly, "you will regret some of the things you said here today."

What the McCarthy exchange amounted to was another important step in the decline and political isolation of Joe McCarthy.

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