The Press: Pearson v. McCarthy

When Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy called Columnist Drew Pearson a Communist tool (TIME, Jan. 8), he thought he was safe enough. As usual, he made his attack from the libelproof U.S. Senate floor. But last week litigious Columnist Pearson thought he had found a way around McCarthy's immunity, slipped a libel suit against him.

McCarthy, charged Pearson's lawyers, had made the same accusations in a mimeographed release to the press before he entered the Senate floor, was thus legally accountable to the extent of $350,000 damages. For good measure, Pearson demanded $250,000 for being "painfully grabbed by the neck and kicked in the groin" by McCarthy in their December brawl at Washington's Sulgrave Club. Pearson rounded off the suit by demanding $2.5 million more from McCarthy, Columnists Westbrook Pegler and Fulton Lewis Jr., the Washington Times-Herald, and seven other individuals, charging that they had conspired to hold him up to "public scorn and ridicule" and scare away potential sponsors for his radio program. It was Pearson's third suit against Pegler. He withdrew the first (for $25,-ooo) in 1946 after he and Pegler had made a gentleman's agreement to stop calling each other names. Still pending is a second (for $250,000), filed last year after Pegler stopped being a gentleman and called Pearson a "lying blackguard."