THE CONGRESS: Elbow Grease

Last week the members of the Watkins committee, with one defection, stood alone in the active Senate fight for censure of Senator Joe McCarthy. They were also alone in defending their personal honor against the attacks of Joe and his cohorts. The rest of the Senate sat silent—or in the case of several top Republican leaders, worked for a backroom deal that would save McCarthy.

McCarthy began the week by summoning Utah's Arthur Watkins to appear before the Permanent Investigating Subcommittee. (Among the handful of spectators in the hearing room were Five-Percenter John Maragon. a strong McCarthyite, and Professional Demagogue from Army Secretary Robert Stevens, naming 30 officers involved in the Peress case. Scoffed Joe: "I am afraid we are wasting the time of the Senate if that is all the information you have." Said Watkins: "I do not believe you could ever be satisfied unless you can find somebody that ought to be shot or hung."

In the Senate itself that morning, Indiana's G.O.P. Senator William Jenner took the floor to defend McCarthy. Pretending that the six members of the Watkins committee were exclusively responsible for the charges against Joe, Jenner cried in injured tones: "Now 96 Senators from all 48 states are obliged to take time they should spend in their constituencies to come here and decide the issue raised by a few members." He neglected to add that 75 Senators—including Jenner—had voted to make the Watkins committee the Senate's agent in considering charges against McCarthy.

Re-election Problems. Bill Jenner was in rare form. He quoted John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burke and Martin Dies. He roared in a voice obviously intended to be heard all the way back in Indiana. He stomped his pointed shoes. He held out his hands and quivered his fingertips. The Watkins committee, he shouted, came close "to recommending the punishment of a member of this body for fighting an alien conspiracy to destroy our nation."

But attention was distracted from Jenner's floor show by a note sent to the press gallery by South Dakota's Republican Senator Francis Case, a Watkins committee member. Case (who is up for re-election in 1956 in a state where McCarthy has powerful political friends) had suddenly changed his mind about censuring Joe for abusing Brigadier General Ralph Zwicker. Case said he had just learned that the Army had honorably discharged Irving Peress the day after receiving a warning letter from McCarthy. Case's switch came despite the fact that the Peress chronology had been public knowledge for months (TIME, March 8). And Case himself had written the part of the censure resolution that referred to treatment of Zwicker.