INVESTIGATIONS: Joe's Bloody Nose

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INVESTIGATIONS Joe's Bloody Nose Like most successful rough & tumble fighters. Senator Joe McCarthy always presses in, and is adept at forensic kneeing, gouging and butting. As a consequence, most of his senatorial colleagues give him a wide berth. But last week, when he set out to defend J. B. Matthews, executive staff director of his subcommittee, McCarthy finally gave his critics in both parties a wide and irresistible opening. They jumped him en masse, and Fighting Joe did not get up from among the cuspidors until he had the legislative equivalents of a split lip, a bloody nose and two black and shiny eyes—the first such clubbing he has taken in 6½ years in the Senate.

McCarthy managed to make a spectacular brawl of it, even though Doctor Matthews had made himself virtually indefensible by charging, in the American Mercury, that "the largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the U.S. today is composed of Protestant clergymen" (TIME, July 13). A longtime McCarthy collaborator, Matthews has been feeding Joe information and suggestions perhaps as far back as McCarthy's first out-on-the-limb blast at Communism in the State Department, made at Wheeling, W.Va. in February 1950. Matthews has been a member of what Westbrook Pegler calls "our cell of Red baiters," a group with which McCarthy also mingled. "It is not an organized group of Red baiters," Pegler has explained. "[But] Mr. Matthews is an amateur cook . . . He cooks a meal and we go down and . . . take part in a small, festive evening."

When members of the seven-man subcommittee demanded that they be allowed to vote on firing Matthews, Joe refused and coolly announced that, as chairman, he and he alone had the right to hire and fire committee employees.

Highhanded Stand. It was a shrewd if highhanded stand; by long precedent the chairmen of Senate committees do hire and fire employees. But it is also understood that they get the consent of other members. Aware of this, Fighting Joe backpedaled a step or two: he agreed to drop Matthews, in return for the promise of Michigan's Republican Senator Charles E. Potter to go along with McCarthy's claim to sole control over committee employees. That got all three Republicans back on McCarthy's side again.

With McCarthy's future control of the staff thus assured, the subcommittee's three Democratic members. Senators Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, Stuart Symington and John McClellan, resigned from the committee in a body, charging that they had been put in the "impossible position of having responsibility without . . . authority." The Senate's Democrats were backing them. The Democratic leadership made it plain that they would not be replaced until McCarthy mends his ways. The Democratic boycott would not keep the subcommittee from functioning, but might expose its conclusions to increased criticism.

Meanwhile, for the first time, Virginia's powerful and respected Senator Harry Byrd delivered a pointed attack on Mc-Carthyism. "Mr. Matthews," he said, "should give names and facts to sustain his charge or stand convicted as a cheap demagogue, willing to blacken the character of his fellow Americans for his own notoriety and personal gain."