The Press: The Scoop That Wasn't

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When Senator McCarthy was riding highest in 1953, a flush-faced man named Paul Hughes held out a bright promise to some of the Senator's bitterest foes. The promise: he could unhorse McCarthy with a dossier of "proof" that the Senator's investigators were resorting freely to burglary, blackmail, bribery and frame-ups to serve McCarthy's ends. Last week Hughes went on trial in a Manhattan federal courtroom on a charge of perjury, in what, a U.S. attorney called "one of the most fantastic schemes to make money in the annals of modern political intrigue."

Before the scheme collapsed, said the prosecution, Hughes mulcted Joseph Rauh Jr., chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, out of $8,500 for "expenses" in investigating McCarthy investigators, took another $2,300 from trusting Clayton Fritchey, editor of the Democratic Digest, and gulled the Washington Post and Times Herald into writing—but not quite publishing—a twelve-part series "exposing" McCarthy.

Guns in the Basement. Hughes, 35, an Iowan who spent 16 years in the Army, showed up in Washington as a civilian in 1953 looking for a job as a McCarthy investigator. He never got it; but that was how he described himself, according to the prosecution, when he called on Democrat Fritchey, promising sensational disclosures because he was "disillusioned." Fritchey paid Hughes for months of "research." When that failed to produce any legal evidence against McCarthy, Fritchey bade Hughes goodbye.

In Rauh, said the U.S. attorney, Hughes found a more gullible customer for his bulging file of "documents" and diary notes. Among Hughes's fantastic reports was one of a secret White House meeting at which President Eisenhower himself joined McCarthy and other Republican bigwigs to plot Red-hunting strategy. Rauh did not even question Hughes's report that McCarthy kept an arsenal of Lugers and submachine guns in the basement of the Senate Office Building. Rauh testified that he also agreed to pay "expense money" for an agent named Bill Decker.

It was Rauh who put the Washington Post onto the story. In the belief that a Pulitzer Prize plum had dropped into their laps, top Post executives saw Hughes repeatedly, without seeing through him. Once, when things seemed about to come to a head, Publisher Phil Graham rushed to tell Attorney General Herbert Brownell that the paper might have to call him at any hour of the day or night with a startling story. Graham could not tell him about it, but a baffled Brownell obliged with his night telephone number.

Fresh Twist. Finally, Hughes demanded that the Post break the story because his "double role" was getting too risky. Assistant Managing Editor Al Friendly began writing the series—and running into facts that cried out for checking. The paper assigned a reporter to the checking job, and demanded that Hughes produce his elusive collaborator Bill Decker. It soon turned out that Decker and others quoted by Hughes just did not exist.