McCARTHY IN BOX

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27373, 11 June 1954, Page 11

McCARTHY IN BOX

“Slur” Cast On Lawyer

(Rec. 11.30 p.m.) WASHINGTON, June 10. Senator Joseph McCarthy will go back on the witness stand today for further rounds of questioning as the accuser and accused in the tempestuous hearings into his dispute with high officials of the United States Army. A bitter clash brought the Republican Senator on the witness stand late yesterday, with Mr Joseph Welch, the special Army counsel denouncing him as a man without a sense of decency, A burst of applause came unchecked from spectators in the packed, hearing room as. Mr Welch told the Senator that "if there is a God in heaven” the Senator would reap no benefit from an attack he had just levelled at a member of Mr Welch’s Boston law firm. Senator McCarthy had termed the lawyer, Mr Frederick Fisher, aged 32, a man with a “Communist Front record.” Mr Welch had been cross-examining Mr Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel and a principal in the Senate Investigations Sub-Committee’s hearings, when the Senator made his charge. Mr Welch abruptly halted his questioning of Mr Cohn. Tears came to his eyes as he paced a hallway outside the hearing-room during a nastily-called recess. He murmured to bystanders that Senator McCarthy had struck a blow “unfair, unfair, indecent to this young man” (Mr Fisher). Senator McCarthy was then called to the witness chair to begin his testimony. Armed with charts and a pointer, he painted a picture of “undercover communism’’ as he said it existed in the United States today. Only a few questions were put to him, and his initial testimony had no direct bearing on the formal charges in his dispute with the Army. The Secretary of the Army (Mr Robert Stevens) and the Army’s chief counsellor, Mr John Adams, have accused Senator McCarthy and Mr Cohn of subjecting them to improper pressures to 1 win favoured Army assignments for Private G. David Schine, a former sub-committee assistant. Senator McCarthy and Mr Cohn hav2 charged the two Army officials with trying to “blackmail’’ them into dropping their search for Communists in the Army.

Attack On Mr Fisher Senator McCarthy’s attack on Mr Fisher came when Senator McCarthy said he had wearied of hearing Mr Welch urge Mr Cohn to give Government authorities the names of any Communists, subversives, or spies he knew of.

In view of Mr Welch’s “phony requests to Mr Cohn,” Senator McCarthy said, Mr Welch should be told that he had in his law firm “a young man named Fisher . . . who has been for a .number of years a member of an organisation which was named, oh, years and years ago, as tfie legal bulwark of the Communist Party.” He referred to the National Lawyers’ Guild.

Mr Fisher, president of the Republican Club of Newton, Massachusetts, has said he belonged to the Lawyers’ Guild while at Harvard and for a few months thereafter, resigning about four years ago. He has said he was never a member of the Communist Party. In New York, the guild denied in a statement that it was a Communist Front organisation, and added: “If Senator McCarthy is allowed to continue with these irresponsible statements, democracy in our country is doomed.” x