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By Root 1589 0

McCarthy. Ralph Flanders, a gritty, taciturn Vermonter, was another unlikely hero of the anti-McCarthy crusade. Jack had only to look in Boston at his onetime campaign manager and former friend, Mark Dalton, to see a citizen rising up against McCarthy. Dalton had been sitting in the front row when McCarthy had brought his investigative hearings to Boston. He had been so appalled at what he saw that he ended up running for the Senate himself in 1954. He got nowhere, however, on his anti-McCarthy platform and believed that the Kennedy family was behind much of the negative press he received.

Earlier that year the television networks broadcast the Army-McCarthy hearings with Bobby sitting there as minority counsel. Americans watched mesmerized as attorney Joseph Welch told McCarthy in a voice nearly breaking with emotion: “Until this moment, Senator, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” Neither had most Americans. Although at the beginning of the year a majority had supported McCarthy, by the end of the hearings most Americans opposed him.

In Congress, the toughest votes are often delayed by tacit agreement long enough so that what once would have been a heroic stance becomes merely expedient. That was decidedly the case for most of Jack’s Democratic colleagues when, on December 2, 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, 67—22. Jack shared the distinction of not voting with only one other senator, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin. The moderate Republican wangled an invitation to an economic conference in Brazil because “it would be a nice way to get out of the McCarthy business.”

For all his intellectual detachment, Jack was not a man to retreat into narrow, self-serving legalisms to defend his actions. But this time retreat he did, running away from the great moral issue of the decade into a thicket of justifications. “So I was rather in ill grace personally to be around hollering about what McCarthy had done in 1952 or 1951 when my brother had been on the staff in 1953,” he rationalized to Burns. “That is really the guts of the matter.” If Jack could not make a distinction between Bobby’s well-documented investigation of shipping to China and McCarthy’s egregious excesses, then he suffered from a political myopia of disastrous proportions. Beyond that, his brother had managed to change sides in the midst of battle and by his actions had helped push the Senate toward this historic vote.

If Jack had gone along with all the other Democratic senators, his vote would not have been long remembered, and he would surely not have been saluted for courage the way his critics condemned him now for cowardice. He bristled at the charge, though only in an unpublished interview with Burns could he display the full volcanic range of his displeasure:

Am I going to vote in the hospital when I was God damn sick on how he treated the censure committee and how he treated Arthur Watkins on the floor of the Senate? They say McCarthy was an obvious son of a bitch, and we all should have been up making speeches against him … but who did it…. [Hubert] Humphrey never made a single speech, nor did [Stuart] Symington until the gun was put at his head … when it actually got to a personal dispute with he and Joe, but it wasn’t on moral grounds. Nor did any other senators, except [Mike] Monroney and [Herbert] Lehman and [Thomas] Hennings and [J. William] Fulbright…. Now I think that anybody who is deathly against McCarthy in the beginning has a right to say that my sensitivity in regard to the abuse of the civil rights and liberties of people were not sufficiently attuned to recognize the real menace of McCarthy. That’s a reasonable indictment, and I don’t mind accepting it … though I would put myself with 90 percent of the senators, which is no excuse, but which at least puts it in proportion. But they have moved beyond that in their criticism. They almost associate me with McCarthy.

Just before Christmas, Jack was wrapped up in a plaid blanket, placed on a stretcher, and taken by ambulance to La Guardia Airport to be flown