The Key West Citizen

McCarran Raps Move To Oust Sen. McCarthy

By Rowland Evans Jr.

WASHINGTON (NEA)-Sen. McCarran (D-Nev) said today a move by Sen. Flanders (R-Vt) to strip Sen. McCarthy (R-Wis) of his Senate committee chairmanships "should never had been made and it has no chance of approval."

McCarran, in an interview, declined to be drawn into further discussion of the motion, which Flanders has said he plans to discuss further in the Senate some time today.

After he offered it last Friday, Sen. Knowland of California, the Republican floor leader, said the move was a mistake and not justified.

Knowland said that if Flanders calls it up, as he promised to do within the next month, debate could run for several weeks and seriously interfere with action on President Eisenhower's legislative program.

Of the senators of either party who have commented, only Sen. Cooper (R-Ky) has said directly that he would vote for Flanders' motion. Cooper said over the weekend he believes McCarthy has been guilty of an "abuse of the investigatory power."

McCarthy is chairman of the Government Operations Committee and of its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

In moving to bump him from those posts, Flanders said McCarthy had shown contempt for the entire Senate in his attitude toward a 1952 inquiry into his financial affairs in 1952. The Democratic-controlled subcommittee which made that inquiry raised a number of questions about McCarthy's conduct and said it could not answer them in the absence of testimony from the senator on the points at issue.

McCarthy has termed Flanders' move a "smear."

Flanders said in Atlanta yesterday he hopes that McCarthy can "again become an asset to the Republican party," but that as of now he thinks the Wisconsin Senator is following a course that "leads toward fascism."

Speaking in an address at Georgia Tech and a later news conference, Flanders declared this puts him "out of the field of usefulness and effectiveness" by seeking to establish himself as "judge of both the evidence and the sentence."

Democratic leaders weren't saying publicly how they feel about Flanders' effort but they were understood to feel that the issue was one for the Republican party.

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