of the Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953. After clearing the VOA hearings with Republican senate leaders, McCarthy hired Rushmore as director of research that spring. The 1953 televised hearings would be held in New York City. Chief counsel Roy Cohn set up headquarters at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where witnesses would be questioned and evidence collected. During the hearings, McCarthy himself would repeat the Rushmorean flourish of waving a suspect list. Before the hearings were over, however, Rushmore resigned from the subcommittee for a brief return at the Journal-American. As director of research, he channeled all pre-hearing testimony through his office, which he would use as raw material for sensational newspaper articles. The public would read about the subcommittee's plan of attack before it could be presented at the hearings, thus sabotaging the entire purpose of the proceedings. As chief counsel, Cohn could have fired Rushmore and initiated felony charges against him for leaking evidence, but Cohn instructed the staff not to release information to Rushmore unless it was cleared with him. Despite Cohn's restraint, Rushmore quit in outrage. After criticizing his estranged friend in print, Rushmore was fired from the Journal-American. Then his old mentor, Walter Winchell, got him a new editorial job. Confidential Harrison Under Winchell's sponsorship, Rushmore became the chief editor of a New York scandal magazine, Confidential. Its publisher, Robert Harrison, began as an office boy and later writer for Bernarr McFadden's New York Graphic during the 1920s, an ancestor of the supermarket tabloids that would emerge in the 1960s. It was at the Graphic where the young Harrison first met Winchell. As an adult Harrison was on the editorial staff of the Motion Picture Herald, a trade publication whose conservative Catholic owner, Martin Quigley, Sr., had close ties to the Hays Office. Having learned from Quigley what he could get away with legally, Harrison struck out on his own with a series of non-pornographic "cheesecake" magazines. Supposedly inspired by the Kefauver Committee hearings, Harrison later launched a tabloid-style gossip magazine focused on the substance abuse habits, criminal records and hidden political and sexual preferences of celebrities. Film historian Mary Desjardins described Confidentials editorial style as using "research methods and writing techniques that recycled old stories or created 'composite' facts as the basis of new ones." Harrison himself described it thus: "Once we establish the star in the hay and that's documented, we can say anything we