COMMUNISTS IN
A FREE
SOCIETY
341
of composition, a way of avoiding some banality of expression, but the
point is Mr. Kristol seldom comes out with the kind of blunt truth
about McCarthy that he wishes other people to speak about the Com–
munists. He is given to just the kind of euphemism for which he
pillories Mr. Barth and others. Among a certain school of anti-Com–
munist writers, this sort of thing is epidemic today. In some cases,
though not, I hasten to say, in Mr. Kristol's, euphemism is used for
an outright defense of McCarthy. "It was probably necessary," Freda
Utley writes in
The China Story,
for McCarthy "to paint a terrifying
picture on a large canvas without much attention to detail and fine
shading if at long last the American people were to be stirred out of
their apathy concerning treason in high places." Who is obfuscating
now? What Miss Utley's fine-arts metaphor means but does not say
is that it was right for McCarthy to lie.
It
is not hard to imagine Miss
Utley's response to anyone who characterized a Communist speech on,
let us say, the treatment of Negroes in this country as a mere exag–
geration, as a portrait done in broad strokes but justified by the need to
call attention to the truth.
2
Behind the rhetoric of Mr. Barth and Professor Commager, Mr.
Kristol says, "lies the gross metaphysic of the liberal Manichee, ap–
portioning the universe to 'forward-looking' and 'backward-looking'
2. It is easy to show that McCarthy has as Iowa regard for the truth as any
Soviet historian. Three examples of falsified documents will suffice.
On
February
9, 1950, in his first speech on Communists in the State Department, he said:
"I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of
State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still
working and shaping the policy of the State Department." Much has been
made of the way he later changed his story about the figures, but not enough
has been made of the fact that he held
no list of any kind
in his hand. What he
had was a letter from James Byrnes to Adolf Sabath containing several figures
from which it could be deduced that 205 State Department employees-in
1946, four years and two Secretaries earlier-had been described as possible
security risks, in most cases for reasons that had nothing to do with Communism,
but had, upon consideration by the proper Department authorities, been
cleared.
Two months later, in April 1950, McCarthy rose in the Senate and
said he would read from a letter from Owen Lattimore to Joseph Barnes.
Senator Lehman, fearing that McCarthy might be quoting unfairly, asked him to
read the entire letter. This McCarthy refused to do. When the letter was finally
put into the record, it became clear that McCarthy had not been quoting at
all but had been inventing a text all his own. In a television broadcast on
March 16 of this year, McCarthy claimed to be reading from the prepared
text of a statement given by Senator Benton to the Senate subcommittee on
privileges and elections. He quoted as follows what he said was a note at
the head of the text:
"Na
part of this must be used by the press until I have
become immune as I testified." The next week, the television network was
forced to report that not a word of this had appeared on the document from
which McCarthy had read, nor any word at all about immunity.
