COMMUNISTS IN A FREE SOCIETY
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ington-that its director is frequently protesting that it can't get its
really important work done.
"The problem of fighting Communism while preserving civil
liberties is no simple one," Irving Kristol writes, "and there is no
simple solution." There is no simple solution to any problem that
involves human beings, but it seems to me that many intellectuals today
are devoting themselves to entangling this one to a fare-thee-well. I
believe that an examination of the facts and an application to them of
the principles shared by decent liberals and conservatives will yield not
a simple solution but one not so hopelessly complicated that it is
unworkable.
The key to it ought to be the Holmesian doctrine of clear and present
danger, the validity of which has been frequently attacked but has never,
to my knowledge, been destroyed. There are agencies of government in
which the presence of Communists or Communist sympathizers is
obviously intolerable; it is perfectly reasonable for these agencies–
the State and Defense Departments, the White House, the Atomic
Energy Commission, and perhaps a few others-to screen present and
prospective employees, those at least whose jobs might enable them to
jeopardize our security. Since no man has a right to a government job,
or to any other kind of job for that matter, there should be no objection
to the test of guilt by association in determining security risks, though
the test should be soberly applied. Elsewhere in government, loyalty
and security procedures ought to be abandoned on the ground that
they are ridiculous. This is not to say that Communists should be
handed jobs or should not be fired from jobs they hold in non-sensitive
agencies. There is no reason why the government should hire anyone who
has a vested interest in its failure. But the test of clear and present
danger does not apply to most government agencies, and in consequence
the rules of evidence should at least approximate judicial ones.
It
is undoubtedly too much to hope that the Communist problem
will in every case be solved with common sense and dignity.
It
is
plain that among the rights of lard merchants are the right to make
themselves absurd and the right to hire and fire radio performers as
they please. It is plain that universities and school systems have the
right, and it may be the duty, to keep Communist teachers out of their
classrooms. In education, though, and in intellectual life
in
general, it
would seem to me that it is the moral duty of those of us who serve our
culture by being its critics to point out that the test of guilt by as–
sociation
is
a bad test and that no present threat to our culture justifies
it. It is very hard to conceive of a Communist writing a good book
