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PARTISAN REVIEW
incautious
[!],
would make a cleanup more difficult because attention
would be drawn away from loyalty
risks
(the real problem) to Com–
munist Party card-holders (a marginal aspect of the real problem)."
Such blindness to the No. 1 Fact of Life about Senator McCarthy–
that his aim is not to focus attention on security risks or on Commu–
nists but on Senator McCarthy, so that exposing Communists is a means
ad majorem gloriam McCarthii
and not an end in itself, hence can be
sacrificed when it conflicts with the end-this might lead unkind persons
to conclude the boys are a couple of shysters. I prefer to think them
honestly naive.
Despite its title, only about one-sixth of the book (73 pages out
of a total 413) is about McCarthy and his enemies-that is, a general
consideration of McCarthyism. The rest is an excessively dry and legal–
istic brief for the prosecution in the case of
McCarthy v. U.S. State
Dept.
Their method is formalistic, abstract, and, despite a great display
of documentation, quite incapable of coming to grips with reality.2 In
tedious detail-tedious because these are lawyers' (or debaters') "points"
and not the kind of details that illuminate reality-the authors arraign
the State Department's security program, try to show that McCarthy
was right in general even though inaccurate in almost any given partic–
ular, and expose the Tydings investigation as a partisan whitewash
of the Department. On the Tydings Committee, I'm forced by the
evidence to pretty much agree with them-its Democratic majority
seemed no more genuinely interested in whether in fact there were
security risks still in the Department than McCarthy himself. But on
the main question, how effectively the Truman administration cleaned
out security risks from State, I can't adopt their gloomy view, mostly
because their definition of a security risk seems to cover almost any
one who in the '30s was politically conscious-as we used to say in
those dear departed days-including myself. But even if State was as
infested with security risks as the authors claim, this does not justify
2 For example, on pp. 208-9, they have a couple of paragraphs on "Mc–
Carthy's Case Number 54," Val R. Lorwin, which concludes with the infor–
mation that last year he was indicted for perjury for denying he had ever been
a Communist Party member. It happens that the Department of Justice the
other day withdrew the charge and fired the lawyer who had prepared the case
(and who had stated to the jury that the defendant had said he would invoke
the Fifth Amendment and that two FBI witnesses would testify against him–
the facts being there were no FBI witnesses and Mr. Lorwin had stated under
oath he had never been a Communist). The authors, of course, can't be re–
proached for this unfortunate outcome of Case Number 54, but they can be
asked why they failed to uncover the easily ascertainable facts about Mr. Lorwin:
that he was an active Socialist in the '30s (Norman Thomas testified for him),
has a long and uninterrupted record of anti-Communist activities, and that the
whole insane charge came of a joking remark he made at a party.
