BOOKS
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McCarthy's wrecking operation.
If
the choice was between McCarthy's
method of cleaning up the Department and leaving it dirty and risk–
infested, it might have been better to take the second alternative, since
in that case we should still have had a State Department instead of the
demoralized, panicky, confused mob of shock victims Mr. Dulles now
presides over. (This is assuming a State Department is necessary at all,
an assumption which at times McCarthy and the authors don't seem
to grant.) In any event, it is a nice point whether a score of Hisses
could have sabotaged State as thoroughly as the methods McCarthy
has used to get them out. (This is assuming he is interested in reforming
the Department-as against making political capital out of pretending
to do so-which I for my part most definitely do not grant.) Finally,
reducing the question of McCarthyism to the campaign against the
State Department, as the authors do, is an intolerably narrow frame–
work of discourse, rather as if Nazism should be treated only in terms
of Hitler's demand for revision of the Versailles Treaty.
Like Gogol's Chichikov, McCarthy is a dealer in dead souls. His tar–
gets are not actual, living, breathing Communists but rather people who
once were or may have been or were not but may be made to appear
to have possibly once been Communists or sympathizers or at any rate
suspiciously 'soft' on the question. Like some D.A.R. who has dreamt
over her (alleged) eighteenth-century revolutionary ancestors until they
are more real to her than her butcher, McCarthy has brooded over
his
(alleged) revolutionaries of a past era until they are more real to him
than, say, Howard Fast. (Not that Mr. Fast or his comrades are revo–
lutionaries, quite the contrary indeed, despite McCarthy's best efforts
to confer that respectable title on them.) Are there, indeed, any flesh–
and-blood Communists extant today
besides
Mr. Fast? Reason and
evidence say yes, but at times McCarthy's operations almost persuade
one there aren't. Single-handed, he has wrought a great change in our
political atmosphere. Before he began to expose Franklin D. Roosevelt's
Twenty Years of Treason, in that idyllic era of the Hiss case when
tangible evidence was frequently produced, there were times when one
wondered if anyone in New Deal Washington had been really anti–
Communist. By now, one wonders whether anyone had been really
pro-Communist. In each instance, a series of startling revelations ex–
ploded, like a string of firecrackers, with cumulative effect though with
opposite political meanings. Where each day used to bring its startling
vindication of some fantastic charge by Bentley or Chambers, today
each morning sees another McCarthy expose of Communist activity pop
like a pricked balloon.
If
McCarthy keeps on much longer, one will
begin to doubt the very existence of the Soviet Union.
