RONALD RADOSH
SS9
the pretense of liberalism, continued
to
justify and whitewash the real–
ities of Soviet Communism."
There were, of course, differences among these intellectuals. The cen–
tral issue was the exact nature of the threat posed by Communism
to
American democracy. Many of the liberal anti-Communists broke with
the hard right over the issue of McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade.
When James Burnham argued that McCarthyism was a non-existent
invention of Communists, and that the Senator had to be backed, the
New York intellectuals struck back. Answering Burnham's endorsement
of McCarthy in the pages of their journal
Partisan Review,
William
Phillips and Philip Rahv argued "anti-Communism is strengthened
rather than weakened by outright opposition to McCarthy and his
methods." And when Max Eastman unabashedly defended McCarthy
at an April
1952
forum, Richard Rovere, Dwight Macdonald, and
Mary McCarthy demanded that the American Committee for Cultural
Freedom take a vigorous stand against Joe McCarthy. The problem,
Rovere wrote Schlesinger, was that they had
to
make it apparent that
their anti-Communism was "of a different sort entirely from
McCarthy's," and show that "American anti-Communism is not the
blind, stupid, selfish thing" that was being portrayed. Rovere was con–
cerned that Communist fellow travelers would make capital out of East–
man's pro-McCarthy position, and use it to brand all of them
indiscriminately as McCarthyites. Moreover, Rovere was certain that
Eastman did not "give a damn about cultural freedom." In response,
Sidney Hook, who had been sent a copy of the letter
to
Schlesinger,
assured Rovere that "I have found no one who agrees with Eastman's
position" and that he was pleased that Rovere, Mary McCarthy, and
Elmer Rice had attacked "what you call McCarthyism and what I call
cultural vigilantism." Indeed, Hook stressed "Eastman irresponsibly
defended McCarthy by name to the overwhelming
disapproval
of the
audience, including almost all of our members present." Hook did note
that some in his group did believe that McCarthyism was not as dan–
gerous as Communism, but, he wrote, "surely it is permissible to enter–
tain different ideas about the relative degrees of danger involved in each
while being firmly opposed to both."
In reality, the issue that divided anti-Communist liberal intellectuals
like Sidney Hook, Diana Trilling, and Leslie Fiedler from those like
Rovere and Schlesinger, was the issue of how precisely to deal with
American Communism. It was, as Hook put it, "not an easy problem."
Although Rovere objected to Irving Kristol's analysis, in some ways he
made very similar points. In
1952,
The Nation,
a magazine identified
