RONALD RADOSH
563
Communist front National Lawyers Guild, without first trying to find
out if in fact it
was
a Communist front, it was simply irresponsible. Had
he done so, he would have found that the Red-hunters of the HCUA
were in fact right, revealing these "fronts for what they are." Moreover,
Kristol asserted that liberals should not attack the FBI for sending in
undercover agents into the Communist Party. When Alan Barth claimed
that such covert action was an interference with the right to privacy, he
had only shifted the blame "from the Communist conspirators to the
FBI agents who identified them."
Kristol's logic applied to loyalty oaths as well. Liberals should oppose
them as ineffective, he argued, since a Communist would willingly lie
and sign them, while an honest civil libertarian might refuse and then be
fired unjustly as a Communist. What Kristol was saying was that liber–
als had to discriminate between their real achievements and their sins,
or allow McCarthy and his ilk to make it appear that the liberals'
achievements were their sins. Joining the effort to uproot Communism
was not a bad policy, and would not contribute to a climate of fear. As
for Communists losing their jobs after refusing to answer the questions
put to them by Red-hunting members of Congress, Kristol retorted that
he had no pity for any liberal who wailed that Communists were "in
danger of being excluded from well-paying jobs!" One could not forget
that Communism was not just another idea, but was rather a "conspir–
acy to subvert every social and political order it does not dominate." To
tolerate Communists was thus to tolerate a conspiracy against the
democratic polity. As Irving Kristol summed up: "So long as liberals
agree with Senator McCarthy that the fate of communism involves the
fate of liberalism and that we must choose between complete civilliber–
ties for everyone and a disregard for civil liberties entirely, we shall
make no progress except to chaos." As for the defense of the rights of
Communists to speak, Kristol had no objection, as long as liberals
spoke as "one of
us
defending
their
liberties," lest they be "taken as
speaking as one of them. "
The response to Irving Kristol's article revealed the extent of the dif–
ferences fellow anti-Communist liberals had with him. Rovere differed
greatly with Kristol's tough essay. He agreed that some liberals accorded
Communists a sympathy they did not deserve. But Rovere argued that
Kristol was using the same logic as the naive fellow-traveling liberals.
These types tolerated Communists because the Reds spoke as men of the
left, used much the same language as the liberals, and gained sympathy
because Joe McCarthy treated them as brutally as he did actual Com–
munists. But while they tolerated Communists simply because they were
