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McCarthy's ViCtimS, Rovere accused Kristol of tolerating McCarthy
because he too was opposed to Communists. Kristol, he argued, was
covering up for McCarthy "just as Mr. Barth and Professor Commager
sometimes cover up for Communists." Yet, Rovere too made it clear
that he realized stern measures had to be taken to deal with the real dan–
ger of America's domestic Communists. While he was opposed to loy–
alty oaths and "scoundrels like McCarthy," Rovere backed the
provisions of the McCarran Internal Security Act, "which calls for the
internment of all Communists known to the FBI immediately upon the
outbreak of war," as "sound and necessary." Others compared the mea–
sure to the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. But Rovere
pointed out that the wartime camps were based on the "illogic of race,"
while this internment was to be based on "the logic of politics," and it
would meet the test of a "clear and present danger." Similarly, Rovere
supported the prosecution of Communists under the terms of the Smith
Act, which he saw as addressing Party members as conspirators and
which did not "involve civil liberties in any important way." FBI agents
had provided the evidence by which they had been convicted, he noted,
and those found guilty were not "denied their rights." In a similar fash–
ion, Rovere praised Alger Hiss's conviction as a "triumph of due
process" as well as a triumph for the HCUA.
If
that committee had
always abided by its procedures in the Hiss inquiry, he wrote, "no one
could raise any reasonable objection to it."
And like his colleague Schlesinger, Americans for Democratic Action
(ADA) chairman Joseph
L.
Rauh, Jr., one of the most prominent Wash–
ington, D.C. liberals, expressed his disappointment that Kristol did not
understand that authentic liberals were already "anti-Communist
enough." Rauh noted that the ADA excluded Communists from its
ranks at the start, and in
1948
it led "the successful drive to expose and
deflate the Progressive Party as an arm of Soviet foreign policy." But
Rauh still defended the decision of some liberals to work with Com–
munists during the wartime Popular Front. Communists, he argued,
had taken part on the terms set by liberals, and were forced to pay lip
service to liberal-and not Communist-ideals. Kristol, however,
found support from the Socialist Party's leader, Norman Thomas, who
praised Kristol for understanding what real civil liberties were about.
In his own book, published two years later, Thomas agreed that it was
"a serious liberal error, contributing to the rise of McCarthyism, that
so many liberals so long minimized the Communist evil." Like Kristol,
Thomas believed that it was Communism "that occasioned the rise of
McCarthyism." He chastised liberals for thinking that because
