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PARTISAN REVIEW
viously had been very poor, having lots of children, and all of that.
Somehow McCarthyism is there, it's out there, and not anything else
about that decade.
John Patrick Diggins:
I skipped over it. The
Partisan Review
symposium
was full of references to anti-communism. I recall that McCarthy went
after General Eisenhower, called him a communist, and William Buckley
said, "Eisenhower isn't a communist. He's a golfer." The point I tried to
make in my paper is that the·re's a tremendous distortion among young
people today, and they all believe, particularly young academics, that
American intellectuals became anti-communist because of McCarthyism
and that was why we got into the Vietnam War. But the sequence of that
thinking is off, because the anti-communism of the New York intellec–
tuals far antedates McCarthy.
It
goes all the way back to the thirties
among the Trotskyists and so forth. I wrote a book once, and I came
across letters about trying to publish on the Gulag in
1943.
The FBI had
refused to allow
Reader's Digest
to publish anything that would be neg–
ative toward the Soviet Union, because we were allies of Stalin's Russia.
But some of the New York intellectuals, like Max Eastman (who read
Russian) and Sidney Hook, knew what was going on in the Soviet Union
a long time before McCarthyism. The other thing aboLlt General Eisen–
hower and the military-industrial complex: it's interesting that in Amer–
ican history, the two great generals, Washington and Eisenhower, were
the least militaristic as presidents. They wanted America to stay out of
war, in the
1790S
and in the
1950S,
and they kept America out of war.
Norman Podhoretz:
Just a correction. It was not communism that the
Trotskyists, or Trotskyites, as their enemies called them, were against, it
was Stalinism. They regarded themselves as the true communists. This
morphed eventually into anti-communism in general. It had nothing to
do with McCarthyism. On the specific issue of McCanhyism, the
responses in the fifties among the New York intellectuals varied from
taking it for granted that this was an evil, to a more complex position,
which used to be called liberal anti-communism. In other words, people
who were against communism, not just against Stalinism, also regarded
McCarthy as a demagogue and a fool who was doing more harm than
good to the cause of anti-communism . athan Glazer was among them,
and he wrote a piece in
Commentary
in the early
1950S
called
"McCarthy and His Enemies ." Irving Kristol wrote a more notorious
article, also in
Commentary,
on the state of civi l liberties in
1952,
in
which he said that the liberals of the time, by denying that there was a
