McCarthyism: Naming names

In the morality play that serves as the history of the "Red Scare" few crimes rank higher than ex-communists who named their former associates in the Communist Party.

Elia Kazan was never forgiven for testifying before HUAC about his former communist associates. For a time, Lillian Hellman became a lesft-wing icon based on her defiance of HUAC. McCarthy compelling James Wechsler to do the same is one of the great crimes chalked up against him. Cooperative witnesses were labelled "squealers", "stool pigeons", "informers".

Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood 10 who eventually testified before HUAC made an interesting point to David Caute. By adopting the language of the gangsters, he said, the Communists were "in effect admitting they were engaged in criminal activity. I never heard of anyone informing on the Boy Scouts."

We are expected to affirm that the communists were pure as the driven snow -- sincere, patriotic, humane -- even as those innocent lambs adopt the secrecy and lingo of the criminal underworld.

These so-called victims of the "Red Scare" were not just asking for privacy. As William Phillips wrote: "First of all, some were Communists and what one was asked to defend was their right to lie about it."

In her autobiographical legend Hellman defied HUAC because she could not "cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion." Yet, for decades, right up until her death in 1984, Hellman had done everything in her power to hide her Stalinized conscience from the public and, chameleon-like, conceal it with poses and cover stories.

WFB:

What Lillian Hellman specialized in, during almost two bloody decades, was precisely in cutting her conscience to fit the whims of Joseph Stalin.

The public hearings could be an unpleasant performance: politicians grandstanding, contrite witnesses seeking absolution from the inquisitors, photographers angling for the photographs that would make the front page.

The spectacle is not the main reason critics find "naming names" distasteful. As Dymtryk said, their language betrays them; they are opposed to "informers" in principle. They do not want even the most sincere ex-communist to tell all that they knew. In their hierarchy of values "squealing" is worse than being a Stalinist.

When putative ex-communists refused to reveal their past associates in the underground, they were implicitly echoing E. M. Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Stalinism is bad, they say, but not as bad as embarrassing a friend-- even if that friend is working for Stalin.

It is anti-communism of the very softest sort.

In a very real sense, those who condemn the naming of names want the US government to adopt the security protocols that allowed the Cambridge spies to flourish in Great Britain. Information is not to be collected. Backgrounds are not to be scrutinized. No one is ever a suspect because every man can assert his innocence and there is nothing to contradict his assertion.

Anti-anti-communists are quick to downplay the value of the information that the witnesses could provide. In some cases, their argument is dishonest. Take, for example, New Republic publisher Michael Straight.

Nevertheless, when the issue of Soviet espionage became a heated public issue in 1948 and 1949, Straight, who knew from his personal experience that their stories were credible, published numerous articles harshly disparaging Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.

Haynes and Klehr, Spies

In other cases, this argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how effective intelligence and counterintelligence works. It is not a question of unearthing a single, big secret. Instead it is a matter of collecting and collating a vast number of individual bits of information. Information that may appear benign or innocuous to the individual can be incredibly valuable to the agency collecting and analyzing it.

Related:

Understanding intelligence
The real Bletchley Park

The parade of public witnesses had an additional salutary effect. The key whistle-blowers -- Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers chief among them -- were derided as mentally ill, mendacious, and as "professional witnesses". The attacks aimed to destroy their character and credibility. Hence, public testimony by other witnesses served to offset the calumnies hurled against them.

To oppose such testimony is to choose the vicious lie over the honest truth.

McCarthyism: Gatekeeping the narrative (2)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., unlike these other reviewers, was never part of the Marxist or Stalinist left. He was a liberal -- a Democrat in the vein of Woodrow Wilson and FDR. He was an anti-communist: he helped found Americans for Democratic Action to oppose the fellow-traveling progressives who were effectively pro-Stalin. In 1948 he worked tirelessly for Harry S. Truman and against Henry Wallace and his Progressive party.

And yet he described McCarthy and His Enemies as a "sick book".

Schlesinger, like his ADL colleagues, was naïve about the extent of Soviet penetration of the New Deal. They were solicitous of those accused by Bentley and Chambers. In 1948 the ADL called for the abolition of HUAC just as that committee was unmasking Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White.

At the end of his life Schlesinger was still defending Laurence Duggan despite new evidence that he was part of the Soviet network in DC. He still described Duggan as "a man whom many knew as an able public servant.”

Schlesinger served as a court historian for FDR and JFK. His loyalty to the Democratic party was deep. His anti-communism became muted and "nuanced" when investigations threated to embarrass the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Truman and his Attorney General had vouched for Duggan. The AG even declared he was "a loyal employee of the United States Government".

If Schlesinger had admitted that Duggan was part of a spy ring, then he would have had to admit the truth to McCarthy's charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were lax on security issues.

That was a bridge too far for the Democrats' favorite historian.

Schlesinger also had personal reasons to oppose a thorough search for Stalin's agents. During WWII he worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Both organizations were deeply penetrated by Soviet spies .

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger confidently announced that “we are changing from a market society to an administrative society.” For twenty years urban progressivism was in the driver's seat. FDR had won four elections while he expanded the federal government and staffed his alphabet agencies with intellectuals and the graduates of the best universities. Then unsuitable men like McCarthy and Nixon had garnered public support by attacking the competence, honesty, and loyalty of these same progressive avatars. (Here)

He clearly saw himself as a natural leader in that administrative class. The spy scandals threatened to call into question both the legitimacy of that regime and Schlesinger's own powers of perception.

The rise of Joe McCarthy was propelled, in large part, by the refusal of progressives and New Dealers to admit to any mistakes. Having claimed that social scientists and academic experts were better guides than the Founding Fathers, they were now revealed to be inept at the most important obligations of government. (here)

Hugh Trevor-Roper announced that he had been "convulsed with mirth" at the buffoonish investigation of the Voice of America by Roy Cohn in Europe in 1953. Recalling that episode he had no interest in looking at the evidence laid out by Buckley and Bozell. As Trevor-Roper was a historian, this refusal to take a look at the evidence is puzzling.

Trevor-Roper was a historian but he was also a former intelligence officer who served alongside Kim Philby in MI6. His most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, was the result of research undertaken at the behest of British intelligence. He enjoyed a close and cordial relationship with those intelligence agencies.

Like his former colleagues in MI6, he was more worried that a former communist might be unfairly accused of disloyalty than that a spy would betray his nation's vital secrets.

My own view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s Pact with Hitler in 1939. We were therefore pleased that at least one ex-communist should have broken through the net and that the social prejudices of our superiors had, on this one occasion, triumphed over their political prejudices. (Here)

British intelligence had good reason to fear and disparage McCarthy and other investigators. Not only had they placed spies in sensitive positions in Washington, they lied to their allies about their investigations. A thorough inquiry had the potential to destroy the "special relationship" ("special" to the US; absolutely vital to the UK if it wanted to remain a Great Power).

Dick White, now Chief of SIS, suggested that Trevor-Roper should write about the notorious spy himself. Once again it was White, the moving force behind The Last Days of Hitler, who appreciated that Trevor-Roper possessed both special insight into a topical problem and the literary skill to do it justice. Trevor-Roper’s The Philby Affair first appeared in a cultural magazine and then as an independent book. Like The Last Days of Hitler, The Philby Affair would never have been written without White’s prompting. His suggestion was part of a wider effort by British intelligence to deploy historians to offset the damage caused to the intelligence services by the media spotlight on security failures. (Here)

Even as Trevor Roper was downplaying the importance of the Cambridge spies and railing against unsophisticated American and their "malevolent" politicians, he was falling prey to Soviet disinformation. He was one of the first serious scholars to fall for the conspiracy theories swirling around the JFK assassination. His long exposure to the world of intelligence and traitors left him as naive as he was when he was a young don under the spell of Kim Philby.

Clio's final revenge was stunning. The man who first came to public attention for a book on Hitler, became a joke when he was conned into "authenticating" the forged Hitler Diaries in 1983.

McCarthyism: Gatekeeping the narrative

The frozen narrative of McCarthy's unique evil was not built solely with books like Richard Rovere's and Jack Anderson's. It also required the exclusion and dismissal of books which provided inconvenient research and perspectives.

In 1954 William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies. The bulk of the book is a deep dive into McCarthy's "public cases". The authors also have an incisive analysis of the trade-offs between individual rights and the need to protect government security and operations. Anti-McCarthy arguements usually, explicitly or implicitly, presume that government bureaucrats have a right to their job unless they can be proven guilty as in a court of law. For a variety of reasons, this standard is neither realistic nor desirable.

McCarthy and His Enemies also addresses the central point about the narrative which is now the most interesting question about the historiography of McCarthyism: What makes Sen. Joseph McCarthy uniquely evil? Why is his name a universal "malediction" among respectable pundits and historians? They provide plenty of examples of harsh rhetoric from esteemed liberals that rival McCarthy's "irredeemable" methods. <>

Seven decades later we still do not have an answer to those questions.

The introduction to the 1961 editions provides some clues as to how that narrative was formed and defended.

McCarthy and His Enemies was not ignored. It could not be-- it was a best-seller. Instead it was bushed off and mocked.

The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) brought out the big guns to knock down the idea that there any rational case to be made for McCarthy and his investigations. Elmer Davies, Richard Rovere, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Dwight Macdonald, and Hugh Trevor-Roper were among the marquee names chosen to delivers the message.

At the time that line up of critics seemed impressive. Knowing what we know now, they illustrate the intellectual dishonesty which marked the opposition to McCarthy and right-wing anti-communism.

Elmer Davies was an early and vehement critic of McCarthy. He also ran the Office of War Information during World War II. Under his watch Stalin's agents had free run to spread lies such as their cover-up of the Soviet's massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. When he returned to journalism after the war, he became an advocate for the innocence of Alger Hiss.

In short, Davies was stubbornly blind to the dangers of Soviet infiltration. To concede that McCarthy and his allies had a point was also to admit that he himself had failed as both a bureaucrat and journalist.

Richard Rovere worked for Stalinist publications before being reborn as a "respectable" journalist at the New Yorker. Like Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess he brushed aside his professional association with communism as a youthful foiable. No one questioned his suitability as a Washington reporter or biographer of McCarthy because he was backed by the towering prestige of the New Yorker.

Macdonald, like Rovere, was a man of the far-left. His anti-Stalinist credentials, unlike Rovere's, were beyond question. He backed Trotsky and denounced the Moscow Trials when the Popular Fronters were defending Soviet "justice".

His distaste for Stalinism did not translate into support for the US. He was a pacifist and deeply suspicious of all governments. If his worldview had a lodestar it was a commitment to high culture and a loathing for mass culture-- both communist and bourgeois.

Any movement with popular appeal, including McCarthy's was bound to draw his ire.

Macdonald did not address the evidence amassed by Buckley and Bozell nor did he counter their arguments. Instead, he mocked the book with a quip: ­McCarthy and His Enemies, he wrote, had "the general effect of a brief by Codwalder Wickersham and Taft on behalf of a picklpocket".

The jest is ironic coming from Macdonald. In a few years he would pen a ponderous 2-part "rebuttal" to a Tom Wolfe article mocking William Shawn and the New Yorker. The honor of his boss engaged Dwight Macdonald's interest; a factual record of the Tydings Committee he treated as a joke.

No wonder he is considered the perfect "New York Intellectual".

His review prefigured a common line of attack on anti-communism as new information emerged about the Stalinist penetration of the West-- VENONA, the Soviet documents, Mitrokhin's archives -- leftwing journalists and professors treated them as unimportant. They were only of "antiquarian interest". Only obsessives and spy hobbyists cared about them.

Mockery and disdain are powerful tools to keep unwelcome ideas out of the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN). Just ask Elizabeth Bentley.

As Buckley wrote in 1961, "documentation that tends to prove uncongenial points is not documentation, it is effrontery".

The New York intellectuals -- communist, former communist, and anti-communist -- were consciously gatekeeping the narrative around the issue of Soviet spies and and Stalinist subversion. Commonweal magazine asked Hannah Arendt to review Whittaker Chambers's Witness. Her friend Mary McCarthy wrote to her to make sure she understood what was at stake:

[Witness] can't be treated simply as a book. The great effort of this new Right is to get itself accepted as normal, and its publications as a normal part of publishing... and this, it seems to me, must be scotched if it's not already too late. What do you think? I know you agree with me about the fact, the question is how it's to be done.

Arendt's review gave Mary McCarthy no reason to complain. She denounced Chambers as an "informer" who "properly belonged in a police state."

John Dos Passos, who knew something about such things, described the reaction to Witness as a "moral lynching of Whittaker Chambers by the right-minded people of this country."

The lines were drawn. Anti-Stainism was OK as long as one remained on the left and was largely limited to words and manifestoes. Hard anti-communism was off-limits, especially if the anti-communist was on the right.

We can see how these lines still largely define the debate around the McCarthy era. In their book on the Amerasia case Klehr and radosh detailed how the Truman administration torpedoed on of the first post-WWII spy cases. Yet there were the obligatory denunciation of McCarthy in the book's conclusion. Similarly, Radosh (an ex-communist) was highly critical of M. Stanton Evans's biography and dismissive of any attempt to rehabilitate the senator's reputation.

What was odd was that review ran in National Review -- a journal founded by William F. Buckley -- a supporter of McCarthy (obviously) and a friend of Whitaker Chambers.