The Best of I.F. Stone Page 4

  No one can “clear” himself or defend himself fairly before one of these committees. James Wechsler’s experience before McCarthy should be demonstration enough of that. We are not dealing with men anxious to learn the truth or prepared to act honorably. We are dealing with unscrupulous political adventurers using the Red menace as their leverage to power. To try and explain to them that one is not a Communist is as humiliating as it is useless, unless one is prepared to go over completely to their service.

  At the same time these committees regard the invocation of the Fifth Amendment with equanimity. To invoke the Fifth is to brand oneself in the eyes of the public as guilty of any offense implied by the dirty questions these committees put. Those who plead the Fifth in most cases lose their jobs and reputations. This satisfies the committees, for their purpose is nothing less than an ideological purge of radicals and liberals from all positions of influence in American life and the demonstration to others that nonconformity is dangerous.

  Great faiths can only be preserved by men willing to live by them. Faith in free society requires similar testament if it is to survive. Einstein knows fascism at first hand. History confirms his statement that “if enough people are ready to take this grave step” of defiance “they will be successful” but that if not, “the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.”

  The path pointed out by Einstein is that taken by the Hollywood Ten and the directors of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, all of whom went to jail for contempt. But tactics that did not succeed at a time when the cold war was begun may fare differently now when it is ebbing away. The Supreme Court did not hear those earlier cases and there has never been final adjudication on two major points of attack against the committees. One is whether they violate the First Amendment by inquiring into beliefs and the other whether they violate the Fifth Amendment by arrogating to themselves the functions of a grand jury. Neither point can be tested until someone dares invite prosecution for contempt.

  This is the moment to try. Einstein has lent the world prestige of his name to such an effort. I propose an association of American intellectuals to take the “Einstein pledge” and throw down a fundamental challenge to the establishment of an inquisition in America.

  The First Welts on Joe McCarthy

  This article offers Stone’s appraisal of the start of the famous Army–McCarthy hearings, the Senate investigation that spelled the beginning of the end for McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunt. McCarthy made a serious tactical error when he accused the U.S. Army of harboring and promoting Communist sympathizers (and of mistreating G. David Schine, a draftee who’d been a member of McCarthy’s staff). The charges were so outlandish that President Eisenhower was finally goaded into publicly rebuking McCarthy; the dramatic Senate hearings that followed were televised live from coast to coast, exposing McCarthy’s dishonest and bullying personality to a disgusted public.

  . . .

  March 15, 1954

  BUDS ARE BEGINNING TO APPEAR on the forsythia, and welts on Joe McCarthy. The early arrival of spring and a series of humiliations for our would-be Führer have made this a most pleasant week in the capital.

  The events of the week are worth savoring. Blunt Charlie Wilson called McCarthy’s charges against the Army “tommyrot” and for once Joe had no comeback. Next day came the ignominious announcement that he was dropping that two million dollar suit against former Senator Benton for calling McCarthy a crook and a liar; the lame excuse promised to launch a nationwide “I Believe Benton” movement. Stevenson followed with a speech calculated to impress those decent conservatives who had grown disgusted with the Eisenhower Administration’s cowardice in the Zwicker affair.

  When McCarthy sought to answer Stevenson, the Republican National Committee turned up in Ike’s corner and grabbed the radio and TV time away from him. Nixon was to reply, and McCarthy was out (unless somebody smuggled him into the program in place of Checkers). While McCarthy fumed and threatened, his own choice for the Federal Communications Commission, Robert E. Lee, ungratefully declared he thought the networks had done enough in making time available to Nixon. Next day a Republican, albeit a liberal Republican, Flanders of Vermont, actually got up on the floor of the Senate and delivered a speech against McCarthy. That same night Ed Murrow telecast a brilliant TV attack on McCarthy.

  Under Stevenson’s leadership, Eisenhower rallied. At press conference he endorsed the Flanders attack, said he concurred heartily in the decision to have Nixon reply to Stevenson, asserted that he saw no reason why the networks should also give time to McCarthy. Like an escaped prisoner, flexing cramped muscles in freedom, the President also made it clear he had no intention of turning Indo-China into another Korea and even had the temerity to suggest that it might be a good idea to swap butter and other surplus farm commodities with Russia.

  The White House conference was no sooner over than Senator Ferguson as chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee released a set of suggested rules for Senate investigating committees which are no great shakes at reform but would, if adopted, make it impossible for McCarthy any longer to operate his subcommittee as a one-man show. These may be small enough gains in the fight against McCarthyism, but they were bitter pills for McCarthy to swallow.

  So far McCarthy’s colleagues on both sides of the aisle have been lying low. When Flanders attacked McCarthy, the Senate was as silent as it was some weeks earlier when Ellender of Louisiana made a lone onslaught and Fulbright of Arkansas cast the sole vote against his appropriation. Only Lehman of New York and John Sherman Cooper, a Republican of Kentucky, rose to congratulate Flanders. Nobody defended McCarthy, but nobody joined in with those helpful interjections which usually mark a Senate speech. When the Democratic caucus met in closed session, the Stevenson speech was ignored. Lyndon Johnson of Texas, the Democratic floor leader, is frightened of McCarthy’s Texas backers.

  Great issues are rarely resolved by frontal assault; for every abolitionist prepared to challenge slavery as a moral wrong, there were dozens of compromising politicians (including Lincoln) who talked as if the real issue were states rights or the criminal jurisdiction of the federal courts or the right of the people in a new territory to determine their own future. In the fight against the witch-mania in this country and in Europe, there were few enough to defend individual victims but fewer still who were willing to assert publicly that belief in witchcraft was groundless. So today in the fight against “McCarthyism.” It is sometimes hard to draw a line of principle between McCarthy and his critics. If there is indeed a monstrous and diabolic conspiracy against world peace and stability, then isn’t McCarthy right? If “subversives” are at work like termites here and abroad, are they not likely to be found in the most unlikely places and under the most unlikely disguises? How talk of fair procedure if dealing with a protean and Satanic enemy?

  To doubt the power of the devil, to question the existence of witches, is again to read oneself out of respectable society, to brand oneself a heretic, to incur suspicion of being oneself in league with the powers of evil. So all the fighters against McCarthyism are impelled to adopt its premises. This was true even of the Stevenson speech, but was strikingly so of Flanders. The country is in a bad way indeed when as feeble and hysterical a speech is hailed as an attack on McCarthyism. Flanders talked of “a crisis in the agelong warfare between God and the Devil for the souls of men.” He spoke of Italy as “ready to fall into Communist hands,” of Britain “nibbling at the drugged bait of trade profits.” There are passages of sheer fantasy, like this one: “Let us look to the South. In Latin America there are sturdy strong points of freedom. But there are likewise, alas, spreading infections of communism. Whole countries are being taken over. . . .” What “whole countries”? And what “sturdy strong points of freedom”? Flanders pictured the Iron Curtain drawn tight about the United States and Canada, the rest of the world captured “by infiltration and subversion.” Fland
ers told the Senate, “We will be left with no place to trade and no place to go except as we are permitted to trade and to go by the Communist masters of the world.”

  The center of gravity in American politics has been pushed so far right that such childish nightmares are welcomed as the expression of liberal statesmanship. Nixon becomes a middle-of-the-road spokesman and conservative papers like the Washington Star and New York Times find themselves classified more and more as parts of the “left-wing press.” In this atmosphere the Senate Republican reply to McCarthy’s silly “Communist coddling” charges against the Army is to launch a formal investigation of their own through Saltonstall and the Armed Services Committee. This will be the Republican and Army analogue of the Tydings inquiry into the charges against the State Department and will be greeted with the same cry of whitewash by the growing lunatic fringe behind McCarthy.

  There are some charges which must be laughed off or brushed off. They cannot be disproved. If a man charges that he saw Eisenhower riding a broomstick over the White House, he will never be convinced to the contrary by sworn evidence that the President was in bed reading a Western at the time. Formal investigations like Saltonstall’s merely pander to paranoia and reward demagogy. What if McCarthy were next to attack the President and the Supreme Court? Are they, too, to be investigated? Is America to become a country in which any adventurer flanked by two ex-Communist screwballs will put any institution on the defensive?

  McCarthy is personally discomfited, but McCarthyism is still on the march. Acheson fought McCarthy, but preached a more literate variation of the bogeyman theory of history. Eisenhower fights McCarthy, but his Secretary of State in Caracas is pushing hard for a resolution which would spread McCarthyism throughout the hemisphere, pledging joint action for “security” and against “subversion.” Nowhere in American politics is there evidence of any important figure (even Stevenson) prepared to talk in sober, mature and realistic terms of the real problems which arise in a real world where national rivalries, mass aspirations and ideas clash as naturally as the waves of the sea. The premises of free society and of liberalism find no one to voice them, yet McCarthyism will not be ended until someone has the nerve to make this kind of fundamental attack upon it.

  What are the fundamentals which need to be recognized? The first is that there can be no firm foundation for freedom in this country unless there is real peace. There can be no real peace without a readiness for live-and-let-live, i.e., for coexistence with communism. The fear cannot be extirpated without faith in man and freedom. The world is going “socialist” in one form or another everywhere; communism is merely the extreme form this movement takes when and where blind and backward rulers seek by terror and force to hold back the tide, as the Czar did and as Chiang Kai-shek did.

  There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means that there must be free play for so-called “subversive” ideas—every idea “subverts” the old to make way for the new. To shut off “subversion” is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war. American society has been healthy in the past because there has been a constant renovating “subversion” of this kind. Had we operated on the bogeyman theory of history, America would have destroyed itself long ago. It will destroy itself now unless and until a few men of stature have the nerve to speak again the traditional language of free society.

  The Cost of Anticommunism

  Stone uses some pathetically comic moments from the Senate debate on the so-called Flanders resolution censuring Joseph McCarthy as the vehicle for broader and deeper reflections on the malign impact of America’s anti-Communist paranoia on the nation and the world. Stone’s warning, “We cannot inculcate unreasoning hate and not ultimately be destroyed by it ourselves,” may be newly relevant in an era when the “clash of civilizations” and the “war on terror” sometimes seem to place Western “values” in a battle to the death against the billion-plus adherents of one of the world’s major religions.

  . . .

  August 9, 1954

  THERE WAS ONE SCENE, in the final minutes, before the tense galleries, after three days of debate on McCarthy, with tired and impatient senators crying “Vote, vote,” that would have entranced the creator of Babbitt. Capehart, that rotund Midwestern businessman, was on the floor in a final plea to table any resolution of censure. “There have been times,” Capehart told a Senate which could not have cared less, “when, if I could have gotten hold of him, I think I would have thrown him out. There have been other times when I thought, ‘By golly, there is a great guy.’” Capehart was maneuvering into position to agree with both the pro’s and the anti’s when he got back to Indianapolis.

  It was comic, as comic as Welker’s assurance that McCarthy must be a good man because he loved Welker’s children “and he loves the children of almost every other senator.” But amid the burlesque, Capehart’s main point faithfully reflected the confusions which haunt Main Street. Capehart declared “out of one corner of our mouths” we say we want billions of dollars to fight communism. We say, “We are going to send your boys all over the world. You may have a third world war.” Yet, Capehart continued, “on the other hand” we say, “We do not like McCarthy because he is a little too rough and a little too tough with these so-called Communists.” How explain that in South Bend or Little Rock?

  This is the heart of the Senate’s difficulty. This is why for the sixth time in six years (since the Malmédy inquiry in 1949) the Senate is wearily setting up yet another committee to investigate charges against McCarthy with no more prospect than in the past of a decision. McCarthy is resourceful, unscrupulous and wily, but the Senate is full of politicians as deft and clowns as crafty. They would have brought him down long ago if it were not for the dilemma created by our own demonology. If Communists are some supernatural breed of men, led by diabolic master minds in that distant Kremlin, engaged in a Satanic conspiracy to take over the world and enslave all mankind—and this is the thesis endlessly propounded by American liberals and conservatives alike, echoed night and day by every radio station and in every newspaper, the thesis no American dare any longer challenge without himself becoming suspect—then how fight McCarthy?

  If the public mind is to be conditioned for war, if it is being taught to take for granted the destruction of millions of human beings, few of them tainted with this dreadful ideological virus, all of them indeed presumably pleading for us to liberate them, how can we argue that it matters if a few possibly innocent men lose jobs or reputations because of McCarthy? Is not this additional cost too slight, are not the stakes too great? How contend for constitutional niceties while acquiescing in the spread of poisonous attitudes and panicky emotions?

  Writ in the skies of the H-bomb era is the warning that mutual destruction is the alternative to coexistence. Until there is a national leadership willing to take a pragmatic view of revolution, a charitable and Christian view of the misery that goes with the great rebirths of mankind, a self-respecting view of the example a free America can set and the constructive leadership an unafraid America can give, we cannot fight the drift to fascism at home and war abroad. We cannot inculcate unreasoning hate and not ultimately be destroyed by it ourselves. We who prate constantly of “atheistic communism” forget that this is what all the great teachers of mankind have taught. There is a retribution that lies in wait for the arrogant and the self-righteous. Where is the man big enough to reach the American people with this message before it is too late?

  Incommensurate Equation: Justice and Security

  Wolf Ladejinksy, a Russian-born naturalized citizen, had started his government career in 1935 working at the Department of Agriculture; by the end of the Second World War, he had become the head of the department’s Far East division, and from 1950 to 1954 he had been detailed to the State Department. However, on December 16, 1954, Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson announced that he was denying Ladejinsky a job in his
department, considering him a security risk. A departmental security office investigation had concluded that Ladejinsky still had relatives in the Soviet Union, that he had visited them in the late 1930s, and that he had once worked as a translator for a Soviet trade firm. For I. F. Stone, the Ladejinsky case illustrated the inevitable clash between the 1950s “fetish” for security and the American concept of justice enshrined in our constitution.

  . . .

  January 24, 1955

  IN THE GROWING UPROAR over the loyalty-security program, its critics still cling to a comfortable fallacy. They assume that it is possible to reconcile “security” with justice. They speak as if, by some reform of the rules, or better adherence to them, maximum security for the government and fair trial for the individual can evenhandedly be assured. Thus Mr. Walter Lippmann, in criticizing the President’s clumsiness in the Ladejinsky case, asserts the citizen’s right in such matters “to have the charge tried by due process” without stopping to consider whether due process is possible in such proceedings. How do you try the “charge” that a man once worked for Amtorg or has two sisters in Russia?

  If we stop to compare what happens in the trial of a crime with what happens in the trial of a loyalty-security case, we will begin to see that a more fundamental attack on the problem is necessary if the miasma of suspicion is to be dissipated. Here are some of the differences:

  1. The matter of proof: A trial deals with something that happened. A loyalty-security hearing deals with something that might happen. When a crime has been committed or attempted, objective proof is possible: a body, a cracked safe, a forged check, witnesses, may all be put in evidence.