McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning
By William F. Buckley, Jr. and L. Brent Bozell.
Henry Regnery Co., 1954.
Hardcover, 425 pages.
The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm View of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
By William F. Buckley, Jr.
Putnam, 1962.
Hardcover, 352 pages.
Reviewed by Francis P. Sempa.
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their legion of critics. One only has to read the voluminous Venona papers or a series of books that explain Venona, or read M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History or Diana West’s American Betrayal, to understand that secret communists, agents of influence, and fellow travelers were ensconced in key government posts, media outlets, and cultural institutions, and effectively worked on behalf of Joseph Stalin against U.S. interests. Back in the 1950s, Buckley knew that Senator Joseph McCarthy was on to something and had the courage to write about it.
In 1954, after eighteen months of research, Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, authored McCarthy and His Enemies. By that time, communists, liberals, and anti-anti-communists had coined the term “McCarthyism” as a description of unmitigated evil, the foundation of the “Red Scare” that supposedly threatened American liberties in the late 1940s and early 1950s. James Burnham, whose book The Web of Subversion appeared that same year, had broken with the liberal Partisan Review crowd and opined that “McCarthyism” was an invention of the communists intended to stifle investigations into domestic communist infiltration of our government and society. Burnham, who would a year later become a senior editor at Buckley’s magazine National Review, said that he agreed with some of Senator McCarthy’s methods and disagreed with some of his methods—but the need to investigate the “web of subversion” was real.
McCarthy and His Enemies was not uncritical of McCarthy. Buckley noted in the introduction to the 1970 Arlington House edition that there are at least 66 criticisms of McCarthy in the 400-plus page book. It was intended not to confirm all of McCarthy’s accusations or to overlook his failings but instead to attempt to set the record straight about the truths behind many of McCarthy’s allegations and to highlight the danger of ignoring the enemy within. At the beginning of the book, Buckley and Bozell identified the problem: during the New Deal and the Second World War, “Communist after Communist worked his way into the assorted [federal] agencies,” and “there was no effective program to keep Communist agents out of sensitive government areas.” The authors referenced the Hiss case and the Amerasia case as examples.
Alger Hiss rose to the position of Assistant Secretary of State in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, despite the fact that both the State Department and the White House had been twice warned of Hiss’s ties to a communist cell within the government. The Amerasia case involved State Department employees providing classified documents to a pro-Communist magazine. President Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, instituted a security program designed to identify security risks within the department and screen potential employees for possible security risks. Subsequently, Secretary of State George Marshall and Undersecretary Dean Acheson, in the authors’ words, rendered the department’s security program “dead in its tracks.” Truman called the Hiss case a “red herring.” Acheson remarked that he wouldn’t turn his back on Alger Hiss, and Truman’s Justice Department dropped all serious charges against the Amerasia defendants. Buckley and Bozell characterized the security program at State during 1947-1950 as “three years of inertia.”
Buckley and Bozell then leveled this damning charge against Secretary Acheson: “the effect of the State Department’s inertia, and of its incorrigible insensitivity to the demands of national security, was the retention in positions of varying importance in the UN of dozens of American Communists and pro-Communists.” So when Senator McCarthy made his first serious public charge in Wheeling, West Virginia, about communists in the State Department, there were ample grounds to support what he said in general. The dispute was over the number of communists—was it 205 or 57? Recollections of people who heard the speech differed. McCarthy later settled on the number 57, but as Buckley and Bozell pointed out, McCarthy never offered specific proof that the number 57 was accurate. It was a “blunder,” the authors wrote, that proved costly to McCarthy’s legitimate and important goal.
Buckley and Bozell then addressed nine public cases where McCarthy raised security risk allegations against current or former State Department employees. In each instance, the authors carefully reviewed McCarthy’s specific claims and evidence, and showed where McCarthy was right and where the evidence had fallen short. In each instance, however, the authors concluded that McCarthy had presented a prima facie case against the accused that warranted further and deeper investigation by Congress.
What the authors do best in the book is to refute the “reign of terror” hyperbole that McCarthy’s critics then and now leveled against him as the instigator of the “Red Scare.” As Buckley and Bozell noted, McCarthy questioned the loyalty or identified as potential security risks a total of 46 persons. That is not an insignificant number, but it hardly amounted to a “reign of terror.” And as M. Stanton Evans pointed out in Blacklisted by History, many of McCarthy’s targets were communists or sympathetic to the communist cause. Venona and courageous scholars like Evans and Eric Breindel vindicated McCarthy in some respects, prompting Nicholas von Hoffman to conclude that McCarthy was closer to the truth about the nature and extent of communist infiltration of the government than his liberal critics.
Eight years after the publication of McCarthy and His Enemies, Buckley and the editors of National Review came out with The Committee and Its Critics: A Calm View of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Committee, known by the acronym HUAC, had become controversial for its alleged role in the “Red Scare,” and voices (mostly on the left but some on the libertarian right) called for it to be abolished (it lasted until 1975). Buckley and the contributors to this volume rose to HUAC’s defense, but not without criticizing certain aspects of its work. For Buckley, the key question was how the Committee’s work straddled the two important goals of effective national defense and an open society.
Buckley wrote that critics of HUAC, who acknowledged the importance of combating the communist threat, argued that the threat was exclusively “external” and that HUAC’s focus on the “internal” threat risked undermining our civil liberties. Buckley took this argument seriously, noting that all of the contributors to the book were “disposed to resist the accumulation by the state of any power which is unnecessary to the insurance, by reasonable measures, of the survival of our society.” HUAC was necessary, Buckley stated, because the scope of the communist effort meant that “the distinction between the internal and the external threat is unreal.” The extent of communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and early 50s was due to the willingness of some and the indifference of others to tolerating “an active conspiracy in our midst.”
Under what James Burnham (who contributed a chapter on the history of the investigative powers of Congress) called the “careless scepter” of Franklin Roosevelt, communist espionage cells, agents of influence, and communist sympathizers infiltrated New Deal agencies in the 1930s and various wartime agencies in the 1940s. Harry Dexter White, the number two man at Treasury, was a Soviet agent of influence. So, too, were State Department official Alger Hiss (who also conducted espionage) and White House staffer Lauchlin Currie. Soviet agents penetrated the Manhattan Project, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Office of War Information, among other agencies of government. There is some evidence that FDR’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins, was at least a Soviet sympathizer and possibly a conscious agent of influence. The Truman administration wasn’t much better at protecting the nation from communist subversion, as evidenced by its early responses to the Hiss case and its cover-up of the Amerasia case.
The book’s other chapters included a survey of twentieth-century subversion and the executive branch’s reluctance to police itself in this respect, evidencing the need for the type of congressional oversight performed by HUAC (Willmoore Kendall); a brief history of HUAC’s work (William F. Rickenbacker); a review of HUAC’s work in 1958 (Karl Hess); HUAC’s role in uncovering Alger Hiss’ treachery (Ralph de Toledano); HUAC’s procedures (C. Dickerman Williams); a proposal to reform HUAC (Irving Ferman); HUAC’s role in congressional legislation (George Crocker); and a record of the Committee’s publications between 1945 and 1960 (Ross Mackenzie).
Buckley added to this genre with biographical novels of Senator McCarthy (The Redhunter) and James Jesus Angleton (Spytime). The Redhunter received a very favorable review in, of all places, the New York Times. Buckley brought out the personal side of McCarthy, effectively countering the devil-like ogre that conventional wisdom paints him to have been. Angleton, who headed CIA counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, was a more difficult subject for Buckley, but Buckley managed to accurately portray the enigmatic spymaster’s talents and foibles that led to his undoing as he relentlessly searched for Soviet moles within American intelligence agencies. In Buckley’s novels, McCarthy and Angleton are two flawed characters who understood the nature of the communist internal threat. Buckley’s books, noted here—non-fiction and fiction—show that he understood the threat, too.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st Century. He is an attorney and an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University. His work has also appeared in The American Spectator, the Claremont Review of Books, and Human Events.
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