Antibodies at Work

MCCARTHY AND THE COMMUNISTS (163 pp.)--James Rorty & Moshe Decter--Beacon (paperbound, $1).

Few writers approach the subject of Joseph R. McCarthy with detached calm. Usually the face flushes, the voice rises and the hand on the typewriter quivers. In this short, well-organized study prepared for the liberal, anti-Communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom, James Rorty and Moshe Decter have maintained an even voice and a steady hand.

Authors Rorty (journalist and self-labeled Taft Republican) and Decter (former political editor for the Voice of America and self-labeled Stevenson Democrat) begin with the sound premise that in the Roosevelt and early Truman Administrations, a number of Communists and fellow travelers slipped into the Federal Government. This fact, Rorty and Decter point out, gave McCarthy a solid runway for his take-off as a Communist fighter in 1950. They grant that the furor caused by McCarthy did help to bring needed attention to the problem of Communist infiltration. But at about that point, the credit side of their McCarthy ledger begins to go blank.

Distortion & Display. From the first, Rorty and Decter point out, McCarthy "never presented any evidence of past or present membership in the Communist Party on the part of any of the persons he named in his lists." When he did have a good case, he damaged it by distortion. 'Thus McCarthy, instead of presenting Owen Lattimore as the skillful, effective and influential party-lining propagandist he was, characterized him as the 'top secret espionage agent' in America."

Rorty and Decter recognize the necessity of 1) a firm internal security system, and 2) congressional investigations of subversion. But they hold that Anti-Communist McCarthy has consistently used Communists' methods, e.g., the false charge of treason. In the process, they note, he has attacked a wide range of loyal and respected Americans, has seriously disrupted the operations of the U.S. State Department and the Army Signal Corps, and has diverted attention from the real problems of fighting Communism abroad.

Containment & Elimination. In the

process of skewering McCarthy, Authors Rorty and Decter reserve a few sharp thrusts for some of his critics--the breed described by Old Socialist Norman Thomas as the liberals "who may be reluctantly persuaded that Alger Hiss is guilty, but never can forgive Whittaker Chambers." Rorty and Decter completely reject the hysterical view that the U.S. is in the grip of McCarthy-inspired hysteria, or that the man from Wisconsin is the American Hitler.

Where will Joe McCarthy go from here? Authors Rorty and Decter have a calm and sensible answer: "The antibodies of the American social and political organism--aided by the new communications technology which proved its value so mpressively during the televised ArmyMcCarthy hearings--are already power fully at work. They may be trusted to contain and eventually to eliminate the demagogue from Wisconsin."

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