By D. W. BROGAN effort that the American people would
not have stood; that it would have meant, as a lawyer friend of mine, no dangerous radical, pointed out at the time, giving orders to Chiang, not mere advice, taking direct responsibility: acting imperially, is a truth that it is convenient to forget. The McCarthy explana- tion is simpler and more agreeable, for it absolves the American people of all blame, restores American belief in American power and provides a series of scapegoats.
It is now time to turn to the Senator. And the first thing to notice is that he is a much more adroit demagogue than his enemies, as a rule, give him credit for. For there were plenty of rivals for the job of being the saviour of the Republic from the reds. There are plenty of rivals now. But when it comes to stealing the show, no one, not Representative Velde, not Attorney-General Brownell, can really compete with Senator McCarthy. This is often attributed to his wild free-swinging style. But I doubt if the Senator is rash, really free-swinging. I have the impression that he is, instead, adroit, carefully careless, a man who knows very well what he is doing. In his revealing tract McCarthyism The Fight for America, the Senator's adroitness is plain enough. A careful lawyer or a careful historian can see the flaws in the argument, the questions begged, the incompleteness of the data. But Senator McCarthy is not aiming at eminent lawyers or historians. He is aiming at plain, blunt men and women. Then (and here the Senator's adroitness is again evident), Joe is a regular guy himself. When he 'attacks, scientists, State department experts, the President of Harvard or all elegant and wealthy senator like Millard T-ydings, he is appeal- ing to a popular emotion not confined to the United States. These superior types are made to appear fools or knaves. There is behind McCarthyism a good deal of social resentment, • a good deal of the animus of the groups from 'the wrong side of the tracks.' They are irritated (they are not the only ones to be irritated) by the fact that scientists are now indispensable and so many scientists are, from the McCarthy point of view, dangerous types. What if his investigation of the research station at Fort Monmouth makes it hard to get on with research '? Those guys have to be shown where they get off. What if a number of distinguished ex-ambassadors protest that the foreign service of the United States is being wrecked ? Wasn't that foreign service, at best, a bunch of cookie pushers and tea drinkers, at worst, of homosexuals and traitors ? What if all the American propaganda effort in Europe is made nugatory by the antics of Messrs. Cohn and Shine ? Europe is crawling with ` Commies ' anyway. The 'age of the commorl man' has its drawbacks and this is one of them.
But, and this tends to be neglected, McCarthyism inside the United States has other roots. There were secret CommunistS in high places. The Tydings investigation did lean over bac wards in giving the Department of State a clean bill of heal If it is a fault in the American people to shout 'we w betrayed' so ,loudly, it is a fault to forget that there w traitors, that the charges of communist penetration were merely a campaign red herring. It is vain to point 0 that other congressional committees work more effectiv and more fairly than does Senator McCarthy's. As long the ` liberals ' in America dodge the awkward fact t American policy and judgement were, to some degree, affect by blindness to the nature of world communism, Senat McCarthy will have things easier than he should or need ha Pepartment, despite the repeated charges that the Senator has cut his ethical corners rather fine' in his private life, he will remain a political force. He will remain a political force for the reasons given. He will remain a political force because, 1,_11 his own State, there is a great Polish colony that feels °etrayed; because there are, all over the Union, corresponding roups of Lithuanians, Czech's, Magyars, who feel that their losmen were sold down the river. He will remain important as long as he can guarantee that any statement of his will Provoke heated replies, from Mr. Truman down. He will ttlain important as long as the Republican Party finds, in Ills charges, a useful red herring. He will remain important as long as Europeans use his name as a symbol. , And if he is Wise, he will keep his vaulting ambitions out of sight, but lthough I have great respect for his adroitness, I ,have not flinch for his wisdom. He will, I trust, be his own worst enemy and we have seen how formidable an enemy he can be.
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