THE BIGGEST SMEAR
HERE is no point in pretending that the White affair does not dismay friends of America as much as it must delight, on the one hand, its enemies abroad, and, on the other, Senator McCarthy and his like. Consider the sequence of events. The case is opened and the dismal situation created by the Attorney-General of the United States, Mr. Herbert Brownell, who in the course of a party political speech accused two men, one dead and the other the former President, of treason in the first case and of something not far short of it in the second. The late Mr. Harry Dexter White, said the Attorney-General, was a Soviet spy, and Mr. Truman knew that he was a Soviet spy when he appointed him executive director of the International Monetary Fund. It seemed obvious last week that the Attorney-General's sole purpose in opening this extraordinary and belated attack on the former President was to arrest the electoral swing away from the Republican Party, and subsequent events have con- firmed this. The chairman of the Republican national com- mittee, Mr. Leonard Hall, said openly in a television programme on Sunday that his committee knew that the Attorney-General was going to make the speech in question and had arranged well in advance to make political capital out of it. Having smeared Mr. Truman, done the necessary damage to the Democratic Party, and made the immediate political capital in California, Mr. Brownell drew back slightly, saying that it was never his intention to impugn the loyalty of any high official of the prior administration. In the light of his original statement, this is less than convincing.
Mr. Brownell may say, " I hope and pray that I have rendered a public service," but it is unfortunate that at this stage in history the chief legal officer of the U.S. Government should resort to such a desperate remedy for his party's ailing fortunes. It is unfortunate that the President of the United States should allow such a charge against his predecessor to go forward. No one is likely to believe that Mr. Truman was disloyal in any sense to the country of which he was such a distinguished and courageous President. It is true, certainly, that many Communists and fellow-travellers infiltrated into the Roosevelt and Truman Administration (although one must remember that this was in the days before the Cold War) and it may be true that Mr. Truman was lax in the case of Mr. White. But to suggest, or to allow it to be suggested, that Mr. Truman was guilty of anything worse than laxity is more than anyone outside McCarthy's camp can swallow. Mr. Truman in the course of his broadcast twice called the Attorney-General of the United States a liar. The provocation was great.
America is much concerned about the existence of Communists in high places, but, unlike Britain, has evolved no method of dealing with the problem that will not split the country in two as the Hiss trial split the country and as the White case splits it now. The problem is itself real, but the American way of tackling it ensures a bewildering crop of unrealities. Was White guilty of espionage ? How dangerous was Mr. Truman's laxity, if laxity there was ? • One way to make certain that these questions are not answered is to start a ding-dong battle in public, with party politics clouding the issue hopelessly. What are the facts 7 They can never be known in full, since White is dead, and it is this above all which gives the Attorney-General's conduct its dangerously irresponsible character.
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