Profiles in Cowardice
Day of Shame. By Senator Charles E. Potter. (Coward-McCann, New York, $5.95.)
A FEW weeks ago the edited film of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Point of Order!, brought back into focus the great inquisition; both these books, written well after the events they discuss, are rewarding in quite different ways in illuminating the McCarthy episode. Charles Potter was a Republican senator from Michigan on the McCarthy committee, the Permanent In- vestigations Subcommittee of the Senate Govern- ment Operations Committee; he was also the first member of the subcommittee to publicise the army's charges against McCarthy and his staff—as a severely wounded veteran, Potter identified himself strongly with his former ser- vice. Potter also tends to emerge as the hero of his book. Here one must remark that the doyen of McCarthyologists, Mr. Richard Rovere, has recently asserted that it was the shadowy Tommy McIntyre, a disenchanted Potter aide, the Sam Spade of the Washington anti-McCarthyites, who put the real muscle into the Michigan senator (McIntyre is not mentioned in the book).
Nevertheless, there does emerge from this floundering narrative, whose leading characters seem almost without exception infected with an alarming, almost inexplicable, degree of cowardice in the face of the Wisconsin Communist-hunter, a persistent aroma of guilt . . 'all six of us who served under McCarthy's chairmanship [i.e., including such Democratic luminaries as Sena- tors Symington, Jackson and McClellan] must
carry on our records forever a fair share of responsibility for the whole disgraceful per- formance, particularly we Republicans.' When Potter visits Eisenhower on the perennial problem, even the President, the ultimate authority, can only wish he were back in the army:
'Charlie, what can be done right now?'
'Not a thing that I know of, Mr. President. . . . The time for action, for courage, was long ago . . . when this thing started. . . . I'm afraid a great many of us decided to live by the law of self-preservation. . .
'It was different in the army,' the President said. 'If a soldier was guilty of rebellion, he would be put in a stockade. . .
If only the buck could have stopped somewhere else.
Decade of Fear is a rather more detached view of the problem than Potter's sometimes in- coherent apologia; Professor Kemper has written a penetrating, important study of Thomas Hen- nings, elected Democratic senator from Missouri in 1950, and the whole problem of balancing the claims of civil liberties and security. Hennings strongly opposed McCarthy from the beginning, and was responsible, with Senator Guy Gillette, for the Senate report which listed in detail McCarthy's peculations, slanders, insults and assorted outrages. . . 'Since [the Gillette Hennings report] appeared at a time [January 1953] when McCarthy appeared least vulnerable, the report had no immediate effect. Later, when the behaviour of the Senator from Wisconsin be- came unbearable even to Republicans, the Hen- nings report provided the strongest base for a move against him.' Hennings, a member of the 'Senate Club,' was less an ideological liberal than a proponent of 'fair play,' and was probably a more effective opponent of McCarthy for not being on the doctrinal left. As the author sees, Henning's career in the Senate illustrates the fact that
the conservative-liberal or order-freedom dicho- tomies leave untouched much of the story of the 1950s. A third element, frequently the crux of the problem and often the decisive factor, entered these conflicts. More often labelled justice or fairness, it embraced such values as the right of an individual to seek employment on his merits and his right to an unsullied reputation. Concern for justice is not identical with the values of the liberal, though it is, usually, one of them. It antedates the rationale of democratic government and individual free- dom. . . . One can prefer order to freedom, yet favour justice over either; on the other hand, there are professed liberals who violate justice in their dealing with opponents. . . .
Kemper's study illustrates the complexities of Democratic politics in the 1950s. Hennings, al- though he supported the 'Fair Deal,' was not a typical Truman Democrat and won his Senate seat in 1950 over the opposition of the President, who supported Hennings's rival in the Missouri senatorial primary, an action widely believed to be 'partial payment of political and personal debts [Truman] owed to James M. Prendergast, an old army comrade who introduced Truman to Boss Tom. . . .' Thus the closely organised material in Kemper's study does much to eluci- date two great paradoxes of the American life in the 1950s. The first is that ultimately the most effective opposition to McCarthy as a nihilistic enemy of the established order came from such basically conservative senators as Hennings; and, secondly, that Truman was regarded by an in- fluential section of the Senate as a jumped-up Prendergast wardheeler rather than as the West's great decision-maker in the cold war's high noon.
DAVID REES
Previous page
