The Redhunter and The View From Alger's Window

I agree with you about the merits of Buckley's novel. It is a tough read, heavy and plodding, without any real juice to it. Not the kind of book you want to take to the beach while on vacation. As for Buckley's take on McCarthy, it is true that he doesn't answer the questions you raise. But by having his mythical character Lord Alex Herrendon get blacklisted for having signed a petition in the '30s for the National Consumer's League, while the FBI et al. were unaware of the real danger he was engaged in--that of spying for the Soviets--Buckley seems to be saying, so what if McCarthy got them for the wrong reason and exaggerated. So many of his targets, after all, were probably spies who were never caught.

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However, McCarthy leveled his sights on many liberals, even anti-Communist liberals who were neither hidden Communists nor spies. The book does not show us the Joe McCarthy who interrogated and pilloried the fiercely anti-Communist editor of the New York Post, James Wechsler, whom Joe accused of secretly writing anti-McCarthy editorials for the Communist Daily Worker, and of opposing the Reds in his own paper just to confuse his audience. Indeed, how could anyone have taken this seriously? How and why, as you ask, did Joe attack someone beyond reproach like General George Marshall? Why did anyone believe all this?

The first answer, I think, is precisely that so many in America refused to take seriously the tough reality--that there was a legitimate issue of Communists in government who posed a real security risk. Just last week, Albert Vetere Lannon, a left-wing historian and son of a mid-level Communist maritime trade unionist in Maryland and New York during the '40s and '50s, revealed in an Internet discussion group, H-Labor, that, and I quote,

some Reds spied, and some, like Party organizers under my father's direction in Maryland, were told to prepare for sabotage when the US and the USSR went to war, and my father believed that socialism would have to come with the help of the Red Army, the same Russian commissars who trained him in clandestine work and sabotage at Moscow's Lenin School.

The second reason is that McCarthy filled a void. After all, it was not only Alger Hiss who perfected the art of the smooth lie. Lillian Hellman masqueraded as a First Amendment absolutist--a Nat Hentoff type--while all the time she was a card-carrying Red, a perpetual liar about everything, and an unabashed defender of Uncle Joe. Lester Cole, one of the Hollywood Ten, confessed in his autobiography that when he ran for office in the Screen Writers' Guild, during the early '40s, he always denied he was a Communist lest he give the reactionaries ammunition. Better to pretend to be a good progressive. And those who were open Communists, such as Lannon's father, lied about their real agenda and pretended to advocate the peaceful road to socialism. It took your liberal friends only a few decades to decide Hiss was probably guilty, and you still aren't sure. No wonder that when McCarthy came along, people were not skeptical about his claims of who was a Red and didn't accept the denials of men like Owen Lattimore.

As for those in government, the scores of Venona documents give the final proof that so many Communists indeed did pose a risk. They were passing documents to Moscow, giving testimony about what transpired in secret official meetings, and doing whatever they could for Stalin. When you have a good number of Soviet agents and CP members in the OSS during World War II, as well as secret Communists in both the State Department and the White House--whose loyalty was not to the United States--it is clear that a very real issue existed. The problem was that the issue was never faced. Recall that when Chambers told A.A. Berle about the CP underground, nothing was done. When the public learned after the war that the Soviets had the A-bomb, that China had gone to Mao and the Communists, and that war had broken out in Korea, it became quite easy for a demagogue like McCarthy to use the frustration that a preventable problem had not been dealt with as a latch with which to gain political notoriety and power.

As for Alger Hiss, I can't buy your claim to be an agnostic about his guilt or innocence. You write that he acted "as if he had never met a Communist his whole life, which is hard to believe." That is not hard to believe; it's impossible! Hiss' story didn't hold water for the reason you claim--that unlike Chambers, he had no convincing narrative--but because the mountain of evidence implicating him had simply become too large and substantive to ignore any longer. As for narratives--both your editor Victor Navasky and Ellen Shrecker have asked the remaining people named in Venona to present such a narrative, and explain what they were doing and why. But as you know, they simply refuse to even address the issue. Maybe you can phone Victor Perlo and Harry Magdoff. Perhaps they'll explain all to you.

As for the homosexual issue, what's your point? Is gay-baiting OK when the targets are anti-Communists, but not OK when they are liberals? None of this, of course, vindicates Joe McCarthy. His attacks on Marshall, Acheson, and Truman remain as despicable as they ever were, Bill Buckley notwithstanding. But what the real risk of Reds in government does vindicate are measures such as the Truman security program for government employees, as well as the Justice Department's decision to indict and try Hiss for perjury. And it vindicates the anti-Communist liberalism that the folks at The Nation magazine have tried to undermine for the past few decades. At this late stage, isn't it time to finally get rid of the Popular Front apologetics for Soviet spies and hard-line Communists?

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Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and the author of Who Speaks for America? (click here to buy the book). Ronald Radosh is senior research associate at the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University and co-author, with Harvey Klehr, of The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (click here to buy the book). This week they discuss The Redhunter: A Novel Based on the Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy, by William F. Buckley Jr. (click here to buy the book), and The View From Alger's Window: A Son's Memoir, by Tony Hiss (click here to buy the book). Addendum: William Buckley Quotes Himself in Self-Defense

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