A Machiavellian Views Subversion

...In The Managerial Revolution and The Machiavellians, he put forward, as a scientific politician, a number of hypotheses and made a good many predictions...

...To a degree, perhaps, everyone could be his own Burnham by consulting from time to time the extremely helpful book, Philosophic Analysis, which Burnham brought out in 1932 in collaboration with Philip Wheelwright...

...But though in The Machiavellians, in 1943, Burnham was contemptuous of the myth of democracy as it is used by what he called totalitarian democrats or the Bonapartists (represented in America at that time by trade-union oligarchs and Henry Wallace), he strongly urged the necessity of political liberty...

...Such reading may strengthen criticism of the committees, but it almost always results in a rather dramatic decrease in sympathy for the non-cooperative witnesses...

...The science was too reductive...

...There is a danger, of course, but it is necessary to examine the intentions of those who exaggerate it...

...Have we any grounds for inferring that equivalent cadres could be recruited to replace them in the anti-Communist atmosphere of the late Forties and early Fifties...

...Though he minimizes the importance of ideas when they oppose his thesis, Mr...

...Unless prevailing social ideas and practices can be freely criticized and challenged by alternative hypotheses, society will grow rigid and fail to adapt itself to change...

...Such is the nature of the operations of the Communist party that all evidence about its key work must necessarily come from informers??that is, from those who have seen it from the inside...

...The only really detailed information comes from Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, but they were party couriers collecting material for transmission to the Russians...

...They would have to be concerned with the material itself, in all its complexity, novelty and richness of meaning, and not with limited political purposes in the selective exploitation of it...

...Yet, those most opposed to "informers" are often intellectuals whose profession it is to inform and be informed, and who fight for freedom of inquiry in every direction but this...

...It is an old saying of the Soviet secret police: 'Any hack can kill a man...

...The highly dangerous Communist conspiracy is "neither a loyal company of Robin Hood nor a cheap gang of petty crooks...

...Machiavellians think in terms of force, fraud and control of state power...

...This limitation and isolation is especially noticeable in The Web of Subversion...

...Burnham makes much of the "sleeper apparatus...

...Presenting its far less extensive and revealing information about Communists in Government, the Senate subcommittee published a similar summarizing report in July 1953, called "Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments...

...At first, this short book doesn't seem to deal with ideas at all...

...And cannot even "sleepers" feel the effects of the times and decide not to wake up...

...Burnham, then, belongs with those who maximize the present internal threat of Communism in this country and minimize the harm that such politically motivated exaggerations may do to our ability to deal effectively with Communism on a world scale and in the future...

...If such identification succeeds, it will make quite impossible the kind of free discussion for which Burnham spoke earlier so eloquently...

...The public hearings have successfully exposed and rendered ineffective many of the most experienced and able Communists in Government service...

...They were nearly all born between 1904 and 1914, and recruited in the anti-Fascist atmosphere of the Thirties...

...He assumes, for instance, that the deaths of Laurence Duggan, Walter Krivitsky and Harry Dexter White were murders by Soviet agents for the very reason that they do not seem to be...

...If all those debating the question of Congressional investigations were required to read this very educational report, these debates would be on firmer ground and more valuable...

...This emphasis on logical analysis and on the contradictions and limitations of ideal systems Burnham carried into his political writing...

...Such treatment would have to fall between the books of James Burnham and John T. Flynn, on the one hand, and those of Walter Gellhorn and Robert K. Carr, in the Rockefeller-financed series published at Cornell, on the other...

...if it is weakened, Communism will rule the world...

...too many factors got left out...

...The facts are drawn almost entirely from published documents of the three bodies known popularly as the McCarthy, Jenner and Velde Committees and of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy...

...It is easy to see why Burnham, as a Machiavellian, makes this emphasis...

...In what it includes and what it leaves out, The Web of Subversion is inevitably more than a factual summary of what the investigations revealed...

...Burnham believes rightly that the United States is the mainstay of world resistance to Communism...

...But then he concludes that what we primarily have to worry about is the efforts of Communists to seize power within Government agencies by force and guile...

...Burnham gives them weight and consequence when they support it...

...With this material James Burnham does in The Web of Subversion very much what Flynn did with the IPR material in The Lattimore Story...

...Presumed Communists who held key posts in the Government and were able to exert influence have almost universally kept silent, invoking the Fifth Amendment...

...It is much better to read the report itself than John T. Flynn's rendering of it in The Lattimore Story...

...Our genuine concern for civil liberties" is referred to, but only in speaking of the "sly use" of it by Communism as "a protective shield for its own treachery...

...Such identification is the chief controversial weapon of intellectual McCarthyism...

...Presence" rather than "operations" of the Communists within the Government might be a more accurate term for what this book recounts...

...When they have made some admissions, as Lee Pressman did, they have managed to avoid making any genuine disclosures...

...The non-cooperative-ness of the witnesses leaves large room for inference...

...Burnham has not been content with detached analysis, however...

...Burnham writes is inconsiderable, if only for its play of mind, its clarification, and the way it unsettles the political pieties of the moment...

...What the book manifests is a basic skepticism, ready to enter into a working alliance with certain dogmas without, however, being dogmatic about them...

...Burnham also minimizes the effect of ideas and of changing political atmospheres on the strength which Communism can exert within the United States at the present time...

...To offset such "mythic" language, there is in The Web of Subversion no such emphatic endorsement of political liberties as occurred climactically at the end of The Machiavellians...

...A fair share of these turned out to be wrong...

...It is one of the best of all handbooks on the recurrent, never-solved philosophical problems of meaning and value, of the relation of the self to the external world...

...The book contains, moreover, enthusiastic endorsement of Medford Evans's The Secret War for the A-Bomb...

...Scientific politicians understand that, without effective opposition and criticism, those in control of power will not be forced to use it to best social advantage...

...As Burnham points out, the pejorative connotations of that word, much exploited by the Communists, are completely inappropriate in this case...

...Burnham, in selecting from their reports, goes them one better...

...Though they naturally have attitudes in common, his books and essays seem each a separate foray, a brilliantly conducted freebooting expedition in the realm of relevant political ideas...

...Among intellectuals who are critical of the committees??and certainly there is plenty to criticize??it is uncommon to find someone who has read extensively the transcripts of the hearings, though this would seem the first requirement before making a judgment...

...Despite the staggering amount of published sworn testimony, we know very little of how the Communists actually operated within the Government, how specific plans were worked out within the cells or fractions, what conflicts and crises arose, and so on...

...Parts of the nation's higher educational system have proved fertile breeding grounds for the spinners of the web...

...These have been analyzed and summarized in an intelligent report by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee...

...They were not themselves Government officials making decisions...

...Not because they are treacherous like Communists, but because, with James Burnham, we will conclude 'that they are mistaken in their predictions, false in their analyses, wrong in their advice, and through the results of their actions injurious to the interests of the nation...

...It is presented as a straightforward, condensed, highly factual account of the operations of Communists within United States Government agencies since 1933...

...He shows how they rose steadily from lesser to greater power, how they recommended and appointed and played ball with each other, and were able, some of them until very recently, to flourish despite the FBI and security checks...

...There is no attempt to give this its proper place in the total, complex struggle with Communism throughout the world, or even to relate it to the strategies he outlined in Containment or Liberation...

...Such re-presentation in book form is justified, of course, by the fact that the official committee reports are so little read...

...But the hearings have also shown how successful the penetration of FBI agents has been...

...In fact, he called his Machiavellians??by which he meant scientific politicians, undeceived by myth??the chief defenders of freedom...

...The political analyst must not be taken in by political myths or by the manifest content of political statements...

...it takes an artist to arrange a natural death.' " He accepts, again with no evidence, Med-ford Evans's inference that Communist agents stole parts of atomic bombs and assembled them in various American cities, ready to be set off when the right moment comes...

...So far, the most revealing picture of Communist modes of operation, of exerting influence, is found in the fifteen volumes of testimony having to do, not with the Government itself, but with the Institute of Pacific Relations...

...critic, contributor to many magazines With his keen, uncommitted mind and his flair for dramatic formulations, James Burnham produces sporadic political theses which have to be dealt with seriously and are exciting to deal with, though experience with a series of them suggests that it would be a mistake ever to swallow any of them whole...

...He uses, moreover, a literary manner which has little of the detachment of his analytic and scientific studies: "From the beginning of the century, the traditional values of patriotism, religion and the family had been weakening...

...An attempt to link Burnham with this has already been made in a much-quoted passage in Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies: "Some day, the patience of America may at last be exhausted and we will strike out against Liberals...

...Materialist and Marxian ideas had been creeping into the educational system, and into the set of ideas that were acceptable in educated circles...

...Despite some qualifications, The Web of Subversion brings James Burnham very close to those who are increasingly, in public controversy, identifying wrong hypotheses with objective disloyalty...

...Nor has Burnham felt the need, from book to book, to establish coherence and continuity, even of a personal kind...

...It defines the traditional approaches to these problems and shows their limitations...

...They got away with what they did because of the advantages of secrecy and unscrupulousness and party organization, and because of carefully fostered prejudices against Red-baiting and informing...

...That is reason enough to strive to free the conduct of the country's affairs from the influence of them and their works.'" Acceptance of the implications of this passage would lead directly to the totalitarianism, the unscientific absolutism of myths or ideas, the rigidification of power??all described in The Machiavellians??which would be fatal to our hopes of creating an intelligent, adaptable world policy for the difficult and unpredictable years ahead...

...The material is fascinating in itself, politically and humanly, and full of disturbing implications which cannot be fitted into older social and intellectual patterns...

...Burnham regularly infers a maximum of implication, conscious design and effectiveness on the part of the Communists...

...This had been preceded in December 1951 by a report of the House Committee on Un-American Activities called "The Shameful Years," a report of Soviet espionage in the United States and its use of American Communists...

...Sympathetic to philosophy and to the uses of reason, but without putting forth any synthesis of its own, it describes the presuppositions and methods of the major philosophies and indicates how the dialectic which each one employs "can be reversed and turned against the final views to which it has led...

...Under the influence of Marx and Pareto, he grew more and more impatient with those who thought that ideas played an initiating and constructive role in history rather than an instrumental and symptomatic one...

...Nothing which Mr...

...Burnham lists many men formerly in important Government posts who have been identified as Communists or close Communist sympathizers...

...The committees themselves, out of understandable political motives, always try to make the situation look as threatening and scandalous as possible...

...A good book??or a whole series of books??remains to be written on the investigations into subversion in this country and the ways in which they have obsessed us...