A Better World:

...He views them as a group whose attitude was strikingly similar to those exemplary anti-anti-communists gathered around Freda Kirchwey's Nation...

...The Communists were victims who were hurt more than any of those individuals they had once recruited...

...O'Neill distinguishes between the "progressive" views of the USSR and of China...

...Yet, he argues, it is wrong to smear the entire group for the sins of its extreme hard-liners...

...In reaching that judgment, O'Neill makes that element of the anti-Communist liberal movement look better than it actually was...

...O'Neill agrees that it was both wrong and vindictive to conduct punitive investigations of legal political activities, and to force people to lose their jobs because of their past activities...

...Those of the ACCF intellectuals who were soft on McCarthy, like Sol Stein and Max Eastman, O'Neill treats as mirror images of the fellow-travelers who were soft on Stalin...

...Actually, as O'Neill points out, the sin of the intellectuals was of a different caliber-if just as inexcusable...

...The area that will produce most of the controversy surrounding O'Neill's book, however, is his analysis of the blacklist years...

...They simply could not forgive Lattimore for his unrepudiated defense, in the mid-thirties, of Stalin's purge trials...

...The same people who offered the same stale apologias for Stalin, he points out, were actually right in their analysis of events unfolding in China...

...The problem was that men like Lattimore never gave up their illusions about Russia, and many of the anti-Stalinist left - like Sidney Hook - responded to McCarthy's false smear with satisfaction that one of their old enemies was finally getting torn down...

...would be rounded up in case of a national emergency...

...It includes writers like Upton Sinclair, the old 1912-era progressive Raymond Robins, the political scientist Frederick L. Schuman, liberal cold warrior Max Lerner, and the humanist philosopher Corliss Lamont...

...Thus O'Neill concentrates on dissecting the views of those who have sought to glamorize the victims...

...All of this will cause consternation among those O'Neill is criticizing or those still subject to fellow-traveling...

...Had this standard been widely upheld it would have been very difficult indeed to speak plainly about Communists or Communist-sponsored activities, which is what progressives wanted - and still want, it would seem...

...His prime target is Nation editor Victor Navasky, whose Naming Names was heralded in the intellectual and show-business community as a work that successfully put the blacklist experience in a moral perspective...

...Many Committee members would admit that McCarthy had defects, but not enough to matter...

...others while holding blinders pulled well over their eyes...

...Rather, it was "to discredit anti-Communism by showing the moral degradation to which it led...

...Moreover, Rovere gave his support to the Smith Act, as well as the McCarran Internal Security Act...

...This measure, he had argued, was "sound and necessary...

...It is salutary to be reminded how so many of the most erudite and learned American intellectuals not only gave the Soviet Union every benefit of the doubt - if they even admitted to having doubts - but offered the most grotestque rationales on behalf of despicable and indefensible behavior...

...All of William L. O'Neill's judgments are not equally valid...

...O'Neill also strains the evidence when he seeks to find common ground between Sidney Hook's formula for opposing the right of Communists to teach in universities - "Heresy, Yes...

...O'Neill is on less firm ground when he concludes that "despite lapses of judgment and taste," the ACCF record "was better than critics have been willing to admit...

...It is in his treatment of matters of contemporary import that O'Neill's book will be controversial, because he insists on challenging the common wisdom of the left on three major areas - its view of the blacklist in the entertainment industry...

...Inversely, O'Neill puts it, the ACCF group exemplified anti-anti-McCarthyism...

...But he and others like him, as Mary McAuliffe has argued, were willing until 1954 "to accept right-wing fanaticism from former radicals" in order to maintain an anti-Communist united front...

...Thus Partisan Review exaggerated in the early Cold War when it accused Stalin's defenders of being guilty of "shooting democrats of every shade and color...

...O'Neill is adamant that the Nation has been wrong not to take its share of the blame for allowing McCarthyism to triumph - since it never acknowledged the very real evils of Stalinism...

...Rovere even praised the horrendous internment provision in which, to use his words, "all Communists known to the F.B.I...

...Indeed, Rovere even wrote that he had no objection "to the test of guilt by association" as a mechanism for determining security risks, as long as such tests were "soberly applied...

...O'Neill asks that this role be maintained in our intellectual life...

...Its position, he argues, is akin to "a homeowner refusing to assign any responsibility to the fire in the house for the damage done by firemen...

...He performs it most ably himself.rforms it most ably himself...

...What the nation required," he writes, "was people who were not prevented from telling the truth by childhood misconceptions" that an honest declaration branded one a squealer...

...The intellectuals were important not because they influenced the policy-makers, but "because they helped erect the intellectual scaffolding of their time...

...William L. O'Neill addresses himself to the legacy left the intellectual community in the United States by those of its members who perpetrated that myth - some of them with conscious awareness of their duplicity...

...They often contradicted each other, at times even themselves...

...They will try to discredit O'Neill's analysis by dubbing him a neo-conservative...

...That scaffolding, O'Neill says, is still somewhat rickety...

...Rovere readily admitted it was a gross violation of traditional civil liberties, but he argued that the step was based on "the logic of politics" and met the test of a "clear and present danger...

...To Navasky it was bad to call a Communist a Communist because that was what witch-hunters did, because it degraded a person to be so characterized, and finally, because it denied the person a right [that] ought to be defended, that being the right not to be correctly identified...

...Both that journal and columnist Granville Hicks continually chastised liberals who had defended Lattimore...

...Yet, he writes that "Stalinism was an evil all the same, and the occasion for what followed...

...but what they held in common was the constant presentation of new arguments to endorse the Soviet Union...

...He points to the anti-McCarthy views of ACCF members like Dwight Macdonald, Richard Rovere, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Sidney Hook as his proof...

...On all the main issues involving Asia, Lattimore was, O'Neill writes, "re-(Continued on page 442) (Continued from page 439) markably on target" and even "prophetic" when writing about Vietnam...

...Navasky praised those who refused to talk before HUAC...

...and at times, the anti-Stalinist intellectuals overshot their mark when they counterattacked...

...O'Neill's book may also shed light on current debates about Communism and anti-Communism...

...Of course, these intellectuals did not hold power, did little to aid the effectiveness of Soviet foreign policy...

...What was at stake, O'Neill writes, was the "integrity of intellectual life...

...Certainly, the late journalist Richard Rovere was anti-McCarthy...

...its treatment of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the 1950's, and its overall hostility to forthright expressions of anti-Communism...

...Nevertheless, any errors of omission and faulty judgments are those of a thinker with the courage to challenge conventional shibboleths...

...O'Neill's conclusion that "as a practical matter Hook and Howe were close enough," seems off base, concentrating too much on abstract principles and less on the particular emphasis which in fact composed a great gulf between two men ostensibly on the democratic left...

...O'Neill argues instead that it is hardly Red-baiting to call a Communist a Communist, or to conclude that Communists called before HUAC might have done better to own up to their real beliefs and admit them, rather than to represent "themselves as simple liberals and patriots...

...Unlike Christopher Lasch, who viewed the intellectuals of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom(ACCF) as handmaidens of the corporate state and as unabashed McCarthyites, O'Neill attempts a more tempered estimate...

...With suchillogic offered by the very best of the ACCF intellectuals, Lasch's conclusion that the ACCF displayed a form of "modified McCarthyism" seems more convincing than the judgment reached by O'Neill...

...He was worse than a spy - which is what McCarthy had branded him - he was a "Lit Ag" (literary agent) of the Kremlin, who sought to fashion a pro-Soviet foreign policy...

...The list of fellow-travelers is long...

...O'Neill also does not sufficiently come to terms with the vengeance with which The New Leader, then a major spokesman for one wing of the anti-Stalinist liberal movement, carried out its campaign against Owen Lattimore - the China scholar who became one of McCarthy's major targets...

...While in this sense Commonweal and its audience cannot very well be placed among the "left," O'Neill's book may nonetheless hold a special interest for the readership of a magazine that was passionately involved in the disputes of the McCarthy period and in the problem of defining intellectual responsibility in politics...

...The existence of the Hollywood Communists as McCarthy-era victims, he argues, "does not absolve show-business Stalinists of political sin...

...Ronald Radosh Nearly forty years ago, George Orwell wrote that he was convinced that the "destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement...

...In dissecting their arguments, William O'Neill wields a scalpel that cuts to the bone...

...At times he overstates his case, and at other times fails to make critical distinctions among the group of anti-Stalinist liberals whose past views he discusses...

...When intellectuals abandon their calling and join the zealots," O'Neill concludes, "they give up a role they alone can play...

...Silence, he puts it, was the real' 'friends of McCarthyism, not the enemy as progressives believed...

...Lattimore, for one, argued early in the game that Chinese and Russian Communism did not have to march together hand in hand...

...Careful readers will note that O'Neill stresses that America desperately needs a "left wing of the proper kind," i.e., one that discards a crude anti-Americanism and that regards the well-being of the United States as a legitimate concern...

...O'Neill calls it simplistic to see informing as "the only sin and silence the only virtue...

...The New Leader therefore gleefully joined McCarthy in backing a purge from State of the old China hands...

...Thus, he says it is an error to deal with the blacklist years by simply praising those who refused to testify before HUAC and by condemning those who did...

...Navasky's real purpose in writing his book, O'Neill claims, was not simply to attack those who informed...

...Conspiracy, No" - and Irving Howe's critique of Hook's argument, a dissection that O'Neill admirably summarizes...