LETTERS
Editors: In Mr. Connolly's review of Kevin Phillips's Mediacracy (Winter 1976), he lists the "areas of greatest McGovern strength" as "New England, the upper Midwest, and the Pacific Northwest."...
...As Burnham saw it, democracy defined in terms of majority rule or government by the people was, a fraud, an impossibility, a myth...
...The combination of Communist dictatorships, theocratic Arab dictatorships, and economically dependent black African dictatorships are basically united in their opposition to the democratic forces inside their own borders...
...In contemporary usage, "neoconservative" labels those liberals who would not accept the "New Politics" shift during the mid-1960s...
...McCarthy was indeed an unpleasant individual, but he was scarcely in the mold of the totalitarian demagogue who operates, in Herberg's words, "with some idea or cause which he himself believes in yet perverts and exploits for his purposes...
...To condemn the Jewish survival doctrine of Zionism as racism is a travesty upon the truth...
...Two aspects of the recent U.N...
...Searching for a new "absolute," around which to center his life, Herberg then embraced Judaism, though still considering himself very much a man of the left and a democratic socialist...
...Sometimes they own an entire family...
...Webb finds "most disturbing of all" my alleged assertion that Herberg supported the McCarthy "inquisition...
...but democracy conceived as freedom or liberty ("a measure of security for the individual which protects him from the LETTERS 223 arbitrary and irresponsible exercise of personally held power") most definitely was not...
...Herberg's views on the Communist issue were really no different from those expressed by Sidney Hook (especially in Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No) or most of the moderate liberals who wrote for Commentary or the New Leader...
...And since none of this had previously appeared in any Communist document anywhere, J.C...
...Its religious basis probably offended most, and many would not have been too happy with its pessimistic and limitationist biases...
...and John Gates can honestly question my conclusions, but they can hardly say that they are based on gossip...
...When he learned that we actually lived in Algeria, he concluded that we were crazy...
...More damaging to his reputation with the left, Herberg argued that all Communists should be banned from non-Communist educational institutions ("Freedom and Loyalty in Economic Life: Labor," Christianity and Society, Autumn 1952, p. 12), and that the U.S...
...and in the early '40s rejected Marxism as well...
...With Herberg, in fact, the transition from Communism to conservatism was a long and drawn-out process lasting more than 20 years...
...constitutional democracy...
...In any case, any jobs that might be lost by men engaged in strip-mining would be gained by underground coal miners...
...To which Wolff replied that both Gates and Browder were full of baloney...
...whose whole approach is subversive of...
...But it is not a combination deserving of respect by people from countries enjoying democratic liberties and traditions of freedom...
...No one knows this better than black Africans living along the edges of the Sahara...
...and much more material of interest and importance to students of the subject...
...I assume the initials stand for Joseph Clark) reviewed my book, The Rise and Fall of American Communism, under the title of "Fact and Gossip...
...In the Pacific Northwest, Nixon carried Oregon with 55 percent of the vote, Washington with 60 percent, and Idaho with 71 percent...
...I, therefore, decided to write my analysis of the fate of Doran and Merriman on reasoning and probability based in part on the new published material...
...It costs substantially less to strip-mine coal than to bring it up from underground mines, so the companies engaged in strip-mining could well afford the cost of putting the land back into proper condition...
...Herberg, of course, was a strong anti-Communist—and an anti-Communist in a way that many on the left would disapprove of...
...The charge is totally without foundation...
...Unlike most of his colleagues, for example, he strongly supported the trade union movement and continued to hold Reinhold Niebuhr in high regard...
...But more important, the reviewer chose to latch on to a small and minor section of a book that contains dozens of heretofore unpublished documents, letters, and interviews...
...In Herberg's words, McCarthy was a "demagogue" and "rabble-rouser," "a crude and rather primitive plebeian" undermining the American constitutional system...
...Then followed specific instructions to the CPUSA on how to take advantage of this "predicted" event...
...Many Arab families, that can afford to, keep one or two black slaves to do their menial labor...
...unless he was deliberately trying to deceive, which does not seem very likely...
...Diggins might recall, the full title of Burnham's work is The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom...
...In the second conversation, Gates's description of the mysterious disappearance of Doran and Merriman was closer to what he wrote in his book but entirely different from what he had told me two years or so earlier...
...Webb claims I am "equally misleading" on the subject of James Burnham...
...Once I pressed an Algerian official for an explanation of the status of these people, and he ended up describing a complicated form of indentured servitude...
...Buckley's Comrades: The Ex-Communist as Conservative," Fall 1975), his analysis as a whole is marred by several errors of fact and interpretation...
...PHILIP J. JAFFE New York JOSEPH CLARK Replies: Jaffe's claim that only in the cables to Browder did Moscow reveal the fateful news that the war spelled the end of capitalism is fanciful...
...Connolly calls Phillips "essentially right" in some of his analyses (though abhorrent in his values), I can't resist blowing the whistle on this important inaccuracy...
...sensational quotations from unpublished stenograms of nine different National Committee meetings...
...Once again, such opinions, though condemned by most radicals, hardly make one a supporter of the McCarthy inquisition...
...He emphasized the conspiratorial nature of Communism and felt that it posed an enormous threat to America and the West...
...had to be aware that this part of the documents was not old hat...
...Most disturbing of all is Diggins's assertion that Will Herberg was a supporter of the McCarthy inquisition in the 1950s (pp...
...Herberg's theologically grounded socialism, of course, was not to the taste of all radicals...
...My chapter, furthermore, describes in quotations how Browder translated these instructions for the faithful...
...Herberg, moreover, mocked the tendency of many anti-McCarthy spokesmen to defend automatically and without reflection anyone accused by the Senator...
...It was as a moderate liberal that he wrote his articles on the McCarthy controversy...
...By the early 'SOs, Herberg had eased further to the right, to a position that could best be described as moderate or revisionist liberalism...
...First, I didn't ignore that priceless suggestion from Moscow, but wrote in my review that the Moscow cable said: "anti-fascism was out, 'the overthrow of all imperialists' was in...
...According to him, both Doran and Merriman were with him in a battle many miles south of Teruel...
...He then described the incident in some detail...
...DOUGLAS WEBB West Hill, Ontario/Canada J. P. DtociNs Replies: Mr...
...Complete freedom, of course, did not exist in any society, but it made a profound difference whether one lived under a totalitarian dictatorship or in a country where most liberties were preserved...
...But what J.C...
...Not only did Herberg not endorse or even tacitly condone the Senator's activities, he specifically condemned McCarthy and McCarthyism in the two articles he wrote on the subject: "Government by RabbleRousing," New Leader, January 18, 1954, pp...
...If the purpose of a reviewer is to give the reader a reasonably accurate knowledge of the contents of a book, an honest balanced judgement of J.C.'s review of my book can hardly justify the tide "Fact and Gossip...
...Diggins's eyes is a commitment to radicalism before 1945 and a later affiliation with National Review, then such former leftists as Lewis Feuer, William Petersen, and Selden Rodman, all of whom began writing for NR in the 1970s, might as well be considered McCarthyite intellectuals too...
...However, in the last few years, several books on the Spanish Civil War have appeared that added some new material though not specifically on the fate of the two men in question...
...But just because Herberg was a radical in his younger days and is now associated with National Review does not mean that his journey to the right was identical to theirs...
...In this period, of course, Herberg began to express a certain sympathy for the conservative position, but the conservatism he found congenial was the anti-McCarthy "new conservatism" of Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter, not the conservatism of Buckley and the Freeman- National Review crowd...
...There would also be a good many thousands of new jobs created by putting the land devastated by strip-mining back into proper condition...
...It is a combination that must be struggled against...
...I have the deepest sympathy for the Palestinian people in their search for justice, but I see no net gain for freedom and human dignity in the world if power blocs, because of their ability to underwrite sagging economics for a season, are able to ram through the U.N...
...Then I met Major Milton Wolff and told him what Gates had described to me and what Browder had told me...
...fails to mention is by far the most important sections of these documents—namely, the paragraphs that state very clearly that the war that began only three weeks before the messages were sent to Browder spelled the end of capitalism...
...resolution labeling Zionism as racist both shocked and surprised me...
...Only at the end of the decade and in the early '60s did Herberg formally identify himself with the right...
...Editors: In John P. Diggins's unbiased and otherwise unexceptible `Buckley's Comrades," one must quibble with his use of the term "neoconservatives" to label the exMarxists who went over to the right before 1950...
...Eds...
...Perhaps this is merely an example of a reviewer conveying without comment the gist of the book being reviewed...
...In contrast, although Nixon carried California with 57 percent (three percentage points below his national average), McGovern carried eight Californian congressional districts—four in the north (Sacramento, San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Jose) and four in the south (all in Los Angeles...
...To escape annihilation by Franco's forces, Major Wolff's contingent fled into the forest behind them and the last he saw of Doran or Merriman was as they were fleeing through the woods...
...Webb also feels I slighted Herberg's rich and varied ideological career...
...Editors: In the Fall 1975 Dissent J.C...
...13-15...
...This gives them a lot in common and lots of room and motivation to wheel and deal among themselves...
...13-16 & "McCarthy and Hitler: A Delusive Parallel," New Republic, August 23, 1954, pp...
...The argument was wrong...
...resolutions repugnant to human reason and historical fact...
...In the earlier of the two conversations, his description of what happened to these two men differed considerably from the story as it appeared in his book...
...q Editors: When President Ford vetoed the bill passed by Congress to control strip-mining of coal, and to require the companies that were strip-mining to put the land back into decent condition for agricultural or other uses, he argued that the bill would cost 36,000 jobs...
...On the other hand, Herberg's flirtation with the McCarthyite logic of "either-or" emerges in his debates with Daniel Bell and Sidney Hook during an "Ethics of Controversy" discussion held at the Tamiment Library in 1952, the minutes of which I found in the files of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom...
...Joining National Review as contributing editor in 1961, however, did not mean that he gave retroactive sanction to the magazine's earlier pro-McCarthy stance, nor did it mean that he necessarily agreed with some of the more belligerent right-wing views of the other editors...
...It must be clear that an analysis based on such statements by Browder, Wolff and even Gates can hardly be said to be based purely on gossip...
...On the right, as the left, sectarianism demands scrupulous care in nomenclature...
...As to the unsubstantiated gossip about the execution of Doran and Merriman, Jaffe gives us more gossip...
...Again I think this is a matter of mistaking a compressed article for a complete statement...
...If Will Herberg was a McCarthyite in Mr...
...In decrying the Senator's activities, he pointed out that demagogic appeals through the 222 LETTERS mass media had actually originated with "the Great White Father" of American liberalism, Franklin D. Roosevelt— a statement that could hardly sit well with many progressives...
...Gates informed me, when I read Jaffe's letter to him, that he never told Jaffe, or anyone else, anything but the account that appears in his (Gates's) book about Doran and Merriman, and which I reported in my review...
...Early in the review, J.C...
...By insisting on the innocence of every victim, such "liberals," he believed, only made themselves look ridiculous when they found their faith misplaced...
...Herberg had no easy time getting to the other side, and it is a measure of his intellectual honesty that once he got there he would still be discontented with 'what passes for conservatism in contemporary American politics...
...Second, this ineffable command had already appeared in Communist publications all over the world by the time the cables arrived here...
...At about the same time, Earl Browder himself told me that while he was in Spain he was informed that both Doran and Merriman were executed without a trial by Andre Marty...
...0 We reprint a portion of an article that was written by Eldridge Cleaver from his prison cell in California and published in the Boston Herald-American...
...Herberg did not write for an explicitly conservative publication until 1959, and he did not become a regular contributor to National Review until the fall of 1961—long after the McCarthy furor had subsided...
...In the Dissent article I suggested that Herberg, like many exradicals, found himself in the awkward position of supporting the "logic (or illogic)" of McCarthyism while disapproving of the Senator's "methods...
...Why did he omit it from his review...
...Herberg also criticized the hysteria with which many on the left reacted to McCarthy...
...Eugene 221 Varga's dispute with Stalin on the nature of capitalism...
...372...
...This, in a way, was a saving grace, according to Herberg, for the very hollowness of McCarthyism made it "in the long run far less dangerous than it would be were it genuinely an 'idea' movement...
...government did need a comprehensive security system—though Herberg also felt that loyalty oaths were largely useless and any security program had to be "scrupulously non-partisan and free from the corruptions of political exploitation and rabble-rousing...
...With Herberg, in fact, the transition from Communism to conservatism was a long and drawnout process which lasted more than twenty years...
...McCarthy, by contrast, operated with no positive idea, Herberg argued...
...they are careful to keep their distance from the premature antiliberals of Buckley and company...
...As for the Senator's backers, such people were not real conservatives at all, Herberg felt, but rather ''radicals...
...Once while traveling through Bamoko, Mali, a cab driver flew into a rage when we asked him to take us to the Algerian embassy...
...I suggest that Mr...
...Shocked because, of all the people in the world, the Jews have not only suffered particularly from racist persecution, they have done more than any other people in history to expose and condemn racism...
...302) 1 wrote of Herberg: "His path to conservatism was a long and arduous ordeal, and if it has taken us some distance to trace his intellectual footsteps, it is because his path took so many interesting turns: personalism, humanism, pluralism, Judaism, neoorthodoxy, existentialism, and, finally, historicism...
...Indeed, in their fury, they were becoming "ever more crude and primitive, exhibiting modes of behavior that arouse very disturbing memories of the recent past...
...an original analysis of the Soviet-German Pact...
...The second half of J. C. 's review discusses only one part of my story of the Spanish Civil War...
...In my book (p...
...I have seen such slaves with my own eyes...
...He was right, although I didn't find out until later...
...See pp...
...What Gossip...
...It is this that he terms "unsubstantiated gossip...
...Eldridge Cleaver q...
...But President Ford evidently did not realize these very plain facts...
...The conversation broke up when told him that it was nothing but a hypocritical form of slavery...
...280-82 of my book...
...No one denies that there are striking parallels between Herberg's intellectual career and the odysseys of Max Eastman, James Burnham, and John Dos Passos...
...Diggins is equally misleading...
...Of course, J.C...
...If Jaffe misquoted Gates to Wolff about the incident, and if Wolff replied "baloney," Gates informed me Wolff would be justified in calling Jaffe's gossip, baloney...
...On another, though less vital, issue, Mr...
...Contrary to some excited statements, legal and constitutional procedures had not broken down in the United States...
...Generations of Jewish social scientists and scholars have labored long and hard in every field of knowledge, from anthropology to psychology, to lay bare and refute all claims of racial inferiority and superiority...
...In their excitement, Herberg contended, the McCarthyite nationalists were "rapidly losing all sense of proportion and rendering themselves incapable of making the most elementary distinctions— such as the distinction between the Communist entrapper and the dupes he entraps, between the Communist and the ex-Communist, between conspiracy and heresy...
...Having lived intimately for several years among the Arabs, I know them to be among the most racist people on earth...
...The points Webb raises are fully discussed in both my book (pp...
...Diggins's definition, then so too were Professor Hook and many others...
...374, 375...
...Of the 13 congressional Districts in these three states, McGovern carried only one—Oregon's Third (Portland), by a slim 52 percent...
...I could not agree more...
...As Mr...
...Eastman and his friends, after all, were all identified with the right by 1950...
...Discussing James Burnham's career, he argues that Burnham in The Machiavellians set out "to prove that democracy and freedom are 'myths"' (p...
...comments at length on the matter contained in the two secret coded documents that Earl Browder received by radio from the Comintern at the end of 1939...
...Therefore, what's all the excitement about...
...In this section, I deliberately omitted mentioning names...
...Editors: Though John Diggins makes a number of valid points in his recent piece on the ideological odysseys of Max Eastman, James Burnham, et al...
...If the only qualification for being a McCarthy supporter in Mr...
...These are not the views of a contributor to the Nation or Dissent, but I fail to see how they could be construed as those of a McCarthy sympathizer...
...303-15, 411-22, 441-42) and in a forthcoming article, "Four Theories in Search of a Reality: James Burnham, Soviet Communism, and the Cold War," to appear in the June issue of the American Political Science Review...
...Diggins apparently had been so blinded by the similarities between Herberg's intellectual biography and those of Eastman et al., that he has failed to make basic distinctions and to view events in proper historical sequence...
...Man," he said irritatedly, "don't you know that the Arabs still have black slaves...
...Herberg, of course, did not offer a conventional leftwing critique of McCarthy...
...McCarthy was not another Hitler, he argued, nor was McCarthyism an American version of fascism...
...Second, I am surprised that the Arabs would choose to establish a precedent condemning racism because it can so easily and righteously be turned against them...
...Diggins reread The Machiavellians, particularly pages 265 to 287, for he seems to have missed one of the main points of the book...
...if it is not to prove more destructive to ourselves than to the enemy (''Loyalty and Security in Historical Perspective, "New Republic, April I1, 1955, p. 22...
...282-84 of my book, Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History...
...Along with the other Lovestoneites, he repudiated Bolshevism in the late '30s...
...However, not only had I read The Story of an American Communist by John Gates, a man I admire for what he did in 1957, but I also had two conversations with him, about two years apart, on the question of what happened to Dave Doran and Robert Merriman...
...The two Herberg articles that Webb cites, which are indeed sophisticated critiques of the demagogic component in McCarthyism, are fully discussed on pp...
...But since Mr...
...He describes the material in them as old hat, saying that everything in them had already been in print throughout the Communist world...
...In 1972, George McGovern carried some of the major cities of the Pacific coast—north, central, and south...
Vol. 23 • April 1976 • No. 2
