LETTERS
Inquiry Editors: I am making a film about John Reed (the author of Ten Days That Shook the World) and Louise Bryant (his wife) and I would appreciate contact with anyone who knew either of...
...Is there, incidentally, a hot-eyed way of reporting statistical conclusions...
...If this distinction means anything, it means that such "forms" as the Bill of Rights, federal statutes of every kind, our system of checks and balances, and the Constitution itself are somehow less worthy of defense than what Pachter calls "the substance of democracy...
...Then, why the overwhelming drive for budget reductions and tax cuts...
...I was told of Hiss's separation at the time the case became public by people in the State Department who, as I reported, remained sympathetic to him, seeing him as the victim of past associations in a much earlier and different political climate...
...Truman's man was Tom Clark...
...Rodney knows, I might have changed my mind after reading the sources he mentions...
...Rodney fails even to get Victor Navasky's name right, nor does he mention Weinstein's crushing rebuttal in the New Republic (April 29, 1978), nor the more recent refutations of Navasky and two other critics in the March 1979 issue of Encounter...
...opposed General MacArthur's wish to extend the Korean War to China and, at least initially, even to North Korea above the 38th parallel...
...Rodney needs to be reminded that the Truman administration invited the Soviet Union itself and Eastern European governments dominated by Communists to participate in the Marshall Plan...
...In addition, as would be expected, over 80 percent felt that the tax burden was too heavy on the "little man" and the "rich get the breaks...
...However, the various constituents of the left have to, as always, examine how much of the fault is in ourselves...
...In the long run," as Mr...
...Rodney's stomach will become even queasier at the news that Caute has recently been named the next editor of that British "socialist-liberal" publication the New Statesman...
...q Can You Help...
...I have yet to see a rational, rather than emotional, refutation of this argument...
...In effect, then, the Skokie ordinances prohibited everyone's free speech, not only that of the American Nazi party...
...Editors: The conservative forces have undoubtedly set the tone of current political discourse and determined the immediate national agenda...
...It is therefore possible to agree with one analyst who says that the tax revolt is simply a traditional American ritual, like yelling "kill the ump" at a ball game...
...But to suggest that the Truman administration was concerned with the "menace of international communism" rather than with the realities of Soviet power and its expansion is to obscure what that conflict was (and is) all about...
...350...
...Wrong's conclusion that there was no American Cold War strategy based on "the menace of international communism," because as a young man in Washington he never heard American policy-makers use such language...
...However, I don't mind telling him that I have not changed my mind despite having read the Schneirs' Invitation to an Inquest and the debate it aroused, much more substantial reviews of the case, introducing some new evidence on both sides, than the ancient productions he recalls...
...One can even merely smile a little at Mr...
...On the other hand, there seems no clearly apparent method for dealing with other powerful institutions in society, such as the large corporations, which are no more favorably viewed by the public...
...5. 1 did not cite Hiss's separation from the State Department as "proof' of Weinstein's accuracy, let alone of the court's verdict against Hiss...
...Above all, it seems a direct way of easing the ravages of inflation...
...1. I made no comparison between Truman and Eisenhower...
...For this task I shall need the help of all friends, all who knew Silone before I met him (in December 1941), or who knew him since in special circumstances or places other than Rome, and who would kindly let me have such reminiscences...
...Shortly before his death, he asked me to publish whatever I think important...
...It is an easy and obvious response to frustrations...
...It may not be necessary for Mr...
...Suicides don't lose their lives...
...Wexley was a Hollywood Communist writer whose long-forgotten book was published in 1955 by a pro-Communist publishing firm at a time when the Communists were exploiting the Rosenberg case in a worldwide campaign to equate the United States with Nazi Germany...
...Goldberger and the ACLU have neglected "the substance of democracy...
...The polls suggest several answers...
...The Skokie laws are the real issue...
...My sole reference to Eisenhower was to note that he appeased Senator McCarthy during the first two years of the Eisenhower presidency (and, let me add here, also had supported the Senator for reelection in 1952...
...Howe writes, "this matter may even be more important than Skokie...
...he also airs his own fairly primitive views on a number of subjects that I never even discussed...
...Wrong recite his sentence to the Rosenbergs' sons...
...Wrong to note that Weinstein's scholarship is under serious attack (Victor Navatny in The Nation), but to cite as proof tha, a man was eased out of the State Department...
...6. Mr...
...The Republican party opposed all these positions and the allegation that the Truman administration had "lost China" by its Far Eastern policies was the primary rationale for McCarthyism, acquiesced in by the 1952 Republican presidential candidate, Eisenhower...
...For what, after all, is the substance of democracy if it is not those very things that constitute its form...
...Bathing Truman's heightening of the Cold War and launching of the government's loyalty oath in gentle apologia is a legitimate point of view, I suppose, though I always marvel at socialist-liberal veneration of old witchhunt Harry, dropper of two atomic bombs on cities full of people, and initiator of the Korea horror...
...There is evidence that the general populace can be similarly convinced, although the task now seems formidable...
...attempted to negotiate a coalition government in China between the Kuomintang and the Communists...
...Rodney fails to note that Eisenhower was not "bumbling" or "indecisive" about the Rosenberg case either: he not only refused to commute the death penalty but went so far as to justify it in rejecting the final appeal for clemency...
...Pachter, "We must defend the substance, not the form of democracy...
...2. My observations on the Cold War were limited to its presumptive effects on the treatment of domestic Communists...
...But whether one agrees or disagrees with the ACLU position in this particular instance, Mr...
...During the Proposition 13 campaign in California, more than half the people polled thought that present services would be maintained with a spending cut of 20 percent, almost two-fifths felt they would be maintained even with a 40 percent decline...
...Editors: In his testament my late husband, Ignazio Silone, bequeathed his archives and correspondence to me...
...On the intellectual '-tvel it rates about even with the Republican "Nobody drowned at Watergate...
...The poll data cannot be casually dismissed...
...Finally, we come inevitably to Alger Hiss...
...Rodney's quarrel is with him rather than with me...
...And whom did these two appoint to the Supreme Court...
...Wrong is convinced they were guilty as charged, I do wish he would ease the burden a little for those of us who think otherwise, by sharing with us the root of his certainty when atomic scientist Harold Urey said he found the testimony of the Rosenbergs more believable than that of the Greenglasses, when a Columbia Law Review study failed to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, when the Indianapolis News review of John Wexley's book said .. raises an awful doubt that perhaps justice wasn't done," when the Western Political Quarterhv, published by the University of Utah, wrote that unless the Justice Department answered the Wexley book's allegations, "we 349 must conclude that the Rosenberg case is our Dreyfus case...
...One can also blame the media, with its superficial reporting, and the Democratic leadership, exemplified by the Carter and Jerry Brown variants of me-tooism, which helps the Jarvises and Kemps set the terms of debate...
...Rodney may suffer from reading disability, for he manages to misstate or misconstrue every single statement of mine to which he takes exception...
...Here we read .. as we learned from Allan Weinstein, he had been eased out of the State Department as a suspected Communist agent long before he came to the attention of HUAC...
...He is counterposed to the bumbling, indecisive Eisenhower, who took us out of Korea, vetoed the advice to bail out the French at Dienbienphu with atomic weapons, stood up to McCarthy (only when Joe tackled the Army, to be sure), and, upon leaving office, warned the country in vain against the military-industrial complex...
...I fervently hope that Mr...
...Howe's epiphany...
...Writes Mr...
...It is to retch...
...3. My statistical summary of the results of the antiCommunist campaign was, as the context made clear, a direct paraphrase of David Caute, so Mr...
...LESTER RODNEY Torrance, California q DENNIS H. WRONG Replies: Mr...
...5451 Marathon Street Hollywood, Ca...
...When asked, "Why Taxes Should Be Cut," 60 percent of a national sample chose the alternative: "The Government Wastes Too Much Money...
...Proving anew that it is negative feelings that stir letters from readers, I was impelled to the typewriter...
...Ike named Warren and Brennan...
...Henry Pachter merely ignores it in his "answer" and substitutes a thesis of his own...
...But isn't this precisely the sort of distinction that distinguishes nothing whatsoever...
...This reaction deterred three presidents in the 1960s from ending American involvement in Vietnam out of fear of arousing a similar domestic response, certainly the most fateful consequence of McCarthysim and Republican attacks on the Truman administration in general...
...DARINA SILONE Casella Postale 7196 Nomentano, 00161 Rome, Italy 348 Conservatives Not So Strong...
...And how can these be suspended or abrogated—except when there is a "'clear and present danger"—without dealing a serious blow to democracy per se...
...IRWIN STARK Hillsdale, N.Y...
...Goldberger's letter points out, the Skokie ordinances required that anyone wishing to speak, parade, or demonstrate had to (1) convince the village officials that the proposed action would not denigrate others or incite hostility and (2) post an insurance bond of $350,000...
...The emphasis should be on democratization of economic life, the theme that mobilized the Democratic Agenda forces, which, among other things, played such a prominent role in opposition to the Carter administration's agents at the Democratic Midterm convention...
...I merely noted that Weinstein had now fully reported the circumstances of this separation in face of the widely held belief that no one except Chambers had ever expressed suspicions of Hiss being a Communist agent before HUAC gave Chambers a public forum...
...And this is, I submit, a patent absurdity...
...Many accept the casual truism that government agencies are uniquely inefficient and government workers inherently incompetent and lazy...
...extended foreign aid to Communist Yugoslavia after 1948...
...Too many have fallen into the trap of propounding government programs as aid for the poor and handicapped, instead of pointing out that they are essential for most of us...
...Eisenhower had previously exercised his judgment in men that Mr...
...It indicates overwhelming support for just about every type of government program and government regulation, even those that obviously require far more appropriations...
...Sectarianism has been the chronic disease of the left in America as well as in Europe...
...Pachter and others who have resigned from the ACLU as a result of the Skokie case will eventually come to share Mr...
...the nazis are not the real issue...
...But, I question how much they actually symbolize the popular mood...
...90038 Thoughts on Skokie Editors: The gravamen of the ACLU position in the Skokie case is contained in David Goldberger's assertion that...
...Pachter is really telling us, I am afraid, that no creed obnoxious to the democratic state deserves the protection that the democratic state by virtue of its being a democratic state is presumed to guarantee to all creeds, however obnoxious they happen to be...
...4. All I said about the Rosenbergs was that I had told someone in 1953 that I thought them guilty but deplored the death penalty...
...maintained after the Communist victory there that American policy toward China ought to be one of, in Acheson's phrase, "waiting until the dust settles...
...Would anyone owning letters from him who does not mind sending photostat copies (since I must edit and publish this correspondence) please do so—and would anyone possessing or knowing how to find articles by or concerning him kindly send these or contact me...
...and favored "containment" as opposed to "liberation" in Eastern Europe...
...Would Mr...
...The persecution of suspected Communists and Watergate were both disgraceful episodes in recent American politics, but a historian cannot avoid adopting a comparative perspective that looks beyond the borders of the United States...
...While we are on the Rosenbergs, since Mr...
...Others are concentrating on the wrong issues as the "principled" questions...
...Navasky has yet to address himself to the issues in contention, which are rather marginal to the main body of Weinstein's evidence...
...The apostles of budget cutting have a well-geared apparatus...
...WILLIAM SPINRAD Glen Cove, New York q McCarthyism Again Editors: Having browsed at extended leisure through the superb anniversary issue, I came late upon Dennis H. Wrong's "Looking Back at McCarthyism...
...Howe's comment on sectarianism is exemplary...
...To encourage its pernicious growth within the civil rights movement would indeed be a grievous misfortune to dissenters everywhere...
...As Mr...
...According to this thesis, in seeking to defend a "form," Mr...
...In defense of Caute, he was comparing the record of the American "anti-Communist purge" with that of the Hitler and Stalin regimes with which it has so often been equated in a certain kind of leftist rhetoric...
...I have therefore decided, on the basis of the archives—but with a great deal of additional material that I must find elsewhere—to write his biography, as a source book, probably in several annotated volumes...
...Inquiry Editors: I am making a film about John Reed (the author of Ten Days That Shook the World) and Louise Bryant (his wife) and I would appreciate contact with anyone who knew either of them...
...No doubt Mr...
...I don't remember a more cold-eyed sentence in any socialist publication...
...But it is more than one can stomach when he writes of the McCarthy period: "A few thousand people lost their jobs, a few hundred were imprisoned, but nobody except the Rosenbergs lost their lives...
...Rodney so admires in twice appointing the third of these presidents to the vice-presidency...
...For all Mr...
...Governments are the most available targets for letting out resentments and, in a relatively democratic society, it seems feasible to do something about its supposed evils and inadequacies...
...Anti-administration strength exhibited at this miniconvention demonstrated that a large number of political activists have not been taken in...
...Few Americans believe that any level of government is spending "too much" on anything except space programs and welfare...
...WARREN BEATTY Paramount Picture, Corp...
Vol. 26 • July 1979 • No. 3
