Uncommon Sense About Security and Freedom

...They will wonder because the only issue of fundamental importance germane to these hearings, viz., the relative autonomy of the Executive Branch of the Government, could have been settled by President Eisenhower long before McCarthy injected himself into Fort Monmouth, and especially before he reduced the Voice of America to an ineffectual whisper...

...Nonetheless, the intent of the provision is clear and justifiable...

...The conflicts between these two principles are often only apparent...

...He was free as a citizen to oppose it, but, if he did, it was not depriving him of a civil right to deny him access to, or continuance in, the job...

...During those days, liberals were also indignant at the notion that any State Department official could be sympathetic to fascism...

...If this is the wording of the statute, it seems to me to be objectionable...

...They were very much concerned, and properly so, lest the work of certain New Deal agencies be sabotaged by individuals hostile to the purposes and ideas for which they were set up...

...That alternative should be followed which results in the least amount of individual injustice...

...Past activities and degrees of involvement in front organizations, long before they were listed by the Attorney General, must be assessed...

...There are a great many pitfalls in any security program, and the great danger is that the heterodox and nonconformist, the man with a critical and independent mind, will be barred from Government service merely because his ideas are unacceptable...

...They will wonder first about the inexcusable laxity in permitting Communist infiltration into Government services and then about the delay in getting rid of the infiltrators when the pattern of subversion was revealed beyond any reasonable doubt by Krivilsky, Gouzenko, Bentley, Chambers and the FBI...

...One of the reasons why some Communists were able to infiltrate into the NLRB was the difficulty of finding individuals whose ideas about collective bargaining would permit proper implementation of the Wagner Labor Relations Act...

...It is a safe bet that anyone who talks this way about the TVA is skeptical of its wisdom whatever he things of its feasibility...

...The TVA, FHA, SEC, FCC, etc...

...In the past, before the emergence of crusading totalitarianisms, when our system of government was far from just and equitable, the problem of security was negligible...

...Ideological commitments are often involved which may be an index to probable performance...

...In the future, historians will wonder about many things connected with the American security program...

...The point I am making here is that, although liberals understood the relevance of ideas to professional qualifications in an earlier period, many of them today denounce any concern with, or inquiry into, the ideas of Government officials and their advisers as the worst form of thought control...

...Principles of security embodied in rules and regulations should be drawn up with an eye to the class of cases to be covered, practicability in applying them, and above all the ends to be achieved...

...It may not warrant dismissal, but at least it warrants inquiry...

...I thought this was a banal commonplace until I discovered that many who proudly think of themselves as liberals regard it as a wild paradox...

...It is not libertarianism but obtuseness to deny that there are problems of security in the present juncture of world affairs...

...For the question remains: What shall we do to prevent betrayals until we reach that blessed state—betrayals which, in a time of war between different conceptions of "the just and equitable," may prevent us from reaching that state- Indeed, such a view is much too pessimistic precisely because it is so Utopian...

...We have been reminded recently by Gordon Clapp that, when the New Deal was set up, there was justified fear lest those in policy-making posts wittingly or unwittingly defeat its purposes...

...It seems to me that neither a desire to coddle treason nor a desire to turn America into a fascist state accounts for these phenomena...

...Otherwise, everything depends upon whose ox is being gored and rules of justice become what Thrasymachus said they were...

...Goldbloom's study is likely to see the security problem in false proportion or blown up to a point where it drives far graver problems of foreign and domestic policy out of the public's consciousness...

...To penalize a man who as a private citizen professes ideas on any subject under the sun, or to penalize someone in Government service for expressing ideas irrelevant to his function, is persecution and utterly repugnant to our liberal traditions...

...It is the dimensions of the problems, and the best ways of meeting them without sacrificing individual rights, which should be the object of liberal concern...

...Most ideas which human beings hold are of this kind, and inquiry into them is an impertinence...

...It is treated as resembling a steel particle in the cornea which, when properly extracted with a delicate probe, does not affect vision, but which, when brutally rubbed with the rough hands of a McCarthy, inflames the eye until the entire landscape is blotted out in self-induced blindness...

...should not be entrusted to those who do not believe in their purposes...

...There will probably never be a system of government so just and equitable that no one will wish to betray it...

...It will be a decided gain if, even before we reach the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the security problem returns to the desuetude of the pre-totalitarian era...

...If liberals are concerned only with abuses, it will be the illiberals who draw up the rules and make the judgments and decisions which generate the abuses...

...Personally, I am extremely puzzled at the failure of American liberals, with some notable exceptions, to think about the problem of security or to go beyond making a token acknowledgment of its existence and then dismissing it by consigning it to the FBI...

...It exhibits just as profound a concern for personal freedom as the most ardent civil libertarian, but shows on every page the marks of extensive knowledge of Communism, experience in the struggle against it, and native good sense...

...Otherwise, none or all would be exceptional...

...No one regarded them as persecuted because of their ideas, nor did they so regard themselves...

...If President Eisenhower is correctly reported as having characterized the TVA as "creeping socialism," he is nevertheless under statutory obligation not to appoint directors whose ideas agree with him...

...Sometimes they are real...

...Those who were so disqualified were not characterized as loyalty or security risks...

...That is why it is of the highest importance that the men who administer the principles, or who review the decisions made, be expert in the subject matters adjudged, have common sense, psychological insight, and devotion to the traditions of freedom...

...Principles to guide action on security matters should be formulated with an eye both to the national interest and to individual justice...

...To this very day, there is evidence that questions of security are often approached not as complex problems affecting the national interest, and requiring as much concern for the preservation of our basic freedoms as for appropriate safeguards against subversion and irresponsibility, but as campaign issues out of which political capital can be made...

...Only because we approach individual cases with some principles to guide us can any be considered exceptional...

...Although here and there some points are not thoroughly explored or issues adequately defined, its pages contain more common and uncommon sense than all the Cornell Studies in Civil Liberty combined, with the writings of Barth, Commager, MacLeish and other ritualistic liberals thrown in...

...It should be an occasion for correcting and improving the security program, not for the wholesale lament that in adopting security measures, forced on us by a systematic campaign of infiltration by the Soviet Union, the declared enemy of all our basic freedoms, we are becoming like our enemy...

...It recognizes, therefore, the necessity of a security program...

...legitimate concern today is, or should be, that the administration of the security program often results in unnecessary injustices, as Government officials, fearing the specter of McCarthy's investigative powers, lean over backward to play safe...

...At the time, any evidence of sympathy for fascism or hostility to New Deal legislation was, in the nature of the case, not organizational but ideological, i.e., it consisted in the expression of ideas in speech and writing...

...The former may have a bearing on qualification, depending upon the position involved...

...The latter should never be considered as disqualifying an individual from service...

...But there is an elementary yet often overlooked distinction between ideas which are relevant to the performance of a man's task and ideas which are not...

...The tests for an adequate degree of belief in the wisdom of a policy would be even more difficult to administer than the tests for an adequate degree of enthusiasm in carrying it out...

...Such a commission, consisting of leading non-partisan scholars of government, American society and the Communist movement—non-partisan in that they have no commitments to the Democratic and Republican parties-will be in a position to give the country a sober survey of the extent of Communist penetration in the past, its present proportions, the chief problems of a security system, and its present deficiencies...

...Even if here and there a loyalty or security risk is turned up, it will probably testify not so much to indifference as to the absence of relevant knowledge, not to speak of infallibility, on the part of those charged with enforcing the security program...

...There seems to be need of a third classification over and above that of loyalty and security to cover eases in which a man's ideas and or pattern of associations disqualify him for a particular post...

...Uncommon Sense About SECURITY AND FREEDOM By Sidney Hook That the American public, the Government and all administrative agencies are by now sufficiently security-conscious to satisfy all but Senator McCarthy and his partisans is a proposition which surely needs no demonstration...

...What I am saying is that an inquiry into their ideas, when this is relevant to the execution of policies approved by the Legislative or Executive Branches of the Government, is not ipso facto inquisitorial persecution...

...The source of...

...As private citizens, such individuals have every right to criticize these agencies, but they have no right to administer them...

...For this shows that they do not have the foggiest notion of a very basic fact: that the problem does not consist in detecting acts of espionage or sabotage after they have been committed, but primarily in denying access to sensitive posts, key policymaking and evaluating jobs, to those whose records indicate reasonable doubt of their reliability...

...It is not enough to say, as one speaker at the Columbia Bicentennial Conference put it, that our surest safeguard is a system of government "so just and equitable that no one will wish to betray it...

...We were not confronted by ideologically motivated subversion compounded of idealism and Machiavellianism...

...It starts from the premise that there is a powerful threat to the security of the United States which flows from the existence, program, methods and activities of the world Communist movement functioning as an arm of the Soviet state...

...One of the great merits of Maurice Goldbloom's discussion is its recognition that, although cases may make a difference to the way in which principles are applied, principles should not be tailored to fit the special interests of a particular case...

...Even the Kingdom of Heaven had its Lucifer...

...The proposal is one of those presented in the most illuminating treatment of the subject which has so far been published...

...I am not saying here that the ideas of any of them in fact disqualified them from serving in those posts (although my views about Lattimore's eligibility remain unchanged), nor am I saying that as private citizens they (including Lattimore) had no right to propagandize for their views...

...Partisan or factional political interest led, in the one case, to hushing-up or denial of the facts, and, in the other, to their shameless exaggeration...

...It makes all the relevant distinctions—between heresy and conspiracy, between moral guilt, legal guilt and professional unfitness, between civil rights and the right to a specific employment, between employment in Government and employment in private agencies, between sensitive positions and non-sensitive positions, between associations which are innocent and associations which are prima facie compromising...

...Had the point of view developed in Mr...

...During the Roosevelt regime, liberals understood that very often a man's ideas were focally relevant to the job he was supposed to do...

...I refer to Maurice J. Goldbloom's American Security and Freedom, published by the American Jewish Committee...

...But it is not persecution to hold a man to account if his ideas show him to be committed to a policy incompatible with one which he is required by his post to carry out...

...Because of past mistakes and present demagogy, the complex of problems bound up with American security will bedevil us until there is an authoritative, objective study of the entire question by a Presidential commission...

...Whatever residual amount of injustice remains is the tragic—and, let us hope, temporary-cost we pay for the preservation and extension of free institutions throughout the world...

...It will not cry havoc on the theory that the public is awake only when it is thoroughly scared...

...The best principles will always have to be applied with certain discretionary powers reserved for some exceptional case or situation, since, as Aristotle pointed out long ago, what holds for a class of situations necessarily ignores particular, individuating features which may have a bearing on the ends we aim to realize...

...No man had any business serving on the National Labor Relations Board who did not believe in the idea of collective bargaining...

...When they are real, several alternative ways of settling the conflict can be found without endangering free institutions...

...For the present connotation of the terms "loyalty" and "security" is too strong where only professional unfitness is at issue...

...They will wonder at the pendular swing from indifference to over-agitated concern, culminating in the spectacle of an entire nation focusing its attention for weeks on the McCarthy-Stevens imbroglio, while the tide of Communist aggression in Asia and Communist influence in Europe rose daily...

...This problem was met, in the case of the TVA, by making statutory provision that those appointed to the three-member board of directors be required to profess "a belief in the wisdom and feasibility of the TVA act...

...The problem of security is much more modest than the Columbia speaker suggested...

...Goldbloom's brochure been adopted when the Hiss case burst upon the country and been embodied in our security practices, and had the grounds for those practices been made clear by authoritative Government spokesmen, McCarthy would never have gotten to first base...

...On the other hand, the fact that errors and injustices result from a screening and clearance program so comprehensively defined that it covers millions is not surprising...

...No one reading Mr...

...All this is completely beyond the authority of the FBI, even if it were within its competence, which it conspicuously is not...

...Making an informed and just appraisal of such records is a troublesome matter...