The Politics of Fear:
ECKARDT, W. V.
CORSI ON TRIAL. THE POLITICS OF FEAR By W. V. Eckardt WASHINGTON, D.C. IT WOULD require the perceptive-ness and descriptive talent of a Franz Kafka to convey the atmosphere of trepidation,...
...Before 90 days were up, Dulles yielded to the pressure...
...The two made all the appointments...
...Less than four months ago, Dulles heaped lavish praise on his "old friend" Edward J. Corsi, an influential New York Republican who campaigned hard to get him a Senate seat...
...Corsi was sent on his trip to Europe on Mc-Leod's orders flanked by two of McLeod's men, one of whom he calls a "Texas cop...
...IT WOULD require the perceptive-ness and descriptive talent of a Franz Kafka to convey the atmosphere of trepidation, insecurity and nightmarish indecisiveness which permeates our Government these days...
...In return, we got a special Refugee Relief Act which, as reported in The New Leader of January 25, 1954, is an administrative monstrosity...
...Their Crusade is committed to this course: "The whole world knows," said candidate Eisenhower in October 1952, "that to these shores came oppressed people from every land under the sun, that here they found homes, jobs and a stake in a bright, unlimited future...
...By now, the fear and frustration have spread to the highest levels...
...The present Court of Last Appeal, however, is out on the golf links somewhere...
...Mc-Leod's chief now is the Secretary of State, but his heart, his eyes and his ears still belong to his former boss Styles Bridges, to Joe McCarthy, and to others of similar persuasion...
...The attendant holds the confidential dossier...
...The sorcerer's apprentices can no longer lay the spirits they raised...
...The Administration's handling of immigration, particularly of the Refugee Relief Act, was under mounting criticism...
...In Kafka's The Trial, the hero doesn't know who charges him with what, but in the end becomes quite convinced of his guilt...
...It was proper for Dulles and Eisenhower to try at last to make our immigration laws work...
...He found that Scott McLeod, the State Department Security Officer who was made the czar of the refugee program, is "sabotaging it...
...It may even give a prosperous and perhaps complacent people an inkling of the deeper, underlying causes of the eruption: the fear and frustration, confounded by politics without policies, which govern this administration...
...It is but another symptom of the fear and frustration within our Government...
...Not to the pressure to make a policy work which Dulles and Eisenhower continue to extol with words...
...Instead, the victorious Crusaders made a deal not to press for removal of what Eisenhower only a year ago called the Act's "palpable injustices and inequities...
...The lack of clear convictions, the game of politics without policies, has confounded their dilemma...
...The seeming indifference of the people outside Washington may well have the same reason...
...Not to the pressure of one reckless but not very influential Congressman who is as intolerant of the critics of his Act as he is intolerant of all but Anglo-Saxon foreigners...
...When he wanted to leak the Yalta papers, he had sent forty copies of them to Congress in the natural hope that they would speedily find their way into public print while he could still claim to honor his promise of discretion to Churchill...
...When he knuckled under and rewarded an informant of the inquisitors, Miss Frances Knight, by appointing her Chief of the Passport Division, he claimed he didn't know what at least one Congressman told him about her...
...It was not in Kafka's weird fantasy but in a committee room of Congress, in April 1955, that United States Attorney General Herbert Brownell made a remark that should have shocked the nation...
...The Attorney General acknowledges that it is better for a Government servant to violate the known laws of justice than to be judged by the unknown, bizarre rules of the inquisition...
...At first, these consequences to our national and individual self-respect and integrity became apparent only at the lower echelons of Government, dredged up for the most part in the privacy of psychiatrists' offices...
...Out of the 200,000 refugees permitted to enter under the program, only a thousand have at last reached these shores...
...Eric Sevareid, in one of his brilliant radio commentaries, suggests the confusion may be due to the absence of a Court of Last Appeal in the Executive Branch of the Government...
...With the same "ecclesiastical foxi-ness" he has displayed so often in recent months, the Secretary of State tried hard to find a compromise...
...But it is not surprising, really...
...The interest Congress has taken in the incident may call public attention to the scandalous failure of the Refugee Act...
...When Representative Francis Walter (D.-Pa...
...Yet, to the Czech, the Pole, the Hungarian who takes his life in his hands and crosses the frontier tonight—or to the Italian who goes to some American consulate—this ideal that beckoned him can be a mirage because of the McCarran Act...
...Friendships must be based on mutual convictions, and Dulles, it would appear, has sacrificed his convictions to the fear of risking his security...
...He was asked why the Justice Department secured a grand-jury indictment against former State Department labor expert Val R. Lorwin, charging him falsely with being a Communist, when it had no evidence to back up its charges...
...For the judgment of that Court would also tell a bewildered people who is right and who is wrong...
...Dulles once again yielded to his own fear of the unknown, bizarre vengeance of the inquisition...
...There are some who feel that per-" haps this public eruption is all to the good...
...The court attendants themselves are never sure of the rules...
...Isn't it wonderful, finally, to have a Secretary of State who turns his back on a friend...
...Lorwin on slight evidence rather than appear before a Senate committee to explain why he had not obtained an indictment...
...Corsi also relates now that McLeod had a policy of never seeing him...
...Here, uniquely, every man's children had one priceless bequest: the birthright of freedom...
...Washington wits say about him, parodying Vice President Nixon's famous remark...
...Corsi has both the courage of his convictions and the power of a prominent leader of New York's Republicans...
...Other men, trapped in the inquisitorial net, were beset by fear and frustration, and nothing was heard...
...In a conflict between a deserved and capable public servant and the attendant of his would-be inquisitioners, the servant of the public again was the loser...
...After 90 days of study, Corsi found that our immigration policies are "in the grip of an intolerant minority, both in Congress and within the State Department itself, which believes that in this world there are superior and inferior races...
...This power, reinforced by the devotion of countless other foreign-born citizens, enables him to tell Dulles: "I am thoroughly amazed that a man whom I held in such regard as Mr...
...He uttered about four falsehoods...
...Secretary of Slate John Foster Dulles seems beset by self-destructive panic...
...And Dulles knew it when he called Corsi in to do something about it...
...The latest one, the Corsi affair, is no more just plain old American rough-and-tumble politics than were the Lorwin, Kaghan, Davies, Oppen-heimer or Ladejinsky affairs...
...We seem to have become accustomed to the consequences of perverting a legitimate quest for internal security into a desperate minority's illegitimate quest for partisan power...
...He whispered and continues to whisper...
...Brownell replied that the Government prosecutor "indicated that he felt it was better to indict Mr...
...The statement was reported as a routine item...
...The price the Administration paid for getting even this law passed by the reactionaries in Congress was to have it administered by people who oppose it...
...It was only proper for Dulles to call in Corsi to try to rescue the program...
...Dulles would stoop so low in falsifying the facts concerning this whole incident...
...of McCarran-Walter Act fame, wielded his smear brush on Corsi, McLeod told the new appointee: "There is no use replying to a Congressman or a skunk...
...A new life in this land is still likely to be a mirage to the Czech, the Pole, the Hungarian who takes his life in his hands and crosses the Iron Curtain tonight...
...But the McCarran Act was not repealed or reformed...
...He also knew that the opponents of immigration, the race-conscious minority, would not relish this appointment...
...It would arouse them to lay the spirits of fear and suspicion which roam their capital...
...Public eruptions occur with increasing frequency...
...This novel, written some twenty years before the word "loyalty" became part of our Government gobbledygook, tells more about present-day Washington than all the newspapers...
...The nation was not shocked...
...Some had courage but no power, and the uproar subsided quickly...
...Dulles would rather violate the laws of decency and even good politics than face the irrefutable, bizarre vengeance of the inquisition...
...He had served as Commissioner of Immigration under President Hoover and New York Slate Industrial Commissioner under Governor Dewey...
...As Dulles said at the time, Corsi is perhaps "the best qualified man in the United States for the job...
...When he left the immigration program again to the exclusive mercy of Scott McLeod, he claimed that Corsi was hired only for three months, that he would give him another job, that Corsi was not qualified...
...There is evidence that McLeod helped furnish Congressman Walter with some of the tar...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
