The Greater Risks
The Progressive T« Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17__September, 1953 Number 9 The Greater Risks ¦"PHE greatest danger to what is ¦I loosely called the Western...
...As nature abhors a vacuum, so McCarthyism cannot live where there is peace and hope and understanding...
...A Republican like John J. McCloy, president of the Chase National Bank and formerly our High Commissioner to Germany, warns us that "the growth of anti-American feeling has grown to dangerous proportions...
...When I think of McCarthy I automatically think of Hitler...
...Recently we consented to a Big Four Foreign Ministers conference on Germany...
...No longer do liberal publications carry the whole load of exposing McCarthyism, for now they have a great deal of right wing company...
...What have we done—or failed to do—to create this dangerous division which is the primary objective of the Kremlin...
...In language as strong as any employed by liberal crusaders, Arthur Eisenhower put the case against McCarthy this way: "Sen...
...Their alliance and rearmament endanger our security for the present and our ambitions for the future...
...Even the most pro-American of our anti-Communist friends share a gnawing concern that we are truculently determined to have peace only if it can be had exclusively on our terms...
...President Eisenhower's special team on psychological strategy recently warned the nation that the isolation of the United States from its allies is the first aim of Soviet planners for eventual "domination or destruction of the United States...
...No longer, for instance, must New York's Sen...
...But he lost every county of the state in which either a daily paper or a labor weekly fought him with the facts...
...They are fearful that we have become so wedded to the paraphernalia of defense and the negative policies of the Cold War that we are either unable or unwilling to provide affirmative leadership in the pursuit of a live-and-let-live peace settlement...
...But having said this, we would be stumbling irrevocably into the Communist trap if we failed to face up to the fact that some of our present policies are frightening many of our friends abroad...
...McCarthyism cannot survive if the people are given the facts about the deceitful character of his "crusade...
...McCarthy is the most dangerous menace to America...
...The Progressive T« Shall Know the Truth and the Truth Shall Make You Free' Volume 17__September, 1953 Number 9 The Greater Risks ¦"PHE greatest danger to what is ¦I loosely called the Western world, or even more loosely, the free world, is division...
...It is being expressed among the masses as well as among the intellectuals...
...There are many causes of this growing fear and mistrust of the United States, many of them not our fault...
...But the fact that less than five per cent of one of the most powerful veterans' organizations in the country bothered to listen to McCarthy was symbolic of the summer-long downward trend in his fortunes...
...Perhaps they are guilty of gross over-simplificar-tion when they sum up their feelings in the one word they find most loathsome—McCarthyism—but they are not far from the truth if they mean our neurotic absorption with anti-Communism to the extent that we have made it the heart of our foreign policy and our greatest concern at home...
...McCarthy quickly backed away from the challenge...
...Most thoughtful Europeans and Asians don't think it is necessary to embrace the romantic and unlikely notion that the Soviets are prepared to settle, amicably and fairly, all the current conflicts, to recognize the enormous possibilities that the new mood in the Kremlin holds out for a war-weary world...
...Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt tell us that the people of Asia regard our military might as a greater threat to peace than Russia's...
...It seems inconceivable, with all the advance warning we have had from the Russians, and all the warnings we have passed back and forth among ourselves, that we should continue to cling to policies which advance the Communist purpose and defeat our own...
...Not a bad crowd for the dog-day season, but this was the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and there were more than 12,000 delegates in town...
...They don't know how we can expect them to build strong internal economies to withstand Communist penetration from within, when we decline to lower our own trade barriers and insist they must not trade with Communist countries...
...American refusal to countenance such a conference is not the result of any perverse desire to prolong the Cold War or warm up to shooting temperature...
...Dane County rejected McCarthy 48,000 to 29,000, largely because of the superb crusade conducted by the Madison Capital Times...
...Milwaukee County, for instance, which tipped the election to McCarthy in 1946, turned against him by nearly 100,000 votes—in great measure because of the almost daily attacks of the Milwaukee Journal...
...It is true, too, that the competing Braves-Dodgers game was an irresistible attraction for the great majority of the VFW...
...They wonder how we can go on insisting, in the face of repeated Soviet peace overtures, that nothing very much has happened this year, and that the Cold War and rearmament must go on as usual...
...Two—The risk that the present rulers of Russia, rebuffed in their proffers of conciliation, may be driven from power by a more warlike clique which would successfully exploit Malenkov's failure to get us to sit down around the conference table...
...The Soviets seemed to agree conditionally—the "seemed" is there because at this writing the experts were still trying to unscramble the Kremlin's gob-bledygook...
...It is noteworthy that the same issue of Time which berated the liberals for creating the "McCarthy myth" carried the report that only 22 per cent of the American people now think McCarthy does more good than harm—certainly impressive evidence that the "myth" has been punctured by publicity...
...But the conference seems like a half-hearted, face-saving device to some of our allies— partly because we insist on restricting the agenda solely to German unification, and partly because Europe has come to believe that there is no substitute for a conference on the highest level...
...It would be nothing less than catastrophic if we continued to brood over the lesser danger, while the greater risks were converted into reality by our mulish insistence that nothing has happened this year either in Moscow or in the minds of our friends...
...In October, 1952, at a great gathering of the Communist clan, Georgi Malenkov was permitted by Stalin to unveil the new Communist strategy...
...They can't see how we expect to settle the all-important problem of Germany by insisting that the Russians agree to let a unified Reich rearm and become part of the anti-Communist European Defense Community...
...But there can be no serious disputing the fact that the opposition to his un-American efforts has developed greatly in recent months, both in size and character...
...They just don't understand how we can possibly hope for a general settlement in the Far East when we say we shall refuse to admit into the UN the government which represents, however much we may despise that fact, half the people of the Orient and a quarter of the human race...
...McCarthy on the Run ONE afternoon in early August Sen...
...We feel it would be a fatal mistake to follow the counsel of publications like Time and the Wall Street journal to "lay off" McCarthy on the theory that publicity builds him up...
...Charles E. Potter, Michigan Republican, angrily repudiated McCarthy's suggestion...
...A lessening of world tensions would remove much of the corrupt soil on which McCarthyism feeds...
...Writing urgently from Europe for the Christian Science Monitor, Joseph C. Harsch reported recently that "the most prominent single factor is the widespread, really appalling decline of European confidence in American leadership...
...This statement ought to carry somewhat more weight than is usually accorded a sweeping editorial generalization because, uniquely, it bears the endorsement of both Soviet and American strategists...
...We have driven the nations of the West together...
...there are Southern conservatives to help...
...Actually, it isn't any one policy that hurts us more than others...
...It turned out to be that old reliable—divide and rule...
...Our best hope of loosening the ties that bind them is to lessen the tensions which drive them into each other's arms...
...It is a horrible shame he is a Republican, for he has done the party no credit...
...The best evidence was the 1952 election in Wisconsin...
...He is too agile an operator, too resourceful an improviser, and too daring a gambler to be counted out because he has been discredited and defeated in half-a-dozen engagements this summer...
...An attempt by McCarthy to bully Americans for Democratic Action into withdrawing its reprint of the Senate report exposing the Senator's weird financial transactions backfired badly when ADA challenged McCarthy to go ahead and sue so the facts could be spread on the record...
...it is our state of mind that troubles our friends most of all...
...Similarly, Gen...
...By holding out proposals for peace and trade to the anti-Communist countries, we can remove their incentive for unity, get them to quarreling among themselves, and dissolve the alliance that threatens us...
...II Evidence of the very split the Soviets gambled on is overwhelming...
...For American stock abroad has dipped to the lowest level of our lifetime...
...Some are based on genuine misunderstandings, others on a calculated distortion of our finer motives and actions, and still others on the inevitable unpopularity of a "have" nation in a world of "have nots...
...They conclude that we must be driven by some obsessive fear of a high-level conference with the Soviets when we reject the counsel of such towering foes of the Kremlin as Churchill, Tito, and Pope Pius XII, who favor such a conference...
...He has shown on more than one occasion how well he has mastered the quack's art of changing the subject to conceal failure...
...Our government, whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans, has been genuinely concerned that such a conference might produce a letdown in the Western world that would flash a green light for further Soviet aggression...
...It is clear enough that the Eisenhower Administration sees the trap, but it is equally clear that it is moving, trance-like, to put its foot smack into it...
...McCarthyism can be stopped dead in its tracks by pitilessly holding up his charges to the light of truth...
...What the Kremlin seemed to be saying was simply this: Our super-tough policies have brought us some sizeable gains, but the price of going on that way has become too high...
...It would be a dangerous delusion to assume that the slippery demagogue from Wisconsin has been defeated in his campaign to create doubt, disunity, and hysteria to advance his personal political ambitions...
...Another Republican, the President's brother, Arthur, called the Wisconsin demagogue a disgrace to the GOP...
...It could be seen and heard by even the most pleasure-bent, picture-hungry tourist knocking around Europe this summer...
...His tactics are Nazi-like, and what makes them all the more of a fiasco is that he has never been responsible for the conviction of one—of one, mind you, Communist...
...The Soviets have made it clear division is their goal and, oddly enough, American experts agree...
...They think we are often more embarrassed than pleased by Soviet peace overtures...
...Herbert Lehman fight alone in the Senate against the crude McCarthy charges...
...We seem to them a powerful, well-meaning, but clumsy giant who may stumble into war and drag them with us...
...McCarthy carried every county in the state where a majority of the newspapers either supported him or refused to expose his shenanigans...
...Joseph R. McCarthy spoke to an audience of 550 in Milwaukee...
...Ill The risk is real, but it is dwarfed today by two greater risks: One—The risk that we may create a greater letdown and split the Western alliance altogether if we continue to hang back from the general negotiations our friends demand...
...Alfred M. Gruen-ther, supreme Allied commander in Europe, told a Senate committee that while he was "absolutely confident" that "war is never going to come," and that "these fellows [the Communists] are no supermen and have no edge on us at all," he was concerned because "the only thing they have is a technique for dividing, and in their conference last October they announced what they were going to do, and the fellow who announced it was Malenkov...
...As the tide seems to run against McCarthy, it seems to The Progressive more imperative than ever that the decent forces in the nation, of whatever party, redouble their efforts to expose the noxious character of McCarthyism...
...McCarthy's attempt to accuse the three Democratic Senators who resigned from his investigating committee of playing partisan politics boomeranged badly when Sen...
...It is true that the McCarthy speech hadn't had much of an advance build-up...
...In the long run McCarthy and McCarthyism can be destroyed only by dealing head-on with the causes of the fear and frustration which make them possible...
Vol. 17 • September 1953 • No. 9
