Point of Order

...He obviously doesn't like it...

...Walter Goodman, author of The Committee, relates with skill and good humor the details of this American success story—how the little group, starting modestly in 1938 under Chairman Martin Dies of Texas with $25,000 per year, today spends that sum each fifteen days, employs sixty people, and is looking forward to its greatest era in the coming months— exposing the "Communists" responsible for the urban riots, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and, in the event of a compromise settlement of the war, exposing the domestic "Communists" back of "the sellout...

...it is clear of emotional adjectives...

...House of Representatives, gave solid proof of its motherly devotion by voting, 343-43, an appropriation of $375,000, which, added to sums already allocated to the Committee, gave it the grand total of approximately $1,250,000 for the years 1967-68...

...The Committee is quite the most sprightly and interesting book written about HUAC...

...I suggest that our founders had in mind that the punishment of Americans, as Justice Hugo Black wrote in his 1959 dissent on the Barenblatt case, was "too serious a matter to be entrusted to any group other than an independent judiciary and a jury of twelve men acting on previously passed, unambiguous laws, with all the procedural safeguards which included the right to counsel, compulsory process for witnesses, specific indictments, confrontation of accusers, as well as protection against self-incriminations, double jeopardy and cruel and unusual punishment—in short, due process of law...

...Both Goodman and Richard H. Rovere in the foreword are careful to absolve the book from any accusation that it is a tract for abolition of the Committee, although Goodman emerges as a concerned liberal who is clearly aghast with the chronicle of evils and cruelties he has collected...

...indeed, he deplores it...

...He believed that the Un-American Activities Committee had rendered a service to progressives by analyzing the workings of Communist fronts, and to labor by exposing Communists in unions...

...I use the qualifying word "almost" because Goodman is uncertain whether he thinks the Committee should be abolished...

...I do not believe that the "outrage they [the liberals] roared at the Committee's free and easy methods would have turned to purrs had only the methods been directed at Father Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith...

...And the book itself can be used almost in its entirety as persuasive evidence that the Committee should be abolished...

...Later on, Goodman observes that liberal Representative Jerry Voorhis, a Committee member during the chairmanship of Martin Dies, believed "that there was a place for such a committee in Congress—and not solely for the purpose of exposing oddities on the right...

...From the safety of his scholar's mountain top he looks down to the hot valley of our nasty grap-plings with the Committee...

...It is unfair...

...In addition to the special appropriation voted each spring for the Committee, it also receives more than $150,000 yearly for regular staff under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, plus substantial additional sums for printing a plethora of reports, hearings, and other documents...

...It encompasses inquiries concerning the administration of existing laws as well as proposed or possibly needed statutes...

...This theme is consistent throughout the book—that the radicals, the Communists, the fellow travelers are appropriate subjects for some kind of Government exposure, some kind of Committee punishment—perhaps not the brutal, vulgar destruction typical of HUAC, but possibly a more orderly variety as suggested by Representative Maury Maverick in December, 1937: that when the names of individuals "whose honor and patriotism are questioned" are put in the Congressional Record, "it should only be after an investigation with the witness under oath...

...Goodman's prose is reasoned and cool...

...It includes surveys of defects in our social, economic or political system for the purposes of enabling the Congress to remedy them...

...I suggest he could then have found the answer to the search for "an appropriate tribunal for adjudicating public charges against a man's loyalty...

...Our objections were generally that punishment of the KKK for overt acts must be through judicial process and not through Congressional committee exposure, and that if new Federal criminal law were needed to protect Negroes and civil rights workers, the jurisdiction belonged to the House Judiciary Committee...

...If Goodman had given this aspect of the Committee's activities more consideration, his excellent book would be even better...

...But broad as is this power of inquiry, it is not unlimited...

...There is no general authority to expose the private affairs of individuals without justification in terms of the functions of the Congress...

...Goodman implies that for thirty years the Committee's accusations of Communist connections or of fellow traveling have generally been accurate...

...His dilemma is stated on page 104: "What is an appropriate tribunal for adjudicating public charges against a man's loyalty...

...Liberals quite generally respect and support Congress' power to investigate within the guidelines established by the Supreme Court...

...Goodman considers it so, and his epigraph by H. L. Mencken celebrates the delights of the show ". . . the ribald combats of demagogues, the exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues, the pursuit of witches and heretics...

...Reviewed by Representative Don Edwards On March 13, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was in the third month of its thirty-first year, and its parent body, the U.S...

...Rovere's foreword scarcely begins before we read his disturbing observation that ". . . with few exceptions, the investigators and the investigated have seemed richly to deserve each other . . ." And Goodman seems to accept the view that the Communists whom the Committee harassed—along, of course, with many non-Communists —were not undeserving of some form of Congressional investigation and censure...

...It might be called to Goodman's attention that the power to expose the political opinions of private persons in our country is traditionally in the private sector—in conversation, in the press, in books—and all subject to the laws of libel and slander...

...He seems to suggest that "liberals" oppose HUAC because its victims are primarily from the left, and that our objections would melt away if the exposed were the right—the Minute Men, the KKK, the Silver Shirts...

...It comprehends probes into departments of the Federal Government to expose corruption, inefficiency, or waste...

...But he makes it clear that he considers some of the Committee's accomplishments to be in the national interest...

...Thus HUAC's usual liberal critics were found in April, 1965, in opposition to a special appropriation of $50,000 "to investigate the KKK...

...Yet he castigates it as having "a record not of laws but of Fifth Amendment pleas and contempt citations and disrupted lives," as embodying "the drive to bar, censor, forbid, jail, that has cursed the land for 200 years...

...I do not think people should be libeled through the country by mere rumor...

...Perhaps HUAC can be looked upon as a part of "the greatest show on earth"—American political life...

...House opponents of HUAC now point out that the law regarding Congressional investigations is as stated by the Supreme Court in the Watkins case, 1957: "The power is broad...

...Goodman could be correct about the early and more primitive years of the Committee, but certainly in recent years the Committee has been opposed on sound constitutional and legal grounds—as a usurper of the judiciary's exclusive jurisdiction over trial and punishment, as a violator of the First Amendment, and as an instigator of bills of attainder...

...It seems to me that Goodman's hang-up is illustrative of the fundamental policy disagreement between Goodman and the House opponents of the Committee...