The Breath of Treason
By D. W. BROGAN
GENERAL EISENHOWER has come into Wisconsin and has gone, recommending the people of that State to send back to the Senate Joe McCarthy who once described General Eisenhower's chief, patron and maker, General Marshall, as " steeped in falsehood." Nobody thinks that General Eisenhower liked backing Senator McCarthy. Politics, especially presidential politics, make strange bed- fellows, and the General is learning that there is no royal, dust- less road to the White House. But what is more momentous is the fact that, in Wisconsin, it is not certain if the impor- tant question is whether General Eisenhower backs Senator McCarthy or whether the Senator backs the General. For the electors of Wisconsin, in the Republican primary, have given Senator McCarthy more votes than all his rivals put together. He may be ranked by competent and moderately objective observers as the worst member of the Senate. His methgcls may arouse conservative lawyers to indignant protest, but that does not, in a sense, matter; the State of Robert Marion La Follette wants Joe. And the Republican high command sees in McCarthy and in McCarthyism one of its most valuable assets. For, in the United States today, many millions of Americans feel or think they feel the breath of treason.
There are historical reasons why the Americans should not emulate the usually desirable English quality of not believing that, when things go wrong, they have been betrayed. American history, even as taught in the most expurgated text- books, has to deal with the problem of treason. What is Alger Hiss to Benedict Arnold or even to General James Wilkinson ? Millions of Americans were brought up to believe, and did believe, that at least one member of President Buchanan's cabi- net anticipated Fuchs by deliberately transferring important military assets to the South on the eve of the Civil War. An ingenious book has been written to prove that Lincoln was murdered at the instigation of one of his own Cabinet. And every week the Chicago Tribune cries, from the ramparts it watches, that the Redcoats are coming. It is only a few weeks since the vigilant Colonel McCormick spotted, and nipped in the bud, a conspiracy to smuggle the United States back into the Empire (no " Commonwealth " euphemism there) under the guise of an inter-parliamentary meeting in Ottawa. But the breath of treason that is now smelt on the breeze is the breath of Communist treason. The first thing to be said is that there was Communist treason. I believe that Alger Hiss was guilty, and, even for those who doubt it, there is the undisputed fact that important federal officials were secret Communists. (I say undisputed fact because they have admitted it themselves.) The wildest charges• of Miss Bentley or of Whittaker Chambers don't look quite so wild as they did when they were first made and when President Truman laughed them off as a red herring. And the average American is not greatly interested in the psychology of treason; he is much more con- cerned with the fact. Nor is he convinced that the security services of America or Britain come very well out of the Fuchs case, and he is, I find in practice, not very willing to believe that there is no more behind the Maclean-Burgess case than meets the eye. And he is reminded that the Democratic candidate for President testified that Alger Hiss was of good repute and that the Secretary of State refused to turn his back on him after his conviction. That was, no doubt, the Christian thing to do, but it is open to question whether a Secretary of State should be as Christian as all that.
And the American voter, perplexed and distressed by the Korean war whose impact is still underestimated in England, at Morecambe for instance, worried by the " conquest " of China by the U.S.S.R. (for in that simple form that great but ambiguous event, the capture of China by the Chinese Com- munists. is seen) needs a simple explanation. And he gets it. "Nous sonunes trahis." That this feeling could be profitably exploited all politicians knew. It was for his real services in unmasking Alger Hiss that Senator Nixon has been so hand- somely rewarded. To denounce the Reds is the standby of all threatened Republican senators in this election; Messrs. Jenner, Kern. Cain all do as good an imitation of Senator McCarthy as their talents allow. Because he was accused of whitewashing the Administration, Senator Tydings lost one of the safest seats in the Senate, one he had held successfully against the bitter opposition of President Roosevelt. The American people is worried, and its worry makes possible the success of statesmen who recall Horatio Bottomley in his political aspects and almost force one to quote (and misapply) Dr. Johnson's famous dictum about the connection between patriotism and scoundrels.
The general British attitude is to laugh this off, or write it down as a piece of barbarism, showing that there is nothing to choose between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. It is not as simple as that. Experience has taught the American people that treason exists and is dangerous. It has taught them, too, the not very recondite lesson that the true country of a Com- munist is the U.S.S.R., that a party-member in good standing is kidding somebody, the country to which he owes legal allegiance or the Communist Party. He thinks it probable that it is the country, not the party, that is being kidded. So do I. And he wants something done about it.
What is to be done is a good deal more difficult to say than Senator McCarthy or even General Eisenhower appears to think. Test oaths won't catch Communists though they will catch Quakers. The whole complimentary belief on which the English Text Act and corresponding legislation were based, . that your enemy, Jesuit or Independent, would not perjure himself, would not forswear his deepest beliefs, is irrelevant in our brave new world. Nor is it easy to spot all Communists by the company they keep or the books they read. With that political innocence which marks so many military men, General Walter Bedell Smith has announced that there may very well be Communists in his own Central Intelligence Agency. If there are, they will not be detected by the means that can be used to cross-examine and expose actresses or professors. And General Bedell Smith who is thus baffled or, at any rate, thinks he may be baffled was General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff and, it is believed, his choice for the very important job he now holds. Even were Senator McCarthy made Secretary of Defence, he would be put to it to purge the C.I.A. by another version of his Wheeling speech. The politician need not worry about all that. He can play on the anxieties of the people, on the natural dislike of a system whose agents have caused over 100,000 casualties and hold thousands of American prisoners. He can play on a dislike of foreigners, on anti-Semitism, on a general and justifiable feeling that in this, as in other matters, Washington, which means the Democratic Party, has been too casual, too trusting in personal relationships, whether they affected delinquent tax-collectors or secret party-members. The issue is a hot one; it will stay hot, and General Eisenhower (if he is elected) will find it far harder to satisfy Senator McCarthy than he may think now. For the Senator is on a good thing and knows it, and he has parlayed (as the Americans say) a minor talking-point into power and prestige. He would be a fool to let down now. And a fool is about the only thing the Senator has not been called.
Previous page
