I was jolted by these words, and at first I wondered if he had gone too far. But as the Communist subjugation of Eastern Europe became more and more apparent—with the takeover of Hungary in 1947 and Czechoslovakia in 1948—I realized that the defeat of Hitler and Japan had not produced a lasting peace, and freedom was now threatened by a new and even more dangerous enemy.
My maiden speech in the House on February 18, 1947, was the presentation of a contempt of Congress citation against Gerhart Eisler, who had been identified as the top Communist agent in America. When he refused to testify before the committee, he was held in contempt. I spoke for only ten minutes, describing the background of the case, and I concluded: “It is essential as members of this House that we defend vigilantly the fundamental rights of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But we must bear in mind that the rights of free speech and free press do not carry with them the right to advocate the destruction of the very government which protects the freedom of an individual to express his views.”
The only member who voted against the contempt citation was Vito Marcantonio of New York.
Eisler was finally indicted for passport fraud. Before he could be tried, however, he jumped bail and fled to East Germany, where he eventually became director of propaganda for the Communist regime.
At the end of 1947 I was appointed to a special legislative subcommittee of the Committee on Un-American Activities. We held some wide-ranging hearings into the nature of communist philosophy and practice, and on the basis of these I prepared a report outlining a new approach to the complicated problem of internal communist subversion. Most of the dedicated anticommunists felt that the best way to stop internal subversion was to outlaw the Communist Party. I believed that this approach would be inefficient and counterproductive. The practical effect of outlawing the party would only be to drive the hard core of true believers underground. I thought it made more sense to drive the Communist Party into the open so that we could know who its members were.
Another problem in this area was finding an objective way to define and identify Communist front organizations. Too many conservatives and other anticommunists applied broad and imprecise criteria, with the result that many extremely liberal and left-wing organizations were unfairly tarred with the communist brush. I felt that no matter how abhorrent the beliefs of any individuals or groups might be, as long as they did not receive financial support or orders from foreign governments, or engage in illegal activities, their right to their beliefs must be protected.
Working closely together, Karl Mundt of South Dakota and I prepared a bill that was introduced in the spring of 1948 and became known as the Mundt–Nixon bill. It was the first piece of legislation to emerge in ten years from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It provided for the registration of all Communist Party members and required a statement of the source of all printed and broadcast material issued by organizations that were found to be Communist fronts. Under our bill, the identification of a group as a Communist front would be made by a Subversive Activities Control Board, which would investigate a group at the request of the Attorney General.
I was made floor manager for the debate on the bill; Vito Marcantonio was the floor leader for the Democrats. At the end of the first day’s debate, I spoke briefly: “There is too much loose talk and confusion on the Communist issue. By passing this bill the Congress of the United States will go on record as to just what is subversive about communism in the United States. . . . It will once and for all spike many of the loose charges about organizations being Communist fronts because they happen to advocate some of the same policies which the Communists support.”
The Mundt–Nixon bill passed the House on May 19, 1948, by a vote of 319 to 58. The Senate let it die in committee, and it was not until 1950 that some of its provisions were embodied in the McCarran Act. By then, of course, the nature of the question of internal communism had changed because of the Hiss case, and the harsher terms of the McCarran Act reflected that change.
It is important to remember that the perception of communism in American politics changed completely in the early postwar years. During the war, the Soviets were our allies against Hitler. The photographs of American and Russian soldiers shaking hands at the Elbe made a strong impression on many Americans, who looked forward to a new dawn of international peace and cooperation.
In the main, anticommunism in postwar America meant opposition to the kind of dictatorial state socialism that existed in Russia and that many Americans saw as a negation of everything America stood for. In the 1946 campaign, for example, when I talked about the “communist-dominated PAC,” my remarks were generally understood in this context of dictatorial socialism versus free enterprise.
In the years 1946 to 1948 domestic communism was a peripheral issue. Until the Hiss case, it was generally not seen as a clear and present danger to our way of life. A poll in January 1948, for example, found that 40 percent of those questioned felt the American Communist Party posed no threat, while 45 percent believed that it posed a potential threat.
As the presidential election of 1948 approached, however, Truman must have begun to worry about the issue of internal security. Now that the Committee on Un-American Activities was in Republican hands, he may have decided that the best way to handle the issue was to cover up the evidence. On March 15, 1948, he ordered all federal departments and agencies to refuse future congressional requests or subpoenas for information regarding loyalty or security matters. This decision backfired because instead of defusing the issue it made it appear that Truman was trying to cover something up. Instead of admitting an error of judgment, Truman decided to tough it through. His course led him into the shoals of red herring that caused him so many problems, not only in the Hiss case but also two years later when McCarthy began his anticommunist career with the ostensible purpose of getting Truman to rescind this executive order.
It was the Hiss case that completely changed the public’s perception of domestic communism. People were now alerted to a serious threat to our liberties. At the same time this new awareness unfortunately led to emotional excesses and demagogic imprecisions that clouded the issue more than they illuminated it.
THE HERTER COMMITTEE
On Monday, July 30, 1947, I was probably the most surprised man in Washington when I opened the morning newspaper and read that I had been chosen by Speaker Joe Martin to be one of the nineteen members of a select committee headed by Congressman Christian Herter of Massachusetts to go to Europe and prepare a report in connection with the foreign aid plan that the Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, had unveiled at a Harvard commencement speech in June. I had not even spoken to Martin or anyone else about the committee because I had not thought there was any chance of being appointed to it.
The appointment was an unexpected honor and opportunity for me. My determination to work hard had paid off unexpectedly soon. I was also modest enough to recognize that geography and age had played a part in my selection. Martin wanted the committee to represent a cross section of the House, and I was the only Westerner and the youngest member appointed to it. I would now have an opportunity to work with some of the most senior and influential men in the House and a chance to show what I could do in the field of foreign affairs.
Most of my advisers in California were pleased with my appointment, but they wanted the committee’s report to disown the bipartisan Truman–Vandenberg foreign policy that was being promoted in Washington to support the Marshall Plan. Just before we sailed for Europe, I received a long letter signed by half a dozen of my strongest supporters. It began, “We feel it appropriate to state our views at this time inasmuch as you are embarking on a trip on which you will be subjected first, to a skillful orientation program by the State Department and later, to no less skillfully prepared European propaganda. It is our hope and belief that, even in the midst of these powerful influences, you will be able to maintain the level-headed course you have followed in C
ongress.” The conclusion was a straightforward partisan reminder that a presidential election was little more than a year away: “We believe there is only one fundamental cure for this whole situation—that is to rid ourselves of all the hangover philosophies of the New Deal by making a clean sweep in Washington and electing a Republican administration in 1948. This can be done provided the Republican members of Congress are wise enough to refuse to be drawn into support of a dangerously unworkable and profoundly inflationary foreign policy and, provided further, that the Democrats do not succeed in so dividing our party by bipartisan internationalism that there no longer is any way to tell who is a Republican.”
The committee sailed from New York on the Queen Mary at the end of August. Despite all our briefings and studying, I do not think that any of us was really prepared for what we found in Europe. From the minute we stepped off the luxurious ship in Southampton it was clear that we had come to a continent tottering on the brink of starvation and chaos. In every country we visited the situation was the same: without American aid, millions would starve or die of diseases caused by malnutrition before the winter was over. The political facts were equally evident: without our food and aid, Europe would be plunged into anarchy, revolution, and, ultimately, communism.
Britain’s Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, invited us to tea at 10 Downing Street, and we spent an hour with the Falstaffian Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, whose recent speech advocating that all the gold at Fort Knox be divided up among the nations of the world tended to get the discussion off on the wrong foot.
If London was depressing, Berlin seemed hopeless. What once had been a great city was now block after block, mile after mile of charred desolation. It hardly seemed possible that three million people were still living amidst the rubble. As we stood in the vast ruined hall of what had been Hitler’s Chancellery, small thin-faced German boys tried to sell us their fathers’ war medals as souvenirs.
Despite the cautious reluctance of some of our embassy people, I insisted that we meet with the Communist Party leaders in each country we visited. We found that these men were usually more vigorous and impressive than their democratic counterparts. I was curious to see how their minds worked, and I also wanted to assess their relationship to the Soviet Union. I particularly remember our meeting with Giuseppe Di Vittorio, the Communist Secretary General of the Italian Labor Confederation. His office was decorated with red curtains and red walls, and he wore a small red flag in his lapel. I had seen most of the American labor leaders in action before the House Labor Committee, and Di Vittorio could have held his own with the best of them.
I asked him what kind of government policy he favored for Italian unions, and he replied that he would like to see labor be free from government control and have the right to strike.
“From your answer,” I said, “I assume that you favor the kind of government we have in the United States, where labor is striking at this very moment, rather than the kind of government they have in Russia, where labor is dominated by the state and they haven’t had a strike in the last twenty years.”
After the translation, Di Vittorio gave me an icy look and said, “The gentleman and I are not speaking the same language. In a country like the United States the workers must strike to obtain their rights from the capitalist reactionaries and employers. In Russia there are no capitalist reactionaries and employers and therefore the right to strike need not exist.”
I asked him if he had any criticisms to offer regarding American foreign policy. In the notes I made of the conversation, I wrote that “he proceeded to give our foreign policy a going over which would make Henry Wallace look like a piker.” When he finished, I said, “We always welcome criticism of our policy, but may I ask whether you have ever criticized Russian policy so closely and in such detail?”
Di Vittorio gave me the same look as before and said, “Again the gentleman and I are not speaking the same language. The reason the foreign policy of the United States is necessarily imperialistic is that it is dominated by capitalists, reactionaries, and employers. In Russia there are no capitalists, reactionaries, and employers, and therefore it is impossible for the foreign policy of Russia to be imperialistic. Therefore it is not subject to criticism.”
He was right: we were not speaking the same language. It struck me that Di Vittorio’s expression of the party line was almost identical—right down to the phraseology—to that of the Communist leaders we had met in England and France. In my notes I concluded that “this indicates definitely then that the Communists throughout the world owe their loyalty not to the countries in which they live but to Russia.”
If we saw the false face of an ostensibly patriotic communism in Britain, France, and Italy, we saw its true and brutal face in Greece and Trieste. In Greece we used an old cargo plane to fly up to the northern mountains to assess the military situation and the morale of the loyalist soldiers fighting against the Communist rebels. When we walked down the main street of a mountain town, the mayor introduced us to a girl whose left breast had been cut off by the Communists because she had refused to betray her brother, one of the loyalist leaders.
In Trieste, the large port on the Italian-Yugoslav border that was about to become a UN-mandated free city, I witnessed firsthand the violence that sometimes accompanied the communist threat.
We arrived the day before the UN mandate was to become effective. I was at the hotel, just beginning to unpack, when I heard loud singing. I looked out the window and saw a parade of about five hundred men and women. They were young, vigorous, and full of fight. Many were carrying red flags, and they were singing the stirring “Internationale” at the top of their lungs. The Communist Party headquarters was opposite the hotel, and as the parade passed by, each marcher raised his arm in a clenched-fist salute. I went down to see what was going on. Suddenly there was an explosion at the end of the block. The crowd cleared and I saw the body of a young man whose head had been blown off by a grenade thrown from a second-story window. For a frozen moment everyone stood looking at the blood gushing from his neck, but then rocks and bottles started flying. The police arrived and began chasing the Communist leaders.
A fleeing Communist, barreling through the crowd like a college fullback, hit an old woman and knocked her halfway across the street against the curb, where she lay motionless. This sort of thing continued all afternoon and evening. That day five people were killed and seventy-five were wounded by bombs and gunfire. I was sure that what was happening in Trieste would soon be re-enacted throughout Western Europe unless America helped to restore stability and prosperity.
A few weeks after we returned to Washington, the Herter Committee issued a number of reports based on the truckload of notes and papers we brought back with us. The common denominator of each report was a strong recommendation for economic aid for Europe. In the meantime I had taken a poll and found that 75 percent of my constituents in the Twelfth District were resolutely opposed to any foreign aid. This was the first time I had personally experienced the classic dilemma, so eloquently described by Edmund Burke, that is faced at one time or another by almost any elected official in a democracy: how much should his votes register his constituents’ opinions, and how much should they represent his own views and convictions? After what I had seen and learned in Europe, I believed so strongly in the necessity of extending economic aid that I felt I had no choice but to vote my conscience and then try my hardest to convince my constituents.
I immediately prepared a series of columns for the local newspapers, and as soon as I could I went home and began an active round of speeches throughout the district describing what I had seen on the trip and why I felt that economic assistance was necessary if we were to save Europe from the twin specters of starvation and communism.
Fortunately, my appearances in the district were successful, and the whole experience ended up enhancing my popularity. On December 15, 1947, the House voted 313 to 82 in favor of the Marshall Plan. As everyone now knows
, it was successful in every way: it saved Europe from starvation, it ensured Europe’s economic recovery, and it preserved Europe from communism.
I learned a great deal from the Herter Committee trip. Above all, I now understood the reasons for the success of communism in Europe.
First, the Communist leaders were strong and vigorous: they knew what they wanted and were willing to work hard to get it. After this visit, I would never make the mistake of thinking, either because of the doubletalk party line jargon or because their manners are often crude, that Communist leaders are not very intelligent and very tough men.
Second, I saw how the leaders of postwar European communism understood the power of nationalism and were appropriating that power. While we were in Rome, for example, Communist posters for the upcoming municipal elections were plastered all over the city. These posters did not feature the hammer and sickle, or any other Communist symbol, nor did they depict the joys of some future workers’ state. Instead, they were huge heroic pictures of the nineteenth-century patriot Garibaldi—who would have turned over in his grave had he known that his life’s devotion to Italy and freedom was being manipulated by an international statist ideology ruled from Moscow.
Third, I saw how European communism was rolling in Soviet money. Unlike most of their democratic counterparts, the European Communist parties were well financed from Moscow.
Fourth, I saw that most of democratic Europe was either leaderless or, worse still, that many in the leadership classes had simply capitulated to communism. For the first time, I understood the vital importance of strong leadership to a people and a nation, and I saw the sad consequences when such leadership is lacking or when it fails. From just this brief exposure, I could see that the only thing the Communists would respect—and deal with seriously—was power at least equal to theirs and backed up by willingness to use it. I made a penciled note in Trieste that is as true today as it was thirty years ago: “One basic rule with Russians—never bluff unless you are prepared to carry through, because they will test you every time.”
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