Six Crises Read Online Free PDF Page B

stake. The Committee in 1948 was under constant and severe attack from many segments of both press and public. It had been widely condemned as a “Red-baiting” group, habitually unfair and irresponsible, whose investigations had failed to lead to a single conviction of anyone against whom charges had been made at its hearings. It was, the critics said, doing more of a disservice to the country because of its abridgment of civil liberties than any alleged services it might be rendering in uncovering Communist subversives.
    The Committee had survived many past attacks for its failure to prove the charges of witnesses appearing before it. But I was convinced that a failure in this case would prove to be fatal. The President of the United States himself, the great majority of the press corps, and even some of the Committee’s own members were mounting an all-out attack on its alleged “sloppy” procedures.
    No one was more aware than I that the Committee’s past record had been vulnerable to attack. This was due in part to how it had conducted its investigations, but possibly even more to what it was investigating. The extent to which congressional investigations are generally approved is largely determined by whose ox is gored. If it is a J. P. Morgan, a Jimmy Hoffa, or a Frank Costello being investigated, most of the press and the public couldn’t seem to care less what procedures the Committee uses. But particularly in those years immediately after World War II, a congressional investigation of Communist activities was just like waving a red flag in the face of potential critics. This was not because the critics were pro-Communist—only a small minority could be accurately so designated. It was, rather, because such investigations seemed in that period to involve an attack on the free expression of ideas. The Communist Party, in most intellectual circles, was considered to be “just another political party” and Communism just “an abstract political idea”—a generally unpopular one to be sure, but one that any individual should have the right to express freely without running the risk of investigation or prosecution.
    The Hiss case itself and other developments in the period between 1947 and 1951 were to effect a significant change in the national attitude on these issues. But I recognized on that August evening in 1948that even though a committee investigating Communism followed impeccably correct procedures and proved to be right, it would receive very little credit. Where its procedures were loose and it proved to be wrong, it would be subjected to scathing and merciless attack—and along with it, all its members who participated in the investigation.
    Despite its vulnerabilities, I strongly believed that the Committee served several necessary and vital purposes. Woodrow Wilson once said that congressional investigating committees have three legitimate functions: first, to investigate for the purpose of determining what laws should be enacted; second, to serve as a watchdog on the actions of the executive branch of the government, exposing inefficiency and corruption; third, and in Wilson’s view probably most important, to inform the public on great national and international issues. I had served on the Committee long enough to realize that congressional investigations of Communist activities were essential to further all these purposes. I knew that if the Committee failed to follow through on the Hiss case, the effectiveness of all congressional investigations, and particularly those in the field of Communist activities, might be impaired for years.
    But more important by far than the fate of the Committee, the national interest required that this investigation go forward. If Chambers were telling the truth, this meant that the Communists had been able to enlist the active support of men like Alger Hiss—in education, background, and intelligence, among the