Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

These revelations began in January and February 1947, when Budenz identified Gerhart Eisler as a Communist leader in the United States. Within a few weeks President Truman gave the investigators a prime weapon when he issued an order (March 21, 1947) requiring a loyalty oath from all government workers. The significance of this was that any Communists in the government could be prosecuted for perjury unless they had admitted the fact.

In the course of the summer the FBI arrested a half-dozen individuals at various times and announced that they “had stolen vital atomic bomb secrets from the heart of the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos.” This alarming news was reinforced by a number of press releases from the HUAC. When the accused were brought to trial, however, it developed that they had been guilty of insignificant and technical infractions of the law, such as taking snapshots of each other while serving as soldiers at Los Alamos or pilfering of government property there. Eventually two were given suspended sentences, one was sentenced to eighteen months, a fourth got six months, and a fifth paid a fine of $250. The original charges of atomic espionage were in headlines; the final disposition of the cases, if recorded at all, appeared as insignificant items on a back page, unconnected with “atomic espionage.”

In February 1948, Representative Thomas, chairman of the HUAC, was seeking from the Congress the largest appropriations his committee had ever obtained. Apparently to bolster this request, on the last day of the month, from his hospital bed he issued a six-page report on Dr. Edward U. Condon, Director of the National Bureau of Standards. Condon, one of the world’s great authorities on quantum mechanics, had been attacked by Thomas for about a year, chiefly in press releases and in two articles in national magazines, apparently because of animosity over Condon’s opposition to the Johnson-Mays bill for atomic-energy control. The report of February 1948 said flatly, “Dr. Condon is one of the weakest links in our atomic security.” This charge was based on a mishmash of falsehoods, irrelevancies, and incorrect inferences. It was charged that Condon had obtained his job from the favor of Henry Wallace, then secretary of commerce, with the implication that Condon must be a Left-winger if Wallace was. In fact, Wallace did not even know Condon, and appointed him only for the administrative reason that the Bureau of Standards was a part of the Commerce Department. Or again, the HUAC report quoted from a letter of J. Edgar Hoover to W. Averell Harriman when the latter was secretary of commerce in May 1947. This letter had been stolen from the FBI loyalty report on Condon and was merely a history of unevaluated reports of Condon’s actions as reported to the FBI. As published in the HUAC report it was edited to cut out (without any indication) sentences favorable to Condon. It was charged that Condon’s passport was taken up by the State Department when he planned to go to Russia in 1946. The fact was that this plan was a government-sponsored project to fly about two dozen American scientists to Russia in an army plane, and Condon’s participation was canceled by the army because it regarded him as too valuable a nuclear physicist to be risked behind the Iron Curtain, where he might be kidnapped. The HUAC report said that Condon recruited members to join an organization listed as “subversive” by the attorney general, the American-Soviet Science Society. It later developed that this organization, which existed for the purpose of translating scientific reports from Russian to English, using funds from the Rockefeller Foundation, had never been listed as subversive by the attorney general, but on the contrary had been encouraged by the United States government as a method of finding out what the Russians were doing in science. The HUAC had simply confused this society with an entirely different organization, which the attorney general had listed.

On this kind of evidence the HUAC demanded Condon’s removal from the government and ominously reported that “the situation as regards Dr. Condon is not an isolated one … there are other Government officials in strategic positions who are playing Stalin’s game to the detriment of the United States.” Condon’s repeated requests for an opportunity to appear before the committee to refute its charges under oath were ignored. The committee, especially its chairman, continued to harass Condon so that it was impossible for him to do his work in the Bureau of Standards. This was done by subjecting him to one loyalty investigation after another (each takes a great deal of work, by the FBI and the accused, and requires months). These investigations, one after another, cleared Dr. Condon, but each clearance was followed by new charges and a new investigation. After the fourth clearance, and the opening of a fifth investigation, Condon resigned from the government in 1954. This fifth investigation was demanded by Vice-President Nixon, who seems to have felt that his original participation in the unjustified smearing of Condon six years before had to be sustained by continued persecution. By that time Chairman Thomas, who was the director of this persecution in 1947-1949, had been sent to prison as a common criminal for making the employees in his congressional office, paid from government funds, secretly give back substantial parts of their salaries to him. Thomas should have restricted his efforts for additional money to smearing innocent scientists in paid articles in national magazines.

The Condon case was still in its early full publicity in July and August 1948, when the Thomas committee hit the headlines for weeks, day after day, with the testimony of Louis Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and other “experts” on Communists. They listed several dozen names of Communists in government in the 1930’s, organized in formal groups or cells, and generally paying dues and sending information through “couriers” like Miss Bentley. Most of those named ignored the charges or simply made a denial to the press, but a few, such as Hiss, who sought to refute the charges, were met by new ones. Eventually, as we have seen, Remington and Hiss were both jailed for perjury, the former for denying he had been a Communist and the latter for denying he gave government documents to Chambers. Both cases required two trials before convictions were obtained.

Others of these named were called before the committee and refused to give evidence under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects against self-incrimination. Little was done about these, but it is clear that many of them were in fact Communists and that Bentley and Chambers knew them as such, by hearsay at least. Bentley’s original evidence in 1948 gave a score of names of Communists she had “known” in the government. More than two years passed before it became clear that she did not “know” them at all, had never met them, and could not identify them by sight, but had merely gathered their names from her contacts with the few Communists who reported directly to her and whom she knew well. Similarly, she indicated in her original evidence that she broke with the Communists and went to the FBI, for patriotic reasons, in August 1945. Only in 1953, when the Eisenhower Administration was still trying to make a major issue of the Communists in the New Deal, did Attorney General Brownell, in publishing a letter of J. Edgar Hoover, inadvertently reveal that Miss Bentley’s revelations to it did not begin until November 8, 1945, the day after the newspapers revealed that Budenz had been giving names. Miss Bentley’s earlier visit to the FBI in New Haven in August 1945 had nothing to do with her desire to give information or with Communists, but was simply her desire to find out if a man who had dated her was an employee of the FBI.