Darkness and Light—Richard Gid Powers, page 58Arthur Koestler,

of McCarthy’s famous wandering statistic of the number of Communist sympathizers at State.) As of 1951, Herman reports, “the State Department [loyalty] board had never separated anyone as a loyalty risk, even though 54 people had been allowed to resign in disloyalty cases and another three had been found disloyal but were still in the department pending appeal . . . [T]he State Department had bent over backward to avoid dismissing anyone for Communist associations or pro-Communist views, and was willing to allow people of doubtful loyalty, as it was then defined, to remain rather than have to get rid of them.”

McCarthy is held in odium for his accusations that men like George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson accepted security risks into their department because of some lack of loyalty to the United States. Herman has no more time for those accusations than the severest of McCarthy’s detractors. But something hindered those two wise men from acting as vigorously as they ought to have done to protect their department and their country against those risks, and Herman’s defense of McCarthy is based on exposing what that something was. He quotes Raymond Moley, one of FDR’s early advisers, confessing in 1953 that McCarthy “was the product of the fright and anger of a ‘deceived and injured public,’ who had been lied to regarding the Soviet threat both at home and abroad.”

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David Cesarani

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of McCarthy’s famous wandering statistic of the number of Communist sympathizers at State.) As of 1951, Herman reports, “the State Department [loyalty] board had never separated anyone as a loyalty risk, even though 54 people had been allowed to resign in disloyalty cases and another three had been found disloyal but were still in the department pending appeal . . . [T]he State Department had bent over backward to avoid dismissing anyone for Communist associations or pro-Communist views, and was willing to allow people of doubtful loyalty, as it was then defined, to remain rather than have to get rid of them.”

McCarthy is held in odium for his accusations that men like George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson accepted security risks into their department because of some lack of loyalty to the United States. Herman has no more time for those accusations than the severest of McCarthy’s detractors. But something hindered those two wise men from acting as vigorously as they ought to have done to protect their department and their country against those risks, and Herman’s defense of McCarthy is based on exposing what that something was. He quotes Raymond Moley, one of FDR’s early advisers, confessing in 1953 that McCarthy “was the product of the fright and anger of a ‘deceived and injured public,’ who had been lied to regarding the Soviet threat both at home and abroad.”