Who’s a Rip Van Winkle?

National review’s January 31 editorial on the House Internal Security Committee (HISC) was incorrect in every particular that led to its hasty and uninformed indictment. The operative word is “uninformed.” NR charged that HISC had become “sleepy” under the leadership of Representative Richard Ichord when in fact Ichord transformed the Committee. First the name was sanitized; the old and much reviled House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was rechristened HISC. Then Chairman Ichord beefed up his staff with experts, former FBI and military intelligence men.

At the time he took over, in 1969, the hearings on the SDS were winding up. A press which had been traditionally hostile to HUAC seemed more interested in reporting the cut of Jerry Rubin’s rented costume or the tilt of David Dellinger’s chin than what the Weatherpeople were about. Guerrilla theater clowns regularly disrupted sessions of HISC, so Ichord stopped subpoenaing the troublemakers and turned to the arduous and less spectacular work of collecting facts from defectors, from surfaced undercover men, from experts on subversion. He succeeded in taking HISC and its investigations off the front pages, which may be what led NR to believe that the Committee had become ineffectual in its final years. (Even the New York Times moved the story of HISC’s demise back to page 64, and then spent most of the space describing how Father Drinan et al. had succeeded in bringing it low.)

LC

About the Author

Lawrence V. Cott

National review’s January 31 editorial on the House Internal Security Committee (HISC) was incorrect in every particular that led to its hasty and uninformed indictment. The operative word is “uninformed.” NR charged that HISC had become “sleepy” under the leadership of Representative Richard Ichord when in fact Ichord transformed the Committee. First the name was sanitized; the old and much reviled House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was rechristened HISC. Then Chairman Ichord beefed up his staff with experts, former FBI and military intelligence men.

At the time he took over, in 1969, the hearings on the SDS were winding up. A press which had been traditionally hostile to HUAC seemed more interested in reporting the cut of Jerry Rubin’s rented costume or the tilt of David Dellinger’s chin than what the Weatherpeople were about. Guerrilla theater clowns regularly disrupted sessions of HISC, so Ichord stopped subpoenaing the troublemakers and turned to the arduous and less spectacular work of collecting facts from defectors, from surfaced undercover men, from experts on subversion. He succeeded in taking HISC and its investigations off the front pages, which may be what led NR to believe that the Committee had become ineffectual in its final years. (Even the New York Times moved the story of HISC’s demise back to page 64, and then spent most of the space describing how Father Drinan et al. had succeeded in bringing it low.)