It is an odd circumstance that men who have devoted themselves most adamantly to the principal issue of our times have very bad reputations. In the annals of Congress, for example, what legislators have been more vilified than Joe McCarthy, William Jenner, Pat McCarran, Francis Walter, or Harold Velde? Each of these men has been pre-eminently identified with the cause of anti-Communism, and one by one they have been attacked by the massed voices of Liberaldom as mountebanks, fools and cads. Nor is the case much different in the world of journalism, where the names Hearst, McCormick and Patterson, staunch anti-Communists all, have been made synonymous with bad practice.
This surely is a strange coincidence. The laws of probability would indicate that sooner or later there would emerge, e.g., a chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities who went decently about his business, innocent of secret designs to rule by knout and truncheon; or that somewhere there would be a newspaperman who is an astringent anti-Communist without being simultaneously a maligner of respectable characters. But, on the Liberal presentation, such things have never been and never can be.
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