The Redhunter

by William F. Buckley

  Two days after the coup, the Political Union convened. Anticipating the heavy demand for seats in the heated political atmosphere, the secretary declined to admit nonmembers until five minutes before the program was to begin. Membership cards were examined as students filed through two entrances to the hall. At both doors Young Progressives handed out a pamphlet, with excerpts of spoken and written views of prominent Americans, mostly academic figures, who had spoken out against the projected prosecutions of the Communist American leaders under the Smith Act, which forbade conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution. The students made their way to their seats with excited anticipatory chatter. But quickly they fell silent. The large hall was packed. Two dozen nonmembers stood in the rear of the hall.

  Only a few minutes behind schedule, President Tucker called the house to order. He read out the resolution, written and punctuated according to high Oxford University debate protocols: “Resolved, That this house should invite to speak the president of the Communist Party of the United States.”

  Ed Tucker was from Georgia. When he was speaking to more than three people his Southern accent deepened. He was affable, relaxed, and quick witted. “We figgered it’s our problem, not any outsiders’ problem, to talk about who we want to inviyate to speak. So we’re going to hear from students of Columbia, not from outsiders.” First, he said, the president of the Progressives, Tom Scott. Then, for the Conservatives, vice president Harry Bontecou. “I don’t really care who wins this debate; I think we’re going to have a great evening. Tom, you all go ahead. Ten minutes.”

  Tom Scott devoted the first half of his time to recalling American figures who in their day had been thought alien and seditious. He reminded the audience of the terrible Alien and Sedition Act passed under President John Adams. He spoke of efforts attempted before the Civil War to silence those who took unconventional positions. He spoke of the persecution of the Wobblies before and after the First World War. Of the Palmer Raids in 1920. He cited the prominent civil-rights scholars who opposed any disqualification of the Communist Party to participate in the great national debate, to compete for the opinions of free men. And concluded: “Do we want to do that bit all over again?”

  He turned finally to face Harry Bontecou, sitting in the front-row right, spokesman, that night, for the hundred-odd Conservative Party members.

  “I do believe, Mr. President, that after we are through with this debate tonight with the antidemocrats, we ought to schedule a debate for the next session.

  “I am convinced that the arguments for illegitimizing the Republican Party,” he said, just a trace of a smile on his face, “are every bit as convincing as those that would forbid the Communist Party.” There was laughter. “No one seriously doubts that the GOP is engaged in class warfare and that its policies are substantially, perhaps even critically, influenced by the all-powerful munitions makers who lust for another world war.” There was scattered applause.

  Scott was staring him in the face: “I call upon Mr. Bontecou, whose subversive demagogy you are fated to hear, to make his fascistic case.”

  That was tough language, even for the PU. The applause was more tepid than Tom Scott expected, more robust than the Conservatives thought tolerable.

  Harry Bontecou was pale. The applause from the Conservative ranks was tentative, apprehensive. When he began speaking there was a strain in his voice. Student speakers were permitted, under union rules, to consult notes, not text. Harry scanned his notes briefly.

  He began by recounting what had happened one year earlier at Berkeley, in California. A student political organization announced two scheduled events. The first was to feature George Hamilton Hughes, the self-proclaimed Nazi, the founder, in North Dakota, of the “U.S. National Socialist Party.” At the succeeding session, the speaker would be Gus Hall, president of the Communist Party.

  Harry’s voice matured into a more stable pitch, the tone becoming forceful but never strident. What happened—as Harry told the story to the packed, attentive house—was that soon after hearing the news of the invitations, John Meng, the chancellor of Berkeley, released for circulation in the university an open letter to the student body.

  Dr. Meng had begun by saying that he would not interfere with the students’ right to invite whomsoever they chose to come to Berkeley, but that—Harry consulted his notes—”‘to accord these undistinguished visitors anything more demonstrative than a shudder of polite disgust would be to attribute to their presence a totally fictitious importance.’ ”

  Harry told how Chancellor Meng had then called on the faculty of Berkeley to join with him in making an appropriate demonstration on the day that Hamilton Hughes arrived: Faculty and students would remove to a synagogue to participate in a memorial service for the millions of victims of Nazism and Communism.

  “You have read what Mr. Gus Hall said about what happened in Czechoslovakia last week,” Harry reminded them. “ ‘A counterfascist victory.’ ” Harry asked the assembly whether they expected to hear anything from Mr. Hall they did not already know a Communist official would say.

  He turned his head up slightly, looking now at the heavy Gothic woodwork above the head of the presiding president. “Communists in America or elsewhere, whether native or Soviet, come to recapitulate their dogmas, to press their drive to coopt the moral slogans of the West, and to practice their science of confusion. Yes, we of the Conservative Party concede that Communists are fit objects of curiosity, but only for practicing social scientists—”some boos were heard—”who inquire into the darker mysteries of the human temperament. This organization isn’t a psychological laboratory.”

  He asked whether one could expect to satisfy political and, indeed, intellectual curiosity when inviting to speak someone whose views were entirely synchronized with the “unflinching even if erratic” will of Joseph Stalin, who “only nine years ago declared his friendship with Adolf Hitler.” What service was being performed by inviting the head of the Communist Party to speak if he could say nothing attributable to any thought that originated with him? An invitation to a self-proclaimed Communist served “only an extrinsic point—the affirmation of the students’ administrative right to invite whomsoever they choose. But that right is not being challenged at Columbia any more than it was at Berkeley.”

  He closed solemnly: “And yet they are human beings. Few of us are practiced at giving that ‘shudder of polite disgust’ recommended by Dr. Meng. How then do you treat a Communist we have ourselves invited? We can jeer him. Some may treat him with that terrible coldness that says that we can’t, at our level of attainment, take seriously a man who seeks out and works for an ideological kingdom which it is the very purpose of our education to know to despise. Why then bring him here, if no purpose can be served by doing so, and if the only result can be that we will humiliate ourselves and him?”

  Harry looked now at the Chair. “Fight him, fight the tyrants everywhere; but do not ask them to our quarters merely to spit on them, and do not ask them to our quarters if we can’t spit on them. To do the one is to ambush a human being as one might a rabid dog; to do the other is to ambush ourselves—into breaking faith with humanity.”

  The hall was in an uproar. There were jeers and catcalls but also wild applause. President Tucker struggled a full two minutes to get silence. Succeeding speakers tried but did not succeed in recapturing attention.

  The vote that night detonated on campus the next day when news of it got out. The verdict—to deny Gus Hall an invitation—was a story in the New York Times.

  Two days later, Tom Scott announced that the Columbia Young Progressives had extended an invitation to Gus Hall to appear on campus under the Progressives’ sponsorship.

  15

  Underground maneuvers

  “Dell?” The phone rang in the corner office rented only ten weeks ago and awash with campaign posters and buttons and brochures and yesterday’s paper coffee cups.

  “Yeah, this is Dell. Victor?”

  “
Dell, you are a true asshole.”

  “Stop making love, Victor. I’m spoken for. What you want, boy?”

  “I’m talking about the list of convention speakers published in the Times. So we put you in charge of the Arrangements Committee in Philadelphia and who do you line up to nominate Henry Wallace? Humberto Stover!”

  “What’s the matter with Humberto?”

  Victor put down the telephone and lit a cigarette. He needed a breather, even a few seconds. “What’s the matter with Humberto Stover?” Was it possible the dumb sonofabitch didn’t know? “Stover is—was—a paid-up party member. Yes, we know all about our neat little party-member ploy. So do most people seriously involved in our business.”

  The Communist Party had made an internal move attempting lightly to frustrate the FBI and others in search of Communist Party members. The new rules were: Any individual membership was automatically rescinded if anybody got officially curious. Vaporized! “Nobody, except maybe Gus Hall, is documentably a ‘member of the party.’ Oh, yes. And Stalin, of course. Dell, you know what I could lay my hands on, with only maybe ten minutes’ research?”

  “What, Victor?” Dell’s voice was quieter.

  “I could give you the party card number for Humberto before it was deactivated. It’s just that dumb what you did. I can’t believe somebody else, some journalist, isn’t going to come up with Humberto’s party record. The FBI—somebody—will leak it. The press is moving in on our Philadelphia convention, and now you give them as lead-off nominator for Henry Wallace somebody who is—was—is—what the hell—a member of the Communist Party U.S.A.!”

  “Victor, I was wrong, I know. But Stover is tops with labor unions, tops with the academic set, fought in Spain, I mean he’s Hollywood made for that first speech. And anyway, it’s too late to change, Victor.” Dell sounded truly repentant, waved away the volunteer clerk who had tried to come in to take something from the file. (“Shut the door!” he hissed out at her.)

  “I know it’s too late to change, Dell. Michelangelo Dellabocca. Should have called you Bocca, not Dell. Look. There is one chance in about one thousand that nobody will pick it up. Humberto has a following and moves in good circles. So the first thing: Don’t mention his party background to one living human being. Don’t even mention it to Gus. He likes to think he knows everything about what’s going to happen in Philadelphia, but he’s left the program part of it to us. Yes, he’s the boss, and the platform will be checked out through Gus. But—again, it’s just a possibility—he may just not happen to know about Humberto. The other guys you picked to second the nomination are okay. Usual types. Well, let us pray.”

  Dell could begin to feel the morning heat in New York in this room without fan or air conditioner. But he picked himself up enough to be able to say, jocularly, “Let us what, Victor?”

  “Fuck you, Dell. No. I should pray? Okay. Lord, will thee please fuck Dell? I’ll call tomorrow.”

  Victor put out his cigarette and placed another call. It was Sunday—only two weeks to go before the convention opened in Philadelphia. The Wallace team worked every day—and Max would be home, safely out of the way of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he worked, blissfully undetected as a clandestine Communist.

  “Max? Victor. … Fine, fine, thanks. She’s fine. Now Max, I want you to do me another favor. It’s a pretty simple one. You still get to see the committee files when you want to? Yes? Well look, I want to know just one thing. In the file for Humberto W. Stover, S-t-o-v-e-r, do they have his card number? ‘There is no party member.’ But I happen to know that Humberto Stover’s number was floating around just a couple of years ago, and maybe one of your HUAC people got hold of it. I know, I know it’s risky. What the hell, Max, we’re in a risky business. World revolution isn’t for sarsaparilla types. I take risks, you take risks. I really want this information, Max. Okay? … Great. Good man, Max. We really appreciate what you do.”

  Harry was at home at Eighty-seventh Street, seated in the great armchair that had belonged to his father, drinking coffee, when the Saturday afternoon paper came. It gave the text of the Progressive Party platform for 1948. It would be ratified, the story said, in Philadelphia on the first day of the convention, a week from Monday.

  Harry was astonished by the platform’s planks. “I mean, Mom, what’s surprising is how they almost succeed in avoiding doublespeak. I mean, it’s all right there—the Communist Party platform on foreign policy is the platform policy of the Progressive Party—allegedly a United States–driven political movement. Its only consistency is that it favors every plank of Soviet foreign policy.” Dorothy Bontecou, protected by an apron, was kneading dough while her eyes focused from time to time through her eyeglasses on a recipe pinned by a thumbtack to the cupboard above the work area. But she looked down to answer her son.

  “What’s in it, Harry?”

  “Okay. Sit tight.”

  “I can’t sit tight when I’m making a pie, Harry.”

  “Listen, Mom. I’m quoting. The Progressive Party wants ‘Negotiation and discussion with the Soviet Union to find an agreement to win the peace.’ ”

  “What’s the matter with that?”

  “Mom. Please. Next, ‘Repeal of the peacetime draft.’ Next. ‘Repudiation of the Truman Doctrine and an end to military and economic intervention in support of fascist regimes in China, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Latin America.’

  “Next. ‘Abandonment of military bases designed to encircle and intimidate other nations.’ Then, ‘Repeal of the National Security Act provisions which are mobilizing the nation for war, preparing a labor draft, and organizing a monopoly militant dictatorship.’ ”

  He paused and looked through the doorway at his mother.

  “So Harry Truman, Mom—in case it escaped your notice—is ‘organizing for a monopoly militant dictatorship.’ ”

  His mother didn’t comment.

  “More. ‘Repudiation of the Marshall Plan and in its place creation of a UN reconstruction and development fund.’ They want ‘destruction of existing atomic bomb stockpiles. … Support of all colonial peoples throughout the world for independence, including Puerto Rico, Africa, Asia, West Indies, Korea.’ ”

  “Isn’t that right, Harry?”

  “The point, Mom, is they don’t talk about freedom for Poland or Bulgaria or Romania or Czechoslovakia or East Germany.”

  “Will they get anywhere, Harry?” Mrs. Bontecou was now in the kitchen doorway, wiping her hands with a washrag.

  “Wallace isn’t going to win the election, if that’s what you mean. But the Progressives are predicting ten million votes. What hurts is the high-profile people they’ve got backing the party. Professors, scientists, artists, critics.” He ran his eyes down the news story. “Everybody’s in the picture. Academics from NYU, Harvard, Yale, Williams … These are educators.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  He broke the news to her. He and Chris Russo had made their plans. “As soon as we get out of class in June, we’re going to do research on the people who are running the Progressive Party. Do you know who Sidney Hook is, Mom?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, on top of being a well-known philosophy professor, he’s been a very active anti-Communist. He served on the Dewey Commission exposing the Moscow purge trials. Listen to this, I found out that last week he went to Princeton and spent two hours with Einstein. You know Einstein is a backer of the Wallace movement? Well, Chris Russo’s father knows James Burnham, the professor—he was also at NYU—who wrote The Managerial Revolution. He’s a superinformed anti-Communist, and he told Mr. Russo—Chris’s father—that Hook pleaded with Einstein to get out of the Wallace movement.”

  “Did he make any progress?”

  “Einstein listened. He admires Hook. But apparently Hook couldn’t get Einstein past the basic problem, which is that Moscow is a socialist society and Einstein is a socialist, so why shouldn’t he be pro-Russian? But o
f course Sidney Hook is a socialist too. What I imagine Hook said to Einstein was that what’s important about the Soviet Union isn’t that they have nationalized the sources of production and exchange, to quote from the socialist kindergarten. It’s that they suppress human freedom and torture and imprison and kill. What has to be done is get to the key people—the intellectuals, I mean, the intellectuals who are making the mistake. Talk to them and get them when they look at Moscow to look through the socialist state to the repressive state. Erik Chadinoff—you remember him? at Camp Plattling? the doctor who was court-martialed and did six months in the brig—has promised to come down to Philadelphia for the convention. He’s a magnetic guy. I wish Einstein could talk with Chadinoff.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “That would be Elinor,” his mother said. “You can get your mind off politics.”

  Harry got up and went to the door. At the end of the room he turned suddenly.

  “Mom? How do I look?”

  “Dazzling.”

  Harry gave a little yelp of joy as he opened the door to Elinor.

  16

  HANBERRY, 1991

  Herrendon and Harry comment

  Herrendon had gone over the material Harry had given him, saved from his college years. He turned to Harry, “You had an intimate experience there, I know, with fellow traveling, back when you were a Columbia student. I knew Enfils. Very bright. When he wrote that book he was less cautious than later on. Ten years later, he’d have watched his step in talking about the show trials that way.”

  “Was he a party member?”

  “I don’t know. And, really, it never greatly mattered. The party sometimes wanted some of its … friends to take membership—it gave the party a more disciplinary hold on them. And some friends of the Soviet enterprise wanted to be members of the party in a comparable sense of some people wanting to be priests or monks—to identify themselves plainspokenly with the cause. Enfils—I don’t remember what came of him—was useful to the party, up through the Wallace years.”