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A favorite McCarthy victim these days is Gustavo Duran. Joe flourishes a picture of Duran taken during the Spanish Civil War in what he says is "the uniform of the S.I.M.—the counterpart of the Russian secret police." He then says that Duran's American citizenship was rushed through, that he was "promoted" by the State Department to the U.N. in 1946. "And what do you think he was doing there today? Unbelievable as it is, his task was to screen displaced persons and decide which would make good, loyal Americans!"
The true story of Duran is remarkable —but nothing like McCarthy's version. Duran was a Spanish composer of music who fought in the Spanish Republican Army, rising to command of a corps. As the Spanish Loyalists split into Communist and anti-Communist factions, Duran, never a Red, was definitely and clearly antiCommunist. When defeat came, he was smuggled out of Spain on a British warship. He married an American, became a citizen in four months more than the time required by law, worked for the U.S. Government in Cuba during World War II, tracking down Axis and Communist agents. For the past five years, Duran has been working for the U.N., where he has never had anything to do with screening refugees entering the U.S. The uniform in which McCarthy shows Duran is that of the Spanish army, not of any secret police. McCarthy knows all this—but his audiences do not.
Ends & Means. Some have argued that McCarthy's end justifies his methods. This argument seems to assume that lies are required to fight Communist lies. Experience proves, however, that what the anti-Communist fight needs is truth, carefully arrived at and presented with all the scrupulous regard for decency and the rights of man of which the democratic world is capable. This is the Western world's greatest asset in the struggle against Communism, and those who condone McCarthy are throwing that asset away. As the New York Times put the case: "He has been of no use whatever in enabling us to distinguish among sinners, fools and patriots, except in the purely negative sense that many of us have begun to suspect that there must be some good, however small, in anybody who has aroused Senator McCarthy's ire."
A very practical danger lies in this inevitable, negative reaction to McCarthy. The Administration supporters have gradually come to see that they could make capital out of "McCarthyism." If anybody criticizes the judgment of any State Department official in his past or present analysis of Communism, the cry of "McCarthyism" is raised. This McCarthyism in reverse was apparent last week in the
Senate hearings over the confirmation of Ambassador Jessup. Harold Stassen had been careful to say that he was raising no question of Jessup's loyalty or his affiliations; he was simply questioning Jessup's past record of judgment. One observer quickly concluded that Stassen was "the rich man's McCarthy," presumably because McCarthy had also attacked Jessup —on different and far shakier grounds.