Anticommunism's Two Faces: The Irresponsible Won Out

Here Powers seems to turn against his own earlier analysis. One does not recall the rejection of anticommunism as a feature of the Eisenhower administration or its successors. Why was the downfall of McCarthy not a salutary defeat for the paranoid countersubversives and a victory of responsible over irresponsible anticommunism? Having excoriated McCarthyism, Powers in the last quarter of his book seems almost to regret its defeat.

"Anticommunism had become so disreputable by the early sixties," Powers writes sadly, that President Kennedy defined his new administration "by crusading against it at home (calling it `extremism') and by rejecting it as a guide for foreign policy (calling it `moralism')." The reconceptualizaton of the Cold War as a power struggle rather than as a holy war exasperates Powers, but was that not always one of the distinctions between his two forms of anticommunism? And would not the republic have been better off with more Hans Morgenthaus and fewer Joe McCarthys?

The Vietnam War accelerated the decline of anticommunism, in Powers' view, until it was seen as "the American original sin." When all seemed lost for anticommunism, however, suddenly there appeared "the first faint stirring of new life, of rebirth.... One man summoned the will, the strength, the imagination to commence the giant task of rebuilding the anticommunist coalition." This Lochinvar turns out to be Norman Podhoretz, the angry neoconservative editor of Commentary. His allies in the great resurrection were the members of the Committee on the Present Danger, formed to oppose détente.

Powers seems to take seriously the committee's extravagant and now abundantly disproven claims that the Soviet Union was overtaking the United States in the arms race. He gives the committee, along with Podhoretz and Ronald Reagan, the credit for winning the Cold War. Counterpoised as villain against these heroes is, of all people, the father of containment, George Kennan.

That communism as a moral, economic, cultural, and ecological disaster might have contributed to its own collapse does not get much play. And while the attempt to keep up with America in the arms race may have wrecked the Soviet economy, Reagan's military spending nearly wrecked the American economy too, as it combined with ill-judged tax reductions to quadruple the national debt in a dozen years and create the deficits that tie down the American government so wretchedly today.

Powers' statement that, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, "real anticommunism had nearly faded from the American consciousness" hardly fits with his eulogies of Reagan and Podhoretz. It is true enough that Podhoretz and his fellow neoconservatives differed from McCarthy in not accusing individuals who disagreed with them of disloyalty to the republic, and that is a substantial difference. But their rigid, NSC-68-like theory of Soviet communism as something unchanging and unchangeable ignored the rise of polycentrism in the communist world and the spread of disillusion, cynicism, and corruption in the Soviet Union itself. Obsessive anticommunism, like most obsessions, distorts judgment and demeans character.

Responsible anticommunism, far from disappearing as Powers would have it, took into account the changes in the Soviet empire since the death of Stalin. As an old-time redbaiter--and Powers is generous in his comments on my 1949 book, The Vital Center, and Cold War liberalism--I remain, like most liberals, an unrepentant and unreconstructed anticommunist. As a historian, I have tried to recognize that communism too underwent changes and that Americans could not forever act as if Stalin were still in the Kremlin orchestrating a monolithic global communist movement. But that hardly makes someone like me less of an anticommunist than Joe McCarthy or Norman Podhoretz.

The first 300 pages of Not Without Honor can be highly recommended as an intelligent, well researched, and workmanlike account of anticommunism in America. One might wish for more recognition of the impact of European books, especially Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and Richard Crossman's The God that Failed, on the shaping of American anticommunism. There are a few trivial errors: the confusion of Robert A. Lovett, the public servant, with Robert Morss Lovett, the professor of English, as a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union; the misspelling of William Henry Chamberlin, J. Parnell Thomas, Clarence Manion, and Harlow Shapley; the misattribution of The Cold War and its Origins to Donald rather than Denna F. Fleming.

But the first three-quarters of Not Without Honor is well worth reading. Then Powers goes off the rails and, by discarding the fruitful distinction with which his analysis began, ends in a morass of self-contradiction.