This Union Square of the District of Columbia is, appropriately, on Skid Row. It is the apparatus that recruits government employes. And sometimes 9th Street is more active and important than 16th Street—the White House. The District chairman is Roy H. Wood.
This book does not bandy the right or wrong of Communism. It accepts and proclaims it all wrong. But it will stay within its limitations of discussing Washington, the city. So it will conduct you mostly through the muck where crawl the punks in the ranks.
The State Department boys call foreign Reds “Agrarian reformers.” We call them cobras. The real story of the extent of their infiltration into the government will never be told. Hundreds of files have been impounded or destroyed, and their subjects cleared.
The following tale is no exception. It is, rather, the rule. One night a mysterious informant called on Constantine Brown, brilliant and patriotic foreign news analyst of the Washington Star, with a photostatic copy of an order from a Deputy Chief of Staff, directing the Army to destroy the records on several thousand subversives.
Brown hurried to the home of Senator Styles Bridges with the evidence. By 9 A.M., Bridges had called the Military Affairs Committee together. An hour later it met and phoned the offices of the Secretary of War with an ultimatum not to destroy any orders. When the officer who had issued the order met with the committee, Bridges looked coldly at him and said, “I can forgive an officer who makes a mistake or loses a battle, but an officer who betrays the security of his country ought to be shot.”
Meanwhile, a similar order was given the Navy, but was not caught in time to head off the destruction of the records. F.D.R. was President at the time.
We are hopeful these things will come to an end, but do not expect too much. That is because we know the C.I.A.—Central Intelligence Agency—is loaded with Commies at the lower level, with some seeping right up into the upper brackets.
A bright spot, however, is the advancement to the position of ranking minority member of the House Un-American Activities Committee of Harold Velde, young ex-F.B.I. agent, now representing Abraham Lincoln’s old Illinois district in Congress. Velde, at 40, has been a G-man, a county judge, and is in his second term in the House. His training under J. Edgar Hoover sets him up as a canny spy-catcher; his hatred of subversives, left or right, will make him a brake on Commie-coddling. His predecessor on the committee was California’s new Senator Nixon, who nailed Alger Hiss, and in Congress, Senator Dirksen, who beat Scott Lucas. The Senate’s own Red probing committee is also good news.
Your authors delved into how the rank-and-file protectors and comforters of Communists in Washington got that way. We know about the over-educated Harvard prodigies, recommended to key spots by Felix Frankfurter, but how does a $3,000-a-year file clerk in State, or Defense, meet Reds in the first place? By what means is he wooed and won to betray his country? Jim Walters of the Times-Herald exposed a lot. Here is more:
Red spies came here as soon as Lenin and Trotsky pulled their successful November coup in 1917. But not until the late Roosevelt handed diplomatic recognition to the enemies of civilization in 1933, did a sizeable apparatus begin to build openly in Washington. In the early years of the New Deal it became fashionable to be “liberal,” to love all radicals, including revolutionaries.