After Censure, What?

For many Americans, the months since March have seen the rapid decline of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. The result of the censure debate will only be anti-climax for these people. The abuses of McCarthy are so patent, they believe, that only one conclusion is possible: censure. Because the Senate proceedings seem likely to run against him, and have temporarily halted his scattergun investigations, many wishful focus of the Senator have written him off as a political dead duck.

In at least one respect they are right. In spite of all the stalling over the Senator's lame elbow, his opponents will probably be able to force a vote before the Christmas Eve deadline. If the vote comes, McCarthy's chances of acquittal are slight at best.

But the optimists are wrong if they think that censure will mean the end of McCarthy as a political power. In the Senate, the debate has swung around McCarthy the man, and McCarthy the ill-behaved Senator. Thus, many liberals, revolted by the abusive McCarthy tactics, tend to dismiss all his adherents as either malicious or stupid people. Such an attitude, however, underestimates the movement and suggests no solution to McCarthyism as a political problem. The censure split in the Senate parallels a more serious split in the nation, a division particularly deep in matters of foreign policy. The McCarthyitcs' overriding fear of internal communism, whatever its elements of opportunism, reflects in some cases a sincere conviction that the country is now in crucial danger; that co-existence with Russia is either completely impossible or means gradual attrition for the West.

This point of view has picked up some powerful spokesmen, including men like Senator Knowland and many of his Mid-Western Senate colleagues. It is not surprising, therefore, that the guiding heads of the "Ten Million Americans Mobilizing for Justice," Lieut. Gen. Stratemeyer, and Rear Admiral Crommelin, both favored the widening of the Korean War against China. They and other McCarthy supporters have found themselves opposed by the Administration and by the majority of the American people.

A rift like this, however opposed, can never be constructive for the country and in the present situation it is dangerous. The most important fight is not over Joe McCarthy--for his personality has obscured the real issue--it is over the whole direction of foreign policy. McCarthy's enemies oppose communism just as vigorously as he does, but they choose to fight it in a different way. It is time that the censure be over and the smoke-screen blown away. Another debate is needed now--one that will probe to the heart of the foreign policy problem.