Volume 25, Number 6 · April 20, 1978
The Bad Old Days
By H. Stuart Hughes
The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower
by David Caute
Simon and Schuster, 697 pp., $14.95
Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1945-1948
by Robert J. Donovan
Norton, 473 pp., $12.95
At the start of his account of 'the anti-Communist purge under Truman and Eisenhower,' David Caute characterizes the first of these presidents as a 'peppery little bustler'; a few pages later he finds it 'tempting to condemn him as a hypocrite.' And that is just about all Caute tells us of Truman himself. Of Eisenhower he says still less—only that the 'slow, soporific, conservative tempo' of his second administration 'deflated anxiety' about the presumed communist threat. Yet it was during the illustrious general's first term that the purge reached its zenith. The almost complete absence from the stage of those who, to judge from Caute's subtitle, would presumably be his main protagonists makes his book curiously invertebrate. If the two presidents do not figure as the villains in this passionately committed work, who, then, are the culprits in what nearly every well-informed person now at long last regards as our national shame of a quarter century ago? Caute's answer—since he seems to be a Marxist of some variety—lies in more impersonal forces in American society. Let us hold this question in suspense until we have examined a book totally different in organization and approach, Robert J. Donovan's account of Truman's early years in office.
Review, 3771 words
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