NEAFC 31st Annual Conference.pdf - New England Association of ...

NEW ENGI~AND ASSOCIATION OF FIRE CHIEFS
But, Ladies and Gentlemen, Senator ~McCarthy, Senator Jenner and all the rest
of the investigators are up against a real campaign in this country; they are up against
a great many scoffers in the press of the country, in the magazine field, in the ~book
publishing field, in. the radio field and in the television field.
Some of the leading papers, the Washington Post, for instance, quite widely known
in Washington nowadays as the Washington Daily Worker, and the New York Times,
always the apex of American Journalism, has in the last year or so taken to slanting
the news so badly that on an occasion when Senator McCarthy_ revealed that Greek
ship owners using American ships were trading with our enemy, they used just one
little paragraph on that story, and on the same page, they Used a half a column, of
type to tell that Father Divine had put a curse on the New Jersey-Turnpike.
Then, on April 13th of this year, TIME Magazine had an article describing the
situation in the .colleges in, relation to the investigations, and I am going to quote one
thing, here, and this i,s all they said about this particular case:
"In the meantime, Boston University was deba,ting the case over Maurice
Ha.lperin, former O.S.S. man and Latin-American expert, who refused to say
whether he ever knew Elizabeth Bentley."
And that is all that TIME Magazine said~ about that case. And yet, what he had
refused to do, of course, was to answer any questions as to whether he was a member
of the Communist Party, and whether he was a .Communist while in the O.S.S.
That is the sort of coverage that the investigators are getting in the newspapers,
or at least some of them.
And that TIME Magazine story, obviously, was deliberately designed to lo_ok as
if it was a trivial .case, when this man had just refused to say he knew Elizabeth Bentley.
He wa’s a member of the most secret organization this country had, during the war, the
0.8.8., and he refuses to say, now, whether he was a .Communist at that time.
You might not know that today, the man who heads what is called Reos, the
American Broadcatsing 8ration in Berlin, which is .designed to flood East Berlin and
Czechoslovakia with our propaganda, is coming back to this country. Ne gave out a
statement to that effect:
"1 might as well get the jump on Joe McCarthy, and admit, now, that I used
to be a ’Communist. But, I haven’t been a Communist for several years, and I am
violently opposed to it."
Well, you can have those who used to be Communists and who have reformed,
but Fll take, in a position like that, somebody who was never a Communist, who. always
was an American! (Applause.) -
I am, and I suppose a great many other people are getting a little fed up with
those who used to be Communists, and have now reformed. And!, a great many of
them used to .be .Communists in 1946, 1947, 1948 and 1949 and 1950. Well, to me,
it is going to be very difficult to convince some people, yes, really to convince a great
many Americans, that these are people who were dupes, that they were just suckers,
who were taken in. They might get away with that up to 1945, but after that, everybody
knew what Communism was, or they should have known it.
The Communist party, of course, has undertaken every possible way to infiltrate
education. Congressional investigators estimate that there are 3,500 Professors in this
country who have Communist affiliations, and I should say, now that I am not condemning
Professors, that as a class, 3,500 varying shades of pink and redl are a relatively
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