No Wonder We Are Losing

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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NO WONDER WE ARE LOSING

BY

ROBERT MORRIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 5

PREFACE 6

1—THE RAPP-COUDERT COMMITTEE 8

2—NAVAL INTELLIGENCE 20

3—DISMANTLING OUR RAMPARTS 30

4—PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE IN THE PACIFIC 39

5—GUAM, SAIPAN AND THE JAPANESE SURRENDER 46

6—YALTA—POTSDAM—HIROSHIMA 54

7—TRANSITION TO THE COLD WAR 61

8—CHINA POLICY 64

9—SENATORS TYDINGS AND MCCARTHY 73

10—THE I P R INVESTIGATION 86

11—BACK TO THE SCHOOLS 100

12—THE UN SECRETARIAT 108

13—THE JENNER COMMITTEE 116

14—THE BENCH AND THE RULES 131

15—THE SHARPENING CONFLICT 143

16—AND NOW ’61 151

APPENDIX 160

Exhibit No. 1 160

Exhibit No. 2 162

Exhibit No. 3 168

Exhibit No. 4 170

Exhibit No. 5 173

Exhibit No. 6 175

Exhibit No. 7 178

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 179

DEDICATION

Dedicated to my father, John Henry Morris, who died here in Point Pleasant on August 8, 1955 while this book was being written. In his day, he was quite a fighter for what he thought was right.

PREFACE

This book is not an autobiography. An autobiography, I believe, should more properly be undertaken at a later stage of a man’s life when he can survey the whole span of his career and weave from the pattern of passed events his own interpretation of life’s content.

This book has a more limited objective. Over the last fifteen years I have been cast into a particular current of life. My undertaking here is to set down my own experiences for what they are worth and to see them in the perspective of the fast-moving world.

This book generally will be concerned with the response, as I saw it, of free men to the pressure of Communism, that twentieth century revolutionary movement which first captured power in Russia and has since extended that power to the Elbe River and the China Sea, that revolutionary movement whose ultimate aim is world dominion. I shall be concerned not only with Communism’s territorial expansion but also with its efforts—sometimes overt, sometimes covert, but unceasing—to undermine the foundations of moral and political authority in every land that has not yet fallen under its domination.

More particularly, this book will dwell upon my own role, insignificant though it was, in this crisis. I am 40 years old, and my life has been dominated by two of the greatest wars in history, followed by periods of peace like no other peace known to man. Both post-war periods were, in reality, truces in which war was continued by other means. It was my lot to take part in one of these great wars and to play a special role in both periods of martial peace. In each case, my role inevitably bore on a global crisis, a crisis in large measure working itself out, between titanic outbursts, through the shadowy activities of the hidden people. These people are, of course, the Communists and those manipulated by them. Their success in the free world depends greatly on the obscuring of their true aims, activities and, in many cases, identities. Our future hinges in large part on bringing them to light. In this task, a kind of hidden war, I also served.

Summer 1955

Point Pleasant, New Jersey

It is now April 1961, and I am now in Dallas, Texas where I am President of the University of Dallas. My publisher and I decided to bring out this sixth edition of No Wonder We Are Losing because three years have now elapsed since the volume first appeared. Many of the strands of the conspiracy that we had sketched and were sketching have become greatly distended. Soviet conquests have been continuing during these years and now at an accelerated pace. Not only do they broaden the scope of the whole picture but they bring into bolder relief the central theme of this work—the gradual loss of our heritage without a response on our part worthy of our great traditions. I have tried to tie these strands together in a new added chapter XVI.

It is said, repeatedly, that we are at last awakening to the nature of our dedicated enemy. But the whole record of the last three years even, belies this awakening. Our egregious errors of the last three years are merely variations of those that brought disaster to us in the preceding twelve years. The lessons that we should have learned from the fall of mainland China were ignored completely when the Soviets struck slyly in Cuba. They are being ignored today in Africa.

We are denouncing Soviet conquests rather eloquently, but, only after they become accomplished facts. While the conquests are in process and being consummated by the disguised advance guard of Khrushchev, we are floundering and even collaborating with those who have us marked for destruction. Our professions of principle are lofty and eloquent but the implementation of these principles is inept.

April 1961

Dallas, Texas

1—THE RAPP-COUDERT COMMITTEE

My recollection of the summer of 1940 is that it was hot, sultry and heavy. Hitler’s Panzer divisions had overrun France and the Low Countries, and were poised on the Channel to strike at England. It was a time of grim foreboding.

The triumphs of Nazi barbarism were bad enough. But at the same time another totalitarian force had begun to expand. Until August 23, 1939, Communism was master in only one country, the Soviet Union, smaller than Russia of the Tsars. But the Nazi-Soviet pact signed on that black day of 1939 by Joachim Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov not only enabled Germany to invade Poland a week later, but launched Soviet Communism on a series of struggles which ultimately placed an additional 800 million people under its shadow. On September 17, Soviet legions invaded Eastern Poland in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin agreement and within four months these territories were formally incorporated into the Soviet Union. In November 1939, the Soviets invaded Finland, and that three-and-a-half month war ended with the Finns ceding strategic territory to the USSR. In June 1940, a Soviet ultimatum to Rumania resulted in Russian annexation of Bessarabia and Bukovina. That same month, Stalin’s armies had occupied Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Thus through its alliance with Nazi Germany, world Communism in less than a year acquired European territory of 13 million people.

In that summer of 1940, when Churchill was calling Britain to its finest hour, I was a young lawyer a year out of law school working with Hines, Rearick, Dorr & Hammond, a good firm in downtown New York. Actually I worked out of the Office of H. Alexander Smith, later to become senator, who was associated with that firm. I had lived in New Jersey all my life and had just come to New York. I was low man on a legal team defending the carpet industry in an anti-trust action brought by the Department of Justice. My particular role was to comb the correspondence of the large carpet companies for papers that would show either agreement to restrain free trade or the absence of such agreement. It was heavy, ponderous work. The task was made the much more oppressive by the unfolding world events.

One day I undertook to escape from it all. I attempted to enlist in a Navy officers candidate program. But it turned out that I was partly color blind, and the Chief Petty Officer who tested my color perception told me that I might as well be resigned to the fact that I would never be a Navy officer.

In the summer of 1940, however, an incident occurred that profoundly changed the course of my life. It seemed, at the start, just another routine incident such as occurs scores of times in the life of almost every restless employee. An associate in the firm told me of an opening with Cravath, de Gersdorf, Swain & Wood that paid almost three times what I was then drawing. I remember hoisting my spirits, brushing the legal cobwebs from my eyes and marching across Broadway down to 15 Broad Street to the source of new hope. Thomas Halleran, a partner in the Cravath firm interviewed me. Whatever I said, I realized later, must have caused a good reaction, but Halleran soon told me that the job called for three years’ experience whereas I could offer only one. I was crestfallen.

But a few days later, I received a phone call from Philip W. Haberman Jr. He had been named associate counsel of the New York State Legislate Committee that was to investigate New York City schools. Paul Windels, who had been City Corporation Counsel under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, had been appointed the committee’s chief counsel. Windels, I was told, had asked the Cravath firm to lend him several young lawyers for a year’s service with the committee. They decided that they could not spare any of their own men. Instead, they had recommended several likely prospects; I was one of these. I was asked to appear for an interview at the office of Trosk and Haberman. The interview was short and agreeable. I discovered in Phil Haberman an intelligent warmth that has many times since given me great assistance. Then I met Paul Windels. I was hired as an assistant counsel to the Rapp-Coudert Committee in August 1940.

In March 1940, the New York State Legislature had set up a Joint Committee to investigate the state school system. Assemblyman Herbert A. Rapp and Senator Frederic R. Coudert Jr. had sponsored the joint resolution creating the committee in the respective legislative chambers. The committee designated a special subcommittee, headed by Senator Coudert, to investigate New York City schools. It was this subcommittee that I served.

To understand how such a subcommittee could investigate Communist activities in the city schools, one must advert to the political atmosphere of the day. Until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a large part of our political and intellectual community was ardently supporting a broad campaign for collective security against Nazi and Fascist aggression throughout the world. Antifascism had its roots in many levels of our society; it was a powerful force in our political and cultural life. Looking back through the newspapers and periodicals of those days, one is impressed by the intensity of this fervor.

When the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, the entire world was shocked. Sincere and observing people quickly grasped the bitter lesson that no totalitarian power can be trusted. The local Communists, on the other hand, who had been exploiting anti-Nazi feeling for their own purposes, within a few days managed to straighten out their line. They joined forces with isolationists and pro-Nazis to damn the Allies, and proclaimed with Molotov that Fascism was a matter of taste.

To the genuine liberals of the day, alarmed by the threat of Hitler’s aggressions, and to the eminently practical American people as a whole, the Communist about-face was a great revelation. Until then, most people had thought Communists to be primarily revolutionaries, Marxists, radical reformers. Now millions around the world began to think of Communists as disciplined soldiers of the Stalin regime in the USSR. Between August 1939 and June 1941, scores of American writers—conservative, and radical—were describing the excesses of their fellow travelling contemporaries. The Communists were fair game; they took the lampooning, as they took the many defections from the party in that period, and bided their time. Those who remained in the Communist movement after 1939 felt confident that they were on the winning side and that Stalin knew what he was doing.

It was in the atmosphere of the Nazi-Soviet alliance that the committee operated. This atmosphere, so different from what was to come, made it possible for us to exist and even to flourish mildly.

Senator Coudert, whom everyone called Fritz and with whom I was to become fast friends, was an able legislator, sharply intelligent and well versed in history and political science. He was also an ideal chairman, particularly because he had confidence in Paul Windels and agreed that the committee’s investigation should be conducted free from political considerations. Windels chose the staff and, above all, set the standards for the investigation. He did so with care and thoroughness.

What evidence is necessary, Windels asked, to establish a person as a Communist?

Guilt by association, a traditional rule-of-thumb for men of all ages (Birds of a feather flock together), Windels ruled inadequate. The U.S. Supreme Court since that time has declared that one’s associates past and present, as well as one’s conduct, may properly be considered in determining fitness and loyalty. But the Rapp-Coudert Committee went beyond such a norm. This meant that the practice of tabulating the Communist associations of the various professors, instructors and teachers in the city schools was given distinctly minor attention. No one on the staff felt that he had made much progress if he could show that a certain teacher was active in a long list of Communist front organizations. Such facts were collected, but they were never emphasized.

A second test of defining a Communist, very popular in liberal polemics at the time, was also rejected by the Committee. Many people said that, if a person in their opinion acted like a Communist, they would treat him as such, whether he was, or not. One noted lawyer put it this way: If a creature walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and flies like a duck, I can assume he is a duck. But for the Committee to use this norm would mean that it would have to trace a person’s stand on a whole long series of major and minor political events. These would be conflicting and contradictory with one another except for the fact that the person’s position would completely coincide with changes in Communist policy. This method had many shortcomings. It was, above all things, circumstantial rather than direct evidence, on which a committee working in a sensitive area could not afford to rely.

The standard that the Rapp-Coudert Committee invoked—and it was to be the standard adopted by the Senate Internal Security Committee years later—called for direct sworn testimony to actual, conscious participation in the organized Communist conspiracy. Just as only someone at the scene of an accident or crime is ordinarily competent to testify to such accident or crimes, so only someone who himself was a Communist, who sat behind the closed doors of the Communist councils, is competent to say who else attended those councils.

The Committee flatly acknowledged that it would accept only direct testimony, under oath, of competent witnesses, corroborated and supported. It rejected as an improper subject of inquiry people’s political and religious ideas. Inquiry into personal beliefs may well violate our Bill of Rights. It is ironic, insofar as these precepts are accepted as fundamental by any legislative committee worth the name, that the charge of flouting them is the most successful Communist accusation against all committees.

At the Committee’s very first public hearing, held in New York City on December 2, 1940, Paul Windels set forth his standards as follows:

The self-imposed limitation of our work...may be expressed quite simply: to proceed with complete objectivity for one purpose only—and that is to ascertain and establish the truth whatever it may be: to investigate diligently by legal standards; and above all, when dealing with the names and reputations of persons, to refrain scrupulously from presenting gossip, rumor or hearsay and to present only such evidence as would be accepted in a court of law; to refrain from entering into public controversy with persons under inquiry, regardless of provocation; to refrain from making charges in the public press; in short, to adhere strictly to the ascertainment of facts and their orderly presentation.

He also said: "In the conduct of this investigation neither the Committee nor its staff will tolerate any invasion of civil liberties, of academic freedom, or of the right of every man to his own political beliefs. I want, however, to stand squarely on this proposition: There is no civil liberty to commit a breach of trust; there is no academic freedom to be one thing and pretend to be something else; there is no freedom in this country to poison the rising generation in the name of any political philosophy which practices hypocrisy and deception as a part of its central and vital doctrines.

I pass no judgment on revolutionary methods to oppose a dictatorship or tyrannical form of government. When civil liberties are abolished, then political change is perhaps unattainable by other means. But one thing is clear: Civil liberties cannot long exist in a free democracy where their corresponding obligations are flouted, and among those obligations is the duty of every person holding a public trust to live openly, to be what he seems to be, and to give an account of his stewardship whenever it is demanded by those in authority having the right to acquire it. In its report submitted to the legislature in the spring of 1942, the committee as a whole concluded:

"We have challenged no man’s right to his private beliefs, however unpopular they may be, but have at all times confined our attention to overt acts of misconduct, holding that, while a man’s private views are his own, a public servant, whether he be a teacher or one engaged in any other of the manifold activities of government, is accountable to the public for the observance of proper professional and ethical standards, especially where his official acts are called into question....

There is no inconsistency between the concept of freedom of political belief and the conclusion that Communists cannot be permitted to hold employment in the public schools. This is because Communist party membership does not mean merely the acceptance of certain political and social objectives: The party commits its members to a discipline and a course of conduct which are incompatible with the public service, in that they are thereby obliged to do improper acts in furtherance of those objectives.

The Committee’s whole record reflected the standard which Paul Windels had proclaimed at the start. At the time, I was inexperienced enough to wonder why the Committee’s procedures were so widely misunderstood. I felt that those persons who denounced the Committee’s use of sworn testimony by ex-Communists were being completely unreasonable. Dr. Bella V. Dodd, who was the Communists’ Legislative Counsel, put the epithet informer into the record on every possible occasion. Now that she has left the party and she and I are good friends, she has pointed out the simple purpose of this line of attack. The word informer is an underworld term which carries with it a great deal of opprobrium. The Communists wanted to identify this hated concept with the simple process of taking sworn testimony from the witnesses who were most competent to testify on the facts of Communist life—namely, former Communists. If former Communists could be discredited as a group, there would be little danger of Communist secret networks being exposed.

Even then, I noticed that some critics of legislative investigations were attacking all three possible approaches to the detection of Communists—namely, exposure by direct sworn testimony; judgment on the basis of associations, and judgment on the basis of personal conduct. Since Communists, unlike the honest radicals of the past, do not identify but conceal themselves and their aims, I can think of no other ways to investigate their activities. I could only conclude that some of these inveterate assailants of the Committee’s means were rather more interested in defeating its end—the exposure of secret Stalinist subversion in the schools.

These were the committee’s standards. The staff which Windels and Haberman assembled was a well-integrated, harmonious group. After Windels and Haberman, the first person I met was Betty Horan, the warm, intelligent wife of Frank Horan and a successful lawyer in her own right with many years’ experience in the United States Attorney’s Office. Then there was happy-spirited young Madelyn Brown, granddaughter of the fabulous real-estate operator Frederick Brown. We were all to respect her eminent ability and devotion.

Ernest Hochwald, treasurer of the staff and liaison with Senator Coudert, worked more on legislative and fiscal matters than on the investigation per se. But it turned out that I became closer to Ernie than to any other staff member, for in 1946 he and I formed a law partnership and to this day he is a close friend. The other lawyers were the genial William Shea, who had left the firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; Ken Slocum, a massive man with a great capacity for work who had been a lawyer with a patent firm; Bev Aaron, a philosophical, even-tempered lawyer who went off to war with Squadron A after several months’ service; and Charles Whitman, son of the New York Governor, just out of law school. A little later, Bob Herman of the Corporation Counsel’s office and Tom Meehan, my friend and classmate at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City joined the staff. Because of great liberal pressures and the general tenor of our times, this division received the strongest encouragement from Fritz Coudert and Paul Windels.

It was in these circumstances and with these colleagues that I began work for the Rapp-Coudert Committee in the eventful summer of 1940.

My assignment with the Committee was to go abroad in New York, and New Jersey and to learn at firsthand what there was to be known of the Communist organization generally and its educational fraction in particular. I can recall that the term fraction was one of the first Communist technical terms to excite my curiosity. It was, I was told, the Communist sector or fragment of an industry or profession.

I soon learned that widely-known anti-Communists around the city could not be major sources of evidence. These individuals, Democrats or Republicans, had long and honorable records of opposition to Communism, but rarely possessed the intimate, firsthand experiences with flesh-and-blood Communists which could be used as evidence. I soon realized that the people who knew the Communists most intimately were labor leaders, Social Democrats, Trotskyites, Socialists and, of course, former Communists. These people, feuding day-to-day with the Communists, could identify them most readily and could accurately assess their relative importance with their respective sphere.

In connection with our investigation, the leaders of the Teachers Guild were particularly helpful. This group, spear-headed by Henry R. Linville, a mellow man in his seventies during our inquiry, had founded the Teachers Union, dedicated to improving teachers’ conditions, and built it into a vigorous, disciplined union. For many years, a zealous, disciplined Communist fraction challenged this leadership until, in 1935, they took over the union. Dr. Linville and his associates withdrew and formed the Teachers Guild. Between 1935 and 1940, however, the Communist-controlled Teachers Union prospered; at its peak it had 11,000 members, one thousand of them Communists. But in the early stages of our investigation the American Federation of Labor revoked its charter from the Teachers Union and conferred it on the Teachers Guild.

Another source of evidence was the New Leader, then the weekly publication of the Social Democratic Federation but for some years now an independent magazine. Its veteran executive editor, Sol Levitas, has been helpful to many investigations with which I have since been associated. Victor Riesel, its managing editor at the time and now a syndicated labor columnist, and Ralph de Toledano, now a national-affairs writer for Newsweek, were also most helpful and have remained good friends ever since.

In those days too, I met Alex Rose, leader of the United Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers, then battling the Communists in the American Labor Party; Sam Baron, who fought the Communists in Spain, as well as his younger brother Murray, now New York County Chairman of the Liberal Party.

During this period, I also met two former Communists who were to be of great help over the years. One was Joseph Kornfeder, known in the party as Joe Zack, who had been selected by U.S. Communist leaders for training at the Lenin School in Moscow from 1929 through 1931, had served with the Red Army, studied the creation of insurrections, had