Westbrook Pegler
The Post-Standard (Syracuse)/November 15, 1955
ROME—This dateline is merely the address from which I am filing information acquired on the run since June. These pieces deal with Bonn, Geneva, Berlin, moral rearmament, the Malmedy case and other topics.
This explains how I happen to discuss the corruption of the British Foreign Office, and of both British political parties and the fatuous and dangerous character of the British press under a Rome dateline.
The MacLean-Burgess case is ideal from the standpoint of Americans who agreed with Sen. Joe McCarthy. The British politicians and newspapers are scared stiff of “McCarthyism.” They should be. McCarthy would rip them open and hang them with their own bloody tripes.
I do not recall reading any specific declaration for or against “McCarthyism” by Miss Rebecca West, a leading English journalist, who recently did a series on Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess, traitorous spies in British Foreign Office, specializing in American affairs. But if she were an American and the statements which she did make in this series and Joe McCarthy was running his committee he would have given her a very hard experience.
Miss West wrote “both men were homosexuals.” McCarthy would have asked “how do know?” She wrote “other homosexuals had come to their aid” in the Foreign Office. McCarthy would have asked: “What are their names?” and “what aid, how and when.” And he would have forced Miss West to come with those names or face prosecution for contempt of Congress. He would have forced her to give the dates when she was in the company of MacLean and Burgess and to say who else was present and relate conversations. It is to understand why the British government, especially the Foreign Office, and the pompous pontiffs in command of The Times, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph want no part of “McCarthyism.”
As it is, Anthony Eden, the prime minister, has arbitrarily refused to appoint a special parliamentary committee to “investigate” the terrible failure of the Foreign Office, the so-called Security, and the British newspapers, to expose these two traitorous, drunken pansies long ago and to prevent their escape when so-called Security was supposed to be on the job. They jumped into France on May 25. 1951, and the Security doesn’t exactly know, but Foreign Office relies on the word of a Russian Communist in Australia that they went straight to Moscow. The Foreign Office “white paper,” a mewling excuse for its own incompetence, with whiffs of treachery, says that although MacLean was suspected in April, 1951, it would have been risky to question him because he would have been free to run away Russia.
“The authorities would have had no legal powers to stop him,” the white paper said, although practically all Britons, even the very best, were prisoners in their homeland for years after the war. They were detained by currency laws, passport restrictions and other red tape. Again, these lying frauds who so ardently abhor “McCarthyism” cross themselves up when they say they were waiting only for Mrs. MacLean to go to a hospital to have her baby to sneak into the MacLeans’ house as ordinary burglars and search it.
Miss West said: “Certainly MacLean passed documents to the Soviet Union year in and year out and among them papers concerning atomic energy which he prepared he was head of -the American department.”
And not a soul in all Britain can slap a subpoena into her chubby fist and put her under oath. It means simply that people have personal knowledge of treachery affecting the fate of the British nation and her allies and no obligation to pass it along even to some stupid ass in Whitehall who may be one of the “other homosexuals” referred to. They trust their “officials” more than we trust ours.
Miss West flatly tells us that “most of their protectors were utterly untainted by communism,” and no authority can demand that she prove this. Anyway, she didn’t know MacLean and Burgess were “tainted” so how good is her judgment here?
How did she happen to be on such terms with those “protectors” of degenerate renegades? Joe McCarthy would want to know who these “protectors” are and how she is so sure that they are untainted. Again, she says “many affectionate and benevolent men and women concerned themselves with MacLean” and again, McCarthy would ask “who?” and “tell us the details.”
Miss West relates a ghastly episode, probably true, wherein Burgess and “an unsavory group” ran around London spreading the word that our ally, Mihailevitch of Yugoslavia, was a fascist. He was anti-Communist while Tito was a bloody-handed Red army commander from the bullpen war in Spain. But Miss West says, “Burgess and his friends were nimble and industrious and did much to create the public opinion which permitted the allies to abandon Mihailevitch and leave him to be captured and butchered by Tito.”
Joe McCarthy would have fun with that because this was a White House jab. “McCarthyism” might give Churchill and the Widow Roosevelt an uneasy time on that one.
Back in 1920 New York firemen flushed down the sewer manholes priceless evidence among the debris of the Wall St. bomb. The British government and press, in their fear of indignation and scorn, in a word, “McCarthyism,” are doing the same thing in this case.
(Source: https://www.newspapers.com/image/16003990/?terms=westbrook%2BPegler)
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