*THREAD:*
NYU Philosophy Professor James Burnham went from advisor to Trotsky to the CIA to anti-communist and founding editor of NR. His anti anti-McCarthyism ultimately lead to him cancelled on the Left.
NYU Philosophy Professor James Burnham went from advisor to Trotsky to the CIA to anti-communist and founding editor of NR. His anti anti-McCarthyism ultimately lead to him cancelled on the Left.
The CIA was anti-McCarthyist. "Those wretched little people" one CIA officer is said to have called McCarthy Committee staffers, scorning them on political and social grounds. 
Readers of Partisan Review protested the presence of a "McCarthyite" Burnham on the editorial advisory board and the editors asked him to resign. He did so noting he was not pro or anti-McCarthy
Burnham wrote "McCarthyism is not McCarthy. I believe 'McCarthyism' to be an invention of the Communist tacticians, who launched it and are exploiting it, exactly as they have in...previous operation in what might be called diversionary semantics."
Burnham found himself in a new uproar with the introduction to a book called The Secret War for the A-Bomb. The author, Medford Evans, had left the Atomic Energy Commission over security concerns. He accused scientists of spying for the USSR. Burnham endorsed the charges and
Added that "vulnerability" to communism was "especially widespread among the college-educated intellectual elite from which the opinion molders, the writers, editors, preachers, university professors, scientists, and upper government employees are drawn."
Eugene Rabinowitch, Editor in Chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and exec member of the ACCF (American Committee for Cultural Freedom), to which Burnham belonged, threatened to resign if the committee did not disassociate itself from Burnham
Burnham responded that Rabinowitch seemed to want "a spot of book burning". The real issue for the committee should be "what accounts for the total boycott of Medford Evan's book by the leading book review media?"
The ACCF rejected Rabinowitch's demand. However, Exec Director Sol Stein noted the committee would "probably give serious consideration to the broader implications of the present controversy: the position of Burnham and his friends in American intellectual life."
Burnham then wrote a book of his own on communist spying and subversion in 1954: The Web of Subversion: Underground Networks in the US Government.
In the 1930's and '40s "an invisible web" was spun over the federal government. Woven by the Moscow directed communist movement for the purpose of spying and subversion, the web had spread to "nearly every executive department and agency".
The bulk of the book drew on transcripts of congressional investigations. Burnham noted that some prominent people were less hostile to the web than to those that exposed it.
Newsweek called Burnham "a balanced, detailed, compelling student of the Red Menace". The New York Times included it on a list of twenty-four "outstanding" nonfiction works of 1954.
However, liberal critics mostly disliked the book. Criticisms included a lack of respect for civil liberties and blowing the domestic communist threat out of proportion.
Tensions over the McCarthy investigations increased in the ACCF. Burnham resigned, telling the chair "the Committee has developed into a narrow and partisan clique ("an anti anti-communist clique" he specified).
In November 1954, the GOP controlled Senate censured McCarthy. Burnham and others including William F. Buckley Jr, wrote a letter to the New York Times that this would benefit the communist enemy.
Burnham wrote that at the heart of the uproar lay a conflict over national self definition that pitted the country's liberal elite against the mass of citizens.
By this time, Burnham himself became a casualty of the McCarthy wars. For 25 years, since his days as editor of Symposium, he had been a figure of note on the New York intellectual scene. But in the mid-1950s, he was effectively expelled from his old stamping ground.
A colleague at NYU said that Burnham still held a "solid and respected place" amongst American thinkers, that was in "a certain conservative sector...not the place his impressive gifts might have brought him if the intellectual climate and especially politics had been different."
Philip Rahv, Burnham's former colleague at the Partisan Review, put the matter succinctly. "The Liberals now dominate all cultural channels in this country...If you break completely with this domimant atmosphere you're a dead duck. James Burnham has committed suicide."
Two decades later, Burnham explained to Brian Crozier, who was puzzled that London Library had no books of Burnham's after 1953, that the "non-Communist left/anti anti-communist left" prevailed in Western Europe. /End
