THE SIXTH COLUMN

We all know to what the Fifth Column refers. Now we can add the Sixth: that climate of fear, frenzy and false witness which attempts to suppress free speech, free assembly, employing police state methods in a pitchman's blend of patriotism and paranoia- in short, those various nefarious self-styled anti-Communists America and the West have been periodically subjected to and distraught over since the Bolsheviks ran rampant in Russia. Thus Roger Burlingame's vim-and-vigor study embraces the 1919-20 Red Scare, the Cliveden set and Munich appeasement, the American, Legion, the DAR, the House Un-American Activities Committee, loyalty oaths and review boards, ""guilt by association"", the McCarthy spectaculars, the China Lobby, the John Birch Society, Minutemen and General Walker. Along the way, liberals and internationalists, names such as Ford, Dewey, Pearl Buck, Dulles and Eisenhower, institutions like Harvard or NAACP, are all deemed, at different times by the above, to be Kremlin controlled; while Lattimore, White, vincent, etc. win the epithet ""traitor"" for as yet unsubstantiated charges. An enlightening, entertaining, fighting mad book, bound to start fireworks, stir up controversy.