New York, April 9

The Army started strengthening its defences yesterday against Senator McCarthy’s accusation that it is “coddling Communists.” Two weeks before the Army-McCarthy-investigation opens, the Secretary of Defence, Mr Charles Wilson, announced that the armed forces have now adopted the security system that the Eisenhower Administration brought into force for its civilian employees.

Known Communists will be barred from the service. Witnesses before Congressional committees who have claimed the privilege of the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination will be rejected as volunteers; and when they come to be drafted they will be given “non-sensitive” duty at the lowest rate of pay. All new officers and enlisted men must sign loyalty questionnaires. There will be no distinction made for the record between those dismissed for disloyalty and those dropped or allowed to resign for drunkenness, gossiping, homosexuality, or any other of the human disabilities that now mark Federal employees as security risks.

The Dentist Case

Mr Wilson was the first Cabinet officer to ridicule Senator McCarthy’s complaint about the Army’s “coddling” of Communists but when the Senator exposed the case of Major Peress, Mr Wilson admitted that it had been mishandled and promised to make the Army’s security system more rigorous.

Major Peress was the Army dentist who refused to testify his associations, under the cloak of the Fifth Amendment, and was yet granted an honourable discharge. This notorious case, which Senator McCarthy implied was merely a flagrant example of the Army’s indifference to subversion laid the train for the blast of charges and counter-charges between Senator McCarthy, his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, and the Secretary of the Army Mr Robert Stevens.

Now that the McCarthy subcommittee has managed to find special counsel, Mr Ray Jenkins, a trial lawyer from Tennessee whose impartiality is not in question, it will open its public hearings into the Army-McCarthy row on April 21.

Mr Wilson would not say yesterday that the Army had revamped its security system in order to give it what soldiers call a better “defensive posture” at these hearings. But there is little doubt that the Army’s quick and drastic reform of its security standards is part of the President’s plan to make the entire executive branch of the Government so impervious to spying and subversion that Senator McCarthy will find his favourite occupation gone. Yet the new regulations are so searching that Senator McCarthy may be said to have won a moral victory before the battle has begun.

Soldiers Must Tell

The new security system is certainly far stricter than anything the armed forces would have instituted if Senator McCarthy had never challenged its vigilance. Although the Army promises to begin investigations only after receiving “credible information,” every member of the Army, Navy, and Air Force is now considered honour-bound to report to his commanding officer any suspicion he may have about all other service men and women. A new order frankly says:

It shall be the duty of every member of the armed services to report to his commanding officer any information coming to its attention which indicates that retention of any member of the armed services is not clearly consistent with the interests of national security.

Something of the sort was bound to be written into a system so comprehensive; but when it is set down as an obligation of service, it obviously offers a rosy opportunity for every private to be his own McCarthy.



