Pick a Number, Any Number

President Eisenhower has stated that the issue of subversives in Government will not be paramount in next Fall's Congressional elections. If the President is serious, he will welcome a bill just introduced in the Senate by a Democrat. This bill would require quarterly reports to Congress and the public on how many security risks have been separated each month from the Government, and exactly what type of risk they were. A detailed breakdown is vital, for only once in the past has there been an effort to distinguish between so-called "security risks" and actual subversives. Communists, criminals, perverts, and alcoholics--as well as people accused only by rumor--have all been lumped under the heading "security risk." The only past breakdown, pressured through a few weeks ago by the House Appropriations Committee, showed that very few of the "security risks" were actual Communists or subversives.

A system of quarterly reports would perpetuate this accounting, and would prevent the Red-hunters from claiming the whole list of so-called risks as they have often done in the past. It would also show how exaggerated past totals have been. For one of the curious spectacles of recent politics is that right wing Republicans, while they complained that Democratic Washington was filled with security risks, could not state the size of the menace. The Civil Service Commissioner at one time reported 2,486 cases. Later, he back-pedalled to 1,456. His critics, with apparent justification, even accused him of swelling the lists with the names of dead men.

Men like Senator McCarthy thrived on this vagueness. Ticking off 300 security risks in one department, a score or so in another, they so enlarged the issue of Democratic laxity that it obscured far more important things such as economic policy and foreign affairs. It is true that subversives and security risks can undermine a government and should be regarded as dangerous. But the number of proved risks turned up to date is minute compared with the number of employees in the Government, and the proved subversives number but a tiny fraction of this total.