POINT OF ORDER

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

It seems to me that there is something more to be said about Point of Order, the documentary film of the Army-McCarthy hearings. It really is a subtle and imaginative piece of editing, a skillful recreation of a bizarre episode in history. But Point of Order is also revisionist history with a vengeance. Most of us, even those too young to remember, like to think of the Army-McCarthy hearings as high drama, one of those immensely satisfying political morality plays whose figures manage to embody our deepest aspirations confronted with our greatest fears. Point of Order suggests that we are wrong, that the hearings were nothing of the sort. In this film, there is no high drama, and precious few morals to be drawn. There is only a great deal of unconscious burlesque and procedural charade.

It is surprising, but almost everybody comes out of the hearings looking shabby. There is, of course, the great and good exception of Mr. Welch (whom Richard Rovere called "the aesthetic dividend" of the proceedings). But then Mr. Welch was brought in by the Army from outside. It is easy to imagine what might have happened if someone less stalwart and more representative of the Washington atmosphere had been chosen.

The sad fact of the matter is that nobody in official Washington stood up to be counted against McCarthy. In the end, those who successfully opposed him did not do so out of any sense of outraged principle: It was just that, for a change, their own ox was being gored. Thus we have the spectacle of the Secretary of the Army suggesting that the real goods on subversives and homosexuals were to be gotten by investigating the Air Force and the Navy, rather than the Army. And Senator Symington's famous outburst against McCarthy came only after Symington himself was personally attacked.

At one memorable point in the hearings, McCarthy notes in passing that no one knows who is to be President in '56 or '60. There is a pause as he listens to what he has just said, and a sly smile creeps over his features. He flashes a little self-congratulatory salute to a spectator. This was McCarthy, three parts guile and one part in-genuousness; whose ambition knew no rest; who was a dangerous man. And here, preserved for coming generations, are his opponents, frightened and intimidated men joined in a crusade to save their own skins. Point of Order looks back on the hearings from the perspective of a decade and argues that nobody's profile looked vary courageous. Joseph L. Featherstone '62