Perplexed as we are by an age of splintering identities, it is tempting to look back on the Cold War as an ideologically simple time. The battles between liberal and Communist intellectuals—epitomized by the bitter dispute between Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre in France—are legends of Cold War history. So, too, are the stories of those that renounced Communism to become liberals or liberal-inflected conservatives, people like Sidney Hook, Arthur Koestler, François Furet, and Leszek Kołakowski. Yet the more we focus on liberalism’s conflict with Communism, and liberalism’s victory over it, the less likely we are to recall how liberals fought among themselves—about Communism.

One cleavage, and my topic here, concerns liberal attitudes to Communist conspiracy in Western lands. How should governments respond to it? The question was complicated by divergent appraisals of the threat. Was the Communist menace overdone and hysterically orchestrated, a Red Scare? Or was the threat real and in urgent need of attention? What was the proper balance to be struck between the rights of states to self-protection and the rights of a state’s members to civil liberty?

Rebecca West accused Cooke of factual inaccuracy and political sleight of hand.

A polemic that dramatized these questions pitted Rebecca West (1892–1983)—the novelist, literary critic, and political commentator—against Alistair Cooke (1908–2004), the journalist born and raised in Britain who became a U.S. citizen in December 1941. At issue was the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ (huac) investigations into Communist subversion.