Flip-Flop, Flip-Flop

Manhattan's Daily Worker faithfully follows the Communist Party line, however suddenly it may swerve, wriggle or tie itself into knots. Last week, in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin's tumble from grace (TIME, March 26), the Worker gave the weird impression of having come to the end of the line--or at least the end of its rope.

One indignant letter to the Worker ran: "[You] have followed successive flip-flops with amazing jolt-proof gymnastic dexterity, without ever being at a loss for editorial words. The doctors were plotting, the doctors were not; Beria was in, Beria was out; Tito was out, Tito was in; Yugoslavia was a dictatorship with ruthless suppression of opposition, Yugoslavia is finding its independent path to socialism; Stalin is up, Stalin is down . . . The Daily Worker editors had carved out a position even more unassailable than the Soviet leaders have claimed for them selves. The Soviet leaders admitted to previous mistakes. The Daily Worker editors smoothly absorbed the new positions without a backward glance."

In another letter to the editor, Ring Lardner Jr.. one of the "Hollywood Ten." wondered whether the kind of one-man worship so deplorable in Stalin's case might not have influenced the "rather maudlin testaments to William Z. Foster on his recent birthday." In the same sentence, evidently feeling no inconsistency. Lardner described U.S. Communist Boss Foster as "America's outstanding working-class leader."

The Worker flip-flopped so energetically that no one, not even Nikita Khrushchev, was sacred to its letter writers.

Wrote one: "If there is one central point to the present revaluation now taking place in the U.S.S.R.. it is that nobody is infallible. Stalin certainly was not--and Khrushchev is not. Undoubtedly the Soviet reappraisal of Stalin will be far more comprehensive than any which 'outsiders' will produce . . . But this is not to say that American Marxists should accept automatically and uncritically the views of Soviet leaders--who are, after all. not without responsibility for Stalin's errors. It seems all too clear that there has been a good deal too much 'leaving it to the Russians' already."

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