 It's time for the Lawn Jean Chronoscope, a television journal of the important issues of the hour brought to you every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a presentation of the Lawn Jean Wittner Watch Company, maker of Lawn Jean, the world's most honored watch, and Wittner, distinguished companion to the world-honored Lawn Jean. Good evening. This is Frank Knight. May I introduce our co-editors for this edition of the Lawn Jean Chronoscope? From the CBS television news staff, Larry Lusser and Walter Cronkite. Our distinguished guest for this evening is Sir Hartley Schockross, member of parliament and former attorney general of Great Britain. I understand you're visiting this country, Sir Hartley, in connection with Columbia's bicentennial and its theme, man's right to knowledge and the free use thereof. Now, as a Britisher, Sir Hartley, do you think this ideal is realistic and practical? Well, of course, it's an ideal for an ideal world, and one has to face realities. We're not living in an ideal world. And with the Iron Curtain, which the Russians have put up with the deliberate intention of cutting off knowledge from one side of the world, getting into the other, it can only be an ideal that we may achieve later on. But it remains important for all that scientists and knowledge don't exist on desert islands. So have you in Britain found it necessary to restrain man's right to knowledge in the face of the communist attack on democracy? Well, only in this sense that we have, of course, taken steps, we think quite effective steps to keep communists, or for that matter, fascists, out of any positions in which they might acquire knowledge of, for instance, atomic weapons or secret matters of policy, which would be of utility to an enemy, such as the communists might be. Do you feel, Sir Hartley, that the search for communists in the United States, whether it is good or bad for the United States, has hurt the United States prestige overseas? Well, you know, that's a very awkward question for me to answer, because the one thing I'm most anxious about is that no one should think that even by implication I'm criticizing American policy in regard to these matters. But I do feel, and I suppose if you ask me, I must say so, that there is a great deal of anxiety, possibly due to misunderstanding in Europe, about some of the things which have been occurring here. Because we're accustomed to look to the United States, and I hope we always shall as a citadel of freedom. Well, Sir Hartley, I'm afraid that there's some suspicion in this country that Britain has been, or is complacent about communism as a result of the Fuchs' atomic secrets case. Now, is this charge true? I would say not. After all, you've had cases in this country, and I suppose if it was a question of counting of heads, you've had more cases here than we've had in Britain. But what we would say about the Fuchs case, and there was another, the Nun May case, although he wasn't actually a communist, I think, what we'd say about that is that it shows the efficiency of our intelligence service in rooting these people out. And of course, you are bound to have, I suppose, at any rate, the risk of spies of that kind in government service. However careful you might be. But we think that we've got them all out. I wouldn't guarantee we have. But we've had the most careful, quiet, but most careful intelligence inquiries about all the people in the sensitive persons. Your own party, Sir Hartley, has been in the forefront of a group who believe that there should be wider trade with the Soviet Union, in Europe particularly. Do you feel that this sort of trade is actually going to help in the general world picture, or can't that sort of trade actually be of aid to Russia in building up against the Western world? We would have thought not. We're very careful, of course, not to supply Russia with any of the so-called strategic goods. We've complied with all the requirements of the United Nations Additional Measures Committee about not supplying strategic goods, and in fact, we've gone a good deal further. And we feel that on balance, the advantage is greater to us than it is to become in this group. Of course, we've got to trade. We've got to import, for instance, half our foodstuffs. And in order to buy those, we've got to sell our goods to markets which are willing to receive them. The more difficult it is to sell them here, the more inevitable it is that we should try and find markets for non-strategic things elsewhere. Sir Hartley, I've got to go back to the previous subject. As you probably know, we're in the midst of a controversy here over charges of communism in the government, and our Attorney General has been very active in this. Now, what's happening in your own very much respected civil service? Are you conducting any investigations of them? Yes, but it's done in a quite different way, I suppose, because of our different arrangements and rather different traditions. We have assumed that there are a certain number of posts, something of the order of 15,000, out of a million or over posts in our civil service which are sensitive and involve security risks. And in regard to them, the police and the intelligence service make the most careful inquiries about the people who are occupying them or who are appointed to them. And as a result of those inquiries, we thought that suspicion was to be directed against about 148 civil servants. Their cases were made the subject of fuller investigation, they being suspended in the meantime. At the end of the day, we were able to reinstate 28 of them as perfectly loyal and honest people. We transferred about 60 to other posts which involved no security risks at all, and the rest were either dismissed or resigned. All those cases were considered by a committee of very experienced retired civil servants, but of course it was all done privately, that nobody knows except the security services even today who was dealt with under that machinery. Well, do you fire or should I say sack of civil servants who are suspected of association with known communists? Depends entirely what his job is. If he's a postman, for instance, or if he's a lorry driver, we would say that his communist views are no danger and we shouldn't consider that we were entitled to sack him because of them. If on the other hand he's in a high position in which he's accessed to secret information of one kind or another, well, then we sack him if it's impossible for one reason or another to transfer him to a position in which no security risk is involved. We prefer to transfer them to some other job, but if there isn't a suitable job, well then they're sacked. Sir, what do you actually do about communism in countries where you're actively engaged in combat, like Malaya for instance? Yes, I think if I may say so, that's a very useful question because it illustrates that our approach in Britain is entirely empirical. It depends on the circumstances. In Malaya, our measures are totally different. We've made the Communist Party illegal and anyone who belongs to it commits a criminal offense and can be dealt with as a criminal and is dealt with if he's caught and is tried. And there's no doubt that because of these and other very drastic measures that we've taken in Malaya, the situation there now is very much better. But I'd like to add that in England, there's no doubt at all as far as one can judge that communism is on the decline. At the last election, the total votes polled in the whole country for the communists was about 20,000. Well, I got about that figure in my own majority in my own constituency and there are 650 constituencies in Britain. I think it all made me clear, the 20,000 majority you got weren't communist votes, it almost sounded like that. No, they weren't communist votes. Well, why has there been this decline in England in the communist prestige there? Well, I would say because in the end, truth usually beats falsehood and we've fought the whole thing out in the open. We've not prescribed the Communist Party, although, and this is, you may think curious, the Labour Party has prescribed a number of organizations which are either communist or associated with communism and said that anybody who belongs to any of these organizations can't be a member of the Labour Party. But subject to that, we've argued the thing out and we've trusted to the political maturity of our people and the result is that since the time in 1944 when we were fighting with Russia and we were all admiring their efforts at Stalingrad and so on, communism has steadily declined both politically and in the trade unions. Sir Hartley, as a Member of Parliament, you obviously know that the other day our Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, enunciated what seemed to be a new foreign policy in which he placed more emphasis on instant retaliation rather than on local ground defense. Now, how do you people in the British Isles feel about that? Well, I'm expressing a personal view on this, you know, but I would feel very worried if that meant that there was to be any general withdrawal of troops from the areas in which there might be a danger of attack. Not so much because I think the retaliating measures of the kind that Foster Dulles contemplated may not be a deterrent against aggression but because I think the presence of British and American troops in these danger areas of the world has done a tremendous amount to give confidence to the local population. It's like saying to the citizens here, for instance, we're going to withdraw all your policemen, but if you're murdered, we'll take care to see that your murder is executed. Most citizens would say, well, we'd rather have the policemen to prevent us getting murdered. Sir Hartley, as a final question, may I ask you, how do you Britishers actually feel about America now? There have been some talk of anti-Americanism and fear of depression. Well, of course, there are misunderstandings and disagreements between us. There always are between friends, but I heard basically we remain friends and indeed I'm sure we do. I brought with me tonight something that Burke said. In 1777, the positions of our countries have been reversed since then, but this is what he did say, talking to what were then the American colonies. As long as it is our happiness to be joined with you in the bonds of fraternal charity and freedom, with an open and flowing commerce between us, one principle of amity and friendship prevailing, we are likely to be at least as powerful as any nation or combination of nations which in the course of human events may be formed against us. That's as true today as it ever was. Thank you very much, Sir Hartley. I'm glad to have you here tonight, and we hope you enjoyed your visit to this country. Thank you very much. I certainly did. The opinions you've heard our speakers express tonight have been entirely their own. The editorial board for this edition of the Laun Jean Chronoscope was Larry LeSere and Walter Cronkite. Our distinguished guest was Sir Hartley Shaw Cross, member of Parliament and former Attorney General of Great Britain. 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