The Professor as Informer

IN EARLY July 1956 James Burnham made his appearance as a government witness at a Department of Justice hearing held as the climax to a six -year-long effort by the Independent Socialist League to have its name removed from the Attorney General’s “subversive list.”

James Burnham had been a member of that organization once, when it was known as the Workers Party. In May 1940 he had resigned from the group, in a letter notable for a certain friendliness of tone, as if h...