Book Review: Loyalty and Security: Employment Tests in the United States

Abstract

AT least tvice in his book, Professor Brown expresses the hope that the material with which he deals will become progressively less important. It is true that the subject of the federal loyalty-security programs, and their many diverse local and national kin, has fallen off in importance as a matter of public interest since the abandonment of the practice of making political capital out of the number of federal employees with derogatory data in their files. But this relaxation in current political interest to my mind is simply a mark of the unhappy fact that the programs' existence has been swallowed by the people and the Government and they are now an institutionalized part of our lives. I do not think that Mr. Brown,'s hope will come true. This fact obviously increases the value of the book as a treatise for use by lawyers with a security case practice. More importantly, however, Loyalty and Sccurity deals in a thorough and perceptive manner with the entire problem of loyalty and security in the cold war context. It is a major contribution to the current legal history of the impact of the cold war on traditional individual freedoms.