THE LUNATICS are running the asylum these days, and lunacy is its own reward, sanity the only true crime. In Only Victims Robert Vaughn has compiled a history of the oldest permanent floating pogrom in America--the show business witchhunt.

"...it will do no good to look for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none; there were only victims," said Dalton Trumbo. Vaughn's book proves Trumbo's sorry point: the Broadway and Hollywood figures he discusses are pitiable figures, betraying each other, groveling in the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) mud, victimizing themselves to save their earning power. The few heroes, those people who defended their integrity and friends, were the most obvious victims. If they refused to cooperate they were thrown into jail, blacklisted, and destroyed.

The investigators were villains, or course, but more than that victims of their own ignorance, their perverted notions of freedom and patriotism, their lack of understanding. Witness this exchange from 1938, between a suspect and a member of the HUAC:

Mr. Starnes: You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?

Mrs. Flanagan: I am very sorry. I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.

Mr. Starnes: Tell us who Marlowe is, so we can get the proper reference, because that is all we want to do.

Mrs. Flanagan: Put it in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare.

Mr. Starnes: Put that in the record, because the charge has been made that this article of yours is entirely communistic, and we want to help you.

Mrs. Flanagan: Thank you. That statement will go in the record.

Mrs. Starnes: Of course, we had what some people call Communists back in the days of the Greek theater.

Mrs. Flanagan: Quite true.

Mr. Starnes: And I belive Mr. Euripedes (sic) was guilty of teaching class consciousness also, wasn't he?

Mrs. Flanagan: I believe this was alleged against all of the Greek dramatists.

Mr. Starnes: So we cannot say when it began.

This stichomythy has so little relation to anything approaching sense that one is hard pressed to believe it ever occurred. Far better it were the creation of some absurdist gone mad. That the Federal Theatre, which Mrs. Flanagan represented, could be investigated for producing Marlowe, for putting on "collectivist" children's plays, is only one symptom of the national disease.

Robert Vaughn has started with an embarrassment of riches, and somehow produced a poverty of ideas. He has as source materials thousands of pages of Committee testimony, hundreds of personal recollections from the victims of those days, and his own experience as an actor--he played Napoleon Solo in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." He tells us, at the very end of the book, that he has undertaken to do a study of blacklisting in the theatre, to the exclusion of motion pictures, television and radio, but he devotes most of his book to motion pictures, television and radio. Vaughn's book is far too diffuse, far too unstructured, and far too confusing to serve as the valuable reference source it could have been if he had done a better job on it.

VAUGHN originally wrote Only Victims as a doctoral thesis at USC, but it is hard to believe that it got through any faculty readings. The book is almost totally unedited for style and substance. His sentences are vintage Timeese, reeling this way and that, incorporating half a dozen half-formed thoughts into six lines, leaving the reader gasping for breath. Vaughn devotes almost all of his book to factual recountings of Committee hearings, going through day after day of testimony. Only Victims is at the same time fascinating and frustrating, for he never looks from the trees to the forest beyond. Vaughn claims to have written a study of blacklisting, but he never actually gets around to a discussion of how blacklists worked. He might have, if he had put his mind to it, added something to John Cogley's two-volume study of the subject, but he seems to have discovered nothing new. If he did, he at least wasn't telling it.

Only Victims does have a use, but only a limited one. The catalogue of national hysteria it provides will raise anybody's blood pressure a few points, and, for the unitiated, it is a reasonably painless annotated introduction to the theory and practice of the witchhunt. But it is not what it could have been, and this country is still in need of a good, readable compact history of one of the greatest blots on the American dream.