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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Ronald Radosh</title>
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		<title>Imagine Living in a Socialist USA</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronald-radosh/imagine-living-in-a-socialist-usa/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=imagine-living-in-a-socialist-usa</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronald-radosh/imagine-living-in-a-socialist-usa/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2014 04:29:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronald Radosh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[communist socialist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IMAGINE]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ron radosh]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221420</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book imagines a future in which no sane person would ever choose to live. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/imagine.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221699" alt="imagine" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/imagine.gif" width="280" height="426" /></a><strong>Francis Goldin, Debby Smith and Michael Steven Smith, eds., <i>Imagine Living in a Socialist USA</i>, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014) 304 pp., $15.99</strong></p>
<p>This dreadful book has one redeeming quality: it admits candidly what the Left in America really wants when it says that its goal is a socialist country. Meant to be a recruiting tool as well as a morale booster for the Left, this book leads to a very different conclusion than its editors and authors intend.</p>
<p>Karl Marx, who, aside from that one famous sentence that when the communist golden age was finally reached, men would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and relax at night, never wrote anything about how the communist future would actually work or what it would look like. The editors of <i>Imagine, </i>on the other hand, have tried for a book that paints an explicit portrait of the utopian future they are sure is just around the corner. They’ve recruited the usual suspects to help them out: including Bill Ayers, Michael Moore, Michael Ratner, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Frances Fox Piven, Mumia Abu-Jumal, Angela Davis, Juan Gonzalez and Leslie Cagan, among many others.</p>
<p>The first thing one notices when looking over the contributors is that there is no longer any differentiation between the Old Communist Left and the New Left. They are now one and the same, united in the hope of creating a revolution, or as Barack Obama once put it, a “fundamental transformation” of the United States. This did not happen, as some of them hoped and expected, in “one step” once Obama got elected. They now realize that whether or not it happens is up to them.  Hence this half-witted blueprint.</p>
<p>I read through as many of the essays as I could stand, until the brain dwarfing unreality became too daunting.  The editors did not take seriously the fundamental principle that boredom is the great enemy of human life.</p>
<p>The first section of <i>Imagine</i> is devoted to a critique of capitalism; the second is meant “to inspire hope”; the third, to imagining what life in a socialist America would be like.</p>
<p>Turning to the last section first, it is immediately apparent that the socialist future imagined here is not a place that anyone in his or her right mind would choose to live.  When you read radical lawyer Michael Ratner’s speculation about what he would do if he became Attorney General of the United States, for instance, you’ll change your mind about Eric Holder being the worst possible person in that post. Ratner would “handcuff the FBI,” parole every “supposed” political prisoner (a list that includes a group of heavy hitters); end the prosecution of “truth-tellers” like Edward Snowden; indict Barack Obama for “murder by targeted assassination,” followed by similar charges against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others.</p>
<p>Then there is City University of New York historian Clifford D. Conner, who among other things is an editor of a volume titled <i>The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest</i>. As you might expect, he tells his readers “there is no avoiding the word ‘revolution’ to describe the necessary transformation” that lies ahead for America. But despite the grim and probably sanguinary prognosis, Conner is quite optimistic that the pieces are in place for this future. All you need is, first,  a “rebellious mass movement,” that would quickly ignite “a revolutionary situation”; then the old vanguard party to lead the protestors to wrest “control of the state away from the booboisie”; and finally the “conquest of state power.” Piece of cake.  Connor’s solution is old-style Leninism tarted up for modern occasions; thousands of the old Communist Party pamphlets he obviously grew up on given a little cosmetic surgery and then presented as a new face. God help the students who enroll in this man’s courses.</p>
<p>In the second section, “Imagining Socialism,” the highlight is Fred Jerome’s article about how the news media would function in a socialist USA. I have already written about an excerpt that appeared in <i>Salon</i>, and you can read my lengthy discussion of what Jerome says <a href="http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2014/01/24/what-the-left-has-in-mind-for-the-media-in-their-communist-utopia-the-prescriptions-of-comrade-jerome/http:/pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2014/01/24/what-the-left-has-in-mind-for-the-media-in-their-communist-utopia-the-prescriptions-of-comrade-jerome/">here</a>. The bio in this book tells readers about all the mainstream publications Jerome has written for, and that HUAC subpoenaed him in the 1960s. It leaves out the quaint fact that he was a leader of the American young Communist movement in the 1950s, the son of the Party’s cultural commissar V. J. Jerome, and one of the founding members of the Maoist breakaway from the CPUSA, the so-called Progressive Labor Party. Obviously, Jerome does not want readers to know about the tradition from which he comes, or that rather than being a “new” socialist he is an old Red, the likes of which by now should have been stuffed and put in the Smithsonian.</p>
<p>Proving faithful to his Marxist-Leninist father’s ideology, Jerome’s prescriptions for journalism could be modeled on the Soviet era <i>Pravda</i> and Fidel Castro’s <i>Granma</i>. In his perfect world, the media would function as a mechanism of control by the country’s revolutionary leaders, who would seek to create enthusiasm for the citizens to fulfill what Jerome, in a possible Freudian slip, calls their “production-distribution quotas.”  The press in the society Jerome envisions will lose its freedom overnight, just as it did under the reign of Hugo Chavez, the hero of so many of the contributors to this anthology. But the kept press of capitalism deserves such a fate. As Jerome says, the U.S. media is controlled by “a grand total of six mega-corporations—Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast.” These evil corporate conglomerates are simply “tools used by the 1 percent to rule and fool.” (It might surprise Comrade Jerome to discover that the book in which his essay appears is published by Harper Collins, a firm that as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollinshttps:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarperCollins">Wikipedia</a> tells us, is owned by — you guessed it — none other than Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation itself, another illustration, presumably, of Lenin’s wise observation that “the capitalists will sell us the rope we’ll use to hang them.”)</p>
<p>This section has some other gems also worth mentioning.  Harriet Fraad and Tess Fraad-Woolf pine for a society in which “we are all basically equal,” which would eliminate shame for those who do not live like “the rich and famous.” Junk food would disappear; everyone would not only have free health care, but soon we would have a health system &#8212;-I kid you not&#8212;-as good as that of Communist Cuba! (“Imagine,” they write, “how healthy we could be in our rich nation if medicine were socialized like Cuba’s.”) Like Michael Moore, they obviously are completely unaware that only tourists and apparatchiks have any decent medical services, and that the bulk of the Cuban population is lucky to get one rationed aspirin when ill.</p>
<p>Oh, and don’t forget that finally Americans will have good sex under socialism, since like Sweden, sex education will begin in the first grade. In this polymorphous perverse utopia, “all kind of mutual loving” will be celebrated, “gay, straight and trans-gender.” Somehow, Fraad and Fraad-Woolf fail to address the well-known suppression of homosexuals in their beloved revolutionary Cuba.  But while such facts may be stubborn things, there’s always affirmation in the larger picture. Historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, another contributor, explains that in the big picture “progressive and socialist women understood that economic security combined with feminism and sexual freedom were required for individual serenity and community harmony.”</p>
<p>Finally, the former terrorist and Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers gives readers his educational philosophy, which comes down to a one-liner: schools should prepare students to be socialist revolutionaries. His educational summum bonum is indoctrination, and it is indeed frightening to realize that Ayers should be regarded as a distinguished educational theorist; indispensable man in the nation’s education schools.  He wants schools to create the new socialist man; even more he wants the destruction of the educational status quo in which “schools for compliance and conformity” produce citizens who accept the “pigeonhole” into which they were born.</p>
<p>Ayers favors what he calls “teaching toward freedom and democracy,” euphemisms for what he once publicly stated, standing next to the late Hugo Chavez, was the essence of the Venezuelan system of education which sooner or later would have to be adopted in the USA as a model. That is “socialist education” which adopts Marx’s belief that “the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all.”</p>
<p>Ayers calls for a “liberating pedagogy” in which “alternative and insurgent classrooms” teach “mind-blowing” ideas.  But you can be sure that students in the socialist future will not have their minds blown by exposure to the strengths of democratic capitalism and that they will experience no remorse or relief from the Marxist views and beliefs of their professors, reading from the gospel according to Howard Zinn, who teach them that the United States is the greatest oppressor in the world and that its past history is one of unmitigated evil.</p>
<p>The idea for this book comes from a woman named Frances Goldin, who is described as an 88-year-old socialist, who has two goals she wants to see before she passes from the earth&#8212;“get Mumia Abu-Jamal out of prison and edit a book about what America might be like if it were socialist.” I do not know much about Ms. Goldin, aside from her bio that tells us that when she first heard the word socialist when she was 18, it “sounded like a great idea.” With the publication of <i>Imagine</i>, she has achieved part of her life’s ambition.  We can only hope that she will go to her socialist grave with the other half being unrequited.</p>
<p>What is striking about the book is how the current generation of self-proclaimed socialists writing in this volume have carried on a bankrupt tradition, pouring poisoned old wine into new bottles by adding a veneer of concern for leftist environmentalism, gay and transgender rights and feminism to the old model of socialist revolution. The entire way in which they refer to a new revolutionary future and system is advocacy by other means for exactly the kinds of systems that produced charnel houses in the old Soviet Union and Maoist China, and in Communist Cuba and North Korea today.</p>
<p>One of the blurbs for the book comes from a man who once considered himself part of the early New Left, the writer Paul Buhle. He thinks that this book will have the effect Edward Bellamy’s <i>Looking Backward,</i> which converted Eugene V. Debs to socialism, had in the late 19<sup>th</sup> Century. I think that we already know that Mr. Buhle’s dream is dead on arrival, which is just as well because as the 19<sup>th</sup> century and its successor showed, it was actually a nightmare in disguise.</p>
<p>I will end with a prediction of my own, quite different than that offered by Buhle. Anyone who innocently picks up and reads this book will forever be turned off by the claim that socialism should be America’s future. Perhaps we conservatives should be handing <i>Imagine</i> out as a sure way to advance our cause.</p>
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		<title>McCarthy On Steroids</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronald-radosh/mccarthy-on-steroids/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mccarthy-on-steroids</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronald-radosh/mccarthy-on-steroids/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Aug 2013 04:56:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronald Radosh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[betrayal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[conspiracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[diana west]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[evidence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mccarthy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ron radosh]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=199666</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Diana West's new book, American Betrayal, spins a vast conspiracy theory without the evidence to back it up. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/betrayal.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-199686" alt="betrayal" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/betrayal.jpg" width="260" height="393" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><em>Editors&#8217; note: Frontpage offered Diana West equal space to reply to Professor Radosh&#8217;s points below. She refused.</em></p>
<p><b>Diana West, <i>American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character</i>, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 403 pages; $26.99.</b></p>
<p>Many Americans at both ends of the political spectrum view history in conspiratorial terms. The late Senator Joseph McCarthy set the bar very high when he claimed to have uncovered “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.” In that famous <a href="http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1951mccarthy-marshall.html" target="_blank">speech</a> to the Senate on June 14, 1951<b>,</b> McCarthy condemned former Chief of Staff of the Army and Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense as a traitor who made “common cause with Stalin on the strategy of the war in Europe,” who “took the strategic direction of the war out of Roosevelt&#8217;s hands and &#8211; who fought the British desire, shared by [General] Mark Clark, to advance from Italy into the eastern plains of Europe ahead of the Russians.”</p>
<p>Diana West, who expands the scope of this conspiracy in <i>American Betrayal</i>, is McCarthy’s heiress.  She argues that during the New Deal the United States was an occupied power, its government controlled by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and subverted it. Like McCarthy, whom <a href="http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2389/Dispatch-International-Joe-McCarthy-Was-Right-All-Along.aspx" target="_blank">West believes</a> got everything correct, she believes a conspiracy was at work that effectively enabled the Soviets to be the sole victors in World War II and shape American policies in the postwar world.</p>
<p>Writing sixty years later, she claims that the evidence that has come to light in the interim not only vindicates McCarthy’s claims but goes well beyond anything he imagined. Throughout <i>American Betrayal</i>, West uses the terms “occupied” and “controlled” to describe the influence the Soviet Union exerted over U.S. policy through its agents and spies. She believes she has exposed “the Communist-agent-occupation of the U.S. government” during the Roosevelt and Truman eras, and that her discoveries add up to a Soviet-controlled American government that conspired to strengthen Russia throughout World War II at the expense of American interests, marginalize anti-Communist Germans, and deliver the crucial material for the Atomic Bomb to Stalin and his henchmen. It also conspired<b> </b>to cover up the betrayal. In West’s summation: “The Roosevelt administration [was] penetrated, fooled, subverted, in effect hijacked by Soviet agents… and engaged in a “‘sell-out’ to Stalin” that “conspirators of silence on the Left…would bury for as long as possible, desperately throwing mud over it and anyone who wanted the sun to shine in.” According to West, it was only because Washington was “Communist-occupied” that the United States aligned itself with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.</p>
<p>But Ms. West writes without an understanding of historical context and lacks awareness of much of the scholarly literature on the subjects she writes about. Moreover, she disregards the findings of the sources she does rely on when they contradict her yellow journalism conspiracy theories. Consequently she arrives at judgment after judgment that is not only bizarre on its face, but also unwarranted by the evidence and refuted by the very authorities she draws on. As a historian I normally would not have agreed to review a book such as this one.  But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations. These included the Heritage Foundation which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; <a href="http://Breitbart.com" target="_blank">Breitbart.com</a> which is serializing <i>America Betrayed</i>; PJ Media which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”</p>
<p>West has evidently seduced conservatives who are justifiably appalled by the left’s rewriting of history, its denials that Communists ever posed a threat, and its claim that Communist infiltration was a destructive myth created by witch-hunters intent on suppressing dissent. For these readers, West’s credibility derives from her aggressive counter vision. For those who have not read the important works of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, Christopher Andrew, Alexander Vassiliev, Allen Weinstein and others, what she has written may seem a revelation, as she herself claims. But for anyone familiar with the historical literature, the core of what she has written is well known and what is new is either overheated, or simply false and distorted—the sort of truculent recklessness that gives anti-communism a bad name.</p>
<p>One of the most unsettling aspects of West’s use of previous authorities who provide the only reliable information in her book is the way she attacks the very writers who pioneered in exposing Soviet espionage and infiltration, while also disregarding their conclusions when they don’t agree with hers. In a typical instance, she writes: “[Christopher] Andrew and [former archivist for the USSR’s foreign intelligence branch Vasili] Mitrokhin seem fairly hip to the problem, but then soft-soap its cause.”  Even more preposterously she writes of those of us who drew attention to the guilt of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg that we view it as a matter of personal conscience and not “an issue of national security.” This is absurd and anyone who has read <i>The Rosenberg File</i> or the many articles I have written since about the case would know it. She attacks Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, among the greatest scholars of Soviet espionage, for their failure to connect “treachery with its impact,” by which she means that they failed to come to her wild-eyed conclusion that Soviet espionage was not only a clear and present danger but succeeded in making America a puppet of its Kremlin masters. As a result, she writes, “The recent confirmations of guilt often show up as mere technicalities…The reckoning eludes us.”</p>
<p>Finally, throughout her book she attacks the rigorous scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, whose groundbreaking books on the Venona decrypts are unrivalled in exposing the true scale of Soviet espionage in the United States, and Soviet control of the American Communist Party. Haynes and Klehr have also co-authored a classic study about the efforts of liberal and left historians to cover up the infiltration and its extent in a book titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Historians-Communism-Espionage/dp/159403088X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374337788&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=in+denial+historians+communism+and+espionage" target="_blank">In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage</a>. Ignoring this record, West claims that Hayes and Klehr minimize the evidence they were the first to expose. What is really bothering her is that they do not buy her preposterous conclusion that “American statecraft was an instrument of Soviet strategy.”</p>
<p>Ignoring or denigrating these brave and accomplished scholars, West proceeds to construct a conspiracy thesis resting on five claims she believes establish a vast plot by Soviet agents and their American pawns to shape the outcome of the Second World War and in the process benefit the Communists at the expense of the West. In this review, I will focus on each of these claims in turn and show that they are groundless, and worse.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Agent 19</b></p>
<p>A key assertion for West is that FDR’s closest advisor, Harry Hopkins, was actually the Soviet agent known in the Venona decrypts as “Agent 19,” sometimes “Source 19&#8243;. The decrypts were Kremlin messages to their American agents that were deciphered after the war. The identification of Hopkins as Agent 19 is the linchpin of West’s conspiracy case. She places Hopkins at the center of major military and foreign policy decisions, and interprets his objective in each instance as advancing Stalin’s goals for Communist world domination.</p>
<p>That Hopkins was the most pro-Soviet of Roosevelt’s close advisers and believed that Stalin could be a working partner in wartime as well as during the peace that would follow has been discussed so often as to be conventional wisdom. But it is one thing to point this out and analyze its implications, and quite another to claim that Hopkins was an actual Soviet agent, a claim that is also not original with West, although it is, in fact, not true.  (When I sent her a collegial email questioning this assertion, and requesting that we get together to talk about it,<b> </b>she became huffy. “Dialoguing is one thing,” she emailed back; “issuing directives is another.”)</p>
<p>In her book, West cites a 1998 article by the late Eduard Mark, an Air Force historian, who claimed that Hopkins was the agent in question. His conclusion was based on a Venona decrypt by “Source 19” that described a top secret conversation between Churchill and FDR in late May of 1943 about plans for the invasion of Normandy, then more than a year away. According to Mark this proved that the code name belonged to Hopkins.  As West notes, “By process of painstaking elimination, Mark determines that it is ‘probable virtually to the point of certainty’ that ‘Source 19’ is Harry Hopkins.” She says this was also the view of the late Eric Breindel and the late Herbert Romerstein, as well as Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.</p>
<p>She even chastises John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, co-authors with the KGB defector Alexander Vassiliev of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spies-Rise-Fall-KGB-America/dp/0300164386/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374337594&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=spies+the+rise+and+fall+of+the+kgb+in+america" target="_blank"><i>Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America</i></a>, for being “agnostic” about the claim, “which has the unfortunate effect of eliminating the story, even the suggestion of the story, from their influential works.”  In fact, Haynes and Klehr are not only not “agnostic,” they flat out deny that Agent 19 was Hopkins because Agent 19 was actually a State Department official and well-known Soviet agent Laurence Duggan. Duggan worked on the State Department’s Latin America desk, and while he did pass on secret information to the Soviets, his role within the administration was minor compared to Hopkins’ who worked in the White House. Klehr and Haynes base their identification of Duggan on the numerous entries in the <a href="http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/86/Vassiliev-Notebooks" target="_blank">Vassiliev papers</a>, which have been readily available online since May 2009. These papers show numerous entries in the KGB papers Vassiliev copied and brought with him to London, that identify Source 19 or Agent 19 as Duggan.</p>
<p>West acknowledges that Vassiliev found “little about Hopkins in the finite number of KGB files he was allowed to view and copy,” but concludes – without evidence &#8212; that it is in those Vassiliev did not have access to that Hopkins was identified. She then scolds Haynes and Klehr for not giving the controversy over Agent 19 the “merit [of] a footnote.” Perhaps they didn’t because there no longer is any controversy. At a <a href="http://www.washingtondecoded.com/files/a.vassilievntbks_conf.agenda1-2.pdf" target="_blank">conference</a> on Soviet espionage held a week before his untimely death, West’s source, Eduard Mark, publicly stated that he now acknowledged that Harry Hopkins was not Agent 19, and that the conclusion he had reached in his 1998 article was false.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Lend-Lease Aid to the Soviet Union</b></p>
<p>West also insists that Lend-Lease aid was a crucial “rogue operation” orchestrated by Hopkins and the NKVD for the purpose of getting not only war supplies to the Russians, but “the materials that go into making an atomic bomb…<i>up to and including uranium.</i>” (Her emphasis.)  A significant part of her book is devoted to “proving” that Lend-Lease helped make the USSR “the true victor of World War II.” She refers to Lend-lease as “the plunder of atomic secrets … spirited out of the country on a U.S.-government sponsored flight.” The reference is to a shipment of uranium to Russia in 1943, allegedly orchestrated by Harry Hopkins as Agent 19. To her, this proves that the Lend-Lease Act “was a slam-dunk victorious Soviet influence operation.” Or, as she refers to Lend-Lease at the end of her book: “All that American booty pirated by Harry Hopkins for Mother Russia.”</p>
<p>These claims, which lie at the heart of her conspiracy theory, are demonstrably wrong, and show that she even fails to understand the nature of the unrefined uranium the Soviets actually received under Lend-Lease, which was not strategic in terms of making an atomic weapon. General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of The Manhattan Project, signed off on the shipment, as has been well known for more than 60 years, because he feared that if he rejected the requests it would tip-off Moscow that uranium was a highly sensitive commodity, something he was certain they did not yet know.</p>
<p>Even if they had known, the Soviets would have faced an insurmountable problem in using the shipped ore for bomb making. The problem they would have faced was in separating bomb-grade U-235 (which makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium) from U-238 (99.3%), a difficult technical engineering challenge. Until the Soviets could figure out how to separate the isotopes, which they eventually did through the post war espionage at Los Alamos we are all familiar with, the uranium ore they received would be useless for making a weapon. While separating uranium ore was a daunting technological issue, mining uranium ore and refining it into metal was easy, and the Soviets, like other nations, did so for industrial purposes vital to the prosecution of the war, such as producing steel alloys for arms.<b> </b>Even after the Soviets learned how to separate the isotopes, the amounts of unseparated uranium needed were huge, because so little of natural uranium is U-235. The shipment sent under Lend-Lease was a tiny fraction of what was needed to extract enough U-235 to build a bomb, even if the Soviets had the know-how, which at the time the shipments were made they did not. In fact, as we now know, the first Soviet A-Bomb, detonated in 1949, and copied from our “Fat Man” weapon, was a <i>plutonium</i> based bomb.</p>
<p>All of this information and more can be found in David Holloway’s definitive study, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Bomb-Soviet-Atomic-1939-1956/dp/0300066643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374420591&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=David+Holloway" target="_blank"><i>Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956</i></a>, which West seems not to be aware of. “In April (1943),” Holloway writes, “General Groves gave the Soviet Purchasing Commission an export license for 10 kilograms of uranium metal….  A later request by the Soviet commission for eight long tons each of uranium chloride and uranium nitrate was turned down.”</p>
<p>As Holloway notes, the Soviet files offer no evidence that Igor Kurchatov, who led the effort to build the first Soviet A-bomb from information provided by the espionage at Los Alamos, ever used any of the material that came in the Lend-Lease flight. He cites evidence from Soviet archives that show that as late as 1945, their labs desperately needed uranium. Holloway writes: “Certainly Kurchatov’s need for uranium remained urgent. V.V. Goncharov, a chemical engineer who joined Laboratory No. 2 in 1943, has written that in 1943 the laboratory had only 90 kilograms of uranium oxide and 208 kilograms of metallic powder, and that these had been brought from Germany.”</p>
<p>In a letter of Sept. 29, 1944 Kurchatov complained to NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria about “the uranium problem.” The “state of affairs,” he wrote, “remains completely unsatisfactory.” Moreover, the “question of separation [of the isotopes] is particularly bad.” He believed, as Holloway writes, that “the Soviet leadership was not treating the uranium problem as a matter of high priority.” Had the Hopkins flight provided the material that Diana West says gave them the material for the bomb, all this concern would have been unnecessary.</p>
<p>Technical questions aside, in concocting her conspiracy theory of Lend-Lease as a Soviet plot to help Russia win the war and build an atomic bomb, West refuses to consider a range of political realities that had nothing to do with Kremlin agents.  Lend-Lease aid to Russia was premised on the assumption that it was better to have Russia as an ally in the war against Nazi Germany than fight the war alone. The entire point of Lend-Lease was to give military support to the Russian and British war efforts. The purpose of Lend-Lease (profoundly self-interested for the U.S.) was to prevent a Russian defeat so the Soviets would continue to assume the brunt of the war against the Nazis, wearing them down and saving American lives in the process.  Moreover, Lend-Lease aid was far more important in helping the British war effort than the Russian one.</p>
<p>In advancing her theory of Lend-Lease (while ignoring this Everest), West relies heavily on Richard Rhodes’ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sun-Making-Hydrogen-Bomb/dp/0684824140/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374523921&amp;sr=1-2&amp;keywords=richard+rhodes+the+making+of+the+atomic+bomb" target="_blank">Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb</a>. But revealingly she makes no reference to this passage from his text: “Until the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, the Soviet Union fought Germany essentially alone on the European continent … <i>Had the USSR lost that fight, hundreds of German divisions bulwarked with Soviet resources would have been freed to turn west and challenge Britain and the United States</i><b> </b>[emphasis added].&#8221;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;" align="center">Rhodes then goes on to quote Averill Harriman, a stalwart anti-Communist who negotiated the Lend-Lease deal with the Russians. It is a passage that West also ignores: “To put it bluntly,” Harriman said in a speech to the American people, “whatever it costs to keep this war away from our shores, that will be a small price to pay …. The United States agreed to furnish Lend-Lease and the Soviets did not doubt that they had earned it &#8212; at Leningrad, at Stalingrad, at the monstrous enclosures in the western USSR where the Germans…confined Soviet prisoners of war completely exposed without water or food. At least 4.5 million Soviet civilians and combatants had been killed by 1943; at least 25 million…died before the eventual Allied victory. From the Soviet point of view, Lend-Lease was the least America could do when the Russian people were dying; anything the Soviets could grab&#8230;must still have seemed less than a fair exchange.”</p>
<p align="center"><b>Did Truman Know About the Venona Decrypts?</b></p>
<p>This third West claim pertains to the opening years of the Cold War. But if Harry Truman, who became president in 1945, knew about the Venona decrypts (first de-classified in 1995), yet failed to pay attention to the evidence they provided of Soviet infiltration, it would bolster West’s claim that Truman was so anxious to avoid offending Stalin that even when confronted with hard evidence of Soviet treachery, he chose to do nothing about it.</p>
<p>To make her case, West relies on the book by Jerrold and Leona Schecter<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Secrets-Intelligence-Operations-American/dp/1574883275/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1374595597&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=Jerrold+and+Leona+Schechter" target="_blank"><i>, Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed America</i></a>. The Schecters first claim that on June 4, 1945, Truman had a fifteen-minute meeting with Gen. Carter W. Clarke and Col. Ernest Gibson of Army Intelligence, who informed the President that army code-breakers had been attempting to read Soviet cables from Moscow to Washington since 1943. Truman was worried, according to West, that making the decrypted cables public or dealing with what they revealed would “damage FDR’s place in history.” West further comments that Truman saw the revelations only as “a partisan political problem” that Republican hawks would use to bash Democrats, adding, “the sensational body of information <i>which belonged to a betrayed nation</i>, remained on political ice at all costs.”</p>
<p>The problem with this fanciful indictment is that in June 1945, the code-breakers had not fully decrypted <i>any</i> of the intercepted messages. Consequently, General Clarke and Colonel Gibson would not have had much to report about the <i>contents</i> of the cables the code-breakers were working on.  Truman could not have had such an alarmed reaction to information they were unable to give him at the time.</p>
<p>West then shifts the time frame five years forward, relying on an interview with Oliver Kirby, an American cryptanalyst who worked on the Venona project. Kirby gave the interview to the Schecters in the late 1990s. Kirby told them that both Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were “positively identified” in decrypts in 1950, and that he brought this information to General Omar Bradley. According to Kirby, Bradley reported that Truman “was most upset and agitated by this,” saying that if the operation became known “it could take us down.” West then writes: “In other words, President Truman took in and grasped revelations that according to Soviet secret cables, the most senior-level, trusted, and powerful government officials had been working on behalf of the Soviet Union, and then he, as president, <i>did nothing about it.</i>” He pretended the whole thing was a “fairy story.” No evidence, she writes, has “emerged to contradict Kirby” whose “assessment of Truman’s visceral aversion to Venona’s revelations comes from notes he made at the time…” She concludes that Truman made “consistent efforts to quash any and all information pertaining to the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government….”</p>
<p>Once again, West shows that she does not know how to evaluate the reliability of a source or assess the evidence produced. The Schecter interviews with Kirby occurred nearly a half century after the events alleged to have taken place. Even worse, Kirby’s account is third-hand. He claimed that General Clarke told him this at some unspecified time, and acknowledges that he himself was not present at any meeting between Truman and Bradley.  Nor is there any documentation to show that such a meeting ever took place.</p>
<p>Reading about this supposed meeting in the Schecter’s book, Harvey Klehr checked the White House logs. They showed that in June of 1945 Clarke did meet with Truman, but they say nothing at all about what was discussed. I also contacted Jerrold Schecter, the authority West depends on.  He emailed me:  “The Kirby notes you refer to were simply that Truman knew of the project to decode Venona but the details of the code breaking came much later. She has taken this out of context it appears to me.”</p>
<p>Most importantly, Kirby’s version contradicts the NSA’s own account of the Venona project chronology. The Schecters say, and West accepts their claim, that Truman was told in June 1945 that the U.S. was “reading secret Soviet messages.” The NSA official history says that at that time, they had made progress in decoding the cables, but did not have any significant readable text. Cryptanalysts had deciphered a few messages, but the underlying Soviet code had not yet been broken. Consequently, the cryptanalysts had at that time only a few cover names and isolated words, no clue as to what the subject of any of the cables were. That came only after 1946, when Meredith Gardner began his work on Venona, and made the necessary progress in breaking the codes. A year before this breakthrough Clarke had nothing of substance to tell Truman, which means that Kirby’s claim about Truman’s alleged reaction is without foundation. Indeed, the Schecters themselves write that “Clarke did not show any messages to the president; he could only report that the efforts were under way and initial results were promising after two years of work.” As in her use of source material elsewhere, West ignores these crucial facts.</p>
<p>There is, in addition, a 1949 FBI memo indicating that Omar Bradley had decided <i>not</i> to inform Truman about the Venona program, which was at the time top-secret. The FBI had by then told Truman about information contained in the messages, but not that it was information that came from decoded Soviet cables. Truman’s well known distrust of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, as Klehr and Haynes have written, “denied the president any assurance that the information was reliable and may have misled him about the seriousness of the problem [of Soviet espionage].”</p>
<p>Kirby told the Schecters that Clarke had long conversations with Bradley and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal about Venona. But contrary to West’s claim, Kirby acknowledged to the Schecters that<i> he had no notes of this meeting</i>. There is nothing in either Bradley’s or Forrestal’s own papers that would corroborate Kirby’s story.</p>
<p>In short, a third key element in West’s vast conspiracy theory is so much hot air.</p>
<p align="center"><b>Should the United States have joined Germany to Fight the Soviet Union?</b></p>
<p>Bizarre as it might sound, this is the fourth pillar of West’s argument. In her effort to paint the Roosevelt administration as a puppet of Soviet intelligence, she argues that towards the end of the war, the American government turned down the opportunity to arm German soldiers willing to form a new army to go to war against the USSR. American leaders were so pro-Soviet, in other words, that they missed one final opportunity to halt the Red Army’s advance into Eastern Europe, thereby delivering these countries to Stalin’s tender mercies and precipitating the Cold War. As she writes, “There existed many German anti-Nazis, even many high-ranking ones…who wanted to end World War II early; that’s the basic concept…we ignored them…Our best interests, once again, were subverted for Soviet ends.”</p>
<p>Her case rests on a story told by FDR’s old friend and former Governor of Pennsylvania, George H. Earle. She spends pages relating how Earle contacted German intelligence chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris in 1943, and tried to persuade him to accept U.S. “peace feelers.” Although this is another well-known episode, West organizes the material to make the reader believe that it was ignored when first made public years ago, and that her own book is finally revealing its momentous significance.</p>
<p>In presenting her case, she has facile answers to the obvious difficulties that confront her scenario. She writes, for example, that the US could have supported the opposition to Hitler and backed a coup against him, thus producing “the defection of the German army and negotiate its surrender to the Allies.” She suggests Canaris and others had the ability to overthrow Hitler, close the death camps, and thwart Soviet conquests in Europe and Asia.</p>
<p>It is apparent that West is unfamiliar with much of the research that has been done on World War II, or the fact that her counterfactual speculations are not regarded as realistic possibilities by any reputable historian of the era. She does not seem to know the context of the decisions that FDR, Churchill and the generals in the field made, or appreciate the factors they had to take into account. Or more likely she prefers to ignore them because her theories could not survive the encounter.</p>
<p>In one paragraph she writes that the “German underground movement was resolutely and operationally anti-Communist just as much as it was anti-Nazi. In Communist occupied Washington &#8212; and London, too &#8212; this particular wing of the Anti-Hitler resistance was viewed as the enemy just as much as Hitler was.” She adds: “common cause with the Communist regime superseded all, <i>even German surrender</i>.” In explaining Washington’s failure to take advantage of the conditions for anti-Soviet collaboration with Germany, she writes later in her book, “a point of secret penetration and subversion had been passed beyond which appeasement was a fundamental principle.”</p>
<p>West has read historian Laurence Rees’ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Behind-Closed-Doors/dp/B005M50F26/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1375137692&amp;sr=1-5&amp;keywords=Laurence+Rees" target="_blank"><i>World War II Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis, and the West</i></a>, British Book Award Book of the Year for History in 2009 and also the basis for a BBC <a href="http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=3574822" target="_blank">television documentary</a> which was aired on all American PBS stations. West cites Rees in her text, and clearly much of her account comes from his own findings and work. But she has ignored all the evidence Rees assembles in his book, and all the arguments he makes that refute her conclusions.</p>
<p>When I myself read about George H. Earle’s advice to FDR in West’s book, it sounded very familiar, until I realized I had read the same account, with the same quotes and detail in Rees’ book.  Rees gives a nuanced account of how Western leaders dealt with Stalin and the Nazis that shows that they went out of their way to placate the Soviet tyrant, if necessary by hiding the facts of the massacres conducted near Katyn Forest, a suppression that has been known for decades.  But Rees does not share West’s conspiratorial mindset, or her claim that the suppression, which Churchill demanded, was the result of machinations by Soviet agents. In fact Rees reaches conclusions quite the opposite of West’s, something readers of West’s book would be unaware of.</p>
<p>Rees asks an important question that West might have paid attention to: Could Western leaders have “prevented the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe by acting differently during their partnership with Stalin?” One possible way would have been the Earle-West proposal.  But this is Rees&#8217; judgment of such a course:</p>
<blockquote><p>It would have been a disastrous course of action. Perhaps the Red Army would have been forced back, but at a terrible cost in Allied lives. Even more importantly, the Europe that would have then existed after the war would have been a good deal less stable than the one we were actually left with. That is because, even after Stalingrad, the German army was still a fearsome fighting machine. If the Western allies had fought alongside the Germans and then reached some kind of uneasy peace with the Soviets &#8212; who would, of course, have felt betrayed by the West, probably fueling a future conflict &#8212; who would then have disarmed the German army? Germany would have been unoccupied by the Western Allies and still immensely powerful. So, thankfully, Roosevelt filed Earle’s plan in the bin.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is the consensus of every historian of the war. The decision not to consider an entente with Hitler’s army against Stalin was a clear-headed affirmation of U.S. interests, not a <i>betrayal</i>, as West virtually screams.</p>
<p>Consider the political difficulties of reversing the course of wartime history at this late juncture. For four years, the Soviet Union had been portrayed as an ally to western publics, praised for its sacrifices and efforts in behalf of “freedom,” while the Germans had secured a place in the public mind as evil incarnate. Could Western leaders turn this equation inside-out while the war was still hot? These are the kinds of questions that never occur to West because she is entirely focused on explaining the decisions of the Allies in terms of the Soviet “occupation” of Western governments: “World War II could have been ended years earlier had Communists working for Moscow not dominated Washington, quashing every anti-Nazi, anti-Communist attempt beginning in late 1942, throughout 1943 and 1944, to make common cause with Anglo-American representatives. Their main condition, Allied support on keeping Russian troops out of central and eastern Europe, was an instant deal breaker&#8212;the anti-Red line- neither the Communist-occupied British government nor the Communist-occupied American government would dare to cross.”</p>
<p>To West, Roosevelt and Churchill were seeking to liberate Europe <i>for the Soviets</i>, because of the Communist occupation of their governments. This construct is a conspiracy theory that has run off the rails and is utterly oblivious to the realities on the ground.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>The Issue of the Second Front</b></p>
<p>The final piece of West’s conspiracy puzzle is the decision to open a Second Front on the continent of Europe, which Stalin had been demanding from the moment Hitler broke his pact with the Kremlin and invaded the Soviet motherland. Let us assume for a moment that a cross-Channel invasion had been mounted in 1943 (before the Axis armies had been decimated in North Africa, Sicily and Italy) instead of at Normandy in 1944. In that case, as Rees argues, the Allies might indeed have reached Eastern Europe earlier in the fighting and Soviet influence would have been lessened. West, as we have seen, attributes the failure to Soviet agents who prevented Roosevelt and Churchill from following this course, allowing Stalin to take control. But Rees also writes (in a passage West also ignores) that “the cost in human terms for the Western Allies would have been enormous.”</p>
<p>The U.S. lost roughly 420,000 soldiers during the war and Britain lost 450,000, while the Soviet Union&#8217;s military death toll was an estimated 8 <i>million</i>. Forget the fact that the Allied armies, learning by doing, were not ready for an invasion of Europe a year before D Day. West doesn’t even consider the question of whether Churchill and Roosevelt would have been willing to sacrifice so much as one million more dead British and American soldiers to keep Eastern Europe out of Soviet hands at the war’s end, let alone whether the American and British publics would have stood for such a sacrifice and policy.</p>
<p>Another point that West fails to consider is the continuing fear shared by both FDR and Churchill that at any point in the fighting, the situation she envisions might be reversed and Stalin might seek a separate peace with Nazi Germany, and move towards a rapprochement as he did during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In March 1942, when the Allies were facing major military setbacks, Churchill wired FDR that the “gravity of the war” forced him to conclude that Britain and the U.S. could not deny Stalin the frontiers he wanted in Eastern Europe, even though it might contradict the goals of the Atlantic Charter. It was not Soviet agents who led Churchill to this judgment, but the military reality on the ground.</p>
<p>Instead of weighing these fears, West turns to another anecdote telling how George Elsey found confidential files in the Map Room that showed FDR naively thinking he could trust Stalin, and instructed Hopkins to tell Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov that FDR was in favor of a Second Front in 1942. She believes that this was a smoking gun proving that FDR was “making common cause with the NKVD.” But here’s what Hopkins actually told Molotov: “I can tell you that President Roosevelt is a very strong supporter of a Second Front in 1942, but the American generals don’t see the real necessity of the Second Front. Because of this I recommend you paint a harrowing picture of the situation in the Soviet Union so that American Generals realize the seriousness of the situation.”</p>
<p>An obvious explanation of this (one by the way that Rees provides) is that FDR wanted to give Molotov the impression that he supported the Soviet request for a Second Front, but was frustrated by his recalcitrant generals. Thus while giving the Soviets the impression that he was their friend, and cementing the alliance that saved so many American lives, he kept his options open. Molotov came out of the meeting expecting a Second Front that same year, which as FDR already knew he would not get. The reality, which West closes her eyes to, is that FDR denied Stalin’s wishes without giving him cause to seek another accommodation with Hitler.</p>
<p>Contrary to West’s shallow and erroneous interpretation of this event, when the Second Front did not materialize on Stalin’s timetable (as Laurence Rees notes), Stalin came “to believe that Roosevelt had added outright duplicity to the mix,” and that “he had been betrayed.”</p>
<p>In his book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Cold-War-New-History/dp/0143038273/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1375285975&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=John+L.+Gaddis" target="_blank"><i>The Cold War: A New History</i></a>, John Lewis Gaddis, the pre-eminent historian of this conflict, agrees that Stalin’s goal was to dominate the continent of Europe in the same way Hitler had before the war. But in 1947, Stalin said, “had Churchill delayed opening the second front in northern France by a year, the Red Army would have come to France…We toyed with the idea of reaching Paris.” If FDR and Churchill were really Stalin’s errand boys, as West suggests, why would they not have delayed the Normandy invasion and allowed the Soviets to reach Western Europe?</p>
<p>Gaddis also agrees with Rees and other major WW II scholars that “the greatest Anglo-American fear had been that the Soviet Union might again cut a deal with Nazi Germany…which would leave large portions of Europe” under totalitarian rule, “hence the importance Roosevelt and Churchill attached to keeping the Soviet Union in the war.”</p>
<blockquote><p>This meant providing all possible assistance in food, clothing, and armaments, even if flying them in by desperate means and at a great cost: running convoys to Murmansk and Archangel while avoiding German submarines was no easy thing to do. It also meant not contesting Stalin’s demands for the restoration of lost territories, despite the awkward fact that some of these…had fallen under Soviet control only as a result of his pact with Hitler.  Finally, forestalling a separate peace on the European continent as soon as was military feasible, although in London and Washington that was understood to require postponement until success seemed likely at an acceptable cost.</p></blockquote>
<p>I quote Gaddis at length to indicate that the decisions reached by FDR and Churchill were not the results of being run by NKVD conspirators who had infiltrated Western governments, but because they needed to win the war against Hitler, which they realized would be impossible to accomplish without Soviet military strength.</p>
<p>Even the most minimally informed reader will recognize the most obvious chink in West’s conspiracy theories: the failure to explain how the anti-Bolshevik Churchill, whose hatred for the Soviet regime went back to 1917 when he sought to crush it in its cradle, became a Soviet dupe.</p>
<p>At Yalta Churchill did agree to the division of Europe with a Soviet sphere of influence in the East in exchange for a promise by Stalin to accept British hegemony in Greece.</p>
<p>True, the way the agreement was sold to western publics was outrageous. Stalin was presented as a leader who wanted democratic regimes in his own sphere. But the Yalta agreements were concluded in order to win the war while minimizing casualties, and, in any case, merely registered what had already occurred on the ground. It was most certainly not the conspiracy that West conjures. Western leaders hoped, foolishly perhaps, that Stalin might keep his word to allow free elections in the Baltic States and Poland. But as Stalin told Molotov when signing the Yalta accords, “Do not worry. We can implement it in our own way later. The heart of the matter is the correlation of forces.” That correlation of forces is something West simply wishes away.</p>
<p>In agreeing to these arrangements Churchill was hardly a patsy let alone an unwitting tool of Kremlin agents. As the historian of Yalta, S. M. Plokhy, writes in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Yalta-Price-S-M-Plokhy/dp/B0040RMENK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1375294757&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=S.M.+Plokhy" target="_blank"><i>Yalta: The Price of Peace</i></a>, at the same time Churchill was defending the agreement to the British parliament, and facing his critics, “he was haunted by memories of Munich as he considered and reconsidered what had happened.” Churchill realized, however, that there were limits to what he could do to rein in the Soviet dictator. “Great Britain and the British Commonwealth,” Churchill said, &#8220;are very much weaker militarily than Soviet Russia, and have no means, short of another general war, of enforcing their point of view.” The reality, as Stalin said, was that “whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system.”</p>
<p>One of the first rude awakenings about Yalta was Stalin’s treatment of American POW’s in Soviet territory. West writes about “how they were being preyed upon by Russian thugs and prevented from coming home &#8212; but it wasn’t ‘appropriate’ for their commander-in-chief to send another crummy cable about this unconscionable outrage to the Soviet dictator, whose army…[was] still being fully fitted out by the magnanimous American taxpayer via Lend-Lease.”</p>
<p>Actually, as Plokhy shows, the Soviets treated American POW’s fairly well. Nevertheless, contrary to West, FDR “lost his temper with Stalin and sided completely with his representatives in Moscow, who by now were sick and tired of Soviet ways of doing things.” He sent stern messages to Stalin inspired by Averell Harriman, no pro-Soviet stooge, who was angered by the dictator’s behavior. FDR said to Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, his unofficial advisor on labor matters, “Averell is right: we can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of his promises he made at Yalta.”  He said this on March 24; a few weeks before his death.  I looked in vain for that statement in West’s book.  What <i>is</i> in West’s book is a condemnation of FDR for not doing more, for not scheduling retaliatory measures, and for not taking the advice of those who advocated turning against the Soviets although the war was not yet over. FDR was, to the very end, she writes, “America’s Dupe Number One.” No wonder the statement to Anna Hoffman does not appear in her book.</p>
<p>West also does not show any awareness that Harry Truman instituted a stern opposition to Stalin’s Eastern European policies culminating in the Truman Doctrine which drew a line in the sand opposing further Soviet expansion, and led to a Cold War that ended with the collapse of the Communist system. West doesn’t confront this little development because it would be inexplicable if America was a Soviet occupied state run by Stalin’s agents.</p>
<p>Conspiratorial theories of history are easy to create once you are prepared to ignore the realities on the ground, or regard those who do take them into account as part of the conspiracy too. This is the path that Diana West has taken in her misconceived and misleading book. Why did the U.S. and Britain not prevent the totalitarian USSR from taking over Eastern Europe after it had defeated the totalitarian Nazis?  It had nothing to do with the Rubik’s Cube of diplomatic and military considerations, a calculus that had to take into account the willingness of the American and British publics to continue to sacrifice and their soldiers to die.  No, it was a conspiracy so immense, as West’s hero Joe McCarthy might have said, that it allowed Western policy to be dictated by a shadow army of Soviet agents. It is unfortunate that a number of conservatives who should know better have fallen for West’s fictions.  It is even more depressing that her book perpetuates the dangerous one dimensional thinking of the Wisconsin Senator and his allies in the John Birch Society which have allowed anti anti-communism to have a field day in our intellectual culture.</p>
<p><b>Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Fellow at The Hudson Institute and a columnist for PJ Media. He is author or co-author of over 15 books, and writes frequently for <i>The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary.</i></b></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>In Defense of Marty Peretz</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/ronald-radosh/in-defense-of-marty-peretz-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=in-defense-of-marty-peretz-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:45:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronald Radosh]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[What the Left's witch-hunt of TNR's Godfather says about the integrity of contemporary liberalism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/marty-peretz1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-81284" title="marty-peretz" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/marty-peretz1.jpg" alt="" width="400" height="267" /></a></p>
<p>Martin Peretz has been a pillar of responsible liberalism since buying <em>The New Republic</em> magazine in 1974.  While establishing himself as a respected teacher at Harvard, he also made TNR into one of the most exciting publications of the post Vietnam era.  Peretz gave graduate students like Michael Kinsley, Leon Wieseltier and Andrew Sullivan the opportunity to establish themselves as important public intellectuals and in return they helped him give a second life to <em>The New Republic</em>, a magazine of politics founded by Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914. Peretz defined its unique blend of muscular political journalism and literary and cultural criticism.  By the 1980s, TNR was the most influential small circulation magazine in the country, and unique among liberal publications in its defense of America in a time of Soviet advances and leftish infatuation with the Sandinistas and other totalitarian adventures, and also in its steadfast defense of Israel when the “progressive” attack on the only democracy in the Middle East, which Peretz saw would become a roar on the left, was still just a murmur.</p>
<p>In 2007, Peretz sold TNR to the Canadian media conglomerate Canwest, but retained his position as editor in chief.  Two years later, as the magazine’s circulation continued to fall, he formed a group of investors to buy it back.  Throughout all the changes, Peretz established himself as the liberal the left loved to hate, primarily because of his resolute  defense of Israel in an era when progressives, acting in concert with Islamic extremists, insisted that it was a reincarnation of Hilter’s Germany.  Peretz’s enemies bided their time, waiting for an excuse to isolate and stigmatize him. Their moment came a few weeks ago when he wrote in his <em>New Republic</em> blog, “The Spine,” about how the primary target of Islamist violence is other Muslims.  “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims,” Peretz wrote.  “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense they will abuse.”</p>
<p>The reaction was immediate.  Leftist commentators from the elite media like <em>The New York Times</em>’ Nicholas Kristof denounced Peretz’s Islamophobia.  Students at Harvard picketed him with signs calling him a “racist rat.”  Intellectuals such as Kinsley, Peter Beinart, <em>The New Yorker’s </em>Hendrik Hertzberg, and others whose careers Peretz made, left him twisting slowly in the wind. It was a full fledged public burning that culminated in a recent <em>New York \Magazine</em> article titled “Peretz in Exile.” The piece by Benjamin Wallace-Well portrayed Peretz as an intellectual pariah who was unbalanced and ultimately undone by his betrayal of the left, and most of all by his rear guard commitment to Zionism.</p>
<p>Wells broke the story that as of the first of this New Year, Peretz would be stepping down and given the new largely honorary position of Editor in Chief Emeritus. Moreover, it was reported that his popular <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blogs/the-spine" target="_blank">blog</a> on TNR’s website, “The Spine,” would be dropped from the magazine’s site. This turned out not be true. I spoke to Peretz, who is teaching in Israel, by phone. He pointed out to me that he is actively writing new blog entries- as he has the past few days. Moreover, rumors that he was forced out of the editorship are not true. He was contemplating leaving that post the last few years, he said, and only pleas by Frank Foer and Leon Wieseltier kept him from doing so. Involved in other projects, Peretz feels he had no time for the responsibility and day to day work of an editor in chief, and felt that now was the right time to relieve himself of the job. Moreover, the implication that the Board of TNR wanted him out are also not true; nor were the rumors that they had a controlling share in the magazine and that he had to bend to its desires.</p>
<p>Readers who may not have as yet seen the Wallace-Wells article were not informed on the magazine’s website of this major change. The magazine had previously <a href="http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/TNR%20appoints%20new%20editor.pdf" target="_blank">announced</a> that its actual editor, Franklin Foer, was leaving, and that Richard Just was to replace him. But the magazine did not announce any changes in Peretz’s status, and the last actual issue still listed him as Editor-in-Chief.</p>
<p>The truth about TNR, as I wrote <a href="http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/2010/12/09/tnr-and-the-crisis-of-the-american-intellectual/" target="_blank">elsewhere</a>, is that the heyday of the magazine’s large influence lies far in the past, particularly in the decade of the 1980’s and the Reagan years. Most <em>TNR</em> readers I have spoken with regularly comment to me about the journal’s decline in importance over the years. Their decision to go bi-weekly, while possibly necessary for financial reasons, made it less effective as an influence in the nation’s political debate. Sites like “Real Clear Politics” sometimes put up pieces from <em>TNR</em>, but more than often, one finds more entries from conservative journals like <em>National Review</em> and the <em>Weekly Standard</em>. Checking the magazine’s print circulation figures that by law are publicly printed once a year, we see a steep drop in subscriptions, compared to a huge rise in left-wing magazines like <em>The Nation</em>, and a constant high circulation in <em>National Review</em>, still since Buckley’s days the standard-bearer for the conservative movement.</p>
<p>In 2000, TNR’s paid circulation was 101,651. In 2009, it had dropped to 53,485—the lowest in many, many years. A previous sale to CanWest did not work out, and in 2009, a group of investors in which Peretz had a major share bought the magazine from the Canadian firm that pledged to make it a major force in publishing once again. In 2010, in comparison, the left-wing <em>Nation</em> had a circulation of 145,000, and the conservative <em>National Review </em>in 2008 had a high circulation of 178,780. These figures tend to change and fluctuate with the fortunes of both the Left and the Right; conservative influence produces an influx of subs to left-wing organs of opinion, and a seemingly resurgent liberalism leads to growth of conservative ones. But despite these changes, the one constant has been a regular drop in the fortunes of TNR.</p>
<p>Peretz disputes the above assessment. First, he argues that on domestic policy, TNR has had a great influence in gathering support for Obama Care, which he backs. Right before Obama’s inauguration, TNR ran an event at which Rahm Emanuel and Barney Frank both spoke, and they would not have done so had they not understood TNR’s importance to the new administration, he argues. Moreover, he notes that TNR’s website has a huge readership, far more than The Nation. One cannot evaluate the magazine’s readership, says Peretz, by just going to the print edition.</p>
<p>For many years, especially in the 80’s, the magazine functioned as the more realistic and hard-edged liberal alternative to the stale liberalism of the wartime Popular Front, and later, the new anti-anti-Communism of the bulk of the liberal movement during the Vietnam War and after.  In the conflict at home over Reagan policy in Central America, Peretz editorially supported the Nicaraguan <em>contras</em>, a group for whom most liberals had nothing but hate and disdain. He did this against the wishes of his own chosen editors, who openly published a letter opposed to the magazine’s editorial policy. And Peretz continued to run articles fiercely critical of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas, from writers like Robert Leiken and myself. Indeed, Peretz and TNR sent me twice to Nicaragua to report on events during the Sandinistas&#8217; years of power. From today’s perspective, Peretz says in retrospect, the fight of those years was more about a conflict between Nicaraguan elites for power, rather than one of the forces of freedom fighting against those of tyranny.</p>
<p>But on domestic issues, the magazine continued to hold firm to the old paradigm of Progressivism, in which it got started when Herbert Croly founded the journal in the days of TR and Woodrow Wilson. Its writers and editors followed the usual Progressive era views, whose adherents thought that the “administrative, bureaucratic state,” as writer Walter Russell Mead <a href="http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/08/the-crisis-of-the-american-intellectual/" target="_blank">defines</a> it, can still be handled via regulatory measures. Hence their defense of and support of Obama Care, which outgoing editor Franklin Foer mentioned as one of the magazine’s most important efforts. As Mead writes so powerfully, “if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and institutions of twentieth century progressivism.” Its promises have dissolved, and its “premises no longer hold.” This goes against the grains of many of our best intellectuals, Mead claims, an observation justified by reading many of <em>TNR</em>’s own writers and editors when they write about domestic issues.</p>
<p>Despite this major problem that has always plagued TNR, for years it was a hard edged critic of the official American liberalism, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.  It stood not only for anti-Communism, but for a strong national defense, against appeasement of tyrannies at a time when many of our Presidents sought to placate or appease them in the hopes that it would lead to peace. Most important of all, TNR was the strongest media voice in the nation that stood foursquare in defense of Israel.  And all of this was due to the influence and guidance of Marty Peretz, who always understood &#8211; and does so especially at present &#8211; that the strength of Israel was paramount to the ability of the West to defeat our latest enemy, the forces of radical Islam. Peretz realizes that Israel’s fight is not that nation’s alone; rather, it is the fight of the Western powers as a whole.</p>
<p>And it is this stance, we must understand, that has led to Peretz having so many enemies. His willingness to stand up and buck official liberalism in its hostility to Israel and the view of most realists and liberals that peace does not exist in the Middle East because of Israel’s so-called self-defeating policies, has meant that those who believe in this fairy tale have total hatred for Peretz, and instead of wishing him well in his endeavors, are out to destroy him.</p>
<p>The <em>New York Magazine</em> article was part of this hit-job, in which the author allowed Peretz’s ex-wife Anne, from whom Peretz obtained a bitter divorce a few years ago, to largely frame the personal narrative of the article, in which readers learn of Peretz’s “anger” that supposedly was “only partly diminished by years of therapy.” His defense of Israel is questioned by having Wallce-Wells treat the Palestinians as making “halting steps to modernization,” while Israel he claims has “pivoted to the right.” Clearly, Wallace-Wells is a sympathizer with Peter Beinart’s school of realism in which Beinart and others argue that Israel has betrayed them and liberalism, and might no longer be worthy of the support they once gave the Jewish State unless it allows them to force concessions upon Israel that a majority of its citizens oppose.</p>
<p>I happened to be leaving a forum with Peretz at which he spoke and as we exited the building, Peter Beinart was coming in. The two passed each other by with hardly a word of response from Beinart, although Peretz said hello. It was pretty clear that Beinart now felt personally hostile to Peretz.  And this is from a man whom Peretz made editor of the magazine and who stood at its helm for many years. Yet Wallace-Wells only lets his readers know that if people dislike Peretz and his politics, it is all Peretz’s fault&#8212;just like the absence of real peace in the Middle East is all Israel’s fault.</p>
<p>We learn that Peretz “is grumpy about modernity,” that James Fallows &#8211; “the most reasonable man in American letters,” Wallace-Wells writes &#8211; concludes that “Peretz is a bigot.” How could he not be, since Fallows said it, and he is, of course, reasonable. Wallace-Wells does not tell his readers that Fallows is well known for long holding an anti-Israel position.  This <a href="http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/schoenfeld/1132">was made clear</a> a few years ago by Gabriel Schoenfeld.</p>
<p>“Taking up the ideas of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt about the inordinate influence of the ‘Israel Lobby’ on American foreign policy,”  writes Schoenfeld, “James Fallows of the <em>Atlantic</em> <a href="http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/armenians_cubans_and_aipac.php" target="_blank">writes</a> that ‘[t]o the (ongoing) extent that AIPAC–the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’–is trying to legitimize a military showdown between the United States and Iran, it is advancing its own causes at the expense of larger American interests.” The people behind this cause, he continue ‘are not from one ethnic group in the conventional sense but are mainly of one religion (Jewish).’ “To observe this, writes Fallows, and to warn against it, ‘including the disastrous consequences of attacking Iran’ that it is seeking to bring about, is not to be anti-Semitic. And noting the ‘power and potential’ of groups like AIPAC ‘to distort policy’ simply means ‘recognizing that James Madison’s warnings about the invidious effects of ‘faction’ apply beyond the 18th century.’”</p>
<p>As Schoenfeld argues, Fallows himself is part of the faction “of liberals who in almost all instances oppose the use of American power abroad. This faction, too, might be thought of as invidiously ‘advancing its own causes at the expense of larger American interests.’”</p>
<p>Take Wells’ second paragraph, in which he blames Israel for refusing “to stop construction of new settlements; its growing hostility toward the international community and the Obama administration; its storming of an aid flotilla off the Gaza Strip in May- these postures and incidents have led some of the liberal intellectuals who have historically defended Israel to begin to edge away.”  He writes as if it was not Obama who reversed a fifty year policy of support for Israel, bowed and scraped before Israel&#8217;s enemies, snubbed Netanyahu and reneged on Bush&#8217;s pledge about allowing settlements. Obama, as most observers have noted, made it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to do any less than Obama had, and hence they demanded Israel make concessions before any negotiations. And then he describes the terrorist attempt to break a legal  blockade of Gaza as an &#8220;aid Flotilla,” rather than a blatant attempt of Hamas supporters to push Israel to the wall. Wallace-Wells, clearly, is in the Beinart-Walt-Mearsheimer camp- and is in no position to criticize Peretz for standing firm against them.</p>
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		<title>A Fresh View of Cold-War America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/ronald-radosh/a-fresh-view-of-cold-war-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-fresh-view-of-cold-war-america</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:05:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronald Radosh]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[alger hiss]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[american communism]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A young historian dares to challenge the accepted left-wing interpretation of our battle with the Evil Empire.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DeltonJennifer.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58696" title="DeltonJennifer" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/DeltonJennifer.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="462" /></a></p>
<p><strong>This article is reprinted from <a href="http://www.mindingthecampus.com/">MindingtheCampus.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Teaching in the universities about the so-called McCarthy era has become an area most susceptible to politically correct and one-sided views of what the period was all about. One historian who strenuously objects to the accepted left-wing interpretation that prevails in the academy is Jennifer Delton, Chairman of the Department of History at Skidmore College.</p>
<p>In the March issue of <em>The Journal of the Historical Society</em> Delton writes:</p>
<blockquote><p>However fiercely historians disagree about the merits of American Communism, they almost universally agree that the post-World War II Red scare signified a rightward turn in American politics. The consensus is that an exaggerated, irrational fear of communism, bolstered by a few spectacular spy cases, created an atmosphere of persecution and hysteria that was exploited and fanned by conservative opportunists such as Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy. This hysteria suppressed rival ideologies and curtailed the New Deal, leading to a resurgence of conservative ideas and corporate influence in government. We may add detail and nuance to this story, but this, basically, is what we tell our students and ourselves about post-World War II anti-Communism, also known as McCarthyism. It is fundamentally the same story that liberals have told since Whittaker Chambers accused Alger Hiss of being a Communist spy in 1948.</p></blockquote>
<p>This conventional narrative of the left has been told over and over for so many years that it has all but become the established truth to most Americans. It was exemplified in a best-selling book of the late 1970&#8242;s, David Caute&#8217;s <em>The Great Fear</em>, and from the most quoted one from the recent past, Ellen Schrecker&#8217;s <em>Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America</em>. My favorite title is one written by the late Cedric Belfrage, <em>The American Inquisition 1945-1960: A Profile of the &#8220;McCarthy Era.&#8221;</em> In his book, Belfrage told the story of how he, an independent journalist who founded the fellow-traveling weekly <em>The National Guardian</em>, was hounded by the authorities and finally deported home to Britain. American concerns about Soviet espionage, he argued, were simply paranoia.</p>
<div id="more">
<p>The problem with Belfrage&#8217;s account was that once the Venona files began to be released in 1995&#8211;the once top secret Soviet decrypts of communications between Moscow Center and its US agents&#8212;they revealed that Belfrage was a paid KGB operative, just as the anti-Communist liberal Sidney Hook had openly charged decades ago, and as turned KGB spy Elizabeth Bentley had privately informed the FBI in 1945. The Venona cables revealed that Belfrage had given the KGB an OSS report received by British intelligence concerning the anti-Communist Yugoslav resistance in the 1940&#8242;s as well as documents about the British government&#8217;s position during the war on opening a second front in Europe. It showed that Belfrage had offered the Soviets to establish secret contact with them if he was stationed in London.</p>
<p>Facts like these did not bother or budge the academic establishment. Most famously, Ellen Schrecker wrote in her book that although it is now clear many Communists in America had spied for the Soviets, they did not do any real harm to the country, and also most importantly, their motives were decent. She wrote, &#8220;As Communists, these people did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism; they were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national boundaries. They thought they were &#8216;building&#8230;a better world for the masses,&#8217; not betraying their country.&#8221;</p>
<p>Schrecker&#8217;s views were endorsed by former <em>Nation </em>publisher and editor Victor Navasky, who regularly in different articles argues that the Venona decrypts are either gossip or forgeries, irrelevant, or do not change his favored narrative that in the United States&#8211; only McCarthyism was a threat. As Navasky wrote, Venona was simply an attempt &#8220;to enlarge post-cold war intelligence gathering capability at the expense of civil liberty.&#8221; If spying indeed took place, it was &#8220;a lot of exchanges of information among people of good will, many of whom were Marxists, some of whom were Communists&#8230; and most of whom were patriots.&#8221; As for those who argue against his view, they were trying to &#8220;argue that, in effect, McCarthy and Co. were right all along.&#8221;</p>
<p>The lens through which McCarthyism has been seen, therefore, is one seen exclusively through the left-wing prism, which regards defense of one&#8217;s own democratic nation against a foreign foe as evil, and sees only testimony against America&#8217;s enemies as McCarthyite. What is therefore necessary is to look anew at the McCarthy era, not in the terms set by its Communist opponents, but from the perspective of examining dispassionately the nature of the entire epoch. Those who have chosen to do this, however, have been met with great opposition. A few years ago, the editors of <em>The New York Times</em> claimed that a new group of scholars &#8220;would like to rewrite the historical verdict on Senator McCarthy and McCarthyism.&#8221; Fearing such a development, the newspaper warned that it had to be acknowledged that it was McCarthyism more than Soviet espionage or Communist infiltration that was &#8220;a lethal threat to American democracy.&#8221;</p>
<p>If one disagreed with that assessment, the <em>Times</em>&#8216; editors implied that such scholars were themselves closet McCarthyites. This became a common tactic. Most recently, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev published their definitive volume on the <em>KGB in America, Spies:The Rise and Fall of the KGB In America</em>. They made it quite clear in their book that McCarthy&#8217;s &#8220;charges were&#8230; wildly off the mark. Very few of the people he accused appeared in KGB documents (or the Venona decryptions), and by the time he made his charges, almost all Soviet agents had been forced out of the government and Soviet intelligence networks were largely defunct.&#8221; That disavowal did not help them. In the major review of their book that appeared in <em>TLS</em>, Amy Knight refers in passing to &#8220;the McCarthyite style of Haynes and Klehr.&#8221; Evidently, any argument that American Communists who spied for the Soviets did some real damage and were not victims of repression, is enough to brand the authors as &#8220;McCarthyite.&#8221;</p>
<p>If they accepted the failure of their old narrative that Delton summarizes so well, it would interfere with their cherished and still held view that all anti-Communism, as Schrecker wrote, &#8220;was misguided or worse,&#8221; that the anti-Communist or Cold War liberals were just as bad as the McCarthyites of the Right, and in fact served them intelligence agents who identified Reds, and who &#8220;tapped into something dark and nasty in the human soul.&#8221; If any harm took place &#8220;from Soviet-sponsored spies,&#8221; she wrote, it was &#8220;dwarfed by McCarthy&#8217;s wave of terror.&#8221;</p>
<p>That is precisely why the new article by Jennifer Delton is of such importance. For the first time, a young historian at a major liberal arts institution has dared to challenge the consensus view, and to declare that it is time for mainstream historians to acknowledge that their old framework of studying the &#8220;McCarthy era&#8221; was both misleading and incorrect. As she says near the beginning of her article, &#8220;New evidence confirming the widespread existence of Soviet agents in the U.S. government makes the Truman administration&#8217;s attempts to purge Communists from government agencies seem <em>rational and appropriate&#8212;even too modest, given what we now know</em>.&#8221;   (my emphasis)</p>
<p>That remark alone is quite different from the conventional analysis offered by historians of the period: that it should not be called the McCarthy Era, but the Truman era of repression, since it was Truman who paved the way for McCarthy&#8217;s rise to power, by acting as if there was an actual Communist threat. Moreover, Delton continues to argue that even if the Communists were not among those who became actual KGB agents, whether in unions or political groups or in Hollywood, &#8220;there were still good reasons for liberals to expel Communists.&#8221; Rather than accept the framework of the Popular Front so beloved by the Left and by left-wing historians, who continue to think workers and Americans could not make real progress unless liberals and Communists cooperated in the post-war era, Delton notes that the Communists &#8220;were divisive and disruptive,&#8221; could cripple the groups they entered, and harm their very ability to attain their desired ends.</p>
<p>What Delton argues is that expulsion of the Communists actually enabled liberals to prosper politically and to have a political effect. She does not endorse all that went on, particularly the much documented violations of basic civil liberties. Rather, she writes &#8220;to challenge the entrenched and misleading characterization of post-World War II anti-Communism as hysterical and conservative.&#8221; To do so, she writes, is to &#8220;ignore the real threat Communism representedâ€¦to the ascendant liberal political agenda.&#8221;</p>
<p>Second, Delton takes on another mainstream argument of the left, displayed in a quote from historian Robert Griffith, who wrote &#8220;the left was in virtual eclipse and the distinction between liberals and conservatives became one of method and technique, not fundamental principle.&#8221; To the contrary, Delton argues that the Left historians have distorted the period, by confusing their own failure to chart a radical path with one that actually triumphed, that of postwar liberalism. Liberal anti-Communism was not, she argues, a &#8220;self-protective, even cowardly response to the conservative version&#8221; of anti-Communism, but a necessary position for attaining liberal goals- that were quite different from the pro-Soviet agenda favored by the radicals.</p>
<p>Delton writes: &#8220;Liberals could only benefit from the disappearance of Communists, who disrupted their organizations, challenged their ideas, alienated potential allies, and invited conservative repression.&#8221; This, precisely, is what a liberal leader of the Hollywood trade unions, Ronald Reagan, understood so well. Reagan came out of his stint in the armed services joining a fellow-travelers group, and quickly saw what the secret Communists had in mind for the union movement. Breaking ranks with them, he was among the first to challenge their hold in the actors and writers colony in Hollywood, which then had a strong activist Communist base. When he later testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the Hollywood investigation by the committee, Reagan stressed that he did not believe the Communists should be politically suppressed, because he understood the need for free speech. What he did oppose was their machinations that led to control of the various Hollywood guilds, and the tactics they used to keep control and to push out anti-Communists.</p>
<p>What Delton knew is what Reagan claimed at the time; that the Communists alienated those with whom they worked, made enemies easily, a development that &#8220;was due in large part to their participation in an international movement that was directed from Moscow.&#8221; Just because Reagan said it then, or J. Edgar Hoover argued it too, does not mean that it was not in fact the absolute truth. The Communists worked, as Delton puts it, &#8220;to infiltrate and take over [liberal] organizations,&#8221; so that they could then pass &#8220;resolutions upholding the party line positions.&#8221; To put it more bluntly, in a phrase I&#8217;m certain Delton might shy away from, &#8220;The Red-baiters were right!&#8221;</p>
<p>Delton has written a lengthy and essential article that is a breakthrough in academia, especially in the history profession. She goes on to discuss the impact of the 1948 campaign of Henry Wallace for President, reveals the self-defeating tactics of the Communists that would have hurt their supposed union allies had they been adopted; the necessary fight of the liberals against &#8220;Soviet totalitarianism&#8221; which she correctly notes &#8220;subverted liberal ideals and aims;&#8221; and concludes that while the Communists were once only bothersome, by the dawn of Cold War they had become &#8220;poisonous.&#8221;</p>
<p>Delton also praises the institution by the Truman administration in 1947 of the Loyalty-Security Program, which has become the number one example offered by leftist academics of Truman&#8217;s supposed &#8220;McCarthyism.&#8221; The Boards that were established kept from employment in the federal government any person who was a member of the Communist Party or its various front groups. When most academics teach about this, they damn them as a purge of citizens for their constitutionally protected civil liberties, &#8220;on the injustices that occurred&#8221; to people who lost their jobs or who were forced to resign, and as a major example of &#8220;unwarranted repression.&#8221; Delton, to the contrary, says that one has to evaluate the program in light of what we now know to be true&#8212;&#8221;the existence of an underground arm of the CPUSA that had cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies.&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, the Boards and the program Truman instituted were vital and necessary, even though in some cases- as with any program- abuses took place and some may have lost their jobs for scant reason. Her point that recent evidence- especially that established by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, has proved that &#8220;the Communist Party USA was involved in recruiting spies.&#8221; This means that the conclusion reached by David Caute in his best-seller, that &#8220;there is no documentation of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period&#8221; has to be thoroughly discarded. It should come as no surprise, however, that to many students being taught the era in their classes, the old discredited view is still being taught.</p>
<p>There are of course, problems that arise from Delton&#8217;s analysis. What, for example, was the real contribution of conservative anti-Communists in the period? Did they all follow the foolish path of Joe McCarthy? We know that this is not true, and that Whitaker Chambers, for one, warned William F. Buckley Jr. in a well known letter that the conservative movement would be ill-advised to support and welcome the antics of the junior Senator from Wisconsin. Moreover, if liberalism gained in America as a result of the liberal success in purging the Communists from unions and the civil rights movement, does that mean that conservative programs might have stemmed the tide of liberalism in the post-war era had the Communists maintained the policy of a Popular Front?</p>
<p>Delton also raises the question of whether or not government programs against the Communists went far enough? After all, as she writes, the Communist Party may have been politically weak, but it still managed to infiltrate the highest ranks of government without being detected, and many who were actually spies, like the major atomic spy Ted Hall, were not arrested and indicted, and were able to remain free, even though the FBI knew of his and others&#8217; probable guilt from the secret Venona decrypts. Delton stresses that most historians &#8220;overemphasize the betrayal of democratic principles [in fighting the Communists] rather than helping students understand the need for and rationality of the government&#8217;s repression of the Communist Party.&#8221; This means, in effect, that left-wing historians in the academy teach in essence what the Communist position was in America of the 1950&#8242;s&#8212;which is that they were no threat, and that those who claimed they had to be suppressed were &#8220;fascist&#8221; Red-baiters who sought to make America a proto-fascist state.</p>
<p>Thus in her revised introduction to the paperback edition of her book, Ellen Schrecker actually writes that even if Hiss was guilty&#8211;a judgment she now accepts -the really bad thing was that his guilt &#8220;gave credibility to the issue of Communists-in-government,&#8221; as if there was no reason for that having credibility. As Delton firmly acknowledges, &#8220;the Republicans were right.&#8221; Hiss was guilty; the blame for the fiasco lies with those who defended him, and if the Republicans exploited the foibles of liberals, she points out that &#8220;any party would have done the same.&#8221; To attack Hiss&#8217; apologists, in other words, was hardly something that should have shocked anyone.</p>
<p>After a lengthy discussion of the union movement and Communism in Hollywood, Delton ends with these words: It is required &#8220;that we reevaluate our understanding of Cold War-era anti-Communism.&#8221; As for the attitude of conservatives, she argues that it should be acknowledged that their anti-Communism was not born &#8220;out of fear or anxiety, but rather conviction about the wrongness of Communism based on principle and experience.&#8221; Even conservative anti-Communists, then, were not all demagogues like Joe McCarthy. As she puts it. The achievements of liberal anticommunism need to &#8220;be recognized and perhaps even celebrated, not hidden, regretted, or equated with McCarthyism.&#8221;</p>
<p>Her important article, then, is hopefully a bellwether for what hopefully may be a strong new wave of young scholars- -honest liberal historians as well as conservative historians- -who will begin to teach the truth about the anti-Communist period that took place in the early Cold War era. One must note, however, that her article appears in the journal of <em>The Historical Society</em>, a relatively young group created a decade or so back by Eugene D. Genovese, its founder, as an antidote to the staid and left-wing major historical societies.</p>
<p>I wonder what would have happened if Delton had submitted this paper to <em>The Journal of American History</em>, the publication of the Organization of American Historians, the main professional group that represents historians of the United States. That organization, and its journal, leans heavily towards what is politically correct&#8212;manuscripts loyal to the race, class and gender paradigm&#8211;and toward accepted leftist positions on issues like American anti-Communism. It would have been a major shift for them to have published anything comparable to Delton&#8217;s manuscript. After all, this is the organization that ran uncritical and laudatory accolades to the late Communist Party historian Herbert Aptheker after his death, without publishing serious criticisms of his very biased and obsolete Stalinist methodology and assumptions.</p>
<p>At any rate, Delton deserves a major award for daring to break through the academic wall of blue that exists when the issue of postwar communism comes up in the classroom. I hope she is ready for the many nasty e-mails I suspect she will shortly receive.</p>
<p><em>Ronald Radosh, Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, has written widely on Communism and anti-Communism. He is co-author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Hollywood-Colonys/dp/1893554961">Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony&#8217;s Long Romance with the Left and The Rosenberg File</a>.</em></p>
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