The Secret World of American Comniunism
Klehr, Harvey & Haynes, John Earl & Firsov, Fridrikh Igorevich
F or those who were startled to learn that Joseph Alsop was homosexual, or that Oprah Winfrey once used cocaine, the contents of this book will come as something of a shock. For while the authors'...
...Characters are fictionalized...
...The other, from ambassador William Dodd in Berlin to President Roosevelt, reports on a number of sensitive discussions with high-ranking Germans, and expresses Dodd's grim assessment of the future...
...American Communists did not just agitate for union organization, or to end segregation, or against military preparedness on the eve of World War II...
...This is not to minimize their misdeeds, but to put them in perspective...
...But William Blake was wiser: "A truth that's told with bad intent/Beats all the lies you can invent...
...Hiss's name is not to be found in this particular set of documents, but it would make little sense for his partisans to rejoice...
...He was in truth a paid saboteur who, at a time when Russia was afflicted by the first of its several post-Bolshevik famines, was granted the sum of $1 million—a colossal figure for the times, largely in confiscated gold, silver, and jewels—to export the revolution...
...Only a relatively small number actually engaged in espionage, or otherwise devoted their lives to the Soviet Union...
...But in Secret World, the first volume of a projected series based on the declassified archives of the Communist International (Comintern), we have firsthand, primary, irrefutable evidence of treachery—evidence which sweeps away all previous polemics and accounts, and bathes a lurid story in unremitting light . Philip Terzian writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...McCarthy was right that there were Communists in government...
...Amen...
...She recants her trial testimony...
...The network described by Chambers, which included Alger Hiss, is revealed here in detail...
...nobody comes to rescue her from a foster care group home...
...In a career that spanned the years from manufacturing pencils under Lenin's friendly gaze to trading funny stories with a reverent Johnny Carson, Dr...
...The ironies of history: As despicable as Hammer was, it is useful to note that a man whose business empire was sustained by slave labor, and dependent on the patronage of Soviet tyranny, ultimately ran afoul of American law by illegally contributing to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign, and ended his career presiding over a payroll that featured Al Gore's father...
...It is true that many party members (and assorted radicals) found employment in federal agencies, and of these, some stole documents, engaged in subversion, and reported to the Comintern...
...Hope this doesn't happen to you...
...In Dodd's case a simpler explanation may be likely: his daughter Martha was a Communist who fled to Czechoslovakia with her husband in the 1950s...
...They infiltrated the agencies of government, stole atomic secrets, corrupted the republican cause in the Spanish civil war, kept the Kremlin informed about what Washington might be thinking, and spread disinformation...
...True Story...
...For the right, this begs the question of Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...Send only $17.95 to: Rivercross Publishing Inc., 127 East 59th St., New York, NY 10022...
...How did these letters fall into such hands...
...Between the 1920s and the 1960s, thousands of peoplejoined the Communist Party for one reason or another, and many seem to have left within a few years of joining...
...The Secret World of American Communism confirms what was long suspected: that, beginning as early as 1919, American party members organized and nurtured an underground spy network, financed and directed by a Soviet controller...
...moreover, he was married to John Reed's widow, Louise Bryant, and was notably indiscreet...
...Seven year old Ann Winner, Daddy's girl, is coached and coerced by social workers during therapy into making perjured statements to a jury that convicts Mom and Dad...
...Hoover's imperial habits may have sullied his last years, but his instincts about the CPUSA were shrewd and remarkably prescient...
...It is also possible that a White House source copied Dodd's letter...
...The mythology of the Cold War, of patient Mother Russia and belligerent Uncle Sam, of gallant radicals and feverish ex-Communists, is too deeply embedded to be easily extracted...
...Hammer built a fortune promoting U.S.-Soviet trade by laundering Soviet money, disbursing stolen cash, and cutting deals with Stalin, all the while lying about his fealty to the party...
...The notion that the American Communist Party was a homegrown assemblage of impractical eccentrics, friendly but by no means connected to the Kremlin, may no longer be presented as a charming romance...
...n a series of annotated documents, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes neatly demonstrate a number of remarkable facts...
...One, from ambassador William Bullitt in Paris to assistant secretary of state R. Walton Moore in Washington, cheerfully discusses the European news, and contains Moore's deeply pessimistic marginal notes...
...Flannigan O'Rorke presents: "MASSACRE IN COURTROOM 425" An outrageously truthful, shocking eye-opening dramatic chronicle of a literate man's entrapment and conviction on charges of child molestation and sexual abuse...
...Bullitt was a stalwart opponent of the Soviets, but had been Roosevelt's first ambassador in Moscow...
...It is easy enough now to dismiss the work of revisionist historian/journalists—David Caute, Maurice Isserman, Ellen Schrecker, Victor Navasky, Richard M. Fried, Vivian Gornick, Robert Rosenstone, etc.—but expecting that the press, or the academy, or Hollywood, or the publishing industry, will come to understand their fundamental error about the nature of American Communism is probably expecting too much...
...By failing to comprehend differences of opinion in policy matters, and criminalizing dissent with demagogic skill, all for partisan purposes, McCarthy gave the Communists and their friends a certain moral standing that they never deserved, and drove the anti-Communist left very nearly out of business...
...A handful of historic reputations must now be pondered...
...There are a number of plausible explanations...
...Incapable of inflicting much harm on Franco's legions, the combatants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade seem to have settled on shooting one another for political incorrectness, deviationist tendencies, or insufficient rapture at the sight of Marshal Stalin...
...For example, it is now certain that John Reed was not just THE SECRET WORLD OF AMERICAN COMMUNISM Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov Yale University Press / 348 pages / $25 reviewed by PHILIP TERZIAN 68 The American Spectator June 1995 Warren Beatty with a brain, an idealistic young radical fresh out of Harvard who moved from insurgent Mexico to revolutionary Russia...
...This fact goes unmentioned...
...The name of his chief accuser, Whittaker Chambers, is conspicuous, and so is the evidence that Chambers's assertions—that agencies of government had been penetrated by Communists throughout the late 1930s and early '40s—were not only accurate, but may even have been understated...
...The effects of this disaster may still be felt today...
...the authors may not know it...
...Years pass, Ann matures and comes to understand that the brainwashing she suffered caused her parents to be incarcerated...
...the only things missing (thus far) are certain names...
...And then there is Armand Hammer...
...And while his reputation might usefully be rescued, whatever sentiment still attaches to the International Brigades, and their struggle against Spanish fascism, should be rapidly interred...
...Both were transmitted by way of the State Department, where Alger Hiss was working in 1936...
...There is a distinction, however, between Soviet agents and muddle-headed liberals...
...The testimony of certain former Communists was persuasive, as were the revelations of various security agencies...
...Whether restraining zealous subordinates or battling the impulses of fellow travelers in the government, the director comes across as that rare specimen—a sensible bureaucrat...
...it is a fiction, a lie, methodically deceptive, historically false...
...Until now, however, proof positive was unavailable...
...While much of the material may appear to confirm many of McCarthy's public suspicions, it also reveals how reckless he was, and ultimately how destructive to the cause he purported to serve...
...There can be no question now that, regardless of the justice or injustice of their punishment, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty of atomic espionage, and that Alger Hiss was put away for perjury with good cause...
...1:1 GOD SAVE ME...
...The American Spectator June 1995 69...
...For this knowledge we may thank the authors and their Russian research associates, and hope that some semblance of the truth may now take root...
...It should also be noted that while not all Communists in Washington were spies, the only spies of consequence in that era were Communists...
...The network flourished even—and perhaps especially—when the nation was imperiled by the fascist dictatorships, and lasted throughout the Cold War...
...For decades it has been a safe assumption that many American Communists spied for the Soviet Union, deliberately subverting the American national interest...
...Please order by mail now...
...For the left, it may be instructive to observe how astute J. Edgar Hoover appears in these precincts...
...The authors are intrigued by the presence of two diplomatic letters found in the Comintern archives that were written in 1936...
...But that will not be easy, for it is in the popular culture, and in the accumulated folk wisdom of the past thirty years, that the fiction persists...
...It was only when Gus Hall, who still heads the CPUSA, wouldn't cease criticizing perestroika that Mikhail Gorbachev stopped the subsidy in 1989...
...For while the authors' revelation—that the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) was subsidized by Moscow to undertake espionage—is sensational enough, it should scarcely surprise anyone who knows much about the Soviet Union, or about the moral presumptions of certain American leftists...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
