Half the Story
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
Half the Story Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism By Richard Gid Powers Free Press. 554pp. $30.00. Reviewed by David M. Oshinsky Professor of history, Rutgers; author....
...A professor of American history at the City University of New York, he inhabits an academic world in which the words of Jean-Paul Sartre are treated more respectfully than those of Aleksandrl...
...He puts President Kennedy in this group, despite abundant evidence to the contrary...
...Many saw Communism as an engine of mass murder disguised in socialist garb...
...In the classroom, students spout Oliver Stone and learn from textbooks that routinely trash American life...
...Lyons, Dubinsky, Sidney Hook and a host of others all spread this unpleasant truth, while the anarchist Emma Goldman took the longer view...
...Furthermore, the apparent demise of Truman-style anti-Communism during the McCarthy years provides an opportunity for Powers to suggest that the Vietnam War was mostly a case of American leaders flexing their muscles, since they no longer comprehended "the morality of the Cold War clash between freedom and totalitarianism...
...The groundwork for mass murder "was laid by Lenin and his group of comrades," she explained...
...The latter moved in the opposite direction, "recklessly undermining" these achievements at every turn...
...Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice " RICHARD GID POWERS has had enough...
...some were former adherents who had quit the Communist Party in horror and disgust...
...The story must be fully told...
...For one thing, it allows Powers to shift heroes in midstream...
...I, too, was infected by that disease," wrote Eugene Lyons in 1937...
...The list includes Norman Podhoretz, George Meany, James Schlesinger, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow, Midge Decter, Saul Bellow, and, of course, Ronald Reagan...
...There is more than enough honor in it for everyone...
...Many anti-Communists were Jewish...
...What happened to the anti-Communists who retained their progressive agenda and liberal world view through five decades of struggle...
...The doubts did not last long...
...Buckley, in fact, tirelessly defends McCarthy to this day...
...A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy...
...By portraying McCarthyism as "simply an adaptation to the Cold War of the subversive anti-Communist conspiracy theories that had been a fixture of American politics since 1919," the author ignores his earlier stance about McCarthy's role in bringing Right-wing anti-Communism into the political mainstream for the first time...
...The answer, sadly, is: nowhere in sight...
...The former, led by President Truman, constructed what Powers calls "a worldwide military, political, and cultural bulwark against Communism" that would last for more than 40 years...
...Not Without Honor recounts the American anti-Communist struggle from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the Soviet collapse in 1990...
...The "hard" Left in America has always been adept at portraying anti-Communism as the refuge of bigots and fanatics determined to undermine our democratic ideals...
...From the 1920s forward, anti-Communism gained strength, and principled support, in the labor movement, the academic world and the urban immigrant communities...
...Although he notes their remarkable diversity, Powers splits the anti-Communists into two main camps...
...He demonstrates that anti-Communist Leftists hammered at this point in the 1930s, warning of the powerful similarities between Hitler and Stalin...
...At times, [he] seemed to welcome the [Communist] rivalry as good for the national health, the moral equivalent of a spirited 50-mile hike or a game of touch football...
...Then I saw these things in full swing and discovered that the revenge was being wreaked on the very masses who were to be saved by that cause...
...Powers is curiously vague about Vietnam...
...Soon opponents began to raise doubts about whether the fight against Communism was really necessary any longer or even if it had ever been necessary...
...As a result, says Powers, the anti-Communist movement "was vulnerable to be captured by the first demagogue able to cloak paranoid Red web conspiracy theories in the mantle of major party respectability...
...People became anti-Communists out of religious conviction, political opportunism or the desire to stop Soviet expansion in their native lands...
...In their eyes, the enemy included anyone who opposed their crusade or defended the civil liberties of individuals they were attacking...
...I can sympathize with Powers...
...Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, begins the second, and less impressive, half of the book...
...His new list is dominated by conservatives who appear out of nowhere with a perfectly clean slate...
...The result is history turned upside down...
...his quarterly, Dissent, doesn't make it in at all...
...Nor does he try to defend Vietnam's conservative supporters (though he effectively bashes a number of its more sanctimonious and arrogant critics, such as former Senator J. William Fulbright, George F. Kennan and revisionist historians across the board...
...That interpretation has several benefits...
...Powers attempts to combat this insidious stereotype, with mixed results...
...The first one, nurtured by Hoover and his FBI, viewed Communism as a conspiracy of radicals and foreigners to overthrow the government by subversion and violence...
...His book is important and provocative, but the writing is dense and, at the end, the focus is badly blurred...
...All of them deserve credit—both for rejecting the pathetic self-flagellation of the Jimmy Carter years and for affirming anti-Communism as a moral imperative in dangerous times...
...And it is especially hard, given the media's spin on the controversies surrounding them, to portray Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten and the Rosenbergs as anything less than principled victims of a national witch hunt...
...At the beginning," he writes, "the opposition simply argued that the war was an ineffective and counterproductive way of fighting Communism...
...I agree...
...Setting the record straight is no mean task...
...Stalin merely built the terrifying citadel on the foundation of his comrade and teacher...
...Ultimately, Powers is content to portray Vietnam—like McCarthyism—as another black eye for the anti-Communist movement...
...Kennedy wanted "competition for competition's sake," we are told...
...Irving Howe is mentioned once in the book...
...But where are the others...
...During the Cold War years, the clash between principled anti-Communists and Right-wing countersubversives took an ugly turn...
...Liberal anti-Communism, Socialist anti-Communism, The New Leader, and Partisan Review virtually disappear...
...In addition, the key figures of Powers' early chapters—the Hooks and Dubinskys—drop completely out of sight...
...Little attention is devoted to the impact of McCarthyism on the Republican Party—or the political process itself...
...McCarthy's ruin released one of his ablest supporters, William F. Buckley Jr., from the fruitless efforts to defend the Senator that had been consuming his time and energy," we learn...
...Its self-pro-claimed spokesmen ranged from J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph R. McCarthy and Father Charles Coughlin on the Right, to Morris Hillquit, David Dubinsky and Emma Goldman on the Left...
...In the national mind, anti-Communism and McCarthyism were one and the same," he writes, "and American anti-Communism would never recover from the effects of that fatal embrace...
...These "countersubversives" believed in censorship, vigilante action, surveillance, mass arrests, deportation...
...The "most important consequence of this [activity] was to create that malevolent stereotype of anti-Communism as an unconstitutional conspiracy against the Left," says Powers...
...Powers' discussion of that demagogue...
...It is sometimes a struggle to convince students that the CIA did not assassinate President John F. Kennedy, that Harry S. Truman did not drop atomic bombs on Japan to "scare" the Russians, or that the United States has legitimate interests beyond "imperialism" in the postwar world...
...The final part of Powers' book is a love letter to the mostly neoconservative men and women who "revived" anti-Communism, pressed the anti-Soviet cause, and helped bring the Evil Empire to its knees...
...He skirts the issue, claiming that McCarthy's outrageous behavior "silenced" anti-Communism by smearing the entire movement as a freak show...
...Claiming that the war was fought without "reference to the principles, values, or goals of anti-Communism," he makes no attempt to discuss those goals in the context of the conflict itself...
...Powers is superb at showing that the horrors of Soviet brutality were well known to American Communists and fellow travelers who would claim ignorance of such matters years later...
...It was never a united effort with common goals...
...I was ready to liquidate classes, purge millions, sacrifice freedoms and elementary decencies, arm self-appointed dictators with a flaming sword—all for the cause...
...Americans need to know the history of American anti-Communism," he concludes, "if they are to understand the great role they have played in ridding the world of the most murderous of 20th-century totalitarianisms...
...Large issues are ignored...
...America "needed the truth, and not the fantasies of the coun-tersubversive Right...
...Powers reminds us of their logic, their courage, their strong statements...
...InPowers' account, the triumph over Communism is a conservative affair, won by Star Wars, huge defense budgets and the Committee on the Present Danger...
...Powers provides no credible explanation for this...
...That truth was supplied by the other camp...
...Sol-zhenitsyn, and terms like "fascist" and "McCarthyite" are thrown about with a recklessness that should embarrass a community of scholars, but rarely does...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 10
