The Spy Gap
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
The Spy Gap Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America By Ted Morgan Random. 685 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" Even now, nearly 50...
...The other chronicles the treacheries of a small group of Americans who did indeed penetrate Washington's highest realms and transmit important intelligence to the Soviet Union...
...Ted Morgan's message to Americans in the post-Soviet world of suicidal terrorists and holy jihads is both blunt and useful: We've seen this movie before, he is saying, and we must learn from our mistakes...
...As Judge Irving R. Kaufman sentenced Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to death for spying in 1951, he announced that they had put the atomic bomb into Russian hands years before the Soviets might have developed it...
...We know about his love for bourbon and his destructive lack of discipline...
...Morgan also works hard to portray McCarthy fairly...
...It is hard to imagine a politician with a legacy in lower repute these days than Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin...
...The Soviets managed to infiltrate the White House staff and high levels within the State Department, the Treasury Department and America's nuclear labs...
...Now their cause would have been wrapped in the deepest kind of gravitas...
...But while they were executed, a British court sentenced Fuchs to just 14 years in prison, and his term was later cut to nine years...
...Still, Ethel might have fared better...
...The Venona transcripts offer, among other things, an illuminating new look at the Rosenberg case...
...Ironically, by the time McCarthy hit his stride, the Soviet spy network was mostly history...
...He even has a few kind words for the Dies committee, calling it "surprisingly effective" in uncovering the Communist Party's concealed activities...
...How could a politician of such lackluster ability, the "sorriest" Senator on Capitol Hill, in the words of Senate Minority Leader LyndonB...
...Suddenly, an America plainly in peril flails about wildly in the Middle East and responds to terrorism in ill-advised ways at home...
...The Republicans were scrambling for juicy issues in 1950—after all, they had been out of power since 1933—and the transcripts would have suited their aims beautifully...
...There was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who buttressed the foundations of his career with investigations of professors, labor organizers andjournalists...
...But would they really have done that...
...The Rosenbergs seem to have offered the Soviets little more than corroboration...
...Yet even here distinctions must be made...
...There are many reasons to like this book...
...Recently opened papers at Marquette University show that the young McCarthy was a compassionate and fair circuit court judge who in domestic cases always kept the best interests of the children uppermost in his mind...
...that the government was awash in treachery, which it had been, though it no longer was...
...The books arguing their innocence would have been exposed as diatribes...
...The new information allows him to paint a vivid and alarming picture of the spy ring the Soviets ran in America for years...
...To understand the rise of McCarthyism, explains Ted Morgan in Reds, it is necessary to start with the Bolshevik Revolution...
...We know about McCarthy's pathological ambition, his reckless disregard for the truth and his sadistic streak...
...Similarly, he says, the Smith Act of 1940—which made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of the United States or to associate with any group that does—at least thinned out the ranks of Communists in the government...
...Morgan has a talent, too, for sorting through stubborn complexities and pulling out random bits of inconvenient truth that are sure to annoy dogmatists on all sides...
...Thus by the time McCarthy was elected to the Senate in 1946, the political stage was set...
...He went on to attribute the recent outbreak of the Korean War to the Rosenbergs, asking: "Who knows but what millions of people may pay the price of your treason...
...When Kaufman sent the couple to the electric chair, he called Ethel a "fullfledged partner" in her husband's activities...
...government...
...That Sisson looks more gullible than Machiavellian in his intrigue is beside the point...
...Woodrow Wilson wound up using the bogus papers to justify his intervention in the Russian Civil War...
...If America's antiCommunist demagogues were deplorable and dishonest, they were not altogether wrong, Morgan finds...
...SofheGOPcouldhave posed this question: Who knows how deep the perfidy has been allowed to go on the long Democratic watch...
...This story would play itself out again and again...
...Yet while his actual contributions as a Communist-hunter were slight, he managed to keep much of the nation in thrall until he was censured by his colleagues in 1954...
...We already know part of the answer...
...In other words, Morgan believes that if the revelations of the Venona transcripts had been aired earlier, they "wouldhave made McCarthy's charges irrelevant...
...He indicates the transcripts might also have prevented the Senator's wild exploitation in general of the Communist threat...
...This lag in perception made McCarfhyism possible...
...There was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose mass raids in the 1920s on suspected Red agitators were meant to further his political ambitions...
...The hysteria was partly generic Republican politics, Morgan says, "But there was also a feeling in the population...
...McCarthy made the fascinating discovery that he could attack anyone and the newspapers would print it...
...interests in ways large and small—but their penetration of the Manhattan Project was particularly disastrous...
...Johnson, materialize from out of nowhere to wield such great power that he could force presidents into silence and military leaders into submission...
...All these men had made names for themselves as they successfully exploited and marketed fear...
...The important thing in this early confrontation with Communism is that ambition ultimately triumphed over truth— and the consequences were profound...
...It advises that Ethel, "in view of delicate health, does not work...
...And bear in mind that only a small fraction of the intercepted spy cables could be decoded...
...Reds, then, is really two stories...
...Yet an argument can be made that some of the worst characteristics of the Cold War era he personified live on...
...But over time, as embellishments mutated into lies, we see Senator McCarthy grow addicted to power...
...Morgan writes well, and his richly detailed narrative brings a fresh, compelling perspective to a familiar topic...
...Suddenly, President George W. Bush is struggling to justify regime change in Iraq with information that is constantly shifting and sometimes flat wrong...
...McCarthy started out as a hard-working campaigner and molded himself into a likable politician, we are told, despite a tendency to embellish his facts...
...We know as well about the special vulnerability of the populace the Republican junior Senator from Wisconsin courted: an America that in the years after World War II was left to wrestle with the specter of nuclear attack, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the ascendance in China of Mao Zedong...
...One tracks the rise of the professional Redbaiters...
...But those facts alone do not adequately explain McCarthy's swift rise to national power after he delivered his now infamous 195 0 speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, and said he was holding a list of 205 Communist Party members "shaping policy in the State Department...
...It seems just as likely that the transcripts would have stirred an even stronger frenzy...
...His account of espionage against the United States in the 1940s comes largely from decoded Soviet spy cables, released in 1995, known as the Venona papers...
...That is because "McCarthy did not emerge in a vacuum, but as the most prominent in a long line of men who exploited the Communist issue for political advantage...
...A 1944 message to their Soviet masters, though, suggests that assessment was wrong...
...Over the next four years, McCarthy's charges constantly changed as he pursued jumbled and overblown claims of treason at high levels...
...Had officials released the Venona papers before the Rosenberg trial, Morgan suggests, the debate about the couple would have been considerably different: "The existence of an espionage ring would have been proven beyond dispute, cutting the ground from under the protest movement...
...The spieshurt U.S...
...The lesson we are left to ponder is this: For all their firebreathing fury and for all the validity of their cause, too many hardliners did more to push their own careers than to keep Washington free of spies...
...And the man who had reinvented himself as Tail Gunner Joe during World War II reinvented himself once more—this time as a Red-hunter with a fervor and an unscrupulousness that was astonishing to behold...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" Even now, nearly 50 years after his downfall, the enigma of Joseph R. McCarthy gnaws at the American conscience...
...There was Texas Democratic Congressman Martin Dies Jr., lord of the House Un-American Activities Committee, who pioneered the idea of Communist subversion as a way to hurt the New Deal...
...Morgan points out, however, the atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs provided far more crucial information to the USSR...
...Finally, Morgan says, "the only thing that counted was to score points and beat your opponent, by bluffing and lying...
...The first among them, Morgan argues, was Edgar Sisson, an American newspaperman whose hatred of Bolsheviks and hunger for a scoop led him to pass fraudulent documents to the U.S...
...This is one place where Morgan's logic does not add up...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
