Correspondence
Correspondence SACRED SECRETS IN "SPIES LIKE Us" (July 1/July 8), Harvey Klehr praises our book for being "filled with fascinating and important new data about Soviet espionage and some Americans...
...Even America's foremost cake mix apologist, Ann Byrn, author of the best-selling The Cake Mix Doctor, admits industrial products need additional flavoring to eliminate that "cake mix taste...
...Cohen is right to want thorough and thoughtful debate about biotechnology...
...The fact that anybody can repeat it without a thought shows how easily we are seduced by the culture of disdain for ordinary people...
...He argues that we confused the bugging of Steve Nelson's apartment with a telephone tap...
...PARADISE REGAINED ERIC COHEN points out some tensions—though not actual contradictions—in pro-biotechnology arguments ("Biotech Loses Its Innocence," June 24...
...DISSENT FROM DISSENT IN ADDITION to an impressive amount of distortion, misinterpretation, and factual error, Stephen Schwartz commits a serious slander in his review of Susan Weissman's biography of the novelist Victor Serge ("Telling Socialism's Story," July 1/July 8...
...it is quite another to implicate a long-suffering poet in such activities...
...And surely anti-biotech forces have been quicker than pro-biotech forces to spin current research in order to bolster their political arguments...
...Steve Nelson's home may well have been bugged and his telephone tapped, but his conversation with Zarubina was in his house, not on the telephone, and their book gives both stories...
...In 1989, I coauthored an article in the journal Arguments and Facts International that described the discovery of the transcript of Tsvetayeva's interrogation by the French police after the flight of her NKVD-agent husband Sergei Efron...
...But it is juvenile...
...But "the Duncan Hines mix turned the tables on the established brands by telling the housewife to add two fresh eggs...
...This judgment merely ratifies the belief held at the time by no less a figure than Vladimir Nabokov...
...They tasted exactly like one of my mother's scratch cakes...
...JERROLD AND LEONA SCHECTER Washington, DC HARVEY KLEHR RESPONDS: The Schecters do not refute any of the criticisms I offered...
...Previously, "mixes were promoted mainly as a convenience product...
...If all she wanted was a standard white or yellow cake, that was "real baking," less the mindless sifting and measuring, so it was not inconsistent for a food-lover like Hines to lend it his name...
...As for Harry Truman's knowledge of Venona, the Truman Library can find no indication of what Carter Clarke told the president at his June 4, 1945, meeting...
...Go to a survivalist store and get some to try, if they still stock them...
...As for Jeffrey Isaac's comment: I have known for quite a while that dissenting from Dissent is asking for trouble...
...KEITH GESSEN Syracuse, NY NOT CONTENT TO COMMENT on Susan Weissman's biography of Victor Serge, Stephen Schwartz feels compelled to slander Dissent magazine...
...It could not have been about the code names of suspected spies because, as the National Security Agency has noted, not until July 1946 did Meredith Gardener begin to read KGB messages...
...But I'm grateful for the reminder...
...He repeats, following Weissman, that while living in Paris the poetess Marina Tsvetayeva was an agent of the NKVD...
...CHARLES PERRY Staff Writer, Food Section Los Angeles Times Sylmar, CA EDMUND LEVIN RESPONDS: Charles Perry is certainly correct that the addition of fresh eggs to cake mixes was an improvement over dehydrated eggs...
...In 1951, Advertising Age remarked approvingly on the shrewd marketing plan...
...Yet Klehr cannot adjust his academic focus to accept revelations by "confidential sources whose motivations and reliability are unknown...
...And cake mixes do have their place...
...In addition, considerable archival material has been published in Russia on the Tsvetayeva-Efron menage, much of which confirms her involvement...
...So it's still a mystery why Hines—who was obsessed from childhood with the quality of food and never had any taste for "con-venience"—put his name on a cake mix...
...Schwartz's real problem is revealed when he says that Serge "belonged to the group perhaps best described as 'anticipatory neoconserva-tives.'" Intellectual history is more complicated than this...
...Wesley J. Smith ("Congress and Cloning," July 1/July 8) expresses the oft-heard conservative confidence in adult stem cell research, while most scientists remain unsure that adult stem cells have the plasticity of embryonic stem cells...
...Oliver Kirby, who worked for Clarke and was in charge of breaking the Russian codes, attests to Truman's knowledge of Venona...
...Anti-biotech activists tell us not to define human life in reductionist, materialistic terms...
...TODD SEAVEY New York, NY A HALF-BAKED STORY...
...Anyone who has read Dissent or knows anything about its history will know how absurd this is...
...We are far from understanding what trait is caused by each component of the human genome, but experiments in the replacement of diseased cells with newly cloned ones are well underway in animals and may soon help humans...
...We are glad that he enjoyed reading Sacred Secrets and hope readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD will follow his lead...
...He describes a recent Dissent review by Keith Gessen as a "hatchet-job," performed in order "to undermine Serge by sabotaging Weissman's biography and obscuring the real evils of Moscow's secret police and the anger of Serge's reaction to them...
...It's amazing that nobody blinks at the suggestion that dehydrated eggs are every bit as good as fresh...
...William Kristol now argues that therapeutic cloning, even if it works, will be so inefficient that it might as well be banned (though many scientists seem to disagree with him—and a capitalist should know that inefficient practices tend to disappear without the need for bans anyway...
...Schwartz implies that Dissent, which he nastily describes as an "organ of the recusant anti-anti-Communist school of Irving Howe," promotes Stalinist apologetics...
...I and others have concluded from this document that Tsvetayeva was a knowing participant in her husband's activities...
...Defenders of science have long shown their willingness to debate topics such as the atomic bomb or the proper protocols for experimental surgery...
...The relation between Elizabeth Zarubina and Kitty Harris is irrelevant to the Schecters' confusion over whether it was Kheifitz or another Soviet operative who introduced Zarubina to the Oppen-heimer family...
...When mammalian cloning was first announced, Rush Limbaugh and others argued that scientists would never be able to create anything that has a soul in a lab...
...But that's not the point...
...But then they tell us that adult stem cell research is morally acceptable—even though the presence or absence of an eggcell membrane is the only discernible difference between the cells used in adult stem cell research and the cells used in embryonic stem cell research...
...Tsvetayeva's husband Sergei Efron was indeed an agent who organized at least one assassination, but there has never been any suggestion that Tsvetayeva actually participated...
...Hines had a lifelong disdain for any food that was not "from scratch...
...The myth seems to date to the late '70s, when feminist contempt for home-makers was in full howl...
...Just add water and pop in the oven...
...indeed, Klehr appears to have difficulty absorbing the evidence of what he did not know before...
...One might think there was just a bit more to human nature than that...
...in his nitpicking to "dilute one's confidence in the authors' command of the material," Klehr exposes his own lack of understanding of FBI methods...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC Editorial Board, Dissent Bloomington, IN STEPHEN SCHWARTZ RESPONDS: Keith Gessen is far behind the curve on Tsvetayeva...
...He notes that biotech defenders claim the benefits of therapeutic cell-cloning are imminent while the possible horrors of radically altering the human gene code (or "eugenics," as Cohen puts it) remain far off...
...Having coauthored an excellent book with John Haynes on Venona, he is aware that sources for Soviet archival material must often be protected...
...The FBI was doing both, we learned from Robert Lamphere and other FBI agents...
...The notion that there is a straight line connecting courageous intellectual dissidents of the 1940s and the perspective of The Weekly Standard may be comforting...
...The Truman Library's presidential appointment records demonstrate that on June 4, 1945, Brigadier General Carter Clarke briefed President Truman on the program underway to break the Soviet codes...
...But now anti-biotech activists say that even single cells sitting in petri dishes, cells that will never gestate in a womb, are people with souls and with the rights of citizens—indeed, with rights that outweigh the needs of Parkinson's and diabetes sufferers...
...Surely one could play Cohen's game with anti-biotech arguments, pointing out seeming contradictions in order to cast aspersions on the whole movement...
...I remember when the Hines cake mixes came in and how much better their flavor and texture were than those from the earlier mixes...
...Is it just an "urban legend" that part of the intention was to make housewives feel they were doing "real baking...
...This is no rhetorical ploy on the part of scientists but an accurate summary of the state of research...
...Now it is one thing to invent, as Schwartz likes to, exciting scenarios whereby leftist luminaries were murdered...
...Even a NSA historian we interviewed admitted that the NSA had no proof that Truman did not know about Venona, they merely assumed it because they found no paper trail showing that Truman knew...
...IN "MIXED LEGACY: The Rise and Fall of Duncan Hines" (July 1/July 8), Edmund Levin has swallowed an urban myth: that by calling for fresh eggs, rather than including dehydrated eggs in the formula, as had been done in earlier cake mixes, the Hines product "gave the housewife the feeling she was doing real baking...
...Similarly, Klehr contradicts himself when he fails to read the connection between Elizabeth Zarubina, deputy chief of Soviet intelligence in North and South America, and her protege Kitty Harris, who was sent to reactivate two illegals close to Robert Oppenheimer...
...That microscopic barrier, sitting in a petri dish and fused to a DNA packet by an artificial electrical stimulus, makes the difference between a fellow citizen and mere medical supplies...
...But a good debate means contending with your opponent's best arguments, not concocting apparent contradictions in order to avoid the real arguments...
...He concedes that this new source material creates a new view of intelligence history...
...Correspondence SACRED SECRETS IN "SPIES LIKE Us" (July 1/July 8), Harvey Klehr praises our book for being "filled with fascinating and important new data about Soviet espionage and some Americans who were engaged in it...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 44
