Correspondence
Correspondence LEFTY LEMMINGS THE WONDERFUL COVER ILLUSTRATION of lemmings as Democrats leaping heedlessly over a cliff (June 30) unfortunately continues a long-running myth about lemmings (but...
...Without the active participation of evangelical Christians and without their votes, "economic-conservative office holders" would be an oxymoron...
...They also have a tendency to portray themselves in a dramatic and favorable light, at the center of events...
...No more...
...HARVEY KLEHR John Earl Haynes Atlanta, GA PROTESTING PROTESTANT IT DISAPPOINTED ME to see The Weekly Standard feature two books ("unsocial Gospel," June 30) which, based upon the reviews, seem calculated to divide the conservative movement and suppress the public involvement of evangelical Christians...
...The overall thrust of the books as indicated by the review is not new—that Christians ought not to let their faith views influence either their participation or their votes—but it should by now be thoroughly discredited among Christian and economic conservatives...
...We should not be surprised that many of these countries opposed or were queasy over supporting the action in Iraq, thereby manifesting the modern version of "better red than dead"—they could see nothing worth fighting for...
...What they have written gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the conservative movement...
...His interviews with the schecters, conducted more than 50 years later, are, however, unsupported by documentary evidence and, in one case, contradicted...
...This lack of understanding alone establishes their total lack of credentials to make intelligent or worthwhile observations about the "Christian Right...
...Again, I say, I hope you will give voice to a better and broader view of the conservative movement in future articles and opinions...
...MARK A. WILSON Wooster, OH DAVID BROOKS'S "Democrats Go off the Cliff" was succinct and to the point regarding the hateful and vitriolic words being spewed by today's leading Democrats...
...It provides almost no editorializing, and thus has almost no apparent bias...
...If anyone is inclined to doubt that fact, simply look for proof at the positions insisted upon by liberals in Congress...
...The FBI had told Truman the information contained in the messages, but not that it came from decoded soviet cables...
...As David Gelernter pointed out in "The Next Great American Newspaper" (June 23), "it would be so easy to found, it's almost painful...
...Hart in your generally laudatory review by Robert Patterson...
...Even in the later years, though, Truman seemed ambivalent about the seriousness of Soviet espionage...
...Moynihan uncovered a 1949 FBI memo indicating that Army Chief of staff omar Bradley had decided not to inform the president about the top-secret Venona program...
...world war II was still on, and he had plenty to tell the new president of far greater immediate importance than Venona...
...Although he fought the Cold war abroad, domestically Truman regarded J. Edgar Hoover as an alarmist and treated Republican complaints about internal subversion as partisan demagoguery...
...They are apparently so far removed from it as to be incapable of accurate analysis, and their writings in this vein do not deserve THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S favorable attention...
...I save articles electronically on subjects of interest...
...But, whether or not Hart and Patterson are such hardly matters...
...It provides links to every major newspaper in the world...
...If you want to see the effect of doing so, numerous examples abound in democracies where there is no movement comparable to our Christian conservatives—France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and on and on...
...while his code breakers had made progress against the soviet cables in 1945, they did not yet have any significant readable text...
...But Truman remained a skeptic, telling Defense Secretary James Forrestal that the decrypts were too partial...
...I never get newsprint on my fingers...
...unfortunately, there are nominally "Christian" theologians who hold the views expressed by D.G...
...Chronology gets confused, and people edit their memories in light of what happened later and in conformity with judgments they later adopted...
...Any thoughtful cultural or economic conservative should know that nothing would serve the left better than dividing the conservative movement and suppressing the votes of evangelical voters...
...Kirby claims Truman met with General Carter Clarke, who supervised the Army's code-breaking activities, on June 5, 1945, and learned that the cryptanalysts were breaking messages indicating "massive soviet intelligence operations" although no names were yet available...
...Click onto the Drudge Report...
...I would have expected better of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and I hope you will redress this wrong in future articles and editorials...
...He did, however, implement a sweeping security program for federal employees, and his Justice Department prosecuted Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs...
...Their views, largely devoid of or hostile to any Christian moral content, are like those of the leaders of France and Germany...
...And I rarely get frustrated at the New York Times's bias and untruths—I just don't link to it very often...
...If Kirby's memory is correct, Clarke would have been aware that Truman had already been briefed about the project several times and could hardly have been exercised about yet another briefing...
...These men really hate our president, but where Brooks attributes this to helplessness in terms of power, i would also respectfully add that they hate George w. Bush because they know they can never be like him...
...There would, incidentally, be an even greater degree of mindless socialism, as the filling of these political positions with vastly more leftist politicians took its toll...
...And Kirby insists that he privately warned the Bundy brothers that Alger Hiss was compromised...
...Hart's unfamiliarity (and Patterson's) with Christian conservative activists is shown by his characterization of James Dobson and Pat Robertson as chiefly providing "entertainment...
...I was a compulsive reader of newspapers with the daily NYT, WSJ, and local paper...
...It is unfortunate and surprising that The Weekly Standard would advocate such a poorly conceived idea...
...He asserts that on General Clarke's orders he briefed House Republican leader Les Arens and Washington Post publisher Philip Graham on Venona, Harry Dexter White, and Alger Hiss...
...He is a good and decent man who loves his country, respects the rights of its citizens, and, like the Founding Fathers, has a deep and abiding faith in God...
...Kirby also told the schecters that Clarke informed him that early in 1945 Eleanor Roosevelt complained to secretary of war stimson about the Army's attack on soviet cable traffic and General Clarke responded with a warning that he would expose the first lady's actions to the press...
...I easily correspond with writers to challenge their facts...
...Further, Novak and the schecters cannot account for the 1949 FBI memo, which reports that Admiral Earl stone, newly appointed head of the Armed Forces security Agency, had proposed briefing Truman on the nature of the Venona project but that Clarke had objected strongly...
...he couldn't believe that Roosevelt had been deceived by the people accused of spying, and in any case making them public would ignite a red scare...
...Novak suggests that Truman, not bureaucratic secrecy, bears responsibility for the failure to move vigorously against soviet spies...
...it would have been easy to simply walk into the voting booth and vote for George w. Bush, but i wanted to do more, so I changed parties...
...The president was unimpressed and responded that it sounded "like a fairy story...
...Apparently the writer and reviewer do not understand that the strength of evangelical Christians rests on a strong Bible-based spiritual commitment to Jesus Christ, and not on "entertainment...
...Actually, it was so easy to found, it is almost unrecognized...
...Basing himself on Sacred Secrets, a book by Jerrold and Leona schecter, Novak argues that Truman was told that decryptions had unearthed massive soviet spying as early as 1945 and he refused to respond, motivated partly by disbelief and partly by domestic political concerns...
...several years ago, senator Moynihan suggested a factor contributing to Truman's attitude may have been that he was not informed the united states had broken into soviet coded-cable traffic and had highly reliable information identifying scores of soviet spies...
...Kirby also alleges that in 1948 Bradley agreed to keep Truman informed but worried that the president did not understand cryptanaly-sis...
...In "The origins of McCarthyism" (June 30), Robert D. Novak charged that Moynihan got it wrong...
...The modern version started with the Disney film White Wilderness in 1958, which apparently staged the "mass suicide" of the little creatures...
...Correspondence LEFTY LEMMINGS THE WONDERFUL COVER ILLUSTRATION of lemmings as Democrats leaping heedlessly over a cliff (June 30) unfortunately continues a long-running myth about lemmings (but not about Democrats...
...Drudge has numerous advantages over traditional newspapers...
...Bradley and Army intelligence officers supposedly met with white House aides to inform them of the progress of Venona...
...There is no indication of what they discussed...
...CLINT SEWARD Acton, MA SCHUMER'S SPAM SOLUTION CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is quite right in "You've Got Spam" (June 16) that unsolicited e-mail has become an issue that must be addressed, but the donot-spam proposal put forward by Sen...
...My hero has always been John F. Kennedy—I have even taught a class on him for several years...
...But it has over 1.5 billion readers in the past 12 months...
...Economic conservatives without the assistance of Christian conservatives in the United States could win few elections and likely could not or would not influence a nation to fight terrorism as The Weekly Standard has advocated...
...The web paper is, of course, the Drudge Report...
...oliver Kirby's unsupported recollections do not put Moynihan's conclusions into question...
...It does not "hide" any story...
...Given Truman's mistrust of Hoover, this denied the president any assurance that the information was reliable and may have misled him about the seriousness of the problem...
...Oliver Kirby claims to have heard all this from General Carter Clarke and to have discussed it with some of Truman's senior aides...
...oliver Kirby had a long and distinguished career with the National security Agency and its predecessors...
...Since a large number of spammers are already engaged in illegal practices (such as violations of laws against fraudulent practices), it is unlikely that they would adhere to a do-not-spam directive...
...But Clarke supervised all Army code-breaking...
...Like most issues, spam should be addressed by targeting criminals, not by passing laws that will only affect law-abiding, legitimate businesses...
...I send articles to friends by e-mail...
...Novak and the schecters base their claims on interviews, 50 years after the events, with former National security Agency officer Oliver Kirby...
...DONALD PAUL HODEL Focus on the Family Washington, DC THE NEW NEW YORK TIMES THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN newspaper is here now, alive and growing on the web at an astonishing pace, and gets more readers per day than the New York Times, L.A...
...Curiously, though, and much more relevant to David Brooks's story, when lemmings experience population pressures, they turn on each other in fratricidal violence...
...Socialism is the inevitable result when the conservative movement loses its heart—which is the cultural conservative (largely Christian) element...
...This is all extremely unlikely...
...I teach my students about the way he inspired us to reach for greater heights for our country, and the way he stood for peace...
...It features access to the best writers of our time...
...The decision to keep the Venona project under tight wraps and to limit those who knew about it, however defensible as a security matter, had unfortunate policy and political consequences...
...The FTC has indicated that it could not guarantee the security of a national do-not-spam list (and doubt its effectiveness...
...Why would you publish a substantially uncritical review of one side of this ongoing argument when you have not reviewed Tom Minnery's excellent and definitive book Why We Can't Stay Silent explaining why committed, conservative Christians must be involved...
...When such amoral views are brought to the office of president of the United States, they give us the abominable actions of a Clinton administration...
...The disagreement then went to Chief of staff Bradley, who sided with Clarke...
...Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and USA Today combined...
...In 1950, Kirby alleges, Bradley told Truman that both Alger Hiss and Harry white had been identified as soviet spies, and Truman complained that the news would be a political albatross...
...The only documentary evidence is white House records indicating that General Clarke met with Truman on June 4, 1945...
...The fact is that without the hard work and votes of millions of Christians who have chosen not to be silent, there would be no Republican majority in both houses of the U.S...
...Charles Schumer (D-NY) to create a national "do not spam" registry is just another example of further criminalizing the actions of criminals...
...In this way President Bush reminds me of my longtime hero...
...Without knowing Hart's personal views, I would note that such theologians often are personally far left, and their objection, when carefully analyzed, is not to evangelical Christian participation in the rights of citizenship but rather to the way we do it, namely, by supporting culturally conservative positions, e.g., traditional values, school prayer, right to life, etc...
...It would only take one disreputable pair of hands to insure that the list becomes available to the entire spam world, free of charge...
...Not until the summer of 1946 did Meredith Gardner break enough of the underlying code to create readable text from the cables...
...They had broken the onetime-pad additive for a number of messages, a key step, but that only revealed the underlying conventional code, which still had to be broken...
...Congress, no Bush presidencies, few Republican governors, and a small handful of statehouses in Republican hands...
...There was no story, fairy-like or otherwise, for Clarke to tell in 1945...
...I was a lifelong Democrat until 2000, but the pathetic sleaziness of Bill and Hillary Clinton became more than i could stomach...
...It opens my reading vistas to the rest of the world...
...Moreover, Clarke could not have reported about massive soviet spying at this meeting...
...GROVER NORQUIST Americans For Tax Reform Washington, DC...
...However, I believe JFK would have no place today in the Democratic party—it has become too radical, and too hateful...
...CATHY MAY Wichita, KS SPY GAMES WHAT DID HARRY TRUMAN KNOW about soviet spies in America and when did he know it...
...oral history can be treacherous...
...I read Drudge three or four times a day...
...More dangerously, a "do not spam" registry would compile a comprehensive list of valid, working e-mail addresses—a veritable gold mine for spammers, who now purchase lists from other spammers...
...The Next Great American Newspaper" is here, and on the web...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 43
