Why didn't he just let McArthur at them?
And his SOS, Alger Hiss, remember him?
April 17, 1996
A POST BOMBSHELL: JOE McCARTHY WAS RIGHT!
Coffee cups rattled all over Washington on Sunday morning, April 14, when The Washington Post ran a headline which, although cast as a question, conservatives never imagined would appear in that paper: "Was McCarthy Right About the Left?"
One-time radical Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, now a freelance writer, went on to give a qualified "yes and no" to the question, acknowledging that the recent gush of information from old Soviet and U.S. intelligence archives make plain the extent of spying by Americans who worked for Moscow. He did not quibble with the statement by the National Security Agency that "200 persons" did the Soviets' bidding, either wittingly or unwittingly. NSA derived this figure from the Venona intercepts of Soviet intelligence cables during the 1940s, transcripts of which were recently released.
In words that must have pained a liberal to write, von Hoffman conceded, "The Age of McCarthyism, it turns out, was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent as two generations of high school graduates have been taught....McCarthy may have exaggerated the problem but not by much. The government was the workplace of perhaps 100 communist agents in 1943-1945. He just didn't know their names."
When McCarthy charged in 1950 that the State Department was riddled with Communists, he didn't know the names of most of them, but he soon came up with names, some of them biggies. Liberals reacted with the same disbelief that they exhibited earlier when Alger Hiss, a former high State Department official; Laughlin Currie, a top White House aide; Harry Dexter White, a power in the Treasury, and others were named as Soviet agents. Von Hoffman himself was sparing in naming names that showed the extent of the penetration.
We searched von Hoffman's lengthy article in vain for any mention of a late journalist who was long dear to The Washington Post -- I.F. "Izzy" Stone, who stands exposed once again, through the Venona papers, as a paid flunky of Soviet intelligence. (In the interest of fairness, von Hoffman is not alone in covering up for Izzy Stone: the only mention we've seen of him in the spate of Venona stories was in a National Review article by Arch Puddington, who as a Canadian perhaps does not feel the tribal loyalties of American journalists.)
We've told the Stone story serially since 1992, when former KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin cited him as one of his sources when he worked in the Washington rezident. Then the FBI responded to a Freedom of Information Act request with a report from a confidential informant that he and Stone were members of the Communist Party USA during the late 1930s. Venona adds further confirmation: an NKVD officer, working under cover as a correspondent for Tass, the Soviet news agency, recruited Stone in the fall of 1944. Stone was cautious about the involvement, "fearing the consequences" and saying he "did not want to attract the attention of the FBI." But since he had "three small children" he would "not be averse to having a supplementary income." The rest of the cable dealt with "the establishment of business contact." Why didn't von Hoffman make mention of the Stone recruitment in his long article? We left calls for him in New York; no answer.
But give von Hoffman credit for setting straight something important about President Truman and his attitude towards the Soviet threat in the immediate post-war period. Historians now generally treat Truman as a spunky warrior who stood up to aggression in Greece, Turkey, Korea and elsewhere. Perhaps, but he was a slow-starter. Truman admirers have deftly shuffled under the rug their hero's reaction to Winston Churchill's famed "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946. Oddly, Truman gave only guarded approval to Churchill's talk and considered sending the battleship USS Missouri to bring Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to the U.S. to give "his side of the story."
When evidence emerged during the 1940s of deep Soviet penetration of the New Deal, Truman reacted like a ward heeler trying to cover up a paving contract scandal in Kansas City. He put himself firmly behind Alger Hiss, the State Department spy, saying Republicans were making a "red herring" of the case for political reasons. Only grudgingly did he institute a security program with teeth. "In fact," von Hoffman writes, "the public conduct of the Truman Administration became the affirmation of people who said that Truman was soft on communism."
Truman's attitude explains why Sen. Joe McCarthy struck a responsive chord with Americans who had the common sense to recognize that the Soviets were up to no good. Liberals of that era, and beyond, dismissed anti-communists as "bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest," as von Hoffman put it. Despite his flaws McCarthy "was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him." We agree, but with a note of caution. McCarthy's major targets haven't been named in any Venona intercepts as yet and they may never be, since most of them were involved with China, not the USSR. <><><> |
