Rethinking McCarthyism, if Not McCarthy
I have here in my hand a list of 205 -- a list of names that were made known to the
Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are
still working and shaping policy in the State Department."
-- Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Feb. 9, 1950, Wheeling, W. Va.
By ETHAN BRONNER
New York Times
nytimes.com
I T is one of the most infamous speeches in American politics. Delivered just months after the Soviet
Union detonated its first atomic device -- a replica of the American bomb right down to the bolts --
and months before the Communist North invaded South Korea and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
were charged with selling nuclear secrets to Moscow, Senator McCarthy's words set off a period
of political hysteria. It would be some time before the nation grasped that he not only had no
scruples but that he also had no list. By then, many honorable Americans whose sentiments leaned
to the left -- among them, teachers and actors, journalists and Government functionaries -- had lost
their jobs in a witch hunt.
But half a century later, with Soviet-era archives open, it turns out there was a list.
Not the fake one brandished by McCarthy before a group of Republican women, but a real one,
with code names and salary receipts and carbons of sensitive messages on the Manhattan Project
and American diplomatic strategy that were passed to the Soviets.
The appearance of the Soviet evidence starting in the
early 1990's, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and
the 1995-1996 declassification of American intelligence
files on the interception of Soviet spy cables -- now
widely known as the Venona decryptions -- has
unleashed a flood of scholarship. In a replay of old
battles, it is a debate over American Communism and
McCarthyism with two challenges.
Sullied Icons
One side is asking: If the left was so wrong so recently,
why should it be listened to at all? The other side
counters that when the right is given a chance, as it was
in the early 1950's, it becomes vicious. And with the
cold war won, it argues, there is a whiff of right-wing
triumphalism in the air that must not go unaddressed.
The new documents certainly sully many icons of the old
left. Julius Rosenberg, it is now clear, was guilty (though
there is still debate about his wife's complicity). Alger
Hiss, according to respected new scholarship, was probably a Soviet agent and the American
Government in the 1930's and 40's harbored hundreds of Communist spies and even more fellow
travelers.
And there is more to come. Next year, Ronald Radosh, a senior research associate at George
Washington University, will publish what he says is a devastating picture of the Spanish Civil War --
as a gruesome example of Soviet imperialism dressed up as anti-fascism, rather than as the epic,
noble battle the left has always said it was.
Extreme Measures
It is no surprise that, given the ferocity of the political struggle at the time, the scholarly struggle over
the new data is raw and impassioned.
"On the one hand you have scholars showing that many members of the Communist Party were
motivated by a legitimate desire to fight social injustice," said Jonathan Brent, editorial director of
Yale University Press, which is publishing 25 volumes on the new material titled "Annals of
Communism." "But at the top of the party they were controlled by Moscow. How do you reconcile
the two?"
The new evidence has appeared so quickly and so forcefully, and at a time when Communism is so
bereft of defenders and intellectual capital, that some have flirted with the rehabilitation of McCarthy
himself.
In 1996, The Observer of London stated: "McCarthy has gone down as one of the most reviled
men in U.S. history, but historians are now facing the unpleasant truth that he was right." In The
Washington Post, Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, "Point by point, Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and
yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him."
Such assertions send chills down the spine of Ellen Schrecker, a historian at Yeshiva University,
whose new book, "Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America" (Little, Brown), argues that
whatever harm may have come to the country from Soviet-sponsored spies is dwarfed by
McCarthy's wave of terror, which crushed livelihoods as well as any alternative political discourse.
She said social developments like government-provided health care and strong labor unions --
things commonplace elsewhere in the West -- were stymied in America. And, she added, the China
hands in the State Department who could have fended off the disaster of the Vietnam War had been
purged for suspected Communist sympathies.
The gush of new scholarship from the archives is less rigorous than it appears, say Professor
Schrecker and others, including Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation, who wrote "Naming
Names" (Viking, 1980), a book about Hollywood blacklisting.
The scholarship relies heavily on the boasts of Soviet-paid agents in America eager to impress their
Moscow masters. And, they say, it is scholarship with an agenda.
"What is happening today is an effort to deny the legitimacy not just of those who favored the
Communist Party but the entire left-wing political movement in the post-Berlin Wall moment," said
Nelson N. Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of Virginia.
"The whole anti-racist, anti-capitalist impulse in American life, which reached its apogee in the
1930's and 40's, is on the line. If it turns out these movements were the results of Communists
advancing their goals, are they still legitimate? People like Ron Radosh want to discredit not only
that historical episode but the moral legitimacy of the left in the United States today."
Mr. Radosh says he has little patience for these arguments. "I deal with issues of historical truth," he
said. "The left's inability to accept this truth is what discredits the left."
Perhaps, too, something more is at stake. Many of the most passionate advocates on both sides of
this struggle, including Mr. Radosh and Professor Schrecker, were "red diaper" babies, weaned on
the left. The debate pits those upholding the honor of their idealistic parents against those who
believe their honor requires them to expose the deceptions on which they were raised.
William F. Buckley Jr., whose new novel on McCarthy is due out next summer, said many
Americans looking back on the espionage dismiss its significance because there is so little threat
from Moscow today that to them it is hard to remember how serious the peril was.
"The notion of stealing secrets is seen today as a kind of misjudgment, a form of eccentric behavior,"
said Mr. Buckley, who was an early friend and defender of McCarthy.
How much damage was done is a matter of some contention. No one suggests that a Communist
coup was afoot or that the nation was in existential danger. But the Soviets did build the bomb a
year or two earlier than they would have -- no small feat -- and it is not hard to imagine other
damage that might have resulted from unchecked spying.
Color Them Red
Harvey Klehr, a historian at Emory University and co-author of a new book "The Soviet World of
American Communism" (Yale University Press), has pointed out that if Franklin D. Roosevelt had
died in his third term, Vice President Henry Wallace would have become President. Wallace had
once said that as President he would make Laurence Duggan his Secretary of State and Harry
Dexter White his Treasury Secretary. Evidence in the Venona messages suggests that both were
Soviet agents, Professor Klehr said.
That is why people like Mr. Buckley argue that McCarthy has been maligned by history.
"McCarthy's excesses have to be taken in the context of other work he did," Mr. Buckley said.
"For example, his concentration on security loyalty practices was absolutely correct."
Timothy Naftali, a senior fellow at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, said McCarthy
gave anti-Communism a bad name, but that a fair examination of Communist activity during and
after World War II would show that anti-Communist paranoia was understandable.
"The F.B.I. and military officials had lists of hundreds of unidentified code names that appeared in
Soviet intelligence traffic and had every reason to believe that many of those names belonged to
agents still operating," he said. Many of the code names have yet to be identified.
The Soviets became aware of American interceptions by the end of the 1940's -- thanks to Kim
Philby, then a Washington-based double agent of British intelligence -- and shut down their
operation just as McCarthy was coming on the scene and American counter-intelligence was
swinging into action. By the time McCarthy was hunting Communists, most of the agents were gone.
As the century draws to a close, Communism and Nazism are being increasingly grouped as
20th-century paradigms of totalitarian horror. But once the Soviets were seen for what they were,
were those who insisted on waiting for "true" Communism fools? Or knaves?
It was Hitler who said people prefer a big lie to a small truth, and the proponents of Soviet
Communism certainly understood that. It was the very depth of their betrayal that made it so hard
for American Communists to grasp the deception.
"When we realized that what we thought was heaven really was hell, we fell into silence," said
Robert Schrank, a former Communist and union leader who has just published a memoir titled,
"Wasn't That a Time? Growing Up Radical and Red in America" (M.I.T. Press). "We were
overwhelmed with shame."
That explains, in part, the uncivil nature of today's dialogue and why it will likely be some time
before a full accounting can be offered.
"As these first documents come out, we are having a debate," said Mr. Brent of Yale University
Press. "But it is a slow historical process, something involving our national consciousness, and I
think it will be at least five to 10 years before a historian arises who can really put this all in
perspective." |
