Whooops! Evidence and scholarship makes the NYT and academia rethink their reflexive anti anticommunism (that is, those capable of thinking):
October 18, 1998
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
It 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."
search.nytimes.com
Like Chambers said, McCarthy was a gift to anti anti-communist liberals that they would use to tar the whole anti-communist movement. History, at last, is showing us who was right. And as usual, the Left always finds its real enemy in the truth.
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