CHAPTER SIX

Who reads the Communist press? Only a few people who are already Communists. We don’t have to propagandize them. What is our object? Who do we have to influence? We have to influence non-Communists if we want to make them Communists or if we want to fool them. So, we have to try to infiltrate the big press.

—VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV1

The Soviets live and breathe deception. You cannot understand what they are doing without understanding this. Indeed, you can’t even begin to understand Communism without understanding deception, which is very rarely mentioned in textbooks on Communism [emphasis added].

—JOSEPH D. DOUGLASS JR.2

Who stole our history?

Because stolen it was, diverted from its natural course and rechanneled to the point where the beaten path became a shortcut from reality to deception. This, I believe, is confirmed every single time one of those gigantic corrections of the false record, flagged by scholars shouting “Eureka!,” fails to enter our general histories, fails to capture popular imagination, fails to become part of our popular understanding, and fails to occur to us as a mainstream thought. Like a skiff on a dry creek bed, these corrections go nowhere.

Thus, when it comes to Harry Hopkins, for example—after Andrew and Gordievsky’s stunning revelation (1990), after Mark’s meticulous Hopkins-Venona study (1998), after Andrew and Mitrokhin’s endnote endorsement of Mark’s conclusions (1999), after Romerstein and Breindel’s extended analysis (2000) (and even more evidence of Hopkins’s treason, as I will argue below), Cambridge University Press can offer Yalta 1945 by Fraser J. Harbutt, 468 pages published in 2010, in which Harry Hopkins lives into posterity as simply that “close aide” FDR relied on. There is not even an asterisk to indicate the small but expert school of thought that attests to Hopkins’s activities on the Kremlin’s behalf, which require consideration in any study of this final and momentous (disastrous) meeting of the so-called Big Three. (Even worse is the tome’s black hole on GRU Agent Alger Hiss, who was all over Yalta like flypaper but rates exactly two mentions in passing.3) All we get by way of elucidation is that Hopkins’s “monitoring and energizing talents were applied far and wide throughout the governmental bureaucracy and on the multiple boards and commissions that were conceived, often on very short notice, to fill unanticipated gaps and discharge urgent critical tasks.”4

This isn’t untrue; it just ignores the central, unresolved controversy: on behalf of whom he was applying those talents. This omission is typical. To sample some of recent bios of FDR, in the 1,360 pages of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black (PublicAffairs, 2003), in the 896 pages of Traitor to His Class by H. W. Brands (Doubleday, 2008), and in the relatively svelte 560 pages of Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2003), the ubiquitous co-president, foreign secretary, and uranium snatcher Harry “Rasputin” Hopkins, is depicted as that most “intimate” of Roosevelt intimates, the most “versatile,” and most “indispensable.” Again, none of this is untrue. All of these recent histories, however, completely ignore the still-burning question about Hopkins that was first raised by experts a quarter century ago: indispensable to whom?

Such professional incuriosity is staggering. Then again, considering the amount of feet-of-clay-revealing spadework that a serious correction of the record will entail, perhaps it is also disappointingly understandable. It’s that “existing view of the world” again: No one wants to admit it’s a total phony. Once we finally incorporate the facts of Soviet-directed penetration of the U.S. government—the Communist-agent-occupation of the U.S. government—which began in earnest in 1933, everything we know about ourselves as a nation will also have to rearrange itself, our history taking on a brand-new pattern of revelation.

It starts small, like a single click of a kaleidescope: Since Harry Hopkins was so close to FDR, as the biographies/hagiographies usually note in passing, and Harry Hopkins served as an agent of Stalin’s influence, where does that leave the motives, the judgment, and the keystone legacy of the “great” Roosevelt?

The questions fragment and multiply. What about those momentous decisions Hopkins influenced Roosevelt to make? That is, what about the economic policies and, later, the war strategies Hopkins helped set in place and personally kept in motion? These same economic polices and war strategies made the postwar world.

Suddenly, our own preexisting view from the Tidal Basin vantage point of FDR’s sprawling memorial blurs. Of course, this new way of looking at things isn’t just about Harry Hopkins. His example is neither singular nor even singularly blatant. Scads of devilish Kremlin agents with dossiers stuffed with confirmed Venona references still manage to retain their masks and smile for the history books, or, more often, disappear into the woodwork of the past as though the Red hunts of old and the massive evidence spills of late never happened. So long as the Red hunters remain lost to us in the toxic black fog of “McCarthyism,” who will notice that they were right all along? Always, correction of the record, exposure of the record, stalls against a formidable force field surrounding the status quo of conspiracy, an ancien régime of lies.

The case of Lauchlin Currie illustrates how history’s cloak of invisibility works, how a perfectly, loftily placed Soviet agent with the trust of and access to the president of the United States can remain an anonymous, unknown, unreckoned presence in our histories despite the epic damage he did to the nation. The truth is, Benedict Arnold should have an awful lot of company in those recesses of the American mind where a name rings a bell and the free-association word choice is “traitor.” Even before Currie started working in the White House in 1939, where his activities on behalf of the Kremlin appear in nine Venona cables (KGB code name “Page”), I would argue that this Harvard PhD was already undermining free markets and liberty as the original champion of a brand-new macroeconomic policy we now know as “stimulus spending.”5 No archival evidence to date confirms that Currie’s pre-Keynesian championing of “public expenditure as a stimulus to the economy” was, in fact, a Red Plot to Destroy America, but the fact that its initial booster inside the Roosevelt administration was a Soviet agent should draw our eye.

Currie wasn’t alone with his Soviet sympathies in the West Wing. Venona tells us Currie’s assistant, Michael Greenberg, was a Soviet agent, too. Moreover, David K. Niles, another Roosevelt executive assistant, appears in Venona, noted for his intervention to procure visas for a KGB husband-wife team—with the final paperwork, Romerstein and Breindel report, being handled by another Soviet agent named Michael W. Burd.6 Was Niles an agent, too? The record establishes Niles’s close connections to other agents, but no more. These connections, by the way, included Harry Hopkins. When Hopkins test-drove his own presidential candidacy in the run-up to 1940—Roosevelt’s third term in the end—Niles was, in Sherwood’s words, Hopkins’s “chief political adviser and campaign strategist.”7 There were other even closer connections. According to a story Whittaker Chambers heard from another Soviet agent (these people got around), Niles at one time threatened to expose the activities of a Communist group in Washington that included a Soviet agent—Niles’s homosexual lover—unless the man left his wife. The man was ordered out of Washington immediately by the Communist underground, then under “illegal,” or undercover, spymaster J. Peters.8 Quite a Red barrel of monkeys, the Roosevelt White House.

To be sure, such evidence was a U.S. government secret before the mid-1990s release, unpredicted but serendipitous, of nearly three thousand fully or only partly decrypted Soviet cables from the Venona archive. Still, it’s important to understand that much of what Venona confirmed had been in the public domain for half a century. In 1948, our heroine Elizabeth Bentley publicly named Currie among dozens of government officials who were also agents of Soviet infiltration. Currie, she said under oath before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was a leading member of a spy network known as the Silvermaster Group. (Whittaker Chambers would testify later that he knew Currie to be close to Silvermaster and arch Soviet spy Harry Dexter White, No. 2 man at Treasury.) In 1944, Bentley recalled, Currie tipped off the Soviets that American codebreakers were cracking a secret Soviet code (ironically, the very code used in the Venona cables); and, further, that Currie had thrown his White House weight around to protect Nathan Gregory Silvermaster from a government security investigation. He also, Bentley testified, simultaneously promoted and helped place other Soviet agents.9 All nose-of-the-camel stuff, as it turned out.

What was also true—and the FBI knew it from 1945 wiretaps—was that Currie interceded not just to save other Communist agents from exposure but also to save himself. I refer to his role in the most important espionage case that never came to trial, the Amerasia case, named for the pro-Communist magazine owned and edited by Philip Jaffe, a friend of CPUSA chief Earl Browder. Amerasia was publishing classified information. OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the precursor to the CIA, wanted to know how. On June 6, 1945, the FBI arrested six people on espionage charges in the case, including owner-editor Jaffe and a State Department official named John Stewart Service. A whopping thousand pounds of classified documents would be impounded from Amerasia’s offices and elsewhere, including Service’s State Department office.10 About one-quarter of these documents concerned military matters, while many were marked with the warning that possession of them was a violation of the Espionage Act. Little wonder FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover considered Amerasia an “airtight case.”11

However, as M. Stanton Evans documents, Amerasia would never come to trial. Why? The fix was in. A dirty plot “to throw the case and free John Service” was hatched and executed by Lauchlin Currie, veteran New Dealer-wheeler Thomas ‘Tommy the Cork’ Corcoran, and “higher-ups at Justice,” including Truman’s newly named attorney general (and later Supreme Court justice) Tom Clark. It was all on tape.12 Stuff like this:

CORCORAN: What I want to do is get the guy [Service] out.

CURRIE: Yeah, the important thing is to get him out …

CORCORAN: … I think our problem is to take care of this kid, isn’t it?

CURRIE: That’s right.

That this shocking exchange and others like it were recorded for posterity (fat lot we’ve done with it) was entirely accidental. Suspicious of Roosevelt loyalist Corcoran, Truman had ordered the FBI to listen in on him, warrantless-wiretap-style, to see what Corcoran was up to. The G-man on the other end of the line must have blown his top when he realized he was listening to a conspiracy in action—not just a conspiracy theory—to rig a grand jury espionage case. Meanwhile, back on Okinawa—just to add a little context—soldiers and marines were just then fighting for gains of “up to” one thousand yards of mud a day. Who was really knee-deep in the muck?

The implications of Amerasia are staggering. It wasn’t just “the kid” and his five Amerasia codefendants who got “taken care of.” It is no exaggeration to say that it was practically the entire secret Communist occupation of the U.S. government itself, kit and caboodle, that these Washington fixers saved from disruption and dispersal, from the mortal blow of exposure. It is also no exaggeration to say that millions of lives would be lost due to this effective and corrupt maneuver to shield this Red Plot in Progress to communize China. That is, here, in mid-1945, quite suddenly poking into the light, was the jagged edge of the dark sword aimed at China by Moscow and ably carried forward by Soviet agents within the U.S. government. The Washington fixers, led (rolled) by Soviet agent Currie, managed to push everything back into the shadows, but the Communist jig could well have been up in open court, even before Elizabeth Bentley came in from the cold five months later. Evans explains, “Because the fix was in, there was no serious effort to track down the confederates of the Amerasia culprits threaded throughout the State Department, Treasury, the White House, and other influential places, all diligently working to shape the course of Cold War history in Asia.”13

Threaded, knotted, and tangled throughout the government is more like it. This thicket of Communist occupation is overwhelming to behold, even now, with the lights up and the curtain partly lifted. At the time, however, everything went dark again with the Amerasia “fix,” and the Red conspirators played on unseen. There would be no probe of Amerasia’s owner, Philip Jaffe—for example, his meetings with CPUSA chief Earl Browder, Chinese Red leader Tung Pi-wu, officials at the Soviet consulate in New York, and Soviet agent Joseph Bernstein (KGB code name “Marquis”). There would be no routine investigation of John Stewart Service to net the fact that two slam-dunk Soviet agents had been his housemates in China: Solomon Adler and Chi Chao-ting, both instrumental in the sabotage of the Nationalist Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek, and the Red-rigged triumph of Mao Tse-tung and his so-called People’s Republic. Worst of all, the sprawling Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), an intimately linked and leading player in the Chinese tragedy (under the Red-toadying tutelage of Owen Lattimore), which regarded Amerasia as one of its publications,14 would be allowed to continue its massive influence operations. IPR would continue to shade and shape U.S. policy in support of what it promoted as the “agrarian” Chinese—Mao’s Red Army. Following a monumental investigation, Senator Pat McCarran’s (D-NV) Internal Security Subcommittee report boiled down the IPR essence thus: “The IPR was a vehicle used by the Communists to orientate American far eastern policy toward Communist objectives.”15 That was in 1952, and the news was too late. All of this and more could have come out in 1945.

It didn’t, thanks in large part to Lauchlin Currie.

Did I mention Currie’s “special program” at the White House was Far Eastern affairs? As a smart Soviet mole in a White House office—which, cozy thought, Currie shared with his assistant, Soviet agent Michael Greenberg, himself an IPR man16—Currie’s notion of “special” meant such projects as maneuvering Japan away from an attack on Siberia and later communizing China.17 That meant a close association with IPR. Indeed, Lauchlin Currie personally (and without consulting Secretary of State Cordell Hull18) installed the IPR’s Owen Lattimore, “a conscious, articulate instrument of the Soviet conspiracy,”19 as a White House adviser to Chiang Kai-shek—or, as Chiang himself suspected, Communist eyes and ears.20 So neat. Obviously, Currie couldn’t let something as inconvenient and dangerous as an FBI investigation and a grand jury proceeding mess everything up. As the Red Plot’s top in-house White House adviser on China, he had to do everything in his considerable power to ensure that Service walked. If Currie hadn’t succeeded, Mao’s Long March might well have been frozen in its tracks.

What a concept. Of course, the march tramped on, assisted in part by Washington’s Soviet proxies. Service housemate Solomon Adler, a Venona-identified spy in the Silvermaster network, remained under cover as a Treasury staffer working to throw China, while Service housemate Chi remained under cover as a Maoist agent inside the Chinese Nationalist government until it fell in 1949, “at which point,” Evans writes, “mission completed, he would abscond to Beijing.”21 After Senator Joe McCarthy, bless him, started unpacking the stinking corruption that had gutted the Amerasia case, much to the benefit of world Communist revolution, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Adler also absconded to Beijing. By 1960, amid the hustle and bustle of Mao’s Great Leap Forward (which killed eighteen million to forty-six million Chinese), Adler was spending his days translating Mao’s writings into English.22

Words fail.

There was something else that should have happened in 1945 that didn’t: the unmasking of Lauchlin Currie himself. No such luck. How could luck—how could the FBI, how could a grand jury—compete against the Communist occupation of Washington? Currie, Adler, Chi, and the rest kept their cover, even their cool. They carried on, their networks of spies and traitors remaining in place until, Evans explains, “Joe McCarthy in his rough-and-ready fashion set about dragging into public view, case by painful case, in 1950.”23 Really dirty work, but someone had to do it. It is only when the malignancy, range, and ruthlessness of the Soviet infestation are understood that the requirements of fumigation make sense.

Funny, 1950 was when Adler left the country; Currie, too—and about time. Five damaging years had passed since the Amerasia arrests. Currie, for one, had resigned from his White House job shortly after the arrests. By July of 1945, not long after that wiretapped Amerasia conversation about “the kid” took place, he had, according to a brief story in The New York Times, already taken up a position in a company. Whether that was due to Amerasia, I can’t say. Salient point is, though, Currie went out with his head high, confident enough of his “protected status,” as Evans calls it—and, I would add, his laughable disguise as a loyal public servant—to bluff his way through a historic House committee hearing in August 1948 where he and the rest of the secret agents called in to testify categorically denied all of Elizabeth Bentley’s charges.24

Mr. Currie also denied that he had disclosed any “inside information” concerning China to any person not authorized to receive it …

Mr. Currie also denied he had interceded for Mr. Gregory Silvermaster when he was under a loyalty investigation.25

As for the infamous photo lab in the basement of Silvermaster’s house? The one that Elizabeth Bentley had told Congress was used by Silvermaster and William Ludwig Ullmann, another federal employee-cum-spy (who jointly owned the Silvermaster house26), to photograph secret government documents for dispatch to Moscow?

To the befuddlement of the House committee, Silvermaster had earlier invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination to answer whether his basement contained photographic equipment; Ullmann had, too. Ullmann even invoked the Fifth to refuse to answer whether he’d ever been in the basement of the house he’d lived in for ten years.

It turned out the FBI had been there and already knew everything there was to know about the photo lab. “On November 29, 1945, a detailed observation of the basement of the Silvermaster residence … was made,” an entry in the voluminous declassified Silvermaster FBI file reads. It goes on to describe the lights, reflectors, enlarger, tripods, camera, and well-stocked supplies that were observed,27 but you didn’t need to be a G-man or a Soviet spy to figure it out. On May 3, 1947, a real estate listing in The Washington Evening Star announced the “price for quick sale” of the Silvermaster house. “Interior of this fine brick house must be seen to be appreciated,” the real estate copy ran beneath a picture of the house. Among its attributes: “an excellent photographic room in the basement.”28

This ad, not the FBI’s “detailed observation,” went into congressional record presumably in response to Silvermaster’s and Ullmann’s stonewalling. Maybe that’s why the Communists’ story on the Silvermaster basement changed by the time Lauchlin Currie was called to testify.

In an extraordinary daylong hearing in August 1948 where the witnesses were “persons accused in the Soviet spy-ring investigation,” as The New York Times put it—and which, in Venona-vetted fact, featured various heavy hitters of the Silvermaster lineup (Currie, Harry Dexter White, Frank Coe, who soon would be translating Mao into English with Solomon Adler, Sonia and Bela Gold, Donald Hiss)—Currie and White both played indignant, owl-eyed bureaucrats with nothing to hide. Former assistant treasury secretary White, now recognized as the highest-ranking U.S. government official to serve Stalin covertly, even had the gall to speechify about democratic principle (printed verbatim by the pro-Communist publication PM29). No pleading the Fifth Amendment for these cool customers. Matter of fact, they both admitted visiting Silvermaster’s home, even visiting the basement. They also admitted that they “understood” that Ullmann—mentioned in an impressive twenty-four separate Venona cables—was an amateur photographer. They just didn’t notice whether he had a photo lab in the basement.

Too busy, apparently. “Mr. White said that he went there to play Ping-Pong … Mr. Currie said he had gone with his son, who was interested in power tools, to see Mr. Ullmann’s collection.”30

Three days later, on August 16, 1948, Harry Dexter White was dead of a heart attack, age fifty-five. “His death completed my sense of human disaster,” Whittaker Chambers writes in Witness, describing his thoughts on hearing the news of his former confederate’s sudden death. “White is luckier than the rest of us. He at least is well out of it.”31

Chambers was right. We, as a nation, were just entering those muddy trenches, thanks to the Curries and Whites and Silvermasters and Hisses. So much damage had been done and was still being done; so many lives were already lost, with more, many more, Americans included, still to be lost—from Siberia to Korea, from Hungary to Vietnam. As Evans reminds us, “in the five-year span between the Amerasia fix and the McCarthy blow-up of 1950,” China fell. The rise of Mao was assured; the death sentences of tens of millions of Chinese had only to be written; wars in Korea and Vietnam were just waiting to be fought. Would Adler and Coe, busy scribbling Mao’s evil aphorisms into English, even notice? Do we even notice? What do we retain of these momentous events? What understanding or artifact do we have to recall the tortuous trail of corruption, betrayal, bloodshed, tears, terror, and waste that seems to follow so very directly from that Corcoran-Currie-Clark conspiracy to “fix” Amerasia in June 1945?

Nothing.

“The bride is a great-granddaughter of the late Harry Dexter White, an economist who helped create the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,” The New York Times effervesced in 2009.32 An economist whose epic treason against this country is documented in fifteen Venona cables, more than two dozen KGB documents unearthed from the archives, and notes in his handwriting found in the Whittaker Chambers “Pumpkin Papers.”33 What about that?

Nothing.

More people “know” that J. Edgar Hoover wore a red dress around the Plaza Hotel—a total fabrication—than know the first thing about Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, and their epic treason against this country that delivered millions of people to misery and death. As a society we gaze, stupefied, at those Warhol portraits of Murderer Mao over the gas logs in the fireplace, and think they make life soigné; we snarl, reflexively, at a demonology centered around Senator Joe McCarthy, inhaling with salubrious indignation over the dastardly deeds of the Evil One. “Had McCarthy done nothing more during his uproarious heyday in the Senate,” Evans writes, “his role in blowing the lid off the Amerasia scandal would deserve the plaudits of a grateful nation.”34

Yes. The nation should indeed be grateful to McCarthy for his determination to expose Amerasia, to wrest the facts of the matter from the darkness of conspiratorial deception, to reveal the hidden workings of a case “replete with cover-up, perjury and grand-jury-rigging,” as Evans neatly sums up. In retrospect, this case, among many others, should finally recalibrate our historical gaze from the bull’s-eye wrongfully painted on McCarthy’s hide to the phony halo awkwardly clamped over the Truman White House. It was the Truman administration, after all, that kept John Stewart Service on the State Department payroll, along with, as noted, his housemate Solomon Adler at Treasury, both men repeat champions of multiple Truman-instituted “loyalty tests” despite their fattening FBI dossiers.

Strange. When given the choice, the Truman White House always chose concealment over revelation, squelching a security breach rather than sounding an alarm. This would seem to make it, in effect, a coconspirator in Communist infiltration, and a lousy defender of the Constitution. I don’t know how to conclude otherwise. The fact is, when we say Venona was a secret before 1995, that means it was a secret to us—Us, the People. Long before the entirely haphazard sequence of events that led to the declassification of the Venona archive—or some portion thereof (we don’t know for sure)—these ciphers were broken. They were read. At some point, then, long before 1995, Lauchlin Currie’s Soviet record was obvious. At some point, then, long before 1995, Alger Hiss’s Soviet record was obvious, too. Ditto for Harry Dexter White and Gregory Silvermaster and William Ludwig Ullmann and hundreds more. After a codebreaker read it first—the electrifying flicker of comprehension coming as payoff for the skull-cracking days, months, years of study—the Kremlin’s secret wasn’t a secret anymore; it was disseminated very strictly to American officials, military and civilian. Was it now … an American secret?

While it would seem that some very wild cats were out of the bag, they were immediately locked back up in a cage where, the idea was, they could do no harm. The truth is, when these secrets were locked back up, they could do no good. They could shed no light on the bitterly, dangerously divisive controversies that would tear this country apart for decades, probably forever. They could offer no succor to the pilloried Cassandras who had no protection but a stubborn grasp of the facts as they knew them and as the government knew them, too. But refused to say so. The continued hush-hush classification of Venona could help no one except, irony of ironies, the spies and traitors who served that murderous and revolutionary junta in Moscow, ardently, volubly supported by the useful fools (“useful morons” seems more apt) in their thrall who created, controlled, and amplified the echo chamber of Communist apologetics.

The raucous career of Drew Pearson, political gossip columnist, radio personality, and one-man cottage industry, demonstrates the echo chamber in action.

By 1950, when McCarthy began trying to reconstruct the hidden means by which the U.S. government had been secretly infiltrated and occupied, the senator picked up on the trail of Lauchlin Currie. As noted above, it was around this same time (I don’t know if it was before or after McCarthy was on the case) that Currie took a powder to Colombia—or, as his apologists prefer, accepted a position with the Colombian government. This was somewhat bad luck for Pearson, whose hugely litigious and influential columns and broadcasts carried their fair share of Currie “tips” through the years.35 Indeed, they were sometimes conveyed to him through John Stewart Service.36

Only met the man at a party once, Pearson stipulates in his diaries, lying. Why did he say that? “Currie arranged for Service to meet the renowned political columnist Drew Pearson in a little bar in the basement of the Hay Adams hotel … They met several times,” writes Laura Tyson Li in her 2006 biography Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, explaining that Currie wanted Service to “build a backfire” against Madame Chiang’s soaring popularity in the United States. “Pearson grew increasingly acerbic [read: anti-Chiang] on the subject of China.”37 Service wasn’t, as he put it himself in an interview with Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh in 1985, Lauchlin Currie’s “designated leaker” for nothing.38

On June 13, 1951, with the McCarran Committee in full investigatory mode, Pearson wrote in his diary, “Tipped off Lock Currie that the McCarran Committee was about to brand him as one of the top Russian informants in the Roosevelt administration … He looked as if the ground had fallen out from under him … Lock is a meek and mild little man who I think would have been the last to have played ball with the Russians.”39

Tipped off Lock Currie? One of the scores of out-of-print books that now stand in stacks in my study is Drew Pearson: Diaries, 1949-1959. Examining the black-and-white head shot of Pearson filling the cover of the 1974 book (a face familiar enough at sell books at one time), I look for some telling break in the intently smug stare, the furrowed brow, the Kronkite mustache (then again, Kronkite’s mustache was probably a Pearson mustache). My question is, Did Pearson buy his own blather? He sure sold a lot of it. “Lock” Currie wasn’t the only little man “to have played ball with the Russians” Pearson went to the mat for; Pearson also vouched for Amerasia’s star, John Stewart Service. “I doubt whether there was any real reason to doubt his loyalty,”40 he wrote on December 9, 1951, the day Service was finally fired by the State Department (after somehow passing “loyalty reviews” for six years). He vouched for Mao’s Red Army—“Northern Chinese” or “an agrarian party,” as he called them.41 Then there was his vouching for Owen Lattimore, the Big Daddy link in the pro-Communist chain to turn China Red. Pearson assured the nation, via coast-to-coast radio hookup, “I happen to know Owen Lattimore personally, and I only wish this country had more patriots like him.”42

Patriots? Owen Lattimore never met a purge, show trial, or violent Communist takeover he couldn’t and didn’t apologize for. Pearson got his wish, though. The country did have more “patriots” like Lattimore—in spades—and that was precisely the problem. For starters, there was Pearson’s legman and reporter David Karr, an alumnus of the Communist-occupied Office of War Information.43 Karr’s the one about whom Pearson said that if the charges against him were true, the Washington Monument was a hole in the ground.44

The record tells us that David Karr was indeed a Communist agent—“a competent KGB source,” as the KGB described him in a file unearthed by Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats in 1992.45 Come to think of it, Karr’s predecessor as Pearson legman, Andrew Older, was also a Party man, identified by undercover agent Mary Markward, while Andrew’s sister, Julia Older Bazer, handler of Moscow cables at OWI, would later invoke the Fifth when asked if she was a Party member.46 Too bad Pearson died before KGB files fingered his longtime cocolumnist Robert S. Allen as a paid NKVD agent in the 1930s—exactly when the duo came to national prominence for their widely syndicated “muck-raking” feature, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round.”47 Pearson would have had to eat his hat.

All of which is to say that Drew Pearson was a man who batted 1.000 when it came to misplaced Communist sympathies—or misplaced sympathies for Communists. The puzzle on Pearson’s page is whether he was just a blowhard who vouched for the Communist agents who happened to be clustered around him or whether he was actively agenting himself. “Virtually every scandal that opponents used to besmirch McCarthy’s reputation … can be traced to a Drew Pearson column,” writes Arthur Herman.48 True, but was it thrill-seeking empathy or strict dogma that drove the man? I can’t find the answer, although it’s part of the record now that Pearson and his journalist brother Leon both became sufficiently palsy-walsy with an important NKVD agent named Samuel Krafsur—a TASS “correspondent” who trolled for NKVD recruits in the Fourth Estate49—to pop up in a 1944 Venona cable because the NKVD was considering inviting Leon aboard. No further Venona or other word on what happened next, but Leon would accompany Secretary of State James Byrnes to Moscow in 1945, which somehow is a less than comforting thought.50

Those Krafsur-Pearson-Pearson tête-à-têtes sound intriguing, probably great Hollywood material—although reel life, as we’ve seen, was rigidly controlled with ideological purpose. So, too, was real life, where the alternate reality created and dominated by the Drew Pearsons of the day supplanted life as it was, and as it should have and would have been apparent had basic facts been revealed and acknowledged—basic facts about the sworn testimonies and other evidence against, for example, Lauchlin Currie. In this case, I don’t blame the media so much as I blame the government. Uncle Sam. In keeping the growing archive of Venona’s secrets from the American people for four decades—not to mention burgeoning, bursting FBI dossiers—the U.S. government played a shocking role in perpetuating what is more and more obviously a fantasy world at war with reality: a crazy place where Communist infiltrators were not, in fact, under every bed; where Red hunters did not, in fact, deserve the plaudits of a grateful nation; where the Curries and Whites and Adlers and Hisses did not, in fact, play ball with treason every time. Because the U.S. government withheld so much vital information, we learned to laugh at Communist “bugaboos,” loathe uptight “Red-baiters,” and cluck sadly over all those “martyrs” of congressional “overreach.” Which reminds me, one of Pearson’s more risible defenses of Soviet agent Karr was that he only worked for the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker so he could cover the New York Yankees and see them play for free.

It is in exactly this kind of fantasy world where what Orwell called “neutral fact” could not exist. As we have seen, he dated its disappearance to 1936 in Spain, where battles were being misreported for ideological ends—whether they were won or not, whether they took place or not—something Orwell noted was not a problem as recently as World War I. With the injection of Communist ideology into the world’s nervous system, “neutral fact,” unshaded fact, unvarnished fact, objectivity, or absolutes couldn’t exist anymore. Moral absolutes couldn’t exist anymore, either. Patriotism, for example, would no longer be “good,” just as treason would no longer be “bad.” Treason is no more when fact and morality are fungible. The concept itself disappeared from our lexicon, and even, I think, from our thoughts altogether. The phrase “betrayal of the nation” has an archaic quality to most of us, the word “betrayal” itself an act of exaggeration somehow inappropriate to any set of circumstances, and “nation”—what’s that?

A 1996 review of Edward Jay Epstein’s biography of Armand Hammer made the eradication of treason as a concept plain. As noted earlier, Epstein’s book reveals the billionaire philanthropist and magnus art collector to have been, yes, a traitor. The reviewer considered the notion a retro novelty. “That word,” the reviewer wrote of “traitor,” “to modern ears, sounds as quaint as ‘victrola.’ But Epstein gives it teeth by putting Hammer’s perfidy in context.”51

Context—bingo. It is precisely such vital context that the U.S. government deprived us of and that, astonishingly, we lack to this day. In their book Sacred Secrets, Jerrold and Leona Schecter examine the short, tight flow of revelation from within the Venona project, beginning in 1945, to the Truman White House. There, it hit not just a brick wall but high ramparts with battlements behind which President Truman himself crouched, armed with buckets of boiling oil to stop it from entering his partisan political domain. From Truman’s fifteen-minute meeting with Gen. Carter W. Clarke and his aide Col. Ernest Gibson of army intelligence (G-2) on June 4, 1945, when, the Schecters argue, Truman was first informed that army codebreakers had been attempting to read secret Soviet cables from Moscow to Washington since 1943, the happy heyday of the anti-Hitler alliance, Truman didn’t want any of it. Shockingly and disappointingly (to Truman fans), this wasn’t even a matter of this president accepting the facts, old boy, just not the implications. Truman didn’t want the facts, period; the implications never had a chance.

The Schecters cite three concerns Truman may have been guided by in the following order: Truman’s concern about whether decoded cables could be introduced in court as evidence to prosecute Soviet agents; concern about damage to FDR’s place in history that such revelations of Soviet infiltration would cause; and concern about political damage to the Democratic Party as the party in charge that had let the country down. Even without Venona’s confirmation, Republicans were running on the platform that Democrats were “soft on security,” a perennial GOP issue; at that time, of course, as Haynes and Klehr might say, they only knew the half of it.52

I’ve concluded that the Schecters’ order of concerns should be reversed. Truman doesn’t seem to have regarded the revelations of Venona—confirmation of Communist infiltration of the U.S. government under FDR—as anything other than a partisan political problem, a cudgel Republican security hawks could use to bash Democrats in elections and, therefore, would have to be deprived of. Mainly for this petty reason, the sensational body of information, which belonged to a betrayed nation, remained on political ice at all costs. That didn’t just mean national security costs. There was also the incalculable cost of continued concealment to the creation of a cogent, factual, reality-based record of history.

It’s true there were legal issues to be resolved regarding the use of the secret, fragmentary decryptions as courtroom evidence, but Truman’s efforts to squelch, minimize, and negate non-Venona sources of corroboration—Elizabeth Bentley’s and Whittaker Chambers’s testimonies spring to mind—make evident the president’s appalling indifference to his basic constitutional responsibilities to safeguard the nation. There was also, I would add, his indifference to his obligation as a human being and American citizen, let alone president, to support the truth tellers twisting nightmarishly in a funhouse-mirrored world where truth had no context and lies predominated. Remember, Truman’s initial reaction to Whittaker Chambers’s testimony about Alger Hiss was to dismiss it as a “red herring.” This plunged Chambers into despair, as he later wrote in Witness, because it told him he “was not only deprived of official good will in testifying against Communism” but also guaranteed “active hostility among the most powerful sections of the Administration.” Indeed, Chambers was soon informed by several sources that the Justice Department was “actively making plans to indict me, and not Alger Hiss, for perjury on the basis of my testimony before the House Committee” (emphasis added).53

Chambers was not, in the end, indicted, but his sources correctly picked up on active administration animus in that direction. The Schecters quote a memo recounting an August 16, 1948, meeting between George M. Elsey, aide to White House Chief of Staff Clark Clifford, and Attorney General Tom Clark—he of the Amerasia “fix”—where such efforts were discussed. It had been a chaotically crippling couple of weeks—if, that is, your idea of “crippling” is the exposure of Soviet agents in the U.S. government. In fact, it had been a chaotically crippling day. Also on August 16, 1948, accused (and copiously and redundantly confirmed) Soviet spy Harry Dexter White had died of a heart attack. Only three days earlier, he had denied under oath in Congress all espionage charges against him made by Chambers and Bentley.

This White House memo makes it clear that the concerns of the Truman White House centered not on what White and other Soviet agents might have done or were still doing to the U.S. government, but rather on what impact the exposure of their deeds might have on the Democratic Party and the 1948 presidential election. When political advantage is of greater concern than national security, the restorative action is reconcealment to try to make it all go away. This was the course the Truman administration was looking to take. The August memo advised the president to avoid addressing the espionage investigations altogether and to consider referring the matter to a “bi-partisan commission”—which, of course, is political slang for punting. Here’s the Chambers bit: It also recommended that “Justice … make every effort to ascertain if Chambers is guilty of perjury” and to investigate Chambers’s “confinement in mental institution,” a story that was pure Communist propaganda, by the way.54 Nor was Elizabeth Bentley neglected. The memo further noted that the Justice Department would provide a description of Bentley’s evidence so the White House could “endeavor to determine how much of the information was freely available to the Soviet government” during the wartime alliance. “The purpose,” the memo continued, “would be to make it clear that Miss Bentley was not successful in transmitting secret material to the Russians that they did not already have.”55

Deflect, destroy, and deny—and that was the reflexive response of the “Good Guys.” It didn’t stop there. In December 1948, several months after Bentley and Chambers first appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and one month after Truman’s stunning upset victory over Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey, Truman asked Attorney General Tom Clark whether the FBI could draw up a statement of fact slamming the “meddling efforts” of the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “a ‘red herring’”—that cliché again!—“not only to detract attention from the shortcomings of the 80th Congress but also [for contributing] to the escape of certain communists who should have been indicted.” The memo is signed “HST.”56 No record of follow-up exists, the Schecters note, which is hardly surprising given FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s respective feelings for both the committee (positive) and the Truman White House (strained, to say the least).

I must point out that Haynes and Klehr reject the Schecters’ assertion that Truman all this time knew about Venona, believing it “unlikely” he would have embarked upon his attack on Chambers’s and Bentley’s credibility with such knowledge. They write, “Had [Truman] been aware of Venona, and known that Soviet cables confirmed the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, it is unlikely that his aides would have considered undertaking a campaign to discredit Bentley and indict Chambers for perjury, or would have allowed themselves to be taken in by the disinformation being spread by the American Communist Party and Alger Hiss’s partisans that Chambers had at one time been committed to an insane asylum.”57

So we would all of us hope. Is there a case to be made, however, for Truman’s state of graceful ignorance of Venona? Haynes and Klehr made their initial claim for Truman’s innocence in their 1999 book Venona, writing, “The evidence is not entirely clear, but it appears that Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley, mindful of the White House’s tendency to leak politically sensitive information, decided to deny President Truman direct knowledge of the Venona Project.”58

The footnoted source of this statement is twofold, the first being Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1998 book Secrecy.59 Moynihan’s “smoking gun,” as columnist Robert Novak would write in 2003 when he entered this fray in support of the Schecters, was a 1949 FBI memo from an FBI agent to J. Edgar Hoover’s assistant, Mickey Ladd, “regarding the dissemination of [Venona] material to the Central Intelligence Agency.”60 Bringing the CIA into the loop was something General Clarke of army intelligence was vehemently against, as the Schecters note in their book, because Clarke believed Elizabeth Bentley’s charges that her own nest of agents, some of whom were alumni of the wartime intelligence agency OSS, might well have entered the newly created CIA (she was right). Clarke was afraid to let the CIA know what American codebreakers knew about Venona—so the Soviets wouldn’t thereby know it, too.61

The 1949 FBI memo Moynihan relies on to prove Truman had no knowledge of Venona recounts a discussion between General Clarke and Adm. Earl E. Stone. Stone was “disturbed” by the progress Venona codebreakers were making, which he’d only just been briefed on, and he wanted the president and the director of the newly created CIA to be alerted “to the contents of all of these messages.” The memo states that Clarke said he “vehemently disagreed,” telling Stone that the only people entitled to know about Venona “were [deleted] and the FBI.”

Alas, we don’t know who “deleted” was. Since the subject of the memo specifically addresses whether the CIA should be brought into the Venona loop, I wonder if “deleted” could be Truman himself.

Back to the memo, for its key, supposedly Truman-exonerating quotation. Clarke said he informed Stone that Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley agreed with Clarke and “stated that he [Bradley] would personally assume the responsibility of advising the President or anyone else in authority if the contents of any of this material so demanded.”

Unless my command of the English language has suddenly failed, Clarke simply indicated that Bradley had taken responsibility for briefing the president or anyone else in authority as needed. It beats me how Moynihan could reprint this memo in full as the “smoking gun” proving Truman never heard word one about Venona. Moynihan concludes, triumphantly, “Army ‘property.’ And so Truman was never told.”62

Far more accurate to have written: “Army” property. We simply don’t know from this memo what, or even whether, Truman was told about Venona. Moynihan was a brilliant man, but Bradley’s assumption of responsibility for briefing Truman about Venona as needed in no way allows us to conclude that therefore Truman never heard a word about the content of the Venona archive. It just doesn’t add up, at least not without the artificial and ultimately empty boost of wishful thinking.63

In the late 1990s, the Schecters interviewed Oliver Kirby, a crack American cryptanalyst who was assigned during the war to the renowned British decoding center at Bletchley as both a linguist and cryptanalyst, later parachuting into Germany on intelligence work, which included recovery and analysis of Nazi cryptographic records. After the war, Kirby joined what became known as the Venona project and, as his National Security Agency Web page says, “was one of the few selected to distribute VENONA products to the small group of authorized readers.”64 As a result, he participated in some of these rather frantic discussions over what to do with the increasingly horrifying “Venona products”—facts—emerging as the Soviet codes were being broken. He later told the Schecters that in 1950, Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss were both “positively identified” as Soviet agents by Venona codebreakers, a date Robert L. Benson and Michael Warner affirm in their Venona study.65

Kirby himself claimed to have brought this information to the attention of General Bradley, White House point man, as noted, on Venona. Kirby said, “When Bradley called me back later he said, “The President was most upset and agitated by this. Bradley reported President Truman’s words, ‘That G____D____ stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger and bigger. It’s likely to take us down.’” The Schecters add, “Kirby said there was no doubt the President understood.”66

In other words, President Truman took in and grasped revelations that, according to Soviet secret cables, the most senior-level, trusted, and powerful U.S. government officials had been working on behalf of the Soviet Union, and then he, as president, did nothing about it. Suddenly, Truman’s domestic anti-Communism program starts to look like a giant act of misdirection. Rather than follow these intense, high-beam revelations to their logical ends—that the U.S. government under his predecessor during depression and war had been penetrated and compromised to a point, I maintain, of occupation captained by an army of painstakingly revealed agents—Truman apparently preferred to treat the whole thing like a “fairy story.” He preferred to generalize a very specific threat by instituting “loyalty boards” for all and sundry. Rather than focus on Venona-ID’d traitors specifically, he ordered that the patriotism of millions of Americans be questioned generally.67

No evidence has emerged to contradict Kirby, whose assessment of Truman’s visceral aversion to Venona’s revelations comes from notes he made at the time, now in the Schecters’ possession.68 It certainly fits the demonstrated government predilection for concealment over revelation, the pattern of papering over facts with fantasy. Truman’s consistent efforts to quash any and all information pertaining to the Communist infiltration of the U.S. government—whether emanating from the FBI’s confidential reports that started coming across his desk in the spring of 1945, from defector testimonies extracted by counsel before the House Committee on Un-American Activities climactically in 1948, or from Joseph McCarthy’s one-man fumigations of the government’s dirty laundry beginning in 1950—lend ample credence to Kirby’s observations as a young man. “That G____D____ stuff,” particularly as it pertained to government penetration, remained officially under lock and key for the next forty years, arguably the most successfully maintained American state secret of all time, preserved and upheld through every administration to follow.

Why?

It should be noted that a number of espionage prosecutions were secretly assisted by Venona, beginning with that of Soviet agent Judith Coplon, a young Justice Department analyst who in May 1949 became the first spy to be identified and arrested due to Venona revelations; Robert Soblen and Jack Soble followed. It was Venona clues that led to the linchpin conviction of British atomic spy Klaus Fuchs in 1950, and Venona decrypts “unmistakably identified Julius Rosenberg as the head of a Soviet spy ring and David Greenglass, his brother-in-law, as a Soviet source at the secret atomic bomb facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico,” Haynes and Klehr write.69

“Unmistakably.” The word peals like a steel bell, cold, penetrating, and troubling. Venona decrypts unmistakably identified Julius Rosenberg … “Unmistakably”—and the U.S. government let that secret evidence sit in a vault as our citizens tore each other up over this case for decades? Exactly the same question goes for the Hiss case, the other split-view lodestar by which what became two distinct peoples took their bearings. The U.S. government knew the truth about Hiss and withheld it, too.

Why?

It’s worth noting that Hiss, unlike Coplon and the other atomic spies, was in no way prosecuted with the help of Venona. Indeed, Hiss was already in jail serving four years for perjury related to the lies he told Congress about Chambers before analysts deciphered his name in Venona. It was in the contentious aftermath of his imprisonment, however, during the battle over Hiss and White and Silvermaster and the rest on the one hand, and Bentley and Chambers on the other, that every scrap of information belonged in the center of the public square under bright lights, with Uncle Sam playing town crier:

Hear ye, Hear ye …

Instead Uncle Sam mumbled to himself and hid away the precious proof against the traitors, protecting the traitors against the soundings and probes of investigators hot on their trail. Let them grope and stagger blind, Uncle Sam said, let them sift through the good info and the bad, let them rely on their gut hunches to go on, let them fall back on their political courage until it gives out, let them get knocked down, smeared, destroyed. Let the country go to hell. Given what the executive branch knew and when it knew it, this was the greatest betrayal of all.

So, yes, M. Stanton Evans is right about the nation owing plaudits to Joe McCarthy, and more. We owe all of these intrepid public servants our undying gratitude. Sensing the massiveness of the assault on our republic—yes, a conspiracy so immense, to give McCarthy his due—they kept at it, seeking, hunting what their many detractors, many inside the government, never stopped screaming was a mythological beast, a figment, a “witch hunt.” It was just something “under the bed,” a silly “bugaboo,” which became the White House term of choice.

“Mr. Congressman, you must see a bugaboo under every bed,” President Roosevelt chided Rep. Martin Dies, founding chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities,70 during a 1940 meeting in which Dies outlined for the president what his committee had discovered about Communists on the government payroll and in control of labor unions and other front organizations.

“The people are very much wrought up about the Communist bugaboo,” Harry S. Truman wrote in a letter to former Pennsylvania governor George H. Earle in 1947, in response to a very similar warning from Earle.71 Truman would switch to “red herring” when it came to the Hiss case in 1948.

Bugaboo? Red herring? Alger Hiss was neither. He was a bona fide enemy of the American republic, but the U.S. government didn’t want anyone to know that, not even after Venona confirmed Hiss’s treason sometime in 1950, as the Schecters report. Why? Oliver Kirby recounted a revealing exchange with Defense Secretary James Forrestal two years earlier, in 1948, about disclosure in general. The way the Schecters tell it, “Kirby raised with Forrestal the idea of publicly releasing the news that American intelligence had broken the Soviet code.” The Soviets, aware American codebreakers were reading them since 1945 (thanks to the treason of Drew Pearson’s meek little “Lock” Currie), would only be further inhibited by the announcement, Kirby argued. More important, “Kirby believed that revealing the full extent of Soviet penetration”—complete exposure—“would remove the issue from politics” and limit a “Red Panic” (Truman’s political concern) “because the cases would be acted upon and fully resolved.”

Call it the Sunshine Strategy. Forrestal nixed the notion in no uncertain terms. “Forget that. No. Hell, no”—that kind of thing. His reaction was not unlike what Kirby had already heard from the State Department when he attempted to bring Venona-fingered Communist infiltration to its attention. Or what he would later hear from Gen. Omar Bradley, who, Kirby said, would urge him not to brief other administration officials on Venona’s findings.72

It begins to sound like a lot of other things. What George Racey Jordan heard in early 1944 when he went to the State Department wondering about whether he really should be “expediting” military secrets ASAP to Moscow. What U.S. Army Maj. John Van Vliet heard after expeditiously filing a report of his eyewitness assessment of Soviet responsibility for the Katyn Forest Massacre in May 1945. Or what German defense lawyer Alfred Seidl would hear at Nuremberg in 1946 when trying to introduce to the world evidence of the secret division of Europe that Stalin and Hitler had prearranged in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Sunshine was the last thing the powers that be—the powers that accommodated, the powers that served—wanted when it came to any aspect of Communist crime and deception. The Establishment wanted its shadows deep, dark and undisturbed. Maybe that was because too many of its members were in them. Maybe that was why they always argued against exposure because, the rationale went, it might upset the Soviets, might worsen relations, might play into the hands of the “hardliners.” These are variations on the same arguments, not at all incidentally, that we hear today to squelch the truth about Islam and its agents’ penetration of the U.S. government.

This Iron Curtain of secrecy left it to the Great Red Hunters to investigate the old-fashioned way, the hard way, the rough way, their suspicions more often than not, it now may be fearlessly declared, confirmed by evidence that just continues to mount to the skies. Evidence that condemns not just the agents of our destruction but our own government, too. With Venona in a vault, the U.S. government became an agent of concealment, and thus, in effect, a part of the Communist conspiracy, despite itself (or perhaps not). The struggle that characterized what we know as the McCarthy Era, then, pit the forces of full disclosure and transparency—personified by Senator Joseph McCarthy—against the more powerful forces of deception and obfuscation, which included the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses. That’s not at all how we think about it, of course. We’re conditioned, Pavlov’s-dog-style, to invert the paradigm.

This is demonstrably wrong, but it is also our most fervent and reflexive belief as a society. Given how many millions lost their lives due to Communists, it may not be correct to say that the American cover-up that supported this inversion was worse than the Communists’ crimes. The cover-up, however, was in no way a victimless crime. It did something to us. It wrought a transformation of us as a people from which we have never recovered. Or did it consolidate a transformation that was already upon us? After all, I pushed off on this roller coaster pointing out that Lauchlin Currie’s record was plenty troubling decades before Venona’s release. In October 1944, more than a year before Elizabeth Bentley walked into an FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut, with her hair-curling tale to tell, Currie was publicly invoked as a marquee name for Communist subversion by one John Bricker, the GOP nominee for vice president running with Thomas E. Dewey.

Coming six months before the end of World War II, Bricker’s salvo may seem surprising given the general but false impression that it was only after Bentley and Chambers testified in 1948 that this kind of stuff was “out there.” Not so. Bricker, at the time a third-term Republican governor of Ohio, in this final stretch of the presidential campaign, was raising the roof on the myriad connections between FDR, the New Deal, and “radicals and Communists,” who, “boring from within,” as Bricker put it, were attempting to “take over our American government.”

The rhetoric of the unfairly forgotten John Bricker sounds a lot like the rhetoric of the unfairly notorious Joseph McCarthy from a few years later. Bricker even had a list of names, only not in his hands.

Will anyone who has read to this point be surprised to learn that M. Stanton Evans couldn’t locate this particular list of 1,124 names of radicals and Communists “[vanished] from the public record”? Assembled by Rep. Martin Dies in 1941, it included the names of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and Harold Glasser. Evans never located the five supplemental volumes chronicling the activities of those named that were compiled by the FBI in 1942.73

Bricker explained that such connections and influences, Currie’s among them, were evidence of a “foreign fifth column,” which was, for the first time in U.S. history, trying to swing a U.S. election.

Quoting the ex-Communist journalist and author William Henry Chamberlin, Bricker declared, “The all-out Communist support for the fourth [FDR] term admits of no other interpretation. There has never been anything like this before because no American party or group has been willing to serve as the obedient instrument of the policies of a foreign power.”74

Bricker couldn’t have been clearer, but the American people weren’t listening. To be sure, the ongoing war in Europe and the Pacific had a lot to do with this; FDR’s campaign slogan, “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” was a powerful admonition to a nation with millions of men—sons, brothers, husbands—under arms. However, it is also the case that years of incessant propaganda promoting “Uncle Joe” and the Soviets as a bunch of All Right Guys had softened up the American psyche—we were “victims of our own propaganda,” as military analyst Hanson Baldwin later put it.75 Enemy infiltration as described by Bricker didn’t make sense, couldn’t make sense. If all the news, via the Communist-riddled OWI, Drew Pearson, Hollywood, and the local bookstore, depicted the Red Army as Boy Scouts with stars, Bricker’s description of the American Communist Party as a “fifth column” of a hostile power came out of left field. There was no context in the public square to bolster it.

Here’s the truly amazing thing: In so many ways, there still isn’t. We still tag history’s hardened agents of Moscow “idealists”; we still romanticize their Leftist acolytes, their enforcers, as “freethinkers.” The Hollywood Ten (“Rat Dmytryk” excepted) were “martyrs” who got standing O’s till they dropped. Bricker’s warning from that long-ago whistle-stop campaign to nowhere zings through the eras without answering echoes. It’s as if we were always deaf to it.

Or were we? In 1950, Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson used language similar to Bricker’s and even more forceful in a Supreme Court opinion in which he made clear the crucial distinctions that separated the Communist Party from all other American political parties. Jackson was discussing the section of the Taft-Hartley Act that required officers of unions to take an oath avowing they were not Communists. Among the six key differences Jackson cited—also among them were Party aims to seize power by and for a minority, Party membership secrecy, and Party requirement of unconditional obedience to Party authority—he wrote, “The Communist Party alone among American parties past or present is dominated and controlled by a foreign Government.”76 He continued, “The chain of command from the Kremlin to the American party is stoutly denied and usually invisible, but it was unmistakenly disclosed by the American Communist party somersaulting in synchronism with shifts in the Kremlin foreign policy” in the run-up to World War II.77

Seeing was believing. In that span of years, then, between Bricker’s political speech and Jackson’s Supreme Court opinion, a span in which Bentley and Chambers testified truthfully, Currie and White lied under oath, China turned Red, and the Soviet Union occupied half of Europe and got “the bomb,” is it fair to say a consensus had taken hold that the CPUSA was, at least, the instrument of a foreign power? If so, it didn’t last. By the time Harvey Klehr became the first American to examine the Moscow archives of the Communist International (Comintern) in the summer of 1992 (where he found not only “extensive” correspondence and reports detailing the Comintern’s tight and dominant relationship with the American Communist Party but also the first “direct archival confirmation” of Elizabeth Bentley’s charges), and by the time Stephen Haynes became the first American to examine the heretofore unknown Moscow archives of the American Communist Party in January 1993 (where he found more than 435,000 pages of material shipped by the CPUSA to Moscow attesting to Moscow’s control of what was demonstrably an American outpost of Soviet power), any such consensus that the Kremlin controlled a Communist party and espionage in the USA had broken up. It had completely vanished in academia. Indeed, on Haynes and Klehr’s publication of the primary documents from Moscow that copiously, redundantly supports these unmistakable links, American academia recoiled en masse against the researchers, firing at will, the stunning experience driving the authors to write a separate book in 2003 called In Denial. In it, they catalog exactly “how contemporary scholars and intellectuals have failed to confront new evidence about the history of American communism and Soviet espionage”—including the history of American Communists in Soviet espionage.78 They haven’t just failed to confront the new evidence. These “scholars” also engaged in “misshaping cultural memories to fit the ideological biases.” This, of course, is exactly the same problem Andrew and Mitrokhin observed: “the difficulty all of us have in grasping new concepts which disturb our existing view of the world.” It is not an attribute of the open-minded.

Maybe Bricker on the right and Jackson on the left were too reasonable, too mainstream, too respectable, too easy to drown out. Jackson, lead Nuremberg prosecutor, is well known. Bricker, just for the record, was no slouch. Résumé highlights include: U.S. Army first lieutenant and chaplain in World War I; assistant attorney general of Ohio; attorney general of Ohio; three-time governor of Ohio; GOP vice presidential nominee; and later two-term U.S. senator who authored the Bricker Amendment, a proposed amendment curtailing the president’s treaty-making powers, which sounds like a still-needed restraint on the presidency post-FDR. Still, when it comes to American history as it has been written to fit the Left’s “existing view of the world,” these two are both Invisible Men. Mute as wallpaper. Passed over when it comes to posterity’s favored heirs, the ones selected by the victors to tell “our story.” There’s no connection between Moscow and the CPUSA, and Communist subversion was a “bugaboo”—that’s “our story” and they’re sticking to it.

It’s as if “two plus two make five,” as George Orwell explained in 1984, the author likely seizing on a chapter of the same name in Eugene Lyons’s 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia. In the novel, which came out in 1949, less than six months after Bentley and Chambers testified, Orwell explores the impact of such thought control, analyzing how “the very existence of external reality” could be “tacitly denied” by ideology. He concludes, “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”

The mind could adapt, though. Orwell: “And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?”79

What then? Here’s what then: Whittaker Chambers is relegated to purgatory; there was no Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union; McCarthy is the Great Satan; John Bricker is remembered as “an amiable and photogenic figure of no remarkable qualities.”80 Lauchlin Currie et al.—and I mean all—keep their cover in posterity’s mainstream without even a teeny, tiny, scarlet footnote. And a Mao portrait by Warhol over the mantelpiece is just the thing.

No wonder it is Elizabeth Bentley who was garishly marked as a “neurotic spinster” from the hot July day of her 1948 testimony forward, tattooed in memory with faintly lurid question marks. Look carefully, though, where the slander against Bentley originated: The very first malign expectoration against her shot from the mouth of NKVD agent Gregory Silvermaster himself (KGB cover name “Pal”). It was Silvermaster who brazenly dismissed Bentley’s charges before the House Committee on Un-American Activities before serially invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination (including about his own basement). On August 4, 1948, the Soviet superspy said, “I can only conclude that she is a neurotic liar.”81

It was just a short hop from neurotic “liar” to neurotic “spinster”82 and back again, the constant being “neurotic.” It was no coincidence, either, that Soviet agent and Ware group cell leader Lee Pressman additionally savaged the testimony of American patriot Whittaker Chambers as “the stale and lurid mouthings of a Republican exhibitionist.”83

Then, thanks to the amplification of the echo chamber—from the Communist rag The Daily Worker to “respectable press” such as The Milwaukee Journal, The New York Post, and The Washington Post to the president—the Party line that it was all in their heads soon was all in our heads. Pace Orwell, if the mind was controllable, what then? Even when physical evidence—typewriters, rugs, microfilm—increasingly bore out Chambers’s word, Communist Party lies vaporized into a dense haze of suspicion that obscured what should have been a diamond-clear line of sight to judgment: Hiss, Silvermaster, and the rest, guilty. Chambers, Bentley, heroes of conscience. But with a Communist-seared “liar” brand still smoking on Bentley’s and Chambers’s hides, the only guilty verdicts that endured were their own, the false verdicts that were upheld in the kangaroo court of elite opinion, the people with rattles and noisemakers, penthouses and publishing imprints, judge and jury with no more claim on fact and reason than the men who sent fourteen women and five men to their deaths for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Salem, and with the same zealotry.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the anti-Communists who were the big, bad witch hunters?

Certainly, that’s the message Americans have had drummed into their heads, Mao’s-Little-Red-Book-style. The more literary text of choice in this case is, of course, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Instead of violent Red Guard troops forcing us to live by it, our reeducators were high school teachers who merely assigned us to read it and absorb its lessons. (I had to read the thing in the eighth grade.) For two or three generations, anyway, Arthur Miller’s dramatic re-rendering of congressional efforts to disclose extensive and clandestine Kremlin-directed assaults on our constitutional republic as the irrational and imaginary fetish of “repressed” and “Puritanical” “zealots” in Pilgrim hats was a classroom staple—Silvermaster’s “neurotics” and “exhibitionists” elevated to the realm of theah-tuh. As a 2005 (post-Venona) collection of twentieth-century American drama puts it, “Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 and it presents a clear parallel between the American anti-Communist paranoia of the period and the 1692 witch trials of Salem, exposing both to be maliciously motivated with ritualistic public denunciations of largely innocent people.”84

Largely innocent? I’d like to plop the 650 damning pages of Spies right down in front of the editor that wrote that tripe. What is most breathtaking here, though, is the obdurate endurance of the glaring lie. In fact, a greater intellectual hoax than the Saleming of the Red hunters is beyond imagination. (Islam-is-peace is as great, but no greater.) Unchanged by the hard evidence, the deception continues, as impossible to claw back from the culture at large as a cloud.

This is telling. The great witnesses (Bentley, Chambers, J. B. Matthews, Louis Budenz…), the great investigators (Dies, McCarran, McCarthy…), took their stand to save America from Communist subversion. Whether they realized it—and, for the most part, how could they?—they also took their stand to save the essential base of reality itself: the importance of fact-based narrative; the primacy of “neutral truth”; morality’s need for absolutes. All would dissipate rapidly in society at large following anti-Communism’s demise in American culture. It was the ultimate defeat for the anti-Communist opposition, with their facts and conclusions, their witnesses and their affidavits, their investigations and their implications. This defeat cleared the field for the rise of brand-new waves of subversion: fungible facts, moral relativism, deconstructionism, and other explosive assaults on the rocks of civilizational equilibrium.

This was revolutionary struggle, raw and desperate. Unlike the discreetly private conspiracy to take Gareth Jones down back in the spring of 1933 in order to hide Soviet perfidy inside the Soviet Union—the very first Big Lie of the Terror Famine, as Conquest tells us—this was an all-out assault on the witnesses and investigators of Soviet perfidy inside the United States. When this battle was joined in our own backyard, the struggle against exposure took on climactic intensity. Whittaker Chambers explains why, and eloquently, in Witness:

The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades … [This] is a statement of fact that need startle no one who voted for that revolution in whole or in part, and, consciously or unconsciously, a majority of the nation has so voted for years. It was the forces of that revolution that I struck at the point of its struggle for power.85

Did We, the People undergo a socialist revolution called “liberalism”? I would say yes, obviously—only it’s not obvious at all. Chambers was right, but he not only struck at revolution generally, but also very specifically in the person of Alger Hiss, one of the secret Soviet assault’s most celebrated agents. What electrified Chambers’s case—or “the Case,” as he calls it—with its epochal frenzy was that Chambers unexpectedly pulled the mask off this leading member of the Liberal Establishment to reveal the Communist conspirator underneath.86 “For a decade, the Committee (first as the Dies Committee and later as the House Committee on Un-American Activities) had been trying to hack off the Gorgon head of Communist conspiracy, which it had never quite succeeded in locating,” Chambers wrote, placing his testimony into historic context. “Now, almost casually, the snaky mass had been set down on the congressman’s collective desk. It was terrifying. It petrified most of them.”

It wasn’t the hideous head alone that petrified them, but also its aroused and thoroughly vicious defenders, the ones who insisted the Gorgon was a pussycat, the ones who argued that the nightmare of alien conquest was a … “bugaboo.” In that election year, Chambers observed, the “hostile clamor … battered the Committee into a state bordering on anxiety neurosis.” A precarious state, in other words, in which the committee seriously considered abandoning the whole case. Which would have had catastrophic implications, Chambers believed. Had the committee’s investigations (the ones Truman wanted the FBI to denounce as a “red herring”) not gone forward, he writes,

it is probable that the forces which for years had kept the Communist conspiracy in Government from public knowledge would have continued to be successful in concealing it. Alger Hiss would have remained at the head of the Carnegie Endowment, exerting great influence in public affairs through his position and ramified connections. With him, the whole secret Communist front would have stood more unassailable than ever because the shattered sally against it had ended in ridicule and rout. Elizabeth Bentley’s charges would almost certainly have been buried in the debris.87

There is a certain irony to this statement. All the items on Chambers’s list—the successful concealment of Communist conspiracy, the influence of at least Hiss’s defenders in public affairs, the disappearance of Elizabeth Bentley’s charges—came to pass more or less despite the fact that the committee took his case forward, despite the fact that Hiss was later convicted of perjury—the exception being that Alger Hiss did indeed lose his Carnegie presidency. He would rise, however, phoenix-style, as the Great Martyr of the Left. Chambers claimed victory too soon.

It’s easy to see why. At the point he was writing, he was preparing his remarkable memoirs for prestigious Random House; Alger Hiss was serving a forty-four-month prison term for perjury related to his congressional testimony against Chambers; and Richard Nixon, Chambers’s patron congressman, whom Chambers credits with steadying the resolve of the committee to continue with the Hiss-Chambers investigation, was somewhere on his meteoric rise from congressman to senator to vice president. If sweet, however, victory was short-lived. Like a submarine that got away, the Communist conspiracy resubmerged, at least in our consciousness, which is exactly where it counts; the subversive nature of Communism was reconceived as a “bugaboo” to shrug off; and the anti-Communists were subject to ridicule and rout once again and for always—and particularly Elizabeth Bentley, who, along with her charges, was definitely buried in the debris.

How did this happen? The answer has to do with another relic of the day, the Communist front, the infiltration mechanism deployed around the world beginning in the 1920s by which Communists, directed by Moscow, would advance, Trojan-horse-style, deep into any enemy’s territory through intensive campaigns of deception and manipulation. Eugene Lyons quotes Nechayev, “one of the prophets of Russian Bolshevism,” who provided the formula for manipulating “liberals of every shade” in his Catechism of the Revolutionist—yet another precursor to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “One may conspire with them in accordance with their program, making them believe that one follows blindly and at the same time one should take hold of them, get possession of their secrets, compromise them to the utmost, so that no avenue of escape may be left to them, and use them as instruments for stirring up disturbances.88

Deathly amoral stuff. In this very way, false front organizations appear to be self-governing and independent but are, as a Comintern resolution of 1926 explained, “in reality under communist leadership.” Otto Kuusinen, a member of the Comintern secretariat, summed up the idea in strategic terms, also in 1926: “We must create a whole solar system of organizations and smaller communities around the Communist Party, so to speak, smaller organizations working actually under the influence of our Party.”89 Members didn’t know, didn’t have to know (although surely some did); they only had to follow.

By following the Party line—following the Silvermaster line on “neurotic” Bentley being a clear example—the Eastern Liberal Establishment did indeed function under Communist influence. By 1948, this was nothing new. It was the modus operandi of the scores of front organizations Martin Dies successfully exposed during his tenure as chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. All of these groups and organizations were working under the influence of the Communist Party. In 1963, Martin Dies made the logical leap when he wrote, “By Kuusinen’s definition, ‘organizations working actually under the influence of the Communist Party,’ there is no question that the New Deal functioned as a Communist front.”90

I agree, but Dies is wrong on one point. Yes, the New Deal functioned as a Communist front; but there are certain to be a lot of questions about it, welling up and blasting off in sputtering indignation. Then there is the question of how to break this to the busloads of American tourists who believe it is their patriotic duty to pay homage to FDR at his memorial. How to break it to them? How to break it to those continuously forming blue-ribbon panels to elevate FDR to the presidential pantheon one more time? How to break it to Doris Kearns Goodwin? This sounds flip, but it’s not. The problem of how to overturn more than three-quarters of a century of grounded, anchored, riveted historical understanding is grave indeed.

Eugene Lyons made what may be a more accessible and palatable comparison to illustrate the workings of the New Deal bureaucracy when he explained that it functioned as an unofficial Popular Front government. Establishing “People’s Front” or “Popular Front” governments had been the main purpose of the Comintern in its “fabulous ‘democratic’ period” in the mid-1930s, Lyons writes, tongue firmly in cheek. These weren’t run-of-the-mill coalitions, of course. The main characteristic, Lyons writes, was “the inclusion of the communists—not so much as a domestic political element but frankly as agents and spokesmen of Soviet Russia.” A sovereign domestic cabinet that included Moscow representatives, in other words. This came about in France in the Leon Blum government, and in Spain briefly, for example. In the United States, where Communists were always a neglible demographic, a different vehicle took shape, what Lyons called “an amazing unofficial Popular Front government—unrecognized, unadmitted, independent of the Administration, yet operating energetically within the New Deal framework.” He continued, “It added up to the most potent and ubiquitous influence in Washington, a half-clandestine government-within-the-government, arrogantly open in some spots on some occasions but conspiratorial in essence … With every passing month, the penetration was deeper, the entanglement closer.”91 This is exactly the force that William A. Wirt detected back at the very beginning. Even by 1941, Lyons didn’t know half of the half of it, with the worst of the penetration and entanglement still to take place, its existence to remain a state secret for half a century.

Both Dies’s and Lyons’s formulations serve to identify the implications of the infiltration of secret agents and spokesmen of Soviet Russia into our government institutions, the infiltration that the intelligence record now confirms. It’s not enough to play “Where’s Waldo?” and end the game when some (not all!) of the agents of infiltration have been identified and pinpointed; it’s crucial to assess the impact of this secret army of occupation. This hasn’t happened, certainly not on the national stage. Even Red hunters of the period got stuck on identification as the endgame, says veteran intelligence officer Peter B. Niblo. In his 2002 book Influence, Niblo points out the consequences of this narrow approach:

The “he’s a communist” scandal fogged real acts of espionage and treason carried out by Soviet intelligence assets—agents of influence—in high American office. If espionage was alleged, its objectives and targets were rarely made clear, confirmed, or admitted until years later. Swept under the rug was the fact that Soviet agents of influence were making key decisions in Washington that affected the security of the American people, smoothed the way for a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, and the disastrous division of Europe that spelled Cold War [emphasis added].92

For now, the compelling question is, How could their origins in Moscow have stayed swept under the rug? The answer has to do with a new gospel of falsehood, new commandments, new patterns of thinking, new modes of reaction. Emerging from the requirements of habitual secrecy and lies, this gospel inspired its followers, on an unprecedented scale, to decouple fact from implication, knowledge from conclusion, logic from judgment. In serving enemy ideology, they exonerated the guilty (example, Hiss), denied evidence (example, the Pumpkin Papers, which included microfilm), and flailed its source (example, Chambers). Doing so, consciously or not, bent them. It bent their brains, bent their thought processes—and, by unavoidable extension and necessary entanglement, bent ours, too, undermining the solidity and credibility and worth of absolutes. Facts and evidence no longer had the same heft they used to. Givens were taken, or had to be nailed down going out the door, which left gaping holes. Oaths, so help me God, were flouted with a demystifying, cheapening regularity. Two plus two might equal five, it might not.

I am not at all suggesting lying didn’t exist before this struggle over exposure—why else would God have sent Moses down the mountain with the Ninth Commandment? Similarly, I am not suggesting that prevaricators, scoundrels, and dirty rats didn’t lie early and often—why else would perjury be a felony throughout the Western world? However, I don’t believe that in all of American history we had ever all of us had to bear witness, rubbing our eyes and shaking our heads, to lying on a scale this sweeping, this public, this officially elevated. The spectacle—the ordeal—was itself corrupting, initiating, or perhaps consolidating, a far more profound revolution than the nuts-and-bolts espionage efforts (stealing documents, influencing policy, etc.) of Hiss and the rest.

It was all destabilizing in a new way. After Alger Hiss—Phi Beta Kappa, Harvard Law School, White House, State Department, Carnegie Endowment—took an oath to tell the whole truth so help him God on August 5, 1948, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he proceeded to deny sweepingly and convincingly that he had ever known or even set eyes on Whittaker Chambers. Chambers, closeted in his Time magazine office in New York City, received a panicky phone call from one of the committee’s chief investigators in Washington.

“Are you sure,” “In a voice in which I caught the unmistakable note of desperation,” Chambers would write, he asked, “are you sure you are right about Alger Hiss?”

Of course, Chambers reassured him in the course of the jittery call.

“You couldn’t have mistaken him for somebody else?”

“Of course, I haven’t mistaken him,” Chambers said. Later, Chambers wrote, “What stunned me as I stared at my desk, and was to puzzle me for some time to come, was a simple question: ‘How did Alger Hiss, in the face of the facts that we both knew, and under the eyes of some 150 million people, suppose that he could possibly get away with it?’”93

It was a good question—if, that is, you were coming from an Enlightenment world of fixed laws, legal and moral, a world where objectivity was magnetic north, a world that was already a dying star. Chambers’s years in the Communist underground notwithstanding, his question came from this fin-de-siècle Retroland. Hiss, meanwhile, was opening brave new territory where facts were juggling balls, truth was strategically expendable, and ideology and raw power set life’s course. Deconstructionists would follow. They had to. A school of systematic thought had to emerge to reflect and enforce the pressures to abort the search for objective truth.

Such a search for objective truth had previously defined Knowledge at least since the ancient Greeks came along, and, as Keith Windschuttle tells it, sought to replace the mythologies other cultures used to affirm their “sense of self-worth and place in the cosmos” with something brand-new: the attempt “to record the truth about the past.”94 This became what Orwell described as “neutral fact,” which, by his observation, ended in 1936 in Spain, and Koestler agreed. Today, the Greek example is forgotten, or dismissed as that of the deadest of white males, and mythologies of self-worth are back in vogue, underscored by the widely shared assumption that truth isn’t “within the historian’s grasp,” as Windshuttle puts it. This is what our children are taught in school, perpetuating this mythology of mythologies. This means, perhaps, we might look back on Alger Hiss and see not just an epic traitor who committed treason but also a pioneer of a shamelsss future. Like an early performance artist, Hiss, sans NEA grant, smeared lies all over naked, defenseless, truth, successfully cutting us all off from the facts, from reality, from our history.

Yes, we are looking at another virtuoso performance—but whoever would have imagined Uncle Sam himself playing in support.