Fools for Communism

Still apologists after all these years

Glenn Garvin from the April 2004 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

The fall of the Soviet Union has driven even more nails into Hiss' coffin. A KGB cable in the Venona files identifies a spy code-named "Ales" at the State Department whose biographical details match only Hiss. Meanwhile, an interview with another State Department spy -- Noel Field, who fled behind the Iron Curtain when he fell under suspicion in 1949 -- was discovered in the archives of the Hungarian security police. Field related how his friend Hiss, unaware that Field was already spying for the KGB, had tried to recruit him as a source for Soviet military intelligence. The same story of the encounter between Field and Hiss (which dismayed the Soviets as a security lapse) turned up in KGB files in Moscow.

Writing in The Nation, Navasky dismisses all the new documents as contrivances, misunderstandings, and KGB braggadocio. What's really important, he says, is that in 1992 Hiss asked Dmitri Volkogonov, a disillusioned former Soviet general who was Boris Yeltsin's adviser on military affairs, to search intelligence archives for material on Hiss. Volkogonov replied that he had "carefully studied many documents from the archives of the intelligence services of the USSR as well as various information provided by the archives staff....I can inform you that Alger Hiss was never an agent of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union." Case closed, Navasky declares, though allowing casually that "Volkogonov later agreed with a persistent reporter that perhaps he should have qualified his declaration of Hiss' innocence because it's impossible to prove a negative."

Here's what Volkogonov actually said. He spent only two days on the "search" for documents and mostly relied on the word of KGB archivists. He didn't make any inquiries at all of Soviet military intelligence, the agency for which Hiss worked. And he had no idea the case was so controversial in the United States; he was just trying to do a favor to an old man near death. "What I saw gives no basis to claim a full clarification," Volkogonov admitted. "There's no guarantee that it was not destroyed, that it was not in other channels...Honestly, I was a bit taken aback. [Hiss' attorney] pushed me hard to say things of which I was not fully convinced."

If it seems that Navasky has turned Volkogonov's words upside down, that's not surprising, because Navasky has always lived in an upside-down universe where the moral flaw is not allegiance to a mass murderer like Stalin but turning away from him (to "crawl through the mud," in Navaskyspeak). The Nation has no harsh words for Paul Robeson, who refused to intervene for Russian friends who were about to be purged -- only for those, such as Elia Kazan, who denounced Stalin and his American quislings. When some Afghan peasant finally points out Osama bin Laden's cave, count on Navasky and The Nation to call him a dirty squealer and to explain that a few airplanes crashing into skyscrapers now and again are a small price to pay for the preservation of personal politesse.

The whole "squealer" ethos is not only stupid -- what kind of moron would not have wanted Mafia turncoats to testify against John Gotti? -- but fraudulent. At a press conference last summer, I listened to the playwright Chris Trumbo argue that Elia Kazan should have been denied an Oscar for naming Hollywood Communists to HUAC. During World War II, when the Soviet Union and the United States were allied against Hitler, Trumbo's Communist father, Dalton, also named names, secretly pointing the FBI to Hollywood figures he believed were suspiciously anti-war. But there was no suggestion during the press conference that his screenwriting Oscar be revoked. Likewise, Trumbo's intellectual fellow travelers in academe and journalism have built entire careers on denouncing spying by the FBI and CIA but are blithely unconcerned about KGB espionage. The standard excuse, as Ellen Schrecker has written several thousand times, is that "McCarthyism did more damage to the Constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."

If that's true, it's not for want of trying by the CPUSA. If Franklin Roosevelt had died just nine or 10 months earlier, his third-term vice president, Communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, would have become president. Wallace once said that if he were president he would appoint Harry Dexter White treasury secretary and Laurence Duggan secretary of state. Both of them, we now know unambiguously from Venona cables, were Soviet spies.

More broadly, people like Schrecker can't or won't understand that their culture of denial is what created McCarthyism. It was the palpable indifference of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward Communist penetration of the American government that finally triggered the backlash led by HUAC and McCarthy. McCarthy's accusation that Roosevelt ushered in "20 years of treason" is an absurd exaggeration. But if Roosevelt didn't deserve to be executed as a spy, he most certainly ought to have been horsewhipped for his cavalier dismissal of Whittaker Chambers' accusations. As early as 1939, Chambers warned Roosevelt about Alger Hiss and named at least 12 other U.S. officials who would later be proved Soviet spies. Roosevelt airily told his aides that Chambers could "go fuck himself." The spies kept passing secrets to Moscow for another nine years, until HUAC began making noises about the case. Chambers' warning was only one of several by regretful spies during that period that first Roosevelt and then Truman ignored. Truman was so lackadaisical that the military code breakers working on the Venona Project kept it secret from him for fear word would leak back to the Soviets.

Fifty years later, the pattern is repeating itself. The character assassinations and lies of the die-hard defenders of American communism have given rise to a movement to rehabilitate McCarthy and other bully-boy anti-communists of the 1940s and '50s. Some efforts of this movement, such as George Washington University historian Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, are relatively judicious attempts to correct some of the exaggerations about McCarthy -- for instance, the widely repeated but totally erroneous claim that he never correctly identified a single Communist. Others, such as conservative attack-blonde Ann Coulter's Treason, attempt a radical makeover. McCarthy (who accused everybody from Harry Truman to George Marshall of secret Soviet sympathies) was actually too charitable, Coulter argues; he was too tenderhearted to say, as she does, that all liberals -- everybody from Lyndon Johnson to Tom Daschle -- are traitors at heart. "Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy," Coulter writes. "This is their essence."

That's idiotic, to be sure, but no more so than American University historian Anna Kasten Nelson's argument that Venona isn't important because there are all kinds of good reasons a perfectly innocent person might be secretly passing microfilm to a KGB agent. (No, she doesn't list any of them.) "It is time to move on," she wrote recently, instead of "rehashing old debates" (because, you know, historians get bored with old stuff). Then there's the psychobabble contention of Bard College's Joel Kovel that J. Edgar Hoover hunted spies not because foreign espionage is against the law but because he had some previously undiscovered Freudian condition in which anti-communism "might be interchangeably a womb or anus." Writing stuff like that amounts to handing the Coulters of the world a loaded gun and daring them to pull the trigger. As somebody once said: Have you no sense of decency, Sir?

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Foner and Trumbo reply to Garvin

Eric Foner and Christopher Trumbo have responded to Glenn Garvin's article:

I hope the rest of reason is more accurate than Glenn Garvin's review "Fools for Communism" (April), which references me. Garvin says "Foner 'denounces 'the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages of the Soviet era.'"

He is referring to an article I wrote after teaching in Russia in 1990. I did not "denounce" the focus on the Soviet past among the people I met in Moscow at all—I reported it, as part of a discussion of a museum exhibition on one of Stalin's prison camps and, more generally, of how Gorbachev's policy of "openness" had unleashed a wide-ranging discussion of history. As a historian I applaud all efforts to uncover forgotten or suppressed aspects of the past. How this qualifies me as one of the historians supposedly "in denial" about Soviet history is difficult to understand.

It is unclear if this misrepresentation stems from the book under review or is the invention of the reviewer. Either way, it does not reflect well on your generally interesting magazine.

Eric Foner
DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University
New York, NY

Comments

Pingback| 10.23.09 @ 6:45PM

Instapundit » Blog Archive » MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: The Cold War Never Ended: Twenty years links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…;A well-known Democratic … October 23, 2009 MICHAEL MOYNIHAN: The Cold War Never Ended: Twenty years later, historians still can’t figure out why the West won. But some people are still making excuses for the losers. Posted at by Glenn Reynolds at 6:44 pm if (WIDGETBOX) WIDGETBOX.renderWidget('c6738f00-977c-48fd-98da-0afe24da2ee8'); Get the Pajamas TV - V2.0 widget and many other great free widgets at…

Pingback| 10.23.09 @ 7:49PM

Unless . . . « Oh, My! links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

Unless . . . « Oh, My! /* */ /* */ Oh, My! Hit Shappenings – Personal Rants « Now, Dude . . . Unless . . . By jbiii You are brain dead . . . The Soviet Union never disappeared. Just took a few years for re-organization, that is all. If you think not, go here–CBS, screaming libs, no less. Plain and simple. Bamm-Bamm is an amateur in the kiddie pool, and he…

|10.23.09 @ 8:32PM|#

"and a mere 2.5 million arrests"

"and a mere 2.5 million arrests"

I think the low ball number of arrests and the large difference in demographic data (millions more missing) has something to do with you and your family tending to be fired and loose your place to live and ration cards. One arrest can then lead to several deaths / the whole family...

saxon|10.23.09 @ 11:16PM|#

Why would they admit that communism was wrong; the SOBs are trying it again in the West. The red 'intellectuals' have morphed into 'greens' and 'progressives'.

Why go back that far to learn lessons from history; they are talking of Stimulus II and Community Reinvestment Act v2 ... and Barney Frank wants to lend more money to poor people ... it 'd be hilarious, if not actually sad

Andy Jones|10.24.09 @ 12:13AM|#

Communism lost?

Better go ask the ex - CEO of GM about that. Or the (mostly former now, strangely enough) executives that have had their contracts waived with a wave of the Leader's hand.

Somewhere down in Florida, three old guys sitting in a bar by the beach are talking about the old days before the fall of the Soviet Union marooned them in their KGB sleeper identities.

Barak Obama is speaking on the cabana bar TV, talking about why Utah can't drill for oil, or why secret ballots aren't fair for unions, or why America must accept the goals of Islamic terror as legitimate grievances.

They shake their heads.

"It took a while, but we WON!"

fin.

Pingback| 10.24.09 @ 10:12AM

Communism and its Apologists @ Helian Unbound links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…sages concerning the supposed “stability” of Communist regimes in the years immediately prior to the time that most of them collapsed, and their continuing attempts to revise history so as to present Stalin at his most charming. We at least have the consolation of knowing that the remaining representatives of the “New Left” of the 60’s who are still busily decorating…

|10.24.09 @ 10:29AM|#

What the sympathizers and apologists for communism cannot get over is that their analysis of the USSR was dead wrong while that of the Reader's Digest, with its focus on ordinary people and stories of escape from the slavery and oppression of communism, was correct. Being well-degreed does not equal being smart and insightful.

|10.24.09 @ 12:51PM|#

Back during the Cold War I developed the "Nazi" test. I would take a statement by a leftist and substitute Nazi for Communist and Jew for Capitalist and then ask whether he agreed or disagreed with the statement.

If you apply it to the revision on the Great Terror you get Holocaust denial. Perhaps that explains the rise of anti-Antisemitism among Progressives.