‘Alger Hiss and the Battle for History’

New York Times ^ | May 10, 2009 | SUSAN JACOBY

[nickcarraway]

We are about to look at the trials of a man who was judged in one decade for what he was said to have done in another. —Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial, 1950

It was not entirely true, even in 1950, that Alger Hiss was being judged primarily on the basis of what he had done in the 1930s. Unless a former Communist Party member had thoroughly repudiated his past and turned against his one-time friends and political associates, he was suspected in the late forties and early fifties of still being a secret Communist — or, at the very least, a communist sympathizer known as a "fellow traveler." In Hiss's case, the real suspicion underlying the indictment for perjury was that he had betrayed his country while serving as a State Department aide, by passing confidential information to the Soviets not only in the thirties but perhaps even during the Second World War (although Whittaker Chambers, who left the Party in 1938, never claimed to know anything about Hiss's subsequent activities). By the time Hiss was indicted and tried for perjury, he stood, in the opinion of a significant proportion of the public, for all of the American-born subverters-from-within who helped the Soviet Union to become the most prominent, indeed the only, counterweight to the power of the United States in the postwar world. To his liberal defenders, Hiss stood for all of the loyal Americans whose lives were being destroyed by charges that they had once been Communists or had even associated with Communists.

But it is impossible to understand the intensity of the passions surrounding the guilt or innocence of Hiss without making an imaginative leap backward to the thirties, when Americans were struggling with the Depression and trying to suppress awareness of the intermittent,

[redpoll]

The worst mistake of our time was not having Nuremberg-style trials for the Communists following the collapse of the Soviet empire. Instead, the communists have been given a free pass to continue their brazen criminality in the light of day among the free people of the world. Sad.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Does anybody else wonder why we still support the UN?

It tries to undermine the Constitution of the USA and
would love to cripple our Constitutional Republic.

In over 60 years the only politicians who tried to get
the USA out of the UN were Goldwater and President
Ronald Reagan who did kick UNESCO out.

16 out of 17 of the AMERICANS that were involved
in creating the UN were later identified, in sworn
testimony, as secret communist agents.

The first Secretary General was the AMERICAN Alger Hiss.
Alger Hiss served time in prison pursuant to his
involvement in a Communist spy ring.

Many of the other AMERICANS that were involved in
creating the UN fled the country, to avoid prosecution.

The ONE AMERICAN, that was involved in creating the UN
and was NOT later identified, in sworn testimony, as a
secret communist agent, was Dean Acheson.
Dean Acheson’s law firm was the legal representative of
the Soviet Union, in US courts.

If the AMERICANS that were involved in creating the UN
were Communists, what do you think we got from the rest
of the world?

[Theodore R.]

All the communists have to do is get Obama to issue an “executive order” declaring Hiss innocent of all the allegations against him, and the topic will be “settled law” for the next century. People want to believe Hiss innocent.

[Theodore R.]

I think it was a Norwegian who first headed the UN named “Lie”, but he may not have been a liar like most of those that followed.

[Theodore R.]

Would the American people have believed the truth about communists? They believe Edward R. Murrow instead of McCarthy. The American people have a love affair with socialism because they are looking for “free things”.

[Theodore R.]

Trygve Halvdan Lie ( [ˌtɾyɡʋə ˈliː] (help·info); 16 July 1896 – 30 December 1968) was a Norwegian politician. From 1946 to 1952 he was the first elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.

[Yardstick]

The writer of the NYT piece seems sympathetic towards Hiss and snippy towards “right-wing revisionist history” which tends to be critical of the leftist intellectuals who liked communism and Stalin’s USSR. Which is about what you’d expect from a NYT piece on this subject.

[the_Watchman]

The bias of this writer is undeniable:

in the opinion of a significant proportion of the public, for all of the American-born subverters-from-within who helped the Soviet Union to become the most prominent, indeed the only, counterweight to the power of the United States in the postwar world.

Clearly the author feels that the Soviet Union did the world a favor by standing up to the United States. Some writers are so far left that they don't recognize how kooky they sound. Anyone with a clear view of history would recognize that the United States was the major power in the world that kept the Soviet Union from dominating the rest of the world.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Hiss was in charge of forming the communist union we
call the UN.
Hiss also was an adviser to FDR and helped FDR and
his Uncle Joe enslave about 100 million East Europeans.

[nathanbedford]

Indeed Susan Jacoby's bias for the Soviet Union verges on Stalinism. Even the New York Times Sunday Review of Books (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Gallagher-t.html) takes her to task:

For her own part, Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American ­Unreason” and other books, believes ­Alger Hiss was guilty of the perjury for which he was convicted; she is almost, but not entirely, persuaded that Hiss was also a Soviet spy.

This distinction is even too much for the New York Times:

One could say, although not without fear of contradiction, that none of the evidence is exculpatory of Hiss. But Jacoby is incensed at the way current scholars have continued old ideological battles on the back of the Hiss case.

Why is Jacoby incensed?

In the end Jacoby concludes that, sadly, the “misplaced faith inspired by Hiss is still being used to impugn the patriotism of those who believe that it is more, not less, important for this nation to live up to its highest ideals and legal traditions in times of danger than in times of complacent security.”

So, let's see: Susan Jacoby says the Hiss was guilty but not guilty of treason merely guilty of committing perjury about committing treason. And what is worse, vicious right wingers are using evidence of his treachery to undermine liberalism.

Ann Coulter wrote a book called, Treason, in which she pointed all of this out. She was right and for her troubles the New York Times in his article takes a backhanded slap at her lack of scholarship and objectivity, " And it is a little disconcerting to find Ann Coulter thrown into the mix of respectable scholars, just to make Jacoby’s point. " Would that the New York Times would apply the same standard to Susan Jacoby.

[Sicvee]

Yours is an excellent summary of the article for those who don’t want to read it.

[PhilDragoo]

Susan Jacoby reveals herself in this:

In an excellent analysis of FDR's first hundred days, which proves that there is always something new to be said about the New Deal, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter points out that the words dictator and dictatorship were frequently used with approval to describe what the new president ought to do to rescue the nation.

Used by whom.

By the hundreds of Soviet agents in his administration? Who were accused by the much-maligned Senator McCarthy--and proved by the Venona decrypts.

The New York Times did much to make Stalinism "fashionable"--in Jacoby's word.

The Old Gray Comrade fielded the great Pulitzer Pravda Propagandist Walter Duranty who covered up Stalin's famine killing of millions of Ukrainians, his show trials which sent more millions to their deaths.

Jacoby is nostalgic for the embrace of Uncle Joe and the great Red hope of Communism.

She needn't be--we've it all again anew in Obamao.

Who has sprung from Frank Marshall Davis' knee to extol China, "spread the wealth around", denounce the Constitution for failing to "redistribute the wealth".

And a Red countervailing power? Hillary and Bill and Madeleine made sure Schwartz and Armstrong and Wen would give the People's Repugnant of China our missile and warhead data.

Ann Coulter called M. Stanton Evans (Blacklisted by History) the greatest living authority on McCarthy. I saw Evans eviscerate Indiana Civil Liberties head Dr. Robert Risk in 1964--a fact-based fearless warrior defeated a propaganda-spewing fairy in public combat.

The Times and Newsweek continue their fight, losing in the capitalist game they look to the Kremlin-on-the-Potomac to be bailed out.

The Battle for History continues--with the Marxist messiah and his obedient media feeding truth to the memory hole fast as they're able.

[kabumpo]

I could not agree more!! We needed to have de-communization the way we had de-nazification.

[wastoute]

Thank you for your thoughtful and informed (as always) remarks. As I recall the Venona decrypts (transcripts?) prove beyond all doubt Hiss was a traitor. For the life of me I still can't fully grasp why current libs feel it is necessary to continually try to improve his standing in history but they never stop. Their lying is like "The Terminator", it never sleeps, it never stops, and it has only one purpose.

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[iopscusa]

The NYTimes is absolutely helpful to Free people by identifying the subversive intellects like Susan Jacoby. She is definitely a Stalinista...FREEPERS can learn a lot about her with a bit of research. She vehemently hates what she calls the Right Wing Religious. From an interview on BeliefNet: 'What do you mean when you say the orthodox religious view? I stress the orthodox or right wing religious view because I don't like it when people talk about religion versus secularism. What they really mean is a particular kind of religion versus secularism. The general press has a tendency to say religious as if all religions were alike and all religious believers had the same beliefs.'

[joelt]

Ms Coulter has had this right; the NYT will not stop trying to massage this whole story. They had to get this latest entry in,,,,, before their own end.

[iopscusa]

If interested, Jacoby’s “Alger Hiss and the Battle for History” is FREELY available on Google Books...if nothing else, read the conclusion, Ms. Jacoby is hardcore COMMIE.
http://books.google.com/books?id=nLU0z6PlTHAC&dq=%E2%80%98Alger+Hiss+and+the+Battle+for+History%E2%80%99&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=5UCff5Edlv&sig=Sdh7HOimdfMRZE8KqTEJH55sXoQ&hl=en&ei=N08FSufuI8mJtgeEpOmPBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#PPA212,M1

[iopscusa]

NB, Good morning from the 1st state to resist the tyrant Honest Abe...looks like the anti-commie brigade has had a rousing Friday/Saturday conversation on that Hero of the western Communist, Alger Hiss. Have you read this book, it is available on Google Books....Jacoby’s Conclusions are a riot. I would love to see Ann Coulter and Susan Jacoby in debate.

[nathanbedford]

You raise a very good point. The left simply will not let go of this. There is another theory to explain why the left reverts to the same old lies but dresses them up and new words. For example, Hillary Clinton said in one of the debates said she did not like to call herself a liberal because that word had assumed bad connotations and she preferred to be called a progressive. As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, progressives were in many respects worse then the liberals of a decade ago. Goldberg's thesis is that the left keeps recycling the old nostrums which do not work so they must be sold the next time under a new label.

I've been thinking much the same thing myself when I wrote this reply trying to trace the effect of the " anti-anti-communism" crusade against logic which has so taken over academia, then the media, and our culture. We have migrated a long way from a time when a senator could electrify the nation by announcing that there were Communists in the State Department to the point where we elect a president whose most profound associations throughout his biography were with Communists, felons, and terrorists. Here's the reply:

Once upon a Time in America the great divide in our society was expressed by where you stood on Joe McCarthy. Of course, that was all wrapped up with Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss and which one of those two you believed. Did you think the Rosenbergs were guilty? The answer that question told everyone whether you were a Democrat or a Republican.

The other American dramas I can invoke to describe the hold the Army -McCarthy hearings had on the nation are the OJ Simpson trial and the Clarence Thomas hearings. I can remember as a boy coming home from school and finding my mother transfixed before a black-and-white television over the Army McCarthy hearings. In our house we believed McCarthy, and Chambers, and we thought that the Rosenbergs were certainly guilty. But this was not the universal opinion of suburbia and certainly not the politically correct version to which I was exposed to in school which was connected to a university.

The impact of McCarthy was not limited to the era which bears his name. In subsequent years in college I learned that my parents must have been real Neanderthals to believe the way they did. Most of this was imparted to me by my professors through innuendo; we quickly absorbed the culture of the University and knew what sort of opinions were acceptable and which were not acceptable to express in learned company.

Today the term "McCarthyism" has assumed a meaning which contains its own DNA and expresses a whole left-wing point of view. We see the same thing now happening with the phrase, "Swift boating." These phrases have been turned on their head by a consensus in academia and in the media which simply ignores any other interpretation of events except the one favoring the left.

McCarthy was connected to Chambers who was connected to Nixon. If the left was irrational in its support of Alger Hiss, it was almost psychotic in its hatred of Richard Nixon. There was a chain of events that led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon for actions that had mostly been done already by previous Democrat presidents. What I find so fascinating so many years later is the question, why was the left so irrational, so emotional in its judgments about the Communists and the anti-Communists? Why was the left so purblind to Communists in high places where they could mortally wound the nation and so viscerally obsessed about the men like McCarthy, Chambers, and Nixon who exposed them?

Why, for example, was President Truman so indifferent to the evidence of Communists in the State Department? Perhaps Truman's inertia can be explained by his parochial Midwestern background, his naïveté, his partisanship, his ignorance of the lay of the land on the day he assumed office. But Roosevelt's involvement was more than indifference. It strikes me that Roosevelt was almost the model of the patrician who sees himself as larger than his own country. John Kerry, of Swift Boat fame, seems to be cast in the same mold, although without Roosevelt's political acumen.

Do men of great wealth like George Soros or Franklin Roosevelt regard the concept of national sovereignty to be merely the outmoded belief systems of the masses, akin to the belief in God which provide some comfort and meaning to their lives, but which is outmoded and not particularly useful in the grand games played for world stakes. Just a thought, but one prompted by knowledge that the financial backer of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL was also a man of great wealth who founded the school which has done so much damage to our culture. The school was founded for the express purpose of breaking down those institutions which frustrated the victory of communism.

Roosevelt must have known that there were Communists in his government. His vice president was virtually an avowed communist. I believe he just didn't care. Either he was so arrogant that he believed he could control events even as he was being undermined by a fifth column, or, more likely, he didn't care because he didn't think it mattered when viewed from the exalted perspective of his world.

George Soros does not care what passport he holds except as it advances his interests. Patricians in general do not see the world as contained and defined by national boundaries but by markets, routes, and centers of supply and demand.

McCarthyism, like Swift Boating, has been distorted and twisted into a widely accepted definition by political correctness. Political correctness is the explicitly contrived belief system created by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. The Frankfurt school was founded by a character who could change skins with George Soros and each could live comfortably in the other's century. They view the rest of us as impediments or useful idiots.

They could be right. The useful idiots enforce the rules of political correctness and obligingly define against the weight of history the meaning of phrases like, " McCarthyism" or, "Swift Boating." I for one choose to count myself among the impediment class.

[Jimmy Valentine]

"not having Nuremberg-style trials for the Communists"

We almost did with the McCarthy hearings.

What the left never, ever will admit is that McCarthy was right. The State Department,and a big chunk of the Federal Government were infested with fellow travelers and outright spies for Soviet Russia.

This is yet another New York Times piece of disinformation.

Always remember when reading the Times that they still have Walter Duranty's Pulitzer on display. The man who helped cover up the Ukrainian starvation by Stalin.

[BnBlFlag]

“The State Dept. and a big chunk of the Federal Govt. were infested with fellow travelers and outright spies for Soviet Russia.”
And not a damn thing has changed. (Except it’s worse now. Even the Prez is involved!)

[iopscusa]

Great followup post NB...I can appreciate where you come from as far as times/family politics, mine were similar.
You, like many of the current day anti-Communism, do a lot to keep the freedom flame alive, thanks for your diligence.

[iowamark]

Hiss himself was a political creature of the thirties, in that his left-wing political sympathies did not emerge before the Depression. Chambers, by contrast, embraced Bolshevism and joined the Party in 1925 — the midpoint of a decade of prosperity in which even the tiny minority of Americans with left-wing political views could not imagine a future for communism in this country. By moving to the left not in the twenties but in the thirties, Hiss followed an entirely conventional course, dictated both by the nation's economic crisis and by personal ambition, for intellectuals of his generation.

Obviously sympathetic to Hiss and other Communists.

[Chode]

Hiss=UN

[LS]

My “48 Liberal Lies About American History” will be released as a paperback in Sept. and we added a 49th lie-—”Alger Hiss was Innocent.”

[varialectio]

No historian or anyone seriously interested in history is going to take the musings of this well-connected leftist journalist seriously. Allen Weinstein’s _Perjury_ and _The Haunted Wood_ closed the book on Hiss years ago. But you’ve got to admire the tenacity of the Left. They just won’t let this go.

Looking forward to the Hiss chapter in Larry’s book.

[baldeagle390]

I did a paper in college on this very topic. Indeed, the trial aroused the passions of America at the time. It was the handsome, eloquent Alger Hiss vs the fat, stumbling Whitaker Chambers. I thought I read somewhere the documents from the USSR showed the Hiss was indeed a spy. Anyway, I concluded in my paper that Alger Hiss was indeed a liar. Fortunately, I had a professor that was interested in learning rather than indoctrination. I got an “A”. As he shook my hand at graduation he referenced the paper I wrote. That was an awesome moment!

[varialectio]

It tells you all you need to know about the Left that, when it turns out Sacco & Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Hiss, etc. were guilty as charged, IT DOESN’T MATTER. Leftists have always been great explainers, ever since the working class failed to deliver as promised by Uncle Karl.

[Melchior]

The title should read: Alger Hiss and Revisionist History. Remember, for Democrats and their minions in the teaching profession the US needlessly exploded two atomic bombs, started the war in Korea, was responsible for the Cold War, forced the Soviets to build the Berlin Wall, and forced the Soviets to invade Afghanistan. And, of course, the person whose policies brought the Cold War to an end was Mikhail Gorbachov. Our indigenous America-haters are now numbered in the tens of millions thanks to revisionist historians.

[ReformationFan]

I took a class from a history professor who was like that. He let FDR off the hook for Yalta and railed against “McCarthyism” claiming there were “never any communists in the government.” He absolutely adored Woodrow Wilson, FDR and JFK. Henry Cabot Lodge Sr., Nixon and McCarthy were the great villains of American history according to him. I would be critical of communism and JFK and question him on it. I think that’s why he gave me a B instead of an A.

[wastoute]

Thanks for your lenghty and thoughtful analysis. I find myself almost always thinking like you and am always eager to read your posts.

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[PhilDragoo]

Richard Carlson as Herb Philbrick in I Led Three Lives the black and white series sponsored by Phillips 66.

How quaint--the secret Communist cell--

Now comes Frank Marshall Davis the CPUSA member and his whiskey-and-marijuana comrade Stanley Armour--

And Stanley's grandson the highest mole yet.

Al Gore the darling of Armand Hammer bagman to the Soviet dictators, his father founding the CPUSA in 1919.

Delano was enamored of Uncle Joe, quite prepared to sacrifice the freedom and very lives of millions of Europeans, to insult Churchill, to dismiss charges of infiltration in his administration--

Now comes Hillary the progressive whose homage to Alinsky is unsealed--and her Alinskyite fellow traveler Hussein.

Again it should be emphasized New York Times, Walter Duranty, Uncle Joe, Senator Joe--

Drink the Kool-Aid or be deemed anti-intellectual, a clinger to Bibles and guns.

The institutional pressures you describe are now so pervasive as to be the water which the fish cannot perceive.

Horowitz chronicles serial academic outrage and is met by shouting agitators.

We have met the anti-intellectuals and they are the Left.

Now shapeshifted into the Harvard grease extruder Hussein, an absolute babbler sans his telepromptered lines.

Who was so impressed at the Potemkin metropolis built on the spilled blood of the Tiananmen Two Thousand.

Brother Ayers knows of omelets and bombs, while bony metro usurper whines to be left alone to his waffle.

Thank you again for your illumination of the persistent subliminal sleight of hand of the Left.

It's tyranny and we're not having it--not yesterday, not today, never.

[Yardstick]

*Bump!*

[iopscusa]

Excellent Phil, we know the truth. I would have loved to see Stanton Evans (Blacklisted by History) the greatest living authority on McCarthy, eviscerate Indiana Civil Liberties head Dr. Robert Risk in 1964—a fact-based fearless warrior defeated a propaganda-spewing fairy in public combat.
Balcklisted by History, The Venona Files and Comrade J are 3 must reads for all Americans.

[Clemenza]

As bad as Alger Hiss was, Harry Dexter White was far more dangerous.