Posted on 02/24/2013 9:28:42 AM PST by Altura Ct.
I cannot overestimate the fearless excellence of M. Stanton Evans' work as a historian, and, I am fortunate to say, mentor. His 2007 book Blacklisted by History is not only a shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and "McCarthyism" -- and, by extension, obfuscation about the successful penetration and subversion of the US government -- it is also an exercise in courage, in confronting a false and crippling consensus with an unshakeable dedication to fact and logic. On a personal note, the book served me as a rosetta stone by which I was able to begin deciphering the mendacious history we "know" as our shining cultural legacy. The results of this unnerving research-odyssey will be published in my forthcoming book, American Betrayal.
That said, I am delighted to post an article written for this week's edition of Dispatch International. My task was to introduce a European audience, in brief, to Evans' work. The piece below is the main article, which is available for free at the DI website. I also wrote accompanying piece assembling a series of thumbnail sketches of some of the sensational revelations Evans and co-writer and Cold War expert Herbert Romerstein discovered in their brand new book, Stalin's Secret Agents. It is behind the online-subscription wall -- so subscribe!
"Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Most Europeans are unlikely to be familiar with the facts behind the American term “McCarthyism.” They probably know it describes something very bad in American politics – the “Communist witch hunts” of more than half a century ago. They may also know that simply uttering the term, like casting a spell, stops all debate cold by associating someone with the eponymous Joseph McCarthy. As the story goes, he was himself very bad. After all, he conducted those long ago “Communist witch hunts,“ ruining his name in perpetuity. This probably exhausts general knowledge.
But here’s a secret: Most Americans know little more than this same familiar but completely false narrative. In recent years, stunning revelations from archives in Washington and Moscow have confirmed that McCarthy’s investigations – and those conducted by other officials before and after – netted not innocent and imaginary “witches,” but secret cadres of hardened Communist agents determined to bring down the American republic. Surely, this makes Joe McCarthy a great patriot and deserving “the plaudits of a grateful nation.”
So wrote M. Stanton Evans, the consensus-smashing, revisionist biographer of McCarthy in Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (2007). Evans was attempting to convey the significance of just one particular Soviet intelligence operation, circa 1945, that McCarthy was instrumental in bringing to light, circa 1950.
Even a few details about this operation, named initially as the Amerasia affair after a pro-Communist journal of the day, will add a little needed context to modern-day perspective on the so-called McCarthy era.
Amerasia’s editor, Phillip Jaffe, came under FBI surveillance in 1944 after the contents of a confidential OSS memo appeared in his magazine. (The OSS was the precursor to the CIA.) The FBI soon learned Jaffe was in possession of hundreds of stolen, secret US government documents, plus a photographic set-up. The magazine ran no photographs, so the FBI plausibly believed it had come across an active espionage operation. Further surveillance, including wire-taps, determined that Jaffe was in frequent contact with US Communist Party leader Earl Browder, Soviet “diplomats” in New York, a top Chinese Communist envoy of Mao and US diplomat John Stewart Service (home from Chiang Kai-Shek’s China, where, it later emerged, Service roomed with two leading Communist agents, Solomon Adler and Chi Chao-ting).
On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested six people, including Jaffe and Service, and seized hundreds of top secret documents, many concerning military matters. An open-and-shut espionage case, it would seem.
An open and quickly shut-down case is more like it. What followed was cover-up, perjury and grand-jury rigging by, among others, high-ranking Washington officials. Some were eager to prevent a national security scandal from engulfing the Truman White House. Others were acting to shield a far wider Communist-led conspiracy mounted by confederates inside the State Department, Treasury, White House and elsewhere in the US government, working not merely to filch secret documents but to ensure, through influence and subversion, the Communist takeover of China. These powerful forces of suppression proved overwhelming. The Amerasia case was scuttled, the scandal was buried, and, within a few years, China was Red.
Five years later, McCarthy’s laser-beam focus on the still-festering case would be instrumental in follow-up investigations launched by both the Senate and the FBI. These massive probes yielded, as Evans notes, some 5,000 pages of Senate hearings, plus 1,000 pages of exhibits and, from the FBI, 24,000 pages of now-declassified records.
They reveal the workings of a vast, complex influence operation, Evans writes, that “assiduously worked to guide official and public thinking, and hence the course of U.S. policy,” in this case regarding the Far East. Other such intricate influence operations, of course, targeted the West. And who was doing this dirty work of Communist-directed subversion from within? Many officials and public figures highlighted by Joseph McCarthy (among others), who, we have since learned from US and Soviet archives, were secret agents and fellow-traveling supporters of Stalin.
McCarthy, as Evans has pointed out, threatened to blow the lid off the official cover-ups and other acts of treason. Thus, he had to be isolated, demonized and destroyed, and so he was. History would be written by the isolators, the demonizers and the destroyers, and repeated by rote for the next half century.
Then along came the declassification of FBI records and releases of intelligence documents, and scholars such as M. Stanton Evans to sift through them. But the far-reaching implications of such research – that anti-Communist “witch-hunters” were right all along – have done shockingly little to change the way Americans regard their history. Such hidebound attitudes extend also to American conservatives, who, it would seem, are the modern-day heirs of the anti-Communist legacy. What Evans calls “court history” is that deeply entrenched as national lore.
Will this ever change? “There’s no concise answer to that,” Evans replied in a recent interview with Dispatch International. “There is a mindset, a narrative, a template that has been out there for a long time.” The reflex reaction, to date, is to preserve that template rather than assess the new evidence.
Thus, it is minimized or denied. Evans mimics the usual reaction to the specter of historical Communist penetration: “ `Well, this thing was overblown, there wasn’t a big problem, these people were persecuted.’ The new evidence, he continues, “challenges this so they dismiss it. We’re dealing with an establishment mindset that is impervious to refutation – to fact. It’s like throwing popcorn at a battleship.”
This hasn’t stopped Evans, 78 – once the youngest metropolitan newspaper editor in the USA (Indianapolis News), and formerly a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and commentator for CBS News and Voice of America – from reloading and firing again. In fact, following his McCarthy book, which corroborates many McCarthy cases and documents the Washington Establishment’s craven efforts to destroy the maverick senator rather than address subversion and cover-up, Evans embarked on a new project. With so much evidence now available attesting to the presence of Soviet agents watching over wartime Washington, Evans set out to write a concise history of what it was these agents of the Kremlin actually accomplished.
The new book, published in November 2012, is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, co-written with Herbert Romerstein, a leading Cold War expert and longtime congressional investigator. Assessing the achievements of agents of influence, is very different, Evans emphasizes, from standard histories of spying as defined by stealing secrets.
The series of history-changing events Evans and Romerstein identify as having been subverted by Soviet agents is itself history-changing, demanding a rewrite of much of the history of World War II. Despite the familiarity with which we regard the era, in many ways, Evans and Romerstein are pioneering a new field of study. The best way to approach it with what Evans himself calls his Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “No matter how bad you think something is,” he says, “when you look into it, it's always worse."
Bill Clinton's "Soros" was an Indonesian gentleman named Mochtar Riady, who ran the Lippo Group. His son, James Riady, was in close contact with Clinton even when he was the governor of Arkansas. The Riadys owned Worthen Bank in Little Rock, which undertook to underwrite Bill Clinton's campaigns.
A little research will give you the enormous extent of this relationship and how the Riadys profited from Clinton and he from them.
See Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument for a hint.
Oddly the father of Denise Rich has the same last name and similar history as the instigator of the first Israeli-China arms deals.Riadys changed their Chinese name to Indonesian; they're Chinese.
Lippo Group was partnered with ChinaResources a PLA intel front.
Clinton made John Huang number three at Commerce and after classified CIA briefings Huang walked across the street to Stephens to fax intel to China.
Ron Brown was Sec Commerce and when he threatened to roll on Hillary he flew into a mountain and got a hole in his head.
The technology was used to launch satellites and make money and the country's security took a back seat to profit.
A much better book on McCarthy is Arthur Herman's Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the life and legacy of America's most hated Senator. Herman comes to very similar conclusions but his book is well written and interesting. It's about 1/3 shorter too.
I’m older than dirt..McCarthy was and is a hero to me..Thanks for an interesting thread.
I tried to inform my children the truth about the real threat when they were younger..Of course it’s plain to see now.
Actually, Evans’ book is better researched and sourced.
However, Evans’ book contains some major flaws which I briefly addressed in my webpage here:
https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/cpusa/mccarthy
You forgot to mention that McCarthy’s critics include prominent conservative anti-communists such as Whittaker Chambers, former FBI informant Herbert Philbrick, and Roy Cohn — not to mention J. Edgar Hoover and senior FBI officials who initially assisted McCarthy and who were directly involved with the matters that McCarthy investigated.
This is what is wrong with the debate about McCarthy. His admirers portray him as saintly and heroic — and incapable of grave flaws and mistakes — whereas ALL critics of McCarthy are, by definition, characterized as “liars” or “smearing” McCarthy.
In fact, there is one rule about the McCarthy controversy that I have found to be incontrovertible: the more adamant, effusive, and unconditional the praise -— the more impervious to fact-based arguments his admirers are.
Obviously, there is something much more profound in operation here. The controversy over McCarthy has assumed cosmic-truth proportions i.e. it is no longer a question open to careful examination of factual evidence and the possibility of falsifying aspects of what McCarthy believed or wrote or said.
Instead, McCarthy admirers insist upon absolute affirmation of every predicate, premise, assertion, and conclusion presented by McCarthy. Any deviation —no matter how small— is impermissible.
In short, McCarthy admirers have enthusiastically adopted the Soviet-style of history telling. ONLY that data which they think advances their argument and the conclusions they want believed is acceptable. Any contradictory data must be ignored, suppressed, or de-valued. Any data which falsifies something which McCarthy said or wrote — is anathema and must immediately be discarded.
As I pointed out in my webpage on Evans’ book:
“To his credit, Evans has no problem acknowledging that the complete story about the ‘McCarthy period’ in our history is still murky, and it is open to conflicting interpretations of available data by entirely honorable and principled analysts, so it certainly deserves considerable further fact-based research.”
However, as Dr. John Earl Haynes (one of our nation’s most accomplished and respected scholars on the McCarthy period) has observed in an email to me:
“Klehr and I have repeatedly made clear that neither Venona, Moscow archival material, nor Vassiliev’s notebooks provide any meaningful vindication for McCarthy. First, that there had been significant Soviet espionage and Communist infiltration of key government agencies was not a view originating with McCarthy. That point had been publicly and vigorously advanced years before McCarthy arrived on the scene by, among others, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and Louis Budenz. The evidence that has emerged since the early 1990s certainly corroborates and vindicates their charges and the particulars of their testimony.
Second, Joseph McCarthy, however, went beyond them by claiming that the espionage and infiltration occurred with the knowledge and assistance of key Truman administration officials, namely Secretary of Defense and State George Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, both part of McCarthy’s “a conspiracy so immense”. There is no support in the new evidence for what was new in McCarthy’s charges or for the particular persons he named such as Acheson and Marshall. When McCarthy was right, he was not original and was only repeating charges made years earlier by others. When he was original, he was wrong.
For my view of McCarthy, see:
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page58.html and http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/12/mccarthy-accord.html
John”
For further discussion re: McCarthy see my webpage here:
https://sites.google.com/site/ernie124102/cpusa/mccarthy
It is also useful to keep the following comment by J. Edgar Hoover in mind:
“The Communist Party in this country has attempted to infiltrate and subvert every segment of our society, but its continuing efforts have not achieved success of any substance. Too many self-styled experts on communism, without valid credentials and without any access whatsoever to classified factual data regarding the inner workings of the conspiracy, have engaged in rumor-mongering and hurling false and wholly unsubstantiated allegations against persons whose views differ from their own. This is dangerous business. It is divisive and unintelligent, and makes more difficult the task of the professional investigator.” [Hoover statement in February 5, 1962 letter to Mrs. W.R. Brown of Bountiful Utah; also published as letter-to-editor in Tri-Cities Daily newspaper of Sheffield, Alabama on Sunday March 31, 1963. Copy of Hoover letter in FBI HQ file 94-1-369, serial #1676]
You obviously have never research Venona. Try reading the articles by Dr. John Earl Haynes which compares Venona documents to McCarthy’s assertions. Venona DOES NOT “vindicate” McCarthy.
Coulter did not do any “research”. She is a polemicist, not a scholar. She uses inflammatory language to generate income, not to provide fact-based insights into any subject under scrutiny.
If you search for ANY scholar who cites Coulter as any sort of expert on the McCarthy period, you will engage in a futile exercise because she has absolutely no record of scholarship -— no peer-reviewed articles, no new research into primary sources, no interviews, no FOIA requests, NOTHING.
Oh, and he never investigated Hollywood.
The messages in this thread contain factual ignorance which is truly breathtaking.
I understand the desire to pretend that McCarthy never made a mistake or that he had some sort of exceptional insights which his critics did not want to acknowledge as accurate.
I suggest that everyone here review the FBI investigative file captioned “Alleged Communists in the State Department” (FBI HQ file 121-23278). It eviscerates most of the assertions made by McCarthy.
As the former Assistant Director of the FBI wrote in his 1979 memoir about McCarthy’s claim regarding “57” Communists in the State Department:
“We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone fifty-seven cases.”
As FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere wrote in his 1968 book, “The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story”,
“McCarthy’s star chamber proceedings, his lies and overstatements hurt our counterintelligence efforts.”
As part of my retirement from the Agency package I got a booklet concerning the VENONA project. I came away feeling that McCarthy was vindicated. The State Department was riddled with comsymps.
The article says “...shattering revision of half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and “McCarthyism”...”
The point is, M. Stanton Evans didn’t just discover this truth. Somehow, Coulter already sold 396,600 hardcover copies on the topic.
I’m sure her’s is not as scholarly, LOL.
No, Ax, Venona did not vindicate McCarthy.
See these two articles by Dr. John Earl Haynes:
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Lists and Venona
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page62.html
(b) Exchange with Arthur Herman re: Venona
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page58.html
In addition, the FBI’s Security Index file falsifies your premise about the State Department — as does the file which the FBI opened which dealt with McCarthy’s accusations, i.e. HQ 121-23278.
Donna, I don’t understand your message.
Evans did seminal research and obtained primary source documents which nobody else had seen up to that time.
For that alone, his work deserves serious consideration.
As Dr. John E. Haynes noted in his review article regarding Evans book (comparing it to the previous work by Arthur Herman):
“Evans does an excellent job of correcting excesses in the historical record — the unthinking, near-hysterical, and far too common demonization of McCarthy. Indeed, Evans’s book is more detailed, and he conducted more original and diligent research into primary documentation than did Herman in his account of ‘America’s most hated senator.’ “
But as Dr. Haynes also points out, McCarthy was gravely mistaken about many matters.
See:
http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/12/mccarthy-accord.html#fn1
Also see my previous messages for more details.
So, you’re saying that there were no Soviet spies in the State Department and other government agencies uncovered by VENONA? BTW, my late wife was a McCarthy (no relation).
The article makes claims that ignore Coulter. That’s clear.
Coulter ...shattered half a century of lies about Joseph McCarthy and “McCarthyism”... first.
No, Ax, I did not say what you claim. Again, I suggest that you read the articles by Dr. John E. Haynes whose links I have provided. Haynes compared what Venona documents reveal with respect to every person named by McCarthy. McCarthy was gravely mistaken.
Donna -— if you make a mistake or a judgment which exceeds available evidence, should I conclude that you “LIED”?
No serious student of the McCarthy era believes that every critic of McCarthy “lied”. Instead, honorable, intelligent, thoughtful people disagreed about what the evidence showed.
Furthermore, as Dr. Haynes pointed out in the email which I copied into one of my previous messages here -— there is a time-line which must be considered.
Space limitations here prevent an in-depth discussion but, again, I suggest that you review the FBI investigative file entitled “Alleged Communists in the State Department” (HQ 121-23278).
Some of McCarthy’s accusations were about people did not even work in the State Department. Other accusations regarding “security risks” had nothing whatsoever to do with alleged communist sympathies by the suspects. Instead, there were concerns expressed regarding such matters as homosexuality, financial problems, marital problems, etc.
Lastly, there is the matter of whether you respect independent judgments or, instead, you insist that your personal opinions must be accepted by everyone. You might consider evidence to be compelling for concluding that a particular person represents a “security risk” whereas another analyst might make a different conclusion — based upon the exact same evidence.
McCarthy made no such distinctions. Instead, he referred to names listed on an outdated years-old State Department document as if there was nothing to analyze or interpret or decide, i.e. just the fact that a name appeared on a list of suspects was (in his mind) equivalent to confirming that a listed person was a security risk.
Again, I refer you to the conclusion made by the former Assistant Director of the FBI (William Sullivan) who headed the Bureau’s Domestic Intelligence Division. He observed:
“We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone fifty-seven cases.”
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