Sure...
from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671695983/qid=1118001082/sr=8-18/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i3_xgl14/002-0623470-1072037?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
"From the coauthor of All the President's Men and The Final Days comes this pained, loving, intensely felt account of his parents' ordeal, and his own emotional upheaval, during President Harry Truman's loyalty purges. Both of Bernstein's parents had Communist Party affiliations in the 1940s. His father, Al, a Senate-appointed investigative attorney on Capitol Hill, later a union leader in San Francisco, attended a few Party meetings; his mother, Sylvia, participated in the party's campaigns on behalf of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and to desegregate swimming pools. When Truman's loyalty boards began passing judgment, in 1947, on government employees' fitness to serve, Al Bernstein was defense counsel in some 500 such cases. His own union career derailed, he opened a laundry. In 1954, his wife was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The FBI was a constant presence in their son's boyhood and adolescence."
I didn't know that kerry was a red diaper baby. I think the answer is that the communist dream is alive and well, both then and now. We think that somehow now that communism has been "defeated" with the fall of the Berlin wall, and the collapse of the USSR, that our times are somehow different than "those" times. In my mind, not a whole lot has changed,
the same types of people are doing the same sorts of things and for the same reasons.
Alger Hiss, Mark Felt - not a whole lot to choose between them. Hell you've got people like Harold Ickes doing today what their forbears did fifty years ago. Same old story, sad to report.
Also, you are 100% correct that just because Communism died in Russia, the Communist ideal is not dead.
Communism was, and always will be, an evil ideology that attempted to be God, and to subvert divine law. It was inherently criminal, virtually exterminationist, and the twin of Nazism.
Evil is not yet dead in the world. While the moniker "Communist" has fallen into disfavor, the left used to proudly hail that title. Now they call themselves "Progressives."