THEY'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU [Ann Coulter on Ron Radosh, Joe McCarthy, "Blacklisted by History"]

AnnCoulter.com ^ | December 5, 2007 | Ann Coulter

[RonDog]

THEY'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU
by Ann Coulter
December 5, 2007

Poor Ron Radosh is still hoping liberals will forgive him.

He wrote a good book a quarter-century ago with Joyce Milton -- "The Rosenberg File" -- which was supposed to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, but instead concluded that Rosenberg was guilty of Soviet espionage.

Radosh has spent the rest of his life apologizing to liberals for that book.

This week, he's apologizing in the pages of the increasingly irrelevant National Review with a nasty review of the greatest book since the Bible, M. Stanton Evans' "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy."

Radosh makes misstatements of fact about the book, misstates facts about the cases and falsely accuses Evans of plagiarism. Other than that, it's a good review!

The review makes it comically obvious that Radosh didn't so much as glance through the pages of Evans' book. (Please forgive me, Eric Foner!) At least Kelly Ripa skims the summary cards written by her assistants who actually read the books when she interviews an author. Radosh doesn't even manage that.

It must be painful for Radosh to read a thrilling historical account of Soviet espionage without every accusation against a liberal having to be surrounded by 400 excuses, as in Radosh's excruciating books.

This contemptible Uriah Heep patronizingly writes, for example, that "Evans does an impressive job of reminding readers how serious the issue of Communist penetration was" -- something Radosh's own books failed to do because he's too busy denouncing right-wingers like Joe McCarthy.

But Uriah Radosh complains that Evans "does not emphasize, although his own data make it clear, that most of the knowledge about these people came before McCarthy was on the scene. After all, Elizabeth Bentley first went to the FBI in 1945, and named key members of Soviet networks."

This is extensively covered in Chapters 10 and 11 of Evans' book. Extensively. There are even never-before-released charts in those chapters that you'd notice by merely flipping through the book before purporting to write a review of it. So even people who just read Evans' book for the pictures will know that he's covered that point pretty exhaustively. This includes one intricately detailed FBI chart mapping out Bentley's Soviet contacts. But thanks for reminding us about Elizabeth Bentley, Ron!

All of this information, incidentally, was delivered to the Truman administration, where it was promptly ignored.

This is the central fact that apparently must be explained to liberals over and over again. I will understand the rules of football before liberals will grasp McCarthy's point.

It is true that most of the high-value targets whom McCarthy cited to prove Democratic perfidy had been identified as Soviet spies before McCarthy came on the scene.

But the essence of what McCarthy was saying was: Let's get into this a bit. How could Whittaker Chambers meet with FDR's Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939, reveal massive Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration, and still have these same Soviet spies swarming through Democratic administrations a decade later?

How could Truman have nominated known Soviet spy Harry Dexter White to be U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund in 1946? How could Truman still be denying Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent in 1956?

Democrats want endless, pontifical investigations into how 9/11 happened, but they can't comprehend why McCarthy wanted an investigation into how an immense network of Soviet spies managed to run rampant through the Democratic administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

After Hiss, the Rosenbergs and the loss of China, there was considerably more reason for McCarthy to investigate the State Department than there is for the current Congress to investigate Bush's firing of his own U.S. attorneys.

By exposing the Democrats' absolute blindness to Soviet totalitarianism, McCarthy shattered forever the nation's confidence in the Democrats' capacity to govern. For that, the Stalinist hate machine attacked him viciously and has never let up -- as detailed in "Blacklisted by History," a book Ron Radosh might want to read someday.

But Radosh is not about to let the first book to render a full and honest historical account of Joe McCarthy ruin his blissful ignorance. Radosh knows less about McCarthy than I know about fly-fishing. He gets cases wrong, sources wrong, hearings wrong. He's been pulling this nonsense for 25 years now. The sole point of his current cliche-ridden ramblings in National Review is to make yet one more special pleading to liberals.

DEAR RON:
No matter how hard you try, they'll never forgive you. You still can't get a job teaching at any university in America.

DEAR NATIONAL REVIEW:
Your fake dispatches from Lebanon are more interesting than whining liberals writing book reviews of books they haven't read and don't have the guts to write.

COPYRIGHT 2007 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
4520 Main Street, Kansas City, MO 64111

[secretagent]

Good catch. Does Philbrick have later praise for McCarthy?

Philbrick could have later opposed McCarthy, as Hoover supposedly did, but details seem very sketchy.

I found this - supposedly Philbrick told the Boston globe he opposed McCarthy:

“Although a staunch anti-communist, Mr. Philbrick turned down several invitations to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s hearings.

“I’m no McCarthyite,” he told the Globe. “He [McCarthy] harmed the cause of anti-communism more than anybody I know.”

http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~nvjack/fylbrigg/obit_herbert_a_philbrick_1993.htm

Thin stuff, either way.

[secretagent]

Good quote from Evans of Hoover publically supporting McCarthy.

Link?

[secretagent]

Good point that Hoover apparently supported McCarthy, as late as 1953.

But Hoover later quietly opposed him, according to Meroney:

“In 1954, during Senate hearings to determine whether McCarthy had pressured the Army to give special treatment to one of his former aides, G. David Schine, Hoover let McCarthy twist in what were already rough winds. He refused to come to McCarthy’s defense on the matter of mysterious documents about the security of an Army installation that appeared to be written by Hoover. Hoover denied their authenticity, which embarrassed McCarthy and his counsel, Roy Cohn.”

[secretagent]

Chambers opposed McCarthy:

“On the one hand, Buckley contends that McCarthy was the ‘’main vehicle’’ of anti-Communism and thus implicitly worthy of support. This is his 1954 position, influenced by a strong Catholic identification with McCarthy’s crusade. Yet Buckley now also endorses the contradictory stance of Whittaker Chambers, who thought McCarthy was too indiscriminate to do the cause of anti-Communism any good and thus deserving of repudiation.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E4DE1F3CF93BA15752C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=5

[secretagent]

As M. Stanton Evans irrefutably demonstrates, McCarthy “didn’t make a practice of frivolous accusations about communism” either.

According to Meroney, McCarthy was reckless, to put it mildly:

"In 1950, McCarthy infamously said he had a list of more than 200 communists who had "infested" the State Department and were shaping its policy—claims he could never prove. He also insinuated that Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Gen. George Marshall were traitors. Those familiar with the techniques of the party later recognized the irony in the fact that McCarthy used the same kind of dishonest tactics—grandstanding, fomenting internal political division, confusing issues on purpose and vilifying those who stood in his way—that had been mastered by the communists."

http://claremont.org/projects/pageID.1865/default.asp#

[KC Burke]

Chambers was a man whose travail forged him as a great and thoghtful thinker.

He dealt with the communists of the era across the country and probably did think that the McCarthy focus on dilletants from the arts was wasteful and distructive grandstanding that gained sympathy from a nation built on toleration of different modes of thought and belief.

But Chambers held that the American communist, the true party member, was a selfless weapon ready to be put to use by Soviet communism. To say that he thought little of the effectiveness of the efforts of McCarthy is not to say that he felt that exposure of communism’s pervasive nature, largely hidden, was an untruth and not a danger.

From my reading, he knew that the Democrat Party was ignoring communism and membership in general because of the general feeling of common goals with the “armed doctrine.”

The article you provided is a good read.

[AndyTheBear]

It's good to be vindicated in the end but what does the McCarthy story really matter now politically?

Because such vindication shines light on what the left was and is. People need to get history right so they can learn from it.

[SShultz460]

Ooooh! Thats going to leave a mark...

He was good, I liked him.

[secretagent]

"Armed doctrine". Does this capture the definition?

Islamic extremism today, like Bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees. And, like Communism, it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E1D7153CF932A25751C0A9649C8B63&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/H/Hussein,%20Saddam

[secretagent]

Found this:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a7f91723a2b.htm

[Ultra-Secret.info]

As in his claim that Hoover and Philbrick opposed McCarthy, Meroney is wrong here.

The document in question was a two-and-a-quarter-page Army Intelligence summary of an FBI report.

Hoover was under explicit orders from his Justice Department superiors not to comment on the matter, which was classified.

See Blacklisted by History, pp. 561-564.

[Ultra-Secret.info]

Meroney repeats the old claim that “In 1950, McCarthy infamously said he had a list of more than 200 communists who had ‘infested’ the State Department and were shaping its policy,” which Evans proves is false.

What McCarthy actually said was, “I have in my hand 57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.” (Evans, p. 197)

The very first count in Sen. Benton’s bill to censure McCarthy was that he had lied about these numbers. The Gillette committee even sent a Senate investigator to Wheeling to interview witnesses to find out what McCarthy actually said. As the investigator wrote, “The newly unearthed evidence demolished Senator Benton’s charges in all their material respects and thoroughly proved Senator McCarthy’s account of the facts to be truthful.” (pp. 438-439)

The committee conveniently buried this report, but quietly dropped this count against McCarthy. Incidentally, another quietly-buried report, from the State Department to the Tydings committee, confirmed that there were actually 58 such cases (“disapproved” by the loyalty-security screening board, but cleared by higher-ups) in the department at the time. (p. 262)

McCarthy never accused Acheson or Marshall of treason. He did lay the loss of Eastern Europe and China at their feet, charging them with either incompetence or complicity. Evans explicitly says McCarthy was in error about Marshall, but he clearly shows that the early Acheson was far more devoted to appeasement of the Soviets than his later Cold-War image.

The notion that McCarthy used “dishonest tactics—grandstanding, fomenting internal political division, confusing issues on purpose and vilifying those who stood in his way,” is categorically false. As Evans shows, it was McCarthy’s antagonists who made these techniques their stock-in-trade.

[Ultra-Secret.info]

To Robwin:

Horowitz repeats the old saw that “McCarthy did not unearth any Communists in government or out (all they had all been previously identified by the FBI).”

As Evans shows, this is a Straw Man: McCarthy did not claim to have unearthed any Communists in government. He said certain people who had been flagged by the FBI, State Department security, Army intelligence, Attorney General, HUAC, etc., as security risks were nevertheless cleared by the Truman loyalty-security boards. Others who had been disapproved by the boards were nevertheless mysteriously cleared by unnamed higher-ups. In carrying out Congress’ constitutional duty of oversight, McCarthy sought to find out why these particular cases were cleared, when others, obviously far less egregious, were kicked out.

Horowitz repeats the old claim that “FBI officials engaged in counter-intelligence work despised McCarthy for damaging their efforts.” Note that he does not quote any. I already quoted Hoover’s own words to prove that the old claim that Hoover opposed McCarthy was false. If the FBI agents involved in counter-intelligence despised McCarthy, who was feeding him the FBI reports suppressed by Truman?

[Ultra-Secret.info]

“’I’m no McCarthyite,’ he told the Globe. ‘He [McCarthy] harmed the cause of anti-communism more than anybody I know.’”

M. Stanton Evans, then with the Indianapolis News, interviewed Philbrick in 1959. Philbrick denied ever saying this.

Would the liberal, anti-McCarthy Boston Globe lie?

[KC Burke]

At #78 I posted in part:

After the interview, he never saw those two agents again.

After the interview, he was never contacted by the FBI again during the War or thereafter.

When the Hiss case began, he went throught other government agencies and did have some secondary contact with the FBI but seems to have considered them compromised, either by political ambition, or manipulation.

I have read again the last 250 pages of Witness and have to retract my characterizations in the underlined portions.

I was remembering the out-of-the-blue interview with the FBI months and months after he had made his report to the Assistant Secretary of State for Security and how he characterized it in that section.

He later says that the FBI did check with him on certain cases after 1945 and it appears he felt that the issue was acusations versus hard-evidence and the Justice Department lack of political will to direct the FBI.

In the Hiss case period itself, especially after he produced the written documents and the film he had virtually forgotten that he had given to his brother-in-law, the FBI really shined when their strength of crime lab and investigation verification could be brought to bear.

I am so humbled by the story of Chambers, I would hate to minimize his worth by inaccurate characterization.

[Ultra-Secret.info]

That “Chambers opposed McCarthy” is a little simplistic. The New York Times article you cite fails to quote (Surprise, surprise!) the following Chambers passage on McCarthy:

“[T]he Senator represents the one force that all shades of the Left really fear….[I]n the U.S., the Left must take power by deception…. [F]or the socialist Apparat, deception and secrecy are prerequisites for the actual taking of power in the State, which they have held before (New and Fair Deals), and which they feel within an eyelash of taking, and permanently consolidating, soon again.… But there is one prime condition: they may not do it as socialists. They may do it only as something else, due to the ingrained American aversion to the word, socialism…. The Senator repeatedly calls the attention of the antisocialist masses to the fact that the socialist Apparat exists…. [I]t is that seizure of power that the Senator constantly imperils. He alone on the Right, at this moment, visibly imperils it. So both Apparats, the cobras and the pit vipers, converge on him…. But, once Senator McCarthy is pruned back, they will get on with the Vice President [Nixon]. As they will get on with me….”

[secretagent]

Philbrick doesn’t seem to have a lot of pro-McCarthy or anti-McCarthy quotes attributed to him, so I see this as unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, with the balance of thin evidence (to me) tipping in the Evans direction:

“M. Stanton Evans, then with the Indianapolis News, interviewed Philbrick in 1959. Philbrick denied ever saying this.”

Thanks for that info. Evans, a named individual, claims to have heard this directly from Philbrick. That edges out the unattributed source at the Globe.

[secretagent]

Looks like a good series. (BTW - its by Wes Vernon, not Pruden)

[secretagent]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/014/360baygp.asp

As those hearings, which effectively would end McCarthy's career, were about to begin, Whittaker Chambers wrote a personal letter to his friend and McCarthy's defender, William F. Buckley Jr. Chambers called McCarthy "a political godsend" to the Communists who "divides the ranks of the Right" and "scarcely knows what he is doing." Those and similar quotes from the letter have been showcased by liberals for a half-century and, indeed, have helped discredit McCarthy among conservatives.

But Chambers was ambivalent about McCarthy. In the same letter to Buckley, he wrote that "the Senator represents the one force that all shades of the Left really fear. . . . He alone on the Right, at this moment, visibly imperils" the Left's "seizure of power." That explains the inexorable assault painstakingly described here by Evans, which succeeded not only in destroying McCarthy but in separating him from anti-Communist followers--

Thanks for the lead that Chambers had mixed feelings about McCarthy.

[Bigun]

It's good to be vindicated in the end but what does the McCarthy story really matter now politically?

Because such vindication shines light on what the left was and is. People need to get history right so they can learn from it.

And because anyone who thinks that the residue of the mess that got papered over then isn't still there is severely deluded!