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."
I didn’t read those, but I will have a look. By the time I came aboard in 1964, I don’t think any of those crippies were still working. They started the attack on the VENONA target in 1943 from Arlington Hall Station, where I worked for a while.
I didn’t read those, but I will have a look. By the time I came aboard in 1964, I don’t think any of those crippies were still working. They started the attack on the VENONA target in 1943 from Arlington Hall Station, where I worked for a while.
I have no idea why you are posting to me. My comments were limited to what the article said on the topic, not the content of the book.
Please read my first post - I provided a link to a FR post from 2003. That’s all.
Then I posted, in response to your eruption:
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.
Well, Donna, I guess I still do not understand your point.
My points are as follows:
(1) Evans’ book provided newly discovered documentation which Coulter never saw much less discussed in her book
(2) Coulter is not a scholar or researcher nor does she have any record whatsoever of research/writing about the McCarthy period — other than her one book which is just a polemical attack — not a calm analysis of available evidence.
(3) Many prominent and reputable scholars have differing views about McCarthy but it is also true that even when they disagree with one another, they do not question each other’s integrity or character or patriotism or intellectual honesty.
BY CONTRAST, in this thread, McCarthy admirers insist that only their personal opinions should be considered valid and all critics are “lying” or “smearing” McCarthy.
NO serious student of this complex subject believes that the McCarthy period in our history is subject to only one interpretation or one conclusion.
A lot of the comments which have been posted in this thread are utter falsehoods which appear to be based upon personal bias — not familiarity with, and careful examination of, available factual evidence.
And to directly answer your inquiry about why I am posting to you, the reasons are:
1. You provided a link to the NewsMax article which recommended Coulter’s book, Treason.
2. That article characterizes the debate about McCarthy with hysterical terminology—i.e. “lies about Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism”
3. You seem to think that since Coulter’s book (Treason) was published before Evans’ book, that perhaps Evans “didn’t just discover this truth”. The inference being that maybe Evans relied upon Coulter for his “truth”?
The problem with that inference is (as I have previously mentioned)
(a) What Coulter presented in her book is not “truth”; she is a professional polemicist who derives her income from writing and speaking in a manner which draws attention to her hyperbolic (and often false) statements and personal opinions. At best, she is a pundit (not a scholar nor even someone recognized for any contribution to public understanding about complex matters)
(b) Unlike Coulter, Evans engaged his critical faculties and did years-long seminal research which turned up new primary source documentation which had never been revealed before his book was published. [I had some of that material long before Evans did from my FOIA requests.]
For clarity, I am copying below, the final paragraphs from the article by Dr. Haynes where Haynes analyzes the 159 names cited by McCarthy at various times and compares those names to Venona documents and other sources.
http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page62.html
This should put the matter in proper perspective:
“Security Risks
Of the 159 persons listed above, there is substantial evidence that nine assisted Soviet espionage against the United States: Lauchlin Currie, Harold Glasser, Gerald Graze, Standley Graze, Many Jane Keeney, David Karr, Robert T. Miller, Franz Neumann, and William Remington. David Zablodowsky is a tenth ambiguous case.
Some of the others were security risks. To say that someone was a security risk is not to say that that person is a proven or even most likely a Soviet espionage source. It is only to say that in matters of national security “better safe than sorry” is a principle. Risks should be minimized by excluding those persons from employment in positions where they would have access to sensitive information.
Risk factors vary from the purely personal to the ideological. Entirely patriotic and loyal persons may have risk factors that make them a security risk. Someone with a history of financial irresponsibility (chronic gambling, bankruptcy) may be tempted by financial gain to betray secret without regard to their patriotism. Someone with close relatives living in a hostile foreign nation may be vulnerable to blackmail due to coercive threats against those family members.
And, of course, someone with ideological sympathy for a hostile foreign power may be tempted to betray by appeals to that ideology. Obviously, in the Cold War between the Communist bloc and the West, persons with Communist or pro-Communist ideological sympathies were security risks due to the possibility of ideological recruitment by Communist intelligence officers. Indeed, the great majority of American, several hundred, now known to have assisted Soviet espionage in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were motivated by ideology and many were secret members of the CPUSA.[54]
Many, but certainly not all, of those in the above lists had in their background some ideological security risk factors. A few were established as having been members of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) or the Young Communist League. Many had belonged to a number of special purpose organizations, some closely, some not so closely, aligned with the CPUSA, were know to former co-workers as pro-Soviet, or had other signs of Communist sympathies. In some cases those affiliations were recent or ongoing. Frederick Schuman, for example, had a long and enduring history of intense Communist sympathies. With others, however, their affiliation with the Communist left were youthful and a decade or more in the past, and the person may have abandoned those views. Stephen Brunauer, for example, had been in the Young Communist League in the late 1920s but appears to have abandoned the movement by the early 1940s and in 1946 the U.S. government sent him to Hungary (he was Hungarian born) to assist in the escape of Hungarian scientists from Communist Hungary. There were also cases were some association legitimately raised security risk concerns but on inspection, the association appears to have been coincidental. For example McCarthy number case # 1 (Lee list # 51) Herbert Fierst, socialized with and was associated at work with several persons known to be linked to Soviet intelligence. But on examination, Fierst’s association appeared to have been no more than that: social and related to his official duties. Among other points, he was a firm supporter of Zionism, an ideological attribute not merely distrusted but hated by Soviet intelligence.[55]
It would take an extensive review of each person separately to come to a firm view on each case, and in a number of cases the passage of time might make reaching a firm conclusion impossible. My own view is that a number of those on the lists above, perhaps a majority, likely were security risks, but others, a minority but a significant one, likely were not, and some, Drew Pearson, Dean Acheson, and George Marshall for example, certainly were not.”
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.
Of course McCarthy was right. To be compared to Joe McCarthy should be a badge of honor.
Not to mention more contemporaneous accounts, such as Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies and Roy Cohn's book about McCarthy.
When I was in high school, I had fun with one of my lefty teachers. He said that the next class would deal with McCarthy. So I got my parents' copies of Buckley and Bozell's book, Cohn's book, and one other. I also got a copy of Richard Rovere's hatchet job on Fighting Joe and stuffed it inside the desk.
When the teacher started spreading the usual misinformation (or was it disinformation?) about Sen. McCarthy, I would raise my hand and cite one of the books on my desk for the contemporaneous (and more accurate) information.
Finally, he came over, looked at my stack of books, and pronounced loudly in a triumphal tone, "I knew it! I knew you wouldn't have Rovere's book."
At that point, I pulled it out of the desk, held it high, and asked, "You don't mean this, do you?"
Well, since you mentioned YAF...
Fightin' Joe McCarthy, we're one and all for you.
You got the dirty Commies and you'll get teh pinkos too.
Oh, Fightin' Joe McCarthy, we're one and all for you.
Our land you'll save, our flag you'll wave,
The dear red, white, and blue!
Now Fightin' Joe McCarthy has gone to his reward
And now he's up in Heaven fighting Commies for the Lord
Oh, Fightin' Joe McCarthy, we're one and all for you.
Our land you'll save, our flag you'll wave,
The dear red, white, and blue!
Another YAF story:
Each odd-numbered year, we’d have a YAF National Convention. In the years just prior to Presidential elections, we’d nominate our dream ticket, with a rollcall for President and Vice President.
At the ‘79 convention, towards the end of the VP rollcall, our Wisconsin chairman rose and said:
“Mr. Chairman, the great state of Wisconsin is proud to cast its 6 votes for a man who truly believes that it is better to be dead than Red — our Senator — FIGHTIN’ JOE McCARTHY!!!”
This set off one of the very few genuinely spontaneous “spontaneous demonstrations” I have ever seen, with people chanting “Joe! Joe! Joe!” and others singing the song I quoted above.
No, they’re shameless.
I remember in HS history (11th grade) and we discussed “McCarthyism”.. I asked that if there were commies in the government and in Hollywood, wasn’t he right? I remember this answer as if it were yesterday.. “It doesn’t matter of he was right, he angered too many people and it had to be stopped”.. this was coming from a teacher that still had Carter/Mondale sticker on his briefcase.
Right after that, I got into it with another student when we discussed the “benefits” of the organized labor movement. It was basically “my dad is in a union so they’re good” versus “if unions were so good for people, why does the state force you to join?”
And Senator McCarthy never claimed that Drew Pearson, Dean Acheson, and George Marshall were in any way supporting Communism — but their actions minimized the problem and made it easier for the Communist moles to do their work.
“Good unions don’t need compulsory unionism; bad unions don’t deserve it.” — Samuel Gompers
TBP:
What makes you think I have not read McCarthy and His Enemies? I read that book more than 30 years ago and I still have a copy in my personal collection.
I also have about two dozen other books re: McCarthy — plus several doctoral dissertations.
I also have numerous FBI files on McCarthy and on persons connected to McCarthy such as former FBI Special Agent Don Surine) and Roy Cohn. I also have the FBI file entitled “Alleged Communists in The State Department” which is devoted to analyzing the accusations which McCarthy made.
I also have the FBI file on Samuel Klaus (the person who wrote the State Department memo which McCarthy relied upon for many of his accusations). And I have the FBI files on Klaus’s superiors in the State Department.
This is what makes my blood boil. McCarthy admirers (such as yourself) always ASSUME that their perceived critics are ignorant fools who would instantly recognize their alleged error if only they would read one specific book.
Meanwhile, however, those same admirers usually have not bothered to read anything other than material which conforms to what they already believe. Instead, you apparently think that no scholar or researcher has ever done any careful examination of available evidence.
I suggest YOU read the various articles and books written by Dr. John Earl Haynes (sometimes with co-author Harvey Klehr). Both of them are very prominent and respected scholars of the McCarthy period. They have devoted their entire careers to careful examination of the McCarthy period in our history. If you can refute what they have presented, THEN by all means — let’s have your EVIDENCE!
Otherwise, stop pretending that McCarthy was “dead on” or that his statements were “a lot more supported than his detractors claim”. Lastly, I suggest you obtain the relevant FBI investigative files about McCarthy’s charges. You will discover just how often McCarthy lied or grossly mis-represented the actual factual evidence.
As former FBI Special Agent Robert Lamphere observed in one interview:
“The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures. He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused.” [The Real Joe McCarthy, Wall Street Journal, 4/22/08, pA25
Also review the comments made by one of McCarthy’s allies and confidants, i.e. conservative columnist Ralph DeToledano:
“Now when McCarthy started out, he knew very little on this subject. He’d got most of his education in the public eye, which is no way to get an education on something as touchy, as sensitive as this. But he was sincere in his anti-Communism, I mean, people tried to say, oh he’s all a phony, no he was very sincere on it. But he had to learn and as he moved along a whole bunch of people who’d been in this fight for years, myself included, were kind of dragged in to straighten him out, to give him material... But he was the kind of a person, you know, you’d give him material and so on, but somehow it would get sort of confused or mixed up...
Now, a number of us were advising him on how to handle that and he agreed to everything we said and then he did just the opposite. And all he did was to make his major supporters in the Senate turn on him.”
TBP:
If you honestly believe that McCarthy never claimed that Pearson, Acheson, and Marshall were “in any way supporting Communism” — then you are so incredibly ignorant that you have totally disqualified yourself as a credible person.
With respect to Acheson, read this McCarthy speech:
http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/DC/JRM/JRM_1950_Hyattsville_excpt.pdf
With respect to Marshall, read this McCarthy speech:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1951mccarthy-marshall.html
The entire premise underlying McCarthy’s accusation regarding “a conspiracy so immense” — was that TRAITORS were devising and implementing the foreign policy of the United States. And McCarthy used every possible opportunity to attack and defame both Acheson and Marshall as major and conscious instruments of that “conspiracy”
In case you missed this message the first time I posted it, I copy it again below for your reference. I received the following email from Dr. John E. Haynes.
Klehr and I have repeated 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 “
TBP:
With respect to Drew Pearson, McCarthy made 7 speeches about McCarthy from the libel-proof Senate floor. On 12/15/50, McCarthy described Pearson as the “diabolically” clever
“voice of international communism,” and a “prostitute of journalism,” and a “Moscow-directed character assassin.”
Let’s substitute YOUR name for Pearson’s name.
If someone attacked and described you as “a voice of international communism” and a “Moscow-directed character assassin”, would you STILL believe that your critic “never claimed” that you were “in any way supporting Communism” OR would you instruct your lawyer to commence a libel lawsuit?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.