Dispatch International: "Joe McCarthy Was Right All Along"

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!

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."

TBP: Oh please stop! One does not use the word “conspiracy” (an illegal act) to describe a “policy” difference. “Conspiracy” refers to MOTIVES and INTENT.

You obviously have no serious knowledge about this period in our history. NO historian (not even McCarthy defenders such as Evans and Herman) denies that McCarthy thought Acheson and Marshall were sinister, evil beings consciously working to advance Communist objectives.

McCarthy’s heirs (the John Birch Society) certainly had no problem understanding what McCarthy meant. Which is why Robert Welch expanded his list of “traitors” to include President Eisenhower.

Again, one simple factual challenge for YOU:

QUOTE some historian (and yes feel free to use McCarthy admirers) who supports YOUR absurd theory that McCarthy was only referring to honest policy differences and that Acheson and Marshall were NOT “deliberately” advancing Communism.

IF you cannot or will not QUOTE an historian, then ADMIT you are full of crap!

TBP:

Incidentally, it would be VERY easy to select several of YOUR statements in this thread to “prove” that YOU were “advancing Communism” — perhaps “not deliberately...but that (is) the effect they were having.”

J. Edgar Hoover and senior FBI officials are on record numerous times (publicly) in speeches, books, and interviews and (privately) in FBI investigative files — where they discuss the objectives of the communist movement in the United States.

Communist Objective #1 (first and foremost) was to undermine public confidence in our national leaders and our institutions. Consequently, every time someone like yourself (and Sen. McCarthy) use language calculated to evoke suspicion, fear, disgust, contempt, and revulsion toward our national leaders (Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Eisenhower, etc.) that is PRECISELY what Communists wanted.

In July 1961, wire services and major newspapers in the U.S. reported comments made by former Soviet spy Anatoli Granovsky who was a Captain of Political Intelligence in the Ministry of State Security of the Soviet Union in 1945 and 1946. He previously was in the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police).

The John Birch Society was so impressed with Granovsky’s credentials that they chose to publish the paperback edition of Granovsky’s book in 1962 and the JBS sold it in their American Opinion bookstores. The hardback edition was published by the noted conservative book publisher, Henry Regnery.

Granovsky’s comment:

“The Soviet Communists would sacrifice a thousand American Communists to save the John Birch Society, for instance.
I don’t mean the Birch Society is Communist-infiltrated. It doesn’t have to be. By discrediting prominent Americans, it confuses the population about whom to trust. In socializing Czechoslovakia…we did everything to divide the armed forces units trained by the British and the Americans by spreading rumors about officers until they were so thoroughly discredited their men would not obey them and they had to be removed.”

Similarly, people like yourself who have no serious knowledge about the McCarthy period -— but who mindlessly parrot every falsehood and every politically-motivated accusation which McCarthy made -— can be said to be engaged in what amounts to a “seditious conspiracy” against the United States government.

McCarthy admirers often resort to the ploy evidenced in YOUR comments here. You PRETEND that McCarthy never made any grave errors. You euphemize and sanitize his accusations to the point where everything becomes nothing more than a “policy difference” — when EVERY WORD out of McCarthy’s mouth was focused upon what he thought were the MOTIVES and INTENTIONS of senior government officials -— which is why McCarthy began his speech about Marshall by declaring:

“How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this Government are concerting to deliver us to disaster?”

Don’t you understand the clear meaning of the word “concerting”??

It means “mutually contrived or agreed on”.

Please stop your pretense that you are a careful student of these matters and just admit you are an advocate for McCarthy and you have no interest whatsoever in ANY data if it contradicts what you presently believe.

No surprise in your reply. As previously stated, you are totally clueless and in denial about this entire period in our history. You are nothing more than a propagandist and like all propagandists you totally ignore all data which contradicts what you prefer to believe. Consequently, you have created a self-sealing circular argument which is impervious to FACTS.

As everyone reading this exchange can now see, you have no ability to QUOTE any reputable source (even including defenders and friends of McCarthy) who agree with your brain-dead premises and conclusions.

You even reject the explicit statements made by McCarthy where he describes his personal antipathy toward Acheson, Marshall, et al — and where he leaves no doubt whatsoever that he is discussing their MOTIVES and INTENTIONS — not “policy differences”.

This is why intellectually honest people cannot “discuss” or “debate” anything with people like you.

Even recent defenders of McCarthy (such as Arthur Herman and Medford Stanton Evans) who have spent many years carefully investigating primary source documentation (which is totally foreign to you!) — DO NOT agree with your statements!

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