Re: Former Hillary Press Secretary Refuses to Agree Alger Hiss Was a Communist

Karen Finney’s refusal to acknowledge that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy — let alone a Soviet agent with a direct hand in crafting American policy during World War II and the crucial early Cold War years — should, alas, come as no surprise. The Cold War years are full of unpleasant memories for the Left, whose intellectuals, ignoring the horrors of the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s massacres, and much more, touted Communism as the wave of the future, and whose policies caved to Communism’s aggressive expansion across the globe.

More than half a century on, when they’ve been shown to be on “the wrong side of history,” to use a favorite liberal notion, Joe McCarthy is one of the few pleasant memories of the period for the Left: an alcoholic Republican senator who launched a shameless inquisition to expose a conspiracy theory — hundreds of Communist operatives secretly working against the United States.

Of course, there is the unpleasant fact that McCarthy was, by and large, right. That makes Hiss a particular problem: Acknowledge he’s a spy and you might have to admit that McCarthy — and, even worse, then-congressman Richard Nixon — were onto something.

But there is more at stake than holding onto an effective rhetorical bludgeon. One cannot — or perhaps should not — mention Alger Hiss without acknowledging the man who, at great personal risk, unmasked him: Whittaker Chambers (who would eventually write for this publication at the behest of Bill Buckley). Chambers chronicled his “impossible return” from the Communist underground in his autobiography, Witness, surely one of the great books of the 20th century.

This is not to give credence to any “Obama the Commie” bumper stickers, but Chambers’s point is damning: Communism, socialism, and their friendlier-faced relation, modern liberalism (“progressivism”), are close kin. They spring from the same philosophical root, and they each reach toward the same end. We see their commensurability today in many liberals’ cultish devotion to the Castro brothers, Hugo Chavez, and Che Guevara.

Karen Finney might have a tough time labeling Alger Hiss a Communist because, in fact, he looks rather disconcertingly like a modern-day liberal.

http://www.peacekey.com/1-1-a/UN_Web/1_UN_Book/The_Fearful_Master_09.htm

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER NINE:

It is truly fantastic, but here is the record:

Alger Hiss: In 1950 Hiss was convicted and sent to prison for perjury involving statements relating to his Communist activities. Since the second Hiss trial evidence has continued to be amassed through other congressional investigations that is even more incriminating than that used for his conviction. As it was, the FBI had solid evidence of Hiss’s Communist activities as far back as 1939 and had even issued numerous security reports to the justice Department and executive branch dealing with this fact.1 In addition, a parade of former Communists testified that they personally had known and worked with Alger Hiss as a fellow member of the party.

It is worth noting that Alger Hiss was very influential with the leaders of the Institute of Pacific Relations, which a Senate committee found to be infiltrated at the top by Communists. Hiss was one of the trustees of the IPR and was very active in its affairs.2

Mr. J. Anthony Panuch, who had been assigned the task of supervising the security aspects of the transfer of large numbers of personnel from various war agencies to the State Department in the fall of 1945, testified that as a security officer he had access to conclusive information on Hiss’s Communist activity; but when he tried to do something about it, it was he, not Hiss, who was dismissed.3

In 1944 Hiss became acting director of the Office of Special Political Affairs which had charge of all postwar planning, most of which directly involved the creation of the United Nations; and in March 1945, in spite of all the FBI reports and other adverse security information circulating among the top echelons of government, he was promoted to director of that office.

It is more than a little ironic that Alger Hiss was the man who traveled with FDR to Yalta as his State Department advisor. It was at the Yalta meeting that the decision was made to give the Soviets three votes in the General Assembly to one for the United States. Giving votes to the Russians for the Ukrainian SSR and Byelorussia SSR made as much sense as giving extra votes to the United States for Texas and California. At any rate, even if Roosevelt had been inclined to protest this absurd agreement, he was up against the demands of Joe Stalin and the advice of Alger Hiss.

The Dumbarton Oaks Conference was held in 1944 to determine the future form that the United Nations would take. It was an extremely important meeting since most of the really critical decisions were made there. This meeting was so hush-hush that the public and even the press were excluded from the proceedings. Alger Hiss was the executive secretary of this conference.

Hiss’s role at the San Francisco conference, where the United Nations was finally taken off the drawing board and put on the assembly line, is better known to most Americans. He was the chief planner and executive of the entire affair. He organized the American delegation and was the acting secretary-general. Visitor passes bore his signature. According to the April 16, 1945, issue of Time magazine:

The Secretary-General for the San Francisco Conference was named at Yalta but announced only last week— lanky, Harvard trained Alger Hiss, one of the State Department’s brighter young men. Alger Hiss was one of the Harvard Law School students whose records earned them the favor of Professor (now justice) Felix Frankfurter and a year as secretary to the late justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was drafted from a New York law firm by the New Deal in 1933, joined the State Department in 1936, accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta. -At San Francisco, he and his Secretariat of 300 (mostly Americans) will have the drudging, thankless clerk’s job of copying, translating and publishing, running the thousands of paper-clip and pencil chores of an international meeting. But Alger Hiss will be an important figure there. As secretary-general, managing the agenda, he will have a lot to say behind the scenes about who gets the breaks.4

Hiss was not only the acting secretary-general at the San Francisco conference, but also served on the steering and executive committees which were charged with the responsibility of actually writing the new Charter.5 In such a position, he undoubted wielded a tremendous amount of influence on the drafting of the Charter itself. He did not do it single-handedly, however, as some critics of the United Nations have claimed. For instance, Andrei Gromyko was asked during a press conference in 1958 whether he considered it a violation of the Charter for a country to send its forces into the territory of another. He replied: “Believe me, I sit here as one who helped to draft the UN Charter, and I had a distinct part in drafting this part of the Charter with my own hands.”6

At the conclusion of the conference Alger Hiss personally carried the freshly written document back to Washington by plane for Senate ratification. The Charter traveled in a black water-tight box with a parachute. The master planners were taking no chances.

Knowing that Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent, the FBI had prepared an extensive surveillance of his activities during the San Francisco conference. Shortly after Hiss learned of this through his contacts in the Justice Department, however, the FBI received orders from the top to cancel its plans.7

An entire book could be written on the single subject of Alger Hiss and his influence over the United Nations during its formative phase. But, as important as he was, he was only one man. Had Hiss never been born, or had he spent his entire life in a monastery, the UN would still be what it is today, for Hiss was not alone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Jessup

However, in two speeches on the floor of the Senate, McCarthy gave his evidence regarding Jessup’s “unusual affinity for Communist causes”:

1.That Jessup had been affiliated with five Communist front groups; 2.That Jessup had been a leading light in the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at a time that organization was reflecting the Communist Party line; 3.And that he had “pioneered the smear campaign against Nationalist China and Chiang Kai-shek” and propagated the “myth of the ‘democratic Chinese Communist’” through the IPR magazine, Far Eastern Survey, over which he had “absolute control”; 4.That Jessup had associated with known Communists in the IPR; 5.That the IPR’s American Council under Jessup’s guidance had received more than $7,000 of Communist funds from Frederick Vanderbilt Field; 6.That Jessup had “expressed vigorous opposition” to attempts to investigate Communist penetration of the IPR; 7.That Jessup had urged that United States atom bomb production be brought to a halt in 1946, and that essential atomic ingredients be “dumped into the ocean”;

8.That Jessup had appeared as a character witness for Alger Hiss, and that later, after Alger Hiss’s conviction, Jessup had found “no reason whatever to change his opinion about Hiss’s veracity, loyalty and integrity.”

McCarthy’s allegations severely damaged Jessup’s reputation and career .

Nonetheless, President Harry S. Truman appointed Jessup as United States delegate to the United Nations in 1951. However, when the appointment came before the Senate it was not approved, largely because of McCarthy’s influence. Truman circumvented the Senate by assigning Jessup to the United Nations on an “interim appointment.”

Shortly after John F. Kennedy took office as president, the State Department approved the appointment of Jessup as U.S. candidate for the International Court of Justice, a post that did not need Senate confirmation. He served from 1961 until 1970.

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