[nwrep]

Three cheers for Robert Novak for writing this. Patriotic conservative bump.

[THX 1138]

Interesting article.

Truman has always been an overrated nobody, a lightweight, a political bungler.

[StatesEnemy]

Why is this surprising?

The ruling class (not to be confused with the bourgeois [which I admire]) have ALWAYS hated the middle class's demand for transparency in government.

[DPB101]

Truman despised Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers as informants . . .

What a sick, twisted little man Truman was.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Bump for a later read. (Looks fascinating!)

[elbucko]

Dewey reluctantly agreed to keep silent, and FDR was elected to a fourth term.

Had Dewey been a Democrat and FDR a Republican, Dewey would have used the information to defeat a Republican. The first duty of a Democrat is, above all, win elections, the nation be d*mned. The Democrats believe any harm done to the country in doing so can be repaired by them, once they are in office.

[elbucko]

In 1950, Bradley informed Truman that Venona had identified two senior U.S. government officials--Alger Hiss at the State Department and Harry Dexter White at the Treasury--as Soviet agents.

Interesting. The IMF's web site has quite an honorable mention of all the "valuable service" Harry D. White did for the International Monetary fund at its founding. It's no wonder that wherever the IMF is, economic chaos is there too.

[u-89]

I can't remember who said it or exactly when but I saw a program on C-Span about Truman and the topic of communist agents in the government came up. One historian - a biographer of Truman if I remember correctly, said that Truman left known communists in place because he did not want to give the Republicans any more ammo to use against the Democrats for being soft on communists. In other words best leave enemy agents in places of influence than to admit they were there, active and that the Dems hired them. National security took a back seat to partisan power politics. Typical of the Washington mentality.

[I_Love_My_Husband]

ping!

[Willie Green]

The America First Committee

The America First Committee had its origins at Yale University Law School in 1940, where R. Douglas Stuart Jr. and other students began circulating a petition with the intention of establishing a national organization of college students opposed to intervention in the European war. As an undergraduate student at Princeton, Stuart had concluded that America's intervention in World War I had cost the nation dearly. He did not want the mistake repeated. In his initial organizing efforts, he was joined by Gerald R. Ford, who would become president of the United States in 1974, and Potter Stewart, who would be named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958.

Meetings with some Chicago businessmen led to plans for a large-scale organization. In July 1940, General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, agreed to become acting chairman. (Wood had earlier supported the New Deal, but then broke with Roosevelt. He was less anti-interventionist than others in the new committee.) In late August, the group adopted the name the America First Committee (AFC).

The Committee attracted some prestigious members or sympathizers from business, journalism, politics, publishing, and the arts. Its best-known member was aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. (He was unfairly accused of anti-Semitism as a result.) They did not all agree on every issue. Some sympathizers would decline to join or were forced to resign, apparently under pressure from interventionists. AFC member and actress Lillian Gish said she was blacklisted from film and theater and offered a $65,000 movie contract if she resigned.

It seems that government snooping and the Hollywood blacklist did not begin as anticommunist tactics — Roosevelt had the FBI investigate the AFC.

[RadioAstronomer]

Senator Joseph McCarthy and my grandmother were great friends. She defended him until the day she died.

[aristeides]

I've read the Schechters' book, Sacred Secrets. It's a very interesting read.

[Zack Nguyen]

As the traffic was decoded, by what became known as the Venona project, the U.S. military learned something it had not expected: Soviet intelligence agencies had penetrated deep into the U.S. government for purposes of espionage.

It has always amazed me that the Soviets understood immediately who their enemies were: the democratic, capitalist, Christian America, and we were completely clueless on who our enemies were until it was almost too late.