Posted on 07/08/2003 7:41:44 PM PDT by DPB101
As might have been expected, Ann Coulter has created a firestorm with her sensational new best-selling book, "Treason – Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism."
Naturally, liberals and Democrats – pretty much the same thing – are infuriated at being indicted as a class of dedicated anti-Americans who beginning with the Cold War found much to be admired in the international communist conspiracy and much to be hated in their own United States of America.
Unexpected has been the reaction of such conservatives as Andrew Sullivan who are offended by Ann’s no-holds-barred polemical style and appear to have been infected by the anti-Joe McCarthy virus.
This virus has spread thanks to the leftist media and socialist dons in academia. Now several generations of Americans who weren’t there when Joe McCarthy was battling to expose hordes of subversives nestled in the bosom of the United States government think he was a bad guy.
For them, it’s simply not stylish to join forces with the very much declasse Wisconsin Senator. McCarthy was not a certified gentleman with all the right Ivy League credentials and club memberships, like Alger Hiss for example. He was a tough Mick, an Ex-Marine street fighter who loved his country and hated its enemies.
To their dismay, instead of wielding a thin dueling rapier in skewing disloyal liberals, Ann uses a heavy Claymore to bash the skulls of a class of people who at the very least hung around the fringes of treachery, or were knee deep in the muck and mire of treason.
As they always do when challenged by facts, her liberal critics settled on a handful of responses, daring Miss Coulter to explain how certain prominent liberals now considered in the common wisdom to have been be fiercely anti-Communist, come off in Ann’s book as less than fervent enemies of communist subversion.
How can you say Harry Truman or Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson – all of whom fought shooting wars against communist aggression – were witting abettors of treason? she’s asked every time she faces a liberal critic.
Or how can she defend Joe McCarthy when he conducted a war of terrorism and repression against hordes of innocent loyal American liberals.
And again, using that old tactic of admissions against interest, allow that sure, a lot of liberals acted against America’s best interests, but it isn’t fair to lump these unfortunately mistaken liberals in with all the good liberals.
Let’s take these criticisms one at a time:
How can Coulter make a case that liberals were busy betraying America when such well-known Americans as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy were such dedicated anti-Communists.
Easy. As Coulter repeatedly states in her book, Joe McCarthy was not running around with a red catching net, seeking to find communists under the White House beds, in Hollywood, in the media or in academia where they abounded.
McCarthy was seeking solely to uncover people who fit the profile of security risk as identified under President Eisenhower’s executive order 10450, which stated plainly that should extensive investigations reveal that if any questions existed concerning the fitness of a government employee from the standpoint of national security, that person should be discharged.
Even prior to that order, evidence that an official of the U.S. government was a security risk would have demanded that person be barred from any government post in the interests of national security.
As Coulter reveals in her book, Harry Truman not only ignored strong evidence that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were agents of the Soviet Union and thus dedicated to the overthrow of the United States and Soviet victory in the Cold War, but actually advanced their careers.
Moreover, his administration was honeycombed with secret Communist agents. And when Truman was advised of the existence of the Venona documents which showed the extent of Soviet penetration of the government, he allegedly dismissed the decoded Soviet cables as a "fairy story," just as he called the charges against Hiss as a "red herring."
Dedicated anti-Communists don’t defend communist subversion of the United States government. Truman did. He may have been a foe of armed Soviet aggression and dragged America into a war he would not allow his generals to win, but the record shows he was soft on communist subversion within his administration.
President Kennedy is also paraded out by Coulter’s critics as another fierce anti-Communist – after all, he took us into Vietnam – another war all those loyal Democrats would not allow us to win.
Moreover, Kennedy continued to allow people, about whom serious doubts concerning their loyalty would have kept them out of government service, to infest his administration at the highest levels. And when one genuine anti-Communist government official sought to enforce EO 10450 and keep unsuitable appointees from working at the State Department, he was parboiled and hung out to dry.
Kennedy’s election gave the liberals an opening to bring a lot of old discredited security risks back into government service. Not long after the election, Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Bobby Kennedy met with State Department security chief Otto Otepka to discuss the possibility of obtaining security clearance for one Walt Whitman Rostow, a one-worlder who had once written a book calling for "an end to nationhood," and had been chosen to be J.F.K.’s chief foreign-policy planner.
Otepka was stunned. Rostow, he knew, had been denied security clearance three times during the Eisenhower administration. He told Rusk and Kennedy about Rostow’s background, how he was the son of a socialist revolutionary; had long consorted with Communist Party members, including known Soviet spies; and that two of his aunts had been identified as members of the Communist Party.
Otepka also explained that U.S. Air Force Intelligence had branded him a security risk, and the CIA had dropped him from a sensitive contract. Under the strictures of Executive Order 10450, Otepka explained, security clearance could not be given to Rostow – not, at least, without a new, full-fledged FBI investigation.
In his book, "The United States in The World Arena," Rostow wrote: "It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations -including the United States- the right to use substantial military force to peruse their own interests. Since this residual right is the right of national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined."
He wrote about a "convergence" between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and ridding the vocabulary of such formulations as capitalism vs. communism. He was one of the principle advocates of escalating the troop buildup in Vietnam while at the same time contributing to the "Rules of Engagement" declassified in 1985 which insured that we could not win the war.
Instead of sending Rostow back to exile, Rusk and the Kennedys began a long-running brutal campaign designed send Otepka into exile. Kennedy would simply ignore this derogatory information and appoint Rostow special advisor in 1961, where he influenced the Bay of Pigs operation, Vietnam policy, and military disarmament. Rostow would remain with Johnson until 1967.
But the Rostow case was just the beginning of the Kennedy’s war on national security. 152 waivers of security approvals s were signed in contrast to the mere five waivers issued under the eight years of the Eisenhower administration. Many security clearances simply bypassed Otepka's Division of Evaluations. Rusk's new security chief, John Reilly, rubber-stamped them. Walt Rostow was slipped into the State Department, heading its policy planning council. There he authored the infamous "Rostow Papers," which laid out these goals for American foreign policy: unilateral disarmament, world government, and accommodation with the Communist world. With Rusk, he would help engineer the Bay of Pigs disaster as well as the Vietnam War – a war calculated to dispirit America and embroil it in turmoil.
When in October, 1963 JFK was questioned about the treatment accorded Otepka (he was being charged with violating Department policy by cooperating with a Senate Committee investigating security breaches at the State Department) he had this reaction .
QUESTION: Mr. President, sir, there seems to be some connection between the attempt of the state Department to discharge Mr. Otto Otepka, the Security Officer, and there seems to be some connection between the fact that he gave much information to the Senate Internal Security Committee about various employees of the State Department – William Arthur Wieland and Walter W. Rostow and many others. Also Secretary Rusk has now put forth an order that employees of the State Department cannot talk or give information to this congressional committee. Isn't that a direct violation of law?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it isn't.
QUESTION: That government employees are allowed to give information to Members of Congress and to committees?
PRESIDENT: By what means? You mean secret dispatches?
QUESTION: Well any information. The law doesn't say what it will be. It says that any government employee can give information to Members of Congress or to the committees.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me just say that the Secretary of State has been prepared to testify since August before the Internal Security Committee and discuss the case very completely –
QUESTION: Well, but –
THE PRESIDENT: Excuse me. There was a hearing scheduled for early September, but because of the Labor Day week end that hearing did not take place. The Secretary of State stands ready, and he is the responsible officer. Now the best thing to do is to give the Secretary of State a chance to explain the entire case; because in all frankness, your analysis of it is not complete.
QUESTION: Would you like to complete it, sir?
THE PRESIDENT: I will be glad to have the Secretary of State talk to the Internal Security Committee about what it is that has caused action to be taken, administrative action to be taken, within the Department of State, to be taken against the gentlemen you named, the kind of actions he carried out, what the law said, how he met the law, how he didn't meet the law: This is all a matter that is going to be heard by the State Department Board. Then it will be heard by the Civil Service Commission for review. Then it can be discussed in the courts.
That little exchange showed how complicit JFK was in this attempt to silence a real anti-Communist government officer.
Sorry, critics, JFK was not anti-Communist – he allowed security risks to serve in his administration at the highest level.
Much the same can be said about Lyndon Johnson. He followed the lead of fellow liberal Democrat presidents, refusing to rid the government of men like Rostow and other security risks. And he continued the persecution of Otto Otepka.
In another press conference on March 13, 1965 there was this exchange between LBJ and a reporter.
Mr. President, sir, I would like to change the subject to another matter. Mr. Otto Otepka, a top security officer in the State Department, faces dismissal for answering the questions of some Members of Congress who were investigating the security of the United States. I would like to know if you can't stop this dismissal.
THE PRESIDENT. I have had some conversations with Secretary Rusk concerning that case, and I have complete confidence in the manner in which he will handle it.
Johnson knew it was Rusk who launched the get Otepka campaign almost as soon as he took office at State, and he knew how Rusk would " handle it." He would get rid of Otepka, but not the security risks.
During the mid-1950s, Otepka reviewed the files of all State Department personnel and found some kind of derogatory information on 1,943 persons, almost 20 percent of those on the Department payroll. He testified at Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearings years later that of the 1,943 employees, 722 'left the department for various reasons, but mostly by transfer to other agencies, before a final security determination could be made. Otepka trimmed the remaining number on the list to 858 and in December 1955 sent their names to his then boss, Scott McLeod, as persons to be watched because of Communists associations, homosexuality, habitual drunkenness or mental illness.
Wrote Coulter "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence." That, liberals say is slander. They say it confuses good liberal with bad liberals. But Coulter maintains that all liberals are the same and the record shows she’s right.
One only needs to, look at what defines liberals: they universally attack America’s foreign policies. When the U.S. is at war, no matter who we’re fighting or what we are fighting, liberals attack the U.S. and side with our enemies. It was that way in Vietnam and it’s that way today, in Iraq.
Hear what liberal Gary Kamiya of the left-wing Salon.com has to say. "I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong."
He wished, he said, for the Iraqi’s to resist the U.S. attack more vigorously, that "the Arab world would rise up in rage" – he wished for "all the things we feared would happen." And, he added, he was not alone – "a number of serious, intelligent. morally sensitive people (read "liberals") have told me they have had identical feelings."
He dismissed the idea that once the shooting started liberals should get on board and support the troops. "But there is one argument against this: what if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative – four more years of Bush, for example ..."
Better that American soldiers should die than that Bush should be re-elected.
What defines liberals? They are universally in favor of abortion (killing unborn babies is OK, killing Ho Chi Minh’s or Saddam’s thugs is wrong), gay rights and homosexual marriage, socialism and universally against the kind of society handed down to us by the founding fathers (dead white Europeans) or strict interpretation of the Constitution.
There are no good liberals because liberalism as it has come to be in the United States is inherently bad.
In Treason Coulter tells us that everything we know about Joe McCarthy is a lie. She lays out the evidence for this assertion but her critics ignore it. It is, to them, an article of faith that Joe was the Devil incarnate, and no one can be allowed to shatter that illusion.
"The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times.," she wrote "Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name."
It is claimed that McCarthy was wrong in claiming that there was a plague of Communist subversion afflicting the government. Release of the Venona intercepts and other documents concerning the extent of communist subversion disproved that lie.
It is claimed that Joe McCarthy persecuted innocent people and that Americans trembled in fear that they would be caught up in Joe’s net, but the record shows that no such reign of terror ever existed. The only people who trembled were those with secrets concerning their flirtations with Communism or who had something else to hide. And the liberals can’t point to a single one of those people Joe ever attacked. As Coulter insists, McCarthy’s only targets concerned subversives in the government.
McCarthy was castigated for attacking General Ralph Zwicker who was portrayed by the media and the liberals as a staunch and honest army officer. But in testimony before the McClellan Committee on March 23, 1955, Zwicker denied giving McCarthy aide George Anastos derogatory information about Irving Peress, – who McCarthy charged had been promoted despite the fact he was a communist – in their telephone conversation of January 22, 1954.
When Anastos and the secretary who had monitored the conversation both testified under oath and contradicted Zwicker, the McClellan Committee forwarded the transcript of the hearing to the Justice Department for possible prosecution of Zwicker for perjury.
McCarthy had been investigating lax security at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. He was attacked on the grounds that there was no security problem there, where Zwicker held a command.
In his 1979 book "With No Apologies," Barry Goldwater wrote that "Carl Hayden, who in January 1955 became chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee of the United States Senate, told me privately Monmouth had been moved because he and other members of the majority Democratic Party were convinced security at Monmouth had been penetrated. They didn’t want to admit that McCarthy was right in his accusations. Their only alternative was to move the installation from New Jersey to a new location in Arizona."
McCarthy’s Senate colleagues allegedly censured him for his reckless activities and smearing of innocent people to hear the libs tell it. That’s not quite the story.
The campaign to destroy McCarthy began on July 30, 1954, when Sen. Ralph Flanders introduced a resolution accusing McCarthy of Conduct Unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate.
Flanders, who had told the Senate two months earlier that McCarthy's 'anti-Communism so completely paralleled that of Adolf Hitler that he struck fear into the hearts of any defenseless minority, had been given a laundry lists of charges from the far-left National Committee for an Effective Congress.
McCarthy's enemies ultimately accused him of 46 different counts of allegedly improper conduct and a special committee was set up – the fifth one to investigate McCarthy – under the chairmanship of Sen. Arthur Watkins, to study and evaluate the charges.
After two months of hearings and deliberations, the committee recommended that McCarthy be censured on just two of the 46 original counts. At a Special Session of the Senate convened on Nov. 8, 1954, these were the two charges to be debated and voted on:
1) That Sen. McCarthy had "failed to cooperate" in 1952 with the Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections that was looking into certain aspects of his private and political life in connection with a Resolution for his expulsion from the Senate and
2) That in conducting a senatorial inquiry, Senator McCarthy had "intemperately abused" Gen. Ralph Zwicker. But too many senators were unhappy about the Zwicker count, because the Army had shown contempt for then committee chairman McCarthy by ignoring his letter of Feb. 1, 1954 and then going ahead and giving Major Irving Peress an honorable discharge the very next day.
Believing that McCarthy's conduct toward Zwicker on February 18th was at least partially justified they dropped the Zwicker count at the last minute and replaced it with the charge that he had called the Watkins Committee as an "unwitting handmaiden of the Communist Party" and described the special hearings as a "Lynch Party" and thus he had acted in a manner contrary to Senate ethics and tended to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute, to obstruct the Constitutional processes of the Senate, and to impair its dignity."
On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" Sen. Joseph McCarthy on both counts by a vote of 67 to 22, with the Democrats unanimously voting in favor and the Republicans split down the middle.
In choosing to explode the McCarthy myth, Ann Coulter, took on one of the liberals’ most cherished articles of faith. Had she simply accepted that myth the furor over Treason would be more or less muted compared to what it is now. Instead she took the hard choice, and in so doing infuriated the left which will now treat her as they treated Joe.
She’s given them a new hobgoblin – Coulterism that they can now rant and rave about for years to come.
I've been asking what McCarthy himself (and his family) said in the years after the furor died down and the lies began to exponentially multiply.
Of course there were others, some, I dare say, far MORE qualified, but not given the jobs. Yes, payback, cronyism, hacks, and old man Kennedy's paybacks.
The controversy isn't so much that Anne is wrong. Its just considered by many kinder, gentler republicans poor form to embarrass our political adversaries by insisting upon airing unflattering historical facts.
Better we remember our place & not make a fuss.
I'm not denying that may have happened, but the aerospace industry is the most capricious "profession" I have ever seen. As an astronautical engineer I got my TS, and beyond TS clearances yadeyadeya...but when the Soviets up and gave up in '88 - the entire aerospace industry collectively said TS to their workers and went off to make toasters (actually true of one company that made inertial guidance systems for MX - a pretty funny story), credit checking systems and auto parts.
Be thankful, in a way, that your husband had the freedom to live and be free, because I'm glad I'm out of an industry where you can lose your clearance and thus your job because of a late Macy's bill (Almost happened to a fellow IBM'er who I worked with in high-clearance work). What BS.
OK, I'll take one!! Where is the parlor?
No doubt, but weren't the average joes worried about the tactics used at the time? I mean, did this guy go about to extract skunks while messing up a few other's dens? Note: my history may either be lacking or twisted by recent interpretation.
STATEMENT OF SGT. BARRY F. RHODEN (The McCarthy Transcript Liberals Do Not Want You To Read)
Don't miss Mr. Hacko's testimony in reply #16. It is funny but I don't know how McCarthy was so patience.
Not at all. McCarthy had high approval ratings. Only in NYC and Hollywood, mainly, was there concern--and those people were supporters of Stalin. Check out page 101.
More currently, what about the hundreds of Clinton appointees that started serving in the White House in sensetive jobs requiring secret or top secret clearances that never were passed by the FBI and were kept on by Clinton anyway?
Didn't Gary Aldridge expose this in "Unlimited Access"? I remember it was a huge flap at the time - someone help me refresh my memory.
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