Posted on 07/18/2003 9:55:41 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
UPI National Political Analyst
WASHINGTON (UPI) – In 1964 a man named John Stormer wrote a book the central thesis of which was that the American political and cultural elites had betrayed U.S. interests for the benefit of international Communism.
The book was not brought out by a big-name New York publisher nor was the author feted on television chat shows. Nevertheless, "None Dare Call It Treason" sold close to 7 million copies – a remarkable feat in the days before Internet bookstores – and was embraced by the same kinds of people who believed that Eisenhower, as John Birch Society founder Robert Welch suggested, was a communist.
Now, more than a quarter of a century later, Ann Coulter, the pundit and author of several best-selling books include last year's "Slander," has done what Stormer alleged none would dare do: She has called it "treason."
Her latest book, "Treason," has been an instant hit. It is No. 2 on The New York Times non-fiction list and is nipping at the heels of former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir "Living History."
There is a market for what Coulter has to say, as the sales figures demonstrate. One more review, good or bad, is not likely to have much impact on whether someone chooses to buy it.
Nevertheless, it is a book worth discussing. Coulter's thesis amounts to a serious charge – that American liberals have for decades been disloyal to the United States.
She is, without necessarily acknowledging it, building on Stormer's thesis – which has produced a predictable uproar among those who believe they are the ones she is writing about.
One example is The Washington Post's Richard Cohen, who led a piece about her book by saying, "I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind."
"The evidence for this is her most recent book," he continues, "a nearly unreadable slog through every silly thing anyone on the left has ever said. ... If the book were a Rorschach test, she would be institutionalized."
These are harsh words from someone who is recognized as one of America's premier liberal newspaper columnists, someone who is reflexively pro-liberal as Coulter is anti-liberal.
According to the flyleaf of "Treason," Coulter believes liberals were "wrong on every foreign policy issue, from the fight against Communism at home and abroad, the Nixon and Clinton presidencies, and the struggle with the Soviet empire right up to today's war on terrorism." So far, an argument that is at least defensible as China, Cuba, Korea, Iran, Nicaragua, Vietnam and other elements of the Cold War struggle are concerned.
Coulter argues that American liberals "have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason."
"You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America too," she writes. "No they don't."
"From Truman to Kennedy to Carter to Clinton, America has contained, appeased, and retreated, often sacrificing America's best interests and security. With the fate of the world in the balance, liberals should leave the defense of the nation to conservatives," she says.
These are strong words, perhaps too strong.
Almost 20 years working in or writing about politics has taught me many things, one of which is that the American people have an innate sense of right and wrong. That sense extends into the way they process political debates. To paraphrase the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, they may not be able to explain where the line between acceptable and unacceptable discourse lies but they know when someone has crossed it.
There have been some, certainly, who really were traitors: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White and Jonathan Pollard are just three out many. But there are also those who have simply been foolish, ignorant or persuaded by political passions that the United States, as it was, represented the wrong side in the Cold War – or was at least the moral equivalent of the Soviets.
By painting with a broad brush, one hopes as a means to generate controversy and spur sales of the book, Coulter diminishes what is actually a very powerful argument on many points.
Much of the book, for example, is devoted to re-examining the conduct of the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., and his investigation into Communist penetration of the U.S. government.
If ever there was a four-letter word in U.S. politics, it is McCarthyism. Over time, it has become a catchall phrase used to dismiss any objection to dissent – from either end of the political spectrum – with the same level of energy that one would use a howitzer to swat a housefly. It is a charge that is thrown around much too loosely.
"The myth of McCarthyism," she writes, "is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism."
As Coulter explains and as others, including the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, well understood, recently declassified Soviet cables dating to the beginning of the Cold War prove conclusively that Hiss – who was exposed not by McCarthy and his committee but by a California congressman named Richard Nixon – was a spy.
It was, according to Coulter, the Truman administration's failure to pursue Hiss once Whittaker Chambers accused him of having been a Soviet agent that ultimately spurred McCarthy to action looking for Communist agents inside the administration. He was not, as most people now believe, looking for leftists and Reds in Hollywood – he was trying to determine whether the Truman administration took the issue of subversion seriously.
I am not, by any means, trying to craft a blanket pardon for McCarthy, who is a major focus of the book. I am, however, pointing out that on this issue, as well as on other major events in the conduct of the Cold War including Korea, Vietnam and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coulter raises some important issues about the way liberals conducted themselves while, at the same time, presenting facts that many Americans likely have not heard before.
It is a shame that "Treason" has generated so much controversy because of its title. There is much in it worth reading. Coulter makes a number of credible observations about the conduct and statements of American liberals during the Cold War that the American people should consider in determining their own partisan allegiances.
For those who say it is all ancient and meaningless history, consider the case of Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., who in 2003 was forced to step down as Senate majority leader after praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 run for president on a pro-segregationist platform.
If a kind aside about a centenarian U.S. senator made about an activity more than 50 years in the past can be the wedge forcing one of the most powerful men in Washington from his post, isn't it equally relevant whether other current members of the U.S. Senate think Alger Hiss was not a spy?
("Treason – Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," by Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, 355 pages, $26.95).
Copyright 2003 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
Editor's note: "Treason" - Ann Coulter exposes the anti-American left: Click here now for special offer
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Do tell. Shakespeare understood treason and treachery:
Yes - bring them hence.You have conspired against our royal person,
Join'd with an enemy proclaim'd and from his coffers
Received the golden earnest of our death;
Wherein you would have sold your king to slaughter,
His princes and his peers to servitude,
His subjects to oppression and contempt
And his whole kingdom into desolation.
Touching our person seek we no revenge;
But we our kingdom's safety must so tender,
Whose ruin you have sought, that to her laws
We deliver you. Get you therefore hence,
Poor miserable wretches, to your death:
The taste whereof, God of his mercy give
You patience to endure, and true repentance
Of all your offences! Bring them hence.--Wm. Shakespeare - King Henry V, Act II Scene III
If that is the best defense one can offer for the Democratic Party, then the debate is over. Some were treasonous for malignant reasons, he suggests, while others simply were foolishly, ignorantly, passionately treasonous. That they were on the wrong side of history Roff doesn't attempt to refute. I would say that he read Coulter and grudgingly agreed with her.
If anyone is responsible for conservatives being labeled Nazis and Fascists, it is Dickstein. For 11 terms in office, he kept up that drumbeat--all on the orders of Joe Stalin.
Ah, and here lies the reason for the in-your-face blanket accusation by Ms Coulter. It is precisely this cohort, prone as they are to acquiesce with the left for whatever reason, that she is trying to shock out of their sleepwalk.
What, pray tell, is the difference from a practical standpoint, between vociferously opposing actions which are needed to defend this country, and sitting back passively, allowing your side to undermine your own country's defense?
I was a commie-lefty at one time, and I can tell you that to become one requires a process, the first step of which is to acquire the ability to step out and look at your country from the outside, as if you weren't from your country at all, but a citizen without a country. The goal, of course is to become more objective, but one simply becomes more overly critical over time, until one morning you wake up and America is the enemy. I changed, but that 's a story for another day, my point is that Ann is attempting to hit these people with a two-by-four embodied in her accusation that what they are doing is treason.
The two-by-four is the same one used on the proverbial donkey (isn't that ironic!) and is quite necessary in my view, it's not so much that democrats will be reading the book, but the rest of us, having read it and absorbed its conclusions, will be bolder now, and therefore more effective in opposing those who oppose our country.
I believe that Clinton is a traitor. He singlehandedly polarized the country. He oversaw the sale of nuclear missile guidance technology to China (or at least did nothing to stop it.).
This person writing the article does not know WTF he is talking about.
Just read some fascinating testimony from the sealed McCarthy transcripts which were released this spring. Our information service, of which Voice of America was a part, had a Hebrew language desk. Somebody eliminated broadcasts in Hebrew just when the purges of high ranking Jews in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Block started. The committee was dumbfounded. McCarthy could not get a straight answer out of anyone as to why broadcasts were halted at the time they would have done America the most good (and might have saved the lives of a few Jews in the USSR).
The testimony, by Reed Harris, deputy administrator, United States International Information Administration, is in Volume One of the transcripts (huge file, Harris is about half way down)
In "The Haunted Wood" by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. He was uncovered by Venona.
And the House Committee on Unamerican Activities was used by Senator McCarthy how?
Most people just go with the flow.
I take issue with this, although the title of her book and many of her comments follow that line. But the path was blazed by Whittaker Chambers whom Ann quotes as follows on page 189:
"Other ages have had their individual traitors -- men who from faint-heartedness or hope of gain sold out their causes. But in the 20th century, for the first time, men banded together by the million in movements like Fascism and Communism, dedicated to the purpose of betraying the institutions they lived under. In the 20th century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas."
Coulter does nothing more than document when and how that happened and, like Chambers, gives the acts the correct name.
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