Posted on 07/30/2003 2:25:13 AM PDT by Norm640
To The Editor:
A pretty good rule of thumb for judging media comment on Joe McCarthy is that people who most vociferously deplore him seldom know the facts of record.
Vide the recent Dorothy Rabinowitz piece in the Journal attacking Ann Coulter’s new book Treason and its McCarthy chapters. In her double-barreled blast against McCarthy/Coulter, Ms. Rabinowitz makes statements that indicate extensive ignorance of McCarthy’s doings and can but compound prevailing myths about him.
One need go no further to see the point than the first of the McCarthy cases Rabinowitz refers to, and that Coulter discusses in her book: The episode of Annie Lee Moss, the U.S. Army code clerk so memorably portrayed by Edward R. Murrow, and others, as a pitiful victim of McCarthy. Ms. Rabinowitz, sad to say, obviously knows nothing at all about this matter.
As it happens, there is a voluminous official record on the case, accessible to Ms. Rabinowitz and anyone else who cares to view it. This shows Mrs. Moss had been identified as a member of the Communist Party in the District of Columbia by FBI undercover agent Mary Markward, who had access to the party’s records. This information was passed on from the Bureau to the Army, which nonetheless promoted Mrs. Moss from cafeteria worker to code clerk, and security-cleared her for these duties.
The outrageous Joe McCarthy, if you can believe it, actually wanted to know how such a thing could happen. When Mrs. Moss appeared before him in March of 1954, she denied she was a communist, indicated she had never heard of Marx, and allowed that she was being confused with some other Annie Lee Moss who must have been the guilty party. This mistaken-identity theme was echoed by the Democrats on the panel, and has been repeated often since.
Unfortunately for Mrs. Moss and for such as Murrow, she inadvertently gave the game away in testifying--volunteering as one of her addresses 72 R St. S.W. in the District. This proved to be the crucial evidence in the case when, four years later, the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) obtained the records of the D.C. party, and there found an Annie Lee Moss, of 72 R St. S.W., listed as a member in the middle ‘40s. Thus Markward’s testimony was confirmed by the Communists’ own records, reflecting this particular Annie Lee Moss, and no other, as a party member.
Ann Coulter’s discussion of the case quite accurately sums up the foregoing information, while Rabinowitz -- though with Coulter’s book before her -- ignores it entirely. The Coulter-Markward-McCarthy version gets the matter exactly right; the Murrow-Senate Democrat-Rabinowitz version is wrong, as shown by an extensive record (the SACB revisited the case on a number of occasions).
The question of Annie Lee Moss is important in itself, as it is so often mentioned in discussions of McCarthy. However, it is even more important as a kind of template for his other cases -- Peress, Amerasia, the speech at Wheeling, Owen Lattimore, and many more. There can be no intelligible discussion of these matters without knowing what the facts are, and these won’t be found by re-cycling Edward R. Murrow’s version of our history.
Anyway, that’s already being handled by The New York Times. Faithful readers of your pages expect something better from the Journal.
M. Stanton Evans Washington, DC
LOL. You're analysis applies most of the time.
"Our" women are LADIES and Feminine. The Leftie Women are mostly "neutered" ballsy, bossy, pushy, power hungry, anti-men, anti-American, and generally not cute.
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