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It takes one to know one | page 1, 2, 3, 4
Discounting the internal Communist threat in the Roosevelt and early Truman years and the external threat in the post-Johnson era have been the hallmarks of modern liberalism and its irregular alliance with the fellow-traveling and pro-Communist left. The summary moment of this strange bed-fellowship occurred in 1939, when Whittaker Chambers went to Washington to warn Franklin Roosevelt that his close aide Alger Hiss was a Communist and a Soviet spy. When the message was conveyed to Roosevelt by Adolph Berle, the president merely laughed and then elevated Hiss to even higher levels of policy and responsibility. Weisberg's Times piece follows the party line of this tradition quite faithfully, as has the Times' own treatment of the post-Communist revelations. The Times, for example, buried the Venona story when it first broke, has remained skeptical to the bitter end on the question of Hiss' guilt, and has continued to cast a more- The liberal temperament reflected in these choices is well-illustrated by Weisberg's treatment of Owen Lattimore, a figure from this history to whom he makes a passing reference in his text. Owen Lattimore was a famous McCarthy target and -- in liberal eyes -- a still more famous McCarthy victim. Yet despite all that Venona, the Soviet archives and the latter-day memoirs of repentant Communists have revealed, Weisberg still describes Lattimore as "the China hand absurdly named as the Soviets' 'top spy' in the United States." It is true that this McCarthy claim was false, and every conservative scholar in Weisberg's crosshairs has emphasized the fact, deploring McCarthy's demagoguery and the damage his reckless accusations did to the legitimate anti-Communist cause. (Indeed, no one at the time was more furious with McCarthy for this over-reach and the discredit it brought than J. Edgar Hoover himself.) To this day, Lattimore has never been proven a spy and does not appear in the Soviet documents thus far released. But the image of wounded innocence that surrounded Lattimore then and does to this day in Weisberg's report is even falser to the reality of both the man and the period than the McCarthy smear itself. In fact, the professorial Lattimore was a devious, unscrupulous, self-conscious betrayer of his country and a willing servant of the Soviet cause who worked hand-in-glove with its underground spy apparatus in the United States. As the editor of Pacific Affairs, and intimate of Lauchlin Currie (the White House liaison to the Department of State), Lattimore was one of America's most influential China experts during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, a period that marked the crucial stages of the Communist revolution, whose triumph in 1949 preceded McCarthy's crusade by a mere eight months. We now know that Currie, Lattimore's intimate friend and patron at the White House, was a Soviet spy. Lattimore's own pro-Soviet outlook was clearly expressed in a memo he wrote to the executive director of the Institute for Pacific Relations, a think tank financed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, which published his magazine: "For the USSR -- back their international policy in general, but without using their slogans and above all without giving them or anybody else the impression of subservience." On Currie's advice, Lattimore hired a KGB collaborator named Michael Greenberg as his assistant at Pacific Affairs, and then on his own initiative, Chen Han-shen, a Chinese spy, as his co-editor. Lattimore put his request for the co-editor through the channels of the Comintern. Yet, in the battle with McCarthy, Lattimore was the put-upon hero in the eyes of liberals and Democrats (with important exceptions like Arthur Schlesinger). As one of Weisberg's targets, Arthur Herman, reminds us in his book on McCarthy, Herbert Elliston of the Baltimore Sun, Al Friendly of the Washington Post, Drew Pearson, I.F. Stone, Eric Sevareid and Martin Agronsky all supported Lattimore. The New York Post editorialized, "All those who believe in freedom in this country are in the debt of Owen Lattimore." McCarthy was painted by the same political forces as the devil incarnate, while his bid to expose Lattimore as the traitor he was, was successfully thwarted by the congressional Democrats. The release of Soviet documents has allowed us to see that in the Cold War battles of this era: 1) The anti-Communist forces of the right were correctly concerned about the internal threat to American security (as were their liberal and socialist allies); 2) the pro-Soviet left was treacherous and subversive; and 3) the Democrats, for partisan reasons (they were covering up the security failures of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations), often harbored and protected the Communists who had infiltrated their ranks. In obscuring these historical realities, Weisberg and the Times are playing a role that has undeniable parallels to that played by their liberal and fellow-traveling counterparts at the time. This includes turning a semi-blind eye to the stranglehold exerted by New Left Marxists and Soviet sympathizers -- the intellectual heirs of Owen Lattimore -- on the teaching of history in American universities, whose two main professional organizations this year are headed by David Montgomery, an unrepentant former Communist, and Eric Foner, a New Left apologist for the Rosenbergs. Sympathizers of the old Communist left now dominate the writing of the historical record in both the academic fields of Soviet studies and domestic communism. The leading academic authority on the McCarthy period, for example, is Ellen Schrecker, a full-blown apologist for American communism. Schrecker's books do not even bother to dream up new defenses for the Communists' treachery but merely rehash the disingenuous arguments the Communists made for themselves at the time. A typical Schreckerism explains that American Communists spied not because they were traitors, but because they "did not subscribe to traditional forms of patriotism." In discussing Schrecker's work, Weisberg treads lightly over this reality of the left's hold on the historical record. To treat this reality for what it is would require recognizing that conservative scholars have been pushed to the fringes of their profession by a political juggernaut in the universities more powerful in excluding dissenters than McCarthy ever was, and that a handful of them have nonetheless courageously struggled to present a balanced view of this past. But to acknowledge this would mean recognizing the power and relevance of the left in the present, and "rehabilitating" the role that ex-Communists like Elizabeth Bentley, conservatives like William F. Buckley and institutions like the FBI played in defending America against the Communist threat. Instead, Weisberg's plea is that the story of American Communists should be approached "in a less judgmental fashion," while his conclusion is that even intellectually "the Cold War is history now." It is more likely, however, that (in Irving Kristol's phrase) the Cold War has merely come home. For although Weisberg affects a posture above the fray, he is himself a partisan in this Cold War. Just three years ago he wrote a cover story for New York magazine called "The Un-Americans," a peculiar reprise of the McCarthy-era stigma that he applied to six conservatives whose photos were also featured: Phil Gramm, Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson and Jesse Helms. Their collective thought crime was to have criticized the federal government and their subversive "act" to have used words like "revolution" in connection with Newt Gingrich's "contract with America," and thus -- in Weisberg's tendentious argument -- to have provided an ideological rationale for the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. When Weisberg called to interview me for his Times piece, I brought up the article. I told him I didn't trust his ability to treat conservatives like me fairly, because I remembered how he had smeared conservatives as "un-American." His reply was evasive. He didn't remember if he had written such a story, he said. Like the Communists who were questioned about subversion by McCarthy's committee in the 1950s and presented themselves as liberal patriots and defenders of the First Amendment, Weisberg defended himself by pretending not to know what I was talking about.
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