Everyone agrees the right side won the Cold War when Soviet Communism collapsed over a decade ago. But a related war continues that the right side is losing. And, like all wars, this battle is politics by other means and is being fought on several fronts.
On the academic front, traditional historians, whatever their personal politics, analyze and explain historical evidence, such as the recently declassified decryptions of Soviet coded messages revealing American and British spies in the 1940s. (For a bibliography, see MetroBooks, March 2003.) At the recent Raleigh International Spy Conference (founded by MetroMagazine publisher Bernie Reeves and co-sponsored by this magazine and the North Carolina Museum of History Associates), eminent British traditional historian Christopher Andrew and intelligence expert Nigel West blamed the Soviets for causing the Cold War. Their candor prompted Spy Conference moderator James Leutze, emeritus professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill and retired chancellor of UNC-Wilmington, to lament the attitudes prevalent in American academia from the 1960s onward. On campus Leftist revisionist historians either theorize equivalent blame for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviets or directly blame the United States and absolve the Soviets.
A leading American traditional historian, John Earl Haynes, recently described the revisionists version of the Cold War as arising from the moral squalor of todays academia where Communists are heroes and those who opposed communism are despised. From that milieu, revisionist historian Ellen Schrecker urges historians to use McCarthyism for an all-encompassing, pejorative description of the American anticommunist movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Using that broad brush, any portrayal of anticommunism will project images of witch-hunts. But such imagery, says Haynes, is inaccurate, and is an act of propaganda in the academic lefts campaign to rewrite history to teach that the wrong side won the Cold War.
The revisionist propaganda extends to the elite media and popular culture. As a leading example, the New York Times still wails about McCarthyism and warns against those who dispute the revisionist version of McCarthyism and their verdict on its namesake, Senator Joseph McCarthy. The stage for the revisionist propaganda was set in the 1950s, soon after McCarthys Senate committee began investigations of suspected Communist security risks in the government, when playwright Arthur Millers The Crucible caused popular culture to adopt the witch-hunt theme as the code for McCarthyism. Decades later, the Salem Witch Trial Museum displays a large wall chart comparing the Salem witch trials with McCarthyism. And Woody Allens film The Front, depicting the boycotted Hollywood Ten screenwriters as mere well-meaning liberals, dominates public perception of them as innocent victims of a witch-hunt. Meanwhile, Lloyd Billingsleys Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (1998), that exposes the screenwriters as duplicitous Communist propagandists, goes largely unnoticed by the public and the media.
Despite the success of the revisionists in academia, the elite media and popular culture, the contrary truth is known if not widely perceived. In Treason, columnist and television commentator Ann Coulter seeks to spread the truth and change that public perception. Coulter rejects the revisionist version of McCarthyism and their verdict on McCarthy personally.
To dispel the witch-hunt comparison, Coulter explains that McCarthys investigations were limited. They were conducted through a Senate oversight committee charged with investigating federal employees suspected of being security risks. Earlier Congressional hearings investigating State Department official Alger Hiss and the espionage accusations against him by Whittaker Chambers were not heard before McCarthys Senate committee, but the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that also convened hearings about Hollywood Communists. Thus, two key elements of the revisionist propagandistic version of McCarthyism, the Hiss and Hollywood episodes, occurred before McCarthys Senate committees investigation of Communists in the government and before his famous I have a list speech.
McCarthy gave his speech saying that he had the names of Communists in the State Department in 1950, soon after Hiss was convicted of perjury for denying his spying for the Soviets. Against the accepted wisdom that McCarthy recklessly named names, Coulter explains that McCarthy maintained that names should be disclosed only in closed session of the Senate committee. Other Senators voted to compel him to name the government security risks publicly. Coulter also explains that the Army-McCarthy hearings, where McCarthy antagonist Joseph Welch asked McCarthy if he had no sense of decency to the applause of the attending press, were not a witch-hunt by McCarthy as they are generally portrayed, but a Senate inquiry into his staffs actions concerning the Army. Coulter exposes lawyer Welch, a hero to the Left for opposing McCarthy, as a hypocrite.
Despite some merit in Coulters defense of McCarthy, even some of her fellow conservatives have criticized her efforts. Commentator David Horowitz complains that she does not concede that McCarthy was a demagogue or that his recklessness injured the anti-Communist cause. Scholar Jamie Glazov, a staunch anticommunist and son of a former Soviet dissident, criticizes Coulter for going over the top. And Harvey Klehr, a leading traditional historian and expert on the era, faults her on many of the details of her account of McCarthy.
Other faults of Treason are its title and Coulters accusation that all liberals are treasonous. She explained to Chris Matthews on Hardball that the title means that the Democratic Party, as an entity, has become functionally treasonable. Obviously, the combative Coulter pulls no punches and hits hard. Here, however, she misdirects some punches and hits some wrong targets, such as anticommunist liberals like Presidents Truman and Kennedy. As Horowitz says, she fails to distinguish between satirical exaggeration and historical analysis. Nevertheless, while wrongly calling all liberals treasonous, Coulter correctly calls some on the Left treasonous, including Communists fronting as liberals.
Beyond treason, there is the question of nonfeasance. Coulter notes that President Franklin D. Roosevelt cavalierly dismissed an early warning from Whittaker Chambers that Roosevelts adviser Alger Hiss was a Communist spy. Later, President Truman dismissed the House committees investigation of Hiss as a red herring, and Truman did not consider charges of Communist spying seriously until after Republicans took control of Congress in the 1946 elections. Soon facing resurgent Republicans in his 1948 election campaign, Truman also faced insurgency within his own Democratic Party from the Henry Wallace-led Progressives and their Communist Popular Front operatives. Only after Truman won the 1948 election did his administration prosecute Hiss, the Rosenbergs and others guilty of treason.
Coulters title is suggested by the lament of Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 book Witness that treason had become a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas. The history of that treason should be known to the public, and Treason tries commendably to overcome the revisionist history propagated by the academic Left and the New York Times-led elite media. As Coulter has remarked, despite all the scholarly works by traditional historians like Klehr, Haynes and Ronald Radosh, revisionist history permeates our high school and college textbooks and the popular perception. Perhaps Treason can make the public understand that, if McCarthyism can be equated with witch-hunts, it is because there were Communist witches to be hunted.
Useful Idiots
Regarding pubic perception of witch-hunts, if Hollywood can gloss Communist propagandists into mere well-meaning liberals victimized by witch-hunts, media elites can be exposed as useful idiots. For that mission, columnist Mona Charen has written Useful Idiots, using the phrase attributed to Lenin that the Communists could always count on support for their cause from liberal useful idiots.
As Charen makes clear, there have been many useful idiots. For an early example, Charen cites journalist Lincoln Steffens, who visited the new Soviet Communist state in 1921 and proclaimed, I have seen the future and it works. Following that foresight, the New York Times Walter Duranty wrote favorably about Communism from the Soviet state, where he reported falsely that collectivized farming produced sufficient food, not famine. Continuing its errors about Communism, at the outset of the Cuban Revolution the Times described the early Fidel Castro as merely an agrarian reformer. Regarding the Communists in Vietnam, the Times abandoned its initial support for the non-communists after the antiwar Left took over the Democratic Party. The Times was soon lionizing Leftists like Susan Sontag for supporting the Communists. Just before the Communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, Times correspondent Sidney Schanberg forecast better lives for the Cambodians under the Communist Khmer Rouge. Instead of better lives, millions of Cambodians suffered a bloodbath of death, later portrayed in the movie Killing Fields featuring Schanberg. At the same time, Times columnist Anthony Lewis found the Cambodian bloodbath debate to be unreal.
Charen exposes much more, including episodes involving useful idiots like Dan Rather, Jane Fonda, and Jesse Jackson. She has mined media archives for treasures of idiocy. For underlying scholarly sources, she relies on several books reviewed or discussed in MetroMagazine, including Paul Hollanders Political Pilgrims (see MetroBooks, May 2002), Ronald Radoshs Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left (see MetroBooks, July/August 2001), and The Black Book of Communism, reviewed with Robert Conquests Reflections on a Ravaged Century (see MetroBooks, May 2000).
As their subtitles suggest, both Useful Idiots and Treason relate the history of the Cold War and the Lefts propaganda about it to the contemporary War on Terrorism and the Leftists who still blame America first. Both books incorporate telling quotes from Leftist politicians, media elites, artists and actors. (Treason includes a whole chapter on celebrity traitors.) There are many parallels between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism and the responses to them by the Left. The next time you hear Leftist entertainer Michael Moore whine or the Dixie Chicks chirp about their free-speech rights being suppressed, think about the propaganda and hypocrisy of the Left exposed in these two books.
Was it treason or idiocy by the Left during the Cold War? Which is it now during the War on Terrorism? Read Treason and Useful Idiots and reach your own conclusions. !