What did Harry Truman know? William Rusher reveals former prez ignored communist infiltration
WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Thursday, July 31, 2003 | William Rusher
Some think that President Truman was never told what the Venona Papers revealed. According to this account, General of the Army Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took personal responsibility in 1949 for insisting that Truman not be told.
There is, however, another and very different account of the facts. Novak has tracked down a retired Army cryptanalyst named Oliver Kirby, who asserts that his superior, Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke, met with President Truman in the Oval Office on June 5, 1945 – just six weeks after Truman took office – and told him (at the urging of Gen. George Marshall) of the Venona decryptions then under way. But Truman was unimpressed. He didn't understand the decoding process, and told Clarke the whole thing sounded "like a fairy story." As late as 1948, when Bradley (according to Kirby) informed Truman of new Venona discoveries, the president told Defense Secretary James Forrestal there were "too many unknowns" in the dispatches, and that "even if part of this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again."
Even in 1950, when Bradley told Truman that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were identified in Venona as Soviet spies, Truman kept his eyes firmly shut: "That g-ddamn stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger and bigger. It's likely to take us down."
So the struggle over domestic communism roared on, while Harry Truman, who (at least according to this account) knew the truth and could have ended the battle by telling it, kept the information deeply buried. A new (and Republican) administration took over in 1953, but how much it was told about Venona is unknown.
In message #4, FairOpinion posts the column by Robert Novak on which the WND piece is based:
The Origins of McCarthyism
What did Harry Truman know, and when did he know it?
by Robert D. Novak
06/30/2003, Volume 008, Issue 41