Posted on 07/02/2003 3:40:14 PM PDT by kattracks
Did President Harry Truman ignore proof that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were Soviet agents, or was he kept in the dark about intercepted Soviet messages that revealed their treason?
Writing in the Weekly Standard, columnist Robert Novak tells how the secret of the intercepted Soviet wireless traffic known as the Venona transcripts was handled and how Truman reacted.
Coming on the heels of the release of Ann Coulter's book "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," in which she suggests that Truman was never told about the Venona project because it was believed that he could not be trusted with the information, Novak's blockbuster revelation indicates that Truman may well have known about the intercepts but simply ignored them. As a result he allowed Hiss and White to be promoted to top posts in the U.S. government and hotly defended Hiss.
Novak notes that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., who discovered the existence of the decrypted Soviet cables and arranged to have them released, did not believe that Truman, who was calling the Hiss case a "red herring," knew about the cables.
Moynihan told Novak that "President Truman was never told of the Venona decryptions. It gives one pause now that all Truman ever 'learned' about Communist espionage came from the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the speeches of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, and the like."
For this, Moynihan blamed the fetish for government secrecy in general and Omar Bradley in particular. Bradley, he indicated, had withheld the information about Venona from the president.
But Novak later learned that there is plenty of information available that Truman did know about the intercepts and simply brushed them off as some kind of "fairy story."
Wrote Novak: "As I entered my office the morning my column [about Moynihan's assertions] appeared, historian and journalist Jerrold Schecter telephoned me with a complaint. A former Time diplomatic editor and National Security Council spokesman during the Carter administration, Schecter contended that 'Moynihan was dead wrong.' He said that six weeks after he became president in 1945, Harry Truman 'was told about the secret decoding of Soviet messages,' adding: 'It was not the bureaucracy that held back the secrets, but the president himself.'" He reports that Jerrold and Leona Schecter later wrote "Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History," in which they totally reject Moynihan's thesis.
When the Venona translators had their first success in decoding the Soviet messages in 1945, Gen. George C. Marshall urged the chief code breaker Gen. Clarke to tell Truman about the project, and on June 5, 1945, Truman, then in office for only six weeks, met with him in the Oval Office for 15 minutes.
"The general told the president that the code-breakers were decrypting messages that revealed massive Soviet intelligence operations in the United States, though it was too early to identify operatives or operations. Clarke described this meeting as 'NDG' (no damn good). The president told the general that his account of code-breaking sounded 'like a fairy story.' Truman obviously did not understand the brief explanation of how Soviet messages were decoded."
Then, in February 1948, Gen. Bradley met with Clarke and other code breakers, and it was agreed that Bradley would control Venona's secrets and keep Truman informed. Bradley said he understood Truman's failure to comprehend. He speculated that so-called wild rumors about communists in government passed to the president by Hoover had made the president skeptical of Venona.
Bradley, however, did keep Truman informed of new material coming out of Venona. Novak writes that Truman told Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, there were "too many unknowns" in the partially decoded Soviet messages.
"Even if part of this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again," Truman told Forrestal, adding he could not believe that President Franklin Roosevelt could have been taken in by traitors in his midst. At any rate, Truman said he did not believe that Russian penetration of the government could be as widespread as Venona indicated.
Novak concludes that "if the Schecters are right and Pat Moynihan was wrong, a question is raised that goes to the duality of Harry Truman's political personality. The statesman who made the decisions ending World War II and fighting the Cold War is also the Kansas City machine politician preoccupied by partisan considerations. The same President Truman who was so decisive in authorizing the atom bombing of Japan, military intervention in Korea, the Marshall plan, Greek-Turkish aid, and NATO could not come to grips with Soviet espionage at home. Truman despised Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers as informants, even though their allegations of Soviet spying were confirmed by Venona. The Truman White House was more interested in bringing perjury charges against Chambers than in probing espionage by Hiss."
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Breezy and irreverant, it should pique people's interest in harder stuff, like the Venona books and Chambers' "Witness".
My copy of Witness resides with a friend at present, but I'm fairly certain there was a passage relating Chambers' attempt to warn Harry Truman about Communists in our government, which was unceremoniously rebuffed by Truman.
I recall my father never uttering Truman's name without preceding it with, "that SOB."
The Mad Hatter From Missouri was many things but brilliant was not one of them.
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
http://video.ire.org/10650.ram (Requires RealPlayer)
Are these names familiar?
Kim Philby
Guy Burgess
Donald Maclean
Roger Hollis
Don't scare me. I've been thinking of buying another copy and was afraid it might be scarce.
I actually got my copy in a "Buck a Book" store years ago.
Yes he was. However, there are some points where I will disagree with you on Truman. For example, he did try to break up the railraod union strike, which pretty much made his base abandon him and he did support Isreal when it was not politically expedient to do so. He left office with a worse approval rating than Nixon, but I don't feel that liberals are trying to ressurect his legacy - he dropped the big one you know. Two of them to be exact. Liberals hate him for that.
I'm a buyin' it.
But good for your Dad!
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