The Letter the Wall Street Journal Refused to Run [ Evans defends Coulter against Rabinowitz]

http://www.anncoulter.org/refused.htm ^ | M. Stanton Evans

[Akron Al]

The Letter the Wall Street Journal Refused to Run
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The Letter the Wall Street Journal Refused to Run

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.

Treason!

Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War..., Coulter
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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

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[DoctorMichael]

........Anyway, that’s already being handled by The New York Times. Faithful readers of your pages expect something better from the Journal.

Hahahahahahahaha.

Alright, Stanton! Way to stick the knife in and turn it!

[Lancey Howard]

Ann bothers ALL liberals...ain't it grand?

I have noticed that she also bothers "big-boned" women.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

I just picked up my copy of Treason yesterday - I plan to read it real soon, but I feel like I know the basic gist already.

As I've said before the ideas in the book are not new -
Ann's contribution is making them available to the masses. And as is often the case that is at least as important if not more important than coming up with the ideas in the first place. My hunch is that this book is going to end up as one of those books that matters - I can see the change happening already. Before this book the commie-left would always hold up their false cloak of patriotism - would always say that they're only speaking up because they "love their country so much" and that that's the point living in America anyway and "how dare you question my patriotism". The usual crap. Now after Ann's book, people are willing to stand up and say that the Daschles and the Gephardts and the Clintons don't love their country at all - in fact they hate it and are trying to destroy it or turn it into something it was never meant to be. And I think that's huge.

I think one of the next books I'm going to read is "Witness" by Whitaker Chambers. I heard someone call Ann on a call-in show and say he'd read it 7 times and that it was the "book of the century". Ann said he'd get no argument from her (and that "Treason" was #2 ha-ha).

Chambers is the intellectual Godfather of Buckley, McCarthy, Nixon and probably many others. Probably the Great-Godfather of Ann. I feel like I need to read his book which many have called a masterpiece.

[Hugin]

Care to point out one instance where Ann paints herself as a victim?

Posting a pro-Coulter letter on her Web site with the tag line "The Letter the Wall Street Journal Refused to Run."

Unless Akron Al is Ann Colter's freeper ID she did not post this. So how does that back up your claim that she "paints herself as a victim"?

Try again.

[HISSKGB]

I'll bet than when you get 2/3rds of the way through Coulter's new book you will be pleasantly surprised. As it starts out you will see the usual anti-pro but her writings pick up speed and are excellent in condensing and fine tuning some the myriad of commie/liberal anti-American episodes.

Although I thought I was well versed in the leftist traitorism, I learned new and abominable things the US commies had perpetrated such as Clinton/Carter's gift of unsupervised nuclear reactors to North Korea. This was so shocking to me that I had to verify this. It was even worse than Coulter described!

[Eva]

This should have been posted on the internet, but you have to do it immediately when you read the article, or it will be too late. I unfortunately failed to respond the night I read it because I was too tired to make sense. I did send my letter anyway, with the hope that Rabinowitz would at least read the responses.

Her article was about her worst written article that I have read. Her whole premise was a non sequitur, especially the part about Hollywood and the last dig about McCarthy supporting the Nazis was totally off base. She obviously wrote the article without doing ANY research.

[Map Kernow]

"The Wall Street Journal...National Review...That's the OLD Right...."
----With apologies to Sec'y. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

The WSJ 'refuses' to run most letters to the editor.
Newspapers are like that.

Most letters to the editor are not written by M. Stanton Evans, either. Read The Theme Is FreedomReligion, Politics, and the American Tradition and get a clue what that means. Note also that Mr. Evans plans to write a book on the McCarthy era . . .

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Coulter's book has a pretty obvious bias perspective.

For a perspective to be so egregious to be a bias, the perspective has to be unconscious, so that the writer is deluded into thinking s/he is "objective." Found in all journalists, most notably of all in those working for The New York Times.

[ontos-on]

Your response does not work. M. Stanton Evans has good standing in the conservative Republican circles and this direct and specific refutation of a column should have been printed. There is no excuse other than thin skins.

[Pharmboy]

The libs like this guy or gal cannot STOMACH Ann because she is so right on the money. They will say ANYTHING at all to slander her...this one does it on any Coulter thread he comes across. Pathetic.

[Stultis]

There's some good stuff by M. Stanton Evans in backhoe's resource thread that I linked in #31.

[ontos-on]

witness the use of the term "discredited" or "untrue" with regard to Bush's 16 word statement in the State of the Union speech. The statement in the speech was not discredited. The statement was in fact true--inasmuch the source, British government, still holds that the statement was true. I even saw Gingrich accept the democrats premise in when he was talking on abc today. We would need something like a permanent "truth squad."

[ontos-on]

Hey, BTW Mr. President, shouldn't you be in bed by now--given that you have to get up early tomorrow?

[thegreatbeast]

What is obvious, and understandable, friend, is that the WSJ didn't want to print a letter that quickly and simply showed one of their columnists to be a harridan bereft of facts.

[HISSKGB]

How leftie of you to worry about the money Coulter may earn from people buying her book! Zinn and Ehrenwrong became wealthy by singing a song that the middle class should support the very lower class exploited by Zinn and Ehrenwrong.

Coulter spoke out. Lefties and pretend conservatives are squealing because they have no real defense against the truths she has named.

[ontos-on]

Why do you be a big boy and deal with the substance of what is being written about rather whether or not you are "tired" of your fantasy that Ann cries victim. I do not recall her doing that once, let alone so often as to be tiresome to you.

You make it sound like you have siad something, but you really have not advanced the discussion.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

First of all, great screenname!

Secondly, appreciate your remarks. Maybe I was too flip in saying there was "nothing new" in Treason without first having read the book! Sounds like Ann has taken the body of work of anti-communism and brought it up to date as Chambers, McCarthy et. al. predated the clinton/carter years by several decades! Good points.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

It gets a little tiresome to hear Ann declare victimhood

Dorothy Rabinowitz didn't read Treason. M. Stanton Evans did--and didn't need to, to know more about the subject than Dorothy Rabinowitz does--inasmuch as Mr. Evans supplied a Coulter with most of her information on "the McCarthy era."

I read Treason start to finish. And I subscribe to the WSJ because of its editorial page. Ms. Rabinowitz's piece isn't the kind of writing that makes me want to buy the paper. And declining to publish a germane letter by M. Stanton Evans simply compounds the error.

[ontos-on]

Still no substance from you. Do you disagree with the points Evans made about the Moss woman or not? All this other stuff about her being shrill and you're being tired and St. Ann etc. -- is more like you being shrill and empty and tiresome.