‘Alger Hiss and the Battle for History’

New York Times ^ | May 10, 2009 | SUSAN JACOBY

[nickcarraway]

We are about to look at the trials of a man who was judged in one decade for what he was said to have done in another. —Alistair Cooke, A Generation on Trial, 1950

It was not entirely true, even in 1950, that Alger Hiss was being judged primarily on the basis of what he had done in the 1930s. Unless a former Communist Party member had thoroughly repudiated his past and turned against his one-time friends and political associates, he was suspected in the late forties and early fifties of still being a secret Communist — or, at the very least, a communist sympathizer known as a "fellow traveler." In Hiss's case, the real suspicion underlying the indictment for perjury was that he had betrayed his country while serving as a State Department aide, by passing confidential information to the Soviets not only in the thirties but perhaps even during the Second World War (although Whittaker Chambers, who left the Party in 1938, never claimed to know anything about Hiss's subsequent activities). By the time Hiss was indicted and tried for perjury, he stood, in the opinion of a significant proportion of the public, for all of the American-born subverters-from-within who helped the Soviet Union to become the most prominent, indeed the only, counterweight to the power of the United States in the postwar world. To his liberal defenders, Hiss stood for all of the loyal Americans whose lives were being destroyed by charges that they had once been Communists or had even associated with Communists.

But it is impossible to understand the intensity of the passions surrounding the guilt or innocence of Hiss without making an imaginative leap backward to the thirties, when Americans were struggling with the Depression and trying to suppress awareness of the intermittent,

[redpoll]

The worst mistake of our time was not having Nuremberg-style trials for the Communists following the collapse of the Soviet empire. Instead, the communists have been given a free pass to continue their brazen criminality in the light of day among the free people of the world. Sad.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Does anybody else wonder why we still support the UN?

It tries to undermine the Constitution of the USA and
would love to cripple our Constitutional Republic.

In over 60 years the only politicians who tried to get
the USA out of the UN were Goldwater and President
Ronald Reagan who did kick UNESCO out.

16 out of 17 of the AMERICANS that were involved
in creating the UN were later identified, in sworn
testimony, as secret communist agents.

The first Secretary General was the AMERICAN Alger Hiss.
Alger Hiss served time in prison pursuant to his
involvement in a Communist spy ring.

Many of the other AMERICANS that were involved in
creating the UN fled the country, to avoid prosecution.

The ONE AMERICAN, that was involved in creating the UN
and was NOT later identified, in sworn testimony, as a
secret communist agent, was Dean Acheson.
Dean Acheson’s law firm was the legal representative of
the Soviet Union, in US courts.

If the AMERICANS that were involved in creating the UN
were Communists, what do you think we got from the rest
of the world?

[Theodore R.]

All the communists have to do is get Obama to issue an “executive order” declaring Hiss innocent of all the allegations against him, and the topic will be “settled law” for the next century. People want to believe Hiss innocent.

[Theodore R.]

I think it was a Norwegian who first headed the UN named “Lie”, but he may not have been a liar like most of those that followed.

[Theodore R.]

Would the American people have believed the truth about communists? They believe Edward R. Murrow instead of McCarthy. The American people have a love affair with socialism because they are looking for “free things”.

[Theodore R.]

Trygve Halvdan Lie ( [ˌtɾyɡʋə ˈliː] (help·info); 16 July 1896 – 30 December 1968) was a Norwegian politician. From 1946 to 1952 he was the first elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.

[Yardstick]

The writer of the NYT piece seems sympathetic towards Hiss and snippy towards “right-wing revisionist history” which tends to be critical of the leftist intellectuals who liked communism and Stalin’s USSR. Which is about what you’d expect from a NYT piece on this subject.

[the_Watchman]

The bias of this writer is undeniable:

in the opinion of a significant proportion of the public, for all of the American-born subverters-from-within who helped the Soviet Union to become the most prominent, indeed the only, counterweight to the power of the United States in the postwar world.

Clearly the author feels that the Soviet Union did the world a favor by standing up to the United States. Some writers are so far left that they don't recognize how kooky they sound. Anyone with a clear view of history would recognize that the United States was the major power in the world that kept the Soviet Union from dominating the rest of the world.

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

Hiss was in charge of forming the communist union we
call the UN.
Hiss also was an adviser to FDR and helped FDR and
his Uncle Joe enslave about 100 million East Europeans.

[nathanbedford]

Indeed Susan Jacoby's bias for the Soviet Union verges on Stalinism. Even the New York Times Sunday Review of Books (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Gallagher-t.html) takes her to task:

For her own part, Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American ­Unreason” and other books, believes ­Alger Hiss was guilty of the perjury for which he was convicted; she is almost, but not entirely, persuaded that Hiss was also a Soviet spy.

This distinction is even too much for the New York Times:

One could say, although not without fear of contradiction, that none of the evidence is exculpatory of Hiss. But Jacoby is incensed at the way current scholars have continued old ideological battles on the back of the Hiss case.

Why is Jacoby incensed?

In the end Jacoby concludes that, sadly, the “misplaced faith inspired by Hiss is still being used to impugn the patriotism of those who believe that it is more, not less, important for this nation to live up to its highest ideals and legal traditions in times of danger than in times of complacent security.”

So, let's see: Susan Jacoby says the Hiss was guilty but not guilty of treason merely guilty of committing perjury about committing treason. And what is worse, vicious right wingers are using evidence of his treachery to undermine liberalism.

Ann Coulter wrote a book called, Treason, in which she pointed all of this out. She was right and for her troubles the New York Times in his article takes a backhanded slap at her lack of scholarship and objectivity, " And it is a little disconcerting to find Ann Coulter thrown into the mix of respectable scholars, just to make Jacoby’s point. " Would that the New York Times would apply the same standard to Susan Jacoby.

[Sicvee]

Yours is an excellent summary of the article for those who don’t want to read it.

[PhilDragoo]

Susan Jacoby reveals herself in this:

In an excellent analysis of FDR's first hundred days, which proves that there is always something new to be said about the New Deal, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter points out that the words dictator and dictatorship were frequently used with approval to describe what the new president ought to do to rescue the nation.

Used by whom.

By the hundreds of Soviet agents in his administration? Who were accused by the much-maligned Senator McCarthy--and proved by the Venona decrypts.

The New York Times did much to make Stalinism "fashionable"--in Jacoby's word.

The Old Gray Comrade fielded the great Pulitzer Pravda Propagandist Walter Duranty who covered up Stalin's famine killing of millions of Ukrainians, his show trials which sent more millions to their deaths.

Jacoby is nostalgic for the embrace of Uncle Joe and the great Red hope of Communism.

She needn't be--we've it all again anew in Obamao.

Who has sprung from Frank Marshall Davis' knee to extol China, "spread the wealth around", denounce the Constitution for failing to "redistribute the wealth".

And a Red countervailing power? Hillary and Bill and Madeleine made sure Schwartz and Armstrong and Wen would give the People's Repugnant of China our missile and warhead data.

Ann Coulter called M. Stanton Evans (Blacklisted by History) the greatest living authority on McCarthy. I saw Evans eviscerate Indiana Civil Liberties head Dr. Robert Risk in 1964--a fact-based fearless warrior defeated a propaganda-spewing fairy in public combat.

The Times and Newsweek continue their fight, losing in the capitalist game they look to the Kremlin-on-the-Potomac to be bailed out.

The Battle for History continues--with the Marxist messiah and his obedient media feeding truth to the memory hole fast as they're able.

[kabumpo]

I could not agree more!! We needed to have de-communization the way we had de-nazification.

[wastoute]

Thank you for your thoughtful and informed (as always) remarks. As I recall the Venona decrypts (transcripts?) prove beyond all doubt Hiss was a traitor. For the life of me I still can't fully grasp why current libs feel it is necessary to continually try to improve his standing in history but they never stop. Their lying is like "The Terminator", it never sleeps, it never stops, and it has only one purpose.

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[iopscusa]

The NYTimes is absolutely helpful to Free people by identifying the subversive intellects like Susan Jacoby. She is definitely a Stalinista...FREEPERS can learn a lot about her with a bit of research. She vehemently hates what she calls the Right Wing Religious. From an interview on BeliefNet: 'What do you mean when you say the orthodox religious view? I stress the orthodox or right wing religious view because I don't like it when people talk about religion versus secularism. What they really mean is a particular kind of religion versus secularism. The general press has a tendency to say religious as if all religions were alike and all religious believers had the same beliefs.'

[joelt]

Ms Coulter has had this right; the NYT will not stop trying to massage this whole story. They had to get this latest entry in,,,,, before their own end.

[iopscusa]

If interested, Jacoby’s “Alger Hiss and the Battle for History” is FREELY available on Google Books...if nothing else, read the conclusion, Ms. Jacoby is hardcore COMMIE.
http://books.google.com/books?id=nLU0z6PlTHAC&dq=%E2%80%98Alger+Hiss+and+the+Battle+for+History%E2%80%99&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=5UCff5Edlv&sig=Sdh7HOimdfMRZE8KqTEJH55sXoQ&hl=en&ei=N08FSufuI8mJtgeEpOmPBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5#PPA212,M1

[iopscusa]

NB, Good morning from the 1st state to resist the tyrant Honest Abe...looks like the anti-commie brigade has had a rousing Friday/Saturday conversation on that Hero of the western Communist, Alger Hiss. Have you read this book, it is available on Google Books....Jacoby’s Conclusions are a riot. I would love to see Ann Coulter and Susan Jacoby in debate.

[nathanbedford]

You raise a very good point. The left simply will not let go of this. There is another theory to explain why the left reverts to the same old lies but dresses them up and new words. For example, Hillary Clinton said in one of the debates said she did not like to call herself a liberal because that word had assumed bad connotations and she preferred to be called a progressive. As Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, progressives were in many respects worse then the liberals of a decade ago. Goldberg's thesis is that the left keeps recycling the old nostrums which do not work so they must be sold the next time under a new label.

I've been thinking much the same thing myself when I wrote this reply trying to trace the effect of the " anti-anti-communism" crusade against logic which has so taken over academia, then the media, and our culture. We have migrated a long way from a time when a senator could electrify the nation by announcing that there were Communists in the State Department to the point where we elect a president whose most profound associations throughout his biography were with Communists, felons, and terrorists. Here's the reply:

Once upon a Time in America the great divide in our society was expressed by where you stood on Joe McCarthy. Of course, that was all wrapped up with Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss and which one of those two you believed. Did you think the Rosenbergs were guilty? The answer that question told everyone whether you were a Democrat or a Republican.

The other American dramas I can invoke to describe the hold the Army -McCarthy hearings had on the nation are the OJ Simpson trial and the Clarence Thomas hearings. I can remember as a boy coming home from school and finding my mother transfixed before a black-and-white television over the Army McCarthy hearings. In our house we believed McCarthy, and Chambers, and we thought that the Rosenbergs were certainly guilty. But this was not the universal opinion of suburbia and certainly not the politically correct version to which I was exposed to in school which was connected to a university.

The impact of McCarthy was not limited to the era which bears his name. In subsequent years in college I learned that my parents must have been real Neanderthals to believe the way they did. Most of this was imparted to me by my professors through innuendo; we quickly absorbed the culture of the University and knew what sort of opinions were acceptable and which were not acceptable to express in learned company.

Today the term "McCarthyism" has assumed a meaning which contains its own DNA and expresses a whole left-wing point of view. We see the same thing now happening with the phrase, "Swift boating." These phrases have been turned on their head by a consensus in academia and in the media which simply ignores any other interpretation of events except the one favoring the left.

McCarthy was connected to Chambers who was connected to Nixon. If the left was irrational in its support of Alger Hiss, it was almost psychotic in its hatred of Richard Nixon. There was a chain of events that led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon for actions that had mostly been done already by previous Democrat presidents. What I find so fascinating so many years later is the question, why was the left so irrational, so emotional in its judgments about the Communists and the anti-Communists? Why was the left so purblind to Communists in high places where they could mortally wound the nation and so viscerally obsessed about the men like McCarthy, Chambers, and Nixon who exposed them?

Why, for example, was President Truman so indifferent to the evidence of Communists in the State Department? Perhaps Truman's inertia can be explained by his parochial Midwestern background, his naïveté, his partisanship, his ignorance of the lay of the land on the day he assumed office. But Roosevelt's involvement was more than indifference. It strikes me that Roosevelt was almost the model of the patrician who sees himself as larger than his own country. John Kerry, of Swift Boat fame, seems to be cast in the same mold, although without Roosevelt's political acumen.

Do men of great wealth like George Soros or Franklin Roosevelt regard the concept of national sovereignty to be merely the outmoded belief systems of the masses, akin to the belief in God which provide some comfort and meaning to their lives, but which is outmoded and not particularly useful in the grand games played for world stakes. Just a thought, but one prompted by knowledge that the financial backer of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL was also a man of great wealth who founded the school which has done so much damage to our culture. The school was founded for the express purpose of breaking down those institutions which frustrated the victory of communism.

Roosevelt must have known that there were Communists in his government. His vice president was virtually an avowed communist. I believe he just didn't care. Either he was so arrogant that he believed he could control events even as he was being undermined by a fifth column, or, more likely, he didn't care because he didn't think it mattered when viewed from the exalted perspective of his world.

George Soros does not care what passport he holds except as it advances his interests. Patricians in general do not see the world as contained and defined by national boundaries but by markets, routes, and centers of supply and demand.

McCarthyism, like Swift Boating, has been distorted and twisted into a widely accepted definition by political correctness. Political correctness is the explicitly contrived belief system created by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. The Frankfurt school was founded by a character who could change skins with George Soros and each could live comfortably in the other's century. They view the rest of us as impediments or useful idiots.

They could be right. The useful idiots enforce the rules of political correctness and obligingly define against the weight of history the meaning of phrases like, " McCarthyism" or, "Swift Boating." I for one choose to count myself among the impediment class.