There were Communists--actual Soviet agents--in the State Department. Not that there's anything wrong with that . . .And the truth is that Truman, and certainly FDR, actually thought that. It wasn't that they were oblivious to evidence against Soviet agents in their government nearly as much as it was that they did not view that possibility with alarm.
The reality is that FDR liked the Soviet Union better than he liked Britain, and started seriously wanting to get into the war against Hitler when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Read The New Dealers' War by self-described Truman Democrat Thomas Flemming; he's upfront about most of the above. Notably missing from his account, in which he states that FDR had the Navy harassing U-boats in the Atlantic "throughout the summer of 1941" is the date of Hitler's attack on Stalin--June 22,1941. Sounds amazingly close to the first day of summer, doesn't it?
The book opens with an account of a brouhaha now otherwise forgotten--the publication in a Chicago paper of the War Department's plan--such as it was--for fighting the Axis. This was somewhat controversial because lots of Americans didn't know anyone who wanted the US to enter WWII. Public sentiment ran 80% against it, so the idea of a government plan to have a million Americans under arms was a bit off-the-wall. There was a protest of that plan by the FDR Administration the following Sunday. December 7, 1941 . . .
What a stroke of luck for FDR! The isolationists--representing the preponderant sentiment in the country--were protesting the idea of fighting WWII just as bombs were falling on Pearl Harbor!
The chief suspect of the leak to the Chicago paper went on to have a fine career in the Army. And as we only learned decades later, FDR had had warning before the leak occurred of what the Japanese mission had been ordered to say at a specific hour on December 7 . . .
Print up the headline, hold it up in the Senate:
FDR He called the ball, the shot, and the pocket. And then went to work shipping war supplies to--Joe Stalin and the Soviet Union.KNEW!
There were Communists--actual Soviet agents--in the State Department. And the truth is that Truman, and certainly FDR, simply did not view that possibility with alarm.As fantastic as it would seem, based on what we know of Stalinist brutality, many Americans looked positively to the Soviet Union in the FDR era. If liberalism can be described as treason now, the apellation would have been doubly apt then.
Yet we know that the History Channel--which sometimes seems to be the Hitler Channel--can barely find any documenatary footage about the gulag; it's simply flushed down the memory hole. It would take an Oliver Stone of the right to tell the truth about Stalin and FDR's war to make the world safe for Stalin.
We simply haven't got the infrastructure on the right to do the movies that history cries out for. All we have is Rush Limbaugh--and maybe we should take a cue from that.
It would be hard/expensive to produce a video of the McCarthy hearings which fleshed out the whole story but doing a series of radio dramatizations would be far easier/cheaper. That is only one step up from the zero-cost text-based fare we take for granted here on FR. One could also envision a small step up from that, illustrating the spoken text just like Shelby Foote did in his series on the Civil War--but the basic idea is to use the imagination of the listener for the visuals, in conventional radio drama style. Done professionally, it could be a book-on-tape; otherwise it could be done by FR (possibly over phone lines, avoiding the need to assemble the cast at one location) and hosted in the way RadioFR is archived.
If nothing else, the FDR era certainly would be a tempting subject for the next Ann Coulter classic. The defense of McCarthy cannot be merely reactive. Normally "The best defense is a good offense." And when the other guy has no legitimate defense at all . . .