Free Republic

It’s relevant because it demonstrates the continued erosion of yet another demographic (along with working people, Catholics, Jews, “white ethnics,” etc.) Democrats have traditionally taken for granted. In the 1970s, Americans self-identified as more liberal than conservative by something like 60% to 40%. Today, those numbers are reversed. Even among African-Americans, conservative values are now predominant in issues such as abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration.

Evans has a new piece on this subject today:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=39596#

Well, that's certainly what I learned in school, with just about as much supporting evidence to back up these vague aspersions as you provide.

In Blacklisted by History, M. Stanton Evans reviews (for the first time ever) McCarthy's files on his cases, which had been preserved by his staff investigator, former FBI agent James Juliana. He cross-references McCarthy's own records against newly available files on these suspects from the FBI, Army Intelligence, State Department Security, the Loyalty Review Boards, the Civil Service Commission, the Subversive Activities Control Board, the Senate Internal Security Committee and HUAC.

He also looks at former Soviet bloc records, including the Venona decrypts (released in 1995-97), and compares all this information with what McCarthy actually said about his suspects in the executive sessions of his own committee, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released in 2003 after 50 years.

Evans finds that the historical record does not support the conventional view you espouse above. If you are going to post statements about McCarthy, you owe it to yourself to Read Blacklisted by History.

Vitally Pavlov, an NKVD (later KGB) official, was picked by his superiors in Moscow to persuade [Soviet agent and U.S. Assistant Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter] White to participate in Operation Snow, which involved Soviet efforts to worsen U.S.Japanese relations. The purpose: to encourage Japan’s war party to view the United States, not Russia, as its main enemy.

Pavlov phoned White in Washington in May 1941, made a date for lunch and then, at the restaurant, handed White an outline of themes that he wanted White to promote among key U.S. policymakers. Among them was a demand, to be wrapped in tough rhetoric, that Japan recall its armed forces from China. White then sent this proposed diplomatic demand, abrasive language and all, to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr.

Morgenthau didn’t act on White’s memo at the time, but the issue of how to confront Japanese aggression resurfaced immediately prior to Pearl Harbor, as many in the U.S. government began frantically searching for ways to avoid hostilities in the Pacific, at least until the United States was better prepared militarily.

White, however, had different ideas. He rewrote his hard-edged memo to Morgenthau, which was then largely incorporated into Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s famous ultimatum to the Japanese on Nov. 26, 1941. That message, many historians believe, goaded the war party in Tokyo into striking early in December at the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Years later, Pavlov boasted of his role in the success of Operation Snow in which White had played such a critical part.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_200101/ai_n8935656

China was the “casus belli” for the U.S. to start up embargoes and economic blockades against Japan. All the more ironic that we gave it away to Stalin by allowing him to occupy Manchuria and give the captured Japanese arms to the Communist insurgents.

The Soviets called it “Operation Snow.” Hitler wanted the Japanese to open a second front for the Russians on the Soviet Far East. Moscow tasked its Tokyo agents (Sorge, Ozaki, Saionji, etc.) with diverting the Imperial Council to strike eastward across the Pacific at the U.S. instead, and its Washington agents (Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler, Virginius Frank Coe, etc.) with sabotaging the negotiations by George Marshall, Patrick Hurley, Claire Chennault, etc. to reach a temporary “modus vivendi” with Japan to give the U.S. breathing room to build up its woefully inadequate Pacific fleet. (See Peter B. Niblo, “Influence: The Soviet Task Leading to Pearl Harbor, the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War.”)

As Mark Clark said, his plan was to “turn right” into the Balkins (That’s south of the Alps).

I hope I did not conflate spies with non-spies. I was responding to your comment that McCarthy got the spy story mostly wrong.

McCarthy didn’t accuse many people of being spies. His most oft-repeated charge (starting with his Wheeling speech) was that the suspects he named “would appear to be either card-carrying Communists or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”

Even if Herbert Romerstein is correct that no Communist ever turned down recruitment as a spy, there is a difference between being loyal to (or even a member of) the CP and being a spy.

Briefly: The Truman loyalty program of 1947 ordered Attorney General Tom Clark to compile a list of subversive organizations; the FBI to investigate all Federal employees; and loyalty review boards to review FBI reports and remove those employees found to be loyalty or security risks.

The AG compiled the list, including the CP and the multitude of Party-line “fronts” it controlled. The FBI submitted many hair-raising reports, documenting affiliation not just with fronts or the CP, but with Soviet intelligence. Yet few of the officials implicated were actually removed — zero in the State Department.

McCarthy got wind of this in 1950 and blew the whistle.

One part of the spy story McCarthy may have gotten wrong — when he called State Department advisor and Soviet disinformation specialist Owen Lattimore a spy, then immediately retracted the charge. The FBI was never able to prove the continuous accusations of espionage against Lattimore (starting in 1927), but there is no doubt that he was active in the Soviet “influence” strategy, particularly in subverting the policy of aid to China during its civil war with the Soviet-proxy Communist rebels.

Regarding Hollywood and McCarthy: Isn’t it ironic that Tinseltown lavishes so much ritual hate on McCarthy (who never investigated Hollywood), but doesn’t even remember J. Parnell Thomas, who actually did investigate Hollywood, jailed the Hollywood Ten, and chaired the hearings that led to the blacklist? (Those publicity-hounds never forgive a snub!)

McCarthy never claimed that most of his suspects were still in official positions. His point was that these people had been flagged by the FBI under Truman's executive order 9835 of 1947, and should have been removed as stipulated in that order. Instead they were cleared or permitted to transfer or leave voluntarily, meaning they were clear to take other official positions, or even return to their old ones later, as indeed many did.

McCarthy's investigations sought to find out why these suspects had been cleared, while others, apparently far less dangerous, were not. And -- fatal to his political career -- McCarthy sought to find out who was responsible for these clearances.

The notion that McCarthy's suspects were mostly already out of official positions when he made his charges in 1950 comes from the Tydings report, which was copied almost verbatim from a "confidential memorandum" from the State Department, which was full of disinformation -- including denying the presence of people in the department who were there.

McCarthy named suspects throughout the government, not just in the State Department, many of whom were still there: Meigs in the Army, Brunauer in the Navy, Ferry at the CIA, Remington at Commerce, Lloyd in the White House, Adler at Treasury, Keeney at the UN, etc. Some of McCarthy's suspects had transferred to other official posts from the State Department. Still others had been permitted to leave, at least temporarily. Yet 80 of McCarthy's suspects were still in official posts in 1950, including no less than 67 in the State Department.

Quote: "The names the McCarthy named were people on a state dept watch list prepared in the late 40’s."

You may be thinking of the "Lee list." Most of McCarthy's initial State Department cases appeared on this list, but he had other sources. McCarthy suspects who were not on the Lee list include such headline-grabbers as Adler, Bisson, Keeney and Lattimore.

Quote: "These were not necessarily people pegged by the venona cables. (A few were. Most weren’t.)"

As Haynes and Klehr noted, 139 Soviet agents in the U.S. have been identified from non-Venona sources, and it was these sources, not Venona, that McCarthy had. Nevertheless, among the McCarthy suspects who also appear in the Venona decrypts are such notorious cases as Adler, Bisson, and Currie.

Quote: "In the early 90’s the kgb also released a list of their spies in the US during the 1940’s."

You may be thinking of the "Gorsky memo."

Kessler was apparently so embarrassed by this take-down that he dropped all reference to Lillian Hellman in the WSJ version.

What is your source for that statement? As Blacklisted by History proves, McCarthy got most of the details of the spy story right. His errors were few enough to count on one hand; in hundreds of cases, he was right on the money. His antagonists, on the other hand, were not just consistently wrong, but in many cases lying.

Herewith a letter sent to The Wall Street Journal a week ago in response to the recent anti-McCarthy article by Ronald Kessler.

By way of explanation for the staccato nature of this letter, I was told that I could have 750-800 words to reply to Kessler (whose article ran to 1,059 words). I overran this by 85 words, but even so it's difficult to answer so many misstatements in such a constricted format.

It's significant, for instance, that Kessler (falsely) invokes the authority of Willard Edwards to support his attack against McCarthy. I point out that Edwards said something very different from this hearsay, but couldn't go into the even more important point that he wrote a very extensive defense of McCarthy—devoted mostly to Fort Monmouth—in Human Events for November 10, 1954.

I have held off on circulating this letter until The Wall Street Journal had ample chance to run it. As of today, a week after the letter was received, it hasn't shown up in the Journal, so I am using this alternative method of conveying its contents. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Unreal Ronald Kessler

By M. Stanton Evans

Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.

Kessler's Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It's noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error.

For openers, there is the bizarre assertion in Kessler's lead that, 54 years ago this April, McCarthy "started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and Communists in the Army." The point is twice repeated in subsequent paragraphs referring to these sessions as McCarthy hearings.

In fact, the hearings that began 54 years ago this April weren't hearings conducted by McCarthy, but hearings in which he was the main defendant, brought on by charges lodged against him by the Army. Kessler has obviously confused these sessions with the Fort Monmouth inquest of the previous year run by McCarthy. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between these two sets of hearings can't be taken seriously as an authority on such topics.

Scarcely better is Kessler's repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of "205 Communists" in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy's version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.) I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the alleged documentation of McCarthy's supposed lying about the numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and (b) that the charge of McCarthy's having claimed 205 was debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy, their memo would abruptly vanish—to be recovered later.)

Likewise with the face-value quote of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's lachrymose denunciation of McCarthy for allegedly having outed Welch assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an officially cited Communist front. Omitted from this Welchian morality play—and apparently unknown to Kessler, since he says nothing of it—is that Fisher had already been outed to the press and public as a former member of the Guild—by none other than Joe Welch, six weeks before this set-to with McCarthy.

As to Kessler's hearsay accounts of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly said to William Sullivan or what Robert Lamphere then said to Kessler, suffice it to note that these windy generalizations about deceased third parties are uncheckable by their nature. Somewhat more susceptible to proof are comments that McCarthy made false accusations against a host of innocent people (specifics, please) and that the FBI couldn't find any Communists in the State Department to back his charges.

If that were true (which it isn't), then the Bureau was more incompetent than its worst enemies have imagined, as there were indeed Communists in the State Department when McCarthy came along, as shown by the official records. In my book I give a complete list of McCarthy's early suspects, plus now accessible data on many of these cases that show Communist affiliation, hanging out with Moscow spies, identification as Soviet agents in the Venona papers, and so on.

In one notable instance, it's possible to check out Kessler's hearsay stories from the grave, as he quotes a third-party account in which Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune allegedly said McCarthy picked up the "205" number concerning Communists in the State Department from a rumor relayed by Edwards. This, however, is also wrong, as shown by a memorandum on the matter from Edwards himself (provided by his son, Lee). This says McCarthy may have picked up the number 57 (not 205) from an Edwards article listing this number of suspects in the Federal government—a speculation that supports McCarthy's version of the numbers and contradicts the Kessler version.

A final instance to be noted is Kessler's reliance on Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the McCarthy executive hearings for publication. Though Kessler quotes Ritchie as an impartial expert, the facts of the matter are quite different. In numerous comments, Ritchie has routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy—most conspicuously and most often in McCarthy's most famous case, that of Annie Lee Moss.

Mrs. Moss, who appeared before McCarthy in March of '54, has been portrayed for 50 years as a mistaken-identity victim because the committee supposedly collared the wrong suspect. Ritchie's treatment of the case, cited to secondary sources, reinforces the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. All of this, however, again is false, as shown by the extensive archives of the FBI and other official records.

When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he had by any chance checked out these official sources, rather than simply citing other academics. When I offered to sum up the relevant data proving McCarthy was right about the case, the historian grew irate, said "I am growing very tired of this conversation" and quickly ended our discussion. Such is the supposedly impartial authority quoted by Kessler-all too typical of the recycled error that passes for historical knowledge of McCarthy.

Herewith a letter sent to The Wall Street Journal a week ago in response to the recent anti-McCarthy article by Ronald Kessler.

By way of explanation for the staccato nature of this letter, I was told that I could have 750-800 words to reply to Kessler (whose article ran to 1,059 words). I overran this by 85 words, but even so it's difficult to answer so many misstatements in such a constricted format.

It's significant, for instance, that Kessler (falsely) invokes the authority of Willard Edwards to support his attack against McCarthy. I point out that Edwards said something very different from this hearsay, but couldn't go into the even more important point that he wrote a very extensive defense of McCarthy—devoted mostly to Fort Monmouth—in Human Events for November 10, 1954.

I have held off on circulating this letter until The Wall Street Journal had ample chance to run it. As of today, a week after the letter was received, it hasn't shown up in the Journal, so I am using this alternative method of conveying its contents.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Unreal Ronald Kessler

By M. Stanton Evans

Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.

Kessler's Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It's noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error.

For openers, there is the bizarre assertion in Kessler's lead that, 54 years ago this April, McCarthy "started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and Communists in the Army." The point is twice repeated in subsequent paragraphs referring to these sessions as McCarthy hearings.

In fact, the hearings that began 54 years ago this April weren't hearings conducted by McCarthy, but hearings in which he was the main defendant, brought on by charges lodged against him by the Army. Kessler has obviously confused these sessions with the Fort Monmouth inquest of the previous year run by McCarthy. Anyone who doesn't know the difference between these two sets of hearings can't be taken seriously as an authority on such topics.

Scarcely better is Kessler's repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of "205 Communists" in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy's version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.) I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the alleged documentation of McCarthy's supposed lying about the numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and (b) that the charge of McCarthy's having claimed 205 was debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy, their memo would abruptly vanish—to be recovered later.)

Likewise with the face-value quote of Army Counsel Joseph Welch's lachrymose denunciation of McCarthy for allegedly having outed Welch assistant Frederick Fisher as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, an officially cited Communist front. Omitted from this Welchian morality play—and apparently unknown to Kessler, since he says nothing of it—is that Fisher had already been outed to the press and public as a former member of the Guild—by none other than Joe Welch, six weeks before this set-to with McCarthy.

As to Kessler's hearsay accounts of what FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover supposedly said to William Sullivan or what Robert Lamphere then said to Kessler, suffice it to note that these windy generalizations about deceased third parties are uncheckable by their nature. Somewhat more susceptible to proof are comments that McCarthy made false accusations against a host of innocent people (specifics, please) and that the FBI couldn't find any Communists in the State Department to back his charges.

If that were true (which it isn't), then the Bureau was more incompetent than its worst enemies have imagined, as there were indeed Communists in the State Department when McCarthy came along, as shown by the official records. In my book I give a complete list of McCarthy's early suspects, plus now accessible data on many of these cases that show Communist affiliation, hanging out with Moscow spies, identification as Soviet agents in the Venona papers, and so on.

In one notable instance, it's possible to check out Kessler's hearsay stories from the grave, as he quotes a third-party account in which Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune allegedly said McCarthy picked up the "205" number concerning Communists in the State Department from a rumor relayed by Edwards. This, however, is also wrong, as shown by a memorandum on the matter from Edwards himself (provided by his son, Lee). This says McCarthy may have picked up the number 57 (not 205) from an Edwards article listing this number of suspects in the Federal government—a speculation that supports McCarthy's version of the numbers and contradicts the Kessler version.

A final instance to be noted is Kessler's reliance on Senate associate historian Donald Ritchie, who edited the McCarthy executive hearings for publication. Though Kessler quotes Ritchie as an impartial expert, the facts of the matter are quite different. In numerous comments, Ritchie has routinely stacked the deck against McCarthy—most conspicuously and most often in McCarthy's most famous case, that of Annie Lee Moss.

Mrs. Moss, who appeared before McCarthy in March of '54, has been portrayed for 50 years as a mistaken-identity victim because the committee supposedly collared the wrong suspect. Ritchie's treatment of the case, cited to secondary sources, reinforces the standard image of Moss as victim and McCarthy as browbeating tyrant. All of this, however, again is false, as shown by the extensive archives of the FBI and other official records.

When I got Ritchie on the phone I asked if he had by any chance checked out these official sources, rather than simply citing other academics. When I offered to sum up the relevant data proving McCarthy was right about the case, the historian grew irate, said "I am growing very tired of this conversation" and quickly ended our discussion. Such is the supposedly impartial authority quoted by Kessler—all too typical of the recycled error that passes for historical knowledge of McCarthy.