Free Republic

How can one write history so that it seems like a thriller? How does one write a biography without making the subject the centerpiece of the narrative? I have no idea if David Pietrusza asked himself these questions — or this one: How can history be written as a newspaper headline? Call this a biography by indirection. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defined by competing individuals and movements: Huey Long, Father Coughlan, Al Smith, the Liberty League, Earl Browder and the Communist Party, Dr. Francis Townsend and the Townsend Plan, Norman Thomas and the Socialist Party. They threatened FDR’s majority in...

Kamala Harris has cemented her place in United States history as the “worst vice president” after her performance this week, Sky News host Rita Panahi says.

Few Americans can remember past vice presidents such as Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes or Thomas Marshall. In more recent memory, almost no one can recall vice presidential nominees who lost such as William Miller, Sargent Shriver or Lloyd Bentsen. John Nance Garner served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's vice president for two terms (1933-1941), but he nonetheless described his eight years as "not worth a bucket of warm spit." Except "spit" was a euphemism used in place of Garner's profane slang for urine. Garner was edged out of the job when leftist Henry Wallace replaced him. But later, as World War...

[I begin] with the story of a series of Socialist scholars conferences that Barack Obama attended when he lived in New York City between the years 1983 and 1985. And when I finally reconstructed what had gone on at these Socialist conferences that Barack Obama attended, I truly was amazed because what I saw was a kind of map of Barack Obama’s entire subsequent political career. It was at this Socialist conferences in New York in the mid-’80s that Barack Obama encountered the groups, the strategies, and the mentors who would guide him throughout his entire political career. [T]hese Socialist...

In the spirit of the recent holiday, among the many things for which Americans should be thankful is a political decision made more than 67 years ago as the Second World War was beginning to wind down and as the nation’s voters prepared for a presidential election. It was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s finest moments of decision, though admittedly, one he exercised reluctantly. By 1944, FDR was living on borrowed time. It was a hardly a secret that health issues he had been dealing with were reaching critical mass, though only a few insiders had any idea as to the...

I just listened to yet another disturbing piece of propaganda by Oliver Stone, the Untold History of the United States. It is about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As can be expected in a good leftist piece of propaganda, the point made is that the US was the bad guy (including Truman) , who bamboozled poor Japan and Poor USSR during that time. The horrible US dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, knowing that Japan was going to surrender without its use within a couple of weeks anyway. Then the laughably improbably logical gymnastics come...

[Below is a talk given by Stanley Kurtz at the Wednesday Morning Club on January 5, 2011.] David Horowitz: It’s been 20 years with the Center trying to tell conservatives that these people are not liberals, that they are leftists and if their dreams are fulfilled they will destroy the United States, and very, very dangerous people. And while conservatives have given me support and given our Center support, they never quite got into their system what I think is the appropriate view of our opponents in these battles. Conservatives, as you’ve probably heard me say, are far too decent...

Ann Coulter’s new book Treason has raised some eyebrows within the conservative camp. While making legitimate points about where liberals have been wrong on foreign policy issues, the conservative pundit and author arguably went too far by 1) defending Joseph MacCarthy and 2) accusing all liberals of treason. Joe McCarthy was an individual who severely damaged the cause of anti-Communism. Why would a conservative try to legitimize him? And what purpose is served by accusing all political opponents of “treason”? Doesn’t such a broad-brushed charge profoundly trivialize the word “treason” itself  and make it more difficult to discuss actual cases of treason in a serious way?...

Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party of the 1940s was nothing but a tool the Communist Party USA – and by extension, the Soviet Union. Today’s Democratic Party is also heavily infiltrated by the now pro Chinese Communist Party USA and their almost as equally extreme comrades from Democratic Socialists of America. Here’s an interesting picture from the 1940s. Henry Wallace chatting with Chicago journalist and Progressive Party supporter Vernon Jarrett. It turns out that around this time Vernon Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy – the youth wing of the Communist Party. Chicago communist...

Media blackout: CIA director accused of links to Communist spy contact -- scandal ignored Wes Vernon June 13, 2011 If you have been depending on the mainstream media for your news the past few days, you are probably learning here for the first time that CIA Director Leon Panetta has been called out for his links to an important open member of the Communist Party. Some background When this writer first arrived in Washington, D.C., as a reporter in 1968, one of my assignments was to cover the congressional delegation from Washington State. Occasionally, both Democrat and Republican members of...

Clearing the air vs. splitting hairs and distorting Cold War history (Part 1) Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter whitewashed Since the downfall of the Soviet Union, volumes have been written about that late superpower's penetration of American Society and its institutions before and during the Cold War years. It can be said without credible contradiction that what we now know about Soviet spying and infiltration of the U.S. for seven decades vindicates the much-maligned anti-Communists (in and out of Congress) of that era. If anything, they didn't know the half of it. It was they who warned — often to...

I was shocked to see that Obama and 1948 Presidential candidate Henry Wallace had so much in common. Both candidates said they would help bring racial unity between blacks and whites. Both advocated universal government health insurance. Both wanted to establish peace with enemies abroad through talking instead of through strength. However, those aren't the only similarities. -Both had/have extensive and regular contact with Communists; Both were/are influenced by shadowy figures behind the scenes with interests adverse to the United States. -Wallace's highly popular book was actually ghost written by a group of Communists. There are questions surrounding the true...

We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

Just months after the twin triumphs over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, former vice-president Henry Wallace called for U.S. withdrawal from the “Cold War.” “The Soviet Union represents the progressive force in history,” said Wallace. “It would be both futile and immoral for us to resist their efforts to transform the world.” Wallace cited the Soviets’ capture of Berlin and Japan’s surrender just days after the Soviets declared war on them as evidence of the dominant power of Stalin’s troops. “Socialism is the wave of the future,” Wallace predicted. “The United States should be climbing on board the bandwagon rather...

Michael Straight, the only American recruited as a member of the notorious "Cambridge Ring" -- Philby, Burgess, Maclean et al -- was the guiding spirit of Henry Wallace's third-party campaign for the presidency in 1948. His family's magazine, The New Republic, which he edited, was arguably the most influential organ of the American left during this period. And he did intelligence odd jobs for the Soviets for decades. The story of Straight's perfidy is detailed in Last of the Cold War Spies by Roland Perry (Da Capo, $27.50, 377 pages). Two relatively obscure outriders, Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, of...

How do you know if you're a Democrat? If you've ever met someone down on his or her luck, and you wanted to help, then you're a Democrat. If you have ever seen the look in a child's eyes of fear, of hunger, or of aspiration, and wanted to help, then you're a Democrat. If you have ever wanted leadership that had common sense, that cared about the future, and that wanted progress over partisanship, then you're a Democrat. If you believe that we are better off working together than apart, then you're a Democrat. If you believe in community,...

There's an odd, poetic justice in Trent Lott's downfall over his incautiously fond reminiscences about Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's Democratic re-election campaign. Thurmond had an opponent in that race whom almost no one has mentioned, because he and his followers were swept immediately into history's dustbin after that election. Now is the time for that untold half of the story. Everyone knows by now that Thurmond's States' Rights Party meant to thwart Truman's unprecedentedly strong commitment to civil rights. The segregationist apostates didn't expect Thurmond to win the election (he carried only four Southern states); they...

Trent Lott's ill-judged remarks about Strom Thurmond have, among other things, pushed the 1948 presidential campaign into the public spotlight after more than half a century. But the most-important and dramatic issue in that election is being forgotten. Of course, no one should forget that then-Governor Thurmond was a renegade Democrat, not a Republican; or that it was historically Democrats, not Republicans, who supported Jim Crow segregation and exploited southern racist sentiment for political gain; or that Thurmond and his running mate, Governor Fielding Wright of Mississippi, won a grand total of two percent of the vote. I am...