Red menace - really - revelations about the communist conspiracies of the 1940s and '50s

National Review, April 8, 1996 by Arch Puddington

Whatever the sins of Joe McCarthy, yes, there really were Communists under the bed.

DURING his 1984 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson relied for foreign-policy advice on a man who had a history of activism in Communist Party affairs. This fact was of some importance, given Jackson's fulsome praise for Fidel Castro, the Sandinistas, and Third World radicalism generally. The advisor's Communist ties, however, were almost completely ignored.

Nor did the press delve into the political affiliations of Ewart Guinier, during the controversy over the appointment of his daughter, Lani Guinier, to the Justice Department. Guinier senior was, in fact, an active supporter of Henry Wallace in 1948 and, for a time at least, sympathetic to Communism, if not a party member. This was a detail of at least some minor relevance given Lani Guinier's testimony about the great influence her father had on her political views.

Bella Abzug's past Communist affiliations are a matter of public record, as is her lifelong enthusiasm for pro-Communist regimes in places like Vietnam and Nicaragua. The media, nonetheless, failed to note the oddity of a one-time sympathizer with totalitarianism serving as the standard-bearer for human rights at the United Nations later conference in Peking.

Had Jesse Jackson's aide been a follower of Marcus Garvey instead of Josef Stalin, this fact would have been mentioned. Had Ewart Guiner been active in the America First movement, the press would surely have asked his daughter whether she shared her father's isolationist views -- just as reporters interrogated Pat Buchanan about his father. Had Bella Abzug been a lapsed Catholic, the press would have taken careful note.

THERE are many and complex reasons why a past record of Communist sympathies has become the great unmentionable of American political biography. Perhaps the most important reason is that liberal culture regards Communists as the ultimate victims of American political repression -- but victims of a very peculiar variety. For while Sakharov, say, or Bukovsky openly defied what they judged to be illegitimate authority, American Communists have mostly hidden their affiliation -- and for good reason. After all, popular sympathy for a professor purged from his teaching position during the McCarthy era would be considerably dampened if it were known that he had applauded the 1948 repression of Czechoslovakia or written an encomium to Stalinist justice during the show trials of the late Thirties.

Conventional liberal opinion, furthermore, has conspired with these alleged victims to suppress the details of their histories. There were, however, two anti-Communist charges that were not simply ignored, but denied outright. The first involved accusations of widespread involvement in Soviet espionage by Communist Party members. The second involved charges that the American party was under the domination of the Kremlin. These amounted to anti-Communist first principles, and if they could be discredited, then other aspects of the anti-Communist argument would be cast into doubt as well.

Thus David Caute argued in The Great Fear (1978) that, "There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period" (emphasis his). Caute suggested that at the source of the charges could be found a peculiarly American form of nativist paranoia.

Over the last several years, however, evidence has emerged that finally enables us to clear up some of the most acrimonious Cold War disputes. The question of American Communism's subservience to the Kremlin was pretty well laid to rest last year by The Secret World of American Communism. This work -- edited by two leading American historians of Communist affairs, Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, with the help of a Russian researcher, Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov -- is based on American Communist Party files from the party's early days until the end of World War II; they had been shipped to Moscow for safe keeping, and were opened to the public only after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The files reproduced in The Secret World of American Communism (reviewed in these pages, by Eric Breindel June 12, 1995) reveal that the American party relied on Moscow for financing almost from its inception, indeed, without the assistance of the Soviet Union, there is little chance that the American party could have survived. The files also reveal that American Communists working in the State Department copied secret documents and sent them to American party officials, who presumably passed them along to the NKVD. The files also indicate that many party members worked for both the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA) and the Office of War Information (America's wartime propaganda office).

As to wartime Soviet intelligence, the most important source is the so-called Venona files. The Venona documents consist of coded messages transmitted by NKVD agents in the United States to their superiors in Moscow. These messages were intercepted by the American government, and sections of some two thousand messages were decrypted by the U.S. Army Signals Intelligence Service, forerunner to the National Security Agency.