Several months ago, in a posting at the American Conservative, bearing the snappy title “Our American Pravda,” Ron Unz bemoaned the many failings of the American media, claiming that, among other things, the media had conspired to conceal the fact that communist penetration of the federal government was rife during the Roosevelt Administration, “Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.”
According to Unz, “I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.” Apparently still bitter at the deception worked upon him, Unz groans that “The notion of the American government being infiltrated and substantially controlled by agents of a foreign power has been the stuff of endless Hollywood movies and television shows, but for various reasons such popular channels have never been employed to bring the true-life historical example to wide attention.”
It’s a bit difficult to figure out exactly what Unz is complaining about, other than faulting the media for his own ignorance of the importance of Soviet espionage during the New Deal era—an ignorance that remains substantial. Let me work my way through his many half truths and errors.
His statement that “many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position” is almost worthy of McCarthy himself, though his language is, unsurprisingly, far more temperate than Tail-Gunner Joe’s. There’s a bit of a difference between “many dozens or even hundreds”—close to a factor of 10, in fact—something that a fellow with an IQ of 214 might be expected to appreciate. As for the phrase “constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” well, that achieves a sleight of hand worthy of Old Joe himself. What level of certainty is indicated by the phrase “perhaps approaching”? I would translate it as “very unlikely to be similar to.” A number that “approaches” 100 is “close to but less than 100,” implying a range of perhaps 51-99. “Perhaps approaching” means “unlikely to approach,” which, in my example, means “likely to be 50 or less.” In Unz-speak, “dozens” equal “hundreds,” and “unlikely” means “likely.”
In fact, what Unz presents is a garbled version of what one of his sources, John Earl Haynes, actually said. “Hundreds of Americans, most Communists, assisted Soviet espionage and Soviet intelligence sources included dozens of mid-level government officials but also impressively high level ones as well: not only Alger Hiss but also Lawrence Duggan, long-time head of the State Department Division of the American Republics; Lauchlin Currie, a senior White House aide to President Roosevelt; Duncan Lee, a senior officer in the Office of Strategic Services; and, most significantly, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry White.” Dozens of mid-level officials become “many dozens or even hundreds” in key policy staffs.
But wait, there’s more. What about “the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position”? McCarthy didn’t “suggest” that there were dozens or hundreds of Soviet agents in the Roosevelt Administration. He said that the Roosevelt-Truman administrations constituted “Twenty Years of Treason.” He said, among other things, that General George Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff in World War II and secretary of state under President Truman, was a Soviet agent who deliberately planned U.S. military operations to maximize American casualties. He accused Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as secretary of state, of being a Soviet agent as well.*
Haynes, unlike Unz, actually bothers to examine the accuracy of McCarthy’s “often unsubstantiated charges,” using, among other data sources, the “Venona files”—the FBI’s secret decoding of Soviet espionage traffic, information that did not become public until 1995. Out of 159 persons identified by McCarthy as Soviet agents from 1950 to 1952, “there is substantial evidence that nine assisted Soviet espionage against the United States.” Of these nine, four were first identified as spies by Elizabeth Bentley in her statement to the FBI in 1945, predating McCarthy’s efforts by five years.
But wait, there’s still more. According to Unz, the Roosevelt Administration was “infiltrated and substantially controlled by agents of a foreign power.” Sorry, that wasn’t the case. From 1939 until June 1941, when Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R., it was, of course, explicit Soviet policy to discourage any U.S. involvement on the side of the “imperialist” powers. Yet during this time the Roosevelt Administration allowed Britain and France to make large orders for war materiel, initiated, over bitter protest, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, greatly expanded defense production in the U.S., and, in March 1941 enacted the massive, $50 billion Lend-Lease program to give essentially unlimited war supplies to Great Britain. Even before World War II began, Roosevelt, responding to the famous letter signed by Albert Einstein, initiated the first steps in what would ultimately become the Manhattan Project.† It’s not surprising that the Communist Party of the USA aggressively opposed Roosevelt’s re-election campaign, something that surely they would not have done if Soviet agents “substantially controlled” the Roosevelt Administration.
The closest Soviet agents ever came to achieving a significant policy coup occurred during World War II when Soviet spy Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the treasury, convinced his boss, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, to advocate for a plan— “the Morgenthau Plan”—that would have converted postwar Germany into an agricultural nation. Roosevelt, who was bitterly anti-German, was very receptive to the plan. But the idea of destroying the second greatest industrial complex on earth gradually collapsed of its own weight. A healthy Europe required a healthy Germany. The trick, which the U.S. eventually achieved, was to create a healthy Germany but not a dangerous one.
Unz says “I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.” He might have read Allen Weinstein’s Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978) or Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton’s The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth (1983). He might have read fervent discussions of these issues in Commentary, or the New Republic, or the National Review, or elsewhere. He might even have read Leslie Fiedler’s brilliant essay on the Rosenbergs, written in “real time,” that captured 95% of the truth without the benefit of either Radosh and Milton’s research or the Venona files. But apparently he didn’t.
This is not to deny that the liberal community, and academia in particular, are still in massive denial about Soviet espionage during the New Deal era. Both Perjury and The Rosenberg File are superb works of history. By writing them, Weinstein and Radosh essentially destroyed their careers as academics. Though they continued to write for decades, neither produced anything comparable to the sustained brilliance of these works.‡ Read them, definitely, and read Sam Tanenhaus’ biography of Whittaker Chambers. Oh, and read Chambers’ own book, Witness—stunningly biased and often massively dishonest, but still “essential.”
*McCarthy’s charges could be completely false, as in his attack on Gen. Marshall, or grossly exaggerated, as when he accused the left-wing scholar Owen Lattimore of being the “top Soviet agent” in the U.S. Lattimore was a Soviet sympathizer and apologist, but there’s no evidence that he was a spy.
†The Nazi-Soviet Pact era creates a stumbling block for both pro- and anti-communists. Apologists for spies like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White claim that they were only “aiding our allies.” But Hiss, White et al. aided the Soviets when they were Hitler’s ally as well as when they were his enemy. Domestically, of course, Roosevelt did far more favors for southern racists than he ever did for the communists. One thing Roosevelt wasn’t was squeamish.
‡Joyce Milton managed to survive in better shape than Radosh. I have no idea of how the two of them came to team up. Milton is author of biographies of Charlie Chaplin, Charles and Ann Lindbergh, and Hillary Clinton. I relied heavily on her Chaplin biography, Tramp, in writing my reviews of Chaplin’s films. Her most recent book appears to be The Road to Malpsychia: Humanistic Psychology and Our Discontents (2003), which is more or less about how the Sixties screwed us all up. (There is more than one Joyce Milton, and Amazon is too lazy to keep them straight, but I think I’m being accurate here.)
