Reds Weren’t Under the Bed…

…They were in the Cabinet. And the State Department. And the offices of military procurement. And the White House.

In other words, Joe McCarthy was right.

Below are excerpts from “‘McCarthyism’ by the Numbers” by M. Stanton Evans, published yesterday at Breitbart:

The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at least it has served a useful purpose.

This lone positive angle — counter-intuitive at first glance — is that her iconoclastic Cold War history has sparked a barrage of charges about “McCarthyism” and the senator from Wisconsin who gave his name to a decisive epoch in America’s long death struggle with the Kremlin.

As is well-known, “McCarthyism” was an alleged focus of political evil in the 1950s: accusations of Communist taint, without any factual basis; bogus “lists” of supposed Communists who never existed; failure in the end to produce even one provable Communist or Soviet agent, despite his myriad charges of subversion.

Such is the standard image of “McCarthyism” set forth in all the usual histories and media treatments of the era. Such is the image relied on by the critics of Ms. West to discredit her book and dismiss her as a crackpot and “conspiracy theorist.” By arguing that pro-Red elements in our government exerted baleful influence on US policy to suit the aims of Moscow, it is said, she becomes “McCarthy’s heiress,” reprising the evils of the fifties.

All of which, from my standpoint, has one beneficial feature — though it doesn’t make things less unpleasant for Ms. West. It pushes the issue of McCarthy and McCarthyism to the forefront, where it ought to be, and where it is now possible to view his cases in ways not feasible years ago when the relevant data were not open to the public.

Even today, there is much that we don’t know — documents that have vanished, ancient records still being censored, deceptions still in circulation. However, there is also a good deal of information available for those who care to view it: sizable tranches of McCarthy’s papers, and those of his opponents; reams of formerly confidential data from the FBI; thousands of pages of hearing transcripts and archives of his committee and other panels of the Congress; intercepted Soviet communications and revelations from Cold War defectors; and so on.

Looking at this mass of materials and matching them up with McCarthy’s cases, the main thing to be noted is a recurring pattern of verification. Time and again, we see the suspects named by McCarthy and/or his committee — treated at the time as hapless victims — revealed in official records as what McCarthy and company said they were — except, in the typical instance, a good deal more so.

The accompanying table provides a sampler of some of the suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or in his committee hearings, and reflects what is now known about them, based on official records (some of it was known even then but ignored or misrepresented).

Suspects named by McCarthy, his aides, or before his committee; identified in sworn testimony, FBI archives, or other official security records as Communists or Soviet agents; or took the Fifth Amendment when asked about such matters:

1.     Adler, Solomon 26. *   Levitsky, Joseph
2. *   Aronson, James 27.     Lovell, Leander
3.     Barr, Joel 28. *   Mandel, William
4. *   Belfrage, Cedric 29.     Miller, Robert
5.     Bisson, T.A 30. *   Mins, Leonard
6.     Carlisle, Lois 31. *   Moore (Gelfan), Harriet
7.     Chew Hong 32.     Moss, Annie L.
8.     Chi Chao-ting 33.     Neumann, Franz
9. *   Coe, V. Frank 34.     Older, Andrew
10.     Coleman, Aaron 35. *   Peress, Irving
11.     Currie, Lauchlin 36.     Posniak, Edward
12.     Dolivet, Louis 37.     Post, Richard
13.     Duran, Gustavo 38.     Remington, William
14.     Field, Frederick 39. *   Rosinger, Lawrence
15. *   Glasser, Harold 40. *   Rothschild, Edward
16.     Graze, Gerald 41.     Sarant, Alfred
17.     Graze, Stanley 42.     Smedley, Agnes
18.     Hanson, Haldore 43. *   Snyder, Samuel
19. *   Henderson, Donald 44.     Stein, Guenther
20. *   Hyman, Harry 45. *   Stern, Bernhard
21.     Jaffe, Philip 46.     Taylor, William H.
22.     Karr, David 47. *   Ullmann, Marcel
23.     Keeney, Mary Jane 48.     Wales, Nym
24.     Lattimore, Owen 49.     Weintraub, David
25. *   Levine, Ruth 50. *   Weltfish, Gene
 

* Took Fifth Amendment as to Communist/ Soviet activity-affiliation

Solomon Adler, Chi Chao ting and V. Frank Coe would all abscond to Communist China. Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, members of the Rosenberg spy ring who worked at Fort Monmouth and related commercial labs in the 1940s, would flee to the Soviet bloc before the McCarthy Monmouth hearings started. Philip Jaffe would self-identify as a Communist in his memoirs.

Analyzing this list of 50, we find all of them either (a) identified in sworn testimony, or in FBI and other once-confidential official security records, as Communists or Soviet agents, and/or (b) plead the Fifth Amendment when asked about such activities, saying a truthful answer would tend to incriminate them.

As is self-evident from this lineup, it’s untrue that McCarthy never spotted a single Communist or Soviet agent, or — per one variation — came up with only a handful of valid cases. He in fact tracked down a small army of such people, and the roster given here is merely a sampling of the flagrant suspects who attracted his attention.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

For links to previous articles about the controversy over American Betrayal, see the Diana West Archives.

9 thoughts on “Reds Weren’t Under the Bed…

  1. As I previously stated, Diana West has opened a can of worms with her expose, American Betrayal, and a rather large can of worms judging from the reprisals.

    The resurrection of Senator Joe McCarthy’s investigation must now be undertaken if the momentum that Ms West’s book has created can be maintained and kept in motion until the whole rotten carcase that now inhabits the American government and its bureaucracy is laid bare for all to see and pass judgement on.

  2. The whole “Free World” owes this brave lady!

    • More than time to do it, but try to do it. It will be far worse than what happened to Diana. This time around there will be violence. For the old communist groups, they were afraid to use violence in the US, it would be rooted out and persecuted. For Muslims, no such concern. Violence gets them to Heaven.

  3. McCarthy, unpleasant individual as he was, does seem to have been largely correct; can anyone explain why he, and those people in power who were concerned, concentrated their efforts on entertainment, the arts and the media, where people were, arguably, exercising their right to free speech, in a democratic society which should have been sufficiently robust to withstand criticism? (Unlike Islam, which is so fragile it can’t.)

    This resulted in the shameful (for the US) spectacle of great artists such as Leonard Bernstein and Paul Robeson being denied passports by their own government, a practice usually confined to dictatorships; meanwhile, as Diana West points out, the really dangerous people (because of their positions of power and influence in government and the military) were left alone by Rooseveldt and Truman.

    • Mark, Communists avoid ‘freedom of expression’ type discourses and arguments because telling the truth exposes their true agenda. They are about undermining Western society through subversion and lies, and not changing it through well reasoned and logical argument. That is why very few of those who now identify as socialists ever take part in pubic discussions and instead personally attack those who try to expose their subversive agenda.

      In short, everyone who tries to expose the Collectivists is now treated like a Senator Joe McCarthy.

      McCarthy knew of the infiltration but did not know just how wide spread it really was. He knew where some of the infiltration was occurring but did not know just how deep and entrenched it was. No one who had a known Communist background would tell him anything, but his probing sure scared the Hell out of some of them, because some took the Fifth while others left town.

      Regardless of how McCarthy presented himself in public one fact remains about him that no one can dispel – he was an American patriot.

      Would you have agreed to giving ‘great artists’ the liberty of travelling from country to country if you knew at the time they were Nazis?

      • Thanks Nemesis (& Julius below), for filling in a gap in my knowledge.

        I must differ with you over the comparison of Bernstein and Robeson with Nazis, unless you can show that either advocated the overthrow of American democracy by force. Bernstein’s operetta “Candide” (after Voltaire) lampoons the intolerance of McCarthyism by satirising religious fundamentalism in 18th century Europe, surely a legitimate exercise of free speech?

  4. Perusing that list of 50 one is struck by the absence of luminaries of treason, (known thanks mostly to Venona) such as Theodore Hall, Harry Dexter White, Nathan Silvermaster, Victor Perlo, William Weisband, Laurence Duggan and dozens more.

    Unhappily for him and the USA McCarthy was like a well-intentioned dog yapping frantically and moving around agitatedly outside a sealed bunker trying to draw the attention of America; he knew by scent there was a lot of rot inside the bunker but was unable to see into or open the hatch which would have proven him so much more correct than his wildest imagination permitted.

    My generation was raised on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” as the definitive work on the era of “McCarthyism”; that it was mandatory reading on the English syllabi of all Australian states in the 1970’s speaks volumes. It may still be on the syllabi, which post Venona is truly appalling.

    Mark Steyn put it best (paraphrasing from memory here): the trouble with Miller’s Crucible is that there weren’t any witches in Salem Mass. in 1646, there were however many very real Communists and Soviet agents in Washington DC in 1946. Miller’s pernicious work thus represents a supremely successful effort over decades in grossly misleading the citizens of the Anglosphere;getting at them when in high school.

    • “My generation was raised on Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” as the definitive work on the era of “McCarthyism”; that it was mandatory reading on the English syllabi of all Australian states in the 1970′s”

      And in Britain.

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