Though the professed stance of her opponents is that of scholarly
condescension, the language being used against Ms. West doesn't read
like scholarly discourse. She is, we're told, "McCarthy on steroids,"
"unhinged," a "right-wing loopy," not properly "house trained,"
"incompetent," purveying "a farrago of lies," and a good deal else of
similar nature. All of which looks more like the politics of personal
destruction than debate about serious academic issues.
From my standpoint, however, what is going on here seems to be
something more than personal. Having delved into these matters a bit, I
think I recognize the process that's in motion: the circling
of rhetorical wagons around a long accepted narrative about the Second
World War and the Cold War conflict that followed.
This narrative sets the limits of
permissible comment about American Cold War policy, bounded on the one
side by Roosevelt and Hopkins, representing generally speaking the
forces of good (appeasing Moscow, e.g. , only in order to win the war
with Hitler), and on the other by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, the
supposed epitome of evil. Between these boundaries, variations are
allowed, but woe betide the writer who goes beyond them. Ms. West has
transgressed in both directions, sharply criticizing Roosevelt/ Hopkins
and speaking kindly of Joe McCarthy.
(Full disclosure: I provided a cover endorsement for Ms. West's book,
and wrote a book of my own some years ago examining the myriad cases of
McCarthy. Based on that background, I can testify that conventional
views about him are almost totally devoid of merit, based as they are on
extensive ignorance of the archival record.)
Especially galling to West's critics is her contention that
Washington in the war years was so riddled with Communists and Soviet
agents as to be in effect an "occupied" city -- an image that seems to
have sparked the greatest anger and most denunciation of her thesis.
By using the "occupied" image, Ms.
West is of course not saying Soviet tanks were patrolling the streets of
Washington, or that Red martial law was imposed on its cowering
citizens. What she is arguing instead is that Soviet agents, Communists
and fellow travelers held official posts, or served at chokepoints of
intelligence data, and from these positions were able to
exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy. Though
ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this
view is overwhelming.
It is for instance abundantly plain, from multiple sources of Cold
War intel, that Communist/pro-Soviet penetration of the government under
FDR was massive, numbering in the many hundreds. These pro-Red
incursions started in the New Deal era of the 1930s, then accelerated in
the war years when the Soviets were our allies and safeguards against
Communist infiltration were all but nonexistent. The scope of the
problem was expressed as follows in an FBI report to Director J. Edgar
Hoover:
"It has become increasingly
clear... that there are a tremendous number of persons employed in the
United States government who are Communists and who strive daily to
advance the cause of Communism and destroy the foundations of this
government. Today nearly every department or agency is infiltrated with
them in varying degree.. To aggravate the situation, they appear to have
concentrated most heavily in departments which make policy, or carry it
into effect..."
Pro-Red penetration was especially heavy in such war-time agencies as
the Office of Strategic Services and Office of War Information, which
were thrown together in a hurry at the outset of the conflict, with
little thought for anti-Communist security vetting. But the problem was
acute also in old-line agencies such as the State and Treasury
departments, both of which by war's end were honeycombed with Soviet
agents.( Making matters worse, anti-Soviet officials and diplomats were
in the meantime being purged from their positions.)
Far from being lowly spear carriers
on the fringes, pro-Soviet operatives in case after case ascended to
posts of great power and influence. Among the most famous-though only
three of a considerable number-were Alger Hiss at the State Department,
Harry D. White at the Treasury and Lauchlin Currie at the White House.
All of these, as we now know, were Soviet agents, well positioned to
affect the course of American policy in matters of concern to Soviet
dictator Stalin.
A prime example of such policy impact occurred during the earliest
wartime going, in the prelude to Pearl Harbor. At this time, Soviet
agents White and Currie maneuvered to prevent a truce between the
United States and Japan, which might have freed up the Japanese military
for an assault on Russia, an attack Stalin was desperate to fend off
while he was embroiled in Europe with the Nazis.
In this maneuvering, White worked with the Soviet intelligence
service KGB, and in parallel with the efforts of a Soviet spy combine
in Tokyo, headed by the German Communist Richard Sorge. The Sorge group
sought to persuade the Japanese that there was no percentage in
attacking Russia-- that there were much more inviting targets to be
found down south in the Pacific. One such target turned out to be the
American naval base at Pearl Harbor.
In the State Department, while
Alger Hiss would become the most notorious Soviet agent of the war
years, he was far from going solo. According to a long concealed but now
recovered report compiled by security officers of the State Department,
there were at war's end no fewer than 20 identified agents such as Hiss
on the payroll, plus 13 identified Communists and 90 other suspects and
sympathizers serving with him.
Like the FBI report saying "nearly every department" of the Federal
government was infiltrated by Communist apparatchiks, these staggering
numbers from the State Department security force look suspiciously like
the description of a de facto "occupation" given in Ms. West's
supposedly unhinged essay.
At the Treasury, there were at least a dozen Communists and Soviet
agents, headed by Harry White, who exerted influence on a host of
issues. In late 1943, to cite a prominent instance, White and his
fellow Soviet agent Solomon Adler, Treasury attaché in China, launched a
disinformation campaign to discredit our anti-Communist ally Chiang
Kai-shek, deny him U.S. assistance, and turn U.S. policy in favor of the
Communists under Mao Tse-tung.
This campaign, aided by Adler's
State Department Chungking roommate John Stewart Service and other U.S.
diplomats in China, succeeded, with results that we are still living
with today. Meanwhile, an identical propaganda campaign was waged by
U.S. and British pro-Red officials to discredit the anti-Communists of
the Balkans, in order to deliver control of Yugoslavia to the Communist
Tito. This, too, succeeded, resulting in the communization of the
country and capture and murder by Tito of his anti-Communist rival, Gen.
Draza Mihailovich .
In the summer of 1944, White and his pro-Moscow Treasury colleagues
played a crucial role in devising the so-called "Morgenthau plan" for
Germany, which would have converted the country into a purely agrarian
nation. They were involved as well in plans to turn two million
desperate anti- Soviet refugees over to the Russians, and a slave labor
proviso that would herd millions into the Soviet Gulag.
All these projects would be
promoted in the run-up to a 1944 Roosevelt- Churchill summit in Quebec,
later becoming American policy in Europe. At an in-house meeting just
before the summit, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. met with a
group of his staffers and praised them for the excellent plans they had
developed. Of these advisers no fewer than six would later be identified
under oath and in secret security data as ideological Communists or
Soviet agents. That amazing line-up of pro-Moscow assets at a single
U.S. Treasury meeting would once more seem to justify the "occupied"
description.
As to how such improbable things could happen under FDR, a
post-script to the above is suggestive. Though Roosevelt signed off on
the Morgenthau plan at Quebec, when he was later challenged on it by War
Secretary Henry Stimson, he said he didn't know how he could have done
so-that he "had evidently done it without much thought." As that
response implied, the President at this time was failing badly in his
powers, and would fail even more dramatically in the months to follow.
Which leads to a provisional
wrap-up of this discussion. The culmination of the policy debacle of
the war years occurred in 1945 at Yalta, where the American delegation
headed by FDR made innumerable concessions to the Russians: slave labor
for the Gulag as post-war "reparations" to the Kremlin , turning
anti-Soviet refugees over to Moscow, Soviet control of Manchuria's ports
and railways-presaging the Red conquest of China. A leading member of
the American delegation that agreed to all of this was none other than
the now famous Soviet agent, Alger Hiss.
In court histories and Roosevelt biographies, we're told that Hiss at
Yalta was no big deal-an insignificant figure without substantive
influence on the proceedings. As the archival records show, this is
grossly in error. In fact, Hiss in the Yalta discussions was a
ubiquitous and highly active presence, dealing as a virtual equal with
British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and speaking out on numerous
issues-China prominent among them-voicing the "State Department" or
"United States" position in backstage meetings.
Scanning these records, it's
obvious that Hiss was far more conversant with issues and events at
Yalta than was his inexperienced nominal chieftain , Secretary of State
Edward R. Stettinius Jr. (all of two months on the job). As with Joe
McCarthy, our historians might be advised to consult the primary data
on such matters, rather than re-cycling Hiss-was-no-problem comment from
secondary sources.
Granted, getting at the primary data takes some digging, as many
relevant records have been buried, censored or omitted from official
archives. Presidential secrecy orders, disappearing papers, folders
missing from the files, two manipulated grand juries (that we know of)
used to cover up the extent and nature of the penetration ; all these
methods and more were employed in the 1940s to keep the shocking story
from Congress and the public. And, sad to relate, in some considerable
measure the cover up continues now, in court histories that
neglect archival data to repeat once more the standard narrative of the
war years.
Diana West's important book is a
valiant effort to break through this wall of secrecy and selective
silence. Her work in some respects touches on matters beyond my
ken-such as Soviet treatment of American POWs-- where I am not competent
to judge . But on issues where our researches coincide-and these are
many-I find her knowledgeable and on target, far more so than the
conventional histories compared to which she is said to be found wanting
. As the above suggests, her notion of wartime Washington as an
"occupied" city, and the data that back it up, are especially cogent.
