Soviet Spy Conspiracies Just Won't Die

If there is one remaining Cold War era belief the Left desperately clings to, it is their assertion that Sen. Joseph McCarthy's conspiracy theory regarding the communist penetration of the government was vastly overblown. But missing in their portrait of the senator was that he never charged FDR and Truman and Eisenhower with pro-Soviet leanings; with FDR he asserted that the President, months away from his death, was in no shape to go head-to-head with Stalin, and that he therefore relied on the advice of Soviet spies like Alger Hiss. Regarding Truman, he found him to be merely a drunkard equally influenced by Soviet moles, while the more sober Eisenhower was naive about the still present communists in the government.  

To get at the type of thinking that saw the above figures as consciously pro-Soviet you have to go forward a few years from the early 1950s to the days of the John Birch Society. It was this group, or to be more specific, their leader Robert Welch, who charged FDR with deliberately partnering with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler to advance the Soviet empire; who believed Truman and Acheson deliberately led U.S. soldiers into a deathtrap in Korea, thus again aiding the Soviet Union by depleting U.S. manpower; who accused Eisenhower, based on his attempts to negotiate with Khrushchev of being a Soviet agent. In short, they asserted what the Left accused McCarthy of doing - of finding pro-Soviets behind the Oval Office desk.

Diana West's American Betrayal (St. Martin's Press, 2013) advances these accusations while including evidence from Venona (World War II era Soviet cables to and from their agents in the United States that finally convinced much of the non-Nation Left that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were indeed Soviet spies). West portrays the New Deal, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as part of an "Occupy the White House" movement, in which pro-Soviet advisers manuevered them into all of the foreign policy failures that McCarthy and the Birchers would pounce on. Like the far right of the 1940s and the Birch Society (but to his credit, not McCarthy), West sees American entry into World War II as proof of a communist plot, consciously aided by Roosevelt.

But in resurrecting what the Right then called "Roosevelt's War," she forgets the support of decided anticommunists in linking arms with the Soviet Union to fight Hitler. Winston Churchill, who had preached against Bolshevik villainy for decades, was for the Grand Alliance, as was his opposite number on the Socialist side, George Orwell. These two never lost their hatred of communism, while their intentions was never to help Russia obtain additional satellites. Indeed, they were among the first to sound the postwar alarm about the expanding Iron Curtain.

There is certainly proof that FDR was soft on communism. Toward the end of World War II, he told advisers that he was willing to give Stalin "anything" in order to keep the peace. But West doesn't mention that mere hours before his death, Roosevelt was drafting an angry letter to Stalin over his crackdown on Poland.  

In accusing the Truman administration of being pro-Soviet, West avoids the context of the mid- to late-'40s, when liberals such as Henry Wallace were criticizing the anticommunist direction of the Truman administration. Truman should be commended for putting NATO, an alliance with Western Europe that in essence let Stalin know that if he invaded one of these countries he would have face all of them, into effect despite criticism by those on his side of the aisle. This policy was sufficiently anti-communist to win plaudits from figures ranging from Richard Nixon to Dwight MacDonald.

If the Truman Doctrine was really a communist plot, then I would like to believe that these two, a congressman who detected that Hiss was a communist spy, the other a former Troskyite who early on saw Henry Wallace's presidential campaign was controlled by Communists, would not have been duped by this policy. And this policy, continued by even Jimmy Carter and enhanced by Ronald Reagan, led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. If these presidents were communist-controlled then the occupation of the White House by this group was to no avail; of course, if one is to follow West's line of thinking, the containment of the Soviet Union was orchestrated and foreseen by the cabal in order to somehow bolster Red China.

In a careful, but largely supportive book on McCarthy in 1954, William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell denied the validity of the senator's attacks on Secretary of State George Marshall as a conscious agent of the Soviet conspiracy. They asserted that McCarthy mistook was what in effect folly for manipulation. Even their ideological opposite MacDonald characterized Marshall's actions as the result of stupidity.

The same mistake has occurred with West. The problem with the conspiratorial school of history is that it is so obvious an effort to make history less messy and more streamlined. From Oliver Stone to herself, this method is a clear attempt to hammer history into a logical mode that fits their ideological agenda. 

But like life, history doesn't operate like that. What West sees as the manipulation of FDR into building on his already evident sympathy with Stalin by communist advisors slights what was in effect the misguided efforts of a dying man who thought he could sway Stalin with his fabled charm. Truman, who bucked the liberal tide in 1945 by going head-to-head with Stalin, may have indeed been naive about Hiss being merely a "red herring" by a do-nothing Republican Congress; but there is equal evidence that Truman was merely being stupidly partisan.

Later on Truman, when presented with the evidence about Hiss concluded that he was guilty. But given Truman's combative personality, he was not about to go public with this conclusion and in effect aid Nixon. With Eisenhower, West forgets that with all his attempts at summits with Khruhschev (not so much evidence of appeasement as his acting on U-2 spy flight information that the Soviets were way behind in missile production) he was also planning the overthrow of Fidel Castro.

If her book was correct, it would be difficult to see how the U.S. won the Cold War. But with the old Soviet Union still in tatters (while admittedly mutating under Vladimir Putin into a burgeoning police state), it is odd that the theories of the largely discredited Birch theories are being dusted off. Even Barack Obama, whom I believe like many other sober-minded conservatives to be a socialist, has followed the policy of not succumbing to North Korean threats and has just canceled a summit with Putin; if communists are present on his staff, he is at the moment not listening to them.  

Much of today's Left has concluded that there were indeed communist spies in the U.S. government - even the dingbat Eileen Schrecker, who pines for the stability provided by the old Soviet Union - has given up the ghost on Hiss. That in itself is a victory of sorts.