Isaac Don Levine and First Anti-Communist Magazine

As Communist China threatens U.S. security from abroad and from within (read Peter Schweizer’s new book Red Handed), anti-communism is once again in vogue -- or should be. The threat of communism did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91. Instead, the battleground of the Cold War shifted to the Asia-Pacific. It has taken some time for Americans to realize this because our business and political elites told us that China would gradually fit within the U.S.-led “liberal” world order; that economic interests would trump political ones in Beijing; that China’s semi-market economy would result in political reform. None of that has happened. Instead, Communist China has become a peer competitor of the United States whose leaders’ goal is to replace the United States as the world’s leading power. Perhaps we should consult the intellectual foundations of anti-communism, and what better place to start than Isaac Don Levine’s Plain Talk.  

In 1946, with financial help from businessman Alfred Kohlberg, journalist Isaac Don Levine founded a monthly magazine called Plain Talk, which published articles about the communist threat abroad and within the United States from 1946-50, after which it essentially merged with The Freeman. Under Levine’s editorship, Plain Talk exposed the Soviet Gulag empire of slave labor camps, urged U.S. policymakers to more fully support Chiang Kai-shek against the communists in China, and tried to reveal the extent of communist subversion and influence within the U.S. government. 

Levine is largely forgotten or unknown by younger conservatives, but he shouldn’t be. This Jewish refugee from imperial Russia who came to the United States in 1911 and initially sympathized with the Russian Revolution, saw communism in power as a reporter in Russia in 1919, and eventually became a leading anti-communist voice within the United States -- a pivotal figure in the early years of American anti-communism.  

'Militant opponent of the Soviet regime'

When Levine died on Feb. 15, 1981, at the age of 89, the New York Times referred to him as a “militant opponent of the Soviet regime,” while the Washington Post called him a “specialist on the Soviet Union.” He was both. And while both obituaries briefly mentioned Plain Talk, neither did Levine justice as one of the founders of American anti-communism. George Nash in his history of the conservative intellectual movement in the United States, only mentioned Levine on three pages. Richard Gid Powers in his book "Not Without Honor: The History of American Communism" (1995) gave Levine more credit for his work exposing “the activities of the Soviet underground apparatus in the West” during the 1930s, and included him among the “sober and realistic anticommunists” in the West.

Before founding Plain Talk, Levine in the late 1930s brought three communist defectors to the attention of U.S. authorities -- Soviet  army officer Walter Krivitsky (who worked for the Comintern), Richard Krebs (a/k/a “Jan Valtin”), also a former Soviet secret service agent, and former member of the communist underground in Washington, D.C., Whittaker Chambers. 

Levine helped Krivitsky write articles for the Saturday Evening Post (one of which predicted the Nazi-Soviet Pact) which were later transformed into a book entitled "In Stalin’s Secret Service," which became a bestseller that sought to expose some of the horrors and treachery of Stalinism. With Levine’s encouragement, Krivitsky in 1939 appeared before the Dies Committee that was investigating domestic subversion. He also traveled to England in an effort to warn British intelligence about Soviet agents active in their country. Krivitsky was later found dead in a hotel room in Washington--an apparent suicide, but some suspected Soviet foul play.

In 1939, Levine worked with Krebs to publish and article in the American Mercury entitled “Communist Agent,” and later helped Krebs write and publish a book "Out of the Night" (1941). With Krebs, writes Richard Gid Powers, “Levine was able to reveal for the first time the full story of Stalin’s betrayal of the antifascist front on Germany, and of his complicity in Hitler’s rise to power.” Both Krebs and Krivitsky “were marked for extermination during Stalin’s purges,” Powers writes. Most important, Levine’s work with the two Soviet defectors, Powers concludes, “gave the American public for the first time an inside look at the worldwide web of subversion and espionage woven by the Soviet secret services”; and this, during a time when Stalin was portrayed by the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration as our friendly wartime ally. 

With Chambers, Levine arranged a meeting between the cautious and suspicious former member of the D.C. communist underground and Adolf Berle, President Roosevelt’s top domestic security adviser in the State Department. Chambers recounted in "Witness" that it was Levine who had urged him to inform the proper authorities about Chambers’ knowledge of the Soviet espionage apparatus within the government. What ultimately convinced Chambers to do so, was a meeting Levine arranged between Chambers and Krivitsky. Krivitsky told Chambers that Stalin had been trying to negotiate a deal with Hitler, and persuaded Chambers that the world struggle was between the communists and the ex-communists, and that for ex-communists “informing is a duty.” So Chambers informed, but the Roosevelt administration didn’t listen--perhaps didn’t want to listen. 

Fight against Communism a 'public service'

Chambers in his autobiography Witness wrote that Levine was a “skillful professional journalist” who “carried on against Communism a kind of private war which is also a public service,” and he called Plain Talk “one of the few magazines in the country that tried to tell some of the truth about” communist infiltration of the United States. 

Even after the wartime alliance with Stalin ended and as the Chinese communists with Soviet support sought to overthrow the Nationalist regime in China -- after the revelations of Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other communist defectors about communist influence within our government -- the Truman administration downplayed, when it didn’t try to suppress, revelations of communist subversion and influence within the United States. That led to three men -- Benjamin Mandel, Father John Cronin, and Alfred Kohlberg--traveling to Levine’s home in Connecticut to urge him to create Plain Talk. Levine recalled that their meeting lasted many hours, and that he accepted the editorship on the condition that he had “absolute control of the contents of Plain Talk.” 

In the first issue of Plain Talk dated October 1946, Levine warned that “Stalin’s fifth column in America is entrenched in all the policy-making branches of the Federal Government.” Based on findings by the Canadian Royal Commission and U.S. congressional committees, Levine contended, the number of U.S. educators, scientists, publishers, political commentators, actors, businessmen, and public servants who willfully or unwittingly aid the worldwide communist effort was in the low thousands. This has enabled Stalin, wrote Levine, “to subvert our foreign policy.” It was essential, he concluded, for the United states to expose and eliminate from our public life “through democratic processes” the Soviet “fifth column.” The communist enemy, in other words, threatened us both from abroad and within. 

The inaugural issue of Plain Talk also included a piece by Emmanuel Larsen, one of the defendants in the infamous Amerasia case, who provided an insider’s account of the nefarious activities of those associated with Amerasia magazine. In June 1945, the FBI searched the offices of Amerasia and retrieved more than a hundred files containing “top secret and highly confidential papers stolen from the State Department, War Department, Navy Department, Office of Strategic Services [OSS] . . . and the OWI [Office of War Information].” Those associated with the journal included John Stewart Service, Philip Jaffe, Frederick Field, Mark Gayn, and Kate Mitchell. The case emerged in December 1944, when Amerasia published an article containing passages from a secret OSS document. Six people, including Larsen, were arrested and accused of spying for the Chinese communists. Only two, one of whom was Larsen (Jaffe was the other) were convicted of unauthorized possession of government documents. (In 1996, Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh wrote an excellent book "The Amerasia Spy Case" where they concluded that Tommy Corcoran (of New Deal fame) influenced the Truman administration to effectively “drop” the case, and high-level FBI and Department of Justice officials at best misled congressional committees about the case).   

Missed opportunities to battle Communism

Over the next three and a half years, Levine wrote or published several articles on the struggle for power then ongoing in China between the Nationalists and the Communists, and how that struggle was being portrayed in the United States and handled by the Truman administration. In a November 1946 piece in Plain Talk, Levine warned that the U.S. was squandering its favorable position in the Far East by allowing Moscow “to drive a wedge between the United States and China,” and called for increased support to Chiang Kai-shek’s regime that was battling the communists. He blamed Truman’s “gullible diplomacy” and the influence of “Stalin’s stooges within our midst” for U.S. policies that favored the communists. In that same issue, Henry Van Dusen argued that the outcome of the civil war in China “is of more direct and vital consequence to the security of the United States than what occurs almost anywhere else in the world,” and urged U.S. policymakers to “lend every practicable support” to Chiang’s government. One year later, Levine called upon the administration to provide “all-out aid” to the Nationalists, explaining that China “is potentially our strongest bulwark against Communist imperialism.” 

Plain Talk carried a series of articles by Alfred Kohlberg written between April 1947 and April 1950, where he accused the Truman administration of a “sellout of China” resulting from misguided policies influenced by a “pro-Soviet China clique” in the U.S. government. Kohlberg mentioned John Carter Vincent, Owen Lattimore, Henry Wallace, John Hazard, and the outside influence of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). Why, Kohlberg asked, is “the Truman Doctrine of stemming Communism not being applied in the Far East”? After the communists seized the mainland, Kohlberg warned that the “entire strategic situation in the Pacific” had moved in Moscow’s favor, and he emphasized the importance of Taiwan (Formosa) to U.S. security interests in the Western Pacific. (Some things haven’t changed).

Levine was especially proud of the publication by Plain Talk in May 1947 of a map named “Gulag-Slavery, Inc.,” which depicted the locations of penal camps in Stalin’s Soviet Union. “Plain Talk,” Levine boasted, “did the pioneering in exposing Gulag at a time when the major press organs of the country almost entirely ignored its existence.” And he noted that famed Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn referenced the map in his speech to the AFL-CIO in Washington in 1975, following his exile from Russia. 

Other contributors to Plain Talk included Harold Laski, Ralph de Toledano, John Chamberlain, Clare Boothe Luce, Eugene Lyons, Alexander Kerensky, Ayn Rand, Max Eastman, Henry Hazlitt, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Ludwig von Mises -- intellectual heavyweights all. In the introduction to an anthology of Plain Talk articles published by Arlington House in 1976, Levine noted that the journal was “dedicated to the enlightenment of public opinion on all the insidious influences and deadly dangers threatening civilization from Communist ideology and imperialism.”  

As noted above, in 1950 Plain Talk merged with The Freeman, a conservative publication that featured the writings of James Burnham, a young William F. Buckley, Jr., and many others. The Freeman would later be superseded by National Review, and the intellectual blooming of conservatism would result in the establishment of other journals, such as Modern Age, the University Bookman, and The American Spectator, to name just three. Isaac Don Levine and Plain Talk deserve to be remembered as helping to provide the intellectual foundation for the anti-communist movement in the United States. It is a movement that needs reviving as we face a new and greater communist threat in the 21st century.