For the past 40 years, it has been an article of faith in intellectual circles that the “Red Scare” of the late 1940s was just that – a scare. Text writers have gone to great lengths to “prove” that the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were completely unjustified and that the investigations conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) constituted nothing more than a “witch hunt”. Of course, McCarthyism is used as a pejorative term to describe unprincipled demagoguery.
There can be no clearer example of falsification on the part of textbook authors than the treatment of this period in American history.
In early 1992, a Russian man walked into the British embassy in a newly independent Baltic republic and asked to "speak to someone in authority." Eight months later, the man, his family, and his enormous archive had been safely ex-filtrated to Britain.
Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin worked as chief archivist for the FCD, the foreign-intelligence arm of the KGB. He was responsible for checking and sealing approximately 300,000 files, allowing him unrestricted access to one of the world's most closely guarded archives. Mitrokhin decided to compile a record of the foreign operations of the KGB.
Every day for 12 years, he smuggled notes out of the archive. He started by hiding scraps of paper covered with miniscule handwriting in his shoes, but later wrote notes on ordinary office paper, which he took home in his pockets. He hid the notes under his mattress, and on weekends took them to his dacha, where he typed them and hid them in containers buried under the floor. When he escaped to Britain, his archive contained tens of thousands of pages of notes.
In 1995, Mitrokhin, by then a British citizen, contacted Christopher Andrew, head of the history faculty at Cambridge University and one of the world's foremost historians of international intelligence. Andrew was allowed to examine the archive Mitrokhin created "to ensure that the truth was not forgotten, that posterity might some day come to know of it."
This book, published in 1999, was the product of their collaboration. It documents the actions of the KGB and its predecessors, the Cheka (Lenin’s Secret Police), and Stalin’s GPU and NKVD going all the way back to the Russian Revolution in 1917.
But, it was the publication of “Venona” in 2000 that provided the greatest insight on the depth of Communist infiltration of American society. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin seized the property of the Communist party. The archive was renamed the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History and was opened to Western researchers.
Of immense surprise to the authors, the staff of that facility asked if they would also like to see the archive of the American Communist party, the CPUSA. They had no idea that any such record even existed. It certainly does not exist in America.
It was during their research into these files that the authors stumbled across a reference to an obscure American code-breaking project. The Venona Project was a long-running secret collaboration of the US and UK intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union as well as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Ultimately, the authors were able to convince the American government that continued classification of the Venona files served no useful purpose and they were declassified and opened.
The revelations contained in the book “Venona” prompted the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to say, “The full implications of Soviet espionage in the United States during and immediately after World War II are only now being realized”.
Those who remember Moynihan will undoubtedly recall that he resided “left of center” ideologically. He was, however, a unique American intellectual in that he did not allow his ideology to completely subsume his recognition of truth. Would that others, particularly textbook authors, were as intellectually honest.
Despite the fact that the scholarship has been available for 10 years or more, text authors publish edition after edition and continue to state the innocence of the Rosenbergs.
In his section entitled “The Anticommunist Crusade”, beginning on page 860 of “Give Me Liberty”, Eric Foner commits a number of historians’ fallacies in his effort to indoctrinate students into believing that this “crusade” was completely unwarranted.
In discussing President Truman’s loyalty review system, Foner states “The loyalty program failed to uncover any cases of espionage. But the federal government dismissed several hundred persons from their jobs, and thousands resigned rather than submit to investigation”. [1]
According to "Venona", however, "by 1948, the accumulating evidence from other decoded Venona cables showed that the Soviets had recruited spies in virtually every major American government agency of military or diplomatic importance. American authorities learned that since 1942, the United States had been the target of a Soviet espionage onslaught involving dozens of professional Soviet intelligence officers and hundreds of Americans, many of whom were members of the American Communist Party (CPUSA)".[2]
In this case, Foner has not committed so much a fallacy as he has simply omitted scholarship that refutes his argument.
Although Foner does mention Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss’ ultimate conviction, he completely fails to mention Elizabeth Bentley, who turned herself in to the FBI in 1945. It was actually Bentley, rather than Chambers, who alerted the government to the extent of Communist infiltration of the American government at all levels, particularly Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Bentley did her undergraduate work at Vassar and went on to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University. While at Columbia, she joined the American League Against War and Fascism, an organization secretly controlled by the CPUSA. After she had demonstrated her worth and commitment to the league, they sponsored her for membership in the party in 1935.
(As with Whittaker Chambers’ stating that he was introduced to Communism at Columbia, here we have another American Communist coming out of that institution of higher learning. Eric Foner is a professor at Columbia).
At first, the FBI was highly skeptical of her story. However, the Venona cables began confirming what she said. There was an underground Communist cell called the Ware Group working in Washington, D.C.
The leader, Harold Ware, along with his mother and sister, was a founding member of the CPUSA and secured a position in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), one of the many New Deal agencies created in the 1930s. Upon Ware’s death in an automobile accident, his group was taken over by Victor Perlo,
who worked in Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration. Among this group's members were:
Alger Hiss - State Department
John Abt - AAA
Lee Pressman - AAA
Another underground Communist group working in Washington, D.C. was headed by Nathan Silvermaster.
Silvermaster's doctoral dissertation at Berkeley was entitled “Lenin’s Economic Thought Prior to the October Revolution”. In the 30s, he served in a variety of positions in various New Deal agencies.
This Communist sympathizer in the government was Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury:
Although he never formally joined the CPUSA, White was what was termed a “fellow traveler”, a person who thoroughly accepted Communist ideology and who participated in espionage for the Soviets.
But, the highest placed Communist was Lauchlin Currie, Special Assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt:
He used his influence with the President to intervene on behalf of individuals identified as subversive, allowing them to keep their jobs in the government.
Maurice Halperin was head of the research section of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. He turned over hundreds of pages of secret documents to the KGB:
William Perl (no photo available) provided the Soviets with the results of highly secret tests and design experiments for American jet engines and aircraft. Upon U.S. entry in the Korean War, American aviators were shocked when Soviet-built MIG-15 jet fighters flew rings around U.S. propeller-driven aircraft and were also superior to first generation American jets. Perl was closely associated with the spy ring run by Julius Rosenberg:
It is in his discussion of the case against the Rosenbergs that Foner commits his greatest example of falsification.
He says, “The case against the Rosenbergs rested on highly secret documents that could not be revealed in court”. [3]
This part of Foner’s narrative is entirely true. In fact, it was the Venona cables which proved the Rosenberg’s espionage activities. Revealing their existence in open court would have alerted the Soviets to the entire project. Foner knows this and yet he continues to argue that the case against the Rosenbergs was unjust.
In a parenthetical statement, Foner then says, “(When they were released many years later, the scientific information they contained seemed too crude to justify the government’s charge that Julius had passed along the ‘secret of the atomic bomb,’ although he may have helped the Soviets speed up their atomic program.)”
Here Foner commits the “fallacy of ambiguity”. He first makes the claim that the information was too “crude” to have been of much use and then he says that it just might have helped the Soviets. Well, which is it?
In the first case, he provides no source for the claim of “crudeness”. In actual fact, the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, that was dropped on Hiroshima was a crude design. One of the weapons on which I worked in the 1970s was the same technology as that weapon. Whether the information was or was not crude is beside the point. Any design assistance given the Soviets at that point was sure to accelerate their own atomic research.
“Joseph Stalin’s knowledge that espionage assured the Soviet Union of quickly breaking the American atomic monopoly emboldened his diplomatic strategy in his early Cold War clashes with the United States. It is doubtful that Stalin, rarely a risk-taker, would have supplied the military wherewithal and authorized North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950 had the Soviet Union not exploded an atomic bomb in 1949.”[4]
Foner finishes by stating, “Controversy still surrounds the degree of guilt of both Hiss and the Rosenbergs, although almost no one today defends the Rosenbergs’ execution”.
This statement is unconscionable, given the existence of both the Mitrohkin and Venona material. Just who constitutes “almost no one”? The Columbia faculty?
How about Morton Sobell?
He was a member of the Rosenberg spy ring. In 1950, he tried to flee to the Soviet Union to escape prosecution for espionage. He was detained in Mexico and returned to the United States. He was convicted of perjury and sentenced to 30 years in prison. In an interview with the New York Times on September 11, 2008 , he finally admitted that he had, in fact, been a spy and implicated the Rosenbergs.
Professor Foner has had 10 years to get the story right. The fact is that he published this 2nd Edition in 2009 knowing full well that the historical record now proves the guilt of at least Julius Rosenberg.
Of course, he also knows full well that if he defies the “revealed wisdom” of academia regarding the Rosenberg
This is an example of how "generalists" write history texts, as opposed to "specialists" who do the in-depth research and write such books as "Venona". It is incumbent on the generalists to familiarize themselves with new scholarship and ensure that their texts are updated accordingly.
If we are to learn from history, then the lesson for Socialists, Communists, and fellow travelers today should be if you commit treason, you'll be executed.
If we are to learn from history, then the lesson for Socialists, Communists, and fellow travelers today should be if you commit treason, you'll be executed.
Should parents and students lay out their hard-earned money to purchase a text that contains such blatant falsehoods?
Note: My next article will deal specifically with Senator Joe McCarthy and the treatment he is given in the other text under consideration, “The American Nation”, by Carnes. Both the Mitrohkin and Venona files shed considerable light on this subject also.
[1] Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty New York
[4] Venona, p.11
