FDR, Truman, and Ike: Not Communists, Just Naifs
By Ron Capshaw
April 18, 2015 8:00 AM
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, February 1945 The post–WWII presidents made mistakes, but they were not pro-Soviet.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the architect of what was once called “the vital center” — a movement that eschewed the Right but also, most importantly, the Communist Left — once said he knew he was doing his job properly because he was being attacked by both sides. Whatever Schlesinger’s blemishes — and they included his knee-jerk defense of and sucking up to liberal Democratic presidents — he was on to something.
When the extremes of Left and Right (which in my libertarian view meet in a circle) both attack you, it can be affirming: proof that you are, at the very least, being responsible. In the past, when I dared to suggest — as is backed now by considerable declassified evidence — that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were indeed Soviet spies, the Old Left, which championed their innocence for so long, attacked me in predictable fashion as a “fascist” and “McCarthyite.” Being conservative with libertarian leanings, or vice versa, I took that as par for the course.
But now I am being attacked by the Right — or, to be exact, an updated version of an older, conspiratorial Right. The impetus is my attacks on Diana West and her latest book, American Betrayal. On her March 29 blog, she claims that I have not read the book, and points out that my early view of it, written when (as I admitted) I hadn’t read it yet, was conditioned by what Ron Radosh, a careful and sober historian if there ever was one, wrote about it. I have read it now, and I reviewed it months back in the academic journal American Communist History. But before proceeding to once again examine her thesis, I think some background is in order, to examine what has given birth to or propelled out of the closet this updated version of an Old Right.
In 1996, spearheaded by the late liberal anti-Communist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the National Security Agency released declassified documents from a World War II–era program known as the Venona Project. In one of the most heavily guarded secrets of the Cold War (until project leaders discovered a Soviet mole within the staff), the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service, thanks to obtaining a Soviet codebook in 1944, was able to decipher secret cables between American moles and their Soviet handlers as far back as 1941. With this, they were able to discover the Cambridge spy ring and the Soviet penetrations of the Manhattan Project. Worse, from the standpoint of the Old Left, were cables that described in detail the background and duties of Soviet spies Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, codenamed by Soviet intelligence “Lawyer” and “Liberal.”
Examination of this information on Hiss and the Rosenbergs, coming from an ideologically impeccable source (the Soviet Union), convinced many holdouts on the Left that they were indeed spies. But this was not all. The outing of several other agents by the cables raised serious questions about the direction of policy under FDR during World War II. Not only was the Treasury Department penetrated — courtesy of Harry Dexter White, the department’s number-two man — along with the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA), which housed between 15 and 20 spies, but Lauchlin Currie, a personal assistant to FDR himself, was revealed to be a Soviet mole.
Many on the Right now considered that Senator Joseph McCarthy might have been on to something. By far the most convincing and responsible of these figures was M. Stanton Evans, with his book Blacklisted by History. Drawing on the Venona telegrams, secret congressional testimony, and declassified FBI files, Evans made the case for McCarthy that Whittaker Chambers, the chief witness against Hiss, had declared the senator “unwilling or unable to make for himself.” Reviewers, with the exception of the ecstatic conservative firebrand Ann Coulter, who called it the “most important book since the Bible,” considered with reservations that portions of it were convincing (myself included). Coulter herself followed up with a thinner volume, in which she reacted as if Hiss and Rosenberg’s guilt were a new thing.
But say what you will about the late senator’s recklessness, he never charged FDR, Truman, or 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 a more robust Stalin at Yalta (according to the American delegation, FDR would often fade out), and that he therefore relied on the advice of Soviet spies like Alger Hiss. Regarding Truman, he found him to be merely a drunkard who was also influenced by Soviet moles, while the more sober Eisenhower was naïve about the continuing presence of Communists in the government.
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Poster Comment:
FDR abrogated the gold standard. From that point there was no money, only debt.
Furthermore, the corporate UNITED STAES OF AMERICA is now a bankrupt entity under Chapter 11.