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  DUPES

  How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century

  PAUL KENGOR, PH.D.

  WILMINGTON, DELAWARE

  While Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.

  —Whittaker Chambers, Witness

  For the time will come when people … will stop listening to the truth and will be diverted to myths.

  —2 Timothy 4: 3–4

  Dedicated to two human Cold War archives:

  Herb Romerstein,

  who chose the right side,

  and

  Arnold Beichman (1913–2010),

  the cheerful Cold Warrior

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Overlooked Role of the Dupe

  Chapter 1

  World Revolution, the Comintern, and CPUSA

  Chapter 2

  Woodrow Wilson: “Utter Simpleton”

  Chapter 3

  Potemkin Progressives

  Chapter 4

  John Dewey: The Kremlin's Favorite Educator

  Chapter 5

  John Dewey's Long, Strange Trip

  Chapter 6

  The Redemption of Professor Dewey

  Chapter 7

  Smearing Another Liberal Icon: CPUSA's Assault on “Fascist” FDR and the New Deal

  Chapter 8

  War Communism: Hating FDR, Loving FDR

  Chapter 9

  Duping FDR: “Uncle Joe” and “Buddies”

  Chapter 10

  The Hollywood Front

  Chapter 11

  October 1947: Hollywood v. “HUAC”

  Chapter 12

  Trashing Truman: World Communism and the Cold War

  Chapter 13

  Dreams from Frank Marshall Davis

  Chapter 14

  Vietnam Dupes: Protests, Riots, and the Chaotic Summer of ’68

  Chapter 15

  Grown-up Vietnam Dupes: Dr. Spock, Corliss Lamont, and Friends

  Chapter 16

  Radicals: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, SDS, and the Weathermen

  Chapter 17

  John Kerry—and Genghis Khan

  Chapter 18

  A Kiss for Brezhnev: Jimmy Carter

  Chapter 19

  Defending the “Evil Empire”: Stopping Ronald Reagan's “Errors” and “Distortions”

  Chapter 20

  “Star Wars”: The SDI Sabotage

  Chapter 21

  September 11, 2001

  Chapter 22

  Still Dupes for the Communists

  Chapter 23

  2008: A “Progressive” Victory

  Postscript

  Bogart at the Workers School?

  Appendix A

  Ted Kennedy's Secret Overture to the Soviet Union

  Appendix B

  Frank Marshall Davis's FBI File

  Notes

  Author's Note

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  THE OVERLOOKED ROLE OF THE DUPE

  This is a book about dupes, about those Americans who have unwittingly aided some of the worst opponents of the United States.1 Misled about the true aims of foreign adversaries, many Americans (and other Westerners) have allowed themselves to be manipulated to serve opponents’ interests. Most notably, after the Bolshevik Revolution and throughout the Cold War, Communists took full advantage of Western dupes. Indeed, Communist propagandists in the Soviet Union, around the world, and within America itself conducted this duping on a remarkable, deliberate scale and with remarkable, deliberate craftsmanship—with America's liberals and progressives as the prime target. Yet the story does not stop with the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, dupes have surfaced in the War on Terror—including some of the very same Americans who unknowingly played the role of sucker to the Soviets—occasionally providing fodder for Middle East enemies, although the periods, and the processes, are quite different.

  Pointing out this ongoing phenomenon is not a matter of beating up on the gullible. Using the word “dupes” may come across as name calling or sensationalism, but the reality is that it is the best term to describe those who are deceived by, and therefore unknowingly assist, foreign adversaries. The word has, in fact, been widely used throughout American history and up to the present to characterize the tools of foreign influence. President George Washington used the term “dupes” in his historic 1796 Farewell Address, for example.2 And like the associated phrase “useful idiots”—widely attributed to Vladimir Lenin3—“dupes” became especially prominent in the Cold War: many of those misled by the Communists said they regretted having been duped; others spoke openly of fears of being duped.

  The plain, undeniable—but historically unappreciated4—fact is that the dupe has played a significant role in the recent history of America and in the nation's ability to deal with destructive opponents. This book aims to shine light on this troubling aspect of our history. Of course, the phenomenon of the dupe is not merely of historical interest. Because it persists today, we must understand how the duping occurs—both how our opponents exploit the American home front and how some Americans allow themselves to be manipulated.

  When I began this project, I did not recognize the extent to which duping still occurs, or how duping in the distant Cold War past has emerged as very relevant in today's politics. I initially conceived of the book as strictly a Cold War project. But it was nothing short of stunning to research this book during the presidential bid of Barack Obama and hear so many of the names in my research surface repeatedly in the background of the man who became president of the United States of America. The names included the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, a mentor to the young Obama in Hawaii; the controversial, well-publicized Bill Ayers; and the marquee figures in the 2008 group “Progressives for Obama,” which read like a Who's Who of the ’60s radicals called to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security. It was impossible for me to have foreseen this, given that I decided to pursue this project in 2006, when no one on the planet would have predicted the 2008 presidential election of a young politician named Barack Obama.5 The way in which so many names and themes from the Cold War past aligned and made their way into Obama's orbit was chilling. This was the most fascinating, frustrating, and unanticipated aspect of the research for this project.6 Though I had not expected to extend the narrative beyond the Cold War, I concluded that this information could not be ignored. It would be a worse sign of bias to ignore it than include it.

  Nor is Obama is the only such contemporary case. Other political leaders today are products of the Vietnam era or the political godchildren of notable Marxist radicals, and they seek to lead America in a new war against a new kind of foreign totalitarianism.7 Here, too, the Cold War past is not entirely disconnected from current threats. In key ways, past is prologue.

  Lenin's “Deaf-Mutes”

  It would be easy to dismiss dupes as gullible but ultimately harmless. But in fact, they have proven indispensable to America's adversaries. Most significantly, dupes were front and center—even when unaware of their position—in the longest-running ideological battle of the twentieth century, which began in October 1917 and did not end until the period of 1989–91, and which saw the deaths of an unprecedented volume of human beings at the bloody hands of Communism.

  The pervasiveness of the dupe, and of Communist efforts to manipulate Americans, has become fully apparent only with the massive declassification of once-closed Cold War archives, from Moscow to Eastern Europe to the United States—the central factor that made this book possible
and demanded it be done in the first place.8 These voluminous archives, especially those of the Soviet Communist International (Comintern) on the Communist Party USA, are the primary source for this book, and were its heart and motivation.

  From these records we now know that American Communists and their masters in Moscow (and “masters” is not too strong a word, as this book will show) were acutely aware that they could never gain the popular support they needed to advance their goals. Instead they concealed their intentions and found clever ways to enlist the support of a much wider coalition that could help them push their private agenda. The Communists carefully ensured that the coalition was kept unaware of that agenda. The larger coalition was duped—or at least targeted to be duped.

  The Communists could not succeed without the dupes. If they flew solo, operating without dupes at their rallies, at their protests, in their petitions and ads in newspapers, then the Communists would reveal themselves to be a tiny minority. They also would be open to immediate exposure.

  The dupes lent a presence, an apparent legitimacy, credibility, and generally a helping hand to the pro-Moscow agenda. Without the dupes, the Communists were dead in the water. Thus, they sought out the dupes desperately.

  From the outset of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union specialized in this unique form of outreach. Vladimir Lenin himself preached the mode of recruitment: “The so-called cultural element of Western Europe and America,” averred Lenin, speaking of the elite, “are incapable of comprehending the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes [idiots] and treated accordingly.” These so-called useful idiots—the title of a bestselling book on the Cold War by Mona Charen9—were to be major components of the Communists’ campaigns.

  The Communists targeted naïve individuals—usually on the left, and nearly always liberals/progressives10—for manipulation. Whittaker Chambers, a longtime Soviet spy who later renounced Communism, wrote in his memoir, Witness, that “Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes.” These liberals were prey, typically made vulnerable by their misplaced trust in the far left. They mistakenly saw American Communists as their friends and as simply another group of citizens practicing civil liberties in a democratic society based on First Amendment freedoms. Most liberals, obviously, were not themselves Communists, but in sharing the left portion of the ideological spectrum, they shared with the Communists many key sympathies: workers’ rights, the redistribution of wealth, an expansive federal government, a favoring of the public sector over the private sector, class-based rhetoric (often demagoguery) toward the wealthy, progressively high tax rates, and a cynicism toward business and capitalism, to name a few. The differences were typically matters of degree rather than principle.

  Communists also zeroed in on American liberals with a strong distaste for anti-Communists. As James Burnham, the great convert to anti-Communism, famously remarked, for the Left, “the preferred enemy is always to the right.”11 To this day, much of the Left views anti-Communists as worse than Communists. Professors Richard Pipes of Harvard and Robert Conquest of Stanford's Hoover Institution—deans of contemporary Sovietology, Communism, and the Cold War, and both conservatives—have spoken at length of how liberals, particularly within academia, have tended to be not pro-Communist as much as anti-anti-Communist. This anti-anti-Communism led many liberals to forsake their better judgment and to be taken in by the Communists. The Communists prized the dupes, then, because these Americans helped not only advance a pro-Moscow agenda but also discredit the anti-Communists who opposed that agenda.

  The Communists’ “Sneering Contempt” Toward Dupes

  Here is how the process of duping typically worked: The Communists would engage in some sort of unpopular, unsavory work that they would be prepared to publicly deny. (I will give plenty of examples in the pages ahead.) Deceit was a deliberate element of a larger, carefully organized campaign. As Lenin said, in a favorite quote of Ronald Reagan, the only morality that Communists recognized was that which furthered their interests.12

  At some point as the Communists pursued their intentions, someone or some group—usually moderate to conservative Republicans or conservative Democrats—would catch on and blow the whistle. When the alarm was sounded, the Communists typically lied about whatever they were doing. They claimed not to be guilty of the charges and said they were victims of right-wing, “Red-baiting” paranoia. They relied on non-Communist liberals to join them in attacking their accusers on the right.

  Contrary to public perception, this process actually preexisted the McCarthy era, although it was particularly after Senator Joe McCarthy that liberals often came to dismiss, dislike, and even detest the anti-Communists on the right. Despite the fact that the warnings of anti-Communists were borne out in the twentieth-century slaughter otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism, anti-anti-Communism was always a powerful tool for the true Communists who relied on liberals as their dupes.

  For instance, liberals were unaware that their harsh criticisms of President Ronald Reagan, who was rightly seeking to counter and undermine the USSR, often were thrust onto the front page of Pravda and cut and pasted into releases from TASS, the official Soviet news agency. This happened all the time. These liberals inadvertently added fodder to the Kremlin's propaganda machine. To be fair, many of them were offering sincere criticisms of the president—legitimate dissent. Only now, however, are we aware of the level to which the enemy exploited such dissent.

  The same happened in the 1960s with the Vietnam War. As readers will see, some of the antiwar movement's marches and statements were organized behind the scenes by American Communists. Some of their published work was actually appropriated by the Vietcong prison guards and laid into the hands of American POWs. Some of the worst, most irresponsible antiwar material was used for the attempted indoctrination of American soldiers held in odious places like the Hanoi Hilton.

  Sadly, these liberals did not recognize that the Communists, at home and abroad, were privately contemptuous of them, viewing them as comically credulous. As Whittaker Chambers noted, Communists privately treated dupes “with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.” In this sense, the greatest victim in this equation—aside from truth itself—has always been the duped liberals. They failed to recognize that the Communists were not their friends—that, indeed, the Communists often hated what they loved.

  More than that, the Communists hated those whom the liberals loved. As this book will make clear, the Communists maligned the Democratic presidents whom liberals adored. Throughout the twentieth century, each and every Democratic leader was a target for Communist vilification, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, whom Lenin called a “shark” and a “simpleton.” The Communists, whether American or Soviet, demonized icons of the Democratic Party. They claimed, for instance, that Franklin Roosevelt was responsible for a “Raw Deal” and that Harry Truman was pursuing “World War III” in the name of an emerging American fascist-racist state. Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis is an unimaginably outrageous case in point—one that must be read to be appreciated. Davis's brutal demonization of, and vile accusations against, Democratic Party heroes like Truman, a man of true courage and character, ought to disgust modern Democrats. His accusations against Truman and his secretary of state, George Marshall—Davis dubbed the Marshall Plan “white imperialism” and “colonial slavery”—make Joe McCarthy's accusations look mild by comparison.

  The Communists frequently sought to undermine not only individual Democratic presidents but the Democratic Party en masse. At one point—in an episode either misrepresented or ignored by modern historians and journalists—American Communists targeted the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in part for the purpose of trying to advance their own far-left third party. Bear in mind that they did not target the Republican National Convention that year. It was the Democrats they lo
oked to unravel. In the revolution, it would be their brothers on the left who were put against the wall first.

  Then there were the Communist betrayals of the causes dearest to liberals’ hearts. For instance, because of their lockstep subservience to the Soviet Comintern—also illustrated in these pages—American Communists flip-flopped on issues as grave as Nazism and World War II based entirely on whether Hitler was signing a nonaggression pact with Stalin or invading Stalin's Soviet Union. The disgusting about-face by Communist Party USA (CPUSA) on this matter was unforgivable.

  Moreover, Communists repeatedly lied to and exploited the Roosevelt and Truman administrations as they sought victory for Communist leader Mao Tse-tung in China. Mao prevailed in 1949, which led to the single greatest concentration of corpses in human history: at least sixty million dead Chinese, and probably many more.13 When Republican congressmen in the 1950s were furious at the Truman State Department for allegedly having “lost” China, those Republicans were—whether they fully understood it or not—really angry over how some good liberal people in the Truman State Department were manipulated by underhanded forces within their midst.