Dupes Read online

  To this day, liberals need to be reminded again and again: the Communists were not your friends. Quite the contrary, American Communists were for the most part a strikingly intolerant, angry bunch—a point well known to anyone who joined, survived, and fled the Communist movement or has studied it closely.14

  Nonetheless, the Communists found that they could deflect charge after charge—“Red herring!” “Red-baiter!” “Witch-hunter!” “McCarthyism!”—and immediately count on an echo chamber from liberals who were more suspicious of right-wing anti-Communists than of far-left Communists.

  Standing Against Dupery

  Fortunately, and importantly, there have always been non-Communist liberals and (more generally) Democrats who refused to be duped. These were shrewd individuals who deserve to be commended for playing a pivotal, positive role during the Cold War. They figured out, some sooner than others, that the Communists often undermined genuine liberal/Democratic Party causes—including workers’ rights and civil rights.

  Consequently, this book certainly does not indict the entirety of the Democratic Party. Democrats like Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Nunn, Thomas Dodd, Zbigniew Brzezinski, John F. Kennedy, James Eastland, Francis Walter, Edwin Willis, Richard Russell, and Harry Truman—plus certain union leaders like the AFL-CIO's Lane Kirkland, some key players in the NAACP, and savvy intellectuals like Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling15—were hardly dupes. Rather, they were committed Cold Warriors or chastened anti-Communist liberals who stood apart in their willingness to confront the Kremlin and not be hoodwinked. Some of them led America in intense Cold War showdowns.

  Interestingly, some of their inheritors—for example, Senator Ted Kennedy, brother of Senator John F. Kennedy (both Massachusetts Democrats), or Senator Chris Dodd, son of Senator Thomas Dodd (both Connecticut Democrats)—bear little political resemblance.16 It is impossible to picture Ted Kennedy in the 1980s borrowing the words of his late brother, who had alerted America to the perils of its “atheistic foe,” of the “fanaticism and fury” of the “godless” “communist conspiracy,” possessed by an “implacable, insatiable, unceasing … drive for world domination” and “final enslavement.”17 Ted Kennedy instead torched presidents like Ronald Reagan, who sounded more like Ted's brother than Ted did. Likewise, Ted Kennedy's pal and Senate colleague Chris Dodd would have never in the 1980s chastised his fellow liberals as “deluded” “innocents,” as “unwitting” and “muddle-headed” “naïve sentimentalists,” saddled with “confusion” over Communism and “communist political warfare”—as had Dodd's father.18 For these modern liberals, the apple fell far from the tree.

  The point, though, is that Democrats should not be painted with a broad brush; the views of the son (or the brother) were not necessarily identical to the father's. The 2008 Democratic senator from the Northeast was not the 1960 Democratic senator from the Northeast. The Democratic Party fifty years ago was more conservative than today. Similarly, the Republican Party then was more liberal than today. Just as Democrats like JFK and Scoop Jackson took hawkish or at least measured stances on Communism, there were liberal to moderate Republicans (like Senator Mark Hatfield) who pushed for accommodation and “freezes” with the Soviets. In fact, détente, which was the essence of Soviet accommodation, was begun by two Republican presidential administrations—those of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—before Democrat Jimmy Carter picked it up. Thus, this book is not a one-sided partisan rant against or in favor of a particular political party. Democrat Harry Truman is defended in these pages as much as, if not more than, Republican Ronald Reagan.

  Often, too, prominent Democrats tried to stop other members of their party from being duped by the Soviets. For example, in the 1940s diplomat George Earle, the former governor of Pennsylvania, informed FDR that he was being badly misled by the Soviets on the infamous Katyn Wood massacre. Earle was far from the only Democrat to warn FDR.

  In fact, large sections of this book could not have been completed without the digging of the Democrats who headed the House and Senate committees that collected information on certain indigenous threats. The House Committee on Un-American Activities was launched by Democrats in the 1930s, and for almost all of its nearly forty-year history it was chaired by Democrats—from Congressman Martin Dies of Texas in the 1930s, to Congressman Francis Walter of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, to Congressman Richard Ichord of Missouri in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Likewise, Democratic Party champions Senator James Eastland of Mississippi and Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut served as anti-Communist pillars on the Judiciary Committee, and chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Subcommittee on Internal Security, which produced numerous investigative analyses. It is crucial to understand that Democratic stalwarts played an important role in standing against the Soviet threat throughout the Cold War—or at least, until Democrats in Congress took a significant turn to the left after Watergate and Vietnam.

  Of course, many liberals today have nothing good to say about the likes of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In fact, many accounts lump together—quite inaccurately—the work of this House committee with the investigations of Senator Joe McCarthy, as M. Stanton Evans ably demonstrates in his 2007 book on McCarthy.19 Frequently, too, the House committee is dismissed as conducting nothing more than “witch hunts.” But in truth, the House Committee on Un-American Activities did much commendable work, from exposing traitors like Alger Hiss to blowing the whistle on insidious Communist-front groups such as the American Peace Mobilization, which unapologetically appeased Nazi Germany simply because Hitler had signed a pact with Stalin—and did so as the Nazis mercilessly pounded Britain. (The American Peace Mobilization will be documented at length in this book.) The House Committee on Un-American Activities—run by Democrats—played an indispensable role in casting light on this and other loathsome Communist fronts.

  Further along those lines, some of the best work exposing the crimes and treasonous duplicity of American Communists—and thereby illuminating the dupes—has come from journalists and scholars who are on the left, or who at least are not right-wingers. To give just a few examples cited in the pages ahead: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Allen Weinstein, Sam Tanenhaus, George F. Kennan, Ron Radosh, Anne Applebaum, John Lewis Gaddis, Mark Kramer, Jerry and Leona Schecter, not to mention leftist sources like The New Republic,20 and leading academic publishing houses like Yale University Press and Harvard University Press.21 Remarkably, the longtime editorial director of Yale University Press who launched the invaluable Annals of Communism series, Jonathan Brent, has been the Alger Hiss Professor at Bard College (no kidding).22 This book builds on the foundation laid by these historians, journalists, and publishers.

  The book further draws—and heavily so—on Communist literature and even the post–Cold War books and memoirs of Soviet officials as high ranking as Mikhail Gorbachev and his close aide Alexander Yakovlev. This is likewise (and especially) true for memoirs of American Communists, from CPUSA officials in the 1930s to the student radicals of the 1960s—the latter including Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd as well as ex-Communists such as David Horowitz, Peter Collier, and Ron Radosh. I have also drawn on the testimony of a long line of former Communists, from Arthur Koestler to J. B. Matthews to Whittaker Chambers.

  The sterling investigative work of certain Democrats and liberals, and the eye-opening testimony of former Communists, should speak to all Americans—conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. In fact, it is my most sincere wish that liberals and Democrats will read this book carefully. It offers a cautionary tale for my friends on the left—the non-Communist left. For the best of my country, I want the dupery to stop. I plead with liberals to consider this book with an open mind, and be ready to be surprised and even occasionally encouraged.

  The Duped, the Innocent, and the Redeemed

  This book covers a wide cast of Cold War types and characters: Communists and non-Communists, left-wingers and right-wingers, fellow travelers, legitimate dissente
rs, anti-Communist liberals, duped and unduped liberals, and even full-fledged traitors. Some hopped across various of these categories at different points in their lives: For example, when Roger Baldwin founded the ACLU he was the prototype dupe and seemingly a small “c” communist—though prudent enough not to join CPUSA—but later he cooperated with the FBI in identifying Americans working for the KGB. More famously, Whittaker Chambers sojourned from KGB spy to conservative Republican. Even a wild progressive like educational reformer John Dewey ultimately learned (but only later) not to say the utterly stupid things about Joseph Stalin gushed by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, or by Dewey's student Corliss Lamont—men who forever embarrassed themselves with the most luscious praise for Soviet dictators.

  Some folks who were duped on occasion were, on other occasions, sensible in recognizing the latest Soviet sham and bravely denounced Moscow's newest set of lies. Eleanor Roosevelt joined Stalin in blasting Winston Churchill's prophetic, courageous “Iron Curtain” speech, but two years later rightly called Stalin and Molotov liars because of their outrageous claims about America's treatment of Europe's “Displaced Persons.” Others, like diplomat William C. Bullitt and Senator Paul Douglas, were once duped but made a 180-degree turn, emerging as brilliant observers who spoke to the brutal reality of the USSR. A major thrust of this narrative is the possibility of political redemption by former dupes. Indeed, three of the four dupes profiled in this book's early chapters later redeemed themselves, and did so while remaining Democrats and liberals in good standing.

  The goal in this book is to be truthful. This means that I have not shied away from exploring how President Franklin Roosevelt was duped by certain aides, possibly including the enigmatic Harry Hopkins. But it also means that I defend FDR against the villainous charges leveled by Communists, not to mention certain inaccurate assertions made by anti-Communists. For instance, this book clarifies the record on FDR's relationship with Comrade Earl Browder, general secretary of CPUSA, a complicated issue subject to longtime, lingering misinterpretation.

  In this book I also acknowledge that some people whom I admire were once dupes. In particular I have in mind the president on whom I began my career as an author: Ronald Reagan. Reagan obviously changed, and later acknowledged that he had been duped early in his Hollywood days. Even ex-Communists like Morris Childs and Ben Gitlow changed. Some of the once duped, who remained liberals to their dying day, have had a profound impact on me spiritually, and still do, such as Thomas Merton.

  In short, I have tried to write this history as objectively as possible. I am open to the possibility that herein I myself have been duped on occasion: it may later emerge from FBI files and Soviet archives that one or more of the “innocent” characters in this book was not a gullible liberal but in fact a hard-line KGB spy. Time will tell.

  Dupes: Defending the “Most Colossal Case of Political Carnage in History”

  The compelling reason why this story needs to be told is that the dupes, the fellow travelers, the traitors, and whoever else wittingly or unwittingly aided and abetted the Communist movement in the last century also knowingly or unknowingly contributed to the most destructive ideology in the history of humanity. That is no small malfeasance. Whether they knew it or not, these folks defended or helped defend the indefensible. Some of them expressed regret, while many others did not. Many of the unrepentant instead attacked those who asked questions or shed light on their wrongdoings—and still do to this day.

  No form of government or ideology in history killed so many innocents in such a short period as Communism. Stéphane Courtois, editor of the French journal Communisme and also of the seminal volume The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, notes that government-orchestrated crime against its own citizens was a defining characteristic of the Communist system throughout its existence. Communism was responsible for an unfathomable amount of murder—a “multitude of crimes not only against individual human beings but also against world civilization and national cultures,” writes Courtois. “Communist regimes turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.”23

  Martin Malia, who wrote the preface to The Black Book of Communism, agrees. “Communist regimes did not just commit criminal acts,” writes Malia, noting that non-Communist states have done likewise, “but they were criminal enterprises in their very essence: on principle, so to speak, they all ruled lawlessly, by violence, and without regard for human life.” Here is a critical point and lesson: Under Communism, totally different national cultures, from all over the globe, sharing only Communism as their common characteristic, all committed mass violence against their populations. This violence was an institutional policy of the new revolutionary order. Its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past of these cultures.24

  Malia aptly writes that the Communist record offers the “most colossal case of political carnage in history.”25 The Black Book of Communism tabulates a total Communist death toll in the twentieth century of roughly 100 million.26 And these frightening numbers actually underestimate the total, especially within the USSR.27 The late Alexander Yakovlev, the lifelong Soviet apparatchik who in the 1980s became the chief reformer and close aide to Mikhail Gorbachev, and who, in the post-Soviet 1990s, was tasked with the grisly assignment of trying to total the victims of Soviet repression, estimated that Stalin alone was responsible for the deaths of 60 to 70 million, a stunning number two to three times higher than estimates in The Black Book of Communism.28 Mao Tse-tung, as noted, was responsible for the deaths 60 to 70 million in China.29 And then there were the killing fields of North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Eastern Europe, and more. In fact, the Black Book went to press too early to catch the 2 to 3 million who starved to death in North Korea in the late 1990s.30

  A mountain of skulls of at least 100 million blows away Hitler's genocide in sheer bloodshed, and is actually twice the death toll of World War I and II combined.31 It is difficult to identify any ideology or belief system in history that has killed more people, let alone in such a concentrated period of time—a roughly seventy-year period that equates to almost four thousand dead victims per day.32 It boggles the mind to imagine how one ideology could cause so much pain and suffering. The very worst moments of the entirety of the Spanish Inquisition come nowhere near the level of death in Stalin's purges or even Lenin's first year in power.33

  To be duped on, say, a poorly written piece of pork-barrel legislation submitted to Congress is one thing, but to be duped on the most horrific slaughter in human history is quite another.

  Compounding the tragedy is that this murderous ideology was expansionary and dedicated to global revolution. While the commitment to that mission varied from Communist country to country, it had been a central tenet in the writings of Marx and Lenin and was the basis for the formation of the Soviet Comintern—the Communist International—which directed Communist parties worldwide from a central headquarters in Moscow. CPUSA was not merely another political party; its founding members considered themselves loyal Soviet patriots committed to this goal.

  This fact—laid out in Chapter 1—is of enormous significance in understanding why fears over domestic Communism in the United States were not unduly obsessive but completely legitimate. And the dupes obliviously helped to advance the savage interests of Soviet Communism.

  A debate still rages to this day: would American Communists have fought for the Soviets in a war between the United States and the USSR? The answer is not black-and-white, and ranged from individual to individual; many American Communists were torn on the matter. An easier question would be whether they would refuse to fight against the USSR. Their loyalties were with Moscow—certainly that was true for formal Communist Party members. They were blindly loyal patriots and parrots for the Soviet cause. As George F. Kennan put it, Communists faithfully obeyed only “the master's voice.”34 As will be seen in the pages ahead, this sentiment is especially pervasive in Comintern archives on CPUSA,
declassified by the Russian government in the early 1990s.

  In short, American Communists were defending a barbarous machine of genocidal class warfare, committed to the overarching goal of spreading itself all over the world, with the ultimate intention of a single Communist state directed from Moscow. Their naïve accomplices—the dupes—were sadly, dangerously unaware of how they were helping to advance that horrid system and its interests. That is why all of this still matters. And that is why the role of the dupe should never be laughably dismissed from our history or from discussions of where America, as a nation, goes from here.

  The Dupe Today

  Finally, that brings us from history—the past—to the present and future. America today finds itself fighting another form of totalitarianism in another global battle: radical Islamic fundamentalism, which brews the hate that the United States confronts in the War on Terror. In the twentieth century, the malignant force America confronted was militant, atheistic, murderous, expansionary communism; in the twenty-first century, it seems to be the scourge of suicidal/homicidal Islamism.