Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  At first blush, it seems quite disturbing that the CPUSA chief had such access to the president of the United States, especially if FDR had no idea that Browder was running the information to Moscow. This would be yet more evidence that too many liberal Democrats—including their president—failed to recognize that CPUSA was not merely another political party.

  That said, all of this is not as odd as it may seem. The timing is important: The USSR, like America, did not want a war with the Nazis. The Soviets also wanted better relations with Washington. The USSR and the United States had positions that sometimes ran along a parallel track. As the 1930s progressed, it became clearer that the priority was to stop Hitler. Thus it was not surprising that some Communists, from America to the Soviet Union, would endorse FDR's presidential bid, even after the Comintern and its operatives had viciously attacked the American president.36

  Franklin, Earl, and Comrade Josephine

  The speculation about the FDR-Browder relationship only intensified because of the claims of one Josephine Adams. Adams was the source of more explosive rumors—and of much misinformation.

  Venona authorities John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr write, “Although Browder performed many valuable services for Soviet intelligence, he also inadvertently provided it with misinformation about President Roosevelt.” Specifically, in July 1943, Browder told KGB and GRU representatives in the United States, who in turn informed their superiors in Moscow, that he had a friend, a secret CPUSA member, who was surreptitiously meeting with FDR. This friend, Browder told his comrades, was a back channel between him and the White House. The friend was Josephine Truslow Adams.37

  Various forms of documentation reveal how Soviet intelligence in the United States reported this revelation to Moscow. For example, the GRU's Georgi Bolshakov excitedly relayed the information in an August 21, 1943, memo to Dimitroff at the Comintern (which, incidentally, Stalin, in the middle of the war, claimed to have a dissolved—another phony Communist claim accepted by many liberals, including FDR).38 “According to information we have received,” transmitted Bolshakov, “an American citizen, Josephine Truslow, on instructions from Browder is meeting systematically with the president of the U.S. Roosevelt. Please advise whether this is in fact the case, and whether you have any information on this issue.”39

  Was it in fact the case? And who was Josephine Adams?

  Public awareness of Adams's claims surfaced as early as Robert Sherwood's highly sympathetic 1948 book on Harry Hopkins, in which Browder was quoted taking pride in the fact that he presented his “views on world events” to the president, and adding that the president “appreciated the service I gave him.”40 The mode of this presentation, plus additional details, were reported in an influential 1959 book by conservative author George Crocker, titled Roosevelt's Road to Russia. Crocker, after underscoring that Roosevelt “was no … Communist,” reported that FDR had “clandestinely obtained the recommendations of Earl Browder.”41

  “We know now that President Roosevelt maintained a secret liaison with Browder,” noted Crocker. “One Josephine Adams, an artist, acted as a courier between the two men. She relayed information, and even documents, between them, conveying to each the views of the other. She saw Roosevelt between thirtyeight and forty times during the three year period preceding his death.” “These meetings,” he added, “were held either at the White House or at Roosevelt's Hyde Park home. (Years later, Miss Adams so testified under oath before a subcommittee of the United States Senate.)”42 Crocker noted that Browder had confirmed this, and cited Sherwood's book on Harry Hopkins.43

  What Crocker did not know, and Browder and others did not know, was that Josephine Truslow Adams was a woman of questionable sanity who seems to have misled everyone, including Browder, into believing that she was Browder's conduit to the White House.

  This is not to say she existed in an entirely alternate universe. She met and knew Mrs. Roosevelt and even exchanged letters with her, as Browder himself had exchanged letters with FDR—most or all of which (Browder-FDR) are now on file at the FDR Library.44 The best sources on this, who have looked into the matter extensively, through interviews and primary sources, including declassified archives, are Haynes and Klehr and Browder biographer James G. Ryan.45

  Ryan notes that by 1941 Josephine Truslow Adams had already become a minor cause célèbre in the Communist Party. Born in Brooklyn in 1897, Adams was a leftist and art teacher at Swarthmore College. She had testified before the House Judiciary Committee against a bill to legalize wiretapping; she had done so in defense of civil liberties for Communists. She later claimed that her position had led “someone” to bug her office and home telephones.

  Swarthmore, for various reasons, refused to renew Adams's teaching contract. The Reds portrayed this as discrimination against her for speaking out, but more likely it was motivated by reasons relating to her mental fitness. She looked for work, and was helped by a woman named Esther Lape, who also happened to be a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. The first lady was impressed by Adams's artistic work and met with her, at Swarthmore, in April 1941.46

  Thus began somewhat of a friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Adams. Yet it was Adams who was the main driver behind the relationship, sending the first lady not only artwork but also a deluge of letters. As Ryan put it, this was “a largely one-sided correspondence” that lasted “throughout the war years.”47

  Meanwhile, Adams continued her “civil liberties” activism on behalf of Communists and their causes. Later that year, in December 1941, she sent a plea to the White House urging a presidential pardon of Earl Browder. She was a visible member of the Free Browder Committee. According to Ryan, Adams received a “short, noncommittal reply” from “the White House” (Ryan does not identify the writer or signer of the White House letter). A few months later, in April 1942, she sent another dispatch pressing Mrs. Roosevelt to meet with the prominent Communist and ACLU board member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, again on the Browder issue. This time, the first lady was more firm, explaining that Flynn's Communist reputation gave her no credibility on the issue. Adams backed off when FDR commuted Browder's sentence.48

  Some authors have suggested that the relationship ended there. In fact, documentation shows that Josephine Adams wrote a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt on July 4, 1944, asking her to assist Raisa Browder (Earl's wife) on a matter of travel and immigration. The letter was sent on to Earl Harrison, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Mrs. Browder's problem was resolved. Even then, Adams sent Mrs. Roosevelt still more letters regarding the Browders.49

  As these details clearly show, there was a relationship between Adams and the Roosevelt White House—or, at least, between Adams and the first lady. The main issue of contention is the extent of the relationship—and how close it got to FDR.

  Adams began claiming in 1942, and through 1943, that she was meeting with the president. Yet, according to Ryan, her only White House visit took place in 1939, and it was with a “lobbying organization.”50 Indeed, that one occasion seems the only documentable White House visit by Adams.

  Importantly, however, people in the Communist movement believed Adams's claims of repeated visits and counsel with the president. Among her most notable believers was Earl Browder, with whom she met frequently. It certainly helped Adams's credibility with Browder when she showed off her letters from Mrs. Roosevelt. When she and Browder met at a July 4, 1942, CPUSA “Independence Day” gathering, she told Browder that she had helped negotiate and secure his release from prison. They became friends, with Adams, in Browder's words, becoming a “frequent family visitor.” She convinced the CPUSA chief that she had, as Ryan put it, “an intimate White House relationship.” According to Ryan, “Browder displayed unprecedented gullibility.”51

  Haynes and Klehr, having reviewed the primary documents, write that through Adams, “Browder believed he had a private pipeline to the White House. Browder gave Adams material on various political matters to discus
s with President Roosevelt during their (as he thought) frequent chats.” Some of Browder's information on politics, they maintain, went directly into letters that Adams sent to Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt, in turn, “recognized the political interest of some of Adams's letters and forwarded them to her husband—noting in one, however, ‘I know nothing of her reliability.’” The first lady, report the authors, sent “polite responses” to Adams, the most encouraging—and eyebrow-raising—being a note that claimed, “Your letters go directly to the president. What then happens I do not know.”52

  Mrs. Roosevelt's ambiguity was not what Josephine Adams imparted to Earl Browder. To Browder, she insisted that she actually met with FDR, in person and often. She then gave the CPUSA leader important, substantive messages that she vowed were the president's responses to Browder.

  Was this the case? No, apparently not.

  In fact, write Haynes and Klehr, Adams “simply made up FDR's responses, basing them on the analysis offered by political commentators and on what Browder wanted to hear.” They say that Adams did such a convincing job that even in the 1950s, when Adams's mental instability was apparent, “Browder had difficulty believing that he had been hoodwinked.” He judged the messages too politically sophisticated for Adams to have fabricated them.53

  Thus, Earl Browder himself—Communist kingpin, duper of liberals—had been duped.

  Browder, at first, could not have known that Adams had major psychiatric issues. Even J. Edgar Hoover's FBI talked to Adams well into the 1950s, and she was called to testify in closed session to Congress. Eventually the FBI would dismiss her, with one agent stating that she suffered from an “emotional and intellectual state of unbalance.”54

  Still, given her involvement with the FBI and even Congress, certain journalists picked up on her claims about the Roosevelts. With such shocking revelations going public, it was only a matter of time before Adams had herself a book deal. The book was never published, however, as her ghostwriter and editor discovered the unreliability of much of what she said and killed the project.

  Adams started going in and out of mental institutions around 1956, and spent the final years of her life permanently confined.

  Haynes and Klehr are excellent sources not only on all the details of these complicated relationships but also, central to the thesis of this chapter, on the effect of all this misinformation. As they note, this bad information, as it became public, “contributed to the souring of postwar American politics.” The bad information began with Browder, who both hinted and boasted of his relationship with Roosevelt, which led to rumors of his “back channel” to the White House—rumors that first circulated in the upper echelons of CPUSA. From there, chronicle Haynes and Klehr, the story “seeped out” to “Popular Front liberal allies” of the party.

  In short order, the rumor mill reached anti-Communists, including prominent defectors like John Lautner, Louis Budenz, and Frank Meyer. And while many anti-Communists (including J. Edgar Hoover himself) discounted the rumors, others, particularly those who despised both Browder and FDR, believed what they hoped to be true—the better to tear down Roosevelt. In certain circles on the political Right, theories began to circulate of the late, great FDR-Browder-CPUSA-Comintern conspiracy.55

  FDR and the Communists

  Overall, FDR's dealings with Earl Browder were not the things of grand conspiracy—or at least were nothing to match Josephine Adams's fevered imaginings.

  Nonetheless, they were troubling enough, as was the whole of American Communist penetration of the president's administration. Here again, the trouble stemmed largely from the common liberal failure to distinguish between the Left and the far Left, and to appreciate that the Communist Party was not simply another political party. This time around, the failure was Franklin Roosevelt's as well, even as there is no evidence that FDR was advancing Moscow's agenda through Earl Browder.

  If FDR was duped, it was not by Browder. The president left himself vulnerable to duping by close advisers like Harry Hopkins—and even by “Uncle Joe” Stalin himself.

  But before any of those charades could transpire, CPUSA had some grand manipulation planned for liberals who could help the Communist cause for “peace” … or for “war” … or for both.

  WAR COMMUNISM:

  HATING FDR, LOVING FDR

  Perhaps the single most egregious example of American Communist duplicity was the appalling manner in which CPUSA and its acolytes flip-flopped on Adolf Hitler and World War II, based entirely on marching orders from Moscow—that is, on loyalty to the USSR, not to the United States. This meant that they alternately hated FDR, loved FDR, and sought to dupe FDR, as well as the beloved president's supporters.

  In the early to mid-1930s, CPUSA adamantly opposed Hitler's Germany. But the party stance shifted dramatically in 1939 with the shocking revelation of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the joint “nonaggression” agreement between Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The pledge of nonaggression pertained only to the two countries; it hardly applied to the nations the dictators sought to devour. Only a week after signing the agreement, Germany invaded Poland from the west (September 1), and just two weeks later the USSR invaded from the east (September 17). This pact sent shockwaves throughout the world, nowhere more so than in the American Communist movement.

  How did CPUSA respond? As always, it followed Moscow's lead. It did whatever Stalin and the Comintern ordered.

  Thus, CPUSA was suddenly allied with Hitler. These Communists no longer marched against Hitler. Instead, they vilified American allies under Hitler's siege, such as Britain, and attacked President Roosevelt for providing aid to those allies. On the American home front, the Communists positioned themselves as being on the side of “peace,” even though they sided with the aggressors who started the Second World War.

  But those were only the first twists and turns: CPUSA did another about-face once Hitler betrayed Stalin, violating his agreement of nonaggression by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941. With that, CPUSA could again (and did) become anti-Hitler, and magically morphed into being pro-Britain and even pro-Roosevelt.

  Still later, after World War II, there would be another flip-flop. When the United States and USSR emerged as antagonists in the Cold War, CPUSA demonized Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman. This time, CPUSA framed America as the renegade aggressor.

  To be sure, some American Communists were so horrified by the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact that they bolted CPUSA. Many Jewish-American Communists, for example, parted with Moscow. Of course, many of the disaffected turned to Trotsky (before he was murdered by Stalin's henchmen) and remained Communists under his roof, rather than Stalin's. Others remained small “c” communists, but withdrew their membership from CPUSA.

  But CPUSA itself, and its devoted faithful, marched in lockstep with the USSR. If Stalin's Soviet Union was against it, so were they. If Stalin was for it, so were they. The record is perfectly clear. This pattern provides plain evidence that CPUSA was a creature of the Comintern—that members of the party considered themselves first and foremost loyal Soviet patriots.

  And all along, the Communists looked for—and found—dupes. Many liberals, they discovered, could be swayed into thinking that the bad guys were not the Communists, who hopped in and out of bed with Hitler and trashed liberal presidents, but, amazingly enough, the anti-Communists who saw the Communists as agents of a foreign power. As had been the case throughout the Depression, the Communists frequently could count on the dupes to come to their defense against the anti-Communists.

  Sadly, CPUSA's sordid behavior before and during World War II is rarely taught today. That omission makes it much easier for contemporary liberal academics to defend the Communists as they denounce the anti-Communists in a one-sided attack.

  “For the Defense of the Soviet Union”

  A good starting point in revealing the Communists’ wartime shell game is a March 23, 1936, document in the Comintern archives on CPUSA. The memo, titled “DIR
ECTIVES ON ANTI-WAR CAMPAIGN,” was sent “TO ALL DISTRICT BUROS” by the Central Committee of CPUSA.1 (See page 138.) The goal of the directive was to “mobilize the masses” and organize “big mass meetings and demonstrations” on April 7, 1936. CPUSA's Central Committee issued talking points: “The chief slogan around which our agitation shall be carried on for the April 7th occasion shall be ‘Keep America out of war by keeping the world out of war. Against the Roosevelt war budget. For the support of the peace policy of the Soviet Union. For the defense of the Soviet Union.’”

  It is useful to recall that this campaign for “peace” fell smack in the middle of Stalin's Great Purge. The USSR's “peace policy” was in truth an unprecedented policy of orchestrated, systemic domestic terror. But in CPUSA's account it was President Roosevelt who was a warmonger.

  The memo provided an excellent example of how CPUSA sought out front groups and dupes to further its agenda. “Every effort should be made,” ordered CPUSA's Central Committee, “to organize these actions on April 7th on a united front basis. Party organizations should, first of all, strive to get the local organizations of the American League Against War and Fascism to take the initiative in organizing these demonstrations and meetings.” The local Communist parties “should make a special effort … to approach the various peace organizations.”