Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  We have before us a vast field of action to develop the world Revolution. Comrades! It is in the interests of the USSR—the Fatherland of the Workers—that war should break out between the Reich and the Franco-British capitalist bloc. We must do everything so that the war should last as long as possible with the aim of weakening both sides. It is for these reasons that we must give priority to the approval of the conclusion of the pact proposed by Germany, and to work so that this war, which will be declared within a few days, shall last as long as possible. It is therefore necessary to strengthen the work of propaganda in the countries that will have entered the war, so that they shall be ready for the after-war period.12

  The “after-war period” would be the moment ripe for the “world Revolution.”

  Think about what this means: This diabolical man saw great advantage in a destructive major war, since the death and devastation would open the doors for “world Revolution.” He thus hailed “the pact proposed by Germany,” which would soon be known as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, because it would usher in such a prolonged and ruinous war. He was right that war was coming: World War II soon followed.

  Four days after this statement, the Soviets and the Nazis signed the pact. One week after the signing, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland from the West; then, on September 17, the USSR invaded from the East. The nonaggression pact aggressively launched the Second World War, the most devastating war in history, which took the lives of at least fifty million people, and probably many more than that. Stalin got the agony he hoped for when he said he would do everything possible “so that the war should last as long as possible,” but not exactly in the way he expected: this deadly war ended up claiming more lives from the USSR than from any other nation—a staggering total of at least twenty million Soviet deaths.

  In the same speech Stalin excitedly addressed the possibilities of a “Sovietization of France”—the result of a “defeated France”—and a “Soviet Germany.” In both cases, “the Communist revolution will happen inevitably,” prophesied Stalin, and the USSR would sweep in to make each country its ally. Even “in the event of a German defeat,” the Soviet dictator confidently predicted, “the Sovietization of Germany and the creation of a Communist government will follow inevitably.” This would mean, however, that the USSR would need to “come to the aid of our Berlin comrades,” because Britain and France would try to prevent the “emergence of a Soviet Germany.” “Thus,” insisted Stalin, “our task consists in making sure that Germany should be involved in war as long as possible, so that England and France would be so exhausted that they would no longer be capable of presenting a threat to a Soviet Germany.”13

  The one factor that Stalin left out of his ideal scenario was the United States of America. Once Uncle Sam entered the fray in World War II, victory for the West was assured, and Stalin's dream of a Sovietized France, Germany, and more was foiled—or, at least, his immediate dream. The postwar chaos that plagued all of Europe gave Stalin another chance.

  There was, however, one man who stood in the way: a rookie American president from a place called Independence, Missouri.

  1946–49: Truman's Crash Course on Communism

  President Harry Truman, who in April 1945 succeeded the deceased FDR, spent his first few years in the Oval Office getting a sobering education on America's wartime ally—that is, on Uncle Joe. First there had been Stalin's infamous Bolshoi Theater speech of February 9, 1946, which blamed capitalism and the West for starting World War II. This speech—widely covered by the press14—was an outrageous rewriting of history, given Stalin's culpability in launching the war. Truman advisers like the distinguished Paul Nitze interpreted the Bolshoi speech as tantamount to a Soviet declaration of World War III.15

  Bolshoi was such a wake-up call that within days of the speech, a young staff officer named George Kennan submitted his historic Long Telegram, sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the United States. Kennan's analysis would be credited for founding the doctrine of containment. And Winston Churchill, by then a former prime minister, headed to the United States, where on March 5, less than a month after the Bolshoi Theater speech, he warned Americans of that “Iron Curtain” closing across the European continent. The speech rattled not only Eleanor Roosevelt but even a green President Truman, not yet the Cold Warrior of history, who quickly distanced himself from the speech.16

  The Bolshoi Theater speech came in the context of blatant Soviet violations of the Yalta agreement, as Moscow installed puppet governments and refused its promise of free elections throughout Eastern Europe. The USSR was also committing countless war crimes throughout defeated Europe, especially in the eastern portion of Germany, where Red Army soldiers were guilty of an estimated two million rapes. Thousands of the violated women committed suicide, and the abortion rate among impregnated German women shot up to 90 percent.17 Bolshoi came exactly one year after Yalta. It was fitting: one giant lie followed by another giant lie.

  Meanwhile, all of postwar Europe was starving, mired in its most acute condition in centuries, compounded by droughts and blizzards. Some sixty million men were out of work, and projections held that a hundred million people would go hungry. By 1947 the United States was devising a plan to aid the recovery of all of Europe, Western and Eastern. Secretary of State George C. Marshall and President Truman saw the relief as humanitarian but also political, with the aim of trying to stop the whole continent from falling into the Communist camp.

  The Marshall Plan, as it became known, was announced in June, and all European nations were invited to apply for aid. From East to West, there was tremendous appreciation for this act of American generosity. Upon the announcement of aid, Britain's Ernest Bevin cheered, “We grabbed the lifeline with both hands.” Even Czechoslovakia's parliament, marked by a strong Communist presence, voted to apply for the much-needed aid.

  But others were not quite so happy.

  Secretary of State Marshall was stunned when he learned during a trip to Moscow that Stalin and the Soviets were totally opposed to any Marshall Plan aid for anyone, especially for Germany. The USSR delivered this message to the entire world when Foreign Minister Molotov, on orders from Stalin, stormed out of the Paris summit, where desperate nations met to discuss the full scope of assistance they needed. The Soviets denounced the Marshall Plan, which would provide desperately needed aid to a ravaged continent, as an example of American “belligerence,” “aggression,” and “imperialism.”

  The jaw-dropping Soviet response made it obvious to Marshall and Truman that the Soviets wanted all of Europe prostrate, to make possible the rise of Communist governments across the continent—just as Stalin had hoped and predicted in his August 1939 Central Committee speech. Stalin's dreams for Western Europe were on the verge of coming true, especially in vulnerable countries like Germany, Italy, and possibly France—on top of the gains already seized in Central and Eastern Europe. Only American aid stood in the way.

  In March 1947, three months before the unveiling of the Marshall Plan, President Truman had announced a major military and economic aid package to Turkey and Greece. In doing so he had laid out what became known as the Truman Doctrine, as he declared, “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman called the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan “two halves of the same walnut”; both were part humanitarian aid and part Soviet containment.18 Together, they gave the Soviets much to complain about.

  Opposing the Marshall Plan and any other form of American aid, the Soviet Union began a major propaganda push. The Kremlin and the Comintern—or, more specifically, the Comintern's successor organization—delivered orders to Communists around the world to repeat the line about American belligerence. It would be a hard sell, even to the most loyal comrades.

  Stalin stepped up the resistance with aggressive action. In June 1948 the Red Army blocked all road and rail routes into Berlin (West an
d East). The Berlin Blockade was a brazen, bellicose act—a clear violation of Yalta.

  Some U.S. military advisers suggested ramming through the Soviet blockade. President Truman rebuffed their advice and instead responded in the most nonaggressive way that he could: he ordered an unprecedented airlift of food, fuel, and medicine to the people trapped behind the blockade. The Berlin Airlift lasted into May 1949.

  As for Czechoslovakia, which wanted Marshall Plan aid, a seething Stalin summoned its leaders to Moscow and ordered them to refuse the action of the parliament and reject Marshall Plan aid. Jan Masaryk, the son of the founder of the modern Czech state, lamented on the plane home that he had left Prague a free man and returned a slave to Stalin. Czechoslovakia's fate was sealed: a Communist coup followed, and by February 1948, the Red flag was flying over Prague. (Amid the tumult, Masaryk died in a “suicide” leap from his window, long suspected as murder.) With the the fall of Czechoslovakia, the isolationist Republican Congress finally began cutting checks for Marshall Plan aid.

  In no time, the two sides were starkly divided. Two adversarial military alliances emerged: NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) in the West, and the Warsaw Pact in the East.

  The Cold War was on.

  Franklin Roosevelt had left Harry Truman in the dark on vital matters relating to Soviet Communism. The lack of crucial details left Truman confused about FDR's discussions with Stalin, and bewildered by Roosevelt's trust in Stalin. FDR's erstwhile chum, however, cleared up that confusion soon enough; “UJ” provided the new president a crash course in reality.

  The Demonization of Harry Truman

  There was no doubt in the mind of any fair, rational observer that the Soviets were starting the Cold War. Among the only skeptics were the irrepressibly naïve and those posing as doubters—that is, those with hidden agendas in support of Moscow. This included American Communists, who parroted the Soviet line expressed in official statements and in publications like Pravda and Izvestia. And the chief audience for those American Communists was American liberals.

  As the Communists set out to dupe liberals/progressives, the main target of Moscow's vicious propaganda campaign was not conservative Republicans. Rather, it was a Democrat—President Harry Truman. This is a crucial point that many modern Democrats and liberals have missed in their ardent anti-anti-Communism.

  Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence official to defect from the Soviet bloc (he is still alive, and now a U.S. citizen), described in shocking candor the Soviets’ campaign to demonize Truman around the world:

  The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman—the leader of the new “occupation power.” Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.19

  Unlike Western liberals—“putty in our hands”—Pacepa lived Communism and thus could not be fooled into some fantasy world. He grew up in Romania, stuck in the new Soviet Communist bloc. He and his family were among those “Captive Peoples” that later presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan would describe, to the snickers of the American Left. Pacepa's father had a picture of Harry Truman, the face of freedom, hanging in their home in Bucharest. That was truth. But as an adult, needing to make a living in awful circumstances, Pacepa did not tell that truth; finding employment in Romanian intelligence, he helped spin the Soviets’ web of lies.

  In the West, the Left, said Pacepa, “needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the ‘butcher of Hiroshima.’” Pacepa and the Communist intelligence agencies would spend “many years and many billions disparaging subsequent presidents.”

  The Communists, in Moscow and in America, vilified President Truman in ways that made the most Red-baiting Republican look like a Truman campaign worker by comparison. The Communist criticism of Truman was brutal, blaming the man from Independence for everything from starting the Cold War to seeking World War III to looking to establish a racist-fascist state that sought an imperial-colonial empire.

  One of the top functionaries in the American Communist Party, Philip Frankfeld, who headed the party in Maryland, disseminated a pamphlet urging his comrades to view Harry Truman as their primary enemy. “Truman is in the driver's seat,” warned Frankfeld. “Truman determines both foreign and domestic policies.” Frankfeld pressed the American party to “direct its main blows against Trumanism as the main enemy of the American people today.”20

  In their pamphlets and publications, American Communists attacked every Truman policy at odds with Stalin policy, from the “Truman-Marshall Plan” to the U.S. resistance of Communism on the Korean Peninsula. CPUSA head William Z. Foster dubbed Truman a “militant imperialist,” and the Daily Worker urged comrades everywhere to see that “the center of the reactionary forces in the world today rests in the United States.” Communists accused Truman of a form of “American fascism,” of being a “warmonger,” of being “another Hitler,” of employing “Hitlerite tactics.” Of course, they had once said such things about FDR—until he sided with Stalin during the war. Now they hailed Roosevelt, at least in contrast to Truman, whom they accused of betraying his predecessor. The comrades assailed Truman for his “abandonment of the policies of Franklin Roosevelt.”21

  And they searched diligently for dupes. As noted, in Hollywood, “liberals” like Dalton Trumbo wrote rally speeches for stars like Katharine Hepburn and Olivia de Havilland. De Havilland adamantly rejected Trumbo's June 1946 Seattle text because it had compared the United States to the Third Reich, blamed the Truman administration for all sorts of racial bigotries, and accused “certain interests” of pursuing a “drive toward war against the Soviet Union.”22 In the mind of the Communists—or, more pointedly, in their propaganda—those “interests” were Harry Truman's.

  Communists also set up front groups wherever they could. In Los Angeles and Washington, the comrades created the benignly named Korean Culture Society, as well as the Korean Independent News Company, to protest American policy in Korea, where U.S. troops were engaged in a life-and-death struggle against the forces of global Communism. Both of these groups, cited as Communist fronts by the California Senate, not only opposed U.S. policy but also created pressure for a recall of U.S. troops from South Korea.23 Pro–Red China organizations popped up as well, including American Friends of the Chinese People (and its official organ, China Today), later cited as a Communist front by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.24

  Ultimately, a large group of disaffected liberals coalesced in the 1948 Progressive Party, which supported the presidential candidacy not of Democrat Harry Truman but of former vice president Henry Wallace, who was wildly pro-Soviet. As one scholar notes, the new party saw itself as “the inevitable outgrowth of liberals’ profound disillusionment with the Truman administration and the only vehicle available for ‘progressives’ to combat the rightward drift of the nation's politics.”25

  The Soviets and their supporters around the world conducted slanderous campaigns against Truman and his administration, with the explicit intent of serving the expansionary aims of Soviet Communism. And it could succeed only by duping non-Communists from the Left into believing the lie.

  A Peek Behind the Iron Curtain

  The Communists faced one recurring challenge to their duping efforts: occasionally the truth about Soviet Communism trickled out. As successful as the Soviets were with Potemkin villages and agitprop, the ugly truth could not be repressed entirely. Revelations of the Stalin regime's brutal tactics had changed the mind
s of John Dewey and other dupes; the Communist movement's abrupt flip-flop on Hitler's Germany had awoken some party members and Communist sympathizers; the ample evidence that supposedly innocent Hollywood figures were, in fact, Communists had led Humphrey Bogart to see that he and his colleagues had been “used as dupes by Commie organizations.”

  Still more evidence came out—to the anger of the Communists—in the form of eyewitness testimony from a former top CPUSA figure, Ben Gitlow. Gitlow had twice run as the Communist Party's candidate for vice president of the United States (1924 and 1928) and had served on the Executive Committee of the Comintern. In 1948, as the Cold War intensified, he drew attention by publishing a major book reflecting what he had seen during his years in the party, The Whole of Their Lives: Communism in America.

  This was actually the second book Gitlow had written, the first having been published in 1940—his autobiography, I Confess: The Truth about American Communism.26 Even before that, in 1939, he had been called to testify before Congress, where he broke a long silence after leaving the Communist Party in 1929. In his testimony and writings Gitlow laid out a litany of disturbing facts on CPUSA's relationship with Moscow. For example, he bore witness to party members’ “fanatical zeal” for the Soviet Union and their support for the USSR's “ultimate victory over the capitalist world.”27 He also revealed details about Soviet espionage and how the Comintern funded the American party—sending, Gitlow said, between $100,000 and $150,000 annually, another $35,000 to launch the Daily Worker in 1924, and tens of thousands of dollars to American union bosses.