by Paul Kengor
Even more irresponsibly, he invoked the outrageous Soviet line that American policy was bringing back the Third Reich. “It is a known fact that many honest American officials have quit their posts in disgust over the way in which Western Germany is being handed back to the Nazis.” In fact, averred Davis, America's policy of de-Nazification was a sham—“one of the big jokes of the 20th century.” He called the program a “sop” to an American public still outraged by the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald. “But the public has gradually forgotten in five years. And as the memory of these atrocities faded, so did our denazification.”
Worse, wrote Davis, American officials were instead making an enemy out of Stalin: “Stalin has been built up as a greater menace than Hitler and tears have been shed over the ‘poor Nazis’ who murdered tens of millions of human beings. Jail doors have been opened and Nazi leaders have been almost invited to take up business at the old stand.” Here again, Davis alleged a racist-fascist-imperialist-capitalist conspiracy: “The big industrialists who financed Hitler have been handed back their factories and the old school ties with Wall Street are almost as strong as they ever were.”
The West Germany that America was trying to help to its feet was, Davis said, “the Germany of the master race theory.… The fascists we sought to exterminate in World War II as ‘the greatest threat to mankind the globe has ever known,’ are now our partners.” This “alliance with a revived Nazi Germany” would certainly please America's bigoted anti-Communists—“such persons as John Rankin of Mississippi and John Wood of Georgia, two past and present chairmen of the un-American committee whose ideas on race parallel those of Adolf Hitler.”
Today, American politicians like Barack Obama travel to Germany to make eloquent speeches on how the United States rightly stood beside Berliners in resisting the Soviet Union in those scary, early days of the Cold War. “The only reason we stand here tonight,” presidential candidate Obama told citizens of a unified Berlin in July 2008, “is because men and women from both of our nations came together” at a time when “the Soviet shadow swept across Eastern Europe” and “the Communists chose to blockade the western part of the city … in an effort to extinguish the last flame of freedom in Berlin.” Germans and Americans had “learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle,” thanks to such things as “the generosity of the Marshall Plan” that helped create “a German miracle.” That “victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security,” an alliance necessary “to face down the Soviet Union.”51
Obama was spot-on, reflecting the consensus feeling of Americans, Republican and Democrat alike—including Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, who also delivered historic speeches in Berlin conveying America's proud solidarity with West Germany against the Communists. And yet Obama's mentor in Hawaii in the 1970s, Frank Marshall Davis, had strenuously contested every one of these points in his propaganda work. None of what Obama rightly hailed was in any way thanks to the work of Davis.
Indeed, joining ranks with Stalin and his Communist acolytes, Davis trashed the vital yet precarious U.S.–West German friendship.
Bitter Mentor
To this day, many liberals pillory conservatives who have accused Harry Truman of turning a “blind eye” to Communist infiltration inside his administration, or of “losing China.” And yet, as this chapter has shown, those accusations from the Right are timid compared to the nastiness that Frank Marshall Davis and the Communists displayed toward Truman and Marshall.
In column after column, Davis went after Truman and his administration, leveling accusations of warmongering, belligerence, hypocrisy, racism, fascism, capitalist exploitation, aid to Nazi leaders, and more. Meanwhile, he held up Stalin's Soviet Union as a paragon of peace, equality, and human dignity. Those liberals who have defended Davis were (and are) covering for a man who lied mercilessly about a great Democrat, Truman—and who did so on behalf of Stalin and Mao, the two greatest mass murderers in human history.
Davis's columns, stunning in their degree of pro-Soviet and anti-American sentiment, were designed to hoodwink non-Communist liberals into supporting the Communist agenda. In particular, his twisted appeal to the racism allegedly inherent in anti-Communism was aimed at dupes.
Was Frank Marshall Davis a Communist? Within only months of these 1949–50 columns, Davis's name began appearing in various investigations of the Communist movement, beginning with a 1949 report by the California Senate, titled “Fifth Report of the Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities.”52 He was closely investigated by the International Security Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, falling under several probes in a series of reports titled “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States.” In one such report, ultimately published by the U.S. Senate in 1957, Davis was listed as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”53 (See page 275). Most important is the transcript of Davis's December 1956 testimony to the U.S. Senate, where, when asked about his relationship with the Communist Party, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment.54 (See pages 278–79). This was a pattern Davis followed throughout his life, and he could always count on dupes to back him. In typical searing fashion, Davis excoriated ex-comrades like the celebrated African-American writer Richard Wright, a courageous man who left and exposed the party in the classic work The God That Failed—a heresy that Davis denounced as an “act of treason.”55
In subsequent decades, a smattering of books, reports, articles, and even Web postings added to the limited volume of material on Frank Marshall Davis. Books like James Edward Smethurst's The New Red Negro (1999) quoted Davis's poetry and noted his involvement as a teacher at CPUSA-sponsored schools; Smethurst, a professor at the University of Massachusetts who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, concluded that Davis “was almost certainly a CPUSA member.”56 Most of the biographical works have been sympathetic and nonaccusatory, even those acknowledging Communist Party affiliations. Other citations have been not at all approving, especially those underscoring Davis's poetic works like “Smash on, victory-eating Red Army” and “Christ is a Dixie N—er.” (In the latter poem, Davis shrugged off Jesus Christ as “another New White Hope,” which was consistent with his other anti-Christian screeds, such as his mocking “Onward Christian Soldiers.”)57
And as we will see, a few years after Smethurst's book was published, another biographer produced something of a smoking gun in regard to Davis's membership in the Communist Party.
The case of Frank Marshall Davis is more relevant today than ever before, given his relationship with America's forty-fourth president. The young man who would be president described Davis affectionately in his best-selling memoirs, calling him a mentor and thanking “Frank” for helping him find his identity as an African-American.
The relationship between Frank Marshall Davis and the future president, Barack Obama, will be visited later in this book.
14
VIETNAM DUPES: PROTESTS, RIOTS, AND THE CHAOTIC SUMMER OF ’68
The Cold War took center stage through the remainder of the 1950s, as did rising fears of “the bomb.” The horror of nuclear Armageddon cast a pall over the tranquility of the Eisenhower years and the revelry of “Happy Days” and rock ’n’ roll; Sputnik loomed over Elvis.
A major conflict consumed the Korean Peninsula from 1950 to 1953, testing both the Truman and the Eisenhower administrations. That first hot war of the Cold War robbed the futures of tens of thousands of American boys, as the Communists in North Korea, backed by Red China and the USSR, invaded the U.S.–backed South Korea.
Quite unforgivably, the likes of Lillian Hellman and Corliss Lamont and Dalton Trumbo and Frank Marshall Davis defended North Korea, assailing the South as the aggressor. Again, they effortlessly parroted the Moscow line, as did CPUSA.
But it was getting harder to dupe others into accepting that Communist regimes were “positive factors for peace.�
�� In addition to the North Koreans’ aggression, there was the USSR's slaughter of tens of thousands of freedom-seeking Hungarians during the 1956 uprising in Budapest.
Most devastating to Communists was the political earthquake generated by Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 “Secret Speech.” In a marathon address to a closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader, denounced the crimes of predecessor Joseph Stalin, who had made his descent into the next world on March 5, 1953 (thirteen years to the day after he signed the death warrants of more than twenty thousand Polish military officers). Khrushchev unleashed a litany of facts and figures on Uncle Joe's annihilation of millions of human beings.1 The lengthy text, smuggled out of Moscow by an agent in the Israeli Mossad,2 was released by the U.S. State Department and ultimately published worldwide, including in a gigantic 24,000-word transcript in the New York Times.3 Only the blindest Potemkin Progressive could still suffer any delusions about the Soviets’ “Great Experiment.” Even American Communists not repelled by the Hitler-Stalin Pact now found themselves reeling.
An eyewitness to the despair was David Horowitz, the 1960s radical/Communist who today is a conservative. Horowitz was raised a red-diaper baby in Brooklyn. His father read the New York Times every day from cover to cover. Horowitz recalls when his parents and their friends opened their sacred Times and read the Khrushchev speech: “Their world collapsed—and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false.”4
It was true. Their utopia was a false one. The struggle had been not for good but for evil.
“The last page crumpled in my fist,” confessed Peggy Dennis, wife of longtime Communist Party apparatchik Eugene Dennis, upon reading the text of Khrushchev's bombshell. “I lay in the half darkness and I wept.” Mrs. Dennis had given everything—mind, body, soul, husband, even her child—to Bolshevism, and now, “a thirty-year life's commitment … lay shattered. I lay sobbing low, hiccoughing whimpers.”5
But never underestimate the zealot's faith. Communism was a religion to its adherents, and many of the laity refused to give up the faith. CPUSA did not saunter off into the night, nor did the Daily Worker. Lenin's altar servers regrouped, keeping the candles lit for another day.
That day arrived in the early 1960s—in Asia. Communists got a gift when the United States began a protracted, unpopular, and costly war in Vietnam. It was a gift in that many American liberals soured on U.S. involvement, especially after the Kennedy years. This meant that American Communists, who naturally opposed America in the conflict, would soon have an entirely new, and extremely effective, propaganda tool to use against Uncle Sam. In fact, this became their best weapon yet.
The grinding Vietnam War, in which the United States was actively engaged from the early 1960s to 1975, spanning four presidents, two Democrats and two Republicans, afforded one of the most fertile periods for dupes in American history. If the Soviets had not been such raving atheists, they might have considered it providential, with fate playing out so fortuitously in favor of Moscow's destructive objectives. Consider: Since the late 1940s the Kremlin had launched a major push to recruit young people from around the world, particularly in its biannual World Youth Festivals, the largest of which was held in Moscow in 1957. The Soviets learned that even when young Americans did not come all the way over to join their cause, or to join America's Communist Party, they could still often be counted on to unwittingly repeat the Soviet line. Youth were some of the best candidates for dupery. And the Vietnam War caused America's university campuses to erupt. As the body count rose—hitting upwards of thirty thousand dead Americans by 1968—and the draft commenced, America's students spilled out into the parks and quads, and behaved in ways never seen in America before or since. The young protesters united in opposition to U.S. policy in Vietnam.
The goal of that policy was to stop a Communist takeover in Vietnam that (policymakers feared) could lead to a “domino effect” throughout Southeast Asia, with nations from Cambodia to Laos potentially falling into the Communist camp. Chiang Kai-shek's China, the most populous nation on the planet, had already fallen to Communism, as had North Korea. The Democratic Kennedy and Johnson administrations, along with most Republicans, feared a wider collapse that would lead these nations to become Soviet allies in the Cold War.
Moscow clearly hoped for Communist ascendancy, even after the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1950s. At the very least, the Kremlin wished for a crushing U.S. defeat. The Soviets did their part to help foster that downfall, through military aid to the Vietcong, diplomatic troublemaking, shamelessly inciting the June 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East,6 and launching remarkable “Active Measures” and propaganda campaigns and other forms of mischief and murder.
Morris Childs's Heroic Work
One of the best eyewitnesses to Soviet intentions in Vietnam was Morris Childs. Childs was the number-two man at CPUSA and was plugged into the Soviet leadership. And he was secretly working for the FBI—the greatest of Cold War spies.
Childs, known by only a handful of U.S. government officials as “Agent 58,” was born June 10, 1902, outside Kiev. His real name was Moishe Chilovsky. His family, like many Russian Jews, was a victim of the czars’ pogroms. Childs's parents fled for America, arriving in Chicago on December 11, 1911.
Nurtured by Chicago's progressives, especially at the Chicago Institute of Art and at Jane Addams's Hull House, Childs quickly became a political radical. At age nineteen he joined the United Communist Party of America (a forerunner to CPUSA), joining so early that he was a charter member. The party insisted on absolute fealty, and he obeyed the master's voice: as biographer John Barron recorded, “Whatever the party asked, Morris did.”7
Childs became close to Earl Browder, the future general secretary of CPUSA. He was sent to Moscow in January 1929 to attend the Lenin School, which trained leaders for the worldwide revolution. There, he learned violent, clandestine techniques to advance the revolution: explosives, robbery, sabotage, firearms, urban guerrilla warfare. He was also recruited into the OGPU (Soviet secret political police) as an informant. Childs rose steadily within CPUSA, and by the 1960s he had become the second-highest-ranked person in the party hierarchy, behind only Gus Hall, who was named CPUSA general secretary in 1959. From the 1960s until 1980 Childs was the most trusted American in Moscow. He became especially close to Leonid Brezhnev and his regime. The Soviets eventually bestowed on him the prestigious Soviet Order of the Red Banner.
Morris Childs, however, hoodwinked CPUSA and the Soviets. The revelations of the late 1930s—Stalin's purges and mass terror, the famine, the Hitler-Stalin Pact—had been a wake-up call for him. Over time he had become a stalwart anti-Communist, and in the mid-1950s he went to work as an undercover FBI agent against Moscow. The fact that he got so close to the Soviet regime at the very highest levels was a stunning accomplishment for an American agent.
Unaware that they were dealing with a mole, Soviet leaders were fully candid with Childs, including on the subject that dominated American headlines: Vietnam. Brezhnev, Boris Ponomarev, Mikhail Suslov—the latter two were the top dogs in the International Department, the successor organization to the Comintern—and other Politburo members used facts and figures to reassure Childs (and thus CPUSA) that they were doing all they could to assist Communist North Vietnam militarily and politically in order to hasten America's defeat.
For example, during the Twenty-third Congress of the Communist Party, held March–April 1966, the Soviets briefed Childs in great detail on the extent of their military aid to North Vietnam, as well as their plans to enlist leftist Western intellectuals in a propaganda campaign to undermine U.S. forces in Vietnam and to try to prompt an American withdrawal.8 Central to the Soviet disinformation campaign was a canard that the Left reflexively repeated any time a Communist movement popped up: Vietnam was simply another uprising of “nationalism” by an indigenous force and was in no way a se
rious Communist threat to American (“imperial”) interests.
Between October 1967 and June 1968, Childs journeyed into the Soviet bloc four times, where he met with Soviet officials as well as Communist leaders from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and North Vietnam itself. He saw firsthand the Soviet commitment to coordinate all Western Communist parties. The Soviet party dictated to the other parties the position to take on events ranging from the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East to the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. (When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, American comrades loyally supported their Soviet masters, defending the indefensible by claiming that Moscow had somehow come to the rescue of Czechs against “imperialist aggression.”)9 Childs also brought home Soviet directives on Vietnam in which the USSR urged Communist parties worldwide to engage in “anti-war actions” against America.10
The FBI agent turned the directives over to American officials, from the FBI to certain members of Congress. Those officials must have been jolted by the realization that the Soviets were dumping whatever resources they could into Vietnam, seeking to amplify their military aid. This was a time when the Soviets were financially destitute, unable to spend the money they wanted in the Middle East, Latin America, Cuba, and even at home, and when the USSR was concerned that relations with the United States could deteriorate to the point of nuclear war, not to mention that relations with Red China were seriously worsening. So why would Moscow invest so heavily in Vietnam? Because the Soviet leadership was certain that nothing could better advance its interests than an American defeat in Vietnam. The Kremlin resolved to keep up the support for the North Vietnamese at whatever financial cost.11