Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Ichord further pushed Dr. Young to answer the question. Young refused. The jousting began in earnest.

  Counsel Smith informed Young that the committee had information showing that Young was a member of the Communist Party, and specifically of the “doctor's club of the party of the North Side of Chicago.”

  That specific question likewise got the committee nowhere. As it became clear that Young would not answer whether he was a party member, Smith got to a more important question: had Young served on the Medical Committee for Human Rights “pursuant to a plan or directive of the Communist Party?” After Young insisted on his rights not to answer that question, he conferred with his attorney and, surprisingly, answered with a direct “No.”

  Counsel Smith quickly explained that the “doctor's club” to which Young belonged was formally known as the Bethune Club, named for a Canadian surgeon, Norman Bethune, who was a Communist but had always tried to conceal his Communist identity. As Smith immediately proceeded to back up the point, “He [Bethune] served with the Communist—,” Young's attorney, William Cousins Jr., objected to the relevance of Smith's information.

  Counsel Smith's information then got extremely relevant: He presented a personal check signed by Quentin Young for $1,000, which went to pay the rent of New Mobe's office at 407 South Dearborn in Chicago. Young disputed that the check had been for that purpose, acknowledging only that it had gone to “somebody” in particular. Asked the identity of that somebody, Young conferred with counsel and named Rennie Davis, to whom he said it was a “loan” to be repaid within forty-eight hours.

  Rennie Davis was a prominent radical, himself called to testify because of his activities. He had been to Hanoi, where he was welcomed with open arms by the Communists, and was identified by Congress as a “Vietcong supporter.”45 Davis had been a leading figure in New Mobe; he, along with Tom Hayden, had been a “project director” for the Democratic convention protests.46 Thus, this check from Young to Davis, produced by the committee's legal staff, suggested Young's close connection to the leading organizers of the Chicago uprising.

  But Dr. Young simply kept dodging, turning the hearing into a circus. During the course of questioning he launched into musings on the meaning of words like “affiliated,” or whether he had indeed “indulged in haranguing,” or his awareness (or lack thereof) of what was meant by “lawyers’ techniques,” or why on earth he would invoke the First Amendment instead of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, and on and on. Young and his counsel conferred on elementary points. Supporters inside the hearing room constantly interrupted the proceedings: the wild attorney William Kunstler repeatedly yelled from his seat in the audience; Abbie Hoffman was paraded into the room because of what Young's lawyer deemed an “emergency situation that has just arisen”; Dave Dellinger, Soviet bloc traveler and Mobe chairman, shouted from the floor, as did Jerry Rubin; Rennie Davis suddenly announced that he was present and could explain a matter raised in association with his name; Young's counsel asked the committee counsel, “When did you last beat your wife, sir?”; and on and on. The congress men and the witnesses and their lawyers issued back-and-forth demands that various people—on the committee itself even—be expelled from the room. An exasperated Congressman Ichord repeatedly pounded his gavel to try to restore order.

  The filibustering of Young, his counsel, and his fellow radicals in the hearing room forced the doctor to stay on to testify for another day. Young's attorney objected to going into a second day, but of course the doctor and his legal team had left Congress no other choice but to need more time, since they had avoided answering even the simplest questions.

  At one point Congressman Ichord told Dr. Young that previous testimony had yielded the names of twenty-one Communists who were involved in the disturbances at the Democratic convention. Not only did Young not confirm any Communists, including whether he was one himself, but he even acted as if he had never before heard the word “Communist.” Ichord had to remind Young: “Let me advise the doctor there have also been threats made to not only disrupt the convention processes in the future, but the Federal election process.” The congressman also noted that more than thirty thousand Americans had been killed during the Vietnam War. “Let's not handle this with levity,” Ichord concluded.47

  Remarkably, Young was able to escape without ever addressing the pertinent questions of the hearing. It is understandable that he would not want to answer whether he was a Communist, but with his dissembling and digressions he made a mockery of a significant inquiry into whether foreign Communist powers were involved in the disruptions of the American political process—disruptions designed to force the U.S. government to change its policy on a crucial matter of national security. As Congressman Ichord rightly observed, this was not a matter to be treated with levity—though the men in Moscow were no doubt amused by the whole spectacle.

  A reminder of how none of this was funny came from Robert Greenblatt, who also testified during the hearings.

  Recall that Greenblatt, another New Mobe cochair, was the person mentioned in Tom Hayden's June 1968 letter to Colonel Lau, in which Hayden wished “Good fortune!” and “Victory!” to the Vietcong. On the stand, Greenblatt was cantankerous but much more open than Dr. Young. From his testimony, Congress learned that the New Mobe leader had met with Colonel Lau and also traveled to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Cyprus, Paris, Hanoi, and a number of other significant places.48 Here was clear evidence of international Communist involvement in a destructive domestic protest of the Vietnam War.

  If Dr. Quentin Young was not in fact a Communist, then he was certainly used by the Communists and unwittingly aided them in their intentions. He and others intimately involved in the August 1968 Chicago uprising were dealing with things that they either did not fully understand or, worse, understood and concealed. Dr. Young was either duped or doing the duping.

  Paul Douglas Says Goodbye

  Not part of the carnival, but very much caught up in the times, was Senator Paul H. Douglas. Douglas serves as a fascinating case study of the complexity of this period as well as the Left's twists and turns dating back to the 1920s.

  By the late 1960s, Senator Douglas was one liberal Democrat from Chicago who was not primed for duping. It had been forty years since Douglas's regrettable Potemkin village tour and tea with Uncle Joe. Now serving his third term in the Senate, the Ph.D. economist, Quaker turned Unitarian, and World War II hero was one of several Democrats in the Senate who were chastened Cold Warriors and supportive of LBJ's policies in Vietnam. He took that position while remaining a social liberal of impeccable credentials, staunchly supporting civil rights and social activism and opposing government abuse and corruption.49

  The Democrat Douglas caused considerable angst among many of his liberal colleagues with his battle-hardened anti-Communism. He regretted having lobbied for diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union so many years before, and he now opposed recognition of Mao's China as well as its admission to the United Nations. Duped once into supporting a massive Communist killing field, he was on guard against doing so again.

  Douglas's strong anti-Communism and support for President Johnson's war policies ended up costing him politically. In 1966, two years before the 1968 blow-up, he was upset in his bid for a fourth Senate term.50 The Democrat Douglas lost to a liberal Republican who was inclined to negotiations with the Vietcong. How things had changed.

  The colorful life—Columbia doctorate, CPUSA target, SS Useful Idiot passenger, luncheon companion of Uncle Joe, University of Chicago professor, labor economist, New Dealer turned Cold Warrior, Okinawa Marine, Purple Heart recipient, U.S. senator, father and husband—would end only a few years later, as Douglas died in 1976. Following a private funeral at the Quaker Meeting House in Washington, D.C., Douglas's ashes were taken to Chicago, where the remains of the veteran of the Pacific theater were scattered at the Japanese gardens in Jackson Park. Douglas's final resting place was a vast distance from the smashed church bells long
ago silenced in Stalin's Soviet Union.

  The Forgotten Story

  Perhaps it was Providence that spared Paul Douglas the ignominy of representing Illinois as its senator during the travesty at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. His embarrassment at the hands of Joseph Stalin forty years earlier had been enough.

  Douglas wised up, but too many others did not. The protests at the 1968 Democratic convention offered numerous cases of dupery. Many of the protesters were non-Communist liberal students who did not know they were being used by the Communist movement. The duping continues today, as plenty of liberals, from the media to academia, fail to research the antiwar movement's links to the international Communist movement, or even to recall the evidence of such links that were publicly available at the time. The typical “flashback” news story portrays the 1968 convention as a hope-filled moment gone wrong, of nonviolent “peace” protesters running into the iron fist of the Chicago police and the National Guard. But ample evidence indicates that the Chicago uprising was an insidious Communist-supported (if not Communist-prodded) national-security showdown—a battle waged against Chicago's police and America's troops. Congressional Democrats uncovered this troubling evidence at the time and recognized that thousands of American dupes had unwittingly served Communist intentions.

  Some of the characters who played prominent roles in the 1968 Chicago protests—dupes and non-dupes, non-Communists and Communists—are alive and well in America today, where they remain active in politics and enjoy cushy Ivory Tower jobs, seemingly exempt from criticism for their militant actions in 1968. With tenure, they tell their students a decidedly different tale of what happened in the late 1960s.

  Nor are these figures found only in the halls of academia. Their influence extends much farther. Some high-profile characters from the October 1968 congressional hearings, such as Dr. Quentin Young, as well as names raised in connection with some of the most remarkable charges of cooperation with North Vietnam, such as Tom Hayden, would later help launch the political career of the current president of the United States, Barack Obama. And as we shall see again and again in the pages ahead, they were not the only radicals to play such an important role in our current political scene.

  15

  GROWN-UP VIETNAM DUPES: DR. SPOCK, CORLISS LAMONT, AND FRIENDS

  Scattered among the student radicals of the Vietnam era were some questionable grown-ups worthy of extensive discussion.1 Onetime Potemkin Progressives like Paul Douglas had learned their lessons. They were no longer so easily misled. But others were.

  The children of the 1960s quipped that they couldn't trust anyone over the age of thirty. That was not quite true. To the contrary, they not only trusted but embraced older folks who shared their radical-left worldview. There were new friends like Dr. Quentin Young. There were crusty old theoretical Marxists like Herbert Aptheker. There were CPUSA hacks like Gus Hall. There were longtime anti-anti-Communists like Lillian Hellman. And there were Old Left mainstays, leftovers from Soviet pilgrimages past. Some of them had bounced around Russia when Quentin Young was still bouncing on his grandfather's knee: fellow travelers like Corliss Lamont.

  Lamont: Still Carrying the Flag

  Corliss Lamont was one old codger the students of the ’60s could trust. His politics was theirs.

  Since the publication of Russia Day by Day in 1933, Lamont had continued his strident activism, and was just as far to the left as ever. He did a long stint as a director of the ACLU, from 1932 to 1954. As he stumped for “civil liberties” in America, he also continued to stump for the totalitarian state headquartered in Moscow. In 1939 he followed Russia Day by Day with the aptly titled You Might Like Socialism, released the same year as the Hitler-Stalin Pact and just after Stalin exterminated tens of millions of people. Then came other Lamont odes to the Motherland: in 1946, The People of the Soviet Union; in 1952, Soviet Civilization.

  Aside from books, the prolific Lamont helped found and subsidize the publication Marxist Quarterly in 1936, smack in the middle of Stalin's Great Purge. He also wrote many pamphlets, such as an indefensible 1952 Stalinist apologia, The Myth of Soviet Aggression, which blasted the Truman administration.

  Not surprisingly, Lamont's continued affinity for the USSR had made him no friendlier to an Almighty. He had written another “humanist” classic, The Philosophy of Humanism (1949), and had cobbled together additional atheist screeds like A Humanist Wedding Service and A Humanist Funeral Service. He would become president of the American Humanist Association.2

  The beneficiaries of Corliss Lamont's worldview were his students at Columbia, Cornell, and the New School of Social Research, which were now erupting into antiwar protests, billows of pot smoke, and wildly left-wing politics. John Dewey's star pupil seemed to inhale much of it.

  In its obituary of Lamont, the New York Times described the good professor as being dedicated to “civil liberties and international understanding.”3 The Times neglected to note that this included convincing the international community to “understand” why the Soviet Union had “gotten tough” (Lamont's words) in places like Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the rest of Eastern Europe “in order to bolster its own self-defense.”4 Sometimes, as in the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Red Army would need to “bolster its own self-defense” by murdering tens of thousands of civilians.

  The Times obituary announced that Lamont, dedicated civil libertarian, had been forced to weather “false accusations of Communist affiliations” by “redbaiters on Capitol Hill in the 1950s”—the real bad guys, in the eyes of the Times and Lamont. (The headline on the obituary hailed Lamont as a man who had “Battled McCarthy.”)5

  The Times noted that Lamont had served as the longtime chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. This is a group still celebrated by liberals as having fought the good fight against paranoid anti-Communism. The obituary did not mention that Lamont was cofounder of the committee along with Marxist I. F. Stone—who, it now seems clear, was a paid Soviet agent.6

  Lamont had started the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, in 1954, because by that point he had moved to the left of the ACLU.7 ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, a onetime gushing advocate of the Soviet state, as exemplified in his embarrassing 1928 book, Liberty under the Soviets, had learned hard lessons about Communism. Perhaps tired of being misled and lied to—duped—by his own officers and “liberal” “friends,” by the early 1950s he was insisting that the ACLU's officers take a non-Communist oath.8 Baldwin came to see that any ACLU member who held allegiance to a totalitarian dictatorship could not truly be serious about civil liberties. But Lamont and others—including I. F. Stone, several editors at The Nation, and several professors from Columbia9—publicly objected to this attempted “purge” by the ACLU.10 (Here was a purge that Lamont could condemn.) Lamont ended up resigning from the ACLU and starting the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.11

  In 1953, testifying before Congress, Lamont told his questioners that he was not a Communist.12 At the time, that response may have been correct; the same year he wrote a widely read pamphlet titled Why I Am Not a Communist—this coming twenty years after his mentor, John Dewey, wrote a piece by the same name. Of course, not being a member of CPUSA never stopped Corliss Lamont from being at least a pro-Soviet socialist—and a dupe.

  Into the 1960s he was supporting various other left-wing endeavors. He fired away at the Kennedy administration for trying to stop a Communist takeover of Cuba; he continued to deny Soviet culpability in the Katyn Wood massacre (as had FDR); he endured a public legal fight with the CIA and State Department over mail sent to him from Red China; and he bitterly battled the U.S. government for refusing to grant him a passport to fly off to more faraway pilgrimages to Communist lands.

  The decade also brought Lamont a new life—he and his fellow-traveling wife, Margaret, divorced after more than thirty years of marriage—and a new cause: the Vietnam War. The antiwar effort seeme
d to invigorate Lamont. He supported seemingly every antiwar group under the Sun. Once again, Dr. Lamont found himself on the side of the Soviet Union. Some things never change.

  America's Doctor: Benjamin Spock

  Another grown-up that the flower children found they could trust was the doctor whose advice had been a bible for their parents: Dr. Benjamin Spock.

  Spock's case is particularly interesting. It has been permitted to fall through the cracks of history. The doctor's role in the 1960s seems to have even escaped some of the better anthologies of the era.13 Spock is typically remembered simply as the most famous and influential pediatrician of his time. His 1946 book The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is one of the all-time bestsellers, selling an estimated fifty million copies worldwide, and translated into upwards of forty languages. His philosophy of parenting, emphasizing the need for affection, provided a much-needed corrective to the cold, austere disciplinary techniques of many parents, though some critics felt he went overboard into permissiveness—leaving a legacy of “brats.” An entire generation of young mothers did their parenting under the governing principle what does Dr. Spock say?

  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in May 1903, Benjamin M. Spock attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he was a champion rower; he even won a gold medal at the 1924 Olympics in Paris. In the late 1920s he headed off to Columbia University to attend medical school, where he ingested the radical left-wing politics that pervaded the campus.