Dupes

  Right on cue, McDermott, the most liberal of the three, mouthed the Iraqi Baathist Party line. He said that President Bush “will lie to the American people in order to get us into this war.”58

  Naturally, Saddam's aides could not wait to get a microphone in front of McDermott. More than that, they had a studio ready. On September 29, 2002, the Iraqi government eagerly positioned McDermott and Bonior there for an interview with ABC News's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.59

  When Stephanopoulos asked McDermott whether he stood by his claim that the president would intentionally lie to drag the nation into war, the congressman held firm: “I think the president would mislead the American people.” The Seattle congressman deduced that Bush and the administration would “give out misinformation … information that is not provable.” When Stephanopoulos asked for evidence of Bush's lying, McDermott did not proffer any, simply reaffirming his conviction that the president was a deceiver.60

  Stephanopoulos, a Democrat and a former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, was surprised, perhaps shocked, when McDermott said he did not harbor the same suspicion toward his endearing hosts in Iraq. Whereas the congressman alleged that the president of the United States operated on duplicity, McDermott said of Saddam and his regime: “I think you have to take the Iraqis on their face value.”61 He wanted the United States to take the Iraqi dictator at his word even though Saddam had spent more than a decade obstructing UN weapons inspectors and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents. The Iraqis, Americans were supposed to believe, suddenly supported “unfettered inspections”; Baghdad had given the trusting politicians “assurances” of that, McDermott said in a press conference.62 The congressman was doing yeoman's work for the Republic of Fear.

  The Baghdad Three were a hit in Iraq. Saddam's Ministry of Information published the itinerary of their goodwill tour in the regime's government-controlled newspapers, television, and radio, and on the ministry's website in both Arabic and English. These stories were headlined on newspaper front pages and on news broadcasts; they ran aside other celebratory Iraqi news items, including stories on the “criminal Bush,” on U.S. “war crimes” against Iraqi children, on how the “U.S. embargo” starved Iraqi infants and killed seniors in hospitals, on nonstop U.S. military “war waging” around the world, on Palestinian suicide bombers who gave their lives as “intrepid martyrs,” and on how Jews had been responsible for 9/11.63

  Even friendly liberal news sources in America seemed embarrassed by the Baghdad Three. A CNN reporter asked Congressman McDermott whether he minded being exploited for propaganda by Saddam's tyrannical regime. “If being used means that we're highlighting the suffering of Iraqi children, or any children,” replied the congressman, “then, yes, we don't mind being used.”64

  Didn't mind being used. This was worse than John Dewey and Corliss Lamont in the USSR. At least the Columbia professors had convinced themselves that they weren't being used.

  McDermott's fellow Democrats—from the head of the Democratic National Committee, to former president Bill Clinton, to John Kerry, to leading members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi, Dick Gephardt, and Barney Frank—were stunned, some of them into complete silence, others into brief replies of “no comment.”65

  And McDermott was not finished. He continued to carry water for Saddam upon his return from Iraq. In an appearance on PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, McDermott said that Congress was faced with a war authorization that was really about whether “the United States can decide to wipe out another country's leader whenever we don't like them.” Interviewer Gwen Ifill was compelled to ask McDermott to respond to the charge that he had returned from Iraq as “an apologist for Saddam Hussein.” McDermott said that the people making such accusations were “stupid.”66

  So blatant and successful had been Saddam's manipulation of Jim McDermott that conservatives began derisively calling the congressman “Baghdad Jim.” But even they could not have known just how badly McDermott and his friends had been exploited.

  As the Associated Press reported six years later, in a March 2008 story, federal prosecutors found that Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency had “secretly financed” (AP's words) the trip to Iraq by the three U.S. lawmakers. The prosecutors determined that the trip had been arranged by a Middle Easterner in Detroit, Michigan, named Muthanna Al-Hanooti, who was charged with setting up the trip “at the behest of Saddam's regime.” Iraqi intelligence officials, prosecutors learned, reportedly paid for the trip through an intermediary, and rewarded Al-Hanooti with two million barrels of Iraqi oil.67

  Prosecutors said they had “no information whatsoever” that the three congressmen were aware that Saddam's henchmen had underwritten the trip. “Obviously, we didn't know it at the time,” explained McDermott. “The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children. That's the only reason we went.”68 (Actually, McDermott's remarks had gone well beyond the plight of Iraqi children.)

  Representative McDermott's spokesman, Michael DeCesare, said the congressman had been invited to Iraq by a Seattle “church group” and had been unaware of Iraqi funding for the trip. Congressman Thompson likewise said he had no “question at all regarding the sponsor of the trip or the funding.”69 The Baghdad Three had been oblivious.

  Congressmen Jim McDermott, David Bonior, and Mike Thompson had been duped by Saddam Hussein. It was a snow job in the Iraqi desert.

  Dupes, Yesterday and Today

  As the “Baghdad Jim” example shows, each case of suspected dupery in the War on Terror needs to be evaluated on its own merits. McDermott and crew had been duped, whereas, say, Ted Kennedy—who had not been flown to Baghdad for special handling by Saddam—had served the Iraqi dictator's interests more indirectly, through outrageous statements that the senator aimed at George W. Bush, not at Saddam. Again, Senator Kennedy had inadvertently helped the adversary. That is also true for degrading remarks about American troops uttered by the other Massachusetts senator, John Kerry, or by Dick Durbin, or by Barack Obama, or by Pete Stark, or by other post-9/11 Democrats.

  Kennedy's and Kerry's remarks were more typical of the sort of suspected dupery we have seen in the War on Terror, which is quite different from the textbook dupery of the Cold War. When John Kerry accused the troops of war atrocities in Vietnam in April 1971, a Communist intelligence chief like Ion Pacepa could claim that Kerry had been taken by Soviet propaganda. But when Kerry did the same to troops in Iraq in December 2005, there was no al-Qaeda operative claiming to have signaled the senator.

  To be sure, in both the Cold War and the War on Terror, certain ill-advised statements by leftist Americans inadvertently helped U.S. opponents. But the statements in the latter have not usually been cued or coordinated as they were so often in the former. It is a big difference, with a notably different kind of adversary.

  Soviet Communism, of course, has been long since dispatched to the ash heap of history. But this doesn't mean that all battles from the Cold War past have gone away. As we shall see next, debates still rage over some of the most disturbing cases of dupery, with many Communists from the Cold War continuing to find their greatest protectors in liberals.

  22

  STILL DUPES FOR THE COMMUNISTS

  While the great international battle facing America has shifted from the Cold War to the War on Terror, from militant Communism to radical Islamic terrorism, certain skirmishes from the former remain. FDR's actions at Yalta, John Kerry's quarrel with the Swift Boat Veterans, the political relevance of top former members of SDS and the Weather Underground—all these are still debated today. The jury also remains out on many of those accused of having been Communists or of secretly working with the Kremlin, and on those who were just plain duped.

  What was Ted Kennedy up to in May 1983 with that offer to Yuri Andropov via the KGB? Why was a grimacing Lillian Hellman so consistently, vindictively wrong? What was Corliss Lamont truly thinking? Is there more we need to know about Humphrey Bogart in the early 1930s (see Postscript)? Di
d FDR really treat George Earle that badly over the Katyn Wood massacre?

  Those are ongoing debates, often between anti-Communist Cold Warriors and liberals who continue to cover for Communists—including Communists who looked to use them, who excoriated their favorite presidents and party leaders and policy initiatives, who viewed them contemptuously as dupes, and who counted on them to help conceal the Communists’ identity and agenda. Whether in Hollywood, journalism, or the academy, many liberals even today provide cover for the Communists—and, more pointedly, deride the anti-Communists.

  Films depicting every Hollywood Red as an innocent victim and every anti-Communist as a paranoid witch-hunter remains a cottage industry, including such movies as Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999), which depicts the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1930s persecuting Federal Theater Project (a group that, in fact, was dominated by Communists); Good Night and Good Luck (2005), based on the 1954 confrontation between Joe McCarthy and TV journalist Edward R. Murrow; and Trumbo (2008), a paean to Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.1 Only in Hollywood could Lillian Hellman, an unrepentant Stalin apologist, be beatified in a film like Julia (1977)—an Oscar-winning movie that starred Vietcong cover girl Jane Fonda—while Elia Kazan, a man of conscience and a liberal throughout his life, remains forever demonized for committing the unforgivable sin of anti-Communism.

  Many contemporary liberals display the strangest naïveté as they rally around their suspected heroes. Recall what The Nation wrote of Arthur Miller at the time of his death: “He certainly wasn't a communist, and he wasn't a socialist,” eulogized fellow playwright Tony Kushner in the pages of that leftist mainstay.2

  Despite Kushner's assurances, we cannot be so certain about Miller's political views. Was he really never a communist, or even a socialist? The evidence makes that claim difficult to believe.

  Claims such as Kushner's are hardly uncommon. When alleged Soviet agent I. F. Stone died in 1989, just as Poland was having free and fair elections, and shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was praised to no end. The New York Times hailed him as a “pugnacious advocate of civil liberties, peace, and truth.” The Los Angeles Times saw Stone as the “conscience of investigative journalism.” CNN's Larry King dubbed him a “genuine hero.” To the deans of journalism, from James Reston of the New York Times to Fred Friendly of Columbia's School of Journalism, I. F. Stone, the “liberal” journalist, had become the epitome of virtue: Saint Stone. A political cartoon by Pat Oliphant showed Stone outside the Pearly Gates, with St. Peter telephoning God to say, “Yes, that I. F. Stone, sir. He says he doesn't want to come in—he'd rather hang around out here, and keep things honest.”3

  I. F. Stone deluded them all—if not quite to the Pearly Gates, then at least until his last breath.

  One might expect that the momentous declassification of Communist archives in both the United States and Russia would prompt scholars to reevaluate the story of the supposedly innocent victims of anti-Communists. But even in the face of ample new evidence indicting Communists whom the liberal community long defended, many academics have refused to concede that the conventional anti-anti-Communist narrative may have been wrong.

  Alger Hiss's Dupes

  A case in point was the grand opening of New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War, a joint project of the school's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its Tamiment Library. Tamiment now houses portions of CPUSA's vast reservoir of records (materials that were consulted for this book). Here, at last, was an opportunity to dispassionately reach some firm conclusions about a cloudy past. This voluminous record could resolve some long-standing debates, including by showing who was and was not a CPUSA member.

  Or maybe not. At its public debut in 2007, the new center announced that it would host a regular series of seminars “to encourage research on how the Cold War and the red scares shaped domestic political culture and foreign policy” (emphasis added). The center sought proposals from scholars dealing with the “political repression and resistance” of the times.

  Historian Ronald Radosh, himself a former Communist who now reports carefully on the most mendacious characters of the Cold War, highlighted the bias in the NYU-Tamiment project. In a piece for The New Republic,4 Radosh wrote that the NYU-Tamiment project had clearly implied that “no proposal … would be welcome that took as its starting point the belief that, in the 1930s and 1940s, American communists just may have posed an actual threat to America's national security, and that does not view the question of how to deal with this problem as anything but repression.”5

  The Center for the United States and the Cold War reinforced this impression with its inaugural conference, titled “Alger Hiss and History.”

  And what of the history of Alger Hiss? It has been long settled. Though Hiss's conviction for perjury in his famous spy trial wasn't enough to convince his most ardent defenders of his guilt, mountains of evidence have emerged since then to prove that Hiss was a Communist spy. Sam Tanenhaus's masterful 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers and Allen Weinstein's definitive 1978 account of the Hiss-Chambers case showed beyond doubt that Hiss was a Soviet agent. Even before that, way back in 1962, there was an authoritative book demonstrating Hiss's guilt by a former vice president named Richard Nixon.6 And the Venona transcripts made public in the 1990s discussed a Soviet spy code-named “Ales” who was almost certainly Hiss. As Christopher Hitchens, a brutally frank man of the Left, put it, the thoroughly discredited claim that Hiss was somehow innocent remains “one of the most persistent (and repelling) myths of the fellow-travelling Left.” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who knew Hiss, noted that even “Alger's friends” knew he was guilty.7 This history on Hiss is indisputable, and extremely well established (which is why he is mentioned little in this book).

  But to the Center for the United States and the Cold War, the Hiss story was not nearly so clear-cut. The tone of the center's comments were favorable toward Hiss, reporting, for example, that he “embodied the reformist vision that linked FDR's domestic agenda to an internationalist foreign policy.” Instead of noting the evidence proving that Hiss was a Soviet agent, the NYU-Tamiment center wrote simply that he had been “accused of spying.” The center said that the Hiss-Chambers trial, rather than exposing Hiss as a spy, had helped “discredit the New Deal, legitimize the red scare, and set the stage for Joseph McCarthy.” It was as if nasty Republicans pursued Hiss solely for partisan purposes. Mark Kramer, the meticulously fair director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, said that the NYU-Tamiment conference consisted of “diehard supporters of Hiss whose attempts to explain away all the new available evidence are thoroughly unconvincing.”8

  Contemporary examples like this are numerous. They have prompted eminent Cold War historians such as Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes to plead with their colleagues to do their job as scholars—to actually do the research and evaluate based on facts.9

  Sadly, after all of these years, and all the new evidence now available, some things never change. The Left's anti-anti-Communism is one such thing.10

  Comintern? What Comintern?

  Alger Hiss is a high-profile case involving obvious guilt. The pattern persists with less-known cases as well, with many academics reacting to newly declassified documents not as long-awaited evidence that can finally resolve historical puzzles but instead as unfortunate opportunities for “demonization” by anti-Communists. In a December 2007 article in The American Historical Review, three academics lamented that “newly released documents of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow” are being “frequently deployed … to provide support for a renewed demonizing of the Comintern and its activists.”11

  A renewed demonizing of the Comintern and its activists?

  I submit here that the Comintern and its activists, from their tutelage under Lenin to Stalin, to their homage to Lenin and Stalin, did an adequate job demonizing itself.

  Communist activity and penetration was very real
and very deep. It should not be shrugged off.

  Frank Marshall Davis's Ghost

  Illustrative of the enduring impact of many of these Cold War characters is the suddenly reemergent case of Frank Marshall Davis. Whereas so many comrades and their fellow travelers abandoned ship once the crimes of Stalin were exposed, Davis kept the faith, even as he publicly denied his membership in the party.

  Davis died in 1987, but his influence it still felt today, and extends far beyond what he wrote for the Chicago Star and the Honolulu Record. His impact is profound because he mentored a young man who made it all the way to the White House, and is now leader of the free world: Barack Obama.

  That Davis-Obama relationship was kindled by Obama's maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who in many ways saw eye-to-eye with Davis. Dunham saw in Davis a potential role model and father figure to his grandson, whose biological father had abandoned him. (Obama's Kenyan father was likewise a man of the Left.)12 Davis and Dunham were “closest friends,” according to Davis biographer Dr. Kathryn Takara, a University of Hawaii professor.13

  Not a lot is known about Stanley Dunham. Occasionally, some mainstream media sources have cast flickers of light on the man through their stories about his famous grandson. For instance, Newsweek, in an insightful article on Barack Obama's religious faith, described Dunham and his wife as “two lapsed Christians” from the Midwest, who, in turn, raised a “Christian-turned-secular mother,” the single mom who raised Obama. All were people of the Left, the article noted.14 According to the Chicago Tribune, the grandparents attended, for a period, the East Shore Unitarian Church, known among locals as the “Little Red Church on the Hill.” (The Tribune article attributes this moniker not to the far-left political sympathies of the congregation but, instead, to the “McCarthyism” infecting the period.)15 Like their later grandson, who would attend the church of Jeremiah Wright, the radical, ranting, raving, racist reverend, this was a very political church.