Soviet Spy Conspiracies Just Won't Die

[Valin]

Real Clear History:

Ron Capshaw

8/20/13

 

If there is one remaining Cold War era belief the Left desperately clings to, it is their assertion that Sen. Joseph McCarthy's conspiracy theory regarding the communist penetration of the government was vastly overblown. But missing in their portrait of the senator was that he never charged FDR and Truman and Eisenhower with pro-Soviet leanings; with FDR he asserted that the President, months away from his death, was in no shape to go head-to-head with Stalin, and that he therefore relied on the advice of Soviet spies like Alger Hiss. Regarding Truman, he found him to be merely a drunkard equally influenced by Soviet moles, while the more sober Eisenhower was naive about the still present communists in the government.

 

To get at the type of thinking that saw the above figures as consciously pro-Soviet you have to go forward a few years from the early 1950s to the days of the John Birch Society. It was this group, or to be more specific, their leader Robert Welch, who charged FDR with deliberately partnering with Josef Stalin against Adolf Hitler to advance the Soviet empire; who believed Truman and Acheson deliberately led U.S. soldiers into a deathtrap in Korea, thus again aiding the Soviet Union by depleting U.S. manpower; who accused Eisenhower, based on his attempts to negotiate with Khrushchev of being a Soviet agent. In short, they asserted what the Left accused McCarthy of doing - of finding pro-Soviets behind the Oval Office desk.

 

Diana West's American Betrayal (St. Martin's Press, 2013) advances these accusations while including evidence from Venona (World War II era Soviet cables to and from their agents in the United States that finally convinced much of the non-Nation Left that Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were indeed Soviet spies). West portrays the New Deal, and the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as part of an "Occupy the White House" movement, in which pro-Soviet advisers manuevered them into all of the foreign policy failures that McCarthy and the Birchers would pounce on. Like the far right of the 1940s and the Birch Society (but to his credit, not McCarthy), West sees American entry into World War II as proof of a communist plot, consciously aided by Roosevelt.

 

(snip)