Yesterday we saw that actor Bryan Cranston, in the course of promoting his new movie Trumbo, has promoted it by claiming that Stalin wasn’t a Communist and that Dalton Trumbo, the real-life mid-century Communist screenwriter whom he plays in the picture, wasn’t really a Communist either – not in any negative sense, anyway.
Hearing Cranston try to sell this line of hogwash the other day on the Howard Stern Show, we were hoping he was just misspeaking (perhaps owing to the early hour?). But the next day The Daily Beast ran an interview with him in which he made the very same claims, in – curiously – the exact same words:
Jay Roach
Stalin wasn’t a communist; he was a fascist dictator. But the name “communism” stuck to that. The American Communist Party at the time, which really grew out of the Depression where nobody had a job, was supposed to be like the political arm of labor unions so that more jobs for the working man could be created. But they had the title “Communist” in there. If they called themselves the American Worker Party, maybe things would’ve been different. But with the name “Communist,” people thought, oh, well the American Communist Party must want to take over the country, so we need to weed them out!
Sheer nonsense. The fact that he repeated the same nonsense in the very same words makes it clear that he was regurgitating a PR line furnished him by the film’s publicists. Or the director. Or somebody. Why are these people rewriting history in order to flack a movie? It’s despicable. It’s irresponsible. And it’s exactly the kind of bald-faced lying that Communist screenwriters of the 1930s and 40s practiced in their own pro-Soviet scripts.
The real Trumbo, at the 1947 HUAC hearings
As for Cranston, does he really not know that the American Communist Party was a fully owned and operated subsidiary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that its members took vows promising to help bring Soviet-style Communism to the U.S., and that they took their orders directly from the Kremlin?
Does he really not know that Trumbo, far from being a First Amendment champion, or a political naif who was undone by his concern about “jobs for the working man,” was a well-informed and devoutly committed Stalinist?
Does he really not know that Trumbo was a Stalinist before HUAC, that he remained a Stalinist throughout his years on the blacklist, and that he was still a Stalinist when it was all over?
Yes, it must’ve been tough for Trumbo to see a name other than his own on the movies he wrote during the blacklist years. It must’ve been tough to see his scripts win Oscars and not be able to show up at the ceremony to pick up his trophy and wave it around at parties afterwards. But his ordeal (if that’s the right word), when compared to the unspeakably monstrous punishments that were meted out by good old Uncle Joe in Moscow to millions of innocent Soviet subjects – acts that Trumbo, ever the devoted acolyte, fully supported and ardently defended – can hardly be depicted as the stuff of tragedy.
We’ve spent the last couple of days talking about Trumbo, a new movie by director Jay Roach that tries to make a free-speech hero out of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-76), and about Hollywood Traitors, a new book in which Allan H. Ryskind shows that Trumbo and his fellow Tinseltown Stalinists, far from being free-speech heroes, sought, in the years before the HUAC hearings, to silence non-Communistsand to slip as much pro-Soviet propaganda as possible into their scripts.
And in the years after the blacklist? As the late Andrew Breitbart noted in a 2009 interview, Hollywood has been run by leftists for “the last forty years,” and those leftists have made one movie after another about the blacklist – among them The Front (1976), Guilty by Suspicion (1991), and The Majestic (2001).All of these pictures have sold the same dishonest message – namely, to quote Breitbart, that “the worst thing that ever happened” during the Cold War was that “a few screenwriters had to write under pseudonyms for a few years.” Yet for the last four decades, Breitbart added, these very same powers-that-be “have been vicious to people who disagree with them,” doing their best to keep the silver screen scrubbed clean of non-leftist voices. Indeed. And if that’s not a blacklist a – or, at least, a “brownlist” – what is it?
But the main point to be made about Trumbo is this: however inadvisable, stupid, wrong, or unjust the HUAC hearings and the blacklist may or may not have been, Trumbo’s summons by HUAC and his placement on the Hollywood blacklist didn’t magically convert him into a champion of American freedom. Roach and company, of course, would have you believe otherwise. On November 3, promoting the movie on the Howard Stern Show, Bryan Cranston, who plays Trumbo, actually made two thoroughly outrageous claims in quick succession.
First, Cranston maintained that “Stalin wasn’t even a Communist. He was a fascist dictator.” Cranston didn’t explain what he meant by this ridiculous statement, and Stern didn’t ask. Presumably, this was Cranston’s own little contribution to the decades-old, and still ongoing, effort by many leftists to whitewash Communism as an ideology by representing real-life, brutal, monstrous, totalitarian Communism, whether in the USSR or China or Vietnam or Cuba, as a betrayal of true Communism – which they continue to view as benign ideology that’s never really been put into practice and that, if it were tried, would succeed, lifting humankind to an unprecedented level of goodness and glory.
Bryan Cranston
Second, Cranston suggested that even though Trumbo and other members of the Hollywood Ten joined the Communist Party, they weren’t really Communists or Stalinists or whatever; they were just well-meaning guys in search of a way to fix the ailing U.S. economy. And besides, the USSR was our wartime ally.
Yesterday we started in on Trumbo, the new movie, directed by Jay Roach, that makes a hero out of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-76). As we’ve already said, Trumbo was no hero. Here, very briefly, is why.
In the 1930s, Trumbo was a staunch anti-fascist who supported the Loyalist struggle in Spain and who hoped for a united Western front against Hitler. When the Soviets and Germans became allies in August 1939, Trumbo, in perfect accord with the Kremlin line, dropped his disdain for Nazis down the memory hole and transformed himself into an ardent pacifist – as reflected in his novel Johnny Got His Gun, which depicted war (for any cause) as the ultimate evil. Then, in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the USSR, Trumbo’s pacifism disappeared instantly; he called for the U.S. to enter the war on the Soviet side and, after Pearl Harbor, banged out rah-rah war films such as A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.
In short, what mattered to him throughout was not the well-being of his own country or the cause of freedom, but the survival of Stalinism – period.
His devotion to the Soviet Union continued after the war. He despised Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, which he described as a vile expression of fascism. In 1950, when the Communists in North Korea attacked the South, he took the side of the aggressors.
During the 1950s, because of the blacklist, he was obliged to write scripts under fake names or friends’ names; two of them, for Roman Holiday (1954) and The Brave One (1957),won Oscars. In 1960, when Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus were released, both carrying his screenwriting credit, the blacklist was finally broken.
Dalton Trumbo and his wife, Cleo, at the 1947 HUAC hearings
We’re not here to defend the blacklist. Some of those whose careers it damaged weren’t Communists at all. But what about the Communists, such as Trumbo? Was a House committee the proper venue in which to address their nefarious activity? Was an industry blacklist a defensible response to it? Tough questions; honorable people can disagree. But certain facts are beyond doubt. As Allan H. Ryskind’s book Hollywood Traitors makes clear, card-carrying Party members were, in a very real sense, active agents of an unfriendly and totalitarian foreign power. In the years prior to the institution of the blacklist, they’d done their best – both in the unions and in the studios themselves – to maximize their own power in the film industry, neutralize their ideological opponents, and use American motion pictures, to the greatest practicable extent, as vehicles for Communist propaganda. In other words, they tried to do to their non-Communist colleagues essentially what HUAC ended up doing to them.
Just a few weeks ago, we discussed the new movie Truth, which turned the truth about the 2004 Rathergate scandal on its head. In real life, CBS anchorman Dan Rather and news producer Mary Mapes were so eager to damage George W. Bush’s re-election prospects with a damaging story about his National Guard service that they were prepared to use obviously fake documents to try to support their otherwise unsupported case; in the film, Rather (Robert Redford) and Mapes (Cate Blanchett) are presented as heroic truth-tellers brought down by craven CBS executives fearful of antagonizing the Bush White House.
NowTinseltown has brought us yet another mammoth distortion of history. Directed by Jay Roach from a script by John McNamara, and starring Breaking Bad‘s Bryan Cranston in the title role, Trumbo purports to tell the story of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-76), who in 1947 was named one of the “Hollywood Ten” – a group of directors and screenwriters who were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether or not they were Communists. The Hollywood Ten were blacklisted – i.e., denied work in the film industry – as were dozens of their colleagues.
In recent decades, Hollywood has churned out innumerable films about the blacklist. The premise is always the same: the men and women of the blacklist were free-speech martyrs and victims of tyranny. There are several things that are rarely if ever mentioned in these films. For example, all of the Hollywood Ten were members of the American Communist Party. That party, in turn, was a willing, devoted instrument of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. The man at the top of that Party was Josef Stalin, a totalitarian dictator who was responsible for even more deaths than Hitler.
The real-life Dalton Trumbo
It shouldn’t be necessary to remind anyone who Stalin was and what he did. But the fact is that Dalton Trumbo and his fellow members of the Hollywood Ten were Stalin’s devoted acolytes. No matter what he did, they refused to criticize him. Whatever shifts in policy he made, they went along with him blindly. This hasn’t kept them from being lionized as champions of liberty.
Take Trumbo. The new Jay Roach movie is far from the first work to celebrate him. Trumbo’s son Christopher wrote a play, Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted, which was staged with such actors as Paul Newman, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin. Christopher Trumbo also directed a 2008 documentary, Trumbo, in which Michael Douglas, Kirk Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, and other Hollywood luminaries agreed that Trumbo was both a victim and a hero.
The facts tell otherwise. In an illuminating new book, Hollywood Traitors, Allan H. Ryskind spells them out. Far from being the fun, quirky “independent spirit” depicted by his apologists – and, we gather, by Roach’s movie – Trumbo was a slavish disciple of the tyrant in the Kremlin.
“[F]ew of the Hollywood writers served Stalin so faithfully,” says Ryskind, who, in addition to studying FBI and HUAC documents, has pored over Trumbo’s private papers. They reveal an unwavering pattern of absolute loyalty to Stalin and to Communism, and an utter indifference to the fate of his own country or of human freedom.
Rosenberg sons Robert and Michael Meeropol, hold the proclamations, flanked by Daniel Dromm and Gale Brewer, outside City Hall
It’s only been a few days since we finished up our three-parter on the Rosenbergs, but we’ve got to return to them today because New York City’s City Council has done something truly remarkable. On Monday, September 29, which would have been Ethel Rosenberg’s 100th birthday, the City Council issued an official proclamation honoring her “life and memory,” praising her “bravery,” and describing her as having been “wrongfully” executed. The man behind this initiative was Daniel Dromm, a Democrat who represents the neighborhoods of Corona, East Elmhurst, Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, Rego Park, and Woodside in Queens. At the same time, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, also a Democrat, issued a separate proclamation, declaring September 29 the “Ethel Rosenberg Day of Justice in the Borough of Manhattan.”
The putative reason for this official tribute to Ethel Rosenberg is that she was a pro-union activist who took part in a 1935 strike. But the real reason, which neither Dromm and Brewer sought to disguise in their remarks at a public ceremony outside City Hall, was to portray both Rosenbergs, in time-honored fashion, as innocent victims of American anti-communist hysteria.
When the Rosenbergs were executed, said Dromm, “it was a time of Jew-baiting, it was a time of McCarthyism, a time of anti-Communist hysteria.” These are familiar words. For certain people on the left, even all these decades later, it’s McCarthyism, not Stalinism, that was the real horror of the early postwar years. They still speak of anti-Communism almost as if there was no such thing as Communism itself. In their rhetoric, the terror of life under Stalin dissolves; the Gulag disappears; the Iron Curtain evaporates. And all that is left is Americans’ apparently baseless “hysteria.”
Ethel Rosenberg
Then there’s Dromm’s reference to “Jew-baiting,” which is, of course, a total diversion. The Rosenbergs weren’t targeted because they were Jews; they were arrested, prosecuted, and executed because they were consciously betraying their country, and threatening its security, on behalf of a totalitarian enemy.
Fortunately, some savvy observers called Dromm and Brewer out on their reprehensible actions. “In these days of progressive ascendancy in New York,” wrote Seth Barron the other day in City Journal, “the Left is in charge, and thus responsible for the humdrum management of trash pickup and school curricula. But that stuff is boring when you’ve been raised on the mythos of class struggle and the glory of violent martyrdom. Today’s leftist leaders can’t help but be wistful for a time when their side was losing and their fight was noble. They cherish the ideals of their revolutionary forebears because it makes them feel like warriors for the oppressed.”
The editors of the New York Post were disgusted, too. The City Council, they charged, had “yet again proved itself one of New York’s biggest political embarrassments.” The City Hall ceremony, they aptly put it, was “the latest installment in the left’s decades-long drive to pretend Ethel and her husband Julius didn’t spy for Moscow.”
But Dromm and Brewer weren’t alone in celebrating the Rosenbergs – and condemning their executioners. At Raw Story, Katie Halper, a contributor to such outlets as The Nation, MSNBC, Jezebel, and Russia Today, rhapsodized over Julius and Ethel and confessed that Ethel’s farewell letter to her sons had made her “cry on live radio.” This is the famous letter in which Ethel lied to her kids, insisting that she and their father were innocent and perversely representing their devotion to Stalin as a commitment to “freedom.” The City Hall ceremony was attended by members of the Rosenberg family, including the traitors’ granddaughter Rachel and her seven-year-old daughter. “The execution left two children orphaned,” we were solemnly reminded at the ceremony. But it wasn’t the fault of America that those two boys grew up without parents; Julius and Ethel made the conscious choice to put their allegiance to a monstrous, bloodthirsty tyrant above their duty to their children.
Robert Conquest, the Anglo-American historian whose works on the Soviet Union, most importantly The Great Terror (1968), confronted useful stooges on both sides of the Atlantic with facts that severely hobbled their efforts to whitewash Stalin, is dead at 98. From his London Times obituary: “The leftwingers who denied the crimes of Stalin did so, Robert Conquest always maintained, because the truth of his terrible purges was “beyond the capacity of their provincial imaginations.”
Robert Conquest in 2006
The Spectator today reprints a 1961 essay in which Conquest, responding to a letter to the London Times from many bien pensant British cultural types who were exercised about the recent Bay of Pigs invasion, wrote, in his powerfully understated way, “There is something particularly unpleasant about those who, living in a political democracy, comfortably condone terror elsewhere.” And the New York Times quotes Stanford University historian Norman M. Naimark: “His historical intuition was astonishing….He saw things clearly without having access to archives or internal information from the Soviet government. We had a whole industry of Soviet historians who were exposed to a lot of the same material but did not come up with the same conclusions. This was groundbreaking, pioneering work.”
The New York Times also cites a limerick that Conquest wrote in reply to those critics who, accepting his verdict on Stalin, still sought to salvage the heroic image of Lenin and to paint Uncle Joe as a deviation from Leninism:
There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in.
That’s a lot to have done in,
But where he did one in
That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.
Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush
Here, from his 1999 book Reflections on a Ravaged Century, is a passage that exemplifies the effectiveness of his cool, analytical approach to the mentality of the useful stooge:
For a useful, almost classical demonstration of the revolutionary mind-warp, the motivation behind acceptance of a totalitarian Idea, we turn to an interview given by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm on “The Late Show,” 24 October 1994….When Michael Ignatieff asked him to justify his long membership of the Communist Party, he replied: “You didn’t have the option. You see, either there was going to be a future or there wasn’t going to be a future and this was the only thing that offered an acceptable future.”
Ignatieff then asked: “In 1934, millions of people are dying in the Soviet experiment. If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time? To your commitment? To being a Communist?”
Hobsbawm answered: “This is a sort of academic question to which an answer is simply not possible. Erm … I don’t actually know that it has any bearing on the history that I have written. If I were to give you a retrospective answer which is not the answer of a historian, I would have said, `Probably not.'”
In 2010
Ignatieff asked: “Why?”
Hobsbawm explained: “Because in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing. Now the point is, looking back as an historian, I would say that the sacrifices made by the Russian people were probably only marginally worthwhile. The sacrifices were enormous, they were excessive by almost any standard and excessively great. But I’m looking back at it now and I’m saying that because it turns out that the Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution. Had it been, I’m not sure.”
Ignatieff then said: “What that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?”
In Moscow
Hobsbawm immediately said: “Yes.”
It will be seen that, first, Hobsbawm accepted the Soviet project not merely on the emotional ground of “hope” but on the transcendental one of its being the “only” hope. Then, that he was justified because, although it turned out wrong, it might have turned out right (and it was not only a matter of deaths, but also of mass torture, falsification, slave labor). Finally, that he believes this style of chiliastic, absolutist approach to reality is valid in principle.
R.I.P. Robert Conquest: scourge of useful stooges everywhere.
We’ve recently discussed James Carden, the Nation contributor and Putin apologist (excuse the redundancy) who in an epically long May article smeared a thoroughgoing report on pro-Putin propaganda in the West. What has Carden been up to since? Well, in early July, a videowas posted online in which Carden and three other admirers of the Kremlin honcho had, or pretended to have, a conversation in which they addressed the question: “Is the invitation for Ukraine to join Europe’s economic association a means to expand NATO’s jurisdiction?” The conversation could not be called a debate, because all four were in total agreement on every major point, and in fact the word conversation is probably not the best choice, either, given that the video, a rather slick production, was obviously edited and also bore traces of being at least partly scripted, coached, or planned. In other words, it had the feel not of a free-wheeling, spontaneous discussion but of a well-packaged piece of propaganda.
About the videotape. It was recorded at the offices of Verso Books, the self-described “radical” publishing house that was founded in 1970 by the staff of the New Left Review. It was posted at therealnews.com, a radical “news” website that callsitself “the missing link in the global media landscape” (one of its directors is Danny Glover, whose useful stoogery we’ll get around to in the next few days). The Nation itself appears to have had something to do with putting it together. And the person identified as the moderator of the discussion, Alexander Reed Kelly, is an editor at truthdig.com, another radical “news” site that describes itself as “drilling beneath the headlines.” In short, a far-left perfect storm.
Michael Hudson
Along with Carden and Kelly, the participants in this discussion were Michael Hudson, an economics professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Jeffrey Sommers, a professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Hudson and Sommers are something of a pro-Putin, anti-capitalist tag team who have collaborated on articles in which they’ve (for example) compared the Koch brothers to “Russia’s oligarchs.”
The description of the chat furnished at the Real News website added helpfully that the four men “explain why Russia may not be able to tolerate a foreign military alliance along its western border.” Make of that wording what you will; we found it interesting, especially given that at no point did any of these men betray the remotest interest in the question of why the free nations along that border – among them not only the Baltic republics, Poland, and Ukraine, but also, let’s not forget, Norway and Finland – should be expected to tolerate an increasingly aggressive and increasingly dictatorial power along their borders without choosing to enter voluntarily into a defensive alliance with one another as well as with other free nations willing to help protect them from invasion.
Alexander Reed Kelly
But then again, Carden and his three colleagues claim not to consider NATO a defensive alliance. Not anymore, anyway. The crisis between Russia and the West, Carden insisted, “is being driven by the desire to put Ukraine into NATO,” which, he said, no longer has anything to do with mutual defense. “We’re a long way from that now,” he maintained, and then served up this interesting assertion: “There’s something very wrong with the idea that NATO and the European Union have to expand to include nearly the entirety of the former Soviet space.” Pause, if you will, over those last four words: “the former Soviet space.” This seems a curious way to refer to those countries that were freed from the Kremlin yoke. Carden can fairly be read here, it seems to us, as implying some kind of lingering right, on the part of the Kremlin, to have a say in what goes on in that “space.”
The “moderate” of the Kremlin
When Kelly suggested that there was an “understanding” after the fall of Soviet Union that NATO wouldn’t ever expand eastward, Sommers agreed, and opined that it’s “foolish” for NATO to be “taking former Soviet territory” – a formulation that leaves little doubt that Sommers, at least, believes that Moscow should indeed have something resembling a veto right over what happens in “former Soviet territory.” This eastward expansion by NATO, Sommers added, has given “the Russian leadership…tremendous pause regarding the United States’ intentions,” as if it were at all reasonable to think that Putin & co. really believe NATO has any designs on their turf. Sommers then expressed a tender regard for Russian concern about “the military advance of an alliance up to its borders,” citing past invasions of Russia from the west (by Napoleon, in 1812, and Hitler, in 1941) as reasons for that concern; needless to say, Sommers showed no similar regard for the concerns of the Baltic republics and other Eastern European countries, which have been brutally violated by Russia on multiple occasions over the centuries, and all of which have been under the Russian boot within living memory, with Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 experiencing Soviet incursions that cruelly crushed efforts at democratic reform within their borders.
Jeffrey Sommers
Hudson chimed in by saying that “today the aim of NATO is to make Europe insecure against the Soviet [sic!] threat” and that “it is as if the Americans were trying to prod Putin into doing something intemperate.” In short, NATO is “restarting the Cold War.” Sommers concurred: “NATO is a force for instability and its increasing the possibility for military conflict.” He rejected the idea that Putin’s an aggressor, claiming that good ol’ Vlad is actually “somewhat of a moderate” when it comes to having imperial designs on former Soviet states, and that, indeed, he’s “a restraining force” against other top Kremlin figures who, given their druthers, wouch take over the whole Ukraine tomorrow. Carden echoed this assessment: Putin’s a “moderate” who’s “surrounded by hawks.” All of which is kind of like saying to an Italian in the 1930s: “Be grateful you’re living under Mussolini; you could be living under Hitler.”
Declassified Soviet documents have long since proven otherwise, but the myth persists that concerns, during the decade or so after World War II, about Kremlin operatives in Hollywood, Washington, and the New York media were the product of “McCarthyite hysteria.” It’s always useful, then, to be reminded just how real that phenomenon was – and just how important it is for free people always to be on guard against the infiltration of their societies by the servants of tyranny.
Walter Duranty
Today, it’s well known, at least in some circles, that Walter Duranty (1884-1957), the New York Times correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Russia, was in fact a tool of Stalin who routinely printed outrageous lies – and who actively sought to discredit colleagues who strove to get out the truth. But Duranty wasn’t alone. On July 1 of this year, Matthew Vadum reported on new research in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies establishing that the number of American reporters of that era who can fairly be described as “journalist spies” turns out to be considerably higher than was previously thought.
In the article referenced by Vadum – entitled “Spies in the News: Soviet Espionage in the American Media During World War II and the Beginning of the Cold War” – University of Ohio scholar Alexander G. Lovelace reports that as of June 1941, no fewer than 22 American journalists were active, full-fledged members of the USSR’s spy network in the U.S., and that after 1941 that number grew. As Vadim reminds us, “the relationship between the U.S. government and the press was different in those days.” What he means is that there was an atmosphere of trust; government officials took it for granted that American journalists were, first and foremost, loyal Americans; consequently, as Lovelace notes (his article, unfortunately, is behind a paywall), they “were routinely trusted with secret information to be used as ‘background’ for stories.”
Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Warren Beatty as John Reed in Reds
Who were these “journalist spies”? Some of their stories have already been told. The 1981 Warren Beatty movie Reds made heroes out of two of the earliest such turncoats – John Reed and Louise Bryant, both of whom, in the wake of the October Revolution, filed disinformation-packed “news reports” that glamorized the fledgling USSR and its Communist system.
Whittaker Chambers
Nor is it any secret that Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine from 1939 to 1948, was a Soviet spy. Chambers, of course, eventually recognized the error of his ways, turned in State Department official Alger Hiss and other Communists, and told the story of his own journey into and out of the Party in the classic memoir Witness.
But Chambers wasn’t the only staffer at that supremely influential newsmagazine who was secretly working for the Kremlin. Others included John Scott, Stephen Laird, and Richard Lauterbach. The last-named did Stalin a great service when he reported that the Katyn massacre, in which the Soviets killed more than 20,000 Polish military officers in cold blood, had been committed by the Germans.
Winston Burdett testifying in 1955 before a Senate subcommittee, to which he confessed to having been a Soviet spy
Other KGB men included Peter Rhodes of the New York Herald-Tribune and Winston Burdett of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and CBS News. (Burdett, who for a time had regular personal contact with both FDR and J. Edgar Hoover, eventually admitted his history of espionage in testimony before a Senate subcommittee.) Then there was Walter Lippmann, in his time the dean of American political commentators. Lippmann himself was not a Soviet spy, but – as it turns out – his secretary was. Therefore Lippmann, in whom many leading politicians confided, unknowingly helped transmit vital top-secret information to the KGB.
Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Robert Redford as Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men
In the immediate post-Watergate era, many young Americans’ image of journalists was shaped largely by the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, which depicted Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as stirring heroes of American freedom. Some of those Americans took a long time to recognize that many journalists are, in fact, less devoted to objective truth than to partisan agendas, in the service of which they are more than willing to distort or suppress the facts. Some Americans, alas, have yet to wake up to this reality. Alexander G. Lovelace deserves our thanks for a timely reminder that even the most trusted, respected, and highly placed members of the fourth estate may secretly owe their allegiance to the most morally abominable of masters. There is no reason to believe this is any less true now than it was in the early days of the Cold War.
We’ve been taking a look at the history of The Nation during the Cold War, when it was, as the phrase went, “anti-anti-Communist.” Practically speaking, to be sure, there was little if any difference between The Nation‘s “anti-anti-Communism” and robust advocacy for (or, at the very least, defense of) Communism. Routinely, The Nation‘s editors and contributors wrote about the U.S. and USSR as if their people had, quite simply, chosen different systems, just as you might order a Coke and your best friend might order a Pepsi. And while The Nation tended to dance around the question of whether the Soviet system was inherently oppressive, it had no qualms about stridently denouncing the supposedly intrinsic evils of American capitalism – and supporting America’s enemies, the more tyrannical, it sometimes seemed, the better. In the 1970s, for example, it ran Noam Chomsky‘s defense of the Khmer Rouge from charges of genocide and supported the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Jesse Jackson with Fidel Castro
Among the other postwar-era low notes reprinted in The Nation ‘s special centennial issue: in a 1988 editorial, the Nation actually endorsed world-class shakedown artist and Castro crony Jesse Jackson for president of the United States – this, in the midst of Jackson’s public enthusiasm for Jew-baiting, gay-bashing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan (whom Malcolm X’s own relatives publicly accused of complicity in his assassination) and in the wake of Jackson’s own disgusting reference to New York City as “Hymietown.”
Tony Kushner
Then there’s gay rights. The Nation presents itself today as having always been at the forefront of the struggle for gay equality; but for years, in fact, its contributors were consistently, fiercely opposed to same-sex marriage, gays in the military, and other forms of what they considered gay “assimilation” into bourgeois institutions. In their view, the proper socialist objective was not to achieve equal rights for gay people in mainstream capitalist society, but to marshal marginalized gay people as far-left storm troopers in the battle to overthrow mainstream capitalist society. The anniversary issue reprints part of a typically jejune 1994 article by Tony Kushner that sneeringly rejects gay marriage and calls for gay people to be true to utopian socialist ideals of “liberation.” (It is instructive, by the way, to compare the complete original article – which can be found here – to the expurgated version served up in the anniversary issue.) The bottom line about The Nation and gay rights is that Kushner and other gay stalwarts at the magazine fought tooth and nail against the social changes that have enabled gay Americans to live and thrive openly with far less difficulty than they could a generation ago; yet now the magazine happily, and deceitfully, takes a big chunk of the credit for those very changes.
Mikhail Gorbachev
When the Iron Curtain fell, millions of Eastern Europeans wept with joy and rushed to embrace capitalism and democracy. But the folks at The Nation – like other stateside comrades of the Kremlin – offered no mea culpas and exhibited no shame. Quietly, they more or less dropped their longtime enthusiasm for the Kremlin down the memory hole. But they didn’t revise their poisonously anti-American attitudes, revisit their fierce hostility to the NATO policy of containment, or rethink their resounding contempt for the unapologetic pro-freedom rhetoric of Reagan and Thatcher, which they had repeatedly denounced as vulgar and dangerous. No, they just kept preaching their same old ideology, as if it had not been thoroughly discredited. They even allowed Mikhail Gorbachev, in a 2009 interview with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and hubby Stephen F. Cohen, to cast himself as the hero of the end of the Cold War – and to depict the whole conflict, in the same old way, as a clash between two morally equivalent regimes. Entirely removed from the picture was the monstrous injustice and intrinsic evil of the Communist system, and the fact that that system ultimately came crashing down precisely because of its injustice and evil.
And what about 9/11 and its aftermath? We’ll move on to that disgraceful chapter of The Nation‘s history next time.
We’ve been pondering The Nation, America’s top left-wing weekly, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. Founded as a respectable organ of liberal opinion, it became, in the twentieth century, a megaphone for fans of Soviet Communism. A generation ago, on the brink of the fall of the Iron Curtain, The New York Times’s Richard Bernstein summed upwhere The Nation stood during the Cold War:
The Nation often argues…that the United States is at least equal as a menace to the world as the Soviet Union, perhaps worse; that the United States has been the primary culprit in fueling the arms race and that it has fomented much of the atmosphere of the Cold War; that the United States has perpetrated injustice in places like Central America and the Middle East because of blind anti-Communism.
Bernstein was actually being rather kind here: in fact, during the Cold War The Nation was fiercely, brutally “anti-anti-Communist,” smearing every critic of Communism as a hysterical McCarthyite reactionary. Routinely, the magazine’s contributors wrote about the anti-Communist “witch hunt” of the 1940s and 50s as if the presence of Communists in Hollywood, in Washington, and in New York media and intellectual circles were a feverish figment of paranoid far-right imaginations. In fact, more than a few of the Nation writers who pontificated piously about the presumably fascist “witch hunt” were themselves card-carrying Communists. The anniversary issue of The Nation includes a self-righteous piece by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo about the Hollywood blacklist; it was not accompanied on its first printing, and is not accompanied now, by any acknowledgment that Trumbo was a devoted Stalinist, who in the service of his appalling political loyalties was prepared to do far more than simply blacklist his ideological opponents. The anniversary issue also presents a 1956 piece by W.E. B. DuBois complaining about the lack of attractive choices in the current presidential contest between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson; there is no mention here, either, that DuBois, at the time he wrote that article, was also a convinced Stalinist, who would have been glad to see the U.S. under the thumb of the mass-murdering Soviet dictator rather than in the hands of Eisenhower or Stevenson.
Harold Clurman
We’ve noted that the back pages of The Nation were ideologically sealed off from the front – but not always. In a theater review from 1964, reprinted in the anniversary issue, Harold Clurmanpraises Fiddler on the Roof –set, of course, in Tsarist Russia – as an admirable representation of the joy of collectivist living. Note that Clurman wrote this review just a decade after the death of Stalin, who’d murdered millions through forced collectivization (which The Nation, by the way, had applauded): “Is it any wonder,” wrote Clurman breathlessly in his review of the musical, “that an audience, living in one of the most heartless cities of the world at a time of conformity to the mechanics of production, an audience without much relation to any tradition beyond that expressed through lip service to epithets divested of living experience, an audience progressively more deprived of the warmth of personal contact and the example of dignified companionship, should weep thankfully and laugh in acclamation at these images of a good life lived by good people?”
Fiddler on the Roof playbill, 1964
Clurman seems to have missed entirely the point that the characters in Fiddler on the Roof were poor, tormented victims of Tsarist tyranny and that, at the end, when they’re forced by that tyranny to flee their beloved village of Anatevka, the good news is that they’re all on their way to America, where – as the audience knows, but they don’t – their descendants will enjoy a degree of freedom and prosperity beyond those villagers’ wildest dreams, will escape the Jew-murdering totalitarians of twentieth-century Europe (including not only Hitler’s minions but also the Communist masters of the Gulag), and will one day be able to attend a Broadway play reminding them of just how lucky they are to be living in 1960s America and not turn-of-the-century Russia.
Does he really not know that Trumbo was a Stalinist before HUAC, that he remained a Stalinist throughout his years on the blacklist, and that he was still a Stalinist when it was all over?
