In November of 1963 an American Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Bureaucratic apathy, and misplaced ideas of tolerance, allowed Oswald to commit this crime; by which he removed from office a staunch anti-Communist hated and feared by the Kremlin.  But don’t expect to hear that in a typical college level history class.

Most history professors and textbook writers are leftists who are very reluctant to acknowledge any connection between Communism and anything bad. Mainstream historians like Dr. Eric Foner show more sympathy for Soviet agents who lost their jobs in the US government after being exposed, than for the millions of innocent people, President Kennedy included, who lost their lives at the hands of Communists during the twentieth century.

The View from the Left

College professors and other leftists are generally loath to talk about the Marxist beliefs of the man who assassinated President Kennedy. The freshman textbook Making a Nation,¹ for example, does not inform the reader that the President’s assassin was a Communist who had tried to renounce his US citizenship.  Similarly, the textbooks Nation of Nations,² Give Me Liberty,³ and America’s Promise⁴ do not say a word about Oswald’s Communist loyalties. Give Me Liberty does not even mention that Oswald ever visited the Soviet Union.

Nation of Nations makes it sound as if Oswald’s reasons for killing the President are a mystery wrapped in an enigma: “Oswald seemed a mysterious figure. Emotionally unstable, he had spent several years in the Soviet Union. But his actions were never fully explained, because only two days after his arrest – in full view of television cameras – he was gunned down by a disgruntled nightclub operator named Jack Ruby.”

Kennedy the Cold Warrior

In reality, Oswald’s reasons for killing Kennedy are not difficult to fathom. President Kennedy was a rock-ribbed anti-Communist who supported Joseph McCarthy’s efforts against subversion in the US government, and took a very aggressive stance against the Soviet Union internationally.

A Wikipedia page on Kennedy describes the hostility Kennedy engendered in the Kremlin: “Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and senior Soviet military figures began to believe that Kennedy was a dangerous extremist who, with the American military, was seeking to plant the idea of a Soviet first-strike capability to justify a pre-emptive American attack. This belief about Kennedy as a militarist was reinforced in Soviet minds by the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and led to the Soviets placing nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.”

Lee Harvey “Oswaldskovitch”

Oswald was a self-described Marxist from the time he was a teenager. During the three years he spent in the US Marine Corps, he was known to his peers as “Oswaldskovitch” because of his obvious Soviet sympathies. Amazingly, the military did not discriminate against Oswald on the basis of his vocal support for America’s Cold War enemy. He was assigned a job in radar technology, and cleared for access to classified materials. Soon he was assigned to a high-security US military base in Japan, responsible for super-secret U2 spy plane missions over the Soviet Union.

Bureaucratic Inertia

Sadly, the Marine Corps was not the only branch of the service that sometimes displayed a cavalier attitude toward security risks during the Cold War. The Army had its share of security problems as well, and Army brass sometimes showed the same “don’t rock the boat” attitude.

In October of 1953, for example, Army General Ralph Zwicker wrote a letter to his commanding officer warning that a Major under his command appeared to be a Communist.⁵ In January of 1954 General Zwicker shared the same information with an investigator working for Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy called the Major (Major Irving Peress) up before his committee and asked him questions like “did you attempt to recruit any of the military personnel there into the Communist party?” “did you have Communist party meetings in your home?” and “did you organize a Communist cell at Camp Kilmer?” Peress took the Fifth in response to each question.⁶

Soon General Zwicker was visited by a messenger from his commanding officer. When General Zwicker testified before McCarthy’s committee, his story had changed.⁷ He denied any knowledge of the Major’s Communist associations. The Major avoided a court-martial, and was granted an honorable discharge. The following year McCarthy was censured by the Senate.

“Oswaldskovich” entered the Marine Corps just two years later.

Oswald Defects, Bureaucrats Yawn

In September of 1959 Oswald was able to obtain a discharge from the Marine Corps by claiming, falsely, that he needed to care for his invalid mother. In October he showed up at the American Embassy in Moscow and renounced his American Citizenship, stating as his reason “I am a Marxist.” He told Richard Snyder, the State Department consul in Moscow, that he had asked the Soviet Government to make him a citizen, and had offered to share with the Soviets any sensitive military information he had learned during his time in the Marines. The State Department refused to accept Oswald’s renunciation of his American citizenship, and kept his US passport on file. In November of 1959 Oswald sent the same State Department official a strongly worded letter repeating his demand that his American citizenship be revoked. Snyder again ignored Oswald’s renunciation of his citizenship.

A couple years later Oswald, who had gotten married in the interim, took advantage of the State Department’s liberal treatment. He demanded and got the return of his American passport.  He returned the United States, with his Russian wife, in June of 1962. No one asked him to renounce Communism.

When he’d been back in the United States for just eight months, Oswald tried to murder General Edwin Walker, an outspoken anti-Communist. Soon after that he was arrested after passing out leaflets in support of Cuban Communist dictator Fidel Castro, and getting into a street fight with three Cuban immigrants who opposed Castro.  He tried to visit Cuba. He also wrote at least one letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C.

Seventeen months after he returned to the US from the Soviet Union, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy.

College professors and other liberals may portray Oswald’s motives as an unfathomable mystery, but in reality they are pretty easy to understand. President Kennedy was an implacable and powerful enemy of Soviet Communism, and Oswald was a Communist. The only real mystery is how the State Department let such an obvious enemy of this country, who had twice renounced his citizenship, return to the United States.

Epilogue

The sad epilogue to this sad story is that the State Department didn’t really change its ways after letting a violence-prone Communist come to the US to kill the President. Nor did the Immigration and Naturalization Service learn anything from the experience. In the years 2000 and 2001 nineteen Muslim radicals, most of them from Saudi Arabia, were fast-tracked into this country and allowed to stay here, despite any number of obvious red flags. On September 11 of 2001 they hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into office buildings, killing some three thousand Americans.

As philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

¹Boydston, Cullather, Lewis, McGerr, and Oakes; Making a Nation; 2004 Edition
²Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations; 2006 Edition
³Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty, 2005 edition
⁴Rorabaugh, Critchlow, and Baker; America’s Promise, 2004 Edition
⁵M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 525
⁶Ibid., p. 523
⁷Ibid., pp. 524, 525

When Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd of 1963, he was striking a blow for Socialism; but don’t expect to hear that in a typical college history class.

College professors and other leftist like to depict President Kennedy as a liberal, and the man who murdered him simply as a “troubled former marine,”¹ whose motives are best left unexamined. In reality, Kennedy’s policies, both foreign and domestic, were so far to the right of the ideas in vogue on most campuses today that any honest appraisal would portray him as the enemy of everything most history professors believe in. The man who assassinated him, on the other hand, was a committed Marxist who saw Kennedy’s conservatism as a threat.

It’s easy to understand why no one on the left tries to portray Kennedy as a villain. Unlike his friends Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon; John F. “Jack” Kennedy was handsome, witty, and charming. His exploits in WWII were the subject of a Hollywood movie. His wife was the beautiful and glamorous Jacqueline Kennedy, a fashion icon admired and emulated by women around the world.

Heroes and Villains

It is widely acknowledged that college faculties lean to the left, so it shouldn’t be surprising that history professors tend to look for heroes among the ranks of liberals, and for villains among the ranks of the right wing.  Having that agenda, historians have labored to re-package National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler as a right winger, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. For similar reasons, left-leaning scholars have been willing to re-write history to some extent to move the dashing figure of John F. Kennedy from the right wing over to the left.

The textbook Making a Nation, for example, uses the word “liberal” no fewer than fifteen times, in just two pages, in introducing Kennedy’s presidency.² According to this textbook, the only thing that kept President Kennedy from charging forward with a left wing agenda was the narrowness of his electoral victory over Republican opponent Richard Nixon: “The president (sic) maintained a dynamic, energetic image, but his administration, hampered by a weak electoral mandate, did not venture too far out onto the liberal New Frontier…Kennedy gave voice to the new liberalism, but he seldom translated liberal ideas into action.”

The truth is very different. Kennedy’s close race against Richard Nixon in the 1960 election did not keep him from furthering his agenda; he pushed his ideas aggressively and with significant success. But his ideas were not liberal. In actual fact, President Kennedy was conservative on many issues, both foreign and domestic.

Kennedy the Tax-Cutter

During his short presidency Kennedy pushed through Congress a twenty-one percentage point cut in the top marginal tax rate, despite the vocal opposition of actual liberals. In a series of public speeches promoting his tax cut idea he predicted that an increase in tax revenues could be the result of a cut in tax rates; an idea that President Ronald Reagan would echo while pushing for further rate reductions twenty years later. In a speech before the Economic Club of New York, for example, Kennedy said “In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.” Reagan couldn’t have said it any better.

Kennedy’s tax cut was signed into law after his death, and went into effect for 1965. Tax revenues rocketed upward, just as he had predicted.

Kennedy and “McCarthyism”

Liberals who lionize President Kennedy and demonize Joseph McCarthy are reluctant to mention that the two men respected and liked each other. In actual fact, McCarthy was on good terms with the whole Kennedy family. Patriarch Joseph Kennedy was an “admirer and backer”³ of McCarthy during his confrontations with various government figures in the early 1950’s. Two of Joe’s daughters (JFK’s sisters) dated McCarthy.

When John Kennedy was in the House of Representatives from 1947 through 1952, he often broke with his party  to vote with the Republicans. During his time in the house he also vocally denounced some of the same suspected Communist agents McCarthy would go after in the early 1950’s.⁴

When Jack Kennedy first ran for the Senate as a Democrat in 1952, leaders of the Republican Party pressured McCarthy to campaign for Kennedy’s Republican opponent, incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge. McCarthy refused,⁵ and John F. Kennedy took a Senate seat from the Republicans during a year when the Democratic Party as a whole was losing congressional seats.   

John’s brother Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, who would be head of the Justice Department during John’s presidency, worked for McCarthy from 1952 to 1953, as part of his Permanent Sub-committee for Investigations, looking into allegations of Communist activities among government employees. Bobby Kennedy had such respect for McCarthy that he named McCarthy godfather to his daughter Kathleen.

Kennedy and Nixon

Joseph McCarthy was not the only Commie-baiting Republican John F. Kennedy counted among his friends. A young Congressman named Richard Nixon made a name for himself in 1948 by exposing former State Department employee Alger Hiss as a Communist agent. Hiss was eventually convicted of perjury for denying his connections to the Soviet Union, and Nixon became a leader of the anti-Communist movement. Jack Kennedy, being just as fiercely anti-Communist as Nixon, soon became a friend. When Nixon ran for the Senate in 1950 John F. Kennedy donated a thousand dollars to his campaign.⁶

The friendship continued while both men served in the Senate. In 1954 Kennedy nearly died from complications arising from back surgery, and the thought of losing his friend moved Nixon to tears. 

The Russians and the “Missile Gap”

In 1960 Jack Kennedy ran against Nixon, who had been Vice President under President Dwight Eisenhower, for the Presidency. Kennedy’s defining campaign issue was the “Missile Gap;” his claim that the Soviet Union had gained an advantage over the US in nuclear weapons because the Republican Eisenhower/Nixon administration had not spent enough money on the military.

In a speech before the American Legion, Kennedy quite accurately stated that “We and the Communists are now locked in deadly embrace,” because of the “The implacable Communist drive for power.”

In his American Legion speech, Kennedy insisted that the US needed to build nuclear missiles and missile-launching submarines in larger numbers: “we must step up crash programs on the ultimate weapon. The Polaris submarine, the Minuteman missile, which will eventually close the missile gap.”

To make sure that no one could doubt his aggressiveness toward the Communists, Kennedy called out Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev by name: “And I want Mr. Khrushchev and anyone else to understand that if the Democratic Party wins this election, he will confront in the 1960′s an America which is not only militarily strong, but which is waging the offensive for freedom all over the globe.”

When John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as President, he took the opportunity to re-state yet again his firm opposition to Soviet expansionism: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

In words that presaged the “Bay of Pigs” and Cuban Missile Crisis confrontations President Kennedy would have with the Soviets over Cuba, Kennedy went on to say “Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.” Hardly the words of a liberal.

Next week’s post will examine how Kennedy’s aggressive anti-Communism would eventually motivate a young American Communist named Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate him.

¹Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty, p. 854
²Boydston, Cullather, Lewis, McGerr, and Oakes; Making a Nation, 2004 edition, pp. 667, 668
³M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 444
⁴Ibid., p. 449
⁵Ibid., p. 444
⁶Volkan, Itzkowitz, and Dod; Nixon: A Psychobiography, p. 55

During World War II the United States and England joined forces with the Soviet Union to fight National Socialist Germany. While the US and Britain were fighting the Germans, and subsidizing the Soviet government with billions of dollars worth of weapons and other supplies, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was actively working against the interests of his allies.

All through the war years Stalin’s Communist government operated a network spies and subversives within the governments of England and the US. His agents stole the secrets of the atom bomb, undermined the pro-American forces of Chiang Kai-shek in China and Draja Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, interfered with communications between US President Franklin Roosevelt and English Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and generally tried to weaken Britain and the US in every way possible. But don’t expect to hear that in a typical US History class. Because most of America’s modern-day history professors and textbook writers lean very far to the left politically, they are reluctant to discuss the sins of the Soviet Union.

Forgetting Soviet Aggression

The whitewashing of Soviet behavior  in WWII starts even before the entry of Britain and the US into the war. In his freshman history textbook Give Me Liberty, Professor Eric Foner describes the German acts of aggression that helped start WWII in the late 1930’s, but withholds any mention of simultaneous Soviet aggression against Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eastern Poland. He mentions the ironically-named “non-aggression pact” that Hitler and Stalin made with each other in August of 1939, but does not describe it for what it was: a plan for coordinated attacks by Germany and the Soviet Union against their neighbors; a division of the map of Europe into Soviet and German conquest zones.

Here is how Dr. Foner’s book describes the pact and its immediate aftermath:

In 1939, the Soviet Union proposed an international agreement to oppose further German demands for territory. Britain and France, who distrusted Stalin and saw Germany as a bulwark against the spread of communist influence in Europe, refused. Stalin then astonished the world by signing a nonaggression pact with Hitler, his former sworn enemy. On September 1, immediately after signing the Nazi-Soviet pact, Germany invaded Poland…Within a year, the Nazi blitzkrieg (lightning war) had overrun Poland, much of Scandinavia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. On June 14, 1940, German troops occupied Paris.”

Dr. Foner’s book does not say a word about the Soviet attacks against Finland and the three Baltic states, nor does he mention that the Soviets were attacking the eastern part of Poland while the Germans sacked the western part, as agreed to in the “non-aggression” pact. The next time the Soviets are mentioned, it is in the context of Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia, which summarily ended the “non-aggression” pact and aligned the Soviets with Britain in a war against Germany.

The five authors of the textbook Making a Nation¹ are similarly reluctant to mention Soviet aggression at the start of the war, outside of one brief mention of the division of Poland.

The textbook Nation of Nations² actually does briefly mention that the 1939 non-aggression pact allowed for Soviet designs on neighboring countries; albeit in rather bland and ambiguous language. According to the book, the pact allowed Stalin to “extend his western borders by bringing eastern Poland, the Baltic states (Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania), and parts of Romania and Finland into the Soviet sphere.” Words like “invasion” are only used in describing Nazi actions, not Soviet actions.

Making Spies Invisible

The historians who write these textbooks are even more reticent about Soviet espionage than they are about Soviet aggression. None of the three textbooks cited above mention a word about the WWII era espionage campaigns conducted in Britain and the US by Communist parties controlled by the Soviet Union through the Communist International (Comintern). Neither does the textbook America’s Promise³ Nor do any of the four books mention that Comintern agents in the American government actively influenced government policy to the benefit of the Soviet regime, and the detriment of America and her other allies. 

Nor, for that matter, do any of these textbooks even mention the words “Communist International.” Only Nation of Nations uses the contraction “Comintern,” one time, and only to say that WWII villains Germany and Japan formed a pact against it.

The Other Side of the Story

The half of history the history books don’t tell is that Communist agents were very active in the US and Britain before, during and after the “alliance” that Stalin formed with the US and Britain after Germany invaded Russia.

Between August of 1939 and June of 1941, when Hitler and Stalin were coordinating their attacks on their neighbors under the “non-aggression pact,” Communist agents in Britain and the US were under orders from Moscow to help Hitler. In England, Communist papers like the London Daily Worker published anti-war propaganda during this period.⁴When the German air force was conducting bombing raids against British cities, Communist agents like J.B.S. Haldane and Ivor Montagu sent their Soviet handlers reports on British air defenses, and damage reports about areas the Germans had attacked.⁵

During this period Soviet agents in the US were similarly publishing “anti-war” propaganda aimed at reducing American support for England, in general; and especially at keeping the US from joining the British in their war against Hitler. Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party USA, published a book called The Second Imperialist War condemning the British war effort.⁶   Communists including Frederick Field organized a group called the American Peace Mobilization, which published “anti-war” propaganda, and even picketed the White House to oppose President Roosevelt’s plan to send aid to the British. But when Hitler invaded Russia on June 22 of 1941 the leaders of the American Peace Mobilization immediately forgot everything they had been saying about “peace,” re-named their organization the American People’s Mobilization, and started lobbying for the US to enter the war against the Nazis.⁷

Wartime Priorities

After Hitler invaded Russia, Soviet agents in Britain and the US supported the anti-Nazi war effort, albeit with conditions.

After Germany subordinated the government of Yugoslavia in early April of 1941, a group of soldiers and officers under the command of Draja Mihailovich, calling themselves the “Chetniks,” fought a guerilla war against the Nazis. Communist leaders in Yugoslavia had no interest in fighting the Nazi’s until after Hitler invaded Russia, but once Hitler and Stalin stopped working together they took up arms against both the Nazi’s and the Chetniks. The Communist leader, who gave himself the name “Tito,” was a protégé of Stalin, and thus the darling of Communist agents in the British and American governments.⁸

The way Communist agents in the Roosevelt administration represented the Yugoslavia situation to President Roosevelt was very different from what has now been documented as the actual truth. The picture he was getting from trusted aides induced Roosevelt to terminate American support for Mihailovich and start sending money and arms to Tito. By undermining British and American support for Mihailovich’s Chetniks, Stalin’s agents in the US government  impaired the war effort to some extent; but the Soviet Union’s agenda was served by having strong Communist influences in all the areas the Soviets hoped to conquer (and actually would conquer) in the later stages of the war.

In China, the bloodthirsty Communist Mao Zedong enjoyed the same advantage Tito had in Yugoslavia. He spent little effort fighting the Japanese, and sometimes even found ways to peacefully co-exist with the Japanese invaders.⁹His real fight was with the pro-American forces of Chiang Kai-shek. Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek, with American financial support, was carrying the fight to the Japanese. But Soviet agents in the US government undermined Chiang at every turn. As they had in the Yugoslavia situation, Communist agents in the American government put Soviet interests ahead of the actual war effort.

Yugoslavia and China were not the only places where American allies were cut off at the knees by Communists in the American government. The same thing happened in Poland in 1944. As the Soviet Army was fighting to retake Poland from the Germans, Poles organized an armed rebellion against their German conquerors. One would think that the Russians would appreciate the help in fighting the Germans, but Stalin ordered his army to hold back, to allow the Nazis to crush the Polish resistance. Stalin was planning on enslaving Poland, something he had been trying to do before Germany invaded Russia in 1941. Letting patriotic Poles gain a military victory in their own country was not in his game plan.¹⁰

While the Polish resistance was still fighting for survival, and the Soviet army was holding back to let the Poles be slaughtered, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Roosevelt made some effort to send weapons and other materiel to the beleaguered Poles. Presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, a Communist agent, boasted to an American general that he was willing and able to withhold any telegrams on the subject that Churchill might send to Roosevelt, in order to delay aid to the Poles until they were beyond help.¹¹

When WWII was over, Soviet imperialism quickly gave rise to an anti-Soviet backlash in the US, which history professors and other leftists disparage as “McCarthyism.” But the American people were wise to distrust Stalin and his agents. The Soviet Union relentlessly pursued an agenda of subversion, aggression, and conquest; from its foundation in 1917 to its ignominious death in 1991.

¹Boydston, Cullather, Lewis, McGerr, & Oakes; Making a Nation
²Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff; Nation of Nations
³Rorabaugh, Critchlow, & Baker; America’s Promise
⁴Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets, p. 23
⁵ibid., pp. 24, 25
⁶ibid., p. 513
⁷M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History
, pp. 58, 59, 406
⁸ibid., pp. 93-97
⁹ibid., p. 107
¹⁰4Romerstein and Breindel, The Venona Secrets
, p. 216
¹¹ibid., pp. 217, 218

During the 1930’s and 40′s China was torn by a civil war between the forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. After Japan attacked both China and the United States at the start of World War II, the US gave some financial and military support to the anti-Communist Chiang; but Soviet agents in the US government undermined Chiang’s interests in various ways. Four years after the defeat of Japan, Mao’s Communists took control of all of mainland China. Chiang and his supporters fled to Taiwan.

Mao’s victory in China was the worst imaginable disaster for the Chinese people. Over the next thirty years Mao’s Communist government killed between forty-five million and seventy-five million innocent Chinese civilians in implementing his “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” movements.¹ Chiang, meanwhile, established an authoritarian government in Taiwan that gradually evolved, with US support, into a democracy. The people living under Chiang’s rule prospered financially, and enjoyed relatively high standards of living, even before the political reforms that made Taiwan a true democracy in the 1980’s.

The American Communists who undermined Chiang’s American support have the blood of millions of Chinese civilians on their hands, but don’t expect to hear that in a typical college history class. Most of America’s history professors and textbook writers, being the arch-leftists they are, downplay or completely ignore Mao’s crimes, while emphasizing and exaggerating Chiang’s shortcomings.

The View from the Ivory Tower

The freshman history textbook Nation of Nations,² for example, introduces the reader to the greatest mass murderer in world history this way: “The winds of reform also blew through Asia. Some Asian leaders, like Mao Zedong in China and Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, saw Communism as the means to liberate their peoples from imperialist rule.”

Mao needed to liberate his people, the book tells us, because at the end of the 1930’s China was ruled by “the corrupt one-party dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.”

Nation of Nations is not the only college textbook to portray Mao as a liberator and Chiang as a dictator. According to the textbook America’s Promise³, Chiang was treacherous to the United States all through WWII:

Roosevelt believed that China, under military dictator Chiang Kai-shek, should be treated as an equal partner, but Chiang often seemed more interested in resuming the civil war against the communists than in engaging the Japanese. General Joseph W. Stilwell reported widespread corruption in Chiang’s army, including sale of American supplies to the Japanese.

In describing the challenges President Truman faced at the end of WWII, America’s Promise states “In Asia, Truman confronted a full-scale war between the reactionary and corrupt nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek and communist insurgents led by Mao Zedong.”

In describing the 1949 conquest of China by Mao’s Communist forces, Nation of Nation states:

Chiang’s defeat came as no surprise to the (American) State Department. Officials there had long regarded Chiang and his officials as hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. Despite major American efforts to save his regime and stabilize China, poverty and civil unrest spread. In 1947 full-scale civil war had broken out. By February 1949 almost half of half of Chiang’s demoralized troops had defected to the Communists. So the December defeat was hardly unexpected.

Neither of the textbooks cited above mentions the prosperity, and eventual democracy, enjoyed by the people living under Chiang Kai-shek on the island of Taiwan. Nor do they mention the millions of innocent deaths engineered by Mao on the mainland. Similarly, the textbooks Give Me Liberty⁴ and Making a Nation⁵ don’t say a word about Mao’s crimes. A student who reads all four of these mainstream college textbooks would come away with the impression that Mao was an altruistic freedom fighter and Chiang was both corrupt and cruel.

Mao’s Little Helpers

The version of history offered up in these textbooks is very similar to the version provided to the Roosevelt administration, in the early 1940’s, by American diplomat John Stewart Service and American Treasury Department attaché Solomon Adler. Both men lived with economist Chi Chao-ting, who was employed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government, in a house in Chungking, China. It has now been well documented that both Adler and Chi were Soviet agents.⁶ Adler was identified as such in the Venona Documents, and by spy-turned-informant Elizabeth Bentley.⁷ Chi was identified by his cousin-by-marriage, and fellow spy, Philip Jaffe.  John Service also appears to have been a Soviet agent; the evidence against him is voluminous, although all of it is circumstantial. Both Adler and Chi sought refuge in Maoist China after the war.

Back in Washington, DC, the reports of Adler and Service received sympathetic treatment from Harry Dexter White, of the Treasury Department, and Lauchlin Currie, a member of President Roosevelt’s White House Staff; both of whom were Soviet agents.⁸ White’s position in the Treasure department enabled him to interfere with the transfer of funds to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Currie was able to influence President Roosevelt, then, later, President Truman, to view support for Chiang as a losing game.

Meanwhile the Roosevelt administration, at the urging of Soviet Agent Currie, sent Soviet agent Owen Lattimore to China to serve as an American “adviser” to Chiang Kai-shek.⁹

History as a Political Tool

When Presidents Roosevelt and Truman restricted and delayed aid to Chiang’s government, they were doing it on the basis of incomplete or false information. Neither of them had any way to foresee the horrible bloodbath that Mao would inflict on the Chinese people once he had defeated Chiang. Add to that the fact that the information they were getting was distorted by Communist agents in the American government, and it is easy excuse Roosevelt and Truman’s mistakes.

It is much more difficult to excuse the willful misrepresentations of modern history professors, who surely know all about the carnage Mao inflicted on China, and choose to withhold this information from their students.

Why is this important? Because the way history is represented in the classroom affects the political views that students will carry with them throughout their lives. Leftist scholars represent things the way they do because they know that their words have the power to leave lasting impressions.

One frightening example of this comes in a speech given by President Obama’s White House Communications Director Anita Dunn in June of 2009. Reflecting the leftist view that permeates academia (and the Obama administration) Dunn actually compared the blood-drenched tyrant Mao with Mother Teresa!

¹ Courtois, Werth, Panne, Paczkowski, Bartosek,and Margolin; The Black Book of Communism, pp. 463-464.
²Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff; Nation of Nations
³Rorabaugh, Critchlow, & Baker; America’s Promise
⁴Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty
⁵Boydston, Cullather, Lewis, McGerr, & Oakes; Making a Nation
⁶M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 100
⁷ibid., p. 101
⁸ibid., p. 105
⁹Ibid., p. 397

During the twentieth century Communist governments murdered roughly a hundred million of their own citizens, tortured and tormented millions more, and robbed hundreds of millions more of individuality, human dignity, and hope. Joseph Stalin alone ordered the deaths of some twenty to thirty million Soviet citizens, including six or seven million in the Ukraine in a single year. When not committing atrocities against their own people, Communists committed even worse atrocities against the people they captured or conquered during their wars of aggression. (In WWII Berlin, for example, soldiers of the advancing Soviet Army raped some ten thousand German women literally to death, according to hospital records.)

Within the United States a virtual army of Communist spies and sympathizers labored to promote the interests of mass murderers like Stalin and Mao. Soviet spies provided Stalin’s government with the secrets of the atom bomb. Soviet agents in the State department shaped American policy in ways that facilitated Communist conquest in places like Hungary and China. During WWII, Communists in the federal government’s Office of War Information even pressured Hollywood to make movies portraying the Soviet Union in a positive light.

But don’t expect to hear these things in a college history class. Most history professors are so committed to their left wing political beliefs that they downplay or ignore most of Communism’s crimes, and demonize anti-Communists in our own country.

From Superpower to Has-Been

In a famous 1982 speech, President Ronald Reagan eloquently condemned Communism for its many evils; and urged the other leaders of the free world to support his plans for military and diplomatic action to free the enslaved millions behind the Iron Curtain. If free people would stand together against Communism, he said, the result would be “the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history, as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”

American intellectuals, with few exceptions, reacted to the President’s 1982 speech with scorn. Communism has always been considered chic among ivory tower liberals, who applaud its Utopian promises while overlooking its real-world abuses. The college campus intelligentsia somehow viewed Reagan’s vision of a world without Communism as both impossible and wrong-headed.  

Today, thank God, the Soviet Union lies moldering on that ash-heap that President Reagan could see in its future back in 1982. Real freedom has come into the lives of millions Eastern Europe and Western Asia. China has been forced to abandon Communism in all but name. The only remaining Soviet-style Communist regimes in the world are in desperately poor and miserable countries like Cuba and North Korea. In the words of Thomas Sowell, “Marxism is an ism that has become a wasm.”

While most people celebrate this new world order, some on the hard left (including a fair number of college history professors) view the halcyon years of Communism with ill-concealed nostalgia; and view cold warriors like Reagan, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joseph McCarthy with ill-concealed rage.

Eric Foner’s Version of History

Professor Eric Foner, a past president of the American Historical Association, sprinkled his freshman history textbook Give Me Liberty with flattering references to the Communist Party USA; which until 1991 was the Soviet Union’s base of operations for espionage and subversion in the United States.

During the Great Depression, Foner tells us, “Only the minuscule Communist Party seemed able to give a political focus to the anger and despair.” “The CIO and Communist Party,” Foner states, “became focal points for a broad social and intellectual impulse that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom.” Furthermore, “the Communist Party was the era’s only predominantly white organization to make fighting racism a top priority.” 

Not surprisingly, Dr. Foner takes a dim view of the anti-Communist movement of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Like other textbook authors, he repeatedly uses the word “hysteria” to describe the anti-subversive efforts of this period. And like other textbook writers, he resorts to making flat-out false statements about Senator Joseph McCarthy, in order to portray America’s counter-espionage efforts as a fraud and a crime.

Professor Foner condemns the NAACP for purging Communists from its leadership during the Cold War years, and gives very sympathetic treatment to black activists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson, both of whom actively supported the Soviet Union. Foner laments that “When the government deprived Robeson of his passport and indicted Du Bois for failing to register as an agent of the Soviet Union, few prominent Americans, white or black, protested.” “The charge against Du Bois,” Foner goes on to say, “was so absurd that even at the height of McCarthyism, the judge dismissed it.”

The charge against W.E.B. DuBois was not at all absurd, in actual fact. Both DuBois and Robeson were proud recipients of the Soviet Union’s “Stalin Peace Prize.” When Soviet butcher Joseph Stalin died in 1963, DuBois described him as a “great man” in a eulogy published in the National Guardian. In the eulogy DuBois went beyond praising Stalin personally, and actually commended Stalin’s murder of  Russia’s “kulaks” (small farm owners) as a necessary step in defending the future of Communism.

Dr. Foner also goes out of his way to whitewash Soviet crimes during the WWII era, but that will be the subject of a future post. 

Dr. Foner has certainly not been the only textbook writer to give Communism a sympathetic portrayal. His book is not the only one to use the word “hysteria” in describing anti-Communist measures taken by the American government during the Cold War, and it is certainly not the only one that makes blatantly false statements about Joseph McCarthy.

Communists as Martyrs

In the textbook Making A Nation the chapter on the Cold War opens with a very sympathetic portrayal of Esther and Stephen Brunauer, an “American success story” who “should have looked forward to a happy, prosperous future.” The Brunauers’ troubles started when “a US Congressman accused Esther of being one of the ‘pro-Communist fellow travelers and muddle heads’ in the State Department.” The story goes on to describe how the Brunauers were exonerated; but lost their jobs in the government, despite their manifest innocence, because “The Brunauers’ employers, the State Department and the Navy, were unwilling to keep such controversial people on the job.”

The truth is very different.

As M. Stanton Evans shows in his exhaustively researched and abundantly well-documented book Blacklisted by History the hearing that “exonerated” Esther Brunauer was nothing more than a series of denials by Mrs. Brunauer, which the sympathetic committee chairman (Senator Millard Tydings) chose to accept at face value.

Evans proves in his book that most of Mrs. Brunauer’s denials were lies. She denied involvement with a Communist front group called the American Youth Congress; the record shows that she was a member of the group and sponsored one of its meetings.¹ She denied collaborating with a Communist named Clarence Hathaway; the record shows that she did.² She denied presiding at a 1936 meeting of the American Friends of the Soviet Union; Evans’ book actually includes a copy of a promotional poster for the event, with her name printed in big letters in the center!³

McCarthy found these activities especially troubling because Mrs. Brunauer’s husband, who also had a history of associations with Communist front groups, worked in weapons research for the Navy and had, at one point, asked to be involved in the military’s nuclear weapons program.⁴

Similar misrepresentations of Communist agents as martyrs, and government investigators as heartless inquisitors, appear in many other freshman history textbooks. The example above is more or less typical.

Any student in a college history class would do well to remember that the portrayal of Communism being presented is likely to be biased, if not downright dishonest. The truth is that Communism was (and still is, wherever it is being practiced) an evil ideology that makes Hitler’s National Socialism look tame by comparison; and it was greatly facilitated in the twentieth century by its fans and supporters in the United States.

¹M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, p. 353
²ibid.
³ibid., p. 351
⁴ibid., p. 354, 355