An irony, by the way, since the phenomenon we now call McCarthyism came on the scene some years before old Joe burst forth with his fake 1950 boast that “I have here in my hand a list of 205–a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party” (later he turned out to have an empty hand). But just beneath the surface lurks a contest over the image of the man whose name has come to symbolize the era in question, Joe McCarthy himself.
Now what is going on here? On the surface it appears to be either a fifty-year-old dispute about the guilt or innocence of various alleged American spies for the Russians and the nature of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and 1940s, or a new dispute about whether, given the newly available evidence, the old dispute is now beyond dispute. Replied The New Republic: “Victor Navasky…only confirms his desire to continue playing ‘games with history.’ He ignores the consensus among historians that the Venona project files confirm the guilt of many accused in the 1950s of spying for the Soviet Union in the previous decade, including Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg…and. Did The New Republic really contend that such claims are beyond dispute? Robert Oppenheimer was a “conscious collaborator with the Soviet secret police” and that Harry Hopkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s intimate friend and White House adviser, was a “Soviet agent.” These were among the conclusions of the latest book drawing on cold war archives, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors, by Herbert Romerstein and the late Eric Breindel. Stone, “in the end agreed to work for the NKVD” that J. But more seriously, I expressed curiosity as to whether that magazine really believed that the incorruptible one-man-band, maverick journalist I.F. I of course took the opportunity to ask in a letter to the editor of The New Republic whether it was possible to be both “tiresome and sickening” at the same time. “The matter, I would suggest, is still in dispute,” I wrote, and I went on to say that although most illusions about Soviet-style Communism may be exhausted, the paranoia left over from those years persists.Īs if to prove my point, no sooner did my piece appear than cold war historian Ron Radosh and former New Left journalist David Horowitz, not to mention the center-liberal New Republic, serially attacked the New York Times for…well, let me quote The New Republic: “ a prominent writer to play his tiresome and sickening games with history” in its pages. But I also thought to use the occasion to observe that even as Hall passed from the scene, a new cadre of cold war historians seems obsessed with perpetuating a counterillusion–seizing fragments from cold war archives, ambiguous intercepts from cables between Moscow and its US-based operatives, and other ephemera to prove that the CPUSA had indeed not been a bona fide political party but rather was control-central for a nest of spies, as “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy had charged–that McCarthy, despite his bad press, had been right after all. 3 (Autumn 2000).Īrthur Miller once observed that “an era may be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.” It occurred to me, as I typed my 750 words, that during his lifetime Hall, who criticized Gorbachev’s reform program and remained a hard-liner to the end, never seemed to give up his illusions.
In addition, readers may wish to consult "The Noel Field Dossier" by Ethan Klingsberg and, outside these pages, "Venona and Alger Hiss" by John Lowenthal in Intelligence and Security, Vol. Victor Navasky also reviewed Perjury by Weinstein. Elinor Langer discussed Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus Ellen Schrecker, The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev Miriam Schneir and Walter Schneir, Venona by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes Jack Gelber, A View From Alger's Window by Anthony Hiss Stanley Kutler, Joseph McCarthy by Arthur Herman and Stephen Schwartz, The Venona Secrets by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel. Many of the books mentioned in this essay were reviewed in these pages at the time of their publication, by other scholars.
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