RESEARCHING AND LISTENING TO HISTORY: CONTINUING THE DIANA WEST BOOK DISCUSSION- MAX FRIEDMAN
( Friedman was a former VN/Cambodia journalist for Human Events weekly, 1970)
Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” has sparked a lot of controversy among conservative historians and I would like to put in my two sense because I have been studying the issue of Communist/Soviet penetration of our Government, especially in the 1930’s and 1940’s, for a long time. I’ve been lucky because I have met a few of the people who helped to break the Alger Hiss story, as well as to expose Communist Party USA operations and individuals both within the government and without.
For that reason, I would like to do some highlighting of such contacts because it shows how extensive the Communist issue has been on my life.
I met and heard Whittaker Chambers speak shortly before he died. I actually talked to him (I was about 16 at the time). I also met the late Isaac Don Levine, an American journalist who covered the Russian Revolution of 1917, and who later took Chambers to meet presidential advisor A.A. Berle, in the White House, to have Chambers reveal directly to him what he knew about Alger Hiss as both a Communist Party member and as a Soviet spy.
· As a counter-balance speaker to Chambers, our boys club advisor brought in a local ACLU attorney who promoted a book entitled “The Un-Americans” by Frank Donner. It was a leftist attack on Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley and other Communist Party defectors, as well as on the FBI, CIA, congressional investigative committees and private groups who did research on communism.
What the speaker did not say, or perhaps did not know, was that Donner was a deep cover Communist Party USA member, who worked in the Party’s security apparatus along with Frank Wilkinson, once a California government employee who went to jail for perjury. Donner eventually emerged as the ACLU’s man heading a “Surveillance Project” at Yale.
· I also have met and questioned both of the theoreticians of the CPUSA (Herbert Aptheker) and the Trotskyite “Socialist Workers Party” (George Novak, once a secretary to Leon Trotsky in Mexico). Both polite but shallow ideologues at best.
I was proud to have been mentored in internal security by the late Herbert “I Led 3 Lives” Philbrick, the FBI undercover agent, and the late Herb Romerstein, a former very young member of the CPUSA, then an Army veteran of the Korean War, a state investigator specializing in Communist penetration of education, and then a government analyst and investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities and its successor, the House Internal Security Committee. He also worked for the House Select Intelligence Committee and the State Department’s section on Soviet Disinformation and Propaganda operations.
Stan Evans published my first monograph in 1976, as part of the American Conservative Union’s ACU Education and Research Institute (“The Meaning of the Bicentennial: Volume One – The Peoples Bicentennial Commission). He also served as an editor of “The Pink Sheet on the Left/American Sentinel” while I was an Associate Editor, writing on internal security and terrorism matters.
Both Evans and Romerstein wrote several books within the past 2-10 years dealing with Soviet penetration of the U.S. Government. Diana West’s book “American Betrayal” looks like a continuation of the last Evans/Romerstein book “Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government”, Threshold Editions, 2012.
Two other books of note by Romerstein and colleagues that preceded the above by many years, were the devastatingly revealing “The KGB Against the ‘Main Enemy’: How the Soviet Intelligence Service Operates Against the United States”, with former Soviet KGB officer Stanislaw Levchenko” , Lexington Books, 1989 and the voluminous “The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors”, with the late Eric Breindel, 2000.
These books should be placed in a set with the pioneering works by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, in the Soviet Archives and on the Venona papers. The titles of their very important books are “The Secret World of American Communism”, Yale Un. Press, 1995; “Spies” with Alexander Vassiliev, another KGB defector; and “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America”, Yale Un. Press, 1999, among others.
Author Steve Kates mentions “Robert Conquest” and his “three laws of politics”. I had met Conquest and read his book “The Terror” about Stalin’s bloody reign in the Soviet Union, but what united us was a common effort of producing a series of studies for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Senate Judiciary Committee, entitled “The Human Cost of Communism”. Conquest did the powerful, summary volume entitled “The Human Cost of Communism in the Soviet Union” (an estimated 30-40 MILLION dead) ; Prof. Richard Walker (Un. S.C.) produced the second, “The Human Cost of Communism in China” which provided the then updated figure of Mao/communism having killed an estimated 60 Million people there (believed to be a low figure); and the late Dave Martin (SISS) and myself did “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam”, first study , 1972. Two hearings on this topic followed, one with the title of “The Testimony of D. Gareth Porter” and the last, “The Human Cost of Communism in Vietnam – II: They Myth of No Bloodbath” Testimony of Daniel Teodoru”.
These compact studies were, for decades, the definitive updated publications on this “human cost” until the “Black Book of Communism” was published in the 1990s, with more updated figures. Also, among the best updated studies on the “human cost of the communist conquest of South Vietnam” were the Desbarat-Jackson study (about 1980) followed by two from the Aurora Foundation by Stephen Denney & Ginetta Sagan (a renown Italian anti-fascist partisan fighter from WW2), entitled “Violations of Human Rights in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, April 30, 1975 – April 30, 1983” and the later updated editor for “April 1975 – December 1988. They followed a 1978 study entitled “Re-education Camps and Prisons in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam: A Human Rights Tragedy” , a report of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Bar Association of the City of New York, written by noted Vietnam specialist “Stephen B. Young.
I also know and like Ron Radosh. We are both members of Historians of American Communism, an organization of professional historians and academic researchers, plus former members of the CPUSA as well as anti-communist fighters. His journey from being raised in a hardcore Red family to a person on the other side may not have been finished, re his severe critique of West’s book. Only time will tell where he lives on the political spectrum.
Criticisms come with the territory we live in, so Diana West must view them as natural but sometimes disappointing. Her writing will have to stand on the documentation that she produced, while her opinions and conclusions are certainly her own and should be respected as such.
She is not the “enemy”. Communism and communists are. In our war against totalitarian ideologies, we must remember that they are the “enemy”, not those who do their honest best to expose them.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/01/10/america-the-big-dumb-ox-steven-kate
“America, the Big Dumb Ox”: Steven Kates ****
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2014/01-02/america-big-dumb-ox/
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