Debunking Howard Zinn

by Mary Grabar

  Playing a significant role in all this was Owen Lattimore, a “scholar of the little-known cultures of the Chinese borderlands of Mongolia, Manchuria, and the Turkish-speaking regions of inner Asia.” Recommended by the spy Lauchlin Currie, he “served in Chiang’s headquarters . . . during 1941 and 1942” and then as “deputy director of Pacific operations for the Office of War Information. In 1950 he was director of the School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University.” After the FBI found him to be “pro-Communist in his sympathies,” but with “no reliable evidence that he was a Soviet agent or even a secret member of the CPUSA,” the Tydings Committee “exonerated him.” He was then brought before the McCarran committee, where under a more probing examination, Lattimore was revealed to have defended the Moscow Show Trials and to have “been a close associate of several of those who stole government documents in the Amerasia case,” along with serving “on Amerasia’s editorial board for several years.” At the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR), he had advised a colleague about surreptitiously advancing policy to the benefit of the Chinese and Russian Communists, and, in 1949, “just before the Communist invasion of South Korea,” letting “South Korea fall—but not to let it look like we pushed it.” Lattimore was charged with seventeen counts of perjury, but “federal courts twice rejected the indictment as involving states of mind and judgments that did not lend themselves to judicial determination in a criminal case.” Still, “the revelations of his past sympathy for Soviet policies disqualified him for faculty status in programs training Americans for U.S. government foreign service.”50

  As Haynes acknowledges, Senator McCarran, who as a Democrat had sway in the Truman administration, was finally able to drum Lattimore out of government service. But while Lattimore may have been a scholar and not a spy, he was still able to influence policy—perhaps even more so because of the assumptions about scholarly objectivity and expertise. While detractors of the anti-Communist “Red Scare” may point to Lattimore as a victim of a “witch hunt,” most Americans during this period would probably not have wanted someone like him teaching foreign service officers, or even their own children at a university.51

  Lattimore, however, was a featured guest speaker at—Spelman College! Invited by—Howard Zinn! We wonder what the students heard about Communist China. The invitation attracted the attention of the FBI. In A People’s History, Zinn presents Lattimore as a victim, someone who could not even get the full support of the ACLU. As Zinn points out, Lattimore was a target of a speech by then-congressman John F. Kennedy in January of 1949. Zinn quotes Kennedy’s speech at length, inserting explanatory information in brackets: “So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks [both scholars in the field of Chinese history, Owen Lattimore a favorite target of McCarthy, John Fairbank, a Harvard professor] with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after 20 years of war and tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in non-Communist China. . . .”52

  As a matter of fact, Kennedy was absolutely right—except that he gave too much of the benefit of the doubt to Lattimore, whose concern about the “imperfection” of Chinese democracy served as a cover for his larger goal: Professor Lattimore avoided formal ties to the Communist Party, but did everything to advance the Soviet agenda from his position as a “scholar.”

  And yet, Zinn presents the House Committee as paranoid: “interrogating Americans about their Communist connections, holding them in contempt if they refused to answer, distributing millions of pamphlets” that claimed that Communists could be found “ ‘everywhere—in factories, offices, butcher shops, on street corners, in private business. . . .’ ”53 Well, they were there. And, we would add, in classrooms. While some professors at American universities were actual Communists, many more were opposed to the committee. In 1947, fifty professors from Dartmouth College signed a letter in opposition. In 1962, William F. Buckley addressed charges from “the Kenyon (College) Council to Abolish the House Committee on Un-American Activities.” In response to one of the twenty-eight professors who wanted to abolish or radically reform the committee (only five favored keeping it), Buckley wrote that “Professor F.” had complained, “I have not heard that the Committee has ever questioned the objectives of the Ku Klux Klan . . . [emphasis in the original].” But as Buckley pointed out, “But the Committee has; see, e.g., Special Com. on HUAC Vol. 1-6, 9-12, 14; Exec. Hearings, made public, Vols. 1, 2, 6-7. Appendix I, IV, and divers references, 1946-1960.”54

  Alas, where was a Communist to go when, as Zinn complains, even “the liberals in the government were themselves acting to exclude, persecute, fire, and even imprison Communists”?55 David Horowitz, in his autobiography, relates how his father, a member of the Communist Party, lost his teaching position for refusing to answer questions about Communist Party membership. But he placed it in perspective: “In the entire Cold War period less than two hundred leaders and functionaries of the Party ever went to prison, in most cases serving less than two years.” Horowitz comments, “Considering the Party’s organizational ties” to the Soviet Union, it was not too large a price to pay.56 Despite the fact that the CPUSA was controlled by a hostile foreign power, the Party “was never outlawed, membership in the party was never a crime, and even during the height of the anti-Communist era it operated legally, maintained offices, published literature, recruited members, and sustained a network of auxiliary organizations.”57

  But according to Zinn, professors just exploring ideas—persons such as himself—faced the prospect of concentration camps because of the anti-Communist hysteria. He charges, “in 1950, the Republicans sponsored an Internal Security Act for the registration of organizations found to be ‘Communist-action’ or ‘Communist-front,’ ” and “liberal senators did not fight . . . head-on.” This bill, also called the McCarran Act after Senator McCarran, was passed on September 23, 1950. To Zinn’s horror, Democrat opponents of the act, “including Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman, proposed a substitute measure, the setting up of detention centers (really concentration camps) for suspected subversives, who, when the President declared an ‘internal security emergency,’ would be held without trial. The detention-camp bill became not a substitute for, but in addition to, the Internal Security Act, and the proposed camps were set up, ready for use.” Fortunately, the 1960s came to save the day: “In 1968, a time of general disillusionment with anti-Communism, this law was repealed.”58

  And who were these Communists that lawmakers wanted to imprison—in “concentration camps,” no less? According to Zinn, by 1954 the “list of organizations [the government had] decided were ‘totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive . . . or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means,’ ” as well as those in “sympathetic association” with them, included “the Chopin Cultural Center, the Cervantes Fraternal Society, the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, the Committee for the Protection of the Bill of Rights, the League of American Writers, the Nature Friends of America, People’s Drama, the Washington Bookshop Association, and the Yugoslav Seaman’s Club.”59 Howard Zinn pretends that there were no such things as Communist front groups.

  Contrary to Zinn’s claim that the McCarran Act was meant to imprison dissident writers, professors, and classical music buffs, it was meant to be used in the case of “a national security emergency,” such as a war with the Soviet Union. As Haynes explains, those to be detained were “potential saboteurs and spies.” Thus, “after the Korean War ended and Stalin died, the Eisenhower administration regarded the plans as unneeded. The government sold or leased the sites for other uses.” Contrary to Zinn’s claim that “the camps were set up, ready to use,” Haynes explains, “No detention camps were ever built, and no one was ever detained under the McCarran Act.”60

  Were the congressmen overreacting? Consider the harm that had been done during the World
War II years. In their book on the decrypted Venona Papers, Haynes and Klehr call the CPUSA “a fifth column working inside and against the United States.” A “disturbing number of high-ranking U.S. government officials . . . had passed extraordinarily sensitive information to the Soviet Union that had seriously damaged American interests.”

  “Harry White,” for example, “the second most powerful official in the U.S. Treasury Department . . . part of the American delegation at the founding of the United Nations—had advised the KGB about how American diplomatic strategy could be frustrated.”

  Maurice Halperin, “head of a research section” of the OSS, “then America’s chief intelligence arm, turned over hundreds of pages of secret American diplomatic cables.”

  William Perl, a “government aeronautical scientist, provided the Soviets with the results of the highly secret tests and design experiments for American jet engines and jet aircraft” and thus helped them to “overcom[e] the American technological lead.”

  Physicists Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, and technician David Greenglass (brother-in-law of Julius Rosenberg) “transmitted the complex formula for extracting bomb-grade uranium from ordinary uranium,” allowing the Soviet Union to make their own bomb in 1949 and emboldening Stalin to authorize North Korea to invade South Korea in 1950.

  And Lauchlin Currie, “trusted personal assistant” to President Roosevelt, “warned” the KGB about the FBI’s investigation of “key” Soviet agent and spy ringleader Gregory Silvermaster.61

  Soviet archive records opened in the 1990s revealed that Currie had also passed on information about President Roosevelt’s attitudes toward Charles de Gaulle (June 1944) and his willingness “to accept Stalin’s demand that the USSR keep the half of Poland that it had received under the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and that FDR would put pressure on the Polish government-in-exile to make concessions to the Soviets.” Currie lied to the FBI in 1947 and lied again during his testimony to Congress in 1948. The FBI continued to investigate him, but in 1950, Currie moved to Colombia, “lost his naturalized American citizenship” (he had been born in Nova Scotia), and “later became a Colombian national.”62

  Had the government acted sooner—that is, immediately after ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers came forward—“significant damage to U.S. national interests would have been avoided and a great deal of the basis for the bitter postwar domestic controversy about communism and subversion would have been removed,” say Haynes and Klehr. In 1939, Chambers gave information to Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of State, including the names of eight people who have now been confirmed by the Venona decryptions to have “cooperated with Soviet espionage”: Alger Hiss, State Department; Laurence Duggan, State Department; Frank Coe, Treasury Department; Charles Kramer, National Labor Relations Board; John Abt, “prominent labor lawyer with wide contacts in the Congress of Industrial Organizations”; Isaac Folkoff, California Communist party leader; Lauchlin Currie; and Harry Dexter White. Five others were confirmed to be spies by means outside of Venona: Julian Wadleigh, State Department; Vincent Reno, a “civilian official at the Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds”; Noel Field, State Department; Solomon Adler, Treaury Department; and Philip Rosenblit, who, “unknown to Chambers” by that time was a victim of Stalin’s terror.63

  The delay came about because a number of individuals failed to act. According to Allen Weinstein, author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, Berle “never filed the memo, before or afterward, with either State Department security officers or military intelligence agencies.” Chambers had sought an audience with the president for a guarantee of immunity, a meeting that the journalist Isaac Don Levine unsuccessfully tried to arrange. He and Chambers did meet with Berle who “assured [Chambers and Levine] that the information would go directly to Roosevelt.” But when Berle “talked to both Felix Frankfurter and Dean Acheson about the loyalties of Alger and Donald Hiss,” he was told “that the charges were groundless.” According to Levine, Berle brought Chambers’s revelations to the attention of the president, but FDR “scoffed at the charges of Soviet espionage rings within the government.” Levine “tried doggedly” for over a year “to stir interest in Chambers’s allegations among influential political figures,” including Representative Martin Dies. Levine also went to “Loy Henderson . . . chief of the State Department’s Russian Section; Republican Senator Warren R. Austin; Ambassador William Bullitt . . . ; labor leader David Dubinsky; and gossip columnist Walter Winchell. . . . Bullitt, Dubinsky, and Winchell all brought the charges to Roosevelt’s attention, according to Levine, but the President continued to brush the story aside.” Berle contacted the FBI several times in February and March 1941 about Chambers’s information, but the FBI did not request the documents until 1943.64

  Chambers did not get his day in court until 1948. Although leftists continued to maintain that Alger Hiss was caught in a frame-up by Red hunters, Hiss’s guilt has been definitively established by Weinstein, who began as a skeptic, as well as by Haynes, Klehr, and Vassiliev, who proclaimed, “cased closed.”65 Allen Weinstein, a man of the Left, had set out to write his book about Alger Hiss to prove his innocence—but then came across the evidence that showed his guilt.

  The same thing happened when then-leftist historian Ron Radosh undertook the investigation of the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for espionage. In the book he co-wrote with Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File, Radosh explained how, though when he began the research for the book he “no longer subscribed to the pro-Soviet views” of his adolescence, he had “continued to hold” to his “earnest belief in the Rosenbergs’ total innocence, always thinking that in the future new evidence might emerge to prove the complicity of the government in a frame-up. When the Rosenbergs’ two sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, finally sued the U.S. government for all FBI files pertaining to the case, [he] assumed that the release of this material would lead to [their] final vindication. . . .” The opposite was true, as Radosh and Milton found after interviewing “scores of individuals” and going through over two hundred thousand “pages of documents” released by the FBI and other agencies.66

  Some witnesses, speaking to Radosh and Milton on the condition they not be identified, acknowledged that the Rosenbergs were guilty but argued that there was “the historical truth and the Party’s truth.” One attorney gave Radosh a lecture “on the necessity of presenting the Rosenbergs solely as victims of Cold War hysteria.” Another “venerable and well-established Communist party lawyer, whose career goes back to the late 1920s,” asked, “What was so bad about helping Stalin get the A-bomb? It was the responsibility of a good Communist to do whatever he could to help the Red Army gain victory.”67

  Before the book’s publication in 1983, a June 23, 1979, New Republic article in which Radosh and Sol Stern raised questions about the Left’s defense of the Rosenbergs had garnered considerable attention. That was the year that Zinn was writing A People’s History. But nothing stopped Zinn from sticking to the old line that the Rosenbergs were the victims of a frame-up—through all editions of A People’s History. Zinn simply repeated the old conspiracy theories, often presenting them as leading questions: “Did [witness Harry] Gold cooperate in return for an early release from prison?” . . . “How reliable was Gold’s testimony?” Zinn repeated long-demolished claims about meetings between judges and prosecutors that supposedly proved that the Rosenbergs were framed. For Zinn, the execution of the Rosenbergs was “a demonstration to the people of the country . . . of what lay at the end of the line for those the government decided were traitors.”68

  In 2008, Rosenberg codefendant Morton Sobell, who had spent nineteen years in Alcatraz and other prisons and at that point was ninety-one years old, admitted that he and Julius Rosenberg had been spies. Zinn mentions Sobell on page 434, claiming that the case against him was so “weak” that Sobell’s attorney had “decided there was no need to present a defense.”69 Sobell’
s admission led the Rosenbergs’ two sons to acknowledge for the first time that their father had been a spy. Writing about this development in the Los Angeles Times, Radosh bemoaned the fact that most college textbooks still presented the “innocent” Rosenbergs as being deprived of a fair trial, or guilty only of passing inconsequential information. In truth, the Rosenbergs not only tried “their best to give the Soviets top atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, they succeeded in handing over top military data on sonar and on radar that was used by the Russians to shoot down American planes in the Korean and Vietnam wars.”70 When Howard Zinn was contacted by a New York Times reporter on the occasion of these revelations in 2008, he claimed, “I never was going along saying I know that they were innocent, and I’m not shocked by the fact that they turned out to be spies,” but, “to me it didn’t matter whether they were guilty or not. The most important

  thing was they did not get a fair trial in the atmosphere of cold war hysteria.”71

  No amount of proven treason, agitation for violent revolution, or, for that matter, mass murder and the immiseration of millions by socialist governments across the globe would ever persuade Zinn to dial down his indignation at what he characterized as “hysteria” about Communism.72 He was concerned not about the victims of the malevolent Communist ideology, but about Communist Party leaders who were prosecuted on evidence he claimed consisted “mostly of the fact that the Communists were distributing Marxist-Leninist literature, which the prosecution contended called for violent revolution. There was certainly not evidence of any immediate danger of violent revolution by the Communist party.”73 Well, how about Karl Marx’s statement in “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna” that “the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror”?74 Or Lenin’s Lessons of the Commune: “there are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”75 In fact, one need not go farther than The Communist Manifesto to see that Communists do not advocate social change through peaceful political means. In fact, Marx and Engels mock Socialists’ “fantastic pictures” of “peaceful means” and “small experiments.” In contrast, “The Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”76 It’s the only way to get things done.