This Biddle list, based on intel from the FBI, spotlighted such organizations as the Washington Book Shop, the Washington Committee for Democratic Action, and an omnibus outfit that spawned numerous other projects called the American League Against War and Fascism, later called for tactical reasons the League for Peace and Democracy (a change in name only). The memo cited chapter and verse on how this group was founded and controlled by the Communist Party and pledged allegiance to the Kremlin.
In its discussion of the League, the Biddle memo cited the confabs called by the Communist Party to get the agitation rolling, the presence of known Communists such as Browder himself among the officers and leading speakers, and the flow of funds from Soviet-controlled commercial outfits to underwrite the costs of doing business. And, most of all, the memo noted, there was the League’s routine, emphatic, and unwavering praise of Moscow as the world’s only champion of peace and justice.*14 7
THE FIRST “ATTORNEY GENERAL’S LIST”
An excerpt from the list of suspect organizations circulated to top U.S. officials by Attorney General Francis Biddle in early 1942.
Document in possession of the author
From the data thus supplied by Biddle, it’s apparent that groups such as the League weren’t being whimsically singled out as “fronts” but were given this designation for ample reason. The point wasn’t lost on Dies, who had much of the material cited in the Biddle memo—a good deal of it originating with the FBI (though the committee had its own information sources also). Dies was early on aware of the Communist nature of the League, would cite it as a Red Trojan horse, and warn of its pro-Soviet nature in reports to Congress.
All this being so, Dies and Co. would be dismayed to learn that the Washington, D.C., chapter of the League consisted almost entirely of federal workers—and these in substantial numbers. Having hammered on the subject for months, and having made the blatantly Communist nature of the group a matter of public record, Dies found that the employees continued their affiliation with it. Whereupon, in October 1939, he would make the names of these employees, 563 in all, a matter of public record also. For this he would be denounced by New Deal officials, countless voices in the press corps, and many historians of the era.
This would be the first of several such employee rosters compiled by Dies that outraged his critics. On other occasions he would take to the floor of Congress and recite some of the more conspicuous cases in the federal workforce, noting their Communist or Communist-front connections. In some instances, he observed, a particular suspect had been let go from one official job only to be transferred to another. In response to this, Dies and others in Congress made several efforts to rid the government of such people through use of the appropriations power, withholding the pay of named employees. (This succeeded in a couple of cases but was negated by the courts.)*15
All this is worth recalling not only for its intrinsic importance in Cold War history but because it would connect up so closely with the later endeavors of Joe McCarthy. He, too, would develop lists of security suspects on the federal payroll—mostly in the State Department, but in other agencies also. He would make note as well of the fact that such suspects would often be removed from one department only to show up in another. And he would likewise zero in on the matter of Communist-front connections among federal workers and the phenomenal number of these in the records of certain suspects.
Like Dies also, McCarthy was aware that a main object of a front was to lure innocents into unwitting cooperation with the Kremlin, so connection with one such group wasn’t necessarily proof of subversive motive. More telling, in McCarthy’s view, was membership in or sponsorship of many such organizations. In some instances, this meant involvement with dozens or scores of pro-Red outfits. Also considered indicative of something more than innocent joining was involvement with groups that were notorious Moscow puppets—a view of the matter by no means exclusive to McCarthy.†16
One such group highlighted by Biddle and the House Committee was the American Peace Mobilization (APM), created by the Communist Party in 1940 at the era of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In the popular front phase of the 1930s, the party had made much of its fierce opposition to Hitler. But now he had joined forces with Stalin, so the propaganda machinery was crudely reversed, with particular stress on opposing U.S. aid to Britain in its then lonely war against the Nazis, allied with Moscow. The APM was the main Communist vehicle for this effort, picketing the White House with placards saying “The Yanks Are Not Coming” and blasting President Roosevelt as a warmonger for his Lend-Lease attempts to help the British.
Then, in June 1941, when Hitler broke his deal with Stalin and invaded Russia, the whole thing suddenly had to be reversed again. Now from a Red standpoint it was imperative to make sure the Yanks were coming, to help the Soviet motherland survive the Nazi onslaught. At this juncture, the APM stopped its picketing, threw away its peace signs, and morphed into a war-supporting outfit called the American Peoples Mobilization. The group was thus exposed for all to see as a Moscow puppet.
Martin Dies at the time was attentive to the APM and people connected with it. And so later would be McCarthy, one of whose most famous cases was linked to the activities of this notorious front for Stalin. (See Chapter 30.) Still other Moscow fronts, such as the Friends of the Soviet Union, American Friends of the Chinese People, and the American Youth Congress, would figure in charges McCarthy brought before the Senate. Matters of Communist-front affiliation in fact were salient in most of the public cases he presented to the Tydings panel as instances of lax-to-nonexistent security in the State Department of 1950.*17
Of course, by the time McCarthy came on the scene, there was a much more extensive database on these matters than when Dies was getting started. Most famously, the Hiss-Chambers confrontation had occurred, Elizabeth Bentley had told her story, and the FBI had assembled a vast storehouse of records on Communist Party machinations. So McCarthy was by no means dependent on inferences from front-group connections to figure out who was who among suspected comrades. Even so, he would continue using data pertaining to the fronts as part of his fact-gathering mosaic, in emulation of Dies before him.
As with the subject of the fronts, there were linkages between Dies and McCarthy concerning many individual suspects. Taking only the McCarthy cases discussed in Chapter 3, it’s noteworthy that most of these had been looked at by Dies and/or his successors at the House committee. Of the ten McCarthy cases in that roundup, four—Bisson, Currie, Karr, and Mins—had been subjects of inquiry by Dies. Four others—Adler, Coe, Glasser, and Keeney—would appear before the House committee in its later incarnations. The persistence of these identical cases across so considerable a span of time is an instructive feature of the record.
Perhaps the clearest Dies/McCarthy linkage was the work of famed anti-Red researcher J. B. Matthews. Himself a former Communist fronter and fellow traveler of imposing status, Matthews became disillusioned with the Communists in the mid-1930s and passed over into opposition. Based on his own experience and intensive study of Red tactics, he became the world’s foremost authority on the front groups. Appearing as a witness before the Dies panel in August of 1938, he so impressed the committee with his expertise that he was hired as its research director, a post he held for the next six years. He would later resurface, in spectacular fashion, as an aide to Joe McCarthy.
Of great value to McCarthy and other Communist hunters was a prodigious volume that was the Matthews magnum opus. This is a huge document, compiled in 1944, called “Appendix IX,” so named because it was printed as an adjunct to a series of hearings pertaining to the subject of the fronts. It has to be the largest “Appendix” to anything ever published, far longer than the hearings to which it was connected. It runs to better than 2,000 pages, names some 500 organizations, and lists more than 22,000 people. It contains many minute details about the listed groups, with emphasis on their interlocking nature and ties to the Red apparatus, and would be cited often b
y McCarthy.8
These continuities between the Dies-McCarthy efforts, and the fact that so many of McCarthy’s cases had previously been spotlighted by Dies and others, would be well noted by McCarthy’s critics and frequently used against him. He was, according to his opponents, dealing in “stale, warmed over charges” already examined and disposed of. This would be one of the foremost allegations made in dismissing the cases he brought before the Senate. The old-hat nature of his information is likewise a feature of every critical book we have about McCarthy and his various lists of suspects.
However, as a moment’s reflection may suggest, the casual brush-off of McCarthy’s cases on this basis is less than persuasive. It’s true that, in the typical instance, McCarthy’s charges broke no new ground, quite apart from the efforts of Dies and others in Congress. In fact, just about everything McCarthy had to offer by way of documentation for his charges had been reposing for some time before then in the vaults of the FBI, the Civil Service Commission, and other official security units. McCarthy often noted this himself, saying when he presented a case “this information is nothing new,” thus not merely acknowledging the point but making a particular issue of it.
But the fact that the charges were of a certain vintage or derived from previous investigations didn’t mean they were false, irrelevant, obsolete, or unimportant. On the contrary, we now know for certain, in case after case they were very much on target, as shown by the witness of Venona and other sources cited. A good deal of evidence on such cases was known pre-McCarthy but had been disparaged or pushed aside. His were indeed, “stale, warmed over charges,” but they also happened to be charges that were true. And the fact that they were both old and true, while the suspects were in many instances still kicking around on official payrolls, obviously made the security situation worse, not better. How, McCarthy would often wonder, had so many flagrant security cases stayed on in positions of public trust despite the evidence in the record?
CHAPTER 5
Unthinking the Thinkable
THE smooth-talking diplomat in chief, unflappable as ever, was blandly reassuring: Charges of pro-Red chicanery made against a former high official had been carefully looked into, and there was nothing to them. The accused had been unfairly named and had now been cleared by the security screeners. Just another case, it seemed, of wild allegations by reckless people who didn’t know the facts of record.
The combative lawmaker who brought the charges wasn’t buying. He had further evidence on the matter, he said, the nature of which he couldn’t reveal but would give to the appropriate committee. This prompted cries of “smear” and demands that the accuser make his outrageous statements off the floor, without legislative privilege, so that he could be sued for slander.
For Americans of the early 1950s, such unpleasant scenes were all too common, as a three-year verbal slugfest raged between the urbane Dean G. Acheson, Secretary of State in the Truman government, and the Red-baiting, tough-talking Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. This new dispute had the makings of another go-round—except for one distinctive feature. The episode in question occurred, not in the United States, but in Great Britain. The secretary of state (for foreign affairs, to give him his full title) oozing all the reassurance was the Tory, Harold Macmillan; the legislator who brought the charges, Col. Marcus Lipton, Labor MP for Brixton; and the suspect so triumphantly cleared, Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby, Red spy par excellence, who would later surface in Moscow as an “intelligence officer” of the Soviet KGB, and extremely proud to say so.1
That super mole Kim Philby was cleared by Harold Macmillan and the old-boy network in the United Kingdom speaks volumes about security standards prevailing there in the 1940s and early ’50s. As does, indeed, the whole fantastic story of Communist infiltration in which Philby was merely one, albeit a leading, player. The saga of Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, James Klugmann, and others of the formidable crowd of Moscow agents who fanned out from the University of Cambridge and wound up in the British government is among the most astounding tales in all the annals of subversion, testimony to the deceptive skills of those who engineered it.2
It’s testimony as well, however, to the complacency and negligence of the people who let it happen. As the records plainly show, there were plenty of signs along the way that members of the Cambridge clique had Red connections, glaringly obvious in some cases, but these were ignored, discounted, or, in the latter phases of the scandal, shoved under the nearest Whitehall carpet. After all, most of the Philby group had gone to the right schools, belonged to the right clubs, and didn’t look or talk the way Bolsheviks were supposed to. It was unthinkable they could be Soviet agents or betray their country. So the evidence of their perfidy was brushed aside until the proof was overwhelming.
The tie-ins of all this to events in the United States were many. Most obviously, the unthinkability factor here was as potent as in England, with effects as deadly for the Western interest. The premier American case was Alger Hiss, also a well-bred, respectable type with all the right credentials, so the evidence against him was downplayed or ignored, just as with the Cambridge comrades. And like Philby, far from being an isolated instance, Hiss was one of a numerous, often upscale, band of brothers. William Remington, Donald Wheeler, Henry Collins, Duncan Lee, Laurence Duggan, Robert Miller, and others involved in Red machinations in the United States had been to the best schools, spoke in cultured accents, and had upper-crust connections. So it followed they couldn’t be Communist agents either.
Underscoring the unthinkability angle in the Hiss affair was that his accuser, ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers, wasn’t nearly so presentable an item. Hiss was polished and genteel. Chambers was a pudgy, down-at-the-heels, and generally Bohemian figure. It didn’t seem possible on this basis that Chambers was telling the truth and Hiss was lying. Thus, when their epic face-off occurred in 1948 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, some lawmakers believed the dapper, plausible Hiss and thought frowsy Chambers was the liar. Only when the proof became irresistibly clear did they revise that first impression.
A despondent Chambers had in fact endured the unthinkability syndrome for several years before the final showdown. In this case, our negligence was as shocking as the British, and by some measures even more so. U.S. officials were first given the main elements of the Hiss-Chambers story, not in 1948 when it became a public scandal, but almost a decade before in September 1939. Having left the Communist Party the previous year, and alarmed by the Hitler-Stalin pact, Chambers tried to warn the authorities about Red agents on the federal payroll. Through the good offices of anti-Communist writer/editor Isaac Don Levine, Chambers discussed the problem in detail with Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle, a specialist on security matters for the Roosevelt White House.
Chambers would later tell the story again in 1942 and 1945–46 in interviews with the FBI and State Department, and then before the House committee and a grand jury. However, it’s obvious from Berle’s notes that the essential facts about the matter were available to the White House and the State Department in 1939. Recording several dozen Chambers cases, Berle jotted down the names of Hiss and his brother Donald, Lauchlin Currie, Solomon Adler, V. Frank Coe, and a score of others. Some Chambers identified as Party members, others as fellow travelers, but all as parts of the apparatus.3
These notes, backed by those of Don Levine, supplied a pretty good sketch of an extensive pro-Soviet combine inside the U.S. government. So far as anyone can tell, however, the result of these stunning revelations was—nothing. Though a story would be floated that Berle had at the time supplied the information to the FBI, that clearly didn’t happen. Nor, so far as the record shows, was anything done about it for years to come. On the contrary, Hiss, Currie, Adler, Coe, and others named by Chambers not only stayed on in their official jobs but played increasingly powerful roles in matters of the highest import. Inertia and self-inflicted blindness were thus as serious here as in Gre
at Britain, and would get a good deal worse before any corrective steps were taken.4
Though Hiss was eventually exposed and convicted of lying about his Red affiliations, the same mind-set would shape the reception given other cases, including that of Laurence Duggan, the testimony of Elizabeth Bentley, and, most of all, the charges of McCarthy.5 Even among those who at last accepted the guilt of Hiss, he was usually viewed as an aberration, not the precursor of a species. That there was a wide-ranging, high-level plot consisting of multiple Alger Hisses, as alleged by McCarthy, was for many in influential places too preposterous for belief. It was either a smear, or paranoia, or a quest for unworthy headlines, or something, but couldn’t possibly be the truth. It was, in a word, unthinkable—unthinkable that such a plot existed, or that the people named by McCarthy could be complicit in such betrayal.
As with Chambers and the response to Martin Dies, there was as noted a cultural subtext embedded in the reaction to McCarthy. He was a rough-and-tumble scrapper from the boonies who hadn’t been to Yale or Harvard, spoke in blunt phrases, and taunted the smooth sophisticates in the salons of Georgetown and plush corridors of official power. His targets, often as not, were Ivy League respectable types in the mold of Hiss or Duggan. How could one believe such outlandish charges from such a lout, aimed at his social betters? One couldn’t, and one didn’t.
In which respect, it’s worth recalling that Hiss-Chambers, the original McCarthy fracas, and other security battles this side of the Atlantic erupted in the period 1948–50, before the truth about the Philby ring came filtering out from European sources. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean didn’t abscond to Moscow until May of 1951, well over a year after McCarthy’s initial speeches. Kim Philby would be cleared of “third man” charges in 1955, only to bolt in 1963. Anthony Blunt wasn’t exposed in public as a Soviet agent until the 1970s. Had the truth about the Cambridge spies been general knowledge in 1948 or 1950, it’s likely the Chambers allegations, perhaps even the charges of McCarthy, would have been viewed in a different light. If it could happen in Great Britain, it could just possibly happen here. And, in fact, it did.
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