This is the passage I wrote that Alterman objects to:
Eric Alterman wasted no time rushing to the web, on the site of Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast, to declare, as the headline puts it, “I.F.Stone Was No Spy.” Alterman argues that Stone could not be a spy, because the dictionary definition of a spy does not fit Stone! Spies, according to the dictionary, have to give military or naval secrets. So talent spotting, acting as a courier for other spies, relaying information to KGB agents, and giving the KGB information he found that the Soviets might find useful is not spying.
And he particularly objects to the following:
Alterman ends up saying he will not argue that what Klehr, Haynes and Vasiliev found “does not affect the historical record at all.” But Alterman finds it hard to believe, since he writes that “Stone and I were close friends during the final decade or so of his life and he never mentioned anything of this to me.” This means, in other words, Alterman believes that if it was true, Stone would have told him!
Alterman writes that “Radosh misread my comment…and claimed …that I had argued that Stone could not have been a spy because he never mentioned it to me.” He then attacks Michael Moynihan of saying the same thing and of “endorsing what Radosh wrote.” But anyone reading Moynihan’s blog will find that he also quotes Alterman directly from his own column, not from me. Nowhere in his article does he even mention my blog. Nor should he have. Indeed, I heard first about Alterman’s claims from Moynihan, who e-mailed me what Alterman wrote and commented how silly it was. That was what prompted me to do my own comment! At any rate, readers can now see Alterman’s claims and his and my remarks exactly as they appeared, and decide on their own whether I was misreading Alterman.
None of this surprises me. I went back to the Nation archives (unfortunately there is no on-line link to provide for what I will cite, but you can pay for it on their website for a nominal fee) and looked again at an April 29, 1996 article by Alterman that appeared in The Nation, titled “I Spy With One Little Eye.” In that article, Alterman did precisely what he now accuses me of doing to him. Alterman referred to a book I co-authored with Harvey Klehr, The Amerasia Spy Case:Prelude to McCarthyism. According to Alterman, who notes that six of the people associated with the magazine Amerasia were arrested as spies; the grand jury refused to indict them, and two paid fines on minor charges. He then concludes: “Lo and behold, the authors [Klehr and I] declare the accused spies guilty as charged.”
In fact, as we said at the time, Alterman clearly did not bother looking at our book. For we said clearly, especially in the case of John S. Service, the old China hand who had the case fixed for him by Tommy Corcoran, was not a spy- despite the charges of McCarthyites that he was. We do argue that several other indicted were in fact toying with espionage, and that the FBI even had wiretaps of them boasting of that.
Reading Alterman’s 1996 article, in light of what we now know from Venona and the Vasiliev notebooks, makes for rather amusing reading. On the Rosenberg case, Alterman claimed —referring to me then with the description of me he has recycled today as a man transformed from “obscure New Left historian to well-funded…right-wing hatchet man during the Reagan era-as one who falsely claimed that the Rosenbergs were recruited out of the Communist Party for Soviet espionage. He wrote that “Radosh, however, only proved once again his ability to read into documents what he wished to believe in the first place.” Venona, he says, proved Ethel Rosenberg was not involved in espionage and that the intercepts did not prove “that Julius operated a spy ring on the order necessary to have carried out the plot for which he was executed.”
Of course, as Anne Applebaum explains, most of the American spies “were either open or secret members of the American Communist Party.” Although, she writes, “it was long a taboo subject on the Left, the extraordinarily close relationship between the American Communist Party and the KGB should nowadays surprise no one, given what we know about the CPUSA…and about communist ideology.” In fact, when I wrote The Rosenberg File, I specifically said the Rosenbergs had broken their party affiliation before becoming spies—something that Venona proved not to be the case! It was only the new documentation that caused me to change my mind, and therefore Alterman was completely wrong to argue that I was making a false charge about the Rosenbergs CP ties, by implication to justify a witch-hunt that was then supposedly carried out against the CPUSA. As Applebaum puts it, “To the truly dedicated Marxist, the goals of the KGB and the CPUSA would have seemed very similar indeed.” She adds that both Earl Browder, the major CP chief during the war years, had a sister and wife who were both KGB agents, and that “the line between loyalty to the CPUSA and loyalty to the Soviet Union was very muddled.”
One must also add that it is further proof of Haynes and Klehr’s fidelity to history that when they discuss the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American a-bomb, they conclude that the sources establish that while he was a secret member of the American Communist Party, he never did become a Soviet spy or agent. This flies in the face of those like Herbert Romerstein and M. Stanton Evans, (whom Alterman begins one of his articles by putting me in the same group as them), who believe that he was a spy because he was a Communist. It also differs from the view of the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer of Oppenheimer, Martin Sherwin, who believes that Oppenheimer was neither a spy nor a Communist. Indeed, at the very conference a few weeks ago on the book held at the Wilson Center, which Alterman describes as a conference that made “wild and unsupportable allegations about Stone,” but which Alterman did not attend and yet writes about what happened based on the recollections of I.F. Stone’s most sympathetic biographer, his Nation colleague D.D. Guttenplan.
At this program, the papers of which will appear in the next issue of Harvard’s Journal of Cold War Studies, edited by Mark Kramer, is called by Alterman a program meant to “provide a forum for the series of wild allegations leveled by their authors.” And horrors. He notes: “Radosh was actually invited to chair a panel.” He also complains that at a morning panel, Guttenplan was asked to stop talking when he attempted to read a 15 minute statement he had prepared and was “summarily cut off by the moderator.” But later, he notes, “Guttenplan was given a few minutes to state his objections.” He fails to inform his readers that the panel at which Guttenplan was allowed to speak was the one I chaired- and that I called upon him to present his case. Indeed, if he checks the video feed of the meeting, he will find Guttenplan saying that “perhaps I should have tried to read my comments at the Radosh panel instead of the one in the morning.”
Yet, Alterman is nervy enough to conclude that all of us- Haynes, Klehr, myself, Max Holland, Steve Usdin, the late Ed Mark and others, are all people who “desire to place their own personal and political agendas above and beyond where any careful historian would go based on the available evidence.”
This is yet another case of the pot calling the kettle black. If anyone is guilty of being in denial and ignoring what the evidence shows, it is none other than Eric Alterman. Let me end by quoting again Anne Applebaum, who puts it best. She writes: “The truth, of course, is that neither [Ann]Coulter or [Victor]Navasky, nor any of the many others [pace Alterman] who have joined this particular battle, is really interested in history. They…instead wish to score points about contemporary politics- points that bear only a tendentious relationship to the events of the 1930s and the 1940s. Coulter and her ilk want modern liberals to be identified with the CPUSA: Hiss= Obama. Navasky and his friends [like Alterman] suspect that anyone who investigates Hiss is covertly promoting ‘the wholesale suspension of liberties,’- historical research=Guantanamo.”
She says that wading through their writing is “a torment.” She should try Alterman next time. That is akin to trying to swim through a tsunami.
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31 Comments
1. David Thomson:“Coulter and her ilk want modern liberals to be identified with the CPUSA: Hiss= Obama.”
Barack Obama has never been a member of the Communist Party. I’ve seen zero evidence to support such an allegation. One of the reasons why Obama was probably never a Communist is that he was born in 1961. By the time he reached his teenage years, the days of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were long past. One would have to be born probably no later than 1945 to be truly tempted by the seducers of the Soviet Union. He is, however, still a non-violent, radical left-winger who substantially agrees with Eric Alterman and his ilk on numerous issues. All of them, for instance, blame America for many of the world’s problems. Nonetheless, many policies of the Obama administration are tyrannical in nature. They will, at the end of the day, destroy the capitalist system and take away most of our rights of citizenship. Obama does not need to be full blown Communist to be very dangerous. There is no reason to exaggerate. The fact that he is something of a follower of Saul Alinsky is frightening enough!
Jun 9, 2009 - 10:25 am 2. Pajamas Media » Eric Alterman: The Left’s Most Dishonest Journalist:[...] Read the rest of the story here. [...]
Jun 9, 2009 - 11:22 am 3. The Historian:EJ DIONNE IS APPARENTLY FEELING INADEQUATE
He has a bad case of “Rush” envy. It hurts to be so smart and so ignored.
http://greensrealworld.blogspot.com/2009/06/ej-everleft-journalist-dionne-author-of.html
Jun 9, 2009 - 12:02 pm 4. whataloadacrap08:It does sound as if Comrade Alterman subscribes to the old adage that if a lie is told often enough, and in his case loud enough, then eventually it will become accept as truth. How typical of the liberal beast, eh?
Jun 9, 2009 - 12:09 pm 5. The Shadow:Ron:
Alterman was right about one thing – You are a right wing polemicist – Occasionaly you strain to be objective but you immediately smother that impulse
Jun 9, 2009 - 12:09 pm 6. mabamford:to view a partial list of crimes committed by FBI agents over 1500 pages long see
http://www.forums.signonsandiego.com/showthread.php?t=59139
to view a partial list of FBI agents arrested for pedophilia see
Jun 9, 2009 - 12:10 pm 7. "progressive"watch:http://www.dallasnews.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3574
I thought there was no question in anyone’s mind that I. F. Stone was a dedicated Communist,and that the Nation was given no credence except by the underground left and the progressive left. The progressive left is everywhere in the Obama adminstration,not to except Barak Obama. Where is Joe McCarthy when you need him?
Again: Shadow[3] your remarks have no substance. And you admitt it. You call yourself shadow.
Jun 9, 2009 - 1:08 pm 8. jw:I. F. Stone’s deep Marxist (communist?) views are apparent in his book about Socrates, THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES. He concludes that Socrates was condemned to death (on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and of not worshipping the gods of Athens but other ones instead) because Socrates supported the rule of the oligarchy – the rule of the rich! He finds that Socrates’ investigations of the meaning of virtue, justice, etc. just meaningless word-play, and he thinks that Meno, the character after whom the dialogue MENO is named, was “a nice guy.” Yet, Stone omits what Xenophon had to say about Meno in the ANABASIS – that he was treacherous, that he regarded friends as fools to be deceived and enemies to be respected.
Jun 9, 2009 - 1:21 pm 9. DavidN:It’s interesting to see the passion with which people, when confronted by facts like these, attack either the messenger or the method of collection, avoiding the confrontation with the facts. So if someone says that various individuals, sacred cows like Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and I.F. Stone, were Soviet agents, someone responds by posting lists of FBI agents who were pedophiles. What does that have to do with the issue at hand? The implication is that because FBI agents are sometimes pedophiles, these other people who the FBI investigated must have been innocent of all charges. It’s like Johnny Cochran’s argument that Mark Fuhrman said something racist, so O.J.’s fingerprint at the crime scene must have been planted. Somehow the possibility that *both* things could be true is never considered.
The strange thing about this is that 95% of the country probably doesn’t even remember who I.F. Stone was, any more, and Hiss and the Rosenbergs have faded into history almost as much. The Rosenbergs were executed more than 50 years ago; Hiss passed away a few years ago, trying desperately to defend his reputation to the last. You’d think that people could approach the question of whether a now relatively obscure journalist worked for the Soviets 7 decades ago with some objectivity, but people go after researchers with a venom that’s amazing. The interesting thing is that such people also rely on the short memory of the public in general: up until the opening of Soviet archives less that two decades ago, most lefties thought the Rosenbergs innocent; up until a few years ago, they similarly thought Hiss just a victim of Richard Nixon. In both cases the vituperation was excessive, and both cases are cited, at least by inference, as evidence the researchers involved can’t be objective, because after all they successfully destroyed the Rosenbergs and Hiss!
Just strange.
Jun 9, 2009 - 1:49 pm 10. bill:Of course he’s a leftist- look at him. He looks like he eats stray children for breakfast.
Jun 9, 2009 - 1:53 pm 11. fred:Eric Alterman will be remembered as well as I.F. Stone was, which is to say hardly at all.
Someone please alert “the shadow” to the facts of the elections around the world during the past week. The Left (a.k.a. collectivists and statists) fared very poorly. I expect that in 2010 the Left in the U.S. is going to start getting kicked back too.
Signed,
A Former Marxist now turned into enthusiastic supporter of free markets and classical liberalism
Long live the Conservative Underground!
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:08 pm 12. alanstorm:The Nation’s not as funny as it used to be – lately it’s as if they expect to be taken seriously. But then they go and let Alterman write columns, so how serious could it be?
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:32 pm 13. Self-hating Boomer:So was Valerie Plame a spy, or not?
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:35 pm 14. Phoenix48:#10 Fred – absolutely. I didn’t pay much attention to Alterman until the surge in iraq and he began to almost pop up on C-Span in left forums refining the art of Bush Derrangement.
Being only 50 the McCarthy & Rosenberg fights escape me. The linage to my folks as Nixon supporters makes it an interesting history, but after watching M Stanton Evans a few years give a very shoddy and spotty ‘revelation’ I’ve about burnt out.
Besides its Alterman’s current transgressions which outrage me – just one of the leftist writers whose one-sided views on Iraq & Afganistan fed the attack machine.
The abysmal standards of rags like GQ, ESQUIRE, VAINTY FAIR, besides the LA Times & (excepting John Burns) the NY Times will, in my view, in the future be looked at as marking beginning of the steep decline in professional journalism exemplified by the dying press today.
Which brings me to my final point – there is one leftist propagandist who is in my view much worse than Eric Alterman – even if much younger and with much less of an audience.
Jeremy Scahill. His complete misrepresentation regarding contracting in BLACKWATER is only upped on the silliness scale by his outrageous claims of ‘millions’ of civilian deaths in Iraq – the punk is cut right from BBC wholecloth.
We should urge one of the conservative media watch groups to give an ‘I.F. STONE’ award for the most outrageous leftist journalism ‘giving comfort, aid, and possibly treasonous intelligence to the enemies of freedom’… yearly.
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:39 pm 15. Self-hating Boomer:David Thompson (1) -
Actually, the old-style communists weren’t anywhere near as destructive as the new-age Luddite/Malthusian give-islam-a-chance “leftism” that 0bama subscribes to. At least Stalin wouldn’t be pushing us into this depression by keeping our natural resources off limits, and he wouldn’t be pussyfooting with these islamists. Even Lysenkosim wasn’t as dumb as this climate change cult.
0bama may not have been a communist; but what he is is worse.
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:48 pm 16. Self-hating Boomer:That’s because they weren’t able to successfully rehabilitate Stalin. If they were, they’d all be proud Soviet supporters.
It’s a funny thing. Che’s cool. It’s ok to be a Che commie. It’s risque, but sorta ok to be a Maoist. But they couldn’t hide the bodies that Stalin killed. I think the reason why Mao is sorta ok is that Chinese aren’t considered by the “cool” people to be real people. Stalin’s sin was killing white people by the millions.
Jun 9, 2009 - 2:55 pm 17. Mark LaRochelle:Ron Radosh is wrong when he writes that “M. Stanton Evans… believe[s] that [J. Robert Oppenheimer] was a spy because he was a Communist.”
While Evans clearly demonstrated in “Blacklisted by History” that Oppenheimer was a secret Communist and lied about his contacts, Evans never said Oppenheimer was a spy. (Evans does say that, once Japan had been defeated and the main threat was Soviet expansionism, Oppenheimer’s Communism, his contacts, and his dishonesty about these made him an unacceptable security and loyalty risk.)
Incidentally, the 1996 Alterman article Radosh references can be read for free here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb1367/is_199604/ai_n6387312/
Jun 9, 2009 - 3:15 pm 18. Bilgeman:#9 DavidN:
” You’d think that people could approach the question of whether a now relatively obscure journalist worked for the Soviets 7 decades ago with some objectivity, but people go after researchers with a venom that’s amazing.”
Not really, when you consider that past is prologue.
IOW, if you dig deeply enough into Altermann’s past, it wouldn’t surprise me to find Reds…and a lot more recently than 50 years ago.
Look, Stalin’s intelligence service recruited undergrads at Cambridge and Oxford in the 1930’s that became and remained active spies into the 1950’s and 60’s.
The Million Dollar Question is who, if anyone, did THOSE spies recruit for the cause?
Whose careers did they promote…and why?
These are chains of infection that would be well worth running down. Fill in a lot of “blank spaces”.
Jun 9, 2009 - 6:17 pm 19. kevinS:Polemics (pronounced /pəˈlɛmɪks/, /poʊ-/) is the practice of disputing or controverting religious, philosophical, political, or scientific matters. As such, a polemic text on a topic is often written specifically to dispute or refute a position or theory that is widely viewed to be beyond reproach.
Sister project Look up polemics in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The antonym of a polemic source is an apologia.
from Wikipeda:
Polemic journalism was common in continental Europe when libel laws were not as stringent.[1] The Research Support Libraries Programme “Pamphlet and polemic: pamphlets as a guide to the controversies of the 17th-19th centuries”, co-managed by the University of St. Andrews, the University of Aberdeen, and University of Wales Lampeter, collected and placed thousands of pamphlets on-line as a study of polemic rhetoric of that era.[2] There are other meanings of the word as well. Polemic is also a branch of theology, pertaining to the history or conduct of ecclesiastical controversy.[3]
The word is derived from the Greek word polemikos (πολεμικος[citation needed], which means “warlike,” “hostile”.[4] Plato uses a character named Polemarchus in his dialogue Republic as a vehicle to drive forward an ethical debate.
So…what’s wrong with being a right-wing polemicist, or a left wing polemicist…can’t see where that means you can’t be objective. It may mean that you have looked at the facts and the arguments in the matter before you and have come to the conclusion that a measured and distant response is not called for, but on the contrary, that a hostile response is distinctly called for.
Jun 9, 2009 - 6:26 pm 20. bbb:Ron: I enjoyed “Red Star Over Hollywood”. I admit I own a copy of “The Rosenberg File” but haven’t gotten around to reading it.
I can’t agree with Anne Applebaum’s painting Ann Coulter and Victor Navasky with the same extremist brush. Navasky is a publisher, a friend to Marxism, and an obscurantist. Ann is a polemicist — but also a truth-teller. She is perhaps the only author willing to use the same extreme tactics as the Left in pursuing conservative goals. Yes, she uses ad hominem arguments. Yes, she uses infuriating, unfair jokes that can’t exactly be refuted. Yes, indeed, she uses a broad brush to sweep up fellow-travelers and Communists in the same package — flagrantly rejecting Applebaum’s own attempt to defocus and deflect criticism of “the exceedingly complicated history of the American Left”. You’ve been on the receiving end of leftist vitriol, and maybe you agree with Applebaum that these tactics are beneath us. But — the fact is, the leftists are winning. They are winning in part because of the tactics they use. I think we can afford to have one conservative hammer back at them without us trying to shoot her in the back.
And Coulter provided an invaluable service by writing “Treason”. After reading “Treason”, I was motivated to read “The Secret World of American Communism” and “In Denial” by Haynes & Klehr, your own “Red Star”, and Horowitz’s “Radical Son”, among other books, in no small part because I could not believe that the Left has been so successful at suppressing this history from popular view. And yet, the more I read, the more I understand that they have.
You write “most reasonable people accepted the verdict [of Hiss and the Rosenberg's guilt]” — but your group of “reasonable people” must be a very exclusive club. Most Americans have never heard of Morton Sobell. (Heck, 57% of Obama voters didn’t even know which party controlled Congress in 2008!) I doubt that even 10% could identify Alger Hiss or Whittaker Chambers. The conventional wisdom in this country is that McCarthy was the moral equivalent of Joseph Stalin, that the folks on the Red Scare Blacklist were framed, that there was no connection between CPUSA and the Soviet Communist Party — and that Soviet spies were the fevered imaginings of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. All these impressions are horrendously wrong. But things have gotten so crazy that even pointing out that Obama has been influenced by (boastful!) communists like Bill Ayers and Mike Klonsky marks one as a loony conservative. Navasky is not the exception — his worldview is closer to what the American people have been taught than yours is.
Now, how many more people read “Treason” than have read the combined good works of you, Haynes and Klehr, and David Horowitz? Sure, you have to discount the hyperbole — but who has explained the ties of modern leftists to the Communists of yore better than Ann Coulter? Even so, Coulter’s audience is a small fraction of the number of people who watch network news every night.
The history of communist influence in this country is not just an exercise between academics, where one fellow points out how another fellow has been unfair. It’s important. It’s important for people to understand how the Left works, not just for academics to document it. It’s important for people to understand when they’re being propagandized. It’s important for them to understand the intellectual makeup of their leaders. We’ve got to do better.
BBB
Jun 9, 2009 - 11:16 pm 21. Fragmentarian:Barack probably would have been a communist if it was hipper to do so. Instead he joined Jeremiah Wright’s church of black liberation theology.
Jun 10, 2009 - 6:52 am 22. dan:The most important ignorance of the discourse is the void where knowledge of Communism and its secret services should be. I suppose we will have to wait until all those born before the mid-1970s and who believed themselves to be, let’s say, intellectually curious are dead. These passions are formed in youth and make a lasting impression – and this is a generational war, launched by the Bolsheviks. Of course, if the public did know what was what the whole 20th century and their own world would change. Their minds would be truly blown. But alas, the Communists have won on this score, and it is not to be.
Does anyone know whether The Chief Culprit, by Viktor Suvorov, is gaining a wider audience?
Jun 10, 2009 - 7:02 am 23. J.J.J.J. Jameson:Alterman’s a tool.
He’s so puffed up with his own imagined importance and ignorance that he’s become a grotesque figure of ridicule: a bloated circus balloon waiting for the needle.
Jun 10, 2009 - 7:35 am 24. Joe Bison:The left always has a fetish for denying
facts opposed to their leanings and inventing
wish lists for what they want to believe in.
A leftist professor always gives you part
facts ignoring the ones that destroy his
argument. They know 95% of students
won’t read outside the outline.
Everyone uses “spies” of some sort to perform
various tasks. The hurdle the US has always
faced is that it is an open society that is
very easy to penetrate. Enemies of the US
tend to be closed dictatorial societies
where it is difficult for actual humans to
penetrate. Thus the value of defectors for
instance.
I don’t look at the spying itself but at
Jun 10, 2009 - 7:37 am 25. Ed Driscoll » Now There’s A Team With A Depth Chart!:what type of society the person is working
for. USSR, PRC, Cuba etc-Uhh nuff said.
For leftists out there, these type of
regimes are where your ideology always
leads. But look on the bright side if
you are successful you’ll probably end
up purged anyway.
[...] Radosh calls Eric Alterman “the Left’s Most Dishonest Journalist.” Walter Duranty, Walter Cronkite, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, Scott Thomas Beauchamp and [...]
Jun 10, 2009 - 8:06 am 26. jb:It’s such a shame when such a perfectly good theory, (communism), is negated by a single undisputed fact.
It just doesn’t work.
Jun 10, 2009 - 8:09 am 27. G. Clarke:We just caught two American spies for Castro who, amazingly, did not do it for money but apparently, as was noted, because Che was cool. I suppose there are still some people out there who think Al Jolson with burnt cork on his face is a great entertainer. Sheesh!
Jun 10, 2009 - 8:50 pm 28. Class Clown:I know that this is only partly on topic, but one of the only things that amused me about the latest (terrible) Indiana Jones movie, is how they could simultaneously depict KGB agents as running amuck in America, and yet still stick to the pop-culture version of history in which FBI investigations of communist spying were just irrational witch hunts.
Welcome to the Leftist/Hollywood funhouse, where you can see anything you want to see, and all of it at the same time.
Jun 10, 2009 - 9:37 pm 29. Chessexpert:Anti-communists were not at war with America, communists and communist sympathizers were (and are).
Jun 11, 2009 - 8:32 am 30. Radegunda:I’m not exactly coming down on Alterman’s side, but I did read his quoted statement differently from Ron. What Alterman says after “he never mentioned anything of this to me” does imply a possibility that Stone was a spy. He assumes that Stone would have expected him to disapprove–of what? The following sentences do not say or imply that he could not have been a spy.
Jun 11, 2009 - 8:24 pm 31. michael:The question we have to ask is exactly what did Stone DO, and was it all that bad?
He was demonstrably not a spy. He had no access to classified information and enjoyed no official capacity. He was a journalist. And as a journalist, knowledge was his stock in trade.
As journalists do, he shared his information with others in his community, gaining as much as he gave out. And many in that coterie were undoubtedly orthodox Stalinists, not just leftists, Marxists or communists. But we’re talking about 1936-38, well before the Cold War.
So what? I’m having trouble grasping the relevance of this.
I’m holding in my hand a copy of W.L. White’s “Report on the Russians”, published in 1945. In fact it was even published by the Readers’ Digest as a condensed book.
How does it depict the Soviets? Glowingly. They were our allies, and staunch defenders of their homeland. Essential to the war on fascism. Etcetera. And this was our official line in those days. We needed them. We liked them. We worked hand in hand with them.
Seen in that light, if Readers’ Digest saw nothing wrong with the Soviets, what is it that makes Izzy Stone’s sharing of info with fellow journos on the left such a heinous act?
Jun 14, 2009 - 2:04 pm