In Denial
Historians, Communism & Espionage
by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
Encounter, 316 pp., $25.95 THROUGH THE LATE 1970s, the consensus among American historians was that communism and Nazism were equally despotic systems. That view was held by Theodore Draper, the foremost historian on American communism, Irving Howe, and Sidney Hook, among many others.
But the subsequent generation of "New Left" scholars furiously attacked this idea. Anti-communism led to the Cold War, McCarthyism, and Vietnam. Suspicion of the American Communist party was "baseless paranoia," and American Communists were unsung heroes working for democratic ideals. Anti-Communist liberals were merely "liberal McCarthyites," and when the Communist party was driven to the margins of American politics in the 1950s, something great was lost to America.
You'd think that the collapse of the evil empire would have weakened their position, but since 1989 their fury and disappointment have risen to fever pitch and show no signs of abatement. It's this refusal to face facts--now, when they are so clear--which has prompted John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr to write "In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage," their attack on the neo-revisionism of contemporary scholarship about communism.
Haynes and Klehr have, between them, produced eleven notable books on the subject of American communism and Soviet espionage. When the Russians briefly opened up the archives of Communist activity stretching back to the beginning of the Bolshevik movement and the creation of the Soviet Union, Klehr was the first American scholar to examine the enormous documentary collections of the Comintern. He found a substantial correspondence between the Comintern and American Communists, copies of Comintern orders, reports from Comintern representatives in America who supervised the Communist party, and thousands of pages of transcribed testimony from American Communist officials who journeyed to Moscow each year. The material from the archives demonstrated conclusively that the American Communist party had a clandestine "secret apparatus" that cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies.
In their pioneering works, "The Secret World of American Communism" and "The Soviet World of American Communism," Haynes and Klehr definitively documented the cooperation between the Communist International, the Communist party, and Soviet foreign espionage agencies. They showed the International's secret financial underwriting of the Communist Party USA, and Comintern control over the party's policies and leadership. Then, in the groundbreaking book "Venona," through the translation and interpretation of intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams, they sealed the case against Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and scores of other heroes of the "progressive Left."
Their latest joint effort, "In Denial," is restrained, deliberative, and authoritative. Their subjects, history professors, are another matter. Rarely has a scholarly crew used such irrationality, casuistry, and invective, or been guilty of such delusional wish-fulfillment. Worse, the professors in question are not soapbox nuts and cranks on the margins, but important figures at the heart of the new historical establishment. Their clearest motive is their longing to return to the days of Soviet power in the world and Communist party insurgency in the United States. "Too many revisionists present a view of history," Haynes and Klehr write, "in which the wrong side won the cold war."
IN ITS EARLIER INCARNATION, revisionism's aim was primarily to discredit anti-communism in the university. With the collapse of the New Left, the second wave of revisionists turned to the heyday of American communism to justify their radical commitment. They saw Communists as inspiring shapers and contributors to American politics and culture. The Communist party hadn't collapsed because of its Soviet worship and undemocratic ideology, but, as Haynes and Klehr explain the revisionist viewpoint, because "a fascistic American security regime...had spied upon and disrupted a radical movement."
The most revered scholar for some revisionists is the dean of Stalinist historians, Herbert Aptheker. Interviewed with reverence in the prestigious Journal of American History in 2000, Aptheker advised younger "anti-capitalist" historians to practice "intense partisanship." He "could not understand the idea of objectivity" in history, for being objective meant "being part of the Right." The new revisionists practice Aptheker's creed with a vengeance, substituting stridency, evasion, special pleading, improbable scenarios, and the airbrushing of facts for traditional standards of scholarship.
ANTI-COMMUNISM is their bête noire. Blanche Wiesen Cook, for instance, writes that because of its fight against communism, America "stand[s] morally isolated before the world, allied with . . . killer countries . . . always bellowing, when we are not shrieking, and thumping and bumping and burping our bombs and tanks and missiles . . . everything fine and creative in American thought has been spattered and smeared by anti-communism." Joel Kovel writes that Hubert Humphrey's anti-communism was "a ritual of male bonding within which the signifier 'father' links Hubert Humphrey Jr., Hubert Humphrey Sr., Lyndon Johnson, and the whole ethos of America as a land where real men stand tall and stand together." As a result of anti-communism, writes Kovel, "millions of innocents lie dead, whole societies have been laid to waste, a vigorous domestic labor movement has been castrated, and the political culture of the U.S. has been frozen in a retrograde position." As if that weren't enough, Kovel adds that "anti-communism destroys time itself." Paul Buhle declares Harry Truman "America's Stalin" and concludes, "When the judgment of the twentieth century's second half is made, every American president will be seen as a jerk."
The 1995 disclosure of the Venona documents, the deciphered cables between KGB spies in the United States and Moscow that further confirmed American Communists' extensive role in espionage, have caused a few revisionists, such as Maurice Isserman, to admit honorably they were wrong about Soviet espionage and Soviet control of the American Communist party. There are still a few holdouts against the existence of Soviet espionage, including Victor Navasky, Bernice Schrank, and William A. Reuben. But most, while no longer denying Soviet espionage, have simply shifted ground. Ellen Schrecker now says the disclosures are "old news," although they were never "new news" to her. "In the academic world," Haynes and Klehr write, "the movement to honor Soviet spies and Stalinist acolytes had long been underway." They point out that Bard College created the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies (now held by Joel Kovel). When it comes to espionage, many revisionists make it clear that Soviet spies who lied about their activities are admirable, and defectors who told the truth are slime--for the spies did it out of "soaring motives," according to Ellen Schrecker. Schrecker sums it up: "Were these activities so awful? They thought they were building a better world for the masses."
The revisionists charge that anti-Communist historians take undue pleasure in the triumph of the West in the Cold War, and they are enraged by this celebration. Writing of America's victory over communism, Joel Kovel declared his "bitterness that those I had considered, as the Sandinista anthem put it, 'the enemy of humanity' were strutting about and boasting that history had ended on their terms." Kovel, obviously, thought we should be in mourning. As Haynes and Klehr note, "No such charge would have been made . . . against those writing books about the outcome of the Allied war against the Nazis."
THE TRUTH IS that Ellen Schrecker's "masses" have thoroughly repudiated communism, wherever and whenever they have been its victims. "To be a Communist," write Haynes and Klehr, "was to be part of a rigid mental world tightly sealed from outside influences, and this seal partitioned [American Communists] from reality." In raging retreat, the revisionists have replicated this sealed, Alice-in-Wonderland world in the ivory towers of academia, far from the sweaty realities of the streets and their beloved masses. Incredibly enough, it is a domain they largely control, imposing their fantasies on students, leading historical journals and textbooks, and on the entire history profession.
John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's "In Denial" could not be more timely.
David Evanier is the author of "Red Love," "The One-Star Jew" and "Making the Wiseguys Weep," and co-author with Joe Pantoliano of "Who's Sorry Now."