This is the most recent installment of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College, on his book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more. Larry Schweikart, author of A Patriot’s History of the United States, calls Dupes “a great contribution.” Burt Folsom, author of New Deal or Raw Deal, says Dupes is “so fascinating and so revealing that I couldn’t put it down.” Fred Barnes calls it “an incredibly important book.”
Big Peace: Professor Kengor, last week we looked at the 1940 Katyn Woods massacre, where some 22,000 Polish military officers were slaughtered by the Soviet NKVD under direct order from Joe Stalin. You shared the shocking story of how President Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed Stalin and the Soviets when they claimed they weren’t responsible for the tragedy, which they blamed on the Nazis.
Kengor: It was symptomatic of a bizarre, fatal trust that FDR too often placed in Stalin, who he dubbed “Uncle Joe.” But that strikes at a core, underlying question—namely, what, or who, helped foster that trust?
Sadly, central to this misplaced trust was the work of “progressives” around FDR. I put “progressives” in quotes because not all of the “progressives” in FDR’s orbit were actually progressives—or liberals, to use a similar, usually synonymous term. Some of them were communists masquerading as progressives—much like some of the self-proclaimed progressives in the current group, Progressives for Obama, which we profiled here a few weeks back. (Click here and here.)
So, FDR was deluded by a destructive combination of duped (genuine) progressives and phony “progressives” who, in actuality, were closet communists masquerading as progressives in order to dupe the genuine progressives. These communists were the wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Big Peace: In Dupes, you write that the relationship between FDR and American communists was “multifaceted,” as they “alternately trashed, demonized, and duped” the president. You state: “The shabby treatment of FDR included slashing from inside as well as outside: There were covert communist operatives who sought to penetrate the administration at the same time their comrades were gashing the new president and his policies in their protests and publications.”
Kengor: So true. Click here to view Comintern documents at my website to see some of the fliers from CPUSA, where they called FDR every hideous name in their playbook: “fascist,” “warmonger,” “slave-master.”
My take on FDR is rather complex, sometimes sympathetic, other times very critical. He gets duped, yes, often by people he thought he could trust, but some of which were clandestine communists, even Soviet spies, from Harry Dexter White to Lauchlin Currie to Alger Hiss, among others.
By the way, then there was another type of traitor, not in FDR’s orbit but sabotaging his highest priorities elsewhere, such as the atomic-bomb project. Here I have in mind the likes of Julius Rosenberg, whose KGB code name was “Liberal.” Imagine that—that’s what the Soviets called him.
Big Peace: The Soviet code name for Julius Rosenberg was “Liberal?”
Kengor: Yes.
Big Peace: On those people that FDR thought he could trust, who were supposedly liberal “progressives,” but may have been something much worse, pick up with Harry Hopkins, who you touched on last week.
Kengor: Harry Hopkins is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. He’s a poster child for the elusive progressive. Of course, he may have been a poster child for something else.
Hopkins was born in 1890 in Sioux City, Iowa, to a small businessman father and devout Methodist mother. He left the Midwest for New York City in the 1910s, where he soaked up the toxic left-wing politics. By the 1920s, he was active in a number of progressive causes, with special interest in social work—a fighter for “social justice.” He ended up executive director of the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, where his running of welfare policy impressed not only the governor but the governor’s wife, Eleanor.
Big Peace: Speaking of whom, Eleanor herself was a progressive and, by your estimation, quite a dupe.
Kengor: That’s right. One of the worst examples I highlight in the book was her ripping Winston Churchill for his “Iron Curtain” speech. Stalin no doubt loved that. Stalin called Churchill a “warmonger” for that speech, which was basically what Eleanor said. At the same time, American communists were trashing Eleanor in their publications. In Dupes, I reprint pages from some of those publications. Pretty vile stuff. They did to Eleanor the same thing they did to her husband.
Big Peace: And Eleanor was a big fan of Harry Hopkins?
Kengor: Oh, yes. By March 1933, with the new president ramping up his landmark 100 Days, Hopkins was summoned to Washington to spearhead relief at the federal level. He had risen to such prominence and influence with FDR that he would become one of the principal architects of the New Deal, particularly the relief programs within the Works Progress Administration. Under Hopkins, the WPA became one of the largest employers in all of the United States, which was how Hopkins wanted it.
That’s another thing that communists and progressives share: a desire to centralize as much as possible in one government, with the government a nation’s largest employer.
Big Peace: Those are Hopkins’ progressive credentials. Where’s the evidence of his interaction with communists?
Kengor: Only after Hopkins’ death in 1946 did we begin learning more concrete information on his dealings with communists. He seems to have first had contact with the communist underground in the 1930s. He seemed to have fallen in with the infamous Hal Ware’s cells created within the Department of Agriculture (DOA), which was rife with communists. American communists wanted to do for agriculture in the United States what their beloved leader (Joe Stalin) was doing for it in the USSR. Of course, had they succeeded, starvation would have been the likely outcome here as well.
One cell leader was Lee Pressman, who organized a “study group” inside DOA by the end of the first year of the Roosevelt administration. Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel, the principal researchers of the Venona transcripts—which were secret wartime communiqués between the Soviet Union and American communists—concluded that Harry Hopkins was a member of Pressman’s group.
Big Peace: In the book, you caution that involvement with the Pressman group “would not guarantee that Hopkins was a communist, nor a KGB mole.”
Kengor: Correct. Yet, those researchers believe that Hopkins activities were quite bad. Indeed, they have concluded that Hopkins seems to be the only member of the Pressman group who has been linked to Soviet espionage.
Even more significant, the evidence from the Soviet side, suggesting he was something much worse, began emerging in the 1960s. The sources include Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer and one of the most knowledgeable defectors ever to leave the Soviet Union, and Iskhak Akhmerov, a high-level Soviet official who worked inside the United States during World War II.
Gordievsky began working undercover for British intelligence a decade before his defection, until he was exposed by CIA traitor Aldrich Ames.
Both of these Soviet officials called Hopkins an “agent,” with Gordievsky calling him an agent of “major significance.” Akhmerov, who was also in contact with the likes of Alger Hiss, described Hopkins as “the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States.” Akhmerov spoke of how he had been in contact with Hopkins well before Hopkins’ first visit to Moscow in July 1941, almost certainly dating back into the 1930s.
Much more information on Hopkins emerged decades later, specifically with the Venona revelations. There are many Venona messages that contain messages to or from Hopkins, and reportedly outside of Hopkins’ expected service as a representative to the president. Hopkins was in contact with Soviet officials as high up as Ambassador Maxim Litvinov and even Andrei Gromyko. Hopkins eventually had repeated discussions with Stalin himself, including some in FDR’s absence and some in FDR’s presence.
Many of those interactions were obviously appropriate, whereas others seem suspicious.
Big Peace: Among them, note the Venona report dated May 29, 1943.
Kengor: That one, signed by Akhmerov, reports secret discussions between FDR and Churchill, which, in turn, were inappropriately channeled to the Soviet government. Those discussions were relayed by Soviet agent “19,” who is believed to have been Harry Hopkins.
Big Peace: You have more on Hopkins, including how he further misled FDR on Stalin. Let’s pick that up again next week. But to wrap up, the big-picture lesson for this week, professor, relates to America’s “progressives.” They were as elusive and sometimes deceptive under FDR as they are today under Obama.
Kengor: That’s one of the lessons, for sure. It remains difficult to tell when the progressives are liberals being duped by communists or are actually communists duping liberals as they masquerade as progressives. Again, I point to the group, Progressives for Obama, formed during Obama’s presidential bid, spearheaded by ‘60s communist radicals like Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, and Mark Rudd. Progressives and their “progressive” ideology have always been exasperatingly difficult to define, with the only thing you really know about them is that they’re constantly evolving, or reforming, or, to borrow from Obama-speak, “changing.” Not only is that maddening for us conservatives, as we can’t get a handle on what these folks truly believe, but it has long offered an opportunity to communists to exploit the progressives, sometimes by infiltration.
For the American voter, we must look hard and closely, with careful discernment, to try to ascertain the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Hopefully, we can do a better a job at that than the “progressives”—whoever or whatever they may be—themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment