This is the first in a weekly series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, who has just released a major book revealing how the far Left—most notably, communists—has 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, and is being hailed as groundbreaking. Herb Meyer, special assistant to the CIA director from 1981-87, says that Dupes “alters our understanding of the 20th century.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
Each week at Big Peace, Professor Kengor will profile one of his book’s Big Dupes. We kick-off with this introduction.
Big Peace: Okay, what’s a dupe?
Kengor: A dupe is someone who has been deceived or misled by opponents of the United States, for the purpose of serving the interests of those opponents. The dupe is an active but unwitting participant. The word has been used since the founding of the republic; George Washington warned about dupes in his Farewell Address. The duping process, however, accelerated exponentially when the Bolsheviks took Russia in 1917, as they launched a systematic effort to target America’s liberals/progressives, with their allies in the American Communist Party carefully aiding the process.
Big Peace: Your focus, then, begins in the 1910s?
Kengor: Yes, particularly with the founding of the Communist Party in the United States in September 1919. The book features actual original documents from that founding, delivered by the American comrades to their pals at the Soviet Comintern—sent directly from their convention in Chicago.
From there, the book moves through the Stalin period. During the Cold War, the duping was done on a remarkable scale, with impressive craftsmanship by communist propagandists. The communists had amazing success with liberals/progressives—successes that shocked the communists. Bolsheviks handlers were astounded at how easily they managed and misled these Americans, especially elites from major universities. This is quite clear from the archives, particularly Soviet Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
Big Peace: Who are the dupes in your book?
Kengor: For starters: Ted Kennedy, John Dewey, Jimmy Carter. I should pause to note that Carter graces the cover, kissing Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev, a fitting metaphor. There’s also FDR, duped by Stalin himself, and possibly duped by his most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins, who some now claim may have been a Soviet spy (“Agent 19”). Also, John Kerry, Dick Durbin, “Baghdad Jim” McDermott, Arthur Miller, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Jane Fonda, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Howard Zinn, Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, John Murtha, Maxine Waters, Pete Stark, Barbara Lee, the late Claude “Red” Pepper. That’s merely a sample. This book covers 600 pages, but I was forced to hold back, so target-rich is the environment. This could be a multi-volume set.
Big Peace: What about Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s mentor?
Kengor: Initially, I struggled to determine if Davis was a dupe or duper. I can now say he was a duper. Frank Marshall Davis was a longtime communist, an actual Communist Party member. No question. Shame on the liberal “journalists” and Obama biographers refusing to dig deeper and present that obvious conclusion. I lay this out in careful detail, with page after page of documentation. I’ll share some of that here when we profile him. Come back in a couple weeks and I’ll give Davis’s actual Communist Party card number.
Mind you, this was the literal mentor of our current president.
Big Peace: Those are specific people who are dupes, or dupers. You also note entire groups, organizations, categories. Who are they?
Kengor: Again, for starters: The “social justice” Religious Left, which were the biggest suckers of them all; indeed, the atheist-communists were almost speechless at the gullibility of liberal Christians, who were often putty in their hands, to borrow Lenin’s characterization. The ACLU, especially founding members Roger Baldwin, Harry Ward, and Corliss Lamont. The New Republic in its early years. The New York Times, for 100 years and counting. Columbia University, which was the worst among universities.
Also, Hollywood, especially the crew who formed the Committee for the First Amendment, which vigorously protested Congress’s investigation of their “liberal” friends, who, we now know, were actually hardened communists who blatantly lied to these celebrities. These oblivious progressives included Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Bogart and Bacall.
Big Peace: Speaking of which, you’ve got a bunch of Hollywood dupes, past and present. You list the actual CPUSA numbers for Hollywood Ten figures that the Left claims were liberal innocents. You also show something remarkable that might involve Humphrey Bogart?
Kengor: Yes, I found a roster of students enrolled in a CPUSA Workers School in New York from January-March 1934. It includes a “Bogart.” I consider at great length whether this might have been Humphrey Bogart. I try to be fair. I have nothing against Humphrey Bogart. I love his movies. Certainly, by the end of his life, he was not a communist, or even a dupe. We can go through this in one of our installments. I took me 10,000 words to cover it in the book. I need more than a few sentences here.
Big Peace: You say that Bogart, either way, quit being duped and redeemed himself. Who are other onetime dupes who changed for the better?
Kengor: I cover a bunch. Ronald Reagan tops the list. The actress Olivia de Havilland is another. She enraged the communists when she blew the whistle on their attempts to manipulate her and other liberals. William C. Bullitt, FDR’s first ambassador to the USSR, who had been a complete useful idiot and did a remarkable 180. Even John Dewey redeemed himself. Senator Paul Douglas was another. Those are few. These are great stories. Most remained Democrats, by the way.
Big Peace: You say you didn’t write this book to be sensational. Why did you write it?
Kengor: I couldn’t avoid it. All this documentation is sitting there in archives: Massive piles and reams and reels—all ignored by America’s illustrious “scholars.” Of course, I understand why they’re ignoring it. Most of them are liberals, and to bring this damning information to light would reveal that the anti-communists were right all along, and that the liberals’ so-called “friends” were really predators who victimized them again and again. This material is deeply embarrassing—an indictment of sacred cows and beliefs they’ve cherished for a century. They’re avoiding it like the plague.
Big Peace: The great strength of this book is documentation. Tell us about that.
Kengor: The final manuscript I turned in had over 1,500 endnotes. As we went through a very scrupulous editing process, we added hundreds more. There are dozens of photos and exhibits. We include never-before-published documents from KGB files, FBI files, Comintern Archives, the Daily Worker, Pravda, you name it.
Big Peace: You say another strength is your refusal to broad-brush all liberals and all Democrats?
Kengor: My heroes are the liberals and Democrats who weren’t duped, or, once duped, learned and redeemed themselves. In the introduction, I rattle off dozens of them. For instance, John Dewey, the father of modern public education, who was terribly manipulated, saying the stupidest things about the USSR, later realized his mistakes and changed. There are countless Democrats in this book who I commend for not being duped or for doing wonderful work exposing communists.
I wish most sincerely that liberals be “liberal” and open their minds and read this book. They need to see how they get suckered again and again.
Of course, that’s my virtuous side. The Machiavellian in me says, “Let them ignore it. I can make a career off this.”
Big Peace: At the same time, almost all of your dupes are on the left?
Kengor: Yes, naturally. The communists didn’t bother with anti-communists on the right. Why would they? They targeted the naïve on the soft left, and especially fellow travelers who shared certain sympathies—redistribution of wealth, progressive income taxes, demagoguery against the rich—and who, especially, shared the communists dislike and even contempt for anti-communists. As James Burnham famously put it, for the Left, “the preferred enemy is always to the right.”
That said, there were Republicans who were duped, from Senator Mark Hatfield to President Gerald Ford, for example. Ford was so wedded to the sham of détente that he refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn out of fear of offending Brezhnev.
Very importantly, I must stress that some of my political and even spiritual mentors, like Ronald Reagan and Thomas Merton, respectively, were once duped. I cover them at length.
Big Peace: Who are dupes today, with the Cold War over?
Kengor: Many of the same Americans suckered by Soviet propaganda have resurfaced in the War on Terror, although the periods, and processes, are quite different. Some of those who accused U.S. soldiers of war crimes and burning down villages in the Middle East made the same irresponsible allegations during Vietnam. Their transition from “Cold War dupe” to “War on Terror dupe” has been nearly seamless. Moreover, many ‘60s radicals have reemerged as not only politicians and tenured professors but, amazingly, as associates of the current president of the United States.
It was stunning to research this book during the presidential formation of Barack Obama and see so many names suddenly surface in the background of the man who is now leader of the free world. These range from Frank Marshall Davis to the well-publicized Bill Ayers, to a long list of others, from Dr. Quentin Young to the marquee names on the 2008 list of the group “Progressives for Obama,” which read like a Who’s Who of the ‘60s radicals called to testify before the House Committee on Internal Security. It was impossible to have foreseen this, given that my decision to pursue this project, as a Cold War project, occurred in 2006, when no one would have predicted the 2008 election of Barack Obama. This was the most fascinating, frustrating, and, frankly, depressing, aspect of this project.
Bear in mind that millions of Americans—especially independents/moderates—obliviously voted for Obama, a man ranked by National Journal as the most liberal member of arguably the most liberal Senate in history, somehow thinking he was another Jack Kennedy. Many of them feel they were duped, voting for “change” far removed from what they imagined. We can talk about that.
Big Peace: That’s enough for this week. Who is the first Big Dupe you’ll profile for us next week?
Kengor: We’ll start with Ted Kennedy, including his confidential offer to Yuri Andropov in May 1983, which is evident through a shocking memo declassified by the Russian government. That entire document, in Russian and English, is printed in the appendix of the book. I’ll also quote a Soviet defector who detailed how the KGB manipulated Kennedy.
Big Peace: Thank you, Professor Kengor. Talk to you next week.
Kengor: Looking forward to it. Thanks.
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