George Putnam
Friday, May 23, 2003

It is this reporter's opinion that when the Left runs out of gas, they can always drag out the magic word "McCarthyism." Those who despise the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy bear an undying hatred of the man and their hatred sometimes gets the best of them, preventing them from seeing what good came out of that era.

What brings this all to light today is that, after a 50-year wait, the U.S. Senate has released all the secret transcripts of Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-communist hearings, which (held in 1953 and 1954) earned McCarthy a place in history and made "McCarthyism" synonymous with "witch hunt."

My friend Pat Buchanan helped me recall the period of the '40s and '50s. I lived through that era. No one has to tell me how deeply the Communists penetrated our radio, theater, film industry (recall the Hollywood Ten*) and our government.

But who was this fellow McCarthy? He was a Wisconsin kid born of the Depression, a red-blooded American struggling to make a living, as we all did; he served his country as a tail-gunner, came home to Wisconsin, ran for the Senate and served his constituency well.

At the time, Communism was our No. 1 enemy - or so it seemed - and Joe McCarthy was obsessed with rooting Communists out of our government. The McCarthy Committee targeted the Communists without mercy.

Thus he gained the hatred of the Left. They charged McCarthy with bullying witnesses - accusing people who had only made "mistakes" of disloyalty.

And because McCarthy's investigations led high into our government, the Communists and their fellow travelers found willing allies to back the attacks on McCarthy.

Perhaps McCarthy, in his determination to root out the Communists, made some mistakes of his own. Perhaps he should have used a rifle instead of a shotgun, charging that hundreds were involved, instead of targeting dozens. Perhaps he should not have charged so many branches of government with being involved. Surely he should have avoided the serious charges he made against men in the military, for that led to confrontation with the No. 1 military man - hero of WWII, president of the United States, Dwight David Eisenhower.

However, the espionage and treason proved by the Barona transcripts - the intercepted coded messages from Soviet agents to Moscow - are far more extensive than McCarthy could have imagined in the 1940s. The words out of Moscow prove that our government was honeycombed with traitors and spies.

Pat Buchanan identifies a few:

• Alger Hiss and Lawrence Duggan, high in the State Department, have been proven to be Communist traitors and spies. Hiss was part of the sellout at Yalta when Eastern Europe was signed away to Stalin, and later shaped the United Nations.

• Harry Dexter White, father of the International Monetary Fund and the Morgenthau Plan, was a Soviet agent.

• Lauchlin Currie, a Soviet spy, was on the White House staff.

• William Remington was a Soviet spy at the Commerce Department.

• Judith Coplon headed up a spy ring at the Justice Department with access to FBI secrets and files that she transferred to Soviet agents.

• The Rosenbergs were Communist traitors who gave their Russian handlers the secrets of the atom bomb.

... and the list goes on and on.

No one had to tell me the story of the '40s and '50s. Communist cells attempted to capture me in the American Federation of Radio Artists in New York and, later, on the West Coast.

I knew Gus Hall, Dorothy Healey, Helen Wood Birnie (who defined the difference between socialism and communism as the difference between seduction and rape) ... and there were others, including Matt Cvetic and John Brewer, who infiltrated union activities as patriotic Americans.

The list is endless.

Recall the McCarthy Committee: Cohn, Shine and Robert Kennedy. They were dedicated Americans working with Joe McCarthy. All suffered at the hands of the McCarthy haters. Did you know that one of Sen. McCarthy's earliest supporters was Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK?

Don't tell me about witch-hunting or any Communist hysteria or McCarthy isms! It is pure myth! Pat Buchanan recalls that in 1954, at the 15th reunion of his class, a McCarthy hater toasted Harvard College for never having produced an Alger Hiss or a Joe McCarthy.

John F. Kennedy stood up and walked out, roaring, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!" - the words of later president JFK judging the worth of Joe McCarthy.

If you doubt all this, consider the more recent cases of spies who have been discovered:

• Robert Hanssen, an FBI insider and admitted spy. Hanssen pleaded guilty in 2001 to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy charges; he had been a mole inside the FBI since 1985.

• Navy Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker. For almost 20 years, Walker sold top secret encryption codes to the Soviets that allowed them into the inner sanctum of United States operations and methods.

• Aldrich Ames, a longtime CIA employee posted to the office that handled clandestine operations around the globe. His spying on behalf of the former Soviet Union proved "catastrophic" to the CIA's human intelligence operations.

• Jonathan Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst. Pollard gave truckloads of the most closely held secrets away to a friendly nation: Israel. Pollard was said to have been a "heavy user" of illegal drugs and a traitor who would also have compromised the Israelis "if it had struck him as something he wanted to do."

• CIA agent Harold Nicholson, the most senior agent ever accused of spying for Russia. He allegedly sold information to Russian intelligence for $120,000.

• Most recently, former FBI agent James Smith was indicted and will be tried for allowing his Chinese spy mistress, Katrina Leung, to steal U.S. secrets. Two of the counts accuse Smith of improperly removing two documents from the FBI offices and taking them to meetings with Leung, enabling her to obtain the documents for China during their affair that spanned more than 20 years.

And there are so many others!

The problem is still alive! It's still working! It's still happening today, stronger than ever! Whatever McCarthy's shortcomings, his chapter in history holds important lessons for America and we must learn from them and keep learning.

*For More on the Hollywood Ten:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/blacklist.html

http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/ten.htm

Further Reading and References:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=
/nm/20030505/ts_nm/congress_mccarthy_dc_5

"The Death of the West" by Pat Buchanan

http://www.gpo.gov/congress/senate/senate12cp107.html

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/
20030506/en_afp/us_politics_mccarthy_030506162426

http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/05/29/cia.spy.02/

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=
/afp/20030508/wl_afp/us_china_spy_030508152615

The legendary George Putnam is 88 years young and a veteran of 68 years as a reporter, broadcaster and commentator ... and is still going strong. George is part of the all-star line-up of Southern California's KPLS Radio – Hot Talk AM 830. Click here for George's complete bio

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