Not Without Honor: The History of American Anti-Communism. - book reviews

READING Not without Honor, I was reminded of the tongue-in-cheek comment of Wilmot Lewis, then dean of foreign correspondents in Washington, about Elliott Roosevelt's book on FDR: "The boy did not understand what the men were talking about." The history of anti-Communism in America is the subject taken up by Richard Gid Powers, but it is too complex to be left to someone who clearly knows little about the Russian Revolution -- in the first paragraph of his book he has the social democrats overthrowing the Tsar and the Bolsheviks overthrowing the social democrats -- and even less about the record of both the anti-Communists and the Communists in the United States.

Professor Powers, from that bastion of anti-anti-Communism, the City University of New York, has read many books, and presumably the daily papers, but despite the mountains of evidence from the Venona intercepts, the research of objective historians, and the disclosures of former officials of the Soviet secret police, he cleaves to the belief that most talk of Soviet and Communist espionage and the infiltration of American society has been "red-web conspiracy" nonsense from crackpots. In spite of this, some con- servatives, perhaps because they were overcome by the book's grudging approbation of some anti-Communists, have applauded the book -- at a time when even the Washington Post is conceding that the anti-anti-Communists were dead wrong and that Senator Joseph McCarthy may have been right.

Powers divides the forces that fought the Kremlin's attempts to destroy American society into "countersubversives" and "liberal anti-Communists," among whom he includes William Buckley. Countersubversives = bad; liberal anti-Communists = good. To arrive at this position, he is forced to equate all those who meticulously exposed Communist infiltration and perfidy with the now-forgotten Elizabeth Dilling and other crackpots. To do so he must smear as "unstable" Elizabeth Bentley, about whom a Justice Department official stated that everything she said that was susceptible of checking proved to be true; and as a "drunk" J. B. Matthews, whose files were unassailable. He must also dismiss the "apocalyptic extremes of anti-Communists like James Burnham."

The Amerasia case is brushed aside in misleading paragraphs which falsely claim that there was no prosecution because the evidence was tainted -- though Professor Powers acknowledges in his notes that he read the full and fully documented account in my book, Spies, Dupes, and Diplomats, as well as others. His recapitulation of the Hiss case is laughable, and he has Whittaker Chambers, prior to 1948, going "from government office to office trying to persuade officials to look at the papers he copied from Alger Hiss" -- which even the pro-Hiss zealots do not allege. The Hiss case, in fact, seems to offend him, for he writes that never before had "the countersubversives been able to sustain their now tired charges of treason in high places. . . . They could use Hiss's conviction to lend credibility to their most outlandish red-web fantasies."

Mr. Powers would rather join the liberals, pinkos, and fellow travelers -- he refers to them always as the "progressive Left" --and discard careful documentation by anti-Communists as "loony." "Loony"? It was claimed in the Thirties and Forties, to shrieks of rage, that Harry Hopkins was sympathetic to the Communists, and now KGB files show that he was an "agent of influence." The reader may smile when Powers argues that J. Edgar Hoover sought a "legal basis for a round-up of Communists in the event of a crisis with the Soviet Union" -- when Hubert Humphrey had already included such a round-up in enacted legislation. Weepy about the Hollywood Ten, he gets most of his facts wrong, and neglects to mention that those who suffered most from the hearings were anti-Communists like Morrie Ryskind, James K. McGuinness, and Adolphe Menjou.

It is, in fact, difficult to get a fair sighting on J. Edgar Hoover, from the Palmer-raid days to the time of his death -- or on Harry Truman's cover-up for Soviet spy Harry Dexter White or his admission to Judge Sam Rosenman that his "red herring" remark was a phony. And nowhere does Powers detail the exemplary record of The New Leader, financed largely by the ILGWU's David Dubinsky, in the exposure of the Communist apparat. Professor Powers tips his hand by asserting that "the reports on Communist activities [by the House Un-American Activities Committee] were for the most part accurate, [but] they had the unfortunate result of stoking the paranoia [of countersubversives by] giving them facts which were true but misleading." And how do we categorize his efforts to dump most of his misunderstanding of anti-Communism on the Catholic Church? He "traces" the anti-Communism of Catholics "to their conflicts with other ethnic groups."

But let me be fair. Richard Gid Powers does devote space to the systematic lynching of anti-Communists by the liberals, the liberal press, and his "progressive Left." But he deals here mostly in generalities. There is no word about the many anti-Communists who sacrificed comfort and career to battle the Communist terror -- no word about Carlo Tresca, the great anarchist and anti-Communist editor and fighter, who was murdered on a New York street by one of Stalin's executioners. And what about the purges in Spain of anti-Communists who joined the ranks to fight what they saw as fascism, or the KGB murder campaign against anti-Communist Loyalist refugees in Mexico?