THE VENONA SECRETS SADLY ARE STILL SECRET TO MANY

(To All, the part of this review concerning Steve Nelson is a repeat from another of my reviews, but the rest of this is original.-HM)

THE VENONA SECRETS: THE DEFINITIVE EXPOSE OF SOVIET ESPIONAGE

IN AMERICA (Regnery History, 2001) by

HERBERT ROMERSTEIN and ERIC BREINDEL

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            Why review in 2016 a book published in 2001?  Because there is need for another look at this important volume.  The main reason for that need is that schools, universities, and media, all ignore the explosive findings presented in this and in similar works.  Thus, Marquette U., founded as a Roman Catholic institution by the Jesuits over a century ago, in 2016 invited Angela Davis as a featured speaker for 2017.  Ms. Davis, once a prominent member of the Communist Party, USA (hereafter, CP) and who in 2014 sent greetings to that year’s CP convention, will not have to contend with opposition speakers invited to the platform.  Her usual fee for such speeches begins at $25,000 = a pittance compared to Hillary Clinton, but a sizable sum for a once most controversial figure, and one probably still very close to the CP.

            In November 2016 former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on Fox News praised the appointment of Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon as President-elect Trump’s Chief Strategist.  Gingrich, who earned a doctorate in history from Tulane U. and who taught history himself at the university level, on television extolled Bannon’s appointment, and compared Bannon to FDR’s chief advisor for many years, Harry Hopkins.  Hopkins was so close to Pres. Roosevelt, he literally lived in the White House.  Had Gingrich read the Venona book, he surely would have avoided the Bannon-Hopkins comparison, because in Venona on learns that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent.

            One of the most popularly assigned books in high schools and universities is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.  Although Wikipedia quotes Zinn’s description of himself as an “anarchist,” “socialist,” maybe a “democratic socialist,” Robert McCain in The American Spectator argued that Zinn had been a member of the CP, at least beginning in the 1940s, that Zinn lied about his membership to the FBI, and he made clear that he would not identify any comrades he might have known.  This was his attitude in the early 1950 at the height of Stalinism.  Might such views be reflected in Zinn’s history of America – his most influential history of America, today?

            To reinforce a pro-Communist approach to American history, Public Broadcasting in some cities has shown “American Reds,” a 90-minute documentary on the American CP.  A distributor of the film reports it raises “a number of key issues concerning social change, idealism, ideology and the nature of our economic and political system…”  Bill Moyers deemed the film “an important addition to public television’s mission to throw light on obscured corners of our history…”  Moyers fails to expose how that film omits, distorts, and spins.  This is another reason why we should read, and re-read The Venona Secrets.

            Here is an example of how the Venona volume of 2001 can shed light on the pro-Communist propaganda spinning in the schools and on PBS-TV.

            One activist interviewed at length (perhaps more than any other in this film) was Steve Nelson, who was born in what is today, Croatia in 1903 to Hungarian parents.  He arrived in America in 1919, and was soon working in Pennsylvania slaughter houses and other non-professional jobs.  He looks and sounds like a typical American blue-collar worker.  For the documentary Nelson describes his efforts to organize laborers into various unions at times when unions were barely legal.  Nelson relates one incident when, after his  arrest, he was interrogated by police.  They beat him.  One hit his jaw so hard that Nelson passed out with that question.  A cartoon recreated the scene.  In the late 1930s Nelson, along with 3,200 other radical Americans, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, part of the Communist-sponsored International Brigades to defend Republican Spain against Francisco Franco and his fascist rebels.  Nelson expresses sorrow at the loss of comrades who fell in the fight.  The narrator even interviews Nelson’s adult daughter, who remembers that as a child she was told not to discuss certain topics at home because the family was aware that their home was bugged.  No word is said, but the implication is – how horrible that in America children were not free to discuss things at home because the government was listening in.

            In the case of Steve Nelson, the government was indeed listening in.  But never does the documentary indicate what the government heard in Nelson’s Oakland abode.  Thanks to the release of various government documents, we now know, and thanks to authors like Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (hereafter R & B), we can readily discover the workings of the Nelson household.  For example, in March 1943 the FBI bug revealed that Nelson met with atomic scientist Joseph Weinberg.  Nelson instructed Weinberg to gather and send him information from other Party members working with him on the atomic bomb project at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.  Nelson also told Weinberg to inform the comrades working there to destroy their CP membership books, and refrain from using liquor.(p. 255)

            In April 1943 Nelson received another visitor, a member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC.  The Soviet official instructed the America Communist to establish an espionage network in the American atomic program.  The Soviet counted out specific amounts of cash to fund the project, and told Nelson where he should place reliable Communists for this “special work” in conveying to the Soviets what the Americans were discovering in the US atomic program.(p. 259)

            When in 1980 Nelson was interviewed by two sympathetic academics, Nelson assured them, “I never had any links with Soviet espionage in the United States.”(p. 259)  And what about any such links in Spain?  Because of the release of the Venona documents, we now know that Nelson lied.  We have known this for over a decade.  But the 2016 documentary ignores Nelson’s treason to portray a poster-boy worker and sympathetic CP activist whose privacy was invaded by an oppressive FBI.

            If you read Venona you will learn that the Rosenbergs were not the only atomic spies.  That there was good reason to suspend the security clearance of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer in the 1950s, and wonder why it was not suspended earlier.  One learns of the power of Harry Hopkins, who lived in FDR’s White House, and that he was a Soviet agent.  Even Eleanor Roosevelt sought to close down the Venona project of recording and trying to decipher messages sent to the Soviets.  One learns that leaders of the American CP vetted members to find who would best serve as Soviet agents.  One learns of Soviet agents in the White House, the State Dept. the Treasury Dept., the Attorney General’s Dept., the Agricultural Dept. etc.  These agents probably hastened the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and delayed a possible German surrender to the western Allies in WWII by publicizing the draconian Morganthau Plan to turn a defeated Germany into a backward, impoverished, agricultural land.  One learns that Alger Hiss, of the American State Dept., received a Soviet medal on a trip to Moscow for his service to Soviet intelligence.

            And after reading Venona, one can conclude that the CPUSA was probably the 3^rd most influential political organization in 20^th century America.  It may have influenced the Communist take-over in China, the Korean War, and Soviet atomic bombs and industrial development as when an American CP member developed the first Soviet computer.

            While many on the Left stress the halcyon days of the popular front, the Venona volume reminds us of Communist rhetoric during the Hitler-Stalin Pact.  Thus, in 1940 Milt Wolff addressed a convention of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Chicago, in which he damned President Franklin “Demagogue” Roosevelt as a “red-baiting, union-busting, alien-hunting, anti-Negro, anti-Semite.”(285) 

One cannot discuss the CP rallies, its skills and bravery in union organizing, and in defying segregation, etc., without discussing how American CP leaders took Moscow money, how the leadership scouted Party members seeking a right fit to place “reliable” Party members in “special work” to supply Soviet intelligence with information. 

Those Americans involved in spying for the USSR were so dedicated that “not one broke with Soviet intelligence as a result of the alliance with the Nazis.”(37)  Far from being just another left-wing party, the CPUSA provided a pool from which the Party leadership would recruit agents to serve Moscow.  “Although any American Communist would have been proud to have been chosen to spy for the Soviet Union, only a small number of Party members had the jobs or other qualifications that the Soviets needed.”(11)

 Here I think the authors exaggerate – if every Party member desired to spy, why bother to vet?  Part of the leadership’s duties was to choose only those willing to spy; and determine those who, if asked to spy, would not go to American authorities and expose the system.  One duty of the CP leadership was to keep the spy system hidden.  Even R & B admit few members of the CPUSA were directly involved in such activities.  Furthermore, if none of those already involved in spying quit because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, that was not true of the general membership.  The CPUSA lost about one fourth of its members during that period.  The film ‘American Reds” notes that about one million Americans joined the CP at some point.  Yet, at its high points, the CP had only 100.000 members.  Not all Party members were spies-in-waiting.  During the popular-front period, some Blacks quit the Party because the Soviets were supplying Mussolini with oil in his invasion of Abyssinia.  While many left the Party with the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, some joined during this period because the CP was opposed to intervention in Europe’s wars and created the American Peace Mobilization.  Bayard Ruston, who would later organize the 1963 March on Washington, quit the Party when after June 1941 it abandoned its peace policy in favor of intervention against Nazi Germany.  A few years later Richard Wright quit the Party.  Of the million who joined at some point, perhaps 850,000 quit the CP because they disagreed with its policies.  I would suggest that 85% were not willing to mindlessly follow any orders given to them.  Clearly, not all members of the CP were so enamored of the Soviet Union.

Overall, Romerstein and Breindel have written a book as pertinent today as when it was first published in 2001.  It is a book needed to counteract the propaganda still emitting from the academy and the media.

AMERICAN REDS - DISTORTED DOCUMENTARY

“AMERICAN REDS” – Documentary or Distortumentary?   Shown on PBS 2016

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            The American Communist Party is probably the 3^rd most influential political organization of 20^th century America.  In October 2016 Milwaukee Public Television telecast a 1 ½ hour documentary produced and written by Richard Wormser.  Its scope was to cover the history of the Communist Party, USA, from its origins at the end of WWI up to the late 1950s and beyond.  Over a million Americans at some point joined the American CP (hereafter, for Communist Party), and the organization had considerable influence on many areas of American life in the 1930s and 40s.  Interviewed are party activists and leaders, some of whom died several years before the film project was completed.  Also interviewed were historians, interspersed with headlines of the day, magazine covers, posters, old newsreels, and even occasional cartoon recreations of incidents described by the participants.  By 1960 it was estimated that the CP had only 10,000 members, and many of them were undercover FBI agents.

            The filmmakers hope that this documentary will be used in schools and universities to help enlighten students about the CP.  I contend that the CP was among the most influential political organizations in American history, which greatly altered American life and world affairs.  But I also maintain that the Wormser documentary distorts history and is essentially dishonest about major aspects of the incredibly influential CPUSA.

            One activist interviewed at length (perhaps more than any other in this program) was Steve Nelson, who was born in what is today, Croatia in 1903 to Hungarian parents.  He arrived in America in 1919, and was soon working in Pennsylvania slaughter houses and other non-professional jobs.  He looks and sounds like a typical American blue-collar worker.  For the documentary Nelson describes his efforts to organize laborers into various unions at times when unions were barely legal.  Nelson relates one incident when, after his  arrest, he was interrogated by police.  They beat him.  One hit his jaw so hard that Nelson passed out with that question.  A cartoon recreated the scene.  In the late 1930s Nelson, along with 3,200 other radical Americans, joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, part of the Communist-sponsored International Brigades to defend Republican Spain against Francisco Franco and his fascist rebels.  Nelson expresses sorrow at the loss of comrades who fell in the fight.  The narrator even interviews Nelson’s adult daughter, who remembers that as a child she was told not to discuss certain topics at home because the family was aware that their home was bugged.  No word is said, but the implication is – how horrible that in America children were not free to discuss things at home because the government was listening in.

            In the case of Steve Nelson, the government was indeed listening in.  But never does the documentary indicate what the government heard in Nelson’s Oakland abode.  Thanks to the release of various government documents, we now know, and thanks to authors like Diana West, Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel (hereafter R & B), we can readily discover the workings of the Nelson household.  For example, in March 1943 the FBI bug revealed that Nelson met with atomic scientist Joseph Weinberg.  Nelson instructed Weinberg  to gather and send him information from other Party members working with him on the atomic bomb project at the Univ. of California, Berkeley.  Nelson also told Weinberg to inform the comrades working there to destroy their CP membership books, and refrain from using liquor.(R & B, The Venona Secrets, p. 255)

            In April 1943 Nelson received another visitor, a member of the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC.  The Soviet official instructed the America Communist to establish an espionage network in the American atomic program.  The Soviet counted out specific amounts of cash to fund the project, and told Nelson where he should place reliable Communists for this “special work” in conveying to the Soviets what the Americans were discovering in the US atomic program.(p. 259)

            When in 1980 Nelson was interviewed by two sympathetic academics, Nelson assured them, “I never had any links with Soviet espionage in the United States.”(p. 259)  And what about any such links in Spain?  Because of the release of the Venona documents, we now know that Nelson lied.  We have known this for over a decade.  But the 2016 documentary ignores Nelson’s treason to portray a poster-boy worker and sympathetic CP activist whose privacy was invaded by an oppressive FBI.

            The documentary shows old newsreels of American CP leader Earl Browder addressing large crowds at Party conventions.  The narrator even interviews Browder’s granddaughter.  What the filmmakers overlook is that Browder, leader of the CPUSA from 1931 until 1945, was also vetting American party members to provide spies for Soviet intelligence agencies.  Even after Browder’s expulsion from the CP (when French CP leader Jacques Duclos wrote criticizing Browder’s policies, undoubtedly at the behest of Stalin), Browder continued his connections with the Soviet spy groups.  But expelled from the CP as a heretic, he quickly lost his old dentist, his accountant, and others.  Clearly, they were members of the CP.  Realistically, the CP was like a cult, and anyone expelled, any heretic, was to be shunned, ostracized, smeared.  Of course, in the USSR, heretics were gulaged or executed.  While the film stresses the pressure on Communists during the McCarthy era to quit the Party and become “regular Americans,” it does not emphasize enough the same  conformist pressure by the CP upon its own members to be politically correct (a phrase invented by the Communist movement), and avoid all heresy and heretics.

            In their book on the Venona files, Romerstein and Breindel  drew conclusions relevant to Browder and all CP leaders.  Breindel and Romerstein write: “It might have been ‘common sense’ not to use CPUSA members and leaders in espionage, but that is precisely what happened.  Venona shows that most of the agents working for the NKVD during WWII were members of the Communist Party, some were Party officials.  The top leadership…not only was aware…but it also provided the Party members to the Soviets.”(259)

            The telecast does mention espionage and the anti-Communist feeling that rose following WWII.  But the filmmakers de-emphasize the former while exaggerating the latter.  Just watching the film, one might conclude that the Rosenbergs were executed in 1952 because of anti-Communist hysteria.  The narrator interviews Bettina Aptheker, daughter of Herbert, who was a prolific author, noted historian of Black history, and fierce defender and open member of the CP.  Bettina tells the camera she recalls how her parents took her – she was about 8 - to Union Square where she thought about 100,000 stood, hoping there would be a reprieve for the convicted atomic spies.  But when news of their electrocutions rippled through the crowd, she saw her father cry for the first time, and her mother turned ashen.  But we now know the Rosenbergs were guilty.  They were convicted, and, even in our Constitution, the punishment for treason is death.  So why the emotions?  Did the crowd really believe the Rosenbergs innocent?  Or did they believe it was moral and proper to give atomic secrets to the Soviets?  And therefore, the Rosenbergs should not be punished.

            What is missing from the film are the conclusions of historians like Breindel and Romerstein, based on revelations of the Venona codes and the opening of some files in Moscow.  The R and B interpretation is far less flattering to the American CP.  Those authors maintain that the American CP, like all CPs, was established with a legal and an illegal organization, and that the Soviets were to use the various CPs to recruit those who could provide intelligence and/or those powerful enough to influence major decisions to favor Soviet policy.  This very important aspect of all CPs tends to be skipped over in Wormser’s docufilm, except when discussing anti-Communist hysteria.

            This documentary is more influenced by the title of Vivian Gornick’s 1979 book, The Romance of American Communism.  The film dwells on struggles to organize unions and build the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the struggle to save the Scottsboro boys and end lynching of Blacks in the South in the 1930s, the struggle to prevent evictions during the Depression with the Unemployed Councils, the struggle for higher wages, for women’s rights to equal pay, even to help consumers through a consumers’ union.  By the mid-1930s, the CP often led groups in the fight against fascism, opposing Hitler’s expansion, opposing Franco’s rebels in Spain, opposing Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia.  The American CP helped fill the Lincoln Brigade in Spain.  But with Franco’s victory, Italy’s victory, the Western appeasement of Hitler at Munich and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Stalin had second thoughts.

            In August 1939 The non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Communist Soviet Union was signed.  Thereafter, the Communists maintained the chief threat to peace came from the imperialist nations, Britain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, all with empires.  Germany and the USSR would be peaceful neighbors.  Of course, in September 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the West with its blitzkrieg, and a few weeks later the Soviets invaded from the East.  Soon after, there was no more Poland.  And the non-aggression pact allowed Stalin to aggress against Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and part of Romania.  The Wormser film skips over this period when the American CP suddenly opposed Pres. Roosevelt and his pro-Allied, pro-war policies.  The Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger sang, mocking those who feared Japanese “spies.”  For the film to stress the CP’s opposition to war during this period would tarnish the image of the CP as a leader in anti-fascism.  So the film ignores the CPs attacks on Roosevelt, Churchill, and American re-armament.  When Hitler’s Germany led a European attack on the USSR in summer 1941, the CP changed its line overnight.  One day the Communists were picketing the White House with signs, “The Yanks Are Not Coming,” and the next day they were urging FDR to intervene in the European war against Nazi Germany.

            Strangely omitted from the documentary is one of the most important and lasting of the CPs contributions to American society.  This was the Progressive Party (hereafter PP) campaign of Henry Wallace for President in 1948 – especially its campaign in the South.  I have argued elsewhere that the PP of 1948 was the civil right movement of that decade.  The campaign manager was Paul Robeson, a Black who had been an all-American football player at Rutgers in the 19teens, an attorney, a baritone soloist, a star of several British films, and finally a star of Broadway playing Othello.  In the early 1940s, he was one of the most famous Blacks in the US.  He encouraged young Blacks in the South to change things through organizations like “snick,” the Southern Negro Youth Congress.  In 1948 at a SNYC conclave in Birmingham for the PP, Police Commish. Bull Connor arrested the VP candidate of the PP, US Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho, because Taylor entered through the Negro entrance of the building.  Henry Wallace himself, a former VP under Pres. Roosevelt, campaigning in the South that year, refused to speak at segregated venues.  When he spoke at open-air rallies,  Wallace was sometimes greeted by segregationists hurling rotten tomatoes.  W E B Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP decades before, was a prominent supporter of the PP.  When he made his view public, the NAACP fired him, and thereafter that organization essentially became a Democratic Party front- group.  The PP made strenuous efforts in the South to get Blacks registered to vote and even run for office.  Many of the names promoting the PP in the South would re-emerge a decade later, people like Daisy Bates.  This does not mean that all involved in the PP campaign were Communists, but the CP provided many of the resources and skills for the new PP.  These included what the Truman Administration would label as front groups, like the SNYC, the Civil Rights Congress, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, etc.  Most of these organizations would dissolve by the early 1950s because once on Truman’s Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations, members could be fired, isolated, and persecuted.

But some of the people who were Progressives would emerge again in the next decade or so.  Everyone knows the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.  But few are aware that she trained to protest before she refused to yield her seat on the bus.  Parks had trained at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which was a popular-front institution.  Communists were welcome.  Indeed, photos were taken of leading Communists with Parks and others at the school like Rev. Martin Luther King.  King would later hire a Communist in King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, and King was very close to Stanley Levison, whom the FBI assumed was a financial leader and secret member of the CPUSA.  And “snick” was reborn as the Students Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (now SNCC).  Why does the film eschew discussion of an area where the CP did contribute to American history?  I suspect Wormser did not want to tarnish the image of the civil rights movement.

The liberal historians interviewed for this film obviously dislike Sen. Joseph McCarthy.  These historians give credit to liberal Democrat President Harry Truman  for purging Communists from the federal civil service.  But Truman, and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, both invoked Executive Privilege to expand Presidential powers and deny important records to Congressional committees like that chaired by Sen. McCarthy, investigating Communist influence in government.  The committees were denied access to files that might have provided evidence of treason in the government.  Denied the essential information by Presidential decrees, Congress was frustrated in its investigations, and sometimes Communist agents continued to operate and foil American policy objectives.  Truman and Eisenhower were more determined to expose and fire whistleblowers who were talking to McCarthy’s investigators than in weeding out and firing Soviet agents in the Federal bureaucracy.  Despite Harry Truman’s assurance, Alger Hiss was no “red herring;”Hiss was a Soviet spy.    Eisenhower deflected criticism by firing some 1,200 “security risks,” but almost all were homosexuals; very few if any were engaged in treason.  Truman had used this tactic on a smaller scale.  Furthermore, McCarthy and his aides, Roy Cohn and David Schine, were pilloried by the “tolerant” liberal media, and in Congress itself, liberal Republican Sen. Flanders of Vermont, made a speech comparing McCarthy to Hitler and clearly implying that the Wisconsin Senator and Cohn and Schine were all homosexuals.(M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History, 586)

Were there decisions made in the US State Dept. and Treasury Dept. and possibly other departments by Communists that effectively denied financial and military aid to the legitimate government of China under Chiang Kai-Shek?  Some in the American bureacucracy demanded that before Chiang receive US aid, he would have to join in a coalition government with Mao and the Communists.  Chiang had once tried that, and was determined not to do so again, believing it would inevitably result in a Maoist take-over.  Thus, while the US did little to help Chiang’s Nationalists, at the same time, Stalin was providing materiel to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists.  Might the outcome of the Chinese civil war have been different had the US aided Chiang more?  And the related question, might the outcome have been different had there been a purge of Soviet agents from the American State  and Treasury Departments?

At the trial of the Rosenbergs, Judge Irving Kaufman declared that their treason in providing American atomic secrets to the Soviets made the Korean War possible.  There is no doubt atomic spies in the West hastened the development of Stalin’s bombs.  And once he had the atomic weapon, Stalin acceded to North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung’s request to invade the southern half of the peninsula.  A bloody war ensued, a war that might not have occurred if Stalin had not developed (with help from Western spies) a Soviet nuclear weapon.  The Korean War, was a consequence of treason by Western Communists like the Rosenbergs.

A greater purge of Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Branch might have prevented the collapse of Nationalist China on the mainland.  But far from helping, in 1950 Trumans’s State Department urged the assassination of Chiang Kai-Shek!  Indeed, there were 2 plots by the Americans to kill Chiang earlier during WWII under Democrat Pres. Roosevelt.   (M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents, 153-54)   The old Republican question of “Who lost China?” was not merely political rhetoric.

Communists did try to alleviate the suffering of the Great Depression.  The Unemployment Councils did stop some evictions.  The International Workers Order did help immigrants adjust to American life, while providing insurance policies.  But the CP- dominated IWO also acquired the names, places and dates of birth of its members, and some of this information was later used by Soviet intelligence.  The CIO encouraged unions beyond the narrow skilled and craft organizations of the AFL, and millions of workers benefitted as a consequence.  And the head of the CIO, Miners’ union chief John L. Lewis, credited Communist organizers in forging the CIO.  The CP not only saved the Scottsboro boys, its methods of combining a good court-room defense with agitation and propaganda outside the legal arena, led to two important US Supreme Court victories in the 1930s – when the high court was quite conservative on racial issues.  Moreover, the CPs approach would be adopted and is now commonly followed in today’s racial disputes.  The CP efforts to end segregation and gain civil rights are probably its most successful effort in America.  But its most successful activities internationally were its supplying information to Stalin’s dictatorship.  The atomic spies – and Steve Nelson should be included among them – changed the balance of power in world politics.  It is possible Communist operatives in the American State and Treasury Dept.s helped Mao and Communism win China – another change in the world balance of power.

The American CP vetted its own members to find who could best serve Soviet intelligence agencies.  (They did not have to be atomic scientists.  during WWII, the American Ambassador to the USSR, William Stanley, was stationed in Moscow.  At one point he discussed his views on the USSR with a group of American journalists working in the Soviet capital.  He complained that American aid to the Soviets was being repackaged so Soviet citizens did not know the goods were coming from America.  They were packaged to appear as Soviet-made goods.  Among the American journalists to whom Ambassador Stanley confided was Janet Ross.  Stanley had no idea that Ross was also a member of the American CP.  He revealed his suspicion of Stalin; she forwarded the information to the Sovets who relayed it to the American Reds, who got the word to an operative in Roosevelt’s White House.  Within a few weeks Ambassador Stanley was no longer the American Ambassador to Moscow.[R & B, 441-44] )  It was not all spying; it was also using influence, not to promote American interests, but to expand those of the Soviets.

One cannot discuss the CP rallies, its skills and bravery in union organizing, and in defying segregation, etc., without discussing how American CP leaders took Moscow money, how the leadership scouted Party members seeking a right fit to place “reliable” Party members in “special work” to supply Soviet intelligence with information.  According to Breindel and Romerstein, in the decoded Venona files, when the NKVD refers to an American Red, the NKVD calls the Communist a “countryman.”  By its own terminology, American Communists were no longer “Americans,” but fellow countrymen of the Soviets.  Though Americans, their loyalty was then to the USSR.  This is not really explored in the Wormser film.

The film has been shown on Public Television, and First Run Features advertises the documentary, emphasizing its educational value.  Here are some of the fields that might be interested in the film:” - Educational Interests- African-American Studies, American Studies, Business, Civil Rights, Cold War Era, Communication, Conflict Resolution, Economics, Globalization, History (U.S.), History (World), Human Rights, Jewish Studies, Labor Studies, Law & Legal Studies, Literature, Media Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Religion, Urban Studies, Vietnam, World War II.

The advert continues:” Professors of both U.S. and social history will find a valuable teaching tool in American Reds. The program provides a perspective on the past that few Americans are aware of while raising a number of key issues concerning social change, idealism, ideology, and the nature of our economic and political system that continue to remain vital issues in contemporary America.

"'American Reds' is a valuable primer into the tragic turn of events that betrayed the hopes and aspirations of everyday working people during the great confrontation between capitalism and communism in the early 20th century. It's an important addition to public television's mission to throw light on obscured corners of our history and on the forgotten people lost in the shadows." - Bill Moyers

        I totally disagree with Moyers and the website’s ad.  Unfortunately, this documentary distorts, omits, spins.  It omits information that has been available since at least 2002.  This film should NOT be used in classes unless there is additional material or lecturers to counter the film’s one-sided, dishonest presentation.  Not only is the documentary about American Reds, it is an example of American Red propaganda.  Wormser’s film is not a documentary, it is a distortumentary.

HERBERT APTHEKER'S BIOGRAPHY

“THE MOST DANGEROUS COMMUNIST IN THE UNITED STATES:”

A BIOGRAPHY OF HERBERT APTHEKER (Amherst and Boston: U. of Mass. Press. 2015)

By GARY MURRELL. Afterword by Bettina Aptheker

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            At the rigged CP convention in Cleveland in December 1991, Gus Hall was determined to retain control of the shrunken CPUSA.  Surprisingly, on the second day, the Hall faction permitted Herbert Aptheker, by then a dissident, to speak for 5 minutes.  Murrell, using the speaker’s notes of the convention, includes some of that speech: “That [the secret financing of the CPUSA] was outrageous.  I had spent much of my life denying it,…under oath,…and the party leadership knowing that what I was saying was not true and what the government was saying was true.  But we did not know that.  We denied that…Gus [Hall] knew it, and supported it, and Gus was paid for it.  Gus was on Moscow’s payroll…”(p. 333)  It seems that when Aptheker was called as an expert witness in Communist Party trials, he was not so expert at all.

            Murrell describes Aptheker’s roll in the Smith Act trial of Communist leader Steve Nelson.  On the witness stand Aptheker discussed Marxism and its approach to armed rebellion, and he was cross-examined by the prosecution.  Aptheker was asked to elaborate on the Marxist view of armed revolution.  (102-104)  This 1951 trial is part of the McCarthy era’s anti-Communism, and included in the chapter “Are you now or have you ever been?”  However, in April 1943 the FBI had bugged Steve Nelson’s Oakland, Calif., home and overheard the visit there by a member of the Soviet embassy give Nelson money from the Soviet Union for the CPUSA.  The Soviet official also gave Nelson instructions for the hiring of Communists who would be assigned posts in the newly created Manhattan Project, whose aim was to create an atomic weapon.  This FBI bugging may have provided the agency with its first knowledge of the Manhattan Project and the American attempt to build the bomb, and clearly the Soviet interest was in planting agents who would supply the Soviets with reports on the progress of the atomic bomb.  The bug had provided the FBI with most important information about a conspiracy to commit treason.  When FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then alerted an official high in the Roosevelt Administration about this plot to steal atomic secrets, that high official tipped off the Soviet Embassy that the FBI was on to them, essentially urging the Soviets to be more careful in the future and not be caught!  In the words of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, “this was a conspiracy so vast.”  Meanwhile, Aptheker defended on the witness stand a Communist official who took Soviet funds for the American CP in order to place moles in strategic jobs to make it easier to steal American secrets in building the bomb for the USSR.  Murrell praises Aptheker for his enormous courage in standing up against Sen. McCarthy.  But on the big issue of that era, McCarthy was right; Aptheker wrong.  Moreover, about Nelson’s treason, did Gus know about that too?  Did the leadership of the CPUSA?

            Aptheker also appeared for the defense at the trial of North Carolina CP leader Junius Scales.(187)  Despite Aptheker’s testimony, Scales was convicted, served time, and quit the CP.  In his autobiography (written with R. Nickson) Scales concedes that he was never asked, but  wondered what he would have done if asked by the CP leadership to perform a treasonous act.  Aptheker never seems to have raised such serious questions about his own 5 decades of CP membership, in which he accepted and followed the discipline of the party.  This question never rises in his consciousness.  How far might he have gone?  Murrell is certain that Aptheker was totally dedicated to the Party; for him the Party was “everything.”(332)  If ordered, would he have spied?  Or what else?

            His daughter’s autobiography gained publicity when she alleged that Herbert had molested her for a decade, from age 3 to 13; from 1947 to 1957.  Far more damning, Bettina included a paragraph (p. 23 of her autobio) implying that Herbert had gone to Mexico to find the Mexican who had informed for the FBI and caused the capture of Gus Hall, then hiding underground in the belief that the US had turned toward fascism.  The clear implication of that paragraph was that Herbert, a recently discharged major from the US Army, had gone to Mexico to “find” the snitch and eliminate him.  Bettina’s paragraph presents the impression that the scholar, author, lecturer, theoretician Herbert Aptheker may well have been even more for the Party!  Murrell does not address Bettina’s paragraph directly; he simply reports that a couple of comrades had been stranded without funds after Hall was taken by the FBI.  Aptheker was asked to bring money to them so they could return to the US.(100)  So Murrell’s version is far more innocent – Aptheker is a Party bag man, not a Party hit man!  But, could not the Party have gotten funds to the 2 comrades in Mexico easier than by sending such a prominent Communist like Aptheker?  Does this make sense?  Smells fishy.

            As early as 1951 Aptheker was on the FBIs Security Index List of 12,000, and Murrell adds that Aptheker was considered one of the most dangerous – to be arrested in 1 hour if the order were given.(95)  If considered so dangerous, was his home bugged?  Was there anything to indicate a choo-choo train game?  Or any sounds of molestation by Herbert of Bettina?  Was there any bugging confirming why Aptheker went to Mexico?  Hard evidence might resolve the question of molestation far better than speculation about repressed memory or fantasies horrible or otherwise.  And did anything happen to the Mexican who provided information to the FBI about Gus Hall’s presence in Mexico?  If there is no hard evidence to support Bettina’s allegations, at this point, I now think Aptheker innocent of the molestation charge.

            On a short trip to NYC in the early 1960s I found the Jefferson Bookshop off of Union Square and chatted with a young woman clerk – Bettina – who informed me that her father was lecturing that night about a block away.  I went.  Herbert Aptheker so impressed me that I still recall something of that lecture 53 years ago.  His subject was that day’s New York Times.  I had attended Tulane U. in New Orleans, which had a large student contingent from New York, and they all boasted of the reporting in The Times.  Using that day’s newspaper as a text, Aptheker opined out the distortions and omissions on page 1.  I recall he pointed to a smaller article on that page about Vietnam; he said that the headline was not the important story.  What was important was in the 2^nd paragraph, revealing the number of American military advisors then in Vietnam.  What was important, it was higher than the last previous count of American advisors.  The American Government was expanding its military efforts in Vietnam, he warned.  That was the important story.

            Aptheker was a most effective speaker, and he had a sharp mind.  Furthermore, he was a man of great courage.  He was a scholar who pioneered aspects of Black history, challenging the conventional wisdom of his day that slavery, contending that there were hundreds of slave revolts and conspiracies, that Blacks were important to the success of the Union in the Civil War, finding documents to encourage an interest in Black history and protest, writing and lecturing, editing, and finding a suitable publisher for the works of W. E.B. Du Bois.  Aptheker even ran for political office, and he established the American Institute for Marxist Studies, which he hoped might be a popular-front type of institution, providing information for various shades of the Left.  He did this and more even though blacklisted, and was denied any university teaching posts from 1946 (when he exited the army until 1969 when he finally got a part-time post at Bryn Mawr?  He was bitter about being blacklisted, but as Anthony Flood revealed in a recent article, Aptheker basically blacklisted C. L. R. James from all of his own writings.  James wrote Black Jacobins, about the slave revolts in Haiti, a topic similar to Aptheker’s own American Negro Slave Revolts.  But understand, how could Aptheker stoop to mention the book about Haiti?  C. L. R. James, the author, was a Trotskyist!

            Not only was Aptheker not provided a teaching post, he was often denied the right to speak on many campuses.  The FBI sought to prevent and disrupt his lectures, and a young Pat Buchanan also sought to do the same.  Aptheker had his critics in the CP, including some of the Black comrades who were jealous and resented that Du Bois had left his papers, etc. to Aptheker, and not to a Black.  The ex-Communist Harold Cruse vehemently denounced Aptheker in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.  Murrell reported that Aptheker only thrice answered the Cruse attack in print.(257)  That may be true, but Aptheker, as leader of AIMS, published my booklet on anti-communism and history writing, in which I devoted a section to an attack on Cruse’s intense Goebbelist, anti-Jewish rhetoric and interpretations,

            Once in the early 1970s while Herbert was opening the mail at AIMS, he saw the first page of a North Korean newspaper.  He held it up so I could see how the “dear leader” of that era was shown, almost as a deity.  Aptheker remarked, “There must be something about the Asian mind that wants a god-like leader.”  It was an off-the-cuff remark, and I do not mention this to be politically correct and accuse him of “racism.”  Indeed, a few years earlier in New York’s China Town I had seen a Chinese film that opened, not with a roaring lion, but with a large red background, in the center of which was a picture of Mao’s head, and from all round his head, like rays of the sun, gold flashes emanated.  Nevertheless, what stunned me upon reading Murrell’s book was Aptheker’s criticism of the CPUSA in the early 1950’s – he complained it was not doing enough to show the true nature of the life (how wonderful it was) in the USSR!  The early 1950s.  Stalin!  What even the CPSU would soon denounce as the cult of the personality!  And those cults were evident in all of eastern Europe.  The “dear leader” syndrome may or may not occur in Asia, but it seems intrinsinkly linked to Communism when it achieves power.  It was not “the Asian mind,” but the Communist minds that required such an adored leader.

            The Apthekers were involved personally with Angela Davis and her trials, figuratively and literally, in California.  At one point, in a hurried session with Angela in her jail cell, he proposed a possible line of defense – she was a member of the CP, the CP opposes individual acts of terrorism, therefore Angela Davis must be innocent of any complicity in the murder of the judge and others in the California courtroom.  Gus Hall’s Party leadership staunchly opposed this strategy.  To me it was like a syllogism, John is a Christian, Christians accept the 10 Commandments one of which is “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” therefore John cannot be a murderer.  But life is not a syllogism, and many Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Communists have been found guilty of murder.  Herbert also was more prone to defend criminal actions by Blacks under the notion that they were an oppressed people and therefore could not be gangsters. (279)  It probably made him unable to recognize the anti-white racism in crime when both he and his wife were mugged near their home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  Like Jews who fled for their lives from Hitler dominated Europe, leaving their homes behind, the Apthekers fled for their lives from the Black ghetto in Brooklyn.  Sociologists, infected by anti-white racism, naturally blame white racism for whites abandoning central cities.  In reality, many like the Apthekers had to flee for their lives from Black racist criminals.  Ideology blinded Aptheker, and the academedia complex, on such issues.

            Herbert Aptheker had many admirable qualities, and I did and still do admire him on many levels.  But he had a major flaw.  Even at the end, he seemed not to have gained wisdom from his treatment in the Party.  Murrell notes, had Gus Hall been in power in the US, Aptheker probably would have been executed for his opposition to Hall.(335)  But had Communist Aptheker been in power, how many would he have found necessary to eliminate?

            The flaw in Herbert Aptheker was his faith, his faith in the Communist Party.(300)  It was not simply a god that failed.  Failed?  Communism was a god that succeeded in many nations and the result was the murder of up to 100 million people.   All faiths are not equal.  For example, I now see Islam, with its barbarous sharia law, as a threat to Western civilization.  Communism, in its ruthless, brutal, and murderous demands for equality has also proved itself an enemy of Western Civilization.  Aptheker’s CP opened his mind in many areas, but the same CP closed it shut in many others.
                                           ADDENDUM

            While the mainstream press invariably referred to Herbert Aptheker as the leading “theoretician” of the Communist Party, there seems to be no valid reason for the media’s appellation.  Murrell quotes Dorothy Healy that the leadership of the CP viewed the role of intellectuals as simply to rationalize the Party line, whatever it might be.(143)  In effect, their role was no different from that of the Party troubadours, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie – to present and spread the Party line in artistic or academic formats.  As Aptheker became ever more prominent in defending Communists at trials, publishing Black history, ing lecturing to university gatherings, he became a rock star of the Party.  Perhaps not the best known Communist: the Rosenbergs and other spies made bigger headlines in a negative way.  Aptheker, however, presented a positive picture of the Party.  Gus Hall probably viewed Aptheker like the President views his official spokesman.  Unfortunately, for Hall, Aptheker was more independent than most Presidential spokesmen.

            Does a Presidential spokesman need to know about secret troop deployments here or there?  Clearly not.  That information is for the President and his closest advisors.  The media spokesman has to know only that which will make a more effective presentation of the President’s policy.  Indeed, more knowledge may make it more difficult for the spokesman to lie for the President effectively.

            In December 1991 Aptheker, outraged, whined, in effect, “Gus Hall, you let me lie to the public.  You knew we were financed by the Soviets.  You lied to me and I then repeated the lie to everyone.”  During the speech, Murrell informs us that Hall was laughing at Aptheker.  One can imagine Hillary Clinton laughing if Under Secretary Susan Rice whined about appearing on 5 television networks to lie to the American people by repeating that a video had caused the killing of Americans in Benghazi.  Susan Rice was expected to do her job, and spin and lies were a part of it.

            Why would the CP leaders tell a public relation spokesman that the CPUSA was subsidized by the Soviets?  With such knowledge, would that make him a better spokesman for the Party?  Why would the CP leaders tell a media spokesman that the CPUSA had enabled members to engage in espionage?  With such knowledge, would that make him a better Party spokesman?  Of course not.  So for very practical reasons, keep the intellectuals and folk singers out of the loop.

            Aptheker enters the loop only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of files.  He was the “theoretician”: he thought he was snfluential in the Party, the Party in which he had such faith.  But the Party saw him as just another intellectual, another flunky, who must toe the Party line or be hurled into history’s dustbin.

            But Aptheker might have been aware earlier.  When Aptheker established the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS), he envisioned it as a popular-front organization, open to various shades of the Left.  Hall soon wanted to take control and restrict AIMS to a rigid, orthodox Party approach.  The tension over the development of the organization could have taken another path, if Aptheker were willing.  Aptheker and 2 others inheritied a million dollars.  If Aptheker had kept his third, he would have had sufficient funding to maintain an independent AIMS.  Instead, he gave the large sum to the Party leaders.  Later, he inherited a smaller amount of $58,000, which he did not give to Hall, but kept for AIMS.  With this small inheritance Aptheker kept AIMS independent of Hall for some time, but the small inheritance ran out, and Aptheker had to go to Hall for new funding.  Hall, with his Soviet bankroll, then made AIMS the narrow Party-line institution he wanted.

            There was something quite pathetic in Aptheker’s speech in December 1991.  People lose in politics – that is not news.  But the sudden awareness that the Party leadership used him for 50 years, yet in the end held him (and all intellectuals) in contempt.  The faith and love he had given the Party was not reciprocated.  In his speech, Aptheker was outraged.  Gus Hall just laughed.  Pathetic.   

RE: BETTINA APTHEKER'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

 INTIMATE POLITICS: HOW I GREW UP RED,

FOUGHT FOR FREE SPEECH, AND BECAME A FEMINIST REBEL

By BETTINA F. APTHEKER, (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006)

                                          Rev. by Hugh Murray 

                     This is a provocative and honest autobiography.  Reading it closely, however, one can observe how ideology still shapes Bettina’s view of reality, distorting it to fit her leftist and feminist structure.

            When her book was first published in 2006, the media focused on her assertion that her father, Herbert Aptheker, for decades described as “the leading theoretician of the Communist Party, USA,” had sexually abused his daughter, Bettina, from age 3 to age 13.  Toward the end of her book, Bettina discussed this “nightmare” of abuse with her female lover, Kate, who like Bettina is also a feminist.  Upon hearing of some of Herbert’s reactions to these charges, Kate suggested that Herbert might have been molested as a child himself.  Bettina then writes, “I knew that my father had had an older brother named Alvin.  He and my father had been very close and they shared a room together as boys.  Alvin had committed suicide” when he was 28 and Herbert 20.(p. 513)

            I have no knowledge of Alvin or why he committed suicide at age 28.  But neither does Bettina.  And because some victims of child abuse later abuse children themselves is no reason to presume that Alvin molested Herbert – which she insinuates.  I submit that Bettina smears and convicts Alvin because of her ideology, not because of any verifiable facts.  Ironically, her family was a fierce opponent of “McCarthyism,” yet here we see her practicing a version of it more damaging than any conducted by the Wisconsin Senator.

            This paragraph’s meanness belies the declared aims of her autobiography: “…, I made the decision that I would write about particular individuals only from my direct experience with them, so that I would not engage in rumor or hearsay.”(5)  By including this smear against her uncle, Bettina weakens her allegations against her father.

 I must admit, I came to this book as a skeptic.  I suspected from the coverage of her “recovered” memory of fatherly abuse that it was all a feminist fantasy.  My Master’s thesis, completed in 1963, explored the Scottsboro rape cases of the 1930s, in which two white women alleged they had been raped on a freight train by nine Blacks.  The Communists defended the young men, agitating here and abroad, and hiring top-notch attorneys who proved – to almost everyone except Alabama juries – that the boys were innocent.  I am male, and totally reject the view enunciated by Nina Totenberg on National Public Radio during the Clarence Thomas hearings that women do not make up stories.  I was furious about the smear campaign against Thomas, and against the young nephew of Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was falsely accused by a woman in Florida after a night of partying.  I also had to endure the year-long hoax of charges invented by Tawana Brawley and supported by Rev. Al Sharpton & Co. and reported daily in the liberal media.  I questioned her veracity from the beginning, but the media dared not do so until much later.  And I was angry not only at the media, but the Duke University administrators who condemned the school’s lacrosse team as guilty the minute false charges were lodged.  All of these were examples of feminist injustice – smearing and destroying the reputations of men to reinforce the feminist ideology, and the feminist lie, - that women do not make up stories.

Though I am clearly opposed to the feminist approach, I do not go to the other extreme by maintaining that women always lie about charges of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape.  I consider each case individually, looking at the credibility of all those involved.  At present the media are quick to investigate the man’s background, searching for patterns or evidence of other indiscretions.  However, because of feminist inspired “rape-shield laws” the public is prevented from knowing the name and background of the woman, or even whether she has had a pattern of making false charges.  These feminist laws are unjust and should be repealed.

            As for Bettina’s father, Herbert, I also knew him personally, having met him at two lectures he presented in the summer of 1962, and  I worked for him on his W. E. B. Du Bois projects and at the American Institute for Marxist Studies from 1971 to 1975.  I was Aptheker’s employee and while relations with my boss were generally cordial, we were not close.  I was invited to his home on only one occasion, a small gathering that included (if I recall correctly) Herbert’s wife, Fay, another Du Bois researcher, Bettina, her husband Jack, and her child Josh.

            I was shocked by Bettina’s charge of molestation.  We have only her account of this; not his.  None of us was there to substantiate her charge.  The evidence supporting Bettina’s claim is circumstantial, so what follows is speculation.

            In the 1980s the Isa family, Palestinians living in St. Louis, Missouri, came under suspicion for possible terrorist connections.  The US Government placed a bug on their telephone.  Though the Feds were listening for possible terrorist activities, in 1989 they inadvertently found themselves recording sounds of the father and mother engaged in a Muslim “honor killing” of their 16-year-old daughter, Palestina.  The daughter, also a Muslim, had assimilated into America life, taking a job and dating someone of whom the family disapproved.  The family believed it had no alternative but to kill her.

            Was the Aptheker home similarly bugged?  Aptheker was an open and prominent member of the Communist Party.  If the home had been bugged, and if the Feds overheard Herbert and Bettina “playing” their secret game, then the FBI would have been in the position to blackmail Herbert Aptheker.  Bettina’s memoir gives no hint of any FBI bugging or blackmail.   So, either 1) the FBI had not installed such listening devices in their home, or 2) they did, but the molestation did not occur, or 3) it did occur, but the bugs did not detect the “games.”  Barring future discovery of some old Govt. recordings, there seems to be no hard evidence to prove Bettina’s charges.  We have simply her word.

            Yet, reading her autobiography, I reluctantly conclude that Bettina’s “recovered memory” is probably accurate, that Herbert probably did abuse her when she was a child.  I admired Herbert, and in many ways still do.  But I concede that her description of his reaction to her accusation when she finally confronted him, - this has the ring of truth.  Sadly, I now think Herbert probably did what she accuses him of.

            There is another item, a strange insertion in Bettina’s story that raises questions that she did not attempt to answer.  She asserts that her father went to Mexico to “find” a Mexican Communist who had betrayed American Communist leader Gus Hall to authorities, so that Hall would face prison in the US.(23)  Hall had fled from the US after being found guilty on an anti-Communist charge, and in Mexico he had been captured.  If the US Govt. was unaware that prominent Communist Herbert Aptheker was going in and out of Mexico illegally in 1951 at the height of the Cold War, then the Feds probably had no clue as to what was going on in the Aptheker household when Herbert “played train” with Bettina.  This would reinforce the notion that the FBI would have no hard evidence of molestation, even if it had occurred.  It makes her charge more plausible.  Not only does it make the charge of molestation more likely against Herbert, it raises other, even more serious questions about his trip to Mexico.  But again, for both alleged events, we have only her word.

            I noted earlier that Bettina’s leftist ideology distorts her view of reality.  Let me illustrate.  Doing research, Bettina and her mate Kate had visited the Chicago home of Mrs. Duster, the daughter of famed civil rights leader Ida B. Wells-Barnett.  “…Mrs. Duster gave Kate and me very careful instructions about which streets in the neighborhood were safe to walk and which were not.  With this she directed us to the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago…We set off and soon came upon the southern border of the university, which faced the ghetto.  Entrance to the campus from this side was impossible, as it was bordered by a huge wrought-iron gate, with spikes…and a literal moat such as one might expect…at a medieval castle.  I was too stunned even to speak; the racist message…was unbelievable.” (400)

Reading this, I concluded that what was unbelievable was Bettina’s denial of reality.  Mrs. Duster, daughter of a Progressive-era, civil-rights activist, Duster, who herself had been a social worker in Chicago, knew her neighborhood, and how unsafe it was.  Who made it unsafe?  Roaming bands of Ku Kluxers?  No, young Black males.  They were the violent criminals whom Mrs. Duster was directing Bettina to avoid.  They were the Huns of modern Chicago – so dangerous that an outpost of civilization, the city’s university, excavated a moat and installed a heavy gate to impede any invasion of the peaceful campus.  Without the moat there might have been no library to house the papers of Wells-Barnett.  With invasions of violent criminals, would the university have found it necessary to relocate to a safer area?  But Bettina can only see “racism.”  Has she really removed her red-tinted glasses she had inherited from her parents?

            When her parents lived in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, Fay was mugged twice, and Herbert was knocked to the ground by a thief who used a knife to cut open his pockets in search for valuables.  Herbert was in denial.  He told me it was all political.  Though one cannot preclude anti-communism as a possible motive, it is far more likely that the mugger had simply targeted a white.  Black racism is rampant, but to the left, which dominates the academedia complex, Black racism does not exist.  Black crime is ignored, or excused.  So the left cannot analyze the reality of big cities.  When I was living in Brooklyn, I resided one subway stop from the Apthekers, and I left the neighborhood after a mugger broke my jaw (which decades later still causes problems).  After their muggings, Fay and Herbert separated themselves from the violent criminals of Brooklyn – not by a moat away, but by a continent away, to California.  Could they even admit to themselves that Black racism and Black crime motivated them to flee their home?  Bettina evaluates the moat as “racist.”  How does she evaluate her parents escape from crime?  Is white flight a symptom of racism?  Or a survival technique – seeking to escape from a hostile environment infected with Black noise, Black aggression, Black bullying, Black crime, Black terror.  (I certainly do not mean that all Blacks do these things, but most vote for the pro-crime politicians that refuse to crack down on illegal activities, resulting in mounting crime in those areas, and crime causes more poverty.)

            Another example of how the leftist ideology distorts Bettina’s view of reality: “I heard white students scapegoating students of color, blaming them if their white friends had not been admitted to university.  I used this as an example, named it as a form of racism.  This lecture brought the white students up short…Only then, I saw, when we were out of denial about how pervasive racism is, could I teach the history and begin a fruitful dialogue.”(461)  In her view, the charge of racism closes debate and brings white students (or Blacks like Louisiana-born Ward Connerly) up short!  Clearly, Bettina did not want dialogue any more than did President Bill Clinton during his “Dialogue on Race.”  What both want is a monologue on race, rationalizing policies that in the name of civil rights and equal opportunity deny civil rights and equal opportunity to white men and others.  (This is not what the civil rights movement stood for when I sat-in at Woolworth’s lunch-counter in the first New Orleans sit-in in 1960.)

            One must wonder about Bettina’s university classes.  She wrote, “Teaching became a form of activism for me,…”(406)  She was helping to create the feminist studies’ curricula, not only for her classes, but for emerging, growing field.  “I created a teaching style that established boundaries of trust and respect…I think this was possible because of the feeling of unconditional love that welled up in me as each class began…Whether or not students agreed with me on any particular subject didn’t matter.  What mattered was offering then a space…to come to their own conclusions.  What mattered was that they learned to love themselves ‘regardless,’…”!? 459)  In a history class, one might (or might not) learn history; sociology class, sociology; engineering class, engineering.  In the feminist class, one learns to love oneself.  Are you kidding me?  Should one receive university credit for learning to love oneself?

            Despite my objections and criticism, I found this to be an enjoyable book.  For brevity I shall mention a few other points.  As a child she bemoaned the execution of the Rosenbergs, the “alleged” atomic spies.(21)  Alleged!  In 2012 Russian leader Vladimir Putin spoke thanking the Western atomic scientists who had delivered suit cases of secret files to the old USSR to help the Soviets develop the bomb.  Putin emphasized “suitcases full.”  Bettina whitewashes the Black Panther Party(221).  For a better description of that murderous organization, read Destructive Generation by David Horowitz.  Bettina praises Mario Savio’s commitment to the First Amendment(129) during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, but omits his support of the suppression of free speech at U. C.  Berkeley  years later when the campus paper printed an editorial critical of affirmative action, and the left confiscated and destroyed all copies of the paper.  Free Speech Movement?  But only for the left.

            Some quibbles.  Bettina writes that her dad was homophobic and describes an incident where he insulted a long-haired man at a concert.  Yet, in all my dealings with him, he was usually cordial.  I worked for him for several years and do not recall him uttering a word demeaning to gays.  However, around early 1975 I brought the subject up when I submitted to him a possible introduction to a collection of his articles.  In the introduction I criticized Herbert on several issues, including his silence about gay oppression.  He blew up, shouting at me as never before.  He screamed at me that he was leading the fight inside the Communist Party to change its position to make it more tolerant of gays.  As I was not a member of the Party, I had no way of judging the veracity of his claim – which was made in anger.  In September 2012 I emailed Bettina, our first contact in about four decades.  I asked her about this specifically.  She graciously replied to me, writing that she has uncovered nothing in her research on gays and the CP to substantiate her father’s assertion to me about his efforts to liberalize the CP stance on gays.  When Herbert returned my introduction in 1975 in that heated encounter, he did not fire me on the spot.  Yet, I felt the atmosphere had changed, and began to search for other work.

            Bettina mentions that her grandfather was a major founder of one of the oldest synagogues in Brooklyn (426), but she omits that he acquired a building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and 28^th Street – a building he got around 1928 and lost after the market crash of 1929.  She is good in describing how as an only child, she was like a 3^rd adult in the family.(34)  I had a similar experience as an only child.  She blames the fall of Communist East Germany on corruption; I blame its demise on socialism.  Indeed, without the presence of Soviet troops, it would have fallen long before 1991.

Her autobiography should have had an index, but that is a minor point.

            What is good about her book?  She presents an inside view of the Free Speech Movement protests in California, which would have repercussions by allowing the left to be heard on numerous campuses throughout the nation.  She is good at showing the struggles by a lesbian to conform to her parents’ religion (Communism), and how, in the end, she could no longer live a lie with her husband.  Her lesbian feelings were a major chink in the armor of Communism, one that allowed her to free herself from some of that heavy, rigid ideology.  It was not easy, and she writes of her problems with paranoia, self-loathing, and depression – problems I too have experienced as a gay man.  Once freed from the red armor, she was lucky to find a lesbian partner, Kate, and if they did not live “happily ever after,” at least they lived together happily.  Her chapter on the death of her parents is moving.  The confrontation with her father, Herbert, about the abuse, is wrenching.  Her description of driving on a bridge in California just as an earthquake rumbled beneath her provides a depth absent from the 20 seconds of TV images shown during such natural calamities.

            Her narrative of her conversion to Buddhism is interesting but left me cold.  One tenet of the religion is enough to close my mind on the issue – thou shall not kill insects.  As one who grew up in New Orleans swatting mosquitoes, crunching cockroaches, and using matches to burn ants, I utterly reject the ideal of not killing vermin.  When my Hindu friends gently remove a bug from a table, I roll my eyes.  I, too, wear my own set of blinders.

            As much as I disagree with Bettina’s politics, I enjoyed reliving her era – for it is mine as well.  We fought some of the same battles, yet arrived at different destinations.  Yet, I suspect we are both a bit more tolerant now than we were decades ago.  That she would even answer my emails, knowing that I’m now a conservative, attests to her tolerance.  Overall, Bettina’s book is an honest work about iconic figures of the left; one notes her courage in various movements, her struggles within her immediate family, and her wider family (the Party).  Finally she emerged as a lesbian mother and an academic for feminism and the left.  One need not agree with her to learn from her.  Bettina’s story covers not only the Berkeley protests, but some of the changes in the US, and the flexibility within the American system that contrasts with the rigidity of the Communist Party.  Hers is a volume that tells volumes.

            Addition, 10 March 2015.  Bottom line – Bettina’s autobiography raises two disturbing charges against her father, Herbert Aptheker: 1) Did he molest her?  2) Was he a hit man (not just a philosophical debater) for the Communist movement?  Do Federal Agencies have any tapes or information related to either of these charges?