Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of
Roosevelt’s Government
By M.
Stanton Evans and Herbert
Romerstein
(Threshold Editions, 294 pages,
$26)
There were giants in those days, and Stan Evans is still
standing, a man of great wit and erudition, a fighting journalist
whom several generations of young conservatives have gladly
followed into ideological battle.
The wit was on full display at The American
Spectator’s 2011 Robert L. Bartley Dinner, at which Evans
accepted the Barbara Olson Award. He spoke of the similarities
among Texas (where he was born), Indiana (where TAS was
born), and Alabama, whose Sen. Jeff Sessions was in attendance. In
those states, he said, unlike Washington, “Alcohol, tobacco, and
firearms is not a bureau. It’s a way of life.”
Addressing his remarks to Congress, in the person of Rep. Paul
Ryan, also in attendance, Evans urged repeal of Obama’s health care
law, “in order to know what is not in it.” He pointed out that even
Nancy Pelosi said she didn’t know what was in it (and no doubt
still doesn’t). But with repeal, “whatever is in it, will not be in
it.”
There were anecdotes involving Indiana state legislator Vernon
Wormser, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Hillary
Clinton’s vast right-wing conspiracy (of which we’re all proudly a
part); an acknowledgment of Bob Tyrrell’s “persecution” of the
Clintons; and an observation on the ideological aspects of aging:
“I’ve always felt that anyone who has his head screwed on right
should be conservative when he is young and, as he gets older,
become more and more conservative.”
That, in a nutshell, is the road Stan Evans has taken. In 1955
he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, where he’d been an editor of
the Yale Daily News. He went to work at the
Freeman, was named editor of the Indianapolis
News (where at 26 he was the nation’s youngest editor of a
metropolitan daily), and became one of the earliest contributing
editors of National Review, and an ally and
friend-to-the-end of Bill Buckley, Bill Rusher, and Frank Meyer.
(Many conservatives were upset when, after Frank Meyer’s death,
George Will rather than Stan Evans was appointed NR’s
books editor.) He was a frequent contributor to Human
Events and to TAS, to which he also provided valuable
advice and counsel, especially during the early Indiana years. He
was a columnist for the Los Angeles Times news syndicate,
founder and president of the National Journalism Center, and
president of the American Conservative Union and the Philadelphia
Society.
He was also one of those young conservatives, along with Lee
Edwards, whom Bill Buckley and Marvin Liebman recruited to help
with the founding of Young Americans for Freedom. Stan Evans
drafted the Sharon Statement, and Lee Edwards became the first
editor of New Guard.
Evans is author of nine books, among them the magisterial
Blacklisted by History, a vindication of Senator Joseph
McCarthy based on an intensive analysis of now-available FBI files
and material from Soviet archives. In Stalin’s Secret
Agents, he continues his examination of the depth and breadth
of Soviet subversion, as revealed through primary sources and
formerly secret documents.
His co-author, Herbert Romerstein (The Venona Secrets),
a leading Cold War expert, served on the staff of several
congressional committees, among them the House Intelligence
Committee, and headed the USIA’s Office to Counter Soviet
Disinformation from 1983 to 1989, when the extraordinarily
nightmarish Soviet alternative universe finally imploded.
That implosion occurred in no small part because of the
continued pressure, despite the best liberal attempts to thwart it,
applied to Washington thinkers, legislators, and policy makers by
outnumbered conservative spokesman, journalists, and patriots like
Evans and Romerstein. The fact is that there was indeed a genuine
international communist conspiracy, and the ultimate success of
this conspiracy necessarily entailed neutralizing opposition from
the United States. To this end, Joseph Stalin’s agents of influence
infiltrated the federal government at the highest levels, one of
their primary objectives being to shape our foreign policy in a
manner favorable to the Soviet Union.
With FDR’s health and mental capacity steadily diminishing,
these agents of influence, among them Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s
closest advisers who came to be known as the “Deputy President” (he
actually lived in the White House), increasingly steered American
foreign policy in pro-Soviet directions.
EVANS AND ROMERSTEIN focus on the Yalta Conference of early
1945, a meeting at which the big three—FDR, Churchill, and
Stalin—decided the futures of nations like Poland and Yugoslavia in
the post-WWII world. Two conflicting views about that future would
set the tone of the talks. Winston Churchill believed that “the
West urgently needed to shore up its defenses against the expansion
of Soviet power,” while among those apparently speaking for FDR
(the authors convincingly document the president’s mental
deterioration, witnessed by a wide variety of reputable observers
and casting doubt on his ability to think clearly), “the impending
dominance of Soviet power in Europe was not something to be
combated, deplored, or counterbalanced, but rather an outcome to be
accommodated and assisted.”
Part of this view was no doubt an extraordinary misreading of
Joseph Stalin by those, who, if they weren’t agents of influence,
served effectively as useful idiots. The authors quote an
assessment of Stalin written by Joseph Davies, our ambassador to
Moscow: “He [Stalin] gives the impression of a strong mind which is
composed and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog
would sidle up to him.” And FDR himself is quoted as having said to
a somewhat startled cabinet “that as Stalin early on had studied
for the priesthood, ‘something entered into his nature of the way
in which a Christian gentleman should behave.’”
In much the same vein, the authors quote William Bullitt on
FDR’s view of aid to Stalin. Said FDR: “I have just a hunch that
Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and
I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask
nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex
anything and will work for world democracy and peace.”
(Emphasis added by the authors.)
And that, at Yalta, is pretty much what happened. The authors go
on to give an account of the dealings between FDR and Stalin,
including FDR’s attempt to cut Winston Churchill out of the
discussions so as not to upset Stalin, and some tasteless jokes
told by FDR, including a highly offensive reference to the problems
he and Stalin shared in dealing with Jews.
But tastelessness, bigotry, and intellectual shallowness aside,
and given the obvious physical and mental deterioration, how did
FDR come to so misread and misunderstand the basic and unchanging
goals of Soviet policy? The answer: He had no coherent idea of what
he was doing and his policies, resulting in the great concessions
made to the Russians at Yalta, were in large part the result of the
work of dupes and useful idiots led by a genuine traitor, Alger
Hiss, who as a Russian agent played a central role in shaping the
conference.
According to one report, write the authors, “The KGB lamented
that Hiss was already spoken for by the rival Soviet agency GRU
(military intelligence), saying that if the KGB had such a source
at State ‘no one else would really be needed.’” (And thus, in the
end, to the distress of liberal fellow-traveling dupes everywhere,
would Whittaker Chambers be totally vindicated, as would Richard
Nixon, the congressman who stood by him.)
Evans and Romerstein identify key conspirators and agents
planted in high positions in the federal government, as well as the
central roles played by such influential advisers as Harry Hopkins
and Henry Morgenthau. They document the indifference of the
bureaucracy to the threats posed by communist infiltration, as well
as the orchestrated cover-ups, including rigged grand jury
sessions, that prevented Congress and the American people from
receiving facts about the extent of that infiltration. In a
perceptive review of Anne Applebaum’s splendid new book, Iron
Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, Norman
Davies writes: “Perhaps the hardest thing for Eastern Europeans to
bear was that no one in the outside world cared. As seen from
Washington and London, Applebaum writes, ‘Russia’s behavior in
Eastern Europe…was hardly worth noticing at all.’” Or worse, as the
evidence mustered by Evans and Romerstein strongly suggests,
noticed in some influential quarters with approval.
As Wlady Pleszczynski points out, Ms. Applebaum’s book “is
getting deserved attention, in part because it focuses on something
that’s either been forgotten or was never paid attention to by the
dominant liberal culture, when that culture wasn’t colluding with
the Stalinists and Stalinoids.”
For the same reasons—and whether it’s agents of influence,
traitors, dupes, or useful idiots—Stalin’s Secret Agents
merits the same critical attention.
