May 13, 2003 -- Albert V. Burns: The 1950's “Reign Of Terror” Was AGAINST McCarthy— Not By Him!

It is worth noting that events of the past several years have abundantly proved that McCarthy was not only correct, but that he was, unknowingly, UNDERSTATING the extent to which the Communist Party had infiltrated the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, namely, the White House, the State Department, the War Department, the OSS (predecessor of the CIA), the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb, etc. The U.S. government was riddled with Soviet agents and sympathizers. Joe McCarthy knew it and tried to the best of his ability to wake the U.S. up to that threat.

Did that corroboration come from the “far right” who had known that McCarthy was correct all the time? Incredibly, the exposure that he had been correct came from one of the most liberal authors in the U.S., Nicholas Von Hoffman. In the Washington Post of April 14th, 1996, appeared his article: “Was McCarthy Right About The Left?” The headline above the article declared to all the world: “The Reds Were Under The Bed While The Liberals Looked Away.” (For anyone who is interested, the complete article should be available in the archives of any library which takes the Washington Post.)

The information which Von Hoffman publicized (and which was and IS almost totally ignored, read “covered up”, by the mass media of this country) came from documents which had just been released by the National Security Agency (NSA). These documents revealed that the NSA had intercepted messages between Soviet agents in this country and their masters in Moscow.

To quote Von Hoffman: “The age of McCarthyism was not the simple witch hunt of the innocent by the malevolent, as two generations of high school and college students have been taught. In fact, the document disgorged by the NSA gives evidence that the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were rife with Communist spies, and political operatives who reported, directly or indirectly, to the Soviet government, much as their anti-Communist opponents charged.”

Von Hoffman went on to reveal that the growing body of evidence about Soviet infiltration and espionage shows that: “Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June, 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty. Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment, was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon, and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations of them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors, or, at the least, ideological vassals of a foreign power.”

The cables were kept top-secret since American counter-intelligence didn’t want the Soviets to know their encryption codes had been broken. That was considered such a top priority that NSA kept silent in the 1950s when Elizabeth Bentley was ridiculed for her assertions that McCarthy was right on target.

Some of those named in the NSA documents, the Venona Project, include former War Department official William Ullman, former intelligence officials Jay Joseph Julius and Jane Foster, Harold Glasser of the Treasury Department, George Silverman of the Air Force, Nathan Silvermaster of the Board of Economic Warfare, and Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department (who presided at the sell-out of American interests in the Bretton Woods agreement.) The list of names goes on and on, but space constraints prevent going further. Suffice it to say, that, at the time of the disclosures of Whitaker Chambers, Elizabeth Bentley, and other defectors from the Communist Party, there were AT LEAST FIVE Communist groups working within the U.S. government. Only TWO of those groups have ever been exposed, and because of the extremely effective efforts of the left wing in this country, we now have NO entity charged with the exposure of these traitors in our government.

The NSA information has been confirmed in documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union itself which have been compiled into a book called: “The Secret World Of American Communism,” by John Earl Haynes, a Library of Congress historian.

No, the so-called “McCarthy Era” WASN’T a time when innocents were accused wrongly, but rather a time when the guilty were protected by friends in very high places! Tragically, that protection goes on today!

To counter the charges that McCarthy “caused a reign of terror” allow me to quote a few statistics of the era: Number of Persons killed: Zero Number of Persons wounded or injured: Zero Number of Persons tortured: Zero Number of Persons arrested without warrant: Zero Number of Persons held or imprisoned w/o warrant: Zero Number of Persons evicted, exiled, or deported: Zero Number of Persons deprived of due process: Zero Some “reign of terror!”

The present Patriot Act is already causing far greater assaults on freedom than Joe McCarthy ever dreamed of causing — and there isn’t a peep of protest to be heard from the liberals who so loudly denounce McCarthy!

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Albert V. Burns is a retired Civil Engineer who worked in Arizona, Peru, Mexico, Honduras, Hawaii and Utah. He has been a writer and a freedom fighter for over three decades
avburns@mindspring