Now We Know

Anne Applebaum
The New Republic
Published: Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev
(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)

If one were trying to define the lowest point in the long and venerable tradition of American anti-communism, surely it came in 2003, with the publication of Ann Coulter's Treason. Coulter's "thesis" in this work of cut-and-paste-from-the-Internet history was that a straight line could be drawn between Americans such as Alger Hiss, who spied for the Soviet Union in the 1940s, and Americans such as Barack Obama, who criticized the war in Iraq half a century later. Both of these groups--along with assorted socialists, liberals, trade unionists, and pretty much anyone whom she defined as "Left"--were guilty of nothing less than treason: "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."

To be fair, which in Ann Coulter's case counts as an irony, she is not the only writer to have lost her sense of proportion, and maybe even her sanity, while contemplating the exceedingly complicated history of the American Left, and in particular its extended flirtation with the Soviet Union. Madness of a different sort--or perhaps of a deceptively similar sort--also characterizes the writings of Victor Navasky, the former editor and publisher of The Nation. Navasky has written many times on the subject of Hiss and other Soviet spies, with a sense of urgency that the passage of time never diminishes. An excellent example of his thinking on this subject can be found in an article in The Nation in 1997, describing the work of historians who were just then beginning to find evidence in the Soviet archives confirming that a number of Americans, including Hiss, had indeed collaborated with Soviet intelligence. "Like crazed lepidopterists with their butterfly nets," Navasky wrote, "they wildly try to capture every fugitive document that flutters into view to pin on their post-Cold War specimen boards. Their manic goal: to prove that the forties and fifties red-hunters with whom they now identify were right all along ... [and that] the wholesale suspension of liberties that characterized the Cold War years was justifiable after all." It is a striking use of metaphor. Would Navasky use the phrase "crazed lepidopterists" to describe those who keep pursuing, say, the still-mysterious fate of Raoul Wallenberg? I don't think so.

(More here.)