Pre-Venona minds at work

Historians and the press still refuse to face the facts of the Red Decade and the "Red Scare".

J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Spy? No. But a Communist Once? Yes.

That only one of these eight biographies of Oppenheimer accurately assessed his relationship to the CPUSA reinforces the themes we discussed in our 2003 book In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage. By and large, American scholars and historians cannot bring themselves to write dispassionately about the elephant in the room, domestic communism, anticommunism, and Soviet espionage

In Denial: Round 11

[I. F.] Stone, however, is an icon in certain journalistic precincts, and to his devotees those six pages are the only ones in Spies that matter. Their responses match in distortion, whitewashing, spinning, and ad hominem viciousness any that we have received over the years and give us a better understanding of what Weinstein and Radosh had to put up with. The history of communism and Soviet espionage have never been fields for those seeking the scholarly quiet life, but the displays of rage (real and faux) in regard to Stone have been impressive.

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A herd of independent minds