Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Wilson Quarterly

Whitewashing reds.

Article Excerpt
IN DENIAL: Historians, Communism and Espionage. By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr. Encounter. 316 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

In three impressive scholarly books published during the past decade, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr detailed how intimately the American Communist Party was tied to the Kremlin from the birth of the party in 1919 right up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991: The Secret World of American Communism, written with Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov (1995); The Soviet World of American Communism, written with Kyrill M. Anderson (1998); and Verona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (1999). Using newly avail able Soviet files and decoded American intercepts of Soviet cable traffic, the authors revealed that dozens of American Communists, including Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg, were guilty beyond any reasonable doubt of aiding Soviet espionage against the United Slates.

Newspapers and magazines paid widespread attention to these revelations, but in scholarly circles, the reaction was often grudging and sometimes hostile. Now Haynes, a historian at the Library of Congress, and Klehr, a professor of politics and history at Emory University, have written an energetic and outspoken rejoinder to their critics.

In Denial pulls no punches. "Far too much academic writing about communism, anticommunism and espionage is marked by dishonesty, evasion, special...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!