(First term Congressman Dick Nixon, on his way to consult with Prescott Bush.)

March Madness has given way to April Ennui. I may look in at the game tomorrow night, or I may not. The headlines pretty much summed it up for me: “University of Kentucky fans overturn cars, burn couches to celebrate Final Four win over Louisville. I had to look carefully to ensure that it said “couches,” and not “coaches.”

On the other side of the Final Four, Ohio State blew a nine-point lead over Kansas at the half as the game degenerated into full-contact basketball. A pal wrote this morning to say that he turned it off at the 14:00 mark in the second half. Someone would be left standing at the end of it, and he said he just didn’t care who it was.

My brackets got busted in the first round- I was one-and-done- and never did manage to dredge up much interest in the rest of the tourney. Maybe I will watch the final, and maybe I won’t.

I have been so irritated with the politics of the current cycle that I had to go back to the days of the Red Scare just to take a break.

Then things got worse. I may have to drop this line of inquiry and exploration because my head might pop.

I mean, Senator Joe McCarthy has been thoroughly demonized, not that there wasn’t reason to dislike him, but it turns out that there actually were commies under the beds. Or, at least if not under them, they were sleeping in them.

The VENONA decryptions of Soviet diplomatic communications done across the street at Arlington Hall suggest there were at approximately 349 Americans who had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence. At least half of them skated free through the rest of their lives, since fewer than half of these code-names have been matched to true-name identities. The chance to walk through the KGB archives is done. But there is no question that the penetration of the Government was real and pervasive.

Of course it was not just happening here, and there were severly alienated young people in Britain, too. The famous British Cambridge spy ring is typical of the far-ranging damage those traitors inflicted on the West, with the last of them (maybe) finally being revealed as Anthony Blunt, a crashing snob and keeper of the King’s (and Queen’s) paintings and the ‘fourth man’ in the infamous spy ring which included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby.

(Anthony Blunt. He returned his knighthood, but there was no official punishment for his treason.)

He was only outed as a traitor, finally, by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Blunt resigned his knighthood, but otherwise was allowed to continue to live out his life of privilege.

The fame of the Cambridge Group is dwarfed by what was going on across the pond. Alger Hiss is the poster child in my mind for the Communists who came to Washington with the New Deal, and his exposure was plain, public and supported by the then highly classified VENONA messages. But still, the media defended him to his death in 1996 at the ripe old age of 92. George Clooney needed to insert this line into his 2005 film 2005 “Good Night and Good Luck,” attributing the words to the legendary founder of CBS William S. Paley: “Alger Hiss was not convicted of treason. He was convicted of perjury.”
Which parses things a little too fine. Of course he was a spy. Whittaker Chambers explained how it happened, how a generation became convinced that radical change was necessary:

“I had joined the Communist Party in 1924. No one recruited me. I had become convinced that the society in which we live, western civilization, had reached a crisis, of which the First World War was the military expression, and that it was doomed to collapse or revert to barbarism. I did not understand the causes of the crisis or know what to do about it. But I felt that, as an intelligent man, I must do something. In the writings of Karl Marx I thought that I had found the explanation of the historical and economic causes. In the writings of Lenin I thought I had found the answer to the question, ‘What to do?’”

I mean, there is a lot there. As a kid in the 1960s, a lot of it resonates. There was The Bomb, and The War and Racism and Injustice. There was plenty to protest, and we did.

The VENONA decrypts of Soviet diplomatic communications outlines the astonishing scope of the Soviet penetration of the American government in the 1930s. I was reading the transcripts of the 1948 testimony that Whittaker Chambers gave to the much-maligned HUAC. I invite your attention to it- it is young Dick Nixon’s first star turn on the American stage, and he has a passing involvement with our pal Mac, who was assigned to the Intelligence School at Anacostia in the mid 1950s. Nixon submitted his correspondence courses to the school until his obligated service was completed.

The Soviet agents Chambers named had been at work since the late 1920s, first through the OGPU and then NKVD (predecessors to the KGB and now FSB). There were Russians and other foreign-born people involved in the spying, of course, but there were many native-born Americans who believed just what Whittaker Chambers did, and were happy to help.

These agents established various espionage networks and eventually succeeded in penetrating various U.S. government agencies, transmitting classified or confidential information to Moscow while influencing U.S. government officials to support policies favorable to the Soviet Union.

Yesterday, I noted (in passing) that Alger Hiss had been the key policy maker on the Far East prior to the war. He was in a position to undermine Chang Kai-shek in his fight with Communist forces led by Mao.

In his last government job, Hiss was the American negotiator determining the composition of the post war UN General Assembly- and the first acting Secretary General- as a Soviet Agent!

It is plain awesome. Of course, the whole thing was embarrassing to all concerned. Harry Truman was no communist sympathizer, but he knew politics when he saw them.

Running against Dewey in 1948, he called the HUAC hearings a “red herring.” Privately, when the FBI showed him the contents of the Pumpkin Papers that Hiss was providing the Soviets through Chambers, he said called Hiss “a son-of-a-bitch” who was “guilty as hell.” Asked why he said something totally different for public consumption, the president replied, “The Republicans are not attacking Alger Hiss. They’re attacking me.”

The whole thing was too embarrassing.

The Secretary of the Army kept the VENONA secrets from Truman, judging it to be too sensitive for the President of the United States. Imagine what the public might think about a government that had been warned about the security problems in 1937, and not only ignore them, promoted the worst of them. Alger Hiss was a man who sat right behind President Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta, and had supervised Far East policy before Pearl Harbor, served in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, in the Justice Department, and as counsel to a Senate committee.

These days, if you point out that everything Whittaker Chambers testified about in 1948 was true, and what’s more, he had provided the same information to the Executive Branch in 1939 and was ignored- well, perfectly nice people will sniff and say he was never convicted for espionage, only perjuring himself about it.

There is a reason for that. The statute of limitations had run out on the spying, but not the lies about it.
These days, people shrug. I am surprised we got through it at all.

(Whittaker Chambers testifies to the HUAC in 1948. Alger Hiss is circled to the left.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com