Cold War Without End

By JACOB WEISBERGNOV. 28, 1999

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Wandering around Herb Romerstein's house, but not knowing Herb Romerstein, you
might think you had happened upon the lair of America's last surviving Stalinist. On
the walls hang tattered posters for Popular Front rallies and Communist candidates.
Knickknack cases display K.G.B. medals and yellowing photos of Bolshevik heroes.
In the basement is the ''Felix Dzerzhinsky Memorial Library,'' named for the founder
of Lenin's secret police. Crammed into every corner are books, transcripts, pamphlets
and files that constitute a vast archive on American Communism. Completing the
picture, a snow-white spitz guards the trove.

Romerstein, a dapper little man with a bushy mustache and silver hair brushed into a
Stalin pompadour, was indeed a Stalinist -- 50 years ago, when he began his
collection as a teenager in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. But by the time he
graduated from high school he was an ex-Communist, and then, while serving in the
Korean War, he became an anti-Communist. And after returning home, he went to
work as a professional Red hunter. He was first employed by one of those panels that
now evokes a lost world -- the New York State Legislature's investigation into
Communist summer camps and charities. In the 1960's, as the hunt for Communists
waned, he became the chief investigator on the Republican side for the House
Committee on Internal Security, which had been the House Committee on Un-
American Activities (HUAC). Several years after the committee closed up shop, he
joined the Reagan administration, where he headed the Office to Counter Soviet
Disinformation, part of the United States Information Agency.

Since retiring from the government 10 years ago, Romerstein has continued to
function as a scourge of American Communism. For the past several years he has
been working on a study of Soviet espionage in the United States, which began as a
collaboration with the conservative journalist Eric Breindel, who died last year. The
book, which is under contract to Basic Books, is based largely on Romerstein's well-
informed and highly aggressive reading of the ''Venona'' documents, Soviet cable
traffic from the 1940's that began being decrypted by the National Security Agency
(N.S.A.) more than 50 years ago but was only released beginning in 1995.

Romerstein intends his book to be an expose of Americans who spied for Moscow as
well as a vindication of the much-maligned HUAC. Among the dead people he is
expected to claim were Soviet spies are Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's closest aide, whom Romerstein identifies as the mysterious ''Agent 19''; J.
Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist on the Manhattan Project; and I.F. Stone, the
revered liberal journalist.

If it is ever completed, Romerstein's book will be an especially intense volley in the

cold war that remains alive and bitter in American cultural and intellectual circles 10
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Empire might have
been expected to lend a sense of perspective and even forgiveness to the subjects of
Communism, McCarthyism and espionage. Instead, the vanished stakes seem only to
have inflamed an argument in which terms like smear and treason, fellow traveler and
Redbaiter and Stalinist and McCarthyite have often been less a matter of politics or
patriotism than of personal identity. Wrapped up in the American intelligentsia's
ongoing cold war are unresolved feelings of personal betrayal and the Oedipal
conflicts of red-diaper babies. There are, too, broader family matters of ethnicity and
belonging: it is impossible not to notice that nearly everyone doing the arguing is
Jewish, as are most of the people they're arguing about.

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Communism as a way of organizing a nation-state is finished. But for some, it

remains -- or at least fighting about it remains -- the only way to organize a life.

The I.F. Stone case provides a point of entry into the caustic accusations, denials and
counteraccusations that are the chief weapons in this cold war. Charges against Stone,
who died in 1989, first surfaced seven years ago, when Oleg Kalugin, a retired K.G.B.
general, implicated Stone as having been a Soviet agent. The allegation was received
skeptically, and Kalugin subsequently denied it, saying that Stone was merely a
friendly ''contact'' of the K.G.B.'s. But Romerstein -- drawing on the Venona
documents -- argues that Stone had a relationship during the Second World War with a
K.G.B. agent named Vladimir Pravdin who served as a TASS correspondent in
Washington. In 1944, according to Romerstein, Pravdin cabled his superiors in
Moscow that Stone, whose code name was ''Blin'' -- the Russian word for pancake --
would continue to talk to him only if he were paid. Stone and Pravdin continued to
meet, which proves to Romerstein's satisfaction that Stone must have been paid.

Stone, who had no access to classified information, can't have been an important
agent, if he was indeed a Soviet agent of any kind. But he is a crucial figure to
Romerstein precisely because he remains an icon to those Romerstein sees as the
legatees of the Popular Front. To show that a hero of left-wing journalists, prized for
his incorruptibility and ''independence,'' was in fact a paid Soviet informant is to strike
close to the heart of the enemy. This explains why The Washington Times, the right-
wing newspaper, and Robert Novak, the conservative columnist, have publicized
Romerstein's charges with such enthusiasm.

The response from the left has been equally tendentious. An article in The Nation
dredged up muck about Romerstein's own past, including the fact that he informed on
his high-school teachers and classmates who were Communists and worked for the
notorious blacklisting publication ''Counter-Attack.'' Among those most enraged by
Romerstein's accusations about I.F. Stone is Stone's son, Jeremy, who is the president
of the Federation of American Scientists. The younger Stone has accused Romerstein
of smearing a defenseless target with tainted and distorted evidence. And indeed,
more meticulous scholars, including some conservative ones, agree that the evidence
against I.F. Stone is weak.

Soon, however, the espionage vortex sucked in Jeremy Stone as well. In his book
''Every Man Should Try,'' published last spring by Public Affairs, Stone describes his
interest in discovering the identity of a mole inside the Manhattan Project. He says
that the impetus for this inquiry was the accusation made by another former K.G.B.
official, Pavel Sudoplatov, against J. Robert Oppenheimer. In researching that charge,
Stone came across an article published in an English-language Russian newspaper
about a spy code-named Perseus. Stone thought he recognized Perseus's political
views and his particular locutions, despite the fact that the quotations in the
newspaper had been translated into Russian and back into English. After struggling
over what to do, Stone decided to visit the object of his suspicions, whom he
describes in his book as Scientist X. Stone discussed the spy issue with Scientist X
without ever confronting him directly. According to Stone, Scientist X seemed to
come close to confessing the charge but worried whether he might still be in legal
jeopardy. When Stone's memoir was read by fellow scientists, they recognized
Scientist X as Philip Morrison, a professor at M.I.T. who had worked on the
Manhattan Project -- and who had been a mentor to Stone and a sponsor of his career.
This unmasking brought a fervent denial from Morrison, who pointed to discrepancies
between himself and Perseus. Stone, under fire within his organization, publicly
accepted Morrison's denial in a terse manner. (Stone, desperately upset by the whole
episode and its treatment in the press, declined to comment for this article.)

Anyone who aspires to get to the bottom of these matters gets lost in evidentiary
thickets pretty quickly. ''Perseus'' may or may not be congruent with ''Pers'' (the
Russian word for Persian), a code name for a spy connected to the Manhattan Project
that appears in various Venona documents. Romerstein says he thinks Jeremy Stone
may have been misled in his investigation by a composite description concocted by
the Soviets to protect the identity of undiscovered atom spies. More cautious students
of Venona say Pers remains unidentified. In all likelihood, the issue will never be truly
settled.

But stepping back from these details, the situation stands as a compelling political and
personal drama. Here we have a liberal public activist (Jeremy Stone) who fervently
denies the charge of espionage leveled against his late father (I.F. Stone). The younger
Stone sets out to exonerate another respected figure (Oppenheimer), an effort that
leads him to accuse a mentor and father figure (Morrison) on the basis of surmise and
evidence that his father's accuser (Romerstein) says is insufficient. These people, it
seems clear, are immersed in something more than a scholarly debate. It's a fight
about which Freud may have more to tell us than Marx.

Indeed, the deeper you delve into such battles, the greater the feeling grows that these
are not primarily arguments about historical fact at all. Espionage charges, initiated by
subterranean and frequently unreliable sources, are a way of arguing about the past as
if it were still present, a continuation of ideological politics by other means among
people who are, charitably put, obsessive. Listening in, you get the sense that these
arguments are less a posthumous sorting out of the cold war than a sublimated
continuation of it. The prevailing perspective remains that of the battlefield, occupied
by shellshocked soldiers who can't process the news that the war is over. It is, in a
way, a metaphysical problem that afflicts the ex-, pro-, anti- and anti-anti-
Communists: What happens when the political struggle that defined your existence
ceases to exist?

When the Berlin wall fell, the rationale for government secrecy about events long past
crumbled with it. Revelations soon began flooding out of archives on both sides. Of
all of these, Venona emerged as the greatest surprise. The story of Venona might have
been written by John le Carre.

In the 1930's and 40's, Soviet outposts around the world sent radio and telegraph
messages encrypted in what was supposed to be an unbreakable cipher. Cryptography
is a discipline that makes quantum physics seem accessible, but to oversimplify, each
message was sent in a unique code, so that even if one were somehow broken, it
wouldn't unlock any others. But beginning in 1942, the Soviets, under the strain of the
war effort, began to duplicate and reuse their ''key'' pages. This rendered their
transmissions vulnerable to analysts working for the Army Signal Intelligence
Service, which eventually evolved into the N.S.A. In 1946, the Soviet code was
broken with the help of a badly burned cipher book that was captured from a Soviet
consulate by Finnish troops in 1941, passed to the Nazis and captured again by the
United States military near the end of the Second World War. Fragments from this
book, plus the analysis of the key-page codes, allowed the reconstruction of messages
from 1942 through 1946, when the Soviets stopped reusing the compromised key
pages.

The 2,900 messages that were eventually decrypted in whole or in part constitute only
a portion of the overall traffic intercepted. When the N.S.A. publicly acknowledged
the operation and began releasing Venona documents four years ago, it became clear
that they had been vastly useful, exposing Julius Rosenberg and many other spies in
the United States government. The first comprehensive analysis of this material is in
''Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America,'' a book by two historians, John
Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, published earlier this year by Yale University Press.

Klehr, a professor at Emory University, and Haynes, who works in the manuscript
division at the Library of Congress, had collaborated on three previous books about
American Communism. Though more measured than many who study and write
about the history of American Communism, both were attracted to the topic largely by
their own political histories. Klehr sympathized with the New Left as a graduate
student in the early 1970's. Haynes was a liberal involved in Democratic politics in
Minnesota. Though neither had been a Communist, they both wanted to try to
understand why radical movements were so unsuccessful in America. In studying the
left, they found themselves increasingly drawn to the right.

In their first joint book, ''The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven
Itself,'' published in 1992, Haynes and Klehr stated that ''to see the American
Communist Party chiefly as an instrument of espionage or a sort of fifth column
misjudges its main purpose.'' On the basis of the Venona material, they have changed
their minds about the party. In their new book, they contend that Soviet espionage in
the United States was far more extensive than previously known -- that the Soviets
had 349 American citizens and residents working for them in the United States in the
1940's, less than half of whom have ever been identified. Haynes and Klehr also
maintain that the American Communist Party was deeply immersed in Soviet spying.
''The C.P.U.S.A.,'' they write, ''was indeed a fifth column working inside and against
the United States in the cold war.''

Haynes and Klehr assert that Venona proves once and for all that most of those
accused of being spies in the 1940's and 50's were indeed spies. This includes not only
the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, but also Harry Dexter White, a top Roosevelt
administration Treasury Department official. However, Haynes and Klehr believe that
the Venona files fail to support a number of Romerstein's charges. Oppenheimer, they
maintain, was a secret Communist Party member, but they doubt he relayed atomic
secrets. I.F. Stone may have met with the K.G.B., but there's no proof he was
recruited. Hopkins, they conclude, was not Agent 19. (Another recent book on Venona
published in the United Kingdom by the British military historian Nigel West
identifies Agent 19 as the Czech leader Eduard Benes).

These issues can perhaps only be settled with evidence from the other side. But here
the flow of revelations has been uneven. The Soviet archive that holds the pre-1943
records of the Comintern, the Soviet propaganda apparatus, was opened in 1992.
These millions of documents have only begun to be digested by scholars. Access to
the even more interesting K.G.B. archives has been spotty, with information sold or
touted by insolvent Russian officials.

Still, the goods being sold are sometimes genuine. In 1992, Alberto Vitale, then the
chairman of Random House, reportedly made a million-dollar contribution to the
Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, the K.G.B. alumni association, in
exchange for access to some of the agency's archives. To write a book based on them,
Vitale hired Allen Weinstein, the author of ''Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case,'' which
was first published in 1978 and made a convincing case that Alger Hiss was guilty.
Weinstein was not allowed to view Soviet documents himself; he could only review
translations made by his ''co-author,'' a former K.G.B. agent named Alexander
Vassiliev. In Weinstein and Vassiliev's book ''The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in
America -- the Stalin Era,'' which was published in January by Random House,
Americans who spied for the Soviets are not merely unmasked as traitors but revealed
as human characters who were often conflicted about their actions. One of the most
sympathetic figures in the book is Laurence Duggan, a high-level State Department
spy who was kept on as an agent largely through psychological coercion. After
Whittaker Chambers named him as an agent in 1948, Duggan either jumped or fell
from the 16th-story window of his New York office.

Alger Hiss is not a major figure in either Haynes and Klehr's Venona book or ''The
Haunted Wood'' because he worked not for the K.G.B. but, according to Weinstein's
account and others that followed, for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, whose
archives for the period haven't been opened even for a glimpse. But Hiss does make
one appearance in the documents released from the K.G.B. In 1936, he horrified his
Soviet handlers by attempting a bit of unauthorized recruiting at the State Department.
According to one memo written by an alarmed Soviet spy, Hiss approached Noel
Field, a fellow State Department official, and let it be known ''that he was a
Communist, that he was connected with an organization working for the Soviet Union
and that he knew [Field] also had connections'' and asked that Field give him
classified documents. This freelance recruiting was a serious violation of espionage
tradecraft.

On the basis of evidence culled from the Venona files, conservatives have been busy
declaring victory over the domestic left, and some on the left have conceded at least
partial defeat. Walter and Miriam Schneir, authors of a book arguing for the innocence
of the Rosenbergs, now acknowledge that Julius was guilty. Another significant
defection is that of Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College and
probably the best regarded of the left-wing scholars of Communism. Referring to Hiss
in a review of ''The Haunted Wood,'' Isserman wrote, ''Let's face it, the debate just
ended.''

Yet somehow, settling factual disputes about who was and wasn't a spy has failed to
create any new consensus. Instead, it has brought the fight about Communism in
America back to life.

In the 1970's and 80's, ''revisionist'' historians like Isserman, many of them the New
Left children of Old Left parents, dominated the field of Communist studies. These
scholars, molded by the 1960's and the Vietnam War, tried to debunk the prevailing
notions that the C.P.U.S.A. was a tool of Moscow and that the cold war was a
righteous effort by democratic America to resist the spread of Soviet totalitarianism.
The thrust of most of the new work on the topic might be called counterrevisionist.
These scholars and polemicists are eager to re-establish the view that American
Communists were traitors and that the cold war was a moral triumph for the West.

Arthur Herman, a historian at George Mason University, may be taking this

counterrevisionism as far as anyone: In his new book, to be published this week by
the Free Press, he sets out to rehabilitate Senator Joseph McCarthy. Herman writes in
''Joseph McCarthy: Re-examining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated
Senator'' that McCarthy ''proved more right than wrong in terms of the larger picture''
of Communists in the State Department. Herman acknowledges that McCarthy would
exaggerate and sometimes lie when cornered, but concludes that he was not the ogre
he was made out to be.

Why does Herman want to vindicate Joe McCarthy? I asked him this question over a
drink in Washington not long ago. He at first denied seeing any political purpose to
his work, explaining that his interest in McCarthy came from growing up in
Wisconsin. But politics soon emerged. McCarthy, Herman told me, ''is part and parcel
of what modern conservatism is all about.'' McCarthy, he says, ''fed the rebirth of
American conservatism'' by creating a bond between ordinary Americans and the
Republican Party.

In approaching McCarthy in this way, Herman is to some degree echoing ''McCarthy

and His Enemies,'' the book written 45 years ago by William F. Buckley and L. Brent
Bozell. But Buckley himself is no longer entirely comfortable with this position. In
his latest novel, ''The Redhunter,'' Buckley offers a fictionalized view of McCarthy
that tries to humanize him without going so far as trying to rehabilitate him. When I
visited Buckley at his Upper East Side town house and put Herman's formulation
about McCarthy being essential to conservatism to him, Buckley shook his head in
mock incomprehension and said he was baffled by it.
On the one hand, Buckley contends that McCarthy was the ''main vehicle'' of anti-
Communism and thus implicitly worthy of support. This is his 1954 position,
influenced by a strong Catholic identification with McCarthy's crusade. Yet Buckley
now also endorses the contradictory stance of Whittaker Chambers, who thought
McCarthy was too indiscriminate to do the cause of anti-Communism any good and
thus deserving of repudiation. As Harry Bontecou, the character who stands in for
Buckley in ''The Redhunter,'' puts it, ''It was one of Joe McCarthy's ironic legacies that
it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a Communist,
because you'd be hauled up for committing McCarthyism.''

What unites Herman and Buckley is the belief that ''McCarthyism'' is a millstone that
shouldn't hang around the neck of the American right any longer. They believe the
new evidence should help them get rid of it, even if they're not sure how it does so. A
second group of anti-Communist writers, who share a background as children of the
Popular Front and New Left radicals in the 1960's, is more interested in using the new
evidence to demolish the historical legacy of contemporary liberals. The leading
scholar in this camp is the political historian Ronald Radosh.

Radosh is a bulky, jolly man with a childlike demeanor and a seemingly endless
capacity to be wounded by ex-friends on the left. At 62, he is writing his memoirs,
tentatively titled ''Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the
Leftover Left.'' Radosh allowed me to read the first few chapters, in which he looks
back at the radical milieu of the 1940's and early 50's in which he grew up -- the
Jewish-Communist subculture of Washington Heights, in Upper Manhattan. In the
summer, Radosh was bundled off to Camp Woodland in the Catskills, where the sons
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg also went. At the local public school, Jewish kids like
Radosh baited their Irish-Catholic teachers by bringing Paul Robeson records to
show-and-tell. These children were used politically by their parents, and many are still
furious about it. Radosh recalls his own anger at his parents for forcing him to return a
school prize sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Radosh writes with a mixture of nostalgic affection and embarrassed hostility -- an

ambivalence that has characterized his relationship with radical culture for years. In
1974, he infuriated fellow members of the New Left by reporting on Fidel Castro's
persecution of homosexuals. In 1983, Radosh and Joyce Milton published ''The
Rosenberg File,'' a book that closed the case for all but a few Camp Woodland alumni
and readers of The Nation, a magazine with which Radosh remains preoccupied. It's
not clear what he expected, but the way his old friends and allies responded to the
Rosenberg book -- treating him as a turncoat and a dishonest scholar -- wounded
Radosh so deeply that he is not even gloating about belated concessions from the likes
of the Schneirs.

''The whole way they fought the case for years was that these people were framed up,''
Radosh told me. ''They have not acknowledged intellectually what it means that they
were wrong.''

Radosh riles the remnants of the left far more than any conservative scholar because
of his insistence that he comes as a friend, demolishing cherished myths in sorrow
rather than anger. But because he fails to identify himself as a conservative, he
remains suspect on the far right. Romerstein describes Radosh as someone who is still
trying to please the left.

Radosh dismisses the characterization. ''You can't please lefties,'' he says. ''I gave up
trying years ago.'' He is a relic, in a way, of the anti-Stalinist splinter groups of the
1930's and 40's, the Lovestoneites and the Schachtmanites. This past summer, Radosh
gave a book party for his friends Haynes and Klehr. The folk singer Joe Glazer played
anti-Stalinist songs from the 1950's, like ''Oh, My Darling Party Line.'' Radosh
himself sang ''Talking Soviet Union Blues,'' a parody of the old Pete Seeger number
''Talking Union Blues.''

In addition to working on his memoirs, Radosh is collaborating on a book about the

Spanish Civil War based on research he has done in Soviet military archives. It will
attempt to dispel the heroic view of the war that Radosh, whose uncle was killed as a
volunteer for the party-run Abraham Lincoln Battalion, grew up with. His argument is
that, as he and his co-author, Mary Habeck, put it in a recent paper, ''should Franco
have lost, Stalin would clearly have imposed . . . a Soviet-style 'people's democracy'
such as that which emerged in Central and Eastern Europe after World War II.'' In
other words, defenders of the Spanish Republic weren't defending democracy against
fascism, as they may have thought and have long asserted, but doing Stalin's work,
however inadvertently.

In the 1950's, the British historian Herbert Butterfield wrote a little book criticizing
what he called the Whig fallacy in history -- viewing the past as the march of progress
toward the present. Radosh exemplifies a kind of Whig Fallacy in reverse -- viewing
the present through the lens of one's own painful past. Having grown up in an
environment in which Communism was powerful, and powerfully appealing, he is
unable to relinquish the idea. What Radosh fails to understand is the way in which
Communism, long irrelevant in American politics, has became not just powerless but
absurd.

Radosh is a mild and temperate critic in comparison with an old friend of his from the
New Left, and a fellow red-diaper baby, David Horowitz. In his own memoir,
''Radical Son,'' which was published two years ago, Horowitz describes how his
parents met in the Communist Party in the 1930's; his father, Phil Horowitz, was
suspended as a public-school teacher on the Lower East Side when he refused to sign
a loyalty oath in 1952. In his book, Horowitz writes poignantly that he understood
adopting his parents' politics was a condition of winning their love. Like Radosh, he
did adopt them, but rebelled against them at the same time by becoming a 60's-style
revolutionary critical of the Soviet Union.

Horowitz, who was active in the left in Berkeley, became co-editor of the radical
magazine Ramparts in 1969. In the 1970's, he became a deeply involved supporter of
the Black Panthers, even harboring a Panther fugitive in his house. When the Panthers
needed a bookkeeper, Horowitz recommended a secretary from Ramparts. After she
was found bludgeoned to death, presumably at the hands of the Panthers, he broke
with radicalism and became increasingly conservative.

Having despised liberals from the left, Horowitz came to hate them just as violently
from the right. He casts himself as a latter-day Whittaker Chambers, bearing witness
against the left. Like Chambers, he is attached to the notion -- farther-fetched in the
90's than in the 40's -- that he abandoned the winning side for the losing one.

What's strangest about Horowitz is the way he views the 1930's through a prism of the
1960's reflected in the 1990's. In his view, un-American activities became Vietnam-
era anti-Americanism and then evolved into left-wing political correctness, which he
believes to be synonymous with Democratic Party liberalism. This explains
Horowitz's penchant for depicting Clinton Democrats in terms borrowed from the era
of high Stalinism. They are enthralled with a ''utopian fantasy,'' practice a ''crypto-
religion'' and wish to install a ''reign of terror.'' In the online magazine Salon, where he
has a column, Horowitz wrote recently, ''It is as though the Rosenbergs had been in
the White House, except that the Rosenbergs were little people and nave.''

This sort of analogy isn't just a hallmark of Horowitz's political thinking -- it's a
common trope of many on the right who can't or won't let the cold war go. The
Chinese spy scandal, in which missile technology appears to have been stolen by a
Communist power on the watch of a Democratic administration, is simply a reprise of
the Rosenberg scandal. Clinton is a modern-day Truman, the liberal who McCarthy
and his supporters believed allowed the Communists to run rampant. Jesse Helms and
others have demonized Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of State and Russia
expert, suggesting that he was converted to the other side during his student travels in
the Soviet Union. As Joshua Micah Marshall pointed out in a recent article in the The
American Prospect, the liberal journal, the right portrays Talbott as a figure exactly
parallel to Owen Lattimore -- the China hand absurdly named as the Soviets' ''top spy''
in the United States by Joe McCarthy.

It is not surprising, perhaps, that conservatives should be so reluctant to let go of anti-

Communism, a cause that gave them unity and purpose for four decades and that
sorted out a complicated world for them. But it does seem strange that instead of
celebrating their victory in the cold war, many behave as if it hasn't yet ended and
their side hasn't yet won. Conservatives wanted Communism to go. What some didn't
realize, apparently, was that when it did, it would take with it not only anti-
Communism but also an entire intellectual and emotional dwelling place constructed
around it.

For those most deeply invested in this universe, clinging to anti-Communism is as

much a personal as it is a political phenomenon. What comes through vividly in
Horowitz's memoirs is a fierce Oedipal struggle entwined with radicalism. Horowitz
wanted to antagonize his Communist father; in later years, when he was ailing,
Horowitz would bait him by raising the name of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. But
Horowitz also wanted to please him and win the unconditional love he never felt as a
boy.

This sense of acting out of personal injury permeates everything Horowitz writes
today. He is enmeshed in a kind of co-dependent relationship with the left. He wants
to hurt them, and wants to be hurt back. As John Podhoretz wrote reviewing ''Radical
Son,'' Horowitz ''has yet to find emotional distance from his onetime brethren on the
left. They have the capacity to wound him as surely as if he were their brother still.
Horowitz cannot help but desire their approbation, just as he sought his father's until
the day of Phil Horowitz's death.''
But the fight is also about family in the larger sense of the family of American Jews.
The reason Communism was attractive to many Jews seems clear: they thought they
found in Marxist universalism both a response to persecution and a way out of the
physical and psychic ghetto. For other Jews in the 1940's and 50's, anti-Communism
was a ticket to acceptance and assimilation, a way to demonstrate their loyalty and
patriotism. A great many of those arguing about Communism today seem implicitly to
be battling about the political choices made by Jews at mid-century. At some level,
anti-Communist historians are still proving their loyalty to country by denouncing
those who betrayed it. Many historians on the left, on the other hand, want to show
that Jewish Communists were good Americans after all.

Victor Navasky no longer does the day-to-day editing of The Nation, but as publisher,
he remains its presiding spirit. In his expansive office on Irving Place, in Lower
Manhattan, he takes calls from figures representing the radical causes of many
decades. He interrupts an interview to reassure Gloria Steinem about a speech and
trade gossip with Tony Hiss, son of Alger, in a low, mumbling voice. He's a very furry
character. With a beard that seems to envelop his entire body, he resembles an Ed
Koren cartoon brought to life.

While he never had any sympathy for the Soviet Union, Navasky had even less use
for its foes. The heyday for this view was the 70's, when the revisionist historians
dominated academia and Navasky led a campaign to discredit Allen Weinstein's
''Perjury,'' claiming that its evidence against Hiss was distorted. Today Navasky
carries an air of a defeat that he can't quite acknowledge. At first, Navasky questioned
the authenticity of the Venona documents. Now he focuses on what he believes is their
misuse. Pointing out what he calls internal contradictions in the documents, Navasky
says that ''to try to leap to conclusions based on them to me suggests another agenda.''
That agenda, in his view, is ''a re-revisionist history of McCarthy, HUAC and Co. that
says, See, they were right all along.''

On the Rosenbergs, Navasky says he now accepts, ''in a very tentative way, if I were
forced to choose,'' that ''Julius was guilty of something and that Ethel probably knew
about it. And that the punishment was hideously disproportionate to the crime.'' And
instead of forcefully arguing that Hiss wasn't guilty as he once did, Navasky now
acknowledges that Hiss wasn't telling the truth when he testified that he didn't know
Whittaker Chambers -- though his ''impression would be that Hiss was innocent of
whatever it is people mean by espionage.''

He continued: ''My larger belief is that 'espionage' is one of those words that is in a
kind of strange way out of context in most of its uses as a description of what went on
in the 1930's. There were a lot of exchanges of information among people of good
will, some of whom were Marxists, some of whom were Communists, some of whom
were critics of government policy. Most of those exchanges were innocent and were
within the law. Some were innocent and in technical violation of law. And there may
have been and undoubtedly were an infinitesimal number of bona fide espionage
agents.''

Ellen Schrecker, a leading left scholar of McCarthyism, goes a bit further. I visited
Schrecker, who teaches at Yeshiva University, at her Upper West Side apartment,
where she lives with her husband, the radical historian Marvin Gettleman. Faced with
new evidence that espionage was far more widespread than previously thought,
Schrecker acknowledges that many of the accused were in fact spies. But, she
contends, spying wasn't necessarily a categorical evil. American Communists, she
says, spied not because they were traitors but because they ''did not subscribe to
traditional forms of patriotism.''

Comments like this have caused Schrecker to be incorrectly described as a red-diaper

baby. She was actually, she says, ''a nice Jewish girl from the suburbs'' who grew up
outside Philadelphia, the daughter of ''good A.D.A. liberals.'' She says she was
alienated from the pro-Communist left for cultural reasons: ''I hated folk music.''

Just as Buckley can't decide whether to rescue McCarthy or excommunicate him,

Schrecker is of two minds about how the left should think about American
Communists. In her book ''Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,''
published last year by Little, Brown, she expresses ambivalence. On the one hand, she
calls it a ''tragedy'' that the left was so dominated by a Soviet-led party in the 30's and
40's. On the other hand, she sees much value in what American Communists did, like
advocating labor unions and fighting against segregation when the Democratic Party
still tolerated it. ''They weren't the kinds of robots that the traditional view of
Communists would have us assume that they were,'' she says.

If Communism was heterogeneous and creative, anti-Communism was, in Schrecker's

view, purely malignant. She argues that there was no good kind of anti-Communism --
including that espoused in the 1950's by varieties of socialists and by liberals. All
contributed, she writes, to an unwarranted effort to quash dissent. Left-wing anti-
Stalinists like the intellectuals associated with the journal Partisan Review helped
''legitimize'' anti-Communism, she maintains. ''It was the very diversity of the anti-
Communist network that made it so powerful,'' she writes.

Where Arthur Herman argues that the word ''McCarthyism'' shouldn't be used because
it no longer has any real meaning, Schrecker and others want to keep it alive as a
cudgel for the left to employ against the right. To Schrecker and her political allies,
McCarthyism, not Communism, was the great political evil of America's postwar
period. Where the right argues that there is an innate strain of dishonesty and
disloyalty on the left, the left contends that the smear tactics of Joe McCarthy will
always be a hallmark of the right. To them, Kenneth Starr is simply a modern-day
McCarthy.

Schrecker and her allies acknowledge that they are losing ground in the historical
argument. Their explanation for this is basically a Marxist one: only historians on the
right can find financing for their research. Schrecker says the National Endowment
for the Humanities won't touch her, and Navasky claims there is no financing from
think tanks for scholars who want to challenge the views of writers like Radosh,
Haynes and Klehr.

When I brought this up with Radosh, he exploded: ''Give me a break! Look at the
MacArthur awards!''

I was having dinner with Radosh and Haynes in Washington, and the accusation of
victory infuriated both of them. The anti-Communist historians view themselves as
the real victims of discrimination, indeed of a kind of left-wing McCarthyism within
the academy. Radosh has never had a job at a top university despite having published
the most important book on the Rosenbergs. A couple of years ago, the president of
George Washington University tried to hire him. After the history faculty refused to
accept money from the conservative John M. Olin Foundation to pay Radosh's salary,
he worked out an affiliation with another think tank connected to the university.
Tenure eludes him.

Haynes, too, sees the academic work on American Communism as heavily skewed to
the left. Haynes has also made his career outside of mainstream academia, where he
says you simply can't address the subject of Soviet espionage in a scholarly way. Over
dinner, he elaborated the point. ''There's been a tendency to freeze consideration,'' he
said. ''For example, let's take a look at Elizabeth Bentley.'' Bentley, a spy who turned
herself in to the F.B.I. in 1945, was probably the government's most valuable defector
from the American Communist Party.

''This was a major incident,'' Haynes continues. ''Do you know how many doctoral
dissertations there are on Bentley? None. Because it's one of those, We shouldn't look
at this -- this is dangerous. You're not going to be able to get a job if you write a
dissertation about Elizabeth Bentley. If this was a field in which things were normal,
there would be half a dozen Elizabeth Bentleys stretched over the last 20 or 30 years.
But this is a field where young historians soon get the message: don't look at that area;
it's dangerous.''

Interestingly, both sides in the ongoing cold war are attached to a view of themselves
as underdogs. At the moment, the left's claim that it is losing the history war appears
more persuasive, thanks to the loss of Isserman, who was probably the best historian
of Communism its side had. Four years ago, Isserman could still argue in The Nation
that spying was, as Harry Truman once said, a red herring. ''That espionage has
suddenly emerged as the key issue in the debate over American Communism,''
Isserman wrote, ''probably has as much to do with marketing strategy as with any
reasoned historical analysis.''

But when I spoke with him recently, he said: ''My opinions on the question have
changed dramatically. Twenty years ago I would have said that there weren't a
significant number of American Communists who spied. It's no longer possible to
hold that view.'' Indeed, the belief that Hiss and the Rosenbergs weren't spies is fast
becoming the left's creation science. It's getting harder and harder to find someone not
related to them who will argue they weren't guilty.

If the revisionist view of Communism is losing scholarly support, Haynes and Radosh
do have a point when they assert that it is still strong in the popular culture.
Conservatives have made few inroads against the notion that McCarthyism did far
more harm to America than Communism. The perspective that most often reaches the
public, in programs like a recent A&E drama about Lillian Hellman and Dashiell
Hammett, is still a species of Schrecker and Navasky's view -- that while Communists
may have been wrong in their views, McCarthyism was the greater evil.

This debate recurred earlier this year during the furor over whether Elia Kazan ought
to have received an honorary Oscar for ''lifetime achievement.'' Kazan, the film
director, was called before HUAC in 1952 and asked for names of Communists he
knew in Hollywood. After initially declining to answer the question, Kazan turned
over the names of a dozen fellow alumni of a Communist cell within the Group
Theater from the 1930's. It was a classic ritual of humiliation: the committee already
knew the names.

Others who named names did so under protest, or later flagellated themselves for
doing so. Kazan's unforgivable sin, from the point of view of the left, was to embrace
his inquisitors in an ad he took out in The New York Times after testifying before
HUAC. ''I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts has the
obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate government
agency,'' he wrote. Kazan made his case more eloquently in the 1954 film ''On the
Waterfront,'' in which Marlon Brando plays a longshoreman faced with a choice about
whether to rat on the murderous and corrupt leadership of his union. In the film, the
decision to testify is portrayed as an act of courage, not cowardice.

Many at the time, and again this year, thought Kazan's behavior disqualified him for
any kind of honored status in the entertainment industry. Richard Dreyfuss wrote in
The Los Angeles Times, ''I cannot agree to those cheers if it means supporting his
reprehensible act of naming names.'' At the awards ceremony, Kazan received a
standing ovation, but many members of the audience, including the actors Nick Nolte
and Ed Harris, sat silently. In other words, the predominant view in the movie
business was that it was the 89-year-old Kazan, not the surviving supporters of Stalin,
who still owed some kind of apology. In the opinion of contemporary Hollywood,
Communists in the 1930's and 40's were nave romantics, not traitors. McCarthyism,
on the other hand, damaged both their industry and the nation.

This view doesn't take in the complexity of the Kazan case. The celebrities who
declined to clap for Kazan did so on the mistaken assumption that he had expressed
no regrets about what he did. In fact, Kazan had described his own actions as
''disgusting'' and evinced great anguish about the terrible choice that was imposed
upon him. He also grasped, at a deeper level than either his allies or critics, the ethnic
drama at the root of his behavior. For an ambitious immigrant from Anatolia, Turkey,
trying to make it in America, denouncing Communism was a way of proving his
loyalty to an adopted country.

Kazan's intense reflection over the episode makes a powerful case for forgiveness. Yet
in a more general sense, the Hollywood attitude is defensible. Communism, however
genocidal abroad, was not murderous or meaningful in America. The Hollywood 10
never put any left-wing propaganda into the movies. Communism never abridged the
freedom of Americans in America. McCarthyism did.

For much of this century, Communism was an Archimedean point for fellow travelers
and cold warriors alike. If you knew where you stood, you could leverage an
understanding of the world. Views of Communism provided a social, intellectual and
emotional home. They helped people choose friends and lovers, to know whom to
admire and whom to despise. These allegiances, alliances and families molded in
response to Communism have survived the demise of their premise.
The problem is that when Communism is used as template and metaphor for the
present, it easily becomes a bar to understanding. You can no longer interpret
international politics, as many conservatives do, with ideological communism as the
chief reference point. Communist China, which has no coherent ideology and no
corps of foreign supporters, is not anything like the Soviet Union of the 1940's.
Chinese missile spies are not like the Rosenbergs.

Paradoxically, the one group that basically got Communism right back then is the one
group that has for the most part sat out this posthumous cold war. I am speaking of the
tradition of liberal anti-Communists. Liberal anti-Communism begins in the 1930's
with Sidney Hook and John Dewey and the Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow
Purge Trials. Hook subsequently founded the Committee for Cultural Freedom, an
organization that resisted both Communism and the demagogic and bigoted anti-
Communism of HUAC.

It was liberal foreign-policy thinkers like Paul Nitze and George Kennan who devised
the Truman Doctrine and containment, successful strategies for resisting the spread of
Communism at the outset of the cold war. And it was liberal intellectuals like Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr who developed the most useful understanding
of the Communist threat. In his classic 1949 statement ''The Vital Center,'' Schlesinger
argued that while Communism was certainly a danger to America, it wasn't much of a
threat in America. The way to answer it, he wrote, was not by banning and
prosecuting Communism, but through the Constitutional methods of ''debate,
identification and exposure.''

It's not just the positions of liberal anti-Communists that hold up, but also their
analysis of American Communism as a phenomenon. The first real historians of the
movement were Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Murray Kempton and Theodore Draper, all
of whom wrote about American Communism in the 1950's. They shared the view that
foreign Communism was a menace and American Communism a flop. As Kempton
wrote in his 1955 book, ''Part of Our Time,'' probably the most eloquent volume on
the subject, American Communists were ''creatures of a lonely impulse, because there
have never been many convinced Marxists in America.''

There were some things liberal anti-Communists of the 1950's didn't know, namely
the extent of Soviet penetration of the United States government during the war years.
Yet the new evidence confirms their larger picture. Elizabeth Bentley, who began
working as a courier for a Soviet spy network in 1939, uprooted the Soviet Union's
espionage network in America when she walked in the front door of the F.B.I. in
1945. Venona confirmed Bentley's charges and revealed many other agents. With
additional help from Whittaker Chambers and a code clerk who defected from
Moscow's embassy in Canada, the Soviet networks were ruined within a few years.
The Truman administration, accused of sheltering spies, in fact rooted them out of the
government. At the very point McCarthy said spies were everywhere, Russians in
America were complaining to their superiors, ''At present we don't have any agents.''

Too few of those dealing with American Communism today have either a real sense of
perspective or an ability to make this history vivid in the way someone like Kempton
could. One exception is Sam Tanenhaus, whose biography of Whittaker Chambers is
one of the few recent books on American Communism capable of engaging the
attention of those not already besotted with it. Rather than obsess about those who fail
to accept the obvious conclusion that Hiss was guilty, Tanenhaus ignores them.
Instead, he concentrates on bringing to life a historical and human drama.

To approach the story of American Communism in a less judgmental fashion doesn't

mean that there weren't heroes and villains in the story, and many gradations in
between. It merely acknowledges the reality that so many seem not to want to accept:
that the cold war is history now. Those who would explain what happened must first
separate themselves from it.