WINMX Assorted Textfiles/Ebooks.tar/Text - Pollitics - What Did Harry Truman Know.txt

Text File | 2003-10-26 | 5KB | 73 lines

What did Harry Truman know?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: July 31, 2003
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: This column contains a word (in a quote) that will be offensive to some readers.
⌐ 2003 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.


The battle over the significance of American communism and what to do about it was probably the biggest
domestic controversy of the 20th century. It began shortly after the Republicans took control of the House
of Representatives in 1946, with a series of investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
and reached its first climax with the conviction of Alger Hiss for perjury (in denying that he had been a Soviet
spy) early in 1950.

The battle was then taken over by Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and roiled on for nearly five more years,
reaching its second and final climax with the censure of McCarthy by the Senate, in effect for having made what
were regarded as false and extravagant accusations of communism against innocent people.

That remained a fair summary of the controversy for 40 years, until the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
D-N.Y., forced the publication of the so-called Venona Papers in 1995. These were coded dispatches from
Soviet KGB officials in Washington and New York to Moscow Center in the first half of the 1940s, which had
slowly been decoded by U.S. Army cryptanalysts who started working on them in the mid-1940s. These
dispatches made it clear that Soviet intelligence agencies had indeed deeply penetrated the American
government before and during World War II, planting agents in almost every important office, right up to and
including the White House.

What has long mystified some of us who participated in the battle over domestic communism from the
anti-communist side, so to speak, is why this immensely important information, which was known to a few
insiders by the mid-40s, was never made public as a definitive answer to the furious controversy.

Now, in a fascinating article in the June 30 issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Novak reveals a previously
unsuspected footnote to history that may explain that baffling silence.

Some think that President Truman was never told what the Venona Papers revealed. According to this account,
General of the Army Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took personal responsibility in 1949 for
insisting that Truman not be told.

There is, however, another and very different account of the facts. Novak has tracked down a retired Army
cryptanalyst named Oliver Kirby, who asserts that his superior, Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke, met with President
Truman in the Oval Office on June 5, 1945 û just six weeks after Truman took office û and told him (at the
urging of Gen. George Marshall) of the Venona decryptions then under way. But Truman was unimpressed. He
didn't understand the decoding process, and told Clarke the whole thing sounded "like a fairy story." As late as
1948, when Bradley (according to Kirby) informed Truman of new Venona discoveries, the president told
Defense Secretary James Forrestal there were "too many unknowns" in the dispatches, and that "even if part of
this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again."

Even in 1950, when Bradley told Truman that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were identified in Venona as
Soviet spies, Truman kept his eyes firmly shut: "That g-ddamn stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger
and bigger. It's likely to take us down."

So the struggle over domestic communism roared on, while Harry Truman, who (at least according to this
account) knew the truth and could have ended the battle by telling it, kept the information deeply buried. A new
(and Republican) administration took over in 1953, but how much it was told about Venona is unknown.

Much of this account depends on the veracity of Oliver Kirby, whose versions of these various conversations
are impossible to check. But it is a fact that Carter Clarke did talk with Harry Truman in the Oval Office on
June 5, 1945, just as Kirby asserts.





--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and
Political Philosophy. If you wish to write to Mr. Rusher, you can contact him c/o United Media; Editorial Dept.,
4th Floor; New York, N.Y. 10016.