History - Page 3

For 50 years, critics of the Warren Commission have usually been associated with the Left. From Khrushchev to Oliver Stone (hardly a leap) have obviously sought a more politically satisfying sniper than the grubby deadbeat Oswald. With regard to the Warren Commission, it is merely a cover job designed to misdirect attention from the true

John F. Kennedy’s 1957 book crediting a bi-partisan group of politicians who, as the title stated, exhibited “Profiles in Courage,” would later be revealed not to have been penned by the then-senator, but by his chief speechwriter (and later, Camelot spear-carrier Ted Sorenson). But that makes the inclusion of uber-conservative Republican Senator Robert Taft all

One of Ronald Reagan’s more obvious fallacies was his location of the date “the Democratic Party left me” as 1948. For this was during the reign of Harry Truman, a liberal anticommunist par excellence; indeed, Reagan’s strategy for causing a Soviet implosion in 1989 was partly traceable to Truman’s containment policy begun in 1947 (Reagan

In his last great battle in a lifetime of dust-ups, the late Christopher Hitchens in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, coined the term “Islamofascists” to describe and denounce the Muslim world. Linking it to 20th-century fascist movements, Hitchens elaborated: “The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult

Every decade or so pundits return to the question of whether George Orwell was a conservative. The answer is dependent on the questioner’s ideology. Norman Podhoretz claimed him as a neoconservative. Christopher Hitchens, still in thrall to socialism, stated that Orwell “was conservative about many things, but not politics.” By and large, this bodysnatching relied

Fifty-six years ago, the Berlin Wall was erected and gave the West the ultimate propaganda victory in the Cold War. JFK certainly viewed it as such. While he enraged some of his military advisers by refusing to green-light an invasion (supply lines would have been impossible to maintain), he nevertheless pronounced the images of people

Historians locate a decisive moment in the Republican Presidential campaign of 1940: The nomination the internationalist Wendell Wilkie, and in essence forever said goodbye to its isolationist wing. For the Democrats, their decisive moment was 1948. That year, Democrats engaged in an inner-party debate, a battle for its soul, between the accommodationist policies of FDR

During the early years of the Great Depression, where a considerable number of American intellectuals threw in with the communist candidate for president in 1932, William Z. Foster, literary critic Edmund Wilson urged American Communists to take Marxism away from the Russians and “Americanize it.” But this advice went unheeded and from 1932 onward, American

During the Cold War, the Right attacked FDR for his appeasement of Stalin, which assured the Soviet empire. In the words of moderate Republican Senator Ralph Flanders, the Soviet aggression America was faced with during the early Cold War period came about because Roosevelt “was soft as taffy on the subject of communism.” The flip

Today, under former KGB spook Vladimir Putin, the older generation pines for Josef Stalin (and may have found him in the form of Vladimir). The proclaimed reason for wishing Uncle Joe was back is that Koba gave the populace a supposed sense of security. But what kind of security? For the older generation, it probably

When that rare celebrity moves from liberalism to conservatism, pundits like to cite Ronald Reagan’s move from New Deal Democrat to Goldwater as pioneering such movement. Reagan claimed in his famous phrase that “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left me.” But the year he cited for this parting of ways, 1948, doesn’t hold

On November 22, 1963, Left and Right came together briefly in an awful contemplation. A hostile mob surrounded the headquarters of Barry Goldwater, the prospective Republican nominee against John F. Kennedy in 1963, chanting “Murderers!” On the other side, the Eastern Republican establishment also got into the act. Immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Nixon phoned

When George Orwell first heard about Josef Stalin’s Purge Trials, he immediately believed them to be rigged. It wasn’t so much the inconsistencies and fantasies of the prosecution (one of the charges lodged at these supposed Russian conspirators with Hitler to overthrow the Stalin regime had the traitors meeting with Nazis at a hotel that

In 1996, it was revealed that George Orwell gave a list he compiled of suspected Communists to a representative of MI-5. Since then, Orwell has been decried as a snitch and McCarthyite by the Left. This name-calling if nothing else, does open a fruitful historical inquiry about Orwell and the Cold War–namely, was George Orwell

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in many ways the epitome of liberal anticommunism, or as he liked to call it, “the Vital Center,” always greeted attacks by both the Right and the Left as proof he was correct. The same satisfaction could have been granted to Budd Schulberg, novelist, Academy-Award winning screenwriter, and for a time,

One hundred years ago, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and with it came the delusions of three decades’ worth of intellectuals and sentiments that still exist today. The stature of those who defended the accompanying Soviet internal policies that led to the deaths of 20 million–far more than Hitler’s actions–was and is astounding. America’s premier journalist

Depending who wants to claim as one of their own, literary critic Lionel Trilling has been called a conservative, a neoconservative (a direction we are assured by neocons of where he was headed before his death in 1975), and a liberal anti-communist. One thing missed in this game of ideological scrabble is how much of