Major Jordan, Carroll Reece, Birchers, Buckley and the Attack on Diana West

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Diana West, interviewed by The Blaze, July 17

One of the stories Diana West tells in her new book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character is about Army Maj. George Racey Jordan, whose tale about Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union you can read beginning on page 110 of the book.

West recounts, on pages 139-140, Major Jordan’s narrative of an April 1943 incident in which his Russian liaison, Col. Anatole Kotikov, put him on the phone with top FDR aide Harry Hopkins. According to Major Jordan, Hopkins told him about “a certain shipment of chemicals,” ordering him to “just send it through quietly, in a hurry.”

Has anyone disproven Major Jordan’s account of that incident, or otherwise contradicted his tale of how, he said, the Lend-Lease program aided the Soviets in stealing U.S. secrets and materials necessary to the development of atomic weapons? I am unaware of any such contradiction or disproof, and the question is why — in the wake of what we have learned about Soviet espionage since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of the Venona decrypts — scholars have not done more to investigate Major Jordan’s tale, which made headlines when he testified to Congress in 1950.

Frankly, there are too damned many such questions that ought to be of interest to historians, and too few historians working to investigate accusations made during the Cold War that got laughed off as ridiculous or denounced as “witch hunts.” We should be grateful that Diana West is picking at the dangling loose ends of history.

Instead, she’s been denounced for her methodology and condemned as a conspiracy theorist by both Ron Radosh and David Horowitz. There have been some people who, persuaded by the arguments of Radosh and Horowitz, have condemned Diana West without ever reading her book. And I suppose the reputations and persuasiveness of these eminent critics are such that, if you went and bought American Betrayal right now, it would be impossible for you to view it in an unprejudiced light. How can she be right — an intelligent and honest investigator — if Radosh and Horowitz say she is so wrong?

Let me attempt to answer this by asking another question: How much do you know about the Reece Committee?

This is one of those Cold War mysteries that the John Birch Society has kept alive, God bless them. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be intrigued by such mysteries, and I once knew a fellow, directly familiar with the inner circles of JBS, who explained to me that talk of a communist “conspiracy,” which has given Birchers such a bad name, was simply a mental framework for viewing the problem.

The Law of Inadequate Paranoia

One need not believe any of the more wild-eyed accusations made by Birchers in order to share their general suspicion that the full story is not known, and that if the full story were known, it would shock your socks off, curl your hair and scare you half to death.

This is what M. Stanton Evans has called Evans’s Law of Inadequate Paranoia: “However bad you think it is, it’s probably much worse.”

Start asking certain questions about subversive influences on American policy during the Cold War, and you will find enough evidence of that stuff to make you understand what Evans means by that.

So . . . the Reece Committee, officially the House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, was created in 1952 under the chairmanship of Rep. Edward Cox (D-Georgia) and continued later under the chairmanship of Rep. Carroll Reece (R-Tennessee). Reece believed that Cox had not gotten to the bottom of the matter — there was the suspicion of a “whitewash” — and brought in a staffer named Norman Dodd as the lead investigator.

Please, go read Dodd’s 16-page report of his investigation. And when you’re done reading that, then you’ll be prepared to learn that, according to Dodd, the Reece Committee’s further investigations were shut down and the committee itself disbanded, and Dodd said that this was done as a result of heavy political pressure.

Big money and important people didn’t want any more snooping around into Dodd’s accusation that there had been a “revolution” in the 1930s that had involved the American education system, and what children were taught about government and economics.

Think about this: A congressional committee with subpoena power to command testimony and requisition evidence as part of an investigation into how major non-profit philanthropic foundations — Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, etc. — had influenced policy in a direction that some have called “un-American” or “subversive.”

And they shut that committee down.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist ranting about Commie infiltrators and pinko subversives to see the implications of this.

Let’s just say that, minimally, Dodd’s report to the Reece Committee raised questions, and that we don’t know all the answers. However, it appears that for many years there was a consensus among leading officials of major philanthropic foundations that U.S. policy needed to be shifted leftward, and that children needed to be taught to accept this shift as beneficial and necessary. In other words, they had their thumb on the scales, tilting everything to the left, and they expended millions of (tax-exempt) dollars for this purpose.

Research it yourself, and see if you disagree with that description.

Say whatever you want about “conspiracy theories.” My point is that if we don’t know all the answers about these things, there is a reason: Important people didn’t want anyone asking questions, and they exercised enough influence that they were able to discredit or shut down anyone who tried to get answers to certain questions.

In the present controversy regarding Diana West and her book American Betrayal, we see a strangely familiar echo of that theme. West is accused of being a conspiracy theorist and an irresponsible demagogue, basically because she calls attention to unanswered questions — which may seem moot to some people — about a shift in U.S. policy that began during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.

What Would Bill Buckley Do?

West’s critics have invoked William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous “purge” of the Birchers from the conservative movement as justification for their campaign against her, thereby inviting others less familiar with the substance of the controversy to dogpile onto their side.

I lamented this controversy when it first arose, and declared myself committed to defending Diana West, and remain resolute. Radosh and Horowitz say that they have serious reasons as conservatives for their crusade against American Betrayal, and despite my general admiration for their work, I think they are misguided in this effort.

Whatever West’s errors, she doesn’t deserve this treatment, and I think serious people need to ask what could be so dangerous about West’s book that it has engendered such extreme hostility.

Well, what happened to the Reece Committee? Didn’t Norman Dodd’s report help answer some of the questions Buckley himself had raised in God and Man at Yale? Isn’t this where the whole modern conservative movement began, with Buckley’s inquiry into why collectivism and secularism had become the prevailing influences in America’s leading educational institutions by the early 1950s?

About 80 years ago, a certain elite in American society decided — more as a consensus than a conspiracy — to bring about this shift that Norman Dodd called a “revolution,” and this shift has proven impossible to reverse, I would argue, because so few educated people are aware of how the shift took place, or what the consequences of that shift have been. This in turn explains why the investigation of Major Jordan’s account, like so many other Cold War mysteries, remains so mysterious to this day: To be “educated” now means to believe that it is impossible for Harry Hopkins to have done what Major Jordan said Hopkins did.

Just by the way, you may be interested to know that in 1946, when Soviet agent Alger Hiss left his State Department job as Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, he did so to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Maybe that was just a coincidence, and maybe it’s just a coincidence that Diana West’s book has caused such a firestorm. But whenever I see a situation like this — where it’s like someone hit the trip wire that set off the Claymore mines on the perimeter — my instinct is to think that the questions being asked are very important, and to disregard those who want to head off certain lines of inquiry.

OK, so here is a 52-minute interview with Norman Dodd, conducted in 1982. Maybe you can dismiss him as a doddering fool:

Was Norman Dodd a crackpot? Was he a paranoid conspiracy theorist? Or was he, as I believe, a man who unearthed some important information that he was not able to explain adequately? The system of organizations funded by major tax-exempt foundations, which was the subject of his 1954 report (if you haven’t read it yet, click here to read it now), may not have been a conspiracy, but neither was the direction of their influence random and coincidental.

Think about it. Try not to get paranoid, but remember what Stan Evans says: “However bad you think it is, it’s probably much worse.”

 

94 comments

  1. “However bad you think it is, it’s probably much worse.” is a very cogent statement. And the reality of the situation. If you track the funding for the Tavistock Institute and the Frankfurt School (and subsequently the Birmingham School) you will see the major donations were from the non-profit foundations you named. So much so was their influence that when WWII began, the Frankfurt School (and it’s affiliated Tavistock Institue fellows) were transported to the US and became part of Columbia University where their research into propaganda and opinion manipulation vis the media, entertainment industry and infiltration of like minded (Marxist) professors into the educational system continued unabated as it had from the early days of the consensus post WWI. The FDR presidency solidified their positions to influence not only generations of future tenured professors but also future politicians and educators to bend the selection of classes and content to their whim.
    The collapse of our economy and the rending of our societal bonds is the result of this almost century long march through the institutions. What we are witnessing today is their chosen end-game, the fall of America.

  2. This explains why, among other things, the fall of the Soviet Union did nothing to reverse the anti-American orientation of the academic Left. The intellectual habits and political attitudes of these people had been nourished by institutions that continued in the same direction, under the same leadership, without reference to what the Soviet Union did.

  4. Exactly! I enjoyed this so much I published an exerpt on the Dead Republican Party (DeRP) blog and linked to this excellent post with recommendation to read the entire post! Thanks for your good reportage.

  5. THAT SYSTEM WHICH DODD UNCOVERED FUNDS THE COLLECTIVIST EFFORT IS CALLED THE NETWORK BY NONE OTHER THAN HOROWITZ HIMSELF. WHICH IS WHY IT’S SO WEIRD HE’S SO RUDELY ATTACKED WEST.

  6. In the vein of “even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” even the JBS sometimes hit the mark. I was a member back in the 1990s. I’d never heard of the group before, but their diatribes against the United Nations in those days were sound. I was producing a local talk radio show at that time and I arranged for an hour long debate between William Norman Grigg and a top UN guy – can’t think of his name now – and Grigg mopped the floor with him. And I have to say this: the actual meetings did not consist of wild conspiracy theorizing, at least, not beyond the “conspiracy of shared values” kind of thing – meaning, like-minded people advancing their goal to make the US a socialist state, acting however and whenever opportunities presented themselves. AFTER the meetings, we began to be treated with some crazy ideas from some members (including a faked moon landing) and we dropped out. All this to say, yes, it’s comfortable and easy to mock JBS, but a lot of what they had to say has proved accurate. And I’m increasingly sympathetic to the JBS view that we don’t really have two political parties, we have “elites” running the country vs. the rest of us.

    If West is being run out of town on a rail for some of the same reasons JBS was, I guess I’ll go ahead and get the book to decide for myself.

  9. And, keeping with the conspiracy theories, it’s no coincidence that Columbia University was at the epicenter of the movement back then, and was also a huge stepping stone in Obama’s rise from stoner on the beach to the WH, Columbia, where nobody remembers Obama in class, in fact nobody remembers him at all. But the Columbia degree helped HLS open its doors, and the rest is history.

  10. Well, their magazine, The New American, used to have some good reporting and historical essays that were by no means conspiracy-theory stuff. If you had enough education to discern good stuff from bad stuff (because, yes, there was some crazy stuff in there), you might read The New American every month and not turn into a paranoid kook. By the same token, you a discerning person could read the Nation or Mother Jones every month without becoming a leftist.

    Some intellectuals are always afraid that other people, less educated than themselves, will be misled by conspiracy theory stuff like that. And I give the average person more credit for discernment. Do some people go off the rails because of crackpot literature? Well, yes, of course, but the New York Times is full of crackpot stuff (e.g., Paul Krugman) so what can you do about it, except to contradict it?

  11. Ding! Ding! Ding!

    Both Horowitz and Radosh are, in fact, cited in the book, and I find their over-the-top reaction genuinely mystifying.

  14. “Big money and important people didn’t want any more snooping around into Dodd’s accusation that there had been a “revolution” in the 1930s that had involved the American education system, and what children were taught about government and economics.”

    See, John Dewey. He was one of the instigators and his writings began appearing in the early 20th Century. It wasn’t until FDR was elected that many/most of his ideas began to be mainstreamed in American education.

  16. Just in the interest of briefly out-paranoiding the paranoid: What if it’s really a deep cover op…hide in plain sight, expose what can afford to be exposed to up your cred but play responsible gatekeeper on the rest that, to this day, cannot afford to be exposed?

    I say this mostly in jest, but as someone as seriously mystified by their overreaction as you.

  17. As far as the educational “revolution” mentioned, I would also note that the “Common Core” curriculum is the culmination of the Progressive’s desire which are close to a century old. The want dumbed-down drones who will do what they’re told by the elites and who will not have the capacity to think or realize they are being used. Of course, they’ll be sufficiently indoctrinated socialists, as well.

  18. It’s important to identify the structural differences between tin-foil-hat conspiracy theories and People Actually Being Up To Something.

    The Birchers and the fans of Coast-to-Coast AM subscribe to the former type, which is described in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and illustrated by None Dare Call It Conspiracy.

    The fundamental assumption of these types of theories is that a powerful, secret cabal is already in place and has been for decades or centuries. This secret cabal consists largely of people who are so powerful that they’ve removed their identities from the grid (we never know their names) and who answer to no one. They have no national loyalties and no political aspirations: only the maintenance of their power concerns them.

    The cabal is essentially omnipotent and omniscient, and they use this power to pull their nefarious little strings in various parts of the world such that world events always redound to their advantage. There is therefore no such thing as a Black Swan Event: any official story that includes some schlub(s) getting lucky and turning the world on its ear is always a lie to cover the True Cause of the event. The theorists, because of their unwillingness to go along with Official Lies, suss out the True Cause of the event by reading clues like tea leaves.

    When People Are Actually Up To Something, the assumptions are entirely different. First, the conspirators have names and occupy actual positions in government and business. They are not omnipotent or omniscient, but they have insinuated themselves into key positions where they can do quite a bit of mischief. They often adhere to coherent political philosophies (which always put them in charge), and their ability to conceal their activities is not absolute.

    These people often are able to state their goals openly, but either because they’re absurdly vague or absurdly ambitious or in academia, it’s easy for ordinary people (with a nudge from the MSM/intelligentsia) to write them off as kooks or dreamers or harmless.

    For example, Tammy Bruce used to work for NOW, and she says they coordinated their messages with the MSM all the time, sending them talking points and press releases. George Soros’s activities are largely in the open, too, with his Open Society Institute and the myriad organizations that it funds. Glenn Beck went ahead and followed the Soros money, cataloging all of the pies that Soros has his fingers in and was told by Murdoch to knock it off. (Which is why he left Fox: he knew they didn’t have his back.)

    In other words, it’s not about reading the tea leaves of a Black Swan event, it’s about following money and paper trails, listening to conference addresses, reading theses and dissertations and articles, and taking bad people at their word.

    Art Bell and George Noory and their guests go on night after night without so much as an IRS audit; those who discover actual collusion between parties have to tell their kids to memorize the faces of the photos on the refrigerator so that they can run like hell if they ever see them approach (Rafe and Cheyenne Beck).

    Buckley read the Birchers out of the movement. People who expose actual wrongdoing aren’t Birchers.

  19. He’s, at best, a hired gun but far more probably a form of ideological replicant…that is, a persona engineered, nurtured and coached from a very early age to accomplish the very specific purpose he has now fulfilled. For me, that would fully explain his utter witlessness whenever left to speak out of his own mind as well as the other oddities about his past you mentioned.

  20. I am not a John Bircher and I certainly do not agree with all their positions, but they are not all wrong either. And to suggest there were Communist sympathizers and traitors at high levels in the US government during WWII and in the cold war is hardly paranoia.

    Of course WWII was practically ancient history. It could not happen today…Wait a second, what ideology did the Weather Underground follow? And one of their members helped jump start a certain “guy from the neighborhood” politician’s career… And that is not to say Obama is a Communist, I am just using that as an example how they play the long game to compromise people.

    Why Horowitz, who was part of the left and saw their level of corruption and decadence first hand would not recognize this is astounding.

  21. Or, stated differently, if determining you’re political reality involves Dan Brown novels, you’ve got a problem. If, however, it’s on every library shelf and a zillion academic journals for the past century, maybe there’s something to it.

  22. Historically, the Thirties were all about Socialism. All you have to do is compare New Deal WPA or CCC posters with those of the German Arbeitsdienst and the Soviet Young Pioneers and you will see a similarity that is so striking as to be more than just coincidence. As PJ O’Rourke said, they all have that one good-looking, buff guy with the upturned chin and the “who cut one?” expression on his face, glorifying working for the collective.

  23. Thanks, Stacy. Good details worth re-reading.

    I can understand Radosh’s criticism. He has his own research and opinion. No one says he has to agree with West. What I cannot understand is how any serious thinker can then just pile on based on his say so. (Of course, the same applies for anyone who tends to believe West piling on for exactly the same reason.)

    As the Great Mark Scott used to say, “Don’t read it with an open mind, I want you to read it with an active mind.” So I’d expect a more fact-based attempt to unseat her opinion, and much less of a personal attack. However, it goes both ways. A war of petulancy is really boring.

    Personally, I’m glad to see this huge Rule #4 fight, because the veneer of infallability painted on the mighty Progressives of the early 20th Century is exactly why people today just meekly accept so many totalitarian chickens from that era that have come home to roost.

    The kerfuffle between Radosh and West is bringing eyeballs to the subject matter.

    People need to take a good look around and see what is happening right now, and ask themselves, “If Progressive leaders today–supposedly so much more enlightened than the people of Roosevelt’s era–can break the law and ignore the Constitution on a daily basis, why is so hard to believe that they would never do so in Roosevelt’s time?

    And here’s why it’s so important:

    When you see testimony like this Retired Marine Colonel recently gave at a City Council meeting in New Hampshire regarding the massive up-armoring and up-militarizing of domestic LEOs (and Mark Levin has commented on this move to add armed response units to all sorts of previously unarmed Federal agencies), you have to ask yourself “how much tinfoil is this, really?” And how much should we be concerned?

    Looking back at how contemptuous they were of Liberty in the era of the Roosevelts and Wilson shows that Stan Evans is totally correct; especailly about what is happening now.

  24. A thousand times, this. A blind squirrel finds the occasional nut, as the saying goes.

    But you’re spot-on regarding the “omnipotent and omniscient cabal” of conspiracy theory versus a few people in certain positions of power dealing under the table. Hell, the latter happens often enough in more mundane functions, it’s a wonder people still engage in the magical thinking that “elected officials” are somehow made more honest through elections instead of being hired by a board of shareholders. It has that “queer twist” of reality, so chances are when there’s something hinky going on that only requires a few like-minded people playing reindeer games behind closed doors, the explanation will seem positively mundane and simple.

  25. According to an article by Gary North, the results of the first of the common core tests was utterly dismal and so that will get dumbed down as well.

  26. The big problem for Horowitz and Radosh is they were red diaper babies, and neither have really recovered from it. Radosh tried to take M. Stanton Evans down over blacklisted. Evans then showed the world that Radosh was not the authority on the subjects they like to let on. Evans utterly humiliated Radosh, and Radosh hasn’t learned his lesson, and Horowitz is trying to enable Radosh in his stupidity.

    people need to realize the neither Radosh or Horowitz are conservatives. They may do some good things now and again, but anyone that publishes Dershowitz, and acts as they have can not be considered conservative. This is not eh first time they have risen in defense of their “former” brethren.

  27. Having read both sides of this (but not West’s book yet), I’ll take West’s side on this tentatively. I’m familiar with teh behavior of both Radosh and Horowitz, and neither are to be trusted any further than you can spit. Horowitz has said that Radosh is a recognized authority on McCarthy and associated times, but he then tangled with M. Stanton Evans on “Blacklisted” and ended up being utterly humiliated. Turned out he didn’t know nearly as much as he thought he did and Evans called him on all his BS.

    This is not the first time that Horowitz and Radosh have risen in defense of their “former” brethren. neither are to be trusted in their claims of conservatism. Radosh has published stuff on the internet that is nothing short of leftist. Horowitz has shut down people like Larry Auster when he pointed out the color of crime.

    In short, those two are still red diaper babies, and the fight has nothing to do with methods. It is entirely about content and conclusions. West seems to have the good, and I have yet to see any substantial reply to West’s refutation of their slander.

  28. -Radosh has never stopped thinking as an Ideologue. He thought when he came over to the Right that he was just changing Ideologies, so he thinks like one.

    -As for Horowitz: I have long admired him, since reading Destructive Generation, but, for some reason, since his bout with cancer and the death of his mentally disturbed daughter, he has changed.

    When confronted with such sadness, some people find strength and virtue; others turn into what Horowitz has become.

    Perhaps he too, like Radosh made the fatal error of thinking being a conservative means being an Ideologue.

    If that is the case, that means he embraced our ideas for Utilitarian reasons. And, when one bases any belief’s worth on how efficient it is, then it is very susceptible to being supplanted in their minds by what appears to be a more efficient belief. For Utilitarians, all beliefs are transient.

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