Cold War Without End

With the opening of long-secret files and a spate of new books, the battle over moles and spies and Redbaiting rages on -- even without Communism. For those naming names and crying smear, the political is all bitterly personal. By JACOB WEISBERG Photographs by JEFF RIEDEL

Herb Romerstein at home in suburban Washington with his collection of Communist memorabilia.

andering 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.

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.

he 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.

McCarthy, Arthur Herman says, 'is part and parcel of what modern conservatism is all about.' McCarthy 'fed the rebirth of American conservatism' by creating a bond between ordinary Americans and the Republican Party.

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.

Jacob Weisberg, chief political correspondent for the online magazine Slate, is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine. His article about President Clinton's legacy appeared in January.

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?

hen 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.

Arthur Herman at the George Mason University history department.

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).

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.

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.

n 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.

Victor Navasky at The Nation.

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."

hat 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.

William F. Buckley at The National Review.

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 naive."

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.

t 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.

ictor 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."

John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr at the National Cryptologic Museum, Maryland.

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.

Ellen Schrecker at her New York apartment building.

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."

Ronald Radosh at his home in Maryland.

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 naive 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.

or 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.

The anti-Communist historians view themselves as the real victims of discrimination. Radosh has never had a job at a top university, despite having published the most important book on 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.

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November 28, 1999

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