American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character

469 Pages·2014·2.42 MB·English

by  Diana West

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For Mother and Jed
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
INTRODUCTION: “THE BEGINNING”
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
NOTES
INDEX
HOW TO USE THE INDEX
ALSO BY DIANA WEST
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to light, lest his deeds be
reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deed may be made
manifest, that they are wrought in God.
—JOHN 3:20–21
INTRODUCTION “THE BEGINNING”
Sometime in 1934, two men got off separate trains at Union Station in
Washington, D.C. They had arrived in the nation’s capital to fight on different
sides of a war. It was a war few Americans knew, or even now know, was raging
all around the capital. One man, in his early thirties, had come to expand the
reach of the secret Communist apparatus already entrenched inside the U.S.
government. The other man, age sixty, had come to expose it. The name of the
younger man was Whittaker Chambers. Later, he would become the most
famous ex-Communist to bear witness to the conspiracy he had served. The
older man, William A. Wirt, would die in obscurity.
Chambers, who was working directly for Soviet military intelligence, had
come late that spring or early summer of 1934 for an appointment with Harold
Ware, leader of a secret, tightly organized Communist network based in the new
government agencies that had mushroomed since President Franklin D.
Roosevelt had embarked on his “New Deal.”1 Chambers met Ware at the Childs
Restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue NW, not far from the Hotel Bellevue (now
Hotel George), where Soviet general Walter Krivitsky, another great ex-
Communist witness-to-be, would die by violent means six years later. He was
murdered, Chambers would later write, “by the same party which he and I both
devotedly served, but from which we had both broken.”2
In 1934, Chambers’s break was still five years away—an eternity. For now,
he was conferring with Ware and, later, with another underground party leader, J.
Peters, about his new mission to help move “career Communists” out of the New
Deal agencies, such as the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration) and
the NRA (National Recovery Administration), to reorganize them in the main
government departments. The party’s first objective: the State Department. Later
that same afternoon, Chambers would meet the first member of his new cell. His
name was Alger Hiss.
William A. Wirt, traveling with his wife to the nation’s capital from Gary,
Indiana, in April 1934, knew nothing of this key vector of the Soviet-directed
assault on the American republic about to take shape. Wirt, a nationally noted
schools superintendent, didn’t know who Whittaker Chambers was, let alone
Harold Ware and Alger Hiss. He knew nothing about other secret Communists at
the AAA—Lee Pressman, John Abt, Charles Kramer, and Nathan Witt, for
example. Wirt nonetheless believed a secret revolution was under way, and he
was in Washington to testify before a select House committee about his
unexpected brush with it.
His evidence came from a series of conversations he’d had with government
personnel in meetings and at a soon-to-be-notorious dinner party regarding their
“concrete plan” for the “proposed overthrow of the established American social
order,” as Wirt put it. These officials, it bears notice, were mainly employed by
the same New Deal agencies from which Whittaker Chambers was to marshal
forces to fan out across the U.S. government. Wirt’s assessment of the radicalism
within the folksily titled New Deal had preceded him to Washington, having
made it into the Congressional Record and then the newspapers. “The
fundamental trouble with the Brain Trusters,” he wrote, “is that they start with a
false assumption. They insist that the America of Washington, Jefferson and
Lincoln must first be destroyed and then on the ruins they will reconstruct an
America after their own pattern.”3 Out of the political pandemonium that ensued,
a select House committee emerged to investigate—or, as the Democratic New
Deal majority preferred, to lay the matter to rest.4
On April 10, 1934, in the same caucus room where Whittaker Chambers
would testify fourteen years later, witness Wirt would have his say, but barely.
The powers that be understood that Wirt’s story of radicalism in the Roosevelt
administration might distract from or even halt their political momentum. Thus
the select committee of three Democrats and two Republicans would merely go
through the motions—and not even all of them. Contrary to custom (and by
party-line vote, 3–2) Wirt wouldn’t be allowed to read his ten-minute opening
statement, wouldn’t have benefit of counsel (3–2), and wouldn’t be permitted to
rebut charges against him (3–2)—not even after he was falsely accused of
having been jailed for German sympathies during the World War (1917–18).5
Hitler, too, would be invoked to smear Wirt. Most important of all, the
committee voted (3–2) not to call any of the key administration officials Wirt
cited in his testimony—not the Agriculture Department official who told him
about talk in the AAA about retarding the economic recovery in order to speed
up the revolution, nor the housing officials planning to collectivize American
workers in government-planned communities, nor the “brain trusters”
advocating the seizure of the economy and the destruction of laissez-faire. House
Democrats preferred, in the words of the scathing minority report on the Wirt
investigation, to leave Wirt’s testimony as hearsay. Then it could be smacked
down by denials in the press and majority rule.
Indeed, within an hour of Wirt’s hearing, such denials “followed in rapid
order.”6 So, too, did a countercharge from the dinner party attendees, all midlevel
government officials (five U.S. and one Soviet) Wirt had cited for what he
described as revolutionary statements. Not only, they told the press, had they not
made any of the statements Wirt alleged, Wirt himself had monopolized all
conversation to the point where no one else had been able to say anything at all.
As they told it, he just never stopped talking.
The world laughed. William Wirt became the butt of jokes throughout the
administration and press corps. This front-page Miami Daily News story,
headlined LAUGHING THROUGH, is not untypical.
It is hard on the good Dr. Wirt and hard on the politicians who sought to use him to make political
capital, but it has been a blessed relief for the nation. A nation needs a good laugh now and then …
Laughing again, the country can resume its march, not to revolution, but to prosperity.7
The piece also showcased a few lines of widely published doggerel by brain
truster Donald Richberg:
Cuttle-fish squirt;
Nobody hurt;
And that’s the end
Of Dr. Wirt.
FDR, too, got into the comedy act a few days after Wirt testified. On
returning to Washington from a fishing trip, the president addressed an
improbably colossal welcoming committee at Union Station—cabinet
secretaries, thirty senators, two hundred representatives, three thousand people,
and the Marine Band playing his campaign theme song, “Happy Days Are Here
Again.” Playfully, the president chided the legislators for, in his absence, having
gone “from bad to Wirt.” “When he made the pun about Dr. Wirt,” The New
York Times noted, “he paused to let the crowd follow his meaning, but only a
few responded.”8