Diana West - American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nations Character

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For Mother and Jed

CONTENTS

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 3:2021

INTRODUCTION THE BEGINNING

Sometime in 1934, two men got off separate trains at Union Station in Washington, D.C. They had arrived in the nations 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.

In 1934, Chamberss break was still five years awayan 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 partys 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 nations 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, didnt know who Whittaker Chambers was, let alone Harold Ware and Alger Hiss. He knew nothing about other secret Communists at the AAALee 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 hed 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. Wirts 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.

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 Wirts 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 motionsand not even all of them. Contrary to custom (and by party-line vote, 32) Wirt wouldnt be allowed to read his ten-minute opening statement, wouldnt have benefit of counsel (32), and wouldnt be permitted to rebut charges against him (32)not even after he was falsely accused of having been jailed for German sympathies during the World War (191718). Hitler, too, would be invoked to smear Wirt. Most important of all, the committee voted (32) not to call any of the key administration officials Wirt cited in his testimonynot 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 Wirts testimony as hearsay. Then it could be smacked down by denials in the press and majority rule.

Indeed, within an hour of Wirts hearing, such denials followed in rapid order. 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.

The piece also showcased a few lines of widely published doggerel by brain truster Donald Richberg:

Cuttle-fish squirt;

Nobody hurt;

And thats 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 Stationcabinet 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.

After the next round of hearings devoted to the dinner party, everybody was in on the joke. The dinner guests all reprised under oath the stories they had already told the press. As hostess Alice Barrows put it, As a dinner party it was not a success because Dr. Wirt talked all the time. Whom was she serving under oath in 1934, truth or Stalin?

The same question might be asked of the next dinner guest to testify, Hildegarde Kneeland, a senior economist at the Agriculture Department. Kneeland might not have had so colorful a file as Barrows, but she, too, is IDd in KGB archives as a secret party member and intelligence contact/informant who would be in contact with Victor Perlo, leader of the notorious Perlo Group, another Communist underground apparatus.