Ron Radosh: The Nation’s Continuing Denial of Soviet Espionage during the New Deal Years

Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Harry Dexter White, the assistant secretary of the Treasury and the man who created the postwar financial structure and the International Monetary Fund, was arguably the top Communist spy working in our top government agencies during the New and Fair Deal days. As I argued in these pages a while back, economist Benn Steil’s new research not only revealed that White was a Soviet agent, but also brings to the mainstream what many of us have known for years — that the New Deal administration was heavily penetrated by Soviet spies, many of them American citizens who were working for Stalin’s intelligence agencies.

This truth, no matter how documented, is something that the left-wing intellectuals and journalists who inhabit Nationland (which is what I call the climate in which they inhabit their own set of truths centered in Manhattan’s Upper West Side) never can accept. They continue to be what John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr term “in denial.” In a recent issue of The Nation, the flagship of the left in America, the publication ran a review of Benn Steil’s new book on White by James M. Boughton, in which the author accuses Steil and others of McCarthyite “guilt by association” and claims that those who say White was a Soviet agent are only speculating....

Like their counterparts on the far-right fringe, the Nation left also ignores evidence, even though it has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that White was indeed a Soviet agent. For those who doubt this, one has only to look at the scrupulous investigation of the evidence by Haynes and Klehr, which you can find at Washington Decoded....