The VENONA decrypted cables plus those documents gleaned from Soviet depositories, especially the records of the Communist International (Comintern), the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), and the Committee for State Security (KGB, also known as NKVD during World War II), have opened a new window on the history of the Cold War much as the Dead Sea Scrolls filled some gaps and cast fresh light on many obscure passages and interpretations of the world of the Old Testament. But while documents may resolve certain questions, they often leave the most important ones unresolved. Goliath, we learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls, was only six feet, nine inches tall, not nine feet, nine inches. But reputable biblical scholars continue to debate whether or not the famous scrolls found at Qumran belonged to the ascetic sect called the Essenes or were a library hidden during the Jewish uprising against the Romans. And so it is with the cache of new documents, both American and Soviet, from the era of the Cold War: they close the book on some historical controversies, but leave still others open to interpretation.

At the most extreme, some scholars have argued that the new documents demand both a reconsideration of the Cold War as well as a radical revision of “a warped view of the nation’s history in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,” a conclusion flattering to those who toil in the historical vineyards of foreign relations, but unlikely to persuade others who perceive more tenuous links between the Soviet-American rivalry and, say, the history of sexuality, race relations, the rise of the welfare state, tort liability, or popular culture since the Great Crash. Evidence of extensive Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project has inspired the conclusion that such espionage hastened dramatically Stalin’s possession of the atomic bomb, “emboldened his diplomatic strategy,” and altered critical events in the Cold War, including “the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides in Korea.” This view echoes the conclusions of Judge Irving Kaufman, who sentenced convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death in 1951 with the observation that “your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb ...has already caused ...the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand.”

The new documents have prompted others to call for a reconsideration of the domestic Red Scare, including the possible rehabilitation of Senator Joseph McCarthy. “Enough new information has come to light about the communists in the U.S. government,” wrote Nicholas von Hoffman several years ago, “that we may now say that point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.” Sounding a variation on that theme, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has criticized the army for not disclosing the VENONA documents in the late 1940s and early 1950s, even to the president of the United States. Such revelations, he argues, would have undermined McCarthy, illustrated the true extent of Soviet espionage, and dampened the intense fires of the domestic anti-Communist crusade.

The new documents, of course, have attracted their share of skeptics, not all of whom are rabid apologists for the Communist Party of America and its feckless behavior. These critics note that in many cases the vaunted new revelations found in the documents alter established historical conclusions only at the margins. In the case of the VENONA cables, critics add, these documents must be read with more caution than those who, having placed blind faith in the conclusions of NSA and the FBI, employ them to lacerate the American left and to expose diabolical conspiracies where less sinister motives may in fact have been at work.

To what extent do the revelations from the Soviet archives and VENONA fundamentally transform our view of U.S. history, the origins and course of the Cold War, and the Red Scare? Where can the books now be closed and where, given the nature of the evidence, must they remain open somewhat longer?

In The Secret World of American Communism and The Soviet World of American Communism, both volumes in Yale’s Annals of Communism series published in 1995 and 1999, respectively, John Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and their associates have methodically documented the American Communist Party’s abject dependence, both ideological and financial, upon the Comintern and later the Soviet government as well as the party’s role in the recruitment and utilization of U.S. spies for the KGB and GRU in the 1930s and 1940s. James Ryan’s critical biography of Earl Browder, the CPUSA’s boss from 1932 until his expulsion in 1945, confirms many of these conclusions as well.

To those acquainted with the earlier writings of Theodore Draper and former leading figures in the party, such as James Cannon and Joseph Starobin, it comes as no real surprise that CPUSA leaders adhered supinely to the dictates of Moscow on foreign policy issues and the party’s relationship to U.S. politics. No serious contemporary or historical observer ever believed, despite protestations to the contrary, that the CPUSA’s ideological flip-flops from “Third Period” militancy of the early 1930s to the anti-Fascist Popular Front, from the Popular Front to the pro-Hitlerism of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, then back again to the antifascism that culminated in the so-called spirit of Teheran arose from other than the impact of shifting world events upon the fortunes of the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. Those CPUSA leaders who did not march to Moscow’s beat, notably Jay Lovestone and later Browder himself in 1945, suffered the consequences, although less serious ones than those who fell out of favor with Stalin back home. As Lovestone once quipped, pointing at Browder: “There – there but for an accident of geography stands a corpse.”

Of course, U.S. communists were not the only political species to experience a rapid change in ideological coloration during the turbulent years of the Great Depression and the coming of the Second World War. In 1932, Father Charles Coughlin declared that the United States faced a future of “Roosevelt or Ruin.” Four years later, his attacks on FDR rivaled those of the Liberty League. America Firsters and other isolationists, notably Charles A. Lindbergh, denounced Great Britain with as much fervor as hard-boiled Stalinists in 1940, but enlisted for the duration after 7 December 1941.

But what distinguished the CPUSA’s ideological opportunism was its consistent moral blindness to the crimes of the Soviet state under Stalin, including those that touched U.S. members of the party such as Thomas Sgovio and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, both of whom wound up in the Gulag. When during the Great Terror Soviet authorities rounded up more than a thousand North American Finns who had emigrated to the Karelian region with the assistance of the CPUSA, the U.S. leaders joined the chorus to denounce them as spies and saboteurs. Browder and his minions defended the Soviet occupation of Poland following the pact with Hitler as a glorious effort that had “saved eleven million people from a capitalist hell ...and ...secured them from foreign enslavement.”

Given its ideological fealty to the Comintern and later the Soviet leadership, one would expect that the CPUSA received some financial compensation for these efforts. Haynes, Klehr, and company have documented the flow of so-called Soviet gold that kept the U.S. party and its leaders solvent, even as its membership dwindled after 1945. Initial Comintern subsidies were hardly princely, amounting to only $75,000 for the CPUSA in 1923, with, as one might expect in a country known for its litigiousness, “two thirds ...to be spent on ...legal work.” In 1932 a CPUSA official complained bitterly that it was “annoying to expect funds and not get them .... We ...are stretching out what we had, [but] lack of assurance of any more prevents us progressing with the work in any way that will involve expense.”

Apart from atomic espionage and military-diplomatic intelligence secured from various federal departments in the 1930s and 1940s, it is difficult to know whether the Comintern and the Soviets received full value for the money they spent on the open activities of the CPUSA. Benjamin Gitlow, an early leader of the U.S. party, claimed to have received subsidies in the form of diamonds and jewels, fenced through sympathetic businessmen, but Gitlow spent a considerable amount of time out of commission behind bars prior to his expulsion from the party in 1929. CPUSA officials complained to the Comintern about “the careless method of sending mail to us,” which included “[a] package so bulky that it was sent to the customs authorities for examination before delivery .... This practice must be stopped.” In 1939, the director of the Comintern’s executive committee complained that “it must be admitted ...only the CC [Central Committee] of the New York organization is doing decent work. The other CC’s are working poorly.”

In what must surely rank among the worst political investment decision of the past century, the Soviets sent $3 million to the U.S. party in 1988 after its General Secretary Gus Hall pleaded for a $4 million subsidy. Hall complained that it had become increasingly expensive to maintain a revolutionary vanguard in New York City, what he called “the decaying heart of imperialism,” due to rising taxes and “the upkeep of our headquarters building.” Hall assured Anatoly Dobrynin, however, that “because the crisis of the Reagan presidency, which is deep and chronic now, our Party’s work has had and continues to have a growing impact on the politics of our country.” Once Hall denounced Gorbachev’s reforms a year later, the “Moscow gold” no longer arrived.

Despite the CPUSA’s bondage to Moscow, Klehr, Haynes, and company remind their readers that not every person who joined the party in the 1920s and 1930s became an ideological slave to Stalinism or pursued political, legal, and social objectives solely with the interests of the Soviet Union in mind. To so argue would be to grossly simplify the motivations of those who spearheaded the organizing drives in the CIO, fought for civil rights in the darkest days of Jim Crow and the Mexican deportations, and vindicated the civil liberties of Angelo Herndon, a black organizer sentenced to eighteen years in prison under Georgia’s antebellum insurrection law. Without the CPUSA, the “Scottsboro Boys” might have been put to death for a crime they did not commit. As Klehr and Haynes properly note, “some Americans, looking for ways to protest against the deepening misery [of the Great Depression], regarded the Communist party as the only or the most effective weapon.”

It is not, of course, the “open” activities of the CPUSA, however compromised, cynical, inept, and heroic, but its ties to a clandestine world of Soviet espionage in the United States that have generated the most controversy. Both the VENONA decrypts and the research by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in the KGB archives document the extent of these activities, directed at three main targets: American business and industry; opponents of the Soviet regime, principally the followers of Leon Trotsky; and the U.S. government, especially the departments of State, War, and Treasury, and after 1941, the atomic bomb project, code named ENORMOZ. These documents also reveal the extensive involvement of CPUSA leaders, including Browder himself (code named Helmsman) in the recruitment of agents and in the placement and competition between Soviet intelligence organizations for their services and sources of information.

Ever admiring of U.S. industrial and technological prowess, symbolized by Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Frederick Winslow Taylor, the leaders of Soviet intelligence directed considerable effort in the early 1930s at gathering scientific and technical information from major U.S. corporations and business institutions, ranging from Standard Oil, Eastman Kodak, and General Electric to the Chicago Wheat Exchange. The NKVD’s New York station even assisted Polina Zhemchuzhina, the head of a state-owned cosmetics company (TEZHE) and the wife of Stalin’s close associate Vyacheslav Molotov, in acquiring formulas for two dozen products made by a major U.S. company in 1937.

As the threat to Soviet security from Nazi Germany intensified in the late 1930s, military and defense-related espionage assumed far greater importance than improving the quality of Russian made lipstick, cold cream, and eye shadow. Soviet agents sought to provide Moscow with a wide range of information on high-performance aircraft, battleships, cruisers, armor, navigation equipment, tank engines, and armaments from key U.S. defense contractors, including Northrop, Douglas, and Marietta. But not all of these efforts, Weinstein and Vassiliev point out, proved fruitful. One recruit, Northrop inventor Jones Orin York, who provided his Soviet contact with tantalizing plans for a new airplane engine of his own design and documents on the newest fighter developed by his employer, dashed hopes for a longer-term relationship by deserting his wife and running off with another woman. He also sang to the FBI. After tempting a Soviet agent with information about high-altitude flights at Douglas, another potential source offered to provide more if the agent secured approval from his boss at the company!

The extent to which these thefts of industrial, commercial, and conventional military information endangered U.S. security, boosted the Soviet economy, or assisted significantly in its defense against major adversaries in the 1930s and 1940s – Germany and Japan – remains difficult to calculate. The acquisition of commercial and industrial “secrets” from U.S. firms does not appear to have improved the performance of the Soviet economy in the short or long run, despite the boasting of Nikita Khrushchev to Vice President Nixon during their “kitchen debate” in the 1950s. Hitler’s mistakes and Soviet manpower turned the tide of World War II on the Eastern front in 1943, not “secrets” on high performance aircraft pilfered from California defense firms. The allegation by Klehr and Haynes that espionage produced the superior performance of Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters during the Korean War has been rejected by the official historian of the U.S. Air Force and others, who point instead to the critical Rolls-Royce engine sold to the Soviets by our own allies, the British.

There is no telling how much more productive Soviet industrial espionage might have become in the 1930s had Stalin and his KGB chief Lavrenty Beria not lavished so much time, effort, and money on surveillance and attempted penetration of groups supporting Leon Trotsky as well as those tiny bands of “White Russians” who hoped to restore the Russian monarchy.

The Soviet leaders also devoted substantial resources to keeping track of German and pro-Nazi organizations in the United States and their reputed influence on powerful Americans such as publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst’s virulent anticommunism predated the rise of Hitler and needed little encouragement from German agents, but groups like the German-American Bund and later, the America First Committee, provided a more potent voice in American political life than either the Trotskyists or the promonarchists

Browder’s role in Soviet espionage, hinted at in the VENONA documents, has been further confirmed by Weinstein and Vassiliev. He helped Joszef Peters (known as the famous J. Peters), the Hungarian-born spymaster, build his initial network of sources in the Roosevelt administration in 1934, a group that included Harold Ware, Alger Hiss, John Abt, and Lee Pressman, and whose courier was Whittaker Chambers, later the most famous anti-Communist defector and Hiss’s accuser before HUAC in 1948. Browder also oversaw the effective efforts of Jacob Golos and his lover, Elizabeth Bentley, whose network of numerous agents and sources in Washington included two key figures at the Treasury, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Harry Dexter White. After Browder’s enemies inside the U.S. party ousted him with Moscow’s approval for ideological deviancy in 1945, the Soviet leaders became so frightened by the prospect of his defection to the FBI that they encouraged him to believe he might regain the leadership post and bought his silence by giving him exclusive contracts with several Soviet publishing houses to market their books in the United States.

One has to admire the stamina, patience, and organizational acumen of someone who spent time in prison for passport fraud, kept the open wing of the CPUSA running, and waged frequent battles with the KGB and GRU to maintain an independent role in Soviet espionage activities. Yet for all his devious skills, Browder became the victim of one of the biggest spy hoaxes of the period. Pardoned by FDR soon after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, Browder was introduced to Josephine Truslow Adams, described by some as “a pudgy middle-aged artist with a famous family name,” who had been involved in assorted left-wing and Communist causes, including the Free Earl Browder campaign. Through a mutual friend and a brief meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt at Swarthmore College, Adams’s paintings and letters began to reach the first lady, who politely responded to these gifts and missives. Adams persuaded others, however, including Browder, that she had developed an intimate relationship with both Eleanor and the president, so close, in fact, that FDR responded to her inquiries about critical public affairs.

Convinced that Josephine Adams had opened an invaluable “back door” to the president of the United States, the head of the CPUSA accepted her invitation to “transmit” his views to FDR through her and receive in return the president’s responses. When Adams faithfully delivered “comments” from Roosevelt, Browder came to believe that he knew the mind of the president. What he really knew were simply the imaginative inventions of Josephine Adams, who made up FDR’s answers as she went along.

The hoax perpetrated on Browder by Josephine Adams highlights a basic issue that neither the VENONA documents nor the Soviet archives have resolved: the precise nature of the intelligence – scientific, military and diplomatic – that Soviet spies in the United States passed on to Moscow before and during the war. Espionage related to the atomic bomb, especially the efforts of Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, Alan Nunn May, Morris Cohen, Donald McLean, David Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg, and others yet to be identified, remains the exception. Few now dispute that the first Soviet bomb in 1949 was a virtual carbon copy of “Fat Man,” the implosion-type plutonium weapon the United States dropped on Nagasaki four years earlier. Espionage hastened the Soviet program by perhaps two years, little more; but it had little bearing on their later development of the super or hydrogen bomb, despite the mistaken notion that Fuchs had given them the key to that weapon, too.

But how is one to assess the importance of what Treasury official Harold Glasser passed to the Soviets in 1945? Pavel Fitin, the head of the NKGB, described as “valuable” the political and economic information Glasser passed along, all of which found its way into thirty-four special reports to Stalin and other top Kremlin leaders. Glasser’s materials, according to Weinstein and Vassiliev, was “all of critical interest to the leadership of the USSR” because it included, for example, the contents of an OSS memorandum about the economic consequences of stripping Germany of heavy industry; an internal memorandum from Treasury concerning conferences at State on postwar reparations; and an internal memorandum by Treasury concerning lend-lease policy toward the Soviet Union. This is all well and good, but it leaves unanswered how the Soviet leadership used such information and the even more interesting question of whether it made any difference in Soviet-U.S. relations.

Those who remain skeptical about the credibility of the VENONA deciphered messages to identify particular Soviet spies point out that code names changed often. Julius Rosenberg, for example, began as ANTENNA and later became LIBERAL; Alger Hiss received an initial code name LAWYER, later changed to ALES; while Harry Dexter White was also LAWYER for a time. VENONA messages were never used in any criminal trial (largely for fear of disclosing this secret to the Soviets), and high officials in the FBI expressed considerable reservations about using the decoded materials as prosecutorial evidence. Although the FBI had greatly aided the security agency in identifying particular individuals with code names, Alan H. Belmont, the number-three man in the bureau, believed that the messages would be excluded in court because of the hearsay rule. Belmont also told his FBI colleagues that several factors “make difficult a correct reading of the messages and point up the tentative nature of many identifications.” He noted that the FBI had first identified ANTENNA as Joseph Weichbrod, not Julius Rosenberg. Both men lived in New York City and had Communist backgrounds and wives named Ethel.

The Soviet archives and internal evidence in the VENONA messages have left little doubt about several of the Cold War’s lingering controversies: did Whittaker Chambers tell the truth? Was Alger Hiss both a Communist and a Soviet agent from the mid-1930s through at least 1945? Did Julius Rosenberg commit espionage? The answer in all of these instances must now be “yes.” Hiss may have had two code names over a period of many years, but he “and his whole group” received “Soviet decorations” in 1945 and he was the only member of the official State Department delegation from Yalta who traveled on to Moscow in March where Soviet military intelligence (GRU) extended to him “their gratitude and so on.”

As revealed in the VENONA documents, Hiss [ALES] had been working with the GRU “continuously since 1935 ...obtaining military information only. Materials on the [State Department] allegedly interest the [GRU] very little and he does not produce them regularly.” This description of Hiss’s espionage activities is consistent with the evidence Chambers produced from his “life preserver” and turned over to Congressman Richard Nixon and HUAC investigators in 1948, the so-called Pumpkin Papers.

Even the Schneirs, long-time defenders of the Rosenbergs who previously argued the cause on behalf of an FBI frame up, now concede on the basis of VENONA and research in Russia and Czechoslovakia that Julius Rosenberg spied for the Soviets and that the CPUSA was engaged in the recruitment of party members for similar espionage. But VENONA also confirms what many scholars have long believed, that Ethel Rosenberg played a marginal role in her husband’s activities, one far removed from that attributed to her by President Eisenhower, who wrote to his brother, John: “It is the woman [Ethel] who is the strong and recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one. She has obviously been the leader in everything they did in the spy ring.”

In contrast to Eisenhower’s characterization, the single VENONA message about Ethel Rosenberg describes her as “sufficiently well developed politically. Knows about her husband’s work and the role of [Joel BARR or Alfred SARANT]. In view of delicate health does not work. Is characterized positively and as a devoted person.” Based on their scrutiny of Soviet sources, Weinstein and Vassiliev have added little to this slim portrait of Ethel’s activities. She arranged for a Soviet courier to meet Julius at a local drugstore. When her brother David came under FBI surveillance, she visited him to retrieve $1,000, previously given him for a flight to Mexico.

Taken all together, this evidence suggests strongly that the FBI and prosecutors used Ethel, in the memorable words of J. Edgar Hoover, “as a lever,” to make Julius name his other confederates. As Alan Belmont explained the strategy to D. Milton Ladd: “New York [field office] should consider every possible means to bring pressure on Rosenberg to make him talk, including ...a careful study of the involvement of Ethel Rosenberg in order that charges can be placed against her, if possible.” Finally, on the evening of their executions, FBI agents at Sing Sing had a thirteen-page memorandum containing questions to be asked of Julius if he agreed to cooperate and identify other members of his industrial espionage ring. Only one question related to Ethel: “Was you wife cognizant of your activities?”

By 1946, thanks to the purge of Browder, defections by Bentley and Chambers, FBI investigations, and VENONA intelligence, both the “open” and “secret” networks of the Communist Party in America had been largely destroyed. Soviet espionage had achieved a few notable coups, especially with regard to the atomic bomb, but they had gained equally valuable intelligence through open contacts initiated by William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the wartime spy organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Until Hoover stepped in to stop his activities, Donovan had developed a close working relationship with his Soviet counterparts to exchange intelligence. Displaying the utmost in professional courtesy, he even returned to the Soviets one of their own code books captured by spies in Finland, a windfall that later proved critical to the VENONA analysts who cracked the Soviet cipher.

Under the law, of course, espionage is espionage, whether in time of war or peace, even when a country’s secrets are delivered to a friendly nation or an ally. But historians of the Cold War must have a different perspective than lawyers. The secrets revealed by VENONA and the KGB archives have exposed the depth and breadth of Soviet espionage in the United States, but they cannot determine its impact, if any, upon the origins or course of the early Cold War. The notion that Soviet espionage initiated the Cold War before 1945, for example, ignores the legacy of the United States’s hostile response to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917–1919 and the years of international ostracism, led by the United States, that followed until 1933. Did the information Alger Hiss passed to Moscow about German and Japanese military preparations help or injure the United States between 1941 and 1945? Ted Hall believes his espionage that helped to break the atomic monopoly, was “in the best interests of the Americans, even if it meant breaking American law.” Who is to say that Hall’s decision and those of Fuchs, Morris Cohen, Rosenberg, and others who gave atomic secrets to the Soviets did not contribute significantly to what John Lewis Gaddis has called “the long peace” that followed World War II? Would the United States have been as prudent in times of crisis in the absence of Soviet nuclear weapons? The world has not been a kinder and gentler place since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.

The notion that Kim Il Sung initiated the Korean War because the Soviets possessed the bomb bears no more weight now than when Judge Kaufman and President Eisenhower placed the blame upon the Rosenbergs in 1953. Stalin and Mao may have given the North Korean leader a green light to invade the South, but he deceived both of his Communist allies about the odds of success, and a civil conflict would have likely erupted on the Korean peninsula even without a Cold War. If anyone bears responsibility for the outbreak of the war, it is Dean Acheson, the original Cold Warrior himself, whose well-intentioned but carelessly worded speech in January 1950 had excluded both Korea and Taiwan from the list of countries the United States (but not the United Nations) would defend from attack. We were probably fortunate in 1950 that Mao did not move against Taiwan.

The U.S. atomic bomb, even before the Soviets developed their own, was never “the master card” of either diplomacy or warfare predicted by Henry Stimson, Leslie Groves, or others. The Red Army, poised to sweep into Western Europe, proved an adequate deterrent; so, too, the fact that the Germans had left little to destroy in the Soviet Union after 1945. The belief that the outcome could have been different for Poland, Germany, and the remainder of Eastern Europe after 1945 but for Soviet espionage and their atomic bomb is counterfactual history at its most absurd. With or without Alger Hiss at Yalta, the deal struck there would have been the same, dictated by events that far transcended the efforts of the best Soviet spies.

It is even more fanciful to believe that disclosure of the VENONA documents in the late 1940s or early 1950s would have tempered the worst excesses of the domestic Red Scare. According to this theory, without hard evidence of Soviet espionage, the U.S. public “was left to wonder whether the allegations were part of a witch hunt by J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy.” Such uncertainty would have disappeared “for reasonable people, at least, if the Venona evidence had been shared.” But Pat McCarren, Karl Mundt, Joe McCarthy and most members of HUAC who ran the witch hunts do not appear to have been “reasonable people” who would have turned away from the opportunity to blame the Democrats and liberals for “twenty years of treason.” Anticommunism had deep roots in the United States. Sharing VENONA’s secrets might have stoked more extremism and repression, not less.

Even without VENONA’s proof of espionage, the Amerasia case in 1945 and Canada’s arrest of atomic spies, including Allen Nunn May, a year later, prompted the adoption of President Truman’s executive order 9835 establishing a Federal Employee Loyalty Program in 1948. Aside from the Smith Act, used to prosecute present and former members of the Communist Party, Truman’s program constituted one of the gravest assaults upon individual rights and the Constitution in the twentieth century. Until the Supreme Court reigned in the program in the late 1950s, “derogatory information” produced by confidential FBI informants against a federal employee could lead to an inquiry before 150 loyalty boards. The employee, never allowed to confront his or her accusers, could be fired if the hearing board found “reasonable doubt” of loyalty based solely on membership in or “sympathetic association” with groups branded as subversive by the attorney general of the United States.

At least four members of the Supreme Court, led by Justice William O. Douglas, found this procedure of anonymous accusations “abhorrent to fundamental justice.” The Eisenhower administration, however, expanded the criteria of the Truman program to permit dismissal based on the simple finding that a person’s continued employment “may not be clearly consistent with the interests of national security.” The most celebrated public servant destroyed by these Star Chamber proceedings was, of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of the Los Alamos Laboratory and head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Although both the “open” and covert organizations of the American Communist Party lay in ruins by 1948, this did not prevent the Truman administration from bringing Smith Act indictments against its new leaders, convicting them and sending them to prison for the offense of conspiring to form a party to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government, a result that Justice Hugo Black condemned as “water[ing] down the First Amendment so that it amounts to little more than an admonition to Congress.” Other provisions of the Smith Act were soon turned against naturalized Americans who, having joined the Communist Party at any time in the past, could be stripped of their citizenship and deported. One such victim was the mother of three American-born children. Another former party member, deported to Italy under these provisions of the Smith Act, lost his Social Security benefits as well, a decision upheld by the liberal Warren Court.

As Ellen Schrecker’s sad inventory reminds us, Senator McCarthy arrived late on the anti-Communist scene in 1950, uncovered not a single spy in his brief career, and always had many rivals in the arena of demagoguery, most of whom would not have been silenced by the VENONA documents. Senator McCarren’s Internal Security Act of 1950 permitted the president to declare an “internal security emergency” and for the attorney general to detain persons without indictment or trial if there were “reasonable grounds” to believe they would engage in acts of espionage or sabotage. U.S. liberals, led by Senators Hubert Humphrey and Wayne Morse, proposed in 1954 to make mere membership in the Communist Party a felony, an idea scotched by the Eisenhower administration on constitutional grounds.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities would have continued to give witnesses the terrifying choice of contempt citations, “naming names,” or taking the Fifth Amendment. States from New York to California would still have enforced loyalty oaths upon bar candidates, medical students, and teachers. Hollywood studies and major radio-television networks would have maintained their blacklists of men and women who had once been party members.

When George Kennan, then attache in the Moscow embassy, sent his famous “Long Telegram” to Washington in 1946 urging “containment” of the Soviet threat, he also warned that it should be done with prudence, “courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.” The greatest danger that could befall the United States “in coping with this problem of Soviet communism,” he cautioned, “is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” How prophetic Kennan proved to be in light of what soon followed under Truman and Eisenhower. Stalin perpetrated many terrible crimes against the Russian people, but he endangered the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights far less than many leaders in the United States. No document from VENONA or the Soviet archives will erase the offenses of that era, perpetrated by the government of the United States, against its own citizens. Could it be, after all the right-wing exulting over VENONA’s truths, that Whittaker Chambers was also right when he summed up his testimony against Hiss: “It was all for nothing .... Nothing had been gained except the misery of others.”