Communists, the Media, and the Democratic Party
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | May 5, 2008
Hayden is almost as controversial as Ayers, a self-described communist.
Tom
Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is
calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But
Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if
Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill
Ayers constitute McCarthyism.
Bernstein,
now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of
this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says
in his book about them, Loyalties, “I
am proud of the choices they made.”
The
Hayden and Bernstein pieces have to be understood in the context of the
Democratic Party being on the verge of nominating a “working class hero” as
their presidential candidate who does not attract many votes from the working
class. And that is why Senator Clinton sees an opening and believes she can
still seize the nomination. But she’s got some skeletons in her closet, too.
The
basic message of Hayden and Bernstein seems to be that the Democrats should
abandon the practice of linking either presidential candidate to communists
because they are both tainted. But we’re just beginning to get to the heart of
the issue. Do we have candidates that are in any way linked or sympathetic to
the greatest killing machine in the history of planet earth? The Black Book of Communism puts the
death toll from communism at about 100 million. A memorial to the
victims of communism has been erected in Washington,
D.C.
On
one of the major issues of our time, have these candidates been right or wrong?
We know where Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright
stands. We know that his
charge that the U.S.
created AIDS was based on Soviet disinformation. But he also had this to say in
his National Press Club speech: “Our congregation stood in solidarity with the
peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua,
while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was
supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians
in those two countries.”
In fact, Ollie North, a member of the staff of
the National Security Council, was implementing a policy of the Reagan
Administration to thwart a communist takeover of Central
America. Some of the Miskito Indians were actually helping in the
fight against the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Communist Sandinistas.
Whose side was Obama on during the fight for Central America?
Hayden’s Pro-Communist
Record
One
can understand why Hayden, a member of “Progressives for Obama,” takes offense.
Hayden and Ayers were key members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),
the violence-prone group that laid siege to college campuses in the 1960s. One
of their main goals was making sure the communists conquered South Vietnam.
Ayers, of course, would go on to plant bombs as a member of the SDS-spawned Weather
Underground communist terrorist group. Hayden would win notoriety as Jane
Fonda’s husband and become a politician.
“Progressives for Obama” is quite a collection. A quick review discloses two names from the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an off-shoot of the old
Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). They include Carl Davidson,
formerly of SDS, and Jim Campbell. Two other names come from the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago
branch has backed Obama from the start. They are Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel
West. West showed up at Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club speech to cheer
and whistle.
Hayden
is almost as controversial as Ayers, a self-described communist. A leader of
protests against U.S.
involvement in the Vietnam War, Hayden wrote a June 4, 1968, “Dear Col. Lao”
letter that ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” This was a letter to a North
Vietnamese official. So here we have someone who was cheering for the communist
enemy killing Americans. They openly displayed flags of the Viet Cong, the
organization sponsored by the regime in Hanoi,
North Vietnam,
also known as the National Liberation Front.
Hayden,
in brief, played a pivotal role in America’s
Vietnam
defeat and the deaths of millions.
Hayden’s
letter to Col. Lao was designed to introduce him to Robert Greenblatt, the
coordinator of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The
MOBE was run by a group that included members of the Communist Party, the
Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, the SDS, and other such
organizations.
Is
this the kind of “patriotism” that Obama approves? What does Senator Clinton
think of an Obama supporter who worked for an enemy victory in Vietnam?
It
is apparently acceptable to somebody because Hayden’s website boasts that he has received awards
from such groups as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the
Rainforest Action Network, and Paw-PAC (animal welfare).
Isn’t
it interesting how someone who became a cheerleader for the communists now gets
awards for protecting trees and animals?
By
contrast, the book, A Viet Cong Memoir, includes a note of apology “to my betrayed comrades, who believed they were
sacrificing themselves for a humane liberation of their people.” One of the
authors, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the Viet Cong, escaped the communist
takeover in a boat. He was one of hundreds of thousands of “boat people.”
Hayden’s
failure to apologize indicates he’s a true believer. And he’s enthusiastic
about Obama.
Spanking Hillary
Hayden
currently contributes to the far-left Huffington Post website and The Nation
magazine, where he made
much of Hillary’s work for a communist law firm. One of his citations is
Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary, A
Woman in Charge. This is actually an old story. We covered it in an AIM Report back in 2003. Hayden, of course, doesn’t really care whether she associated
with communists. He calls her work there “honorable.” He just thinks she’s a
hypocrite for calling attention to Obama’s communist ties, such as the
“imagined association” between Obama and Ayers. (Their relationship is
described by the Obama campaign as “friendly.”) Hayden also finds fault with
Hillary for making an issue out of Obama’s association with his pastor Jeremiah
Wright.
Hayden
decries the “campaign of defamation” against Obama, who has “transformational
appeal.”
Carl
Bernstein added his voice to the controversy, saying in a dispatch on the
Huffington Post not only that Hillary worked for that firm but that her linking
of Obama to Ayers might be “21st century McCarthyism” or
“ideological demagoguery.”
This
is what “McCarthyism” has become―telling the truth about communists.
Bernstein
has a personal conflict of interest, having written a book, Loyalties, about his parents Al and
Sylvia Bernstein being members of the Communist Party USA. He reveals that
Democratic liberal Senator Edward Kennedy helped him obtain government
documents about his father’s case in particular. His father was questioned
about a possible relationship with a member of a Soviet espionage network named
Louise Bransten.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Bernstein
says that he feared coming upon some “parental Pumpkin Paper.” But his father
explained away the Bransten connection by saying he had only attended a “party”
with her. That closed the case for Carl Bernstein, who was part of the
Washington Post investigative team that brought down President Richard Nixon in
the Watergate scandal. As journalist Victor Lasky would later point out in It Didn’t Start With Watergate, it was a
scandal in which Nixon or his staff stood accused of using tactics employed by
previous Democratic administrations.
Nixon
was a special target. As a Congressman, he had seized upon the hidden documents
known as the Pumpkin Papers of former communist Whittaker Chambers in order to
make the case that former State Department official and United Nations founder
Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Chambers had publicly named Hiss as a communist.
The Pumpkin Papers proved it.
In
his father’s case, Bernstein writes that documents showed that Louis B.
Nichols, the assistant director of the FBI for internal security matters, said
that he would be probably be able to furnish a witness identifying Alfred
Bernstein as a Communist Party member. (Bernstein confirms that his father and
mother were members). Later, Bernstein writes, Nichols would become “the
Bureau’s liaison to Richard Nixon’s White House.” Bernstein includes this
information as if it’s damaging to the FBI, Nixon, or both.
But
whatever one can say about Nixon, he was not naïve about the communist threat.
And he was right on target about Hiss.
The Pattern
Bernstein
and his partner, Bob Woodward, worked for a paper, the Washington Post, whose
late owner, Katharine Graham, was known as a prominent liberal committed to the
success of the Democratic Party. Less well-known is the fact that she had
worked for a time as a reporter in San
Francisco and developed a rather sympathetic view of
“radical” labor leader Harry Bridges, who turned out to be a secret member of
the CPUSA central committee. “One of her [Katharine Graham’s] sources was Harry
Bridges, the head of the longshoremen’s union,” says the official
Washington Post website, still unable to set the record straight about this
notorious communist agitator.
After
Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, Bernstein would turn his
attention to the sins of the Central Intelligence Agency, writing a piece for
Rolling Stone, the rock-and-roll publication, entitled, “The CIA and the
Media.” He also spent some time at ABC News trying to expose secret U.S. support for anti-communist fighters in Afghanistan
during the Soviet occupation.
Getting
to the Hillary connection, in his Huffington Post dispatch on “The
Question of Hillary Clinton’s Guilt-By-Association Tactics,” Bernstein
wrote about Jessica Mitford, the “muckraking journalist” whose husband Robert
Treuhaft, ran the communist law firm where Hillary worked.
Bernstein said, “In the 1980s, Jessica Mitford
visited the Clintons at the governor’s mansion
in Little Rock.
She and Treuhaft had left the communist party in 1958, years after the
revelation of Stalin’s murderous crimes, but―Jessica Mitford wrote in her
memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, she quit ‘not primarily over some issue
of high principle, but because it had become dull....boring. Rather like London’s debutante
circuit.’”
He goes on, “When Jessica Mitford died in 1996, Hillary
Clinton wrote Bob Treuhaft a lovely condolence letter from the White House…”
But does any of this make Hillary a Stalinist, he asked. Or a Communist sympathizer?
Of course not, he replies. All of this is just silly, he says. And it’s just as
silly, he suggests, for Hillary to make an issue of Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers.
But wait. In Mitford’s 1977 book, A Fine Old Conflict, she writes about
how Al Bernstein signed her up as a member of the United Federal Workers Union,
which she considered “a step towards finding the Communist Party.” The union,
she adds, had been publicly denounced by the House Committee on Un-American
Activities as Communist-dominated. This charge was “not wide of the mark,” she
admits.
The afterword of another Mitford book, Poison Penmanship, is written by
Bernstein, who praises Mitford for educating the public about how journalism
should be a “simple process” of seeking “the best obtainable version of the
truth.”
They Can’t
Handle the Truth
If this is the case, then why is Bernstein
afraid of pursuing the truth about Obama? Why the outrage over Senator Clinton
drawing attention to a well-documented personal connection between Obama and a
communist terrorist? Is there something else more damaging that has to be
hidden from public view? Does new information have to be discredited in advance
as “McCarthyism?”
The information may have to do with Obama’s
upbringing. Obama says that he was raised by his mother and grandparents. But
those aren’t the only people who had influence over him during his formative
years. His own book, Dreams From My
Father, talks about a mysterious “Frank” giving him advice, reading poetry,
and telling him not to believe that―expletive deleted―about the American way of
life when he went off to college. We know who “Frank” is. He was a member of
the Communist Party who started writing for the Honolulu Record at the
suggestion of Paul Robeson, another secret member of the CPUSA, and Harry
Bridges. His “poetry,” like the sermons of Pastor Wright, was laced with anti-American
sentiments.
Don’t wait for Carl Bernstein or the Washington
Post or the rest of the major media to cover any of this. But it will come out.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at
8 Comments | Post a Comment
Interesting piece. This is one reason I always refer to liberals who now style themselves as “progressives” as “progressives (socialists).”
Also intersting to note the seemingly innocuous “do-gooder” groups who, in the name of saving the environment, block the building of new oil refineries and nuclear power plants, while demanding an effective energy policy...but taking two of the better solutions off the table, as they have drilling in ANWR (a ban which began, as the sub-prime mortgage situation with Jimmuh Cottuh, who was presumably not senile back in the 70s). There is no compelling reason not to drill ANWR, only lies and distortions from “progressives” (socialists). Carter’s subordinates working in the White House refer to his “weirdness factor.” He just kept his lunacy hidden a good bit better back then. Guess he’s out of the closet now.
People who get their news through headlines, brief summaries, or late-night comedians miss the obvious: anti-American groups who go mainstream don’t have names such as “Evil Bad Guys Out to Destroy America.” (Perhaps because it hasn’t got a snappy acronym, eg, PAW, which hasn’t a clue of what the “American Way” is! PUW would be more befitting.)
What kills me is rich businessmen who go along to get along with leftist pols. The oil co’s provide an essential product/service and their profit margins are something like 9ยข on the dollar. (The average for the S&P;500 co’s is 13%.) If the gov’t can arbitrarily skim the profits of the oil co’s, why can’t they justify skimming the profits of ANY company with a profit margin of 9% or more?
The oil co’s make billions in profits, but pay even more in taxes. Okay, $4 gas isn’t a fond wish of mine or anything, but we old geezers can remember candy bars for a nickel and soft drinks for a dime (older geezers can remember lower prices than that; they tell me about it). And I doubt that our oil co’s are responsible for the growing demand in India and China, nor the kleptocracies in Russia and Venezuela.
America will not be brought down by bombs. America will be brought down by ignorance, particularly ignorance of basic economics. They want to improve our schools? Get rid of the tolerance and diversity nonsense and teach our public school students basic economics, perhaps with a section on balancing a check book or prioritizing spending for a family budget.
ATM: I’m voting in NC today. While I will vote republican for the most part, I will be casting a vote for Hillary...as will those who know that I keep up with politics and want to cast an informed vote! Hillary won’t get 90% of the black vote, a huge anomaly. She probably won’t win NC, either, but the narrower the margin of loss could be significant if enough republicans figure out that McCain has the nomination, so our primary vote for a democrat won’t affect McCain.
McCarthy was right in the 50s...and he’s still right today.
IN THE 60’S I SAT WITH AN ITALIAN IMMIGRANT HAVING COFFEE. HE WAS READING AN ITALIAN NEWSPAPER. HE TURNED TO ME AND SAID. I AM AFRAID TOM ITALY IS GOING COMMUNIST.
HAVING PERUSED TODAYS ARTICLE I NOW FEAR THAT WE ARE HOODWINKED VICTIMS OF DEMONCRAT GRAY POOPON COMMUNISM.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE POOR TO BE A COMMUNIST. WHEN I HEAR HILLARY CHAVEZ, CHE OBAMA AND HEINRICH SCHUMER TALK ABOUT WINDFALL PROFITS AND SEIZING OIL COMPANY ASSETS I WONDER IF EXXON WILL MOVE TO DUBAI TO SAVE ON TAXES. I AM SURE THE MAKTOUMS WILL GLADLY OFFER 100 NO TAX YEARS AS A WELCOME.
HONG KONG WILL MATCH FUNDS JUST FOR FUN.
THE COMMUNISTS NEVER GAVE UP AND THEIR THREE BIGGEST ENEMIES WERE BLESSED JOE MCCARTHY, NIXON AND CHARLETON HESTON. I AM SURE JANE FONDA WOULD HAVE LOVED TO WATCH JOHN WAYNE GETTING THE MCCAIN WORKOUT IN HANOI.
BUT YOUR ATICLE ROCKED ME WHEN YOU MENTIONED THAT BERNSTEIN WAS A FAMILY COMMUNIST. HOW HE MUST HAVE DANCED THE KAZOTSKY WHEN THE BROUGHT DOWN A PRESIDENT.
JIMMY FROM BROOKLYN. IF YOU READ THIS ARTICLE
EMAIL ME. I HAVE HEARD YOU ON BOB GRANT. LIKE TO KNOW MORE.
TOM
Acck! I just lost everything in my post because I did not include email.
No time to repost it all.
Remember, Communist, Russia and China leaders are not giving up the fight. The evil empire’s motto was that America would lose from within, from corruption of our values, by the very freedoms we enjoy. They intend to use against us.
It is scary to know that Bernstein has such a history. And double scary that I only found this out today. I feel that I’m well read, but with a late start changing from liberal to conservative staring in ‘98.
How many millions do not know this? And how many more connect the dots are there to uncover?
I think there will need to be a special map made for these communist supporters, sympathisers, and all of their connections.
Great work!
For those interested in the way our energy policy is going to go, there are two competing bills.
The “bi-partisan” Warner-Lieberman bill (which takes all the viable alternatives off the table before debate begins) is S.2191.
Senator Domenici’s more reasonable bill (basically: we’ve GOT oil; let’s drill for it!) is S.2958.
If you call or email your DC Senator (you can find out how at firstgov.gov, a treasure chest of contact info), mention the S.2958. The staffers can’t keep up with all the names of these bills, but they can keep a running tally of for/against calls from constituents.
Better: Knock off a quick letter. The unwritten rule is that the more hassle that is involved, eg, bigger hassle to write a snail mail than to make a phone call or send an email, the more attention it will receive.
BTW, if Obama had learned as much in school as he did in Church, he would be illiterate! (Perhaps off topic, but the guy is a communist.)
Are they truly communists? Some probably are. I’m thinking the politicians aren’t. I don’t think they have that much allegiance to any philosophy - only to their own power and profits.
There is nothing wrong with drilling for oil in Alaska. How exactly that will relieve the gas prices for us is what may be the unanswered question. Oil companies are global entities. They are no longer US companies. Why would they drill for that oil, then sell it cheaper to the US than they can to China?
When they talk about ‘foreign oil’ vs. ‘domestic oil’ - I think the only difference is in the geographical location.
If there is a bill to make this oil available for drilling and only for sale to the US, then that might make a difference. We all know that isn’t going to happen.
The American Military wasn’t “defeated” in Vietnam.
We Won every major battle in spite of the Communist influence in this country.
A Democrat congress unfunded the war in 1973.
The South Vietnamese fought on alone until 1975 until they were overrun (no U.S. Troops involved).
The U.S. Embassy was evacuated at that time.
May 5 at 9:06 pm | #1 | Link
Cliff,
Thanks for the work. The communist/terrorist angle is just too tight to ignore, but ignore it the media does.
Perhaps the MSM, being the liberal elite that all of this points to is too ashamed to focus the brioght light on Obama and on themselves because they know that America doesn’t really want them - at least not yet.
I believe they have to slowly and surely factionalize the country until they can promise enough to enough to get elected and legislate more and more of their communist agenda.
It’s sad, it’s frightening and it’s angering.
BTW, I live in Indiana and will vote for Hillary tomorrow. Not because I wish for her to win the general election but because the chances of her winning are lower.