At the David Horowitz Freedom Center West Coast Retreat, I conducted a three-part interview with Scott. We discussed Oliver Stone’s miniseries, my updates to my 1983 The Rosenberg File, and my latest book on Truman. Powerline is featuring the videos here and here with some commentary by Scott — the videos alone are below:

In the ever growing literature about Soviet spies who infiltrated the White House during the lofty Popular Front years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the most fascinating — and perhaps unexpected — was Harry Dexter White.

He was an official of the Treasury Department who later became the architect of the post-war Bretton Woods system, a new global monetary system that would become the basis of the international capitalist marketplace in a new era. Now, in a new book, Benn Steil — a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations — deals with White’s activities as a Soviet spy.

Steil has also published an excerpt as a major article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, available for purchase on the magazine’s website, titled “Why a Founding Father of Postwar Capitalism Spied for the Soviets.” Steil’s article is of importance for two reasons.

First: it 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. Indeed, this is the focus of another new book, M. Stanton Evans and Hebert Romerstein’s Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, which fills in the broader picture. The most well-known, of course, is Alger Hiss. But he was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Second: since others found evidence in the Venona papers and Alexander Vassiliev’s KGB papers of White’s espionage, the former Treasury undersecretary’s reputation was defended by many writers who saw that charge as mere anti-Communist slander. Stephen Schlesinger, for example, writes: “Among historians, the verdict about White is still unresolved, but many incline toward the view that he wanted to help the Russians but did not regard the actions he took as constituting espionage.” In a letter to the New York Times, White’s daughter argues: “The content and provenance of all these documents have been studied in depth by serious scholars and have been found to raise as many questions as they answer. However they are interpreted, it can by no means be said that they establish my father’s guilt.” She adds: “It should also be remembered that White himself vigorously and eloquently denied the accusations against him.”

Also, James J. Broughton authored an entire article devoted to exonerating White.

With the publication of Steil’s book and article, we know that White, whom Steil points out had “by 1944 achieved implausibly broad influence over U.S. foreign and economic policy,” sought to implement what Steil calls “a far more radical reordering of U.S. foreign policy, centered on the establishment of a close permanent alliance with … the Soviet Union.” In this regard, he was on the same wavelength as his friend Henry A. Wallace, who had said he would appoint White to the Cabinet if he was to become president.

To accomplish this aim, White did more than Wallace. He took the next step, and from the 1930s on “acted as a Soviet mole, giving the Soviets secret information and advice on how to negotiate with the Roosevelt administration and advocating for them during internal policy debates.” Steil goes so far as to argue that White “was arguably more important to Soviet intelligence than Alger Hiss.”

What is most fascinating, and why commentators and historians could never accept that White was working for the Soviets, is he was known as a mainstream Keynesian, and most hardly suspected that he was the type who would be working clandestinely for Joe Stalin. Steil has found what he sees as a smoking gun: “An unpublished handwritten essay on yellow-lined notepaper” among White’s scribblings in the White archives, one that other scholars missed. As Steil describes the essay, it foresaw “a postwar world in which the Soviet socialist model … would be ascendant.”

White wrote: “In every case the change will be in the direction of increased [government] control over industry, and increased restrictions on the operations of competition and free enterprise.” White also was not too concerned about the Soviet Union’s repressive system, believing that “the trend in Russia seems to be toward greater freedom of religion,” which he said was guaranteed by the Soviet Constitution. He also thought that its foreign policy was “not actively supporting [revolutionary] movements in other countries.”

Actually, this belief system was not much different from that of other advocates of the Popular Front with the Communists, including many who never would have gone to work for Soviet intelligence. It was, in fact, the attitude taken by scores of fellow travelers and apologists for the Soviets, as well as realists like Walter Lippmann, the major columnist of his time.

So the document, while interesting for shedding light on White’s views, is not as significant as Neil seems to think it is. Like Henry Wallace, White too favored a U.S.-Soviet common front and worried it would be opposed by warmongers, or by any groups “fearful that any alliance with a socialist country cannot but strengthen socialism and thereby weaken capitalism.”

But as Steil points out, White’s notes for an article that was never published does make it quite clear that he saw himself as an advocate of the Soviet system. He quotes him as writing: “Russia is the first instance of a socialist economy in action. And it works!”

As Steil himself notes, however, that view was “not out of keeping with the tenor of the times.” Adherents  firmly believed that radical upheaval was inevitable, and that the future was something closer to Soviet socialism than American capitalism. It was, to put it another way, the progressive mindset of most left-liberal intellectuals of that era. But few of that point of view took the step that White did, what Steil calls “the sort of dangerous double life” of a secret agent.

Kudos to Marty Peretz, who in 1974 bought The New Republic and became its editor-in-chief, where he stayed until he sold the magazine in 2012. He has taken a brave step: he has gone public in the Wall Street Journal to write, having read the cover story in the current issue by Sam Tanenhaus, that: “I still don’t recognize the magazine that I sold in 2012 to the Facebook zillionaire Chris Hughes.”

Peretz continues:

“Original Sin,” by Sam Tanenhaus, purported to explain “Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people.” The provocative theme would not have been unthinkable in the magazine’s 99-year history, but the essay’s reliance on insinuations of GOP racism (“the inimical ‘they’ were being targeted by a spurious campaign to pass voter-identification laws, a throwback to Jim Crow”) and gross oversimplifications hardly reflected the intellectual traditions of a journal of ideas. What made the “Original Sin” issue unrecognizable to this former owner is that it established as fact what had only been suggested by the magazine in the early days of its new administration: The New Republic has abandoned its liberal but heterodox tradition and embraced a leftist outlook as predictable as that of Mother Jones or the Nation.

Peretz is more than correct; the magazine has further become an adjunct of the Obama administration, shilling for it and the most leftist Democrats. Its current stance brings to the fore the blatant lie by its new Editor-in-Chief Hughes, who has publicly said that the magazine will be non-partisan and balanced.

This was not what made the journal a must-read in the ’70s and ’80s. Indeed, as I argued a few months ago:

Before long, TNR took positions that furiously antagonized its liberal base. In the ’80s, during the Central American wars in which the Reagan administration took on the fight against the Communist revolutionaries in El Salvador and Nicaragua, TNR stood with those opposed to the Sandinistas and the FSLN. Indeed, at a critical moment, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Marty Peretz, openly sided with Nicaragua’s contras, the very armed resistance to the Sandinistas that the liberal community had painted as a bunch of fascist goons. That editorial position enraged many of its editors, who signed a letter to the editor protesting the magazine’s editorial. Before long, whenever TNR took a position opposite to that taken by most self-proclaimed liberals, a new saying emerged in Washington D.C. circles, “even the liberal New Republic says … ”.

I predicted that since Hughes said it would be a magazine of “progressive values,” the journal of opinion would quickly veer to the left and would abandon the stance that once made it essential reading, abandon what gave it a cutting edge. I asked:

Does anyone really think that Hughes will let his new magazine be anything but a vehicle for a second Obama administration?

Some were skeptical of my prediction, arguing that I had not given the new TNR a chance. Sadly, I have been proven correct, and finally Marty Peretz himself now feels the need to make this clear.

I went on to argue that we did not need a magazine slightly to the right of The Nation, and for the intellectual group, as we already had the left-wing slant of The New Yorker. At the time, I hoped I was wrong, but noting that I was essentially a pessimist, “I only expect the worst.”

Peretz accurately summed up what TNR represented when he ran it:

We were for the Contras in Nicaragua; wary of affirmative action; for military intervention in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur; alarmed about the decline of the family. The New Republic was also an early proponent of gay rights. We were neoliberals. We were also Zionists, and it was our defense of the Jewish state that put us outside the comfort zone of modern progressive politics.

The only position Peretz mentions that the journal still adheres to is gay rights, since that too has become a main cause of the left, one that is not surprising to those who make identity politics their major and sometimes only concern.

It is the particular premise of the new FX cable TV series The Americans that the Soviets had ready to go when called lots of sleeper cells of KGB agents living in the United States. Taking place in the years of the Reagan administration, the show depicts the exploits of a husband and wife who seem, at first introduction, a typical young, middle-class suburban couple living in the Washington, D.C., area, with a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son, to whom they are loving parents.

The couple, Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings, are played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys. Viewers quickly learn that their coupling was a KGB-arranged marriage. Brought together in the Soviet Union by KGB bosses, they are trained in the ways of America, taught perfect English, and then smuggled into the U.S., where the KGB buys them a nice home and establishes a travel agency for them to run as a perfect front. As part of the deal, they are expected, as most Americans are, to have children and raise a family.

Their days are spent running their business and taking their kids to school, while their evenings (and sometimes their days) are spent in such endeavors as kidnapping a KGB defector who has become too prominent on the lecture circuit, and preparing upon orders to spy upon the home of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, where a top level meeting is to take place at which they hope major American secrets will be revealed. To do this job, the couple has to force Weinberger’s African-American maid to place a bug on a clock in Weinberger’s study, which they accomplish by poisoning her son with a toxic agent for which only they have an antidote.

Ironically, viewers learn that their next-door neighbor is an FBI agent named Stan, played by Noah Emmerich, who is suspicious of everyone, and naturally wonders whether everything is as it seems with his neighborly friends. The Jennings do not know whether he moved there because the Bureau suspects them. To boot, Stan’s area is counter-intelligence and searching for secret Soviet agents operating in the United States.

NBC investigative reporter Michael Isikoff got another major scoop last night. He posted online a secret Justice Department memo summarizing legal opinion given the White House for carrying out drone strikes against U.S. citizens abroad, leading to their immediate death without arrest, interrogation, or concerns for their constitutional rights. The 16-page memo, which you can read yourself in its entirety, says that a drone attack can take place if any “informed, high-level official” determines that a targeted individual “poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” if capture is not feasible, and when the operation can take place “in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

I have no objection to the use of drones if necessary, but one must consider the following problems concerning their use. There is always going to be major “collateral” damage, as when the al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki was killed — the drone also caused the death of another American who was a propagandist for al-Qaeda. In another strike, Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was killed. When asked about that at a press conference, then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs answered: “He should have had a more responsible father.” Both were U.S. citizens abroad. Even the old Russian anarchists, ready to kill members of the czar’s entourage with a roadside bomb, stopped in their tracks when they saw that the monarch’s carriage carried not only the ruler, but his young nephews.

As viewers of Homeland know, drone strikes kill many innocent civilians as well as the guilty targets, even when the subjects are not U.S. citizens. The three major terms of use, however, are rather vague and leave many other issues raised, but not answered. As Isikoff writes, the attacks can be ordered “even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.” Isikoff writes:

The secrecy surrounding such strikes is fast emerging as a central issue in this week’s hearing of White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, a key architect of the drone campaign, to be CIA director. Brennan was the first administration official to publicly acknowledge drone strikes in a speech last year, calling them “consistent with the inherent right of self-defense.” In a separate talk at the Northwestern University Law School in March, Attorney General Eric Holder specifically endorsed the constitutionality of targeted killings of Americans, saying they could be justified if government officials determine the target poses “an imminent threat of violent attack.”

The legal brief, he explains, introduces a more expansive definition of self-defense or imminent attack than described by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches. It refers, for example, to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland. The memo states:

The condition that an operational leader present an “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.

If you came of age in the rock and roll years of the 1960s and were into music you knew of Danny Kalb and the band he created The Blues Project. Often referred to as New York City’s “Jewish Beatles,” the group was at first managed by Sid Bernstein, the same man who ran the Fab Four’s New York City tours. You might have heard them at the Paramount Theater in Times Square, where a new group, Eric Clapton and Cream, opened for them. Or you might have heard them play at Palisades Park Amusement Park, at one of Murray the K’s (the most well-known NYC DJ) weekend programs at the park. Most likely, however, you went to hear them at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village, the place for folk, rock and blues.

Now, after years of living in the shadows, Kalb has come out with a masterful two-disc of his most recent work, and is starting to receive major reviews. The latest for his new album Moving in Blue appears in The Morton Report, a major pop-culture review, and is written by its music critic, Bill Bentley. Calling Kalb “one of that decade’s musical linchpins,” Bentley writes that,

“his playing crossed blues with folk, rock, country and even jazz over the course of their albums, and before that he was one of the young white bluesmen who found nirvana in the music of Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Lightnin’ Hopkins and other originators, and honored their creation with dedication and deep spirit.”

“The Blues Project,” he says, “spread waves far and wide.” In the new album, Kalb sets out to let you hear all the various musical directions he has absorbed into one unique style. You will hear songs by Muddy Waters, Tim Hardin, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, a few of his own compositions, and some glorious blues licks and the kind of incredible, finger-picking magic on the guitar of which only he is capable. Kalb finds, as Bentley writes, an “inner beauty in everything he touches.” His home, he concludes, “is a musical rainbow inside us all.”

Another additional treat is the insightful and beautifully written liner notes by historian and musicologist Sean Wilentz — yes, that same Wilentz who is a historian at Princeton University, most well-known for his books on American history, as well as his meditation on our greatest singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan in America. Kalb, whom he says “looks like a Jewish lumberjack Buddha,” is “more like Mandrake” once he starts playing. He says that Kalb stomps with “soulful joy through one genre after another.” He plays such tunes as Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” the Muddy Waters classic “I Got My Mojo Working,” Leadbelly’s “Leaving Blues,” John Lee Hooker’s “Louise,” and Big Joe Williams “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Many will agree with Wilentz that his version of the traditional “Death Comes Creeping,” sung by many from Dylan to Mance Lipscomb, is done alone on acoustic guitar “more movingly” than interpretations by other past singers.

Accompanying Kalb on the album: his brother Jonathan (himself a fine blues musician) on slide guitar and harmonica, his drummer from The Blues Project Roy Blumenfeld, bass player Jesse Williams and Lenny Nelson, and Sojourn Records co-founder, the label of Kalb’s CD, drummer Mark Ambrosino. There is, as listeners will find, some incredible keyboard and organ work by someone whose name does not appear, but who aficionados will think sounds suspiciously like the famous Blues Project keyboard man, founder of “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” and sideman for most of Dylan’s earlier hits, Al Kooper. The absence of any credit for whomever is playing those awesome keyboards on the CD is rather, I must say, inexplicable. The man deserves credit!

So, go take a break from the TV, stop fretting over the world situation, and enjoy some heartfelt powerful music. Bring some joy into your life. You deserve it, and Danny Kalb deserves to be heard and listened to.

I was proud to consider myself a friend of Ed Koch. Despite obvious disagreements, Koch remained supportive of my work, and very often I would get a brief email indicating how he appreciated what I had written about the need to support Israel and to criticize its opponents. I heard from him regularly, the last time on January 2 when he wrote to compliment me for a recent PJ Media column criticizing the nomination of Chuck Hagel and another on the anti-Israel positions of Tom Friedman: “Your commentaries on Hagel and Friedman were superb.” I have no doubt that were he still with us he would have been a lone Democrat who would have commented negatively on Hagel’s testimony yesterday.

Last year when I was openly critical of him for supporting Obama’s re-election, he responded simply that he saw things differently than I did, and he particularly disagreed with my assessment that Democrats were not defending Israel as boldly as Republicans were. Koch argued that he was sure I would not like it if he had insinuated I was against Israel’s interest because I wasn’t a Democrat, and that he thought it important that support of Israel come from both sides of the aisle.

I never felt comfortably calling him Ed, and would address him as “Mr. Mayor” or “Mayor Koch.” I last talked with him personally during the presidency of George W. Bush, when he attended a speech by the president at a fundraising dinner for a Jewish organization in Washington, D.C. Koch walked up to me, addressing me, as he often did when I saw him, as “the bravest man in America.” His judgment, which he often repeated, was not sarcastic, although hardly deserved. I think he admired me because when I spent time with him in 1987 — which I will soon turn to –  he appreciated my outspoken willingness to say what I thought about leftist demagogues when others were either silent or deferential in their presence. Koch, as we all know, always said what he thought, and more than often caught hell for doing so.

The last time I heard him speak publicly was during the counter-session (which Roger L. Simon also attended) at the United Nations to oppose growing anti-Israeli sentiment at the international body. It was there that Koch announced he had rescinded his critical editorial written a few days earlier in the New York Daily News on Barack Obama’s views towards the Jewish state. He had met with the president one day before, he told us, and Obama had assured him that he was a firm supporter of Israel. Koch believed, as he himself acknowledged a short while ago, that he always thought Obama would betray Israel, although as he put it, he didn’t think it would happen so quickly.

Back then, however, he seemed to really think his op-ed had convinced the president to change course, and he desperately wanted to believe that Obama was most sincere at his private meeting.

For those interested in a critical overview of Koch’s role as mayor of New York, so far the best assessments are by Benjamin Smith writing today on the website of the New York Sun and one by John Podhoretz today in Contentions. Also worthwhile is Matthew Cooper’s assessment of Koch’s new liberalism in the National Journal. You can, of course, all read the overview in the lengthy obituary in today’s New York Times.

What I want to mention, however, is an event that Koch sponsored while mayor that everyone seems to have forgotten about, although at the time the mayor was vigorously attacked for it. In 1987, at the time of escalating warfare in Central America, a growing revolutionary threat in El Salvador, and a civil war in Nicaragua between the Sandinistas and the contras (the armed opposition to the Sandinistas by peasants and business opponents of the country’s revolutionary junta), Ed Koch decided to see if he could contribute to the peace process introduced by Costa Rica’s President Oscar Arias by putting together a New York City mission to Central America.

So far, I have not seen it mentioned in any of the discussions of Koch’s mayoralty, and to a certain extent, it certainly was a footnote. But the very idea grated the New York liberals.

I recall editorials chastising the mayor for even implying that the city had its own foreign policy, and calling for him to disband the mission and to cancel his scheduled trip. Koch replied that he only was trying to work with President Arias and trying to see if he could in any way contribute to his effort. What really galled Koch, however, was his memory that years earlier he had welcomed Sandinista commandante Daniel Ortega (now president of Nicaragua) to New York City and, in a public ceremony at City Hall, given him the keys to the city. As a congressman, he had been a fierce opponent of the Somoza dictatorship and hence had welcomed its overthrow by the young revolutionaries, a decision he had come to deeply regret.

He, like other well-meaning liberals, had been conned by Ortega’s sweet talk, only to find he was a low-rent version of Fidel Castro.

Every so often, a cherished myth of the Left’s historical narrative comes apart. That is why keeping the flame alive by repeating the myths gives sustenance to the Left’s chosen causes. I learned this the hard way when I wrote The Rosenberg File with Joyce Milton in 1983.

To the Left, it was imperative that the Rosenbergs — who were found guilty of “conspiracy to commit espionage” and sentenced to death by Judge Irving Kaufman after the trial — be innocent. If they were not, it would mean that they were not martyrs for peace, arrested and tried for their “progressive” and anti-war politics and their opposition to the impending fascism and anti-Soviet hysteria of the Truman administration. Rather, if actually guilty, it would mean that the United States had a right to protect itself against those who were working on behalf of the Soviet Union by seeking to ferret out atomic secrets on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime.

To acknowledge the truth, in other words, meant that those on the Left would have to question their most cherished beliefs.

When the book came out, it was only thirty years after the Rosenbergs were executed at Sing Sing prison, and many of those who fought on their behalf were still around and active. Thus they engaged in a massive campaign to discredit our findings and to smear us as tools of the FBI and the Reagan administration, which they charged was trying once again to undermine the cause of peace and to seek war with the still existing Soviet Union.

That is the charge that the Nation magazine’s editor-in-chief, Victor Navasky, made in the magazine’s editorial. As for the American Communist Party, its chief, Gus Hall, attacked us for smearing the Rosenbergs, whom he tellingly referred to as “the sacred couple.”

Now, a brave left-wing historian named Timothy Messer-Kruse — despite his own self-proclaimed “social-democratic” politics — has walked into the minefield.

In the latest issue of National Review, writer John J. Miller has penned an article — “What Happened at Haymarket?” — that takes up one of the Left’s most longstanding historical myths: the one surrounding events that took place the night of May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. Formerly, Messer-Kruse would tell his students:

A gathering of anarchists near Haymarket Square turned into a fatal bombing and riot. Although police never arrested the bomb-thrower, they went on to tyrannize radical groups throughout the city, in a crackdown that is often called America’s first Red Scare. Eight men were convicted of aiding and abetting murder. Four died at the end of a hangman’s noose. Today, history books portray them as the innocent victims of a sham trial: They are labor-movement martyrs who sought modest reforms in the face of ruthless robber-baron capitalism.

To the present day, those events have been a staple in the portrayal of the United States as a nation unjust to those it oppressed, which included workingmen who sought only to gain protection for their rights against rapacious capitalists.

Miller explains that a group of peaceful protesters had gathered to demand an eight-hour workday. Many were anarchists, but Messer-Kruse formerly believed:

They were mainly a peace-loving bunch who simply wanted to improve their wretched conditions. As police arrived to bust up the crowd, someone tossed a bomb. No one knows who did it — perhaps an anarchist agitator.

Howard Zinn wrote in his best-selling People’s History of the United States that it likely was “an agent of the police, an agent provocateur.” Police fired their guns, and seven of their group and some protesters lay dead. Authorities blamed the deaths on the radicals, who were rounded up and convicted without evidence; four were hung, one committed suicide, and three were later pardoned. The Left’s narrative is explained by Miller:

Ever since, Haymarket has occupied a central place in progressive lore. The international labor movement honors May Day as its holiday in part because of its proximity on the calendar to Haymarket’s anniversary. In the United States, Haymarket ranks alongside the cases of Sacco and Vanzetti, Alger Hiss, and the Rosenbergs as a fable of anti-radical persecution. Well into the 20th Century, its notoriety provoked violent rage. In 1969, Bill Ayers and an accomplice from the Weather Underground engaged in their own Haymarket terror, bombing a statue that honored the fallen policemen of 1886. “This is too good — it’s us against the pigs, a medieval contest of good and evil,” wrote Ayers of the affair in his memoir, Fugitive Days.

Historian Messer-Kruse believed the standard left-progressive mythology. But a student’s question about what happened during the trial led him to look anew at the events from that sad day in 1886. The result was his brave exploration of what had been until now the standard take on Haymarket. Just as most of the college textbooks portrayed the Rosenbergs as innocent, the Left’s narrative was repeated verbatim, and as Miller writes, “entered mainstream education.” The left-wing labor historian James Green explained in a 2006 account:

The Haymarket case challenged, like no other episode in the nineteenth century, the image of the United States as a classless society with liberty and justice for all.

Imagine Messer-Kruse’s shock when his own careful scholarly examination of Haymarket revealed that most of what the Left taught about the event was based on both shoddy scholarship and ideological wish-fulfillment.

No sooner did President Barack Obama finish his second inaugural address than the liberal pundits proclaimed it to be a speech of unity on behalf of all Americans. Yes, it is a platitude, but all of us do pause to reaffirm the greatness of our republic, and to celebrate the election of a chief executive with whom many of us may disagree but who nevertheless represents our country as a whole and is entrusted by us to make the tough decisions that all our countrymen will have to live with. The speech, however, left much to be desired, and my first take is that it will not be one that many will remember in future years.

The president took generalities with which we all agree and used them to imply that to carry on in the American tradition, “progressive” measures favored by his base need to be implemented.

Take the enthusiastic response by liberal columnist Matthew Yglesias writing at Slate. According to Yglesias, the president’s speech was “not even slightly” anti-capitalist, but instead was a defense of economic liberalism tempered by a “robust welfare state and select government interventions in the economy.” Obama, he thinks, came off not as any kind of socialist or statist, but as a pragmatist in the American tradition who believes that fidelity to the Constitution demands a “pragmatic response to changing circumstances.”

Thus the president said in his speech that a “free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.” Echoing the progressivism of the age of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he emphasized that a “great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”

Few would disagree, including most conservatives. But the devil, of course, lies in the details.

The problem is well spelled out by William Voegeli, who in the current issue of National Review warns Americans about the coming Swedenization of America. He notes the difference between European social democracies and the United States and our welfare state:

Our deeply rooted, don’t-tread-on-me Jeffersonianism means that we cannot be persuaded to buy even a relatively modest welfare state unless a significant portion of the purchase is financed with debt. In this we are unlike the Europeans, who want cradle-to-grave welfare states with enough to pay cash for them.

…

[The welfare state] creates strong incentives for individuals to have fewer children of their own and rely instead on aggregated financial support from everyone’s children, thereby putting social-security systems under intolerable strain.

The social-democratic project, already sinking in Europe and Scandinavia, cannot work here. Yet, by implication — arguing that it is only a pragmatic adjustment for today to our Constitutional obligations — the president is subtly suggesting that our nation continue down a forlorn path.

The old totalitarian nations understood the importance of history. They believed, as Orwell wrote in 1984, that those who controlled the narrative of the past would be better able to rule the present and the future. That is why the Soviets continually rewrote the “Great Soviet Encyclopedia,” airbrushing out of the record former Bolshevik leaders who had been purged, and rewriting accounts of their own revolution to weed out positive references to the likes of Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and other old Bolsheviks.  That is why the Chinese Communists have to perpetuate the myth of Mao, whose leadership role has to remain firm, less their own legitimacy to rule China be questioned by their own people.

In their own way, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick are attempting the same kind of rewrite for their own country. Clifford May writes that “these days, documentaries, too, often are weapons of mass indoctrination. In addition to airing Homeland, Showtime has been broadcasting Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, a series that re-litigates the Cold War, finding Truman more to blame than Stalin, telling audiences that Americans not only aren’t ‘the good guys,’  but that we are ‘the wrong side.’”

“This debate is of far more than academic interest,” May adds:

It is hugely consequential at a time when Americans are trying to decide whether we should be robustly defending America and other free nations from those who proclaim themselves our enemies, or whether we should be attempting to address the ‘legitimate grievances’ of those we have supposedly wronged.

Hence, if you believe that the Cold War was caused by America’s imperial outreach, and that Stalin and his henchman took a tough line because of U.S. policy, you are likely to believe today that those who say our nation has very real enemies who have to be recognized are arguing on behalf of a myth, and that what the United States should do is unilaterally disarm, cut our military budget drastically, and reach out to our Muslim enemies, who would become friends if we only showed them respect and deference and, of course, put great pressure on Israel, whose provocative policies oppress the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors.

PJM readers know that I have been on a campaign to expose and challenge the so-called history offered to our countrymen by Stone and Kuznick. Aside from my many articles on this site, I penned an op-ed that appeared last week in The Wall Street Journal, which I wrote because I knew Stone and Kuznick would not ignore an article that appeared in a major newspaper, unlike those that have appeared here as well as the series in David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com. I am glad to report that now Conrad Black has joined in presenting his own major critique of the series, and now his readers will understand how important it is to challenge their account. In “The Real Henry Wallace,”  Black successfully demolishes the account of the principal hero of the TV series.