Stalinist spies and the Democrats

Pat Buchanan provides some historical facts that the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media would like to forget:

The FDR and Truman administrations were shot through with treason. Alger Hiss, who was with FDR at Yalta and Truman in San Francisco when the U.N. was founded, was a Stalinist spy, exposed by Whittaker Chambers and Rep. Richard Nixon.

Harry Dexter White, Treasury's No. 2, who pushed the infamous Morgenthau Plan to turn Germany into a pastureland, was a Soviet agent, as was White House aide Laughlin Currie and State's Laurence Duggan, whose treason was confirmed by the VENONA decrypts of Soviet cables in 1995.

William Remington at Commerce was convicted of perjury for denying his ties to a spy ring. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for their role in betraying the secrets of the atom bomb.

The VENONA transcripts contained the names of scores of U.S. citizens assisting known Soviet agents during and after World War II.

By 1952, Truman, having been repudiated by his own party in New Hampshire, was down to 23 percent, and was the most unpopular president ever to leave office.

But Joe McCarthy's approval, four years into this crusade in January 1954, stood at 50 percent, with only 29 percent disapproving.

And was that really a time of anti-communist hysteria?

Why, then, does not a single Gallup poll from 1950 to 1954 show even 1 percent of Americans giving anti-communist extremism or witch hunts or Joe McCarthy as an issue of concern?

Not only did Joe Kennedy Sr. admire and support Joe McCarthy, Jack Kennedy befriended him, Bobby worked for him, Teddy played touch football with him at Hyannis Port and the Kennedy girls dated him.

When, at a Harvard reunion, Jack heard a speaker say he was proud the college never produced an Alger Hiss or Joe McCarthy, JFK roared, "How dare you couple the name of a great patriot with that of a traitor?" and stormed out.