Sure, there were many American intellectuals who thought the Soviet experiment, as they
called it, was something worth looking into.
Something that they thought had promise.
That didn't necessarily mean, right, that they were literal Communists taking orders
from a foreign power dedicated to violently overthrowing the government.
Was there really infiltration of Communists into the U.S. government?
It's fashionable today to say that the very idea was a ridiculous conspiracy.
We associate all of this with Joe McCarthy to the point where we call in McCarthyism;
the asking of questions about whether or not people are Communists particularly in sensitive
positions within the U.S. government.
Not just communists in the sense of agreeing with communism, but Communists in the sense
of being members of the Communist Party, a party which was getting its orders from a foreign
power with the agenda of overthrowing the government.
And doing so secretly.
This is not a conspiracy theory, this was conspiracy history.
Well as a matter of fact in 1995 we finally got declassified what are known as the Venona
Project files.
They were made available to the American public, finally.
These were a series of transcripts of thousands of Soviet intelligence messages from the 1940's
when at the time, the U.S. government had discovered a vulnerability inside Soviet intelligence
transmission.
And they captured a whole lot of these messages.
It turns out that when you sift through them, 350 people in the U.S. government had relationships
with Soviet intelligence.
That's not a small thing.
The Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Harry Dexter White, was certainly involved, as Venona
shows, in inappropriate communications to say the least with Soviet intelligence.
Also Laurence Duggan, who coordinated American relations with Latin America.
And Lachlin Currie, who was a Special Assistant to FDR.
These people are not minor individuals, these are significant figures.
So this isn't some crazy theory somebody thought up, this was an actual problem.
Ronald Reagan was the first union president, he was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
And part of his role was to figure out just how deeply Communist agents had invaded Hollywood.
And again by Communists, he meant people taking orders directly from a foreign government,
not just simply those who had a different political point of view.
And this was the actors who were worried about how much communism had taken root among their peers.
This is where the expression "card carrying Communist" came from.
They were members of a specific organization.
And to this day the technique used to fight the people who were fighting them was snark
and humor.
"Oh you're paranoid, no one is taking orders from a foreign power, this is all just a witch
hunt."
The problem is, there really were witches!
And their schemes led to some very bad consequences including stealing the plans for the deadliest
weapon ever seen on earth, the atom bomb, and handing it over to Stalin, one of the worst dictators
the world had ever seen.
What ended up happening is many of these former Communists flipped and realized "wait a minute,
I'm fighting for some really evil people."
And they came forward, they outed their former colleagues, and to this day they're portrayed
as evil for pointing out which one of their peers were secretly taking orders from Moscow
in order to destroy America.
That was the goal.
The great celebrated case of course involved Alger Hiss, who had been a U.S. State Department
official, and Richard Nixon, who came to hated after this particular episode, helped get him found
guilty of purgery when he claimed he had not known Whittaker Chambers.
Whittaker Chambers had been part of the U.S. Communist Party, and he was one of the people
who later flipped when he suddenly examined himself and realized he'd been on the wrong
side.
What ended up happening is many of these former Communists realized "wait a minute, I'm not
fighting for any sort of emancipation at all, I'm fighting for the absolute totalitarian
oppression of a people and a government that is intent on bringing their revolution to
every country in the world."
And to this day investigating communism is regarded as the worst thing that's ever happened
in American history.
And then you turn on the TV and you hear, "the Soviet Union, excuse me Russia, has influenced
our elections in a way that apparently they never have in the past, or only started doing
so in 2016."