The fact that Hiss was a spy doesn't change the fact that there was a witch-hunt. This is no criticism of Mr. Weinstein, who seems to arrived at the correct answer 15 years before the confirmation was in; and no defense of Hiss' supporters, who are simply in denial of the facts.
But claiming "the Left support[ed] Soviet espionage" is ludicrous, because the same material that confirmed Hiss was a spy also showed that there was not a single ideologically motivated traitor recruited in the US after the war; in fact, the breaking point seems to be the Rapallo Pact. The traitors to the United States in the Cold War (Walker, Ames, Hansen, et al.) were motivated by that most capitalistic of motives: money.

If the witch hunt actually catches witches, what's the problem?

The left remains toxically angry that its future is of a piece with the collapse of marxism-leninism-stalinism. They're In Denial (see Haynes and Klher), they have plenty of anger, they are always ready to bargain with the devil, their depression is palpable, and their need for acceptance is dominating the twilight of their miserable ideological existence.

"Not a single ideologically motivated traitor recruited in the US after the war,..".

Spoken like a true lefty. Ideology, motivation and and timing must be proven in order to satisfy you regarding the relationship between some American leftists and the Soviets.

Specific sources supporting your contention would be helpful.

The Falcon and the Snowman.

The leftist media, which always fell at the feet of the Soviets, right up to the end. Espionage was not their game, but subversion certainly was.

As David said, there were witches. The question is, what was more hurtful to the West: the witches or their exposure?

On a different note, one is reminded that the film
of the Falcon & the Snowman, was playing in the US, and in Mexico City, right around the time, that Aldrich Ames started to consider to spy

"Not a single ideologically motivated traitor recruited in the US after the war"

Noel Erinjeri

Man, talk about moving the goalposts!

>'Tis the nature of the beast that the Right is
>required to do unending penance for Joe
>McCarthy, but the Left need never reckon with
>its support for Soviet espionage.

That's because the Soviet Union are The Good Guys (TM), soooooo Morally and Intellectually Superior (TM) to the stupid common rabble...

Ah, yes, the influential American Organization of Historians.

'Perjury' was a main selection of the History Book Club when it was published, which is a better gauge of Weinstein's professional standing, inasmuch as HBC was founded by two of the most eminent historians of their generation, one liberal, one conservative.

Would somebody explain to me why senators have to (or are competent to) advise on the national archivist?

McCarthy is the code word, but it was Nixon and HUAC that really opened the Can of Worms.

Nonetheless, the remarkable thing is the tiny impact that HUAC and McCarthy had. A few guys lost their jobs, a couple did time for contempt. From all the years of howling that followed, you would think that somebody had suffered some real pain like being made to crawl naked while a bimbo from West Virgina mocked him.

Couple suicides, too.

From all the howling that followed, you would think that Hiss's spying somehow damaged American security.

He was a traitor all right, but to what purpose?

Hiss made one of most eloquent statements I've ever read of American values (in Rolling Stone). If you didn't know what he'd done, Orrin could have read it and been ready to put him up on the pedestal with Solzhenitsyn.

Weird guy. Like Reagan. The words that came out of their mouths never seemed to have any connection to their behavior.

Harry:

It wouldn't seem like even you were a big enough (fill in the blank) to compare Ronald Reagan to Alger Hiss. I think FDR was a terrible president, but undoubtedly a patriot and no worse than an accidental enemy of freedom.

Harry-

Alger Hiss was a delusional sociopath with the typically elitist view of Marxism/Leninism, i.e. "everything would be fine, if only I and those who agree with me have the power". Like a typical cultist, Hiss would say anything to advance his cause. Reagan understood the misguided attraction of ivory tower types to Marx. It's called "common sense".

I met Alger Hiss briefly, a year or two before he died. He was about as phony as they come, creepy.

Interesting, Tom.

Reagan was delusional, no question of that. He believed what he believed, and no amount of demonstration that it couldn't be could sway him. He told the same impossible stories over and over. He was not the lyingest politician ever, but few have matched his contempt for truth.

And none his indifference to the fact that people knew he was wrong.

Hiss acted in a different belief system, but was a similar personality, I think. I think you're right, Tom, that Hiss considered himself destined to lead, by class; while Reagan's sense of destiny had some other source, obviously.

It isn't, Orrin, that they were morally equivalent. They were both crazy, in a political sense, but chose opposite sides.

That was the big question of their generation, wasn't it? Few got an A.

Not Reagan, who recognized one Evil Empire but not another; still less Hiss, who recognized one EE but not the other, only in reverse.

To David Cohen: A witch-hunt is fine if it catches witches. But a lot more besides witches went up in smoke. Like the State Department's Far Eastern Bureau, and as a result no one in the government got decent information about that part of the world for 20 years and more.

To Jim Hamlen: The Berrigans were not spies in the context we are discussing. There were plenty of Leftists (Berrigans, SDS, Fonda) who supported the Communists but they did so openly.

To Tom Corcoran: my source is "The Sword and the Shield" by Christopher Andrews and Vasily Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin was basically a KGB archivist who boosted decades worth of KGB files in 1992. It covers pretty much everything significant the KGB did from 1925 to the mid 1980s.

Noel:

They were communists and the info they produced was no better then than now.

Harry:

Reagan is actually the only one to recognize all three isms as evil and to recognize Judeo-Christianity as the one good empire.

Orrin:

You are in factual error. They were not Communists but predicted Mao's victory or Chiang. Getting rid of them was a matter of shooting the messenger.

Noel Erinjeri

Noel:

Were

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9311

Reagan sat out WW II and confirmed what some of us suspected when at Bitberg he revealed that he just didn't get it.

Like a lot of people I could name -- some who post here often -- he was so mesmerized by the evil of the one that he was willing to overlook the evil of the other.

Few in his generation did not do also, at least among so-called leaders. He had plenty of company, all of it bad, but bad company was his stock in trade, wasn't it?

Orrin:

Did you really link to an Ann Coulter "article" as evidence? I may as well quote Michael Moore's or Noam Chomsky's "books" as to the motivations of President Bush.

Noel Erinjeri

Noel:

I think Chomsky is generally right about causes. He's just on the wrong side of the fight.

Harry:

Priceless. Reagan served in WWII and was a big FDR/Truman supporter. Those presidents, by their failure to settle with both isms at the same time, made it necessaryu to rehabilitate Germany and make it a valued ally against communism. Forty years after that, at the Chancellor's request, Mr. Reagan recognized that Germany too had been devastated by war. In his speeches there he commited America to the universal struggle against all isms that his predecessors had not understood. That shows he was a closet Nazi?

Orrin:

Chomsky is so full of it that if they exported him to a medium sized 3rd world country he would cover their fertilizer needs for a year. With Moore, it's probably two years, as he is not a brilliant linguist.

Which does nothing to address my main point, that citing Ann Coulter as a historical authority is like applying for a job as a physicist by having claimed to have watched every episode of Star Trek.

Noel Erinjeri

Noel Erinjeri:

Hey, when you need your warp nacelles repaired, or to re-calibrate your phaser arrays, who are you gonna call ?

Reagan signed up for the cavalry in 1937 so he could ride horsies on the public dime and fought the Battle of Culver City.

It takes more than that for me to consider him a member of the Greatest Generation.

When Carter was elected, I thought we had seen the last of the World War II vets in the highest office.

I was wrong.

Not because of the next president, who sat out the war and appears not to have noticed it was going on, but because of sudden appearance of Bush I.

If you'd asked me in 1976 whether we'd still have had World War II vets seriously in contention for the presidency in 1996, I'd have said you were nuts, but I'd have been wrong, wouldn't I?

Harry:

He served during WWII as well, or are you saying that the failure to actually see combat discredits one's service? If so, the greatest generation is rather tiny.