Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Carl Bernstein vs. The FBI

By Alex Ferguson  (originally written and submitted September 13, 2018)
www.conservativecannonade.org

Editor's Note: The delay in publishing this work which was expertly written by my radio co-host, Alex Ferguson, was due to nothing more than the work getting buried under a pile of other work on my desk.  However, the delay turns out to be fortuitous, because now the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, and other leftist madness that has emerged, as we approach the mid-term elections, is behind us, and with our 20/20 hindsight, we can more easily recognize the parallels between Carl Bernstein's story, and today's Democrats (especially of late). For those not familiar, Carl Bernstein is an American investigative journalist and author.  He was a reporter for The Washington Post in 1972, and he teamed up with Bob Woodward to provide much of the original news reporting on the Watergate scandal.  In the article below, the President of the United States that the author states Bernstein helped destroy was Richard M. Nixon.

The Deep State's ability to control the information we citizens rely on is far greater than we imagine.  For instance, in 1945, American cryptographers working on the Venona project broke the code then in use by Soviet espionage agents.  Our code-breakers only managed to decipher 10% or so of these messages to and from Moscow, but that was enough to identify some 200 spies in the Roosevelt Administration, many at the highest levels.

This information remained hidden for fifty years, until Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan released it in 1995.  That was twenty-three years ago, and yet not one in fifty educated Americans can identify the term "Venona", let alone explain its significance.  Its significance, however, is, and was, enormous.  The entire anti-Vietnam War movement, together with the left-wing counter-culture that grew out of it, were dependent upon the belief that the Red Scare was a right-wing fraud.

Dozens of would-be writers became successful muckrakers based on this misinformation.  Prior to the revelations of 1995, they ran wild with anti-American, pro-socialist slander and libel.  A prominent example would be Carl Bernstein, whose 1989 book, Loyalties; A Son's Memoir, is a perfect example of the genre.

Bernstein, having co-written a couple of Watergate books with Bob Woodward, looked around frantically for a subject that would establish him as a major writer in his own right.  The best he could come up with was a description of what it was like growing up in a Communist household during the "Red Scare."

We are not talking about some dalliance, here.  Bernstein makes it very clear that, since they emigrated from Russia, his entire extended family was dedicated to the most extreme variety of Bolshevism (Only Uncle Itzel favored socialism over Communism).

His grade school was "listed on the Attorney General's roster of subversive organizations for the year 1951, the first year I was enrolled." (p. 40)
"My Bar Mitzvah came and went.  I sat on a chair that resembled a throne, elevated from the congregation, among them the pillars of Washington radicalism, most of them, like my own parents, Jews who weren't religious." (p. 141)
"The FBI was across the street, taking down license numbers."

Between them, his parents' FBI file runs 2,500 pages. According to The House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), his mother, Sylvia, "was a member of the ... Communist Political Association ... She was transferred to the underground club of the Communist Party."  (p. 34)  "I was transferred to the underground because of Dad's position in the union." (p. 108)

And, what was Dad's position in the union?  Alfred Bernstein was Director of Negotiation for the United Federal Workers of America.  In that capacity, he litigated some 500 loyalty cases, winning 80% of them.  How would it look if the litigator's wife was found to be a card-carrying Communist?

Well, in the fullness of time, she was found out, took the Fifth, and got her picture on the front page of the Washington Daily News ("D.C. Housewife Takes Fifth") (p. 33)

You have to weed these old "tell-all" books like a garden of mandrakes.  You file the documented admissions and discard the self-serving denials.  For instance, Alfred Bernstein goes to great lengths to assure Carl that his Party membership was entirely harmless.  It threatened no one, he averred.  For example, page 81 is full of assurances that the Communist Party had no desire to interfere in the American government (let alone, overthrow it).  And yet, on page 191, we find this excerpt from Alfred's FBI file:
On 3/13/44 Bernstein, then a Master Sergeant in the Air Corps, was present at the home of Louise Bransten.  Bransten was a confident {sic} of numerous Soviet Intelligence agents including Gregon Kheifits who was the West Coast director of Soviet intelligence in the United States for several years.
Now many would answer that this is simply guilt-by-association. Fine, but the Venona intercepts, together with tons of other evidence that has poured in over the years, establish conclusively that the Rosenberg network was instrumental in delivering the atomic bomb's secrets to Stalin in time for him to order Kim Ill Sung to attack South Korea in 1950.  Note that Stalin died in 1953.  Without their help, Russia would never have been able to produce an atomic bomb prior to Stalin's demise.  Without the nuclear cover they provided, there would have been no Korean War.  33,000 Americans died in that pointless conflict, and the American Communist Party deserves the lion's share of the blame.
"I cannot say precisely how old I was when the Rosenbergs became a presence in our house.  There were a ... series of names actually: Emanuel Bloch, Helen Sobell, Ethel Weichbrod, Michael and Robbie [Rosenberg], others.... Bloch was the Rosenberg's lawyer; he and Morton Sobell's wife, Helen, came to visit us.  Sobell had been convicted with the Rosenbergs.  My mother and her friend Ethel Weichbrod organized the Washington Committee to Secure Justice for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg." (p. 99)
"Abe Bloom made a speech -- Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, the Cold War, 'this monstrous frame-up.'" (p. 100)  All of which would be fine if it weren't for all that pesky evidence that has been showing up over the past seventy years or so.  We know for certain now that knowledge of the half dozen Soviet spy rings operating in the Roosevelt Administration was common among leftists during, preceding and following WWII.  For the Communist lawyers to claim any level of ignorance is nothing short of despicable.

For little Carl Bernstein, whose "first memory of the White House is from a picket line," (p. 101) things were much more personal: "All the lights around Osining had dimmed when they threw the switch.  I shook and cried uncontrollably that night, can still summon the terror -- and the fury ... the utter despair." (p. 102)

"To a child, the connection was unavoidable: if they could be executed, what was to prevent the execution of one's own parents, particularly one's own mother." (p. 101)

So, now this overrated "red diaper baby," who supported his parents' treasonous collusion with Russia ("I am proud of the choices they made") and destroyed an American president during time of war, is lecturing us on the subject of loyalty.

Warning from Alfred Bernstein: "I am worried about the kind of book you're going to write about cleaning up McCarthy.  The problem is everybody said he was a liar; you're saying he was right....because all he was saying was that the system was loaded with Communists.  And he was right." (p. 79)

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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