Sick: 'The Nation' Denies Harry Dexter White's Soviet Espionage

Well, this is fascinating, especially given the whole debate over Diana's West's American Betrayal.

It turns out Katrina vanden Heuvel's rag has published a review denying that Harry Dexter White ---- Franklin Roosevelt's man at the U.S. Treasury and Bretton Woods ---- was a Soviet mole.

Jonathan Tobin reports, at Commentary, "Portrait of Denial: ‘The Nation’ and Communist Spies":

You might think that having the most liberal president since Jimmy Carter would free The Nation from their commitment to keep fighting the old ideological battles. There are, after all, a host of contemporary arguments to engage in that, notwithstanding the weakness of the left-wing case, are not vulnerable to disproof by incontrovertible historical evidence as is the case with the delusional effort to defend White. Yet after so many years of pretending that Soviet infiltration of Washington in the 1930s and 1940s was a figment of the imagination of demagogic right-wing anti-Communists, keeping the flag of denial flying is their way of asserting that being left wing means never having to say you’re sorry.

Doing so can be dismissed as a mindless loyalty to their past as a publication, but one suspects there is also something else at work. Admitting the truth about Communist espionage doesn’t validate contemporary conservative critiques of other traditional left-wing positions on the economy like the minimum wage or the folly of socialized medicine and its forerunner, ObamaCare. But at The Nation, the notion that any cracks in what in another era would have been called party solidarity undermines all their beliefs still seems to prevail.

Why else would they bother beating the dead horse of espionage denial if not for the fact that doing so somehow bucks them up in the idea that the right is always wrong, even when it is obviously right.

Word.

Remember, with Democrats, it's always no enemies on the left, and that's to the dying end.

I wrote about this earlier, on Benn Steil definitive reporting on White as the ultimate Soviet mole, even more important than Alger Hiss. See, "Harry Dexter White, Franklin Roosevelt's Man at Bretton Woods, Was Communist Mole Who Passed State Secrets to Soviet Union."

Steil's book is here, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order.