. Under Roosevelt/Truman, communists had free rein in Washington.
Seems some things never change.
Some reminders of the period under discussion:
11. ". .... original source archives that have come to light in recent years suggest that,
if anything, McCarthy understated the breadth of Soviet infiltration. These include
...the revelations by the former KGB Chief Oleg Gordievsky, who in conjunction with the Cambridge intelligence expert Christopher Andrew, began exposing the scope of Soviet penetration in 1990, even before the USSR collapsed;
...the U.S. intelligence community’s
Venona decryptions that began becoming public in the mid-1990s and were summarized in breathtaking detail by Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel;
...the investigative work of Jerrold and Leona Schecter, who traced the flow of
Venona revelations into the Truman White House, beginning as early as 1945;
...the former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who
smuggled his files out of Moscow in 1992 (and who, in conjunction with Christopher Andrew, found astonishing the apathy of American historians regarding the KGB’s influence operations);
... the groundbreaking scholarship of John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr on the history of
Communist espionage and the mulish determination of the academy not to notice it;
...the
voluminous evidence of American treason on Moscow’s behalf amassed by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev; the files of FBI investigations and congressional hearings on
Communist infiltration that have recently been declassified; and so on."
Red herrings by Andrew C. McCarthy - The New Criterion
It is well know that Roosevelt simply chuckled about Soviet spies in his administration....but the above paints Truman into the same red corner.