Word: kubek
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...announced recently that it was releasing its files on the Hiss case for scholarly use, so the pursuers of that fleeting mystery will soon have a new store of ammunition. Hopefully they will make better use of it than Texan professor Anthony Kubek made of a batch of dispatches from wartime China that the Senate Judiciary Committee decided to publish three years ago. That committee, which is not in the habit of collecting scholarly information on the Far East, obtained this material in 1945 in a rather spectacular fashion. After an agent of the OSS (wartime precursor...
...mention the Amerasia case not only because it is another McCarthy-era mystery that time has not solved, but also because Kubek's contribution, along with Cedric Belfrage's The American Inquisition and Lately Thomas's When Even Angels Wept, forms a perfect Trinity of Ignorance: See No Evil, See No Good, See Nothing. By once again posing that time-eroded question--who lost China?--Kubek has oversimplified the true picture and, in the McCarthyite manner, painted portraits, portraits of heroes and villains, portraits in which all (and this, of course, is the tip-off) the subjects are Americans. Somehow...
...Kubek's essay is a transplanted period piece, but Belfrage's book is no less dated. Editor of the National Guardian and a British citizen, Belfrage was deported from the United States in 1955. He has now written a detailed but superficial chronicle of the persecution of American radicals--whom he prefers to call "heretics"--in the post-World War II, pre-New Frontier...
...died down now. We have the right to demand more than pamphlets bound between hard covers. Belfrage's book resembles Kubek's not only in its vituperative writing style, but more importantly, in the questions it chooses to ask and not ask. By writing a narrative of the American purge trials, Belfrage has opted to remain within the intellectual context of the fifties. Was Owen Lattimore the number one Soviet espionage agent in America? Did Alger Hiss maneuver the Yalta sell-out? Did the denial of a passport to W.E.B. DuBois uphold the principles or security of this nation...
...recreate a drama and "to appreciate the impact it produced on that [original] audience," perhaps he was correct to restrict his reading. But an "objective reappraisal," by this definition, is only a watered-down, flattened out version of the original story. No depth is added, no illumination attempted. Kubek and Belfrage asked the wrong questions; Thomas asks no questions...