The Russian hacking has been rightfully viewed as an attack by the Putin government on our political system. Liberals and commentators on the American left have been particularly vociferous, hoping that it might delegitimize the Trump presidency even before it began by making the public believe that if not for the hacking of the DNC, Hillary Clinton may have won the election.
But there was a time starting in the beginning days of the Cold War, and continuing for decades, when leftists and liberals wanted the Soviets to interfere in our politics to elect and pressure Democrats to adopt pro-Soviet policies.
The man the Russians sought first to help was Henry A. Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of Commerce. Wallace became the first public figure to oppose Harry Truman’s “get-tough policy” with the Soviets, which he adopted after it became clear that the Soviets were seeking to expand their empire to control Eastern Europe, not to reach a road to peace through negotiations with the United States. Back in 1943, Wallace already had made his views clear in a speech in which he said that “fascist interests motivated largely by anti-Russian bias” were trying to “get control of our government.”
In October of 1945, while he was still secretary of Commerce, Wallace secretly met in Washington, D.C. with Anatoly Gorsky, the station chief of the NKGB (forerunner of the KGB.) KGB files show that Wallace told Gorsky that he wanted to share the secrets of the a-bomb with the Soviets, complained that Truman was being influenced by an “anti-Soviet group” in government that wanted the Anglo-Saxon bloc to have dominance in the world, and that he hoped that the Soviet Union could help Wallace’s “smaller group significantly.”
For a member of the President’s Cabinet asking the Soviets to intervene to help his side win an internal battle within the administration was more than indiscreet. It was the action of a willing tool of Moscow.
Eventually, Truman fired him in September 1946. Wallace had given a speech to a Madison Square Garden rally where, contrary to administration policy, he called for recognizing Soviet spheres of influence—in effect, occupation zones—as just and necessary. He did this while Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was in Europe, negotiating with the Soviets. Byrnes immediately told Truman that if not repudiated immediately, Wallace’s words would be taken as policy and would undermine Byrnes’ attempts to modify Soviet behavior.
In 1948, Wallace announced that he would be an independent candidate for President on a new third party, named the Progressive Party after the ticket Theodore Roosevelt ran on in 1916. Wallace’s new party was created by American Communists acting on behalf of instructions from Moscow, which told CP leaders that war with the U.S. was imminent, and that Western Communists should no longer work within Popular Front governments, and had to break and create a movement against the new anti-Soviet policies being adopted. As the independent left-wing journalist I.F. Stone wrote at the time, “If it had not been for the Communists, there would be no Progressive party.” John Gates, editor of the CP paper The Daily Worker, wrote in his memoir that the Communist Party was “most instrumental in influencing Wallace to make [the]…decision” to run.
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In the middle of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan became President, his stance towards the “Evil Empire,” as he called the Soviet Union, was a latter-day equivalent of Harry S. Truman’s tough policy towards Russia. Democrats called Reagan every name in the book, from “fascist” to “warmonger” who could bring about a nuclear war. Reagan mirrored Truman’s policy to back regimes fighting the Soviets in Europe, like the opponents of the Communists in the Greek civil war. Reagan did this by supporting the Contras in Nicaragua and opposing the attempts of local Communists to take-over Central American nations, especially El Salvador and Guatemala.
Democrats were desperate to defeat Reagan when he ran for his second term. Senator Ted Kennedy turned to the Soviet Union for help. The information was first reported in The London Times on February 2, 1992, in an article titled “Teddy, the KGB and the Top Secret File,” written by reporter Tim Sebastian, who came across it while researching Soviet Communist Party Central Archives in Moscow. American historian Paul Kengor wrote about it in his 2007 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. Despite this, many liberals still seem not to know about it.
What the London Times revealed was a 1983 KGB document, written on May 14th of that year, from KGB chief Victor Chebrikov to General Secretary Yuri Andropov. Chebrikov relayed an offer presented to the Soviet leaders by Kennedy. The headline of the message was “Special Importance.” Kennedy, Andropov said, was “very troubled” by U.S.-Soviet relations, which he said was due to “Reagan’s belligerence.” Chebrikov wrote:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/when-the-left-longed-for-russian-political-interference
