BOOKS
697
significant American intellectuals who willingly participated in the 1949
Waldorf "peace" conference organized by the Party - from Norman
Mailer to Lillian Hellman - to have a glimpse ofjust how important the
CPUSA was - even after the start of the Cold War.
It
may be hard to accept that once-hated enemies on the right were
more correct about the Communists than some anti-Communist liberals.
But the beginning of political wisdom is the acceptance of truth, as hard
as it is to take. And it is the great merit of this startling volume of doc–
uments offered to us by Harvey Klehr, John Haynes, and Fridrikh Firsov
that it allows us, for the first time, to look at the documentation of
which we have long been deprived, and put an end once and for all to
the spurious debate about the supposed hidden merits of American
Communists. "The opening of the Comintern's archives," the authors
conclude, "frees us all from the cave" in which we had been trapped,
and like the ex-Communist defectors, allows us to see things in their true
light. The cave to which the authors refer is the one of anti-anti-Com–
munism, whose practitioners believe, as the authors put it, that "concern
about domestic Communism in the late 1940s and 1950s was without
justification and constituted an authoritarian, anti-democratic attack on
a movement whose only sin was to dissent from prevailing norms." What
Klehr and his colleagues have proven is that the prevailing academic
consensus about American Communism is totally false. American Com–
munism was not a "normal part of American political life." It was, in
reality, an extension of Soviet politics impacted upon the American
landscape. Undoubtedly, the revisionists who have done so much over
the years to mythologize and romanticize American Communists will
continue in their endeavors. Their task, thankfully, will be next to im–
possible if the documentation in this volume is honestly taken into con–
sideration.
RONALD RADOSH
