On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 20:25:47 -0700 (PDT), Gautam Mukunda: <snip> > I think that's a little optimistic. A simple > historical "what-if". What if FDR had died in, say, > mid-1944 instead of mid-1945? This is eminently > plausible - his health was poor throughout 1944. If > he had, Henry Wallace would have become President of > the United States, and presumably won reelection in > 1944. Henry Wallace had, at one point in his career, > named the people he would have picked for several > senior positions in his Cabinet. We now know his > choices for both Secretary of State and Secretary of > the Treasury were paid Soviet agents.
But see: Roger J. Sandilands, "Guilt by Association? Lauchlin Currie's Alleged Involvement with Washington Economists in Soviet Espionage" Boughton and Sandilands, "Politics and the Attack on FDR's Economists: >From the Grand Alliance to the Cold War" Economist Brad DeLong looks into this and concludes the evidence is not there although he does admit they were "security risks." "Up until recently the public evidence that White was a spy for Stalin was that Whittaker Chambers said so. But Whittaker Chambers was a very strange man--someone who sees no essential difference between Marx and Keynes; someone who said that Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin's terror made Communism not less but more dangerous; and someone who rewrote Theodore White's dispatches from WWII China to make Chiang Kai-Shek appear to be the noble, competent, and democratic Hope of China. As either a liar, a loon, or both, Chambers's unsupported statements have little credibility. It strongly looks as though he was right about Hiss (but I am told that in Blind Ambition Dean says that Nixon said that Hiss was framed), but about what else? ... "Were I on a jury, I certainly would not convict White of espionage on the basis of the evidence we have, even including VENONA. I'm not sure the evidence passes the "clear and convincing standard." Nevertheless I think that even though Boughton and Sandilands have pleaded their case well, there is enough evidence to classify White as a genuine "security risk." "There is, of course, one more point that needs to be made: If Harry Dexter White was indeed a spy for J.V. Stalin, never did a tyrant receive worse service than Stalin did from White. The post-WWII North Atlantic alliance was so strong and such a barrier to the Soviet Union primarily because post-WWII economic growth was so strong, and Harry Dexter White's work at institution-building played as large a role in laying the foundations for those Thirty Glorious Years of economic growth as anyone's. " http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000967.html Gary Denton - -- #2 on google for liberal news "I don't try harder" _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
