Cold War Relics

“ by the Truman Library’s willingness to consider that president’s decisions at the dawn of the Cold War as possibly mistaken. Maybe Henry Wallace was right after all!” - Harvey Klehr

Henry A. Wallace, as a former vice president to Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Oliver Stone’s new history series.

(PORTLAND, OR) - Did you know that what started as a $100M “Victims of Communism Museum,”authorized by Congress in 1993 fizzled out into a ten-foot-high replica of the Goddess of Democracy from Tienanmen [sic] Square on a traffic island in Washington, D.C.?

That the “The Whittaker Chambers National Historic Landmark” in Westminster, Maryland is so obscure that even the county visitor center doesn’t know where it is? Or that a piece of the Berlin Wall is installed in a Las Vegas casino’s men’s room where visitors are invited to urinate on it?

Such relics intended to remind us of the evils of Communism (and the glories of capitalism) are documented in Jan Jon Wiener’s new book, How We Forgot the Cold War (University of California Press) and was recently reviewed, or reviled, by Harvey Klehr, an academic member of the dead-ender anti Communist cabal which still rides the horse that most American Communists were Soviet spies and traitors.

Klehr’s angry rant charges that Wiener offers an insufficiently anti-Communist treatment of the subject appears in the far right wing Weekly Standard, a house organ of the cabal edited by his colleague Bill Kristol. He then posted it on the cabal’s website, “Historians of American Communism,”http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/ where Klehr is on the editorial board.

The book also provides more evidence that a reconsideration of the political career of Henry Wallace is under way.

“[Jon Wiener] is delighted,” Klehr sarcastically snorts, “ by the Truman Library’s willingness to consider that president’s decisions at the dawn of the Cold War as possibly mistaken. Maybe Henry Wallace was right after all!”  The revival of interest in Wallace is also mentioned in the NYTimes' review of  Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, a ten part series starting Monday on the premium cable channel Showtime. The Times notes that in Stone’s treatment of Cold War history, “ Henry A. Wallace, the progressive who was vice president during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, is puffed up as a greater hero than Roosevelt and Churchill.”

To raise your hackles, read Klehr’s review here  http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/war-necessity_662219.html#