Thought Diggins had turned neo-con. His book from the 70's, "Up From
Communism, " on figures like Bertram Wolfe and Will Herberg is a good read.
> ...Intellectually, the Cold War began in New York City at the Waldorf
> Hotel on March 26, 1949. A conference organized by, among others, Lillian
> Hellman brought communist cultural celebrities together to defend the
> U.S.S.R. The older, more liberal Commentary carried William Barrett's
> lively account of the affair. Those who bolted from the Stalinist-
> dominated conference and started the American Committee for Cultural
> Freedom included liberals, democratic socialists and even anarchists
> (Dwight Macdonald), with no conservatives in sight. Indeed, there was
> more true, gut-felt anti-communism among Italian American, Polish
> American, Irish American and Jewish American anarchists (Carlo Tresca,
> Aldino Felicani, Max Nomad, Dorothy Day, et al.) than within the entire
> Republican Party, some of whose leaders used the issue to win elections,
> only later to shake hands with communist leaders and open up trade
> relations. As early as 1920, it was the anarchists and the liberals, Emma
> Goldman and Bertrand Russell, who first perceived the treacheries of
> Leninist communism, and in the 1920s, Max Eastman of the old Masses
> helped translate Russian documents for The New Leader to publicize the
> plight of the opposition in Stalin's Russia and make available to
> Americans the writings of Boris Souvarine and Boris Nicolaevski. The
> valiant struggle against totalitarianism became synonymous with
> democratic liberalism and the anti-communist left.
That was then. Four decades later, when Norman Podhoretz edited Commentary, he took the magazine away from the zany liberal radicalism of the '60s and, in the late '70s, liberalism became the problem -- not only the wimpy liberalism of Jimmy Carter but liberalism itself, going all the way back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and World War II. The failure of nerve to resist communist expansion, Podhoretz insisted, had its origins in America's "acquiescence" to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe toward the end of the war against Adolf Hitler. The Cold War may have begun in 1947 with Harry Truman and containment and the Marshall Plan, but "up until this point the Russians had enjoyed a free hand. They had been permitted to occupy most of Eastern Europe and to begin installing puppet regimes in one after another of the countries of the regions."
Podhoretz and sociologist Robert Nisbet claimed that FDR allowed such developments against the advice of Churchill. But in the essay "Neoconservative History," first published in The New York Review of Books and later reprinted in his A Present of Things Past, Theodore Draper insisted that "there is nothing, I repeat nothing" in the voluminous FDR- Churchill correspondence to support such a charge... <SNIP> -- Michael Pugliese American imperialism has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic. Harold Innis, 1948 http://www.monthlyreview.org/sr2004.htm