[lbo-talk] John McCain: Salute to a Communist - The New York Times

[Marv Gandall]

Whatever his right-wing views on most issues, John McCain has always struck me as one of the more principled and independent-minded of American politicians. Here he salutes the last known veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who died earlier this month, notwithstanding Delber Berg’s lifelong commitment to the Communist party.

McCain’s remarkable open tribute to Berg in the New York Times can also be seen, of course, as a marker of how innocuous the once powerful Communist movement and the ideals which animated it have become in the twenty-first century. Nothing remotely like McCain’s essay could have been written by an American public figure and published in a major American daily during the paranoid  era of the Cold War.


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