The Venona Project

As every fan of spy movies knows, cryptography is an important skill for an intelligence agency to have. Various wars have hinged on codes, and someone's ability or inability to break them. The Cold War is no exception. The Venona Project was a big code-breaking effort which informed the American government about dozens of Soviet spies who had been planted inside the State Department and other agencies. Historian Ann Coulter writes:

The Venona Project was begun in 1943 by Colonel Carter Clarke, chief of the U.S. Army's Special Branch, in response to rumors that Stalin was negotiating a separate peace with Hitler. Only a few years earlier, the world had been staggered by the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Unaccountably, Colonel Clarke did not share President Roosevelt's trust in the man FDR called "Uncle Joe." Cloaked in secrecy, Clarke set up a special Army unit to break the Soviet code. Neither President Roosevelt nor President Truman was told about the Venona Project. This was a matter of vital national security: The Democrats could not be trusted.

Historians have hotly debated the degree to which FDR was taken in by Stalin. FDR did manage to talk Stalin into at least making the gesture of preparing to engage the Japanese in a militarily significant way, and this may have sped up Japan's timetable for surrender. So maybe FDR wasn't always easily fooled. Truman also had his doubts about Stalin's integrity. Yet both presidents were lulled into thinking that Stalin's word, or his signature on a document like a treaty, had meaning. It was clear that Stalin would say anything, or sign any document, while planning to do the very opposite.

The Soviets used a code that was, in theory, unbreakable. But by the war's end, the Americans had cracked it. And when the Venona cryptographers read the Soviet cables they discovered something far more sinister than Stalin's war plans: The Roosevelt administration was teeming with paid agents of Moscow. Stalin's handmaidens held strategic positions at the White House, the State Department, the War Department, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Treasury Department.

This discovery provoked a crisis. People had been appointed or hired into positions which gave them access to sensitive information - people whose stated and sworn objective was to destroy the United States. Men and women were working in departments and making decisions about national policy - men and women who were attempting to implement a plan for a communist takeover in America, a takeover which would have eliminated political freedom as we know it.

Given the large volume of communications between Soviet agents in the United States and their headquarters in Moscow, "only a small number of the intercepted Soviet cables have been decoded. But even that much proves" that America was in grave danger. "The U.S. government had a major Communist infestation problem." In hindsight, FDR's and Truman's "gravest error was in underestimating the problem of Communist subversion."

A Bitter Harvest from the New Deal

The pain of the Great Depression made people willing to go along with FDR's New Deal. In hindsight, they probably began regretting it soon thereafter. National debt went up immediately, as did the deficit; but the unemployment rate didn't go down. But the tax burden to pay for it all began to crush Americans, both rich and poor. It has been doing so ever since. On January 18, 1960, almost thirty years after the New Deal began to take millions from American wage-earners, the New York Times printed, on its front page, that:

The President estimated that the expenditures of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the fiscal year 1961 (including Social Security payments) would exceed $15,000,000. Thus the current results of New Deal legislation are Federal disbursements for human welfare in this country second only to national defense.

The huge amounts of money - back then, $15,000,000 was a lot of money - were spent in the name of "human welfare," but in fact only created misery in society. The net result of these expenditures was an increase in the divorce rate, the numbers of children born illegitimately, and the numbers of chronically unemployed. FDR's programs also created a dependency mentality, in which people saved less earnestly for their retirement, assuming that the government would pay for it all.

In the 1960's, LBJ's "Great Society" programs would extend the New Deal mentality, and Senator Barry Goldwater would note:

The currently favored instrument of collectivization is the Welfare State. The collectivists have not abandoned their ultimate goal - to subordinate the individual to the State - but their strategy has changed. They have learned that Socialism can be achieved through Welfarism quite as well as through Nationalization. They understand that private property can be confiscated as effectively by taxation as by expropriating it. They understand that the individual can be put at the mercy of the State - not only by make the State his employer - but by divesting him of the means to provide for his personal needs an by giving the State the responsibility of caring for those needs from cradle to grave. Moreover, they have discovered - and here is the critical point - that Welfarism is much more compatible with the political processes of a democratic society. Nationalization ran into popular opposition, but the collectivists feel sure the Welfare State can be erected by the simple expedient of buying votes with promises of "free" hospitalization, "free" retirement pay and so on ... The correctness of this estimate can be seen from the portion of the federal budget that is now allocated to welfare, an amount second only to the cost of national defense.

Senator Goldwater correctly projected the future tactics of certain politicians. Taxes would continue to increase, as would national debt, yearly federal deficits, and the promises made to care for various needs. In fact, domestic spending for such projects would soon exceed defense spending, and eventually the government would spend, annually, twice or thrice on domestic welfare what it spent on defense. Yet the class of urban poor and chronically unemployed would only grow with each new spending initiative. Even when well-intentioned, such programs only harm those they are supposed to help.

How to Create Economic Growth

The economy of any nation is cyclic - ups and downs happen over and over again. History shows us that if we simply wait it out, the downs will eventually pass, and we will return to the ups. But sometimes people grow impatient - understandably, given the human cost of the downs - and want the government to “do something” to “fix it.” But well-intentioned attempts to intervene in the economy can only make things worse, never better. Senator Barry Goldwater wrote:

Let us, by all means, remember the nation's interest in reducing taxes and spending. The need for “economic growth” that we hear so much about these days will be achieved, not by the government harnessing the nation's economic forces, but by emancipating them. By reducing taxes and spending we will not only return to the individual the means with which he can assert his freedom and dignity, but also guarantee to the nation the economic strength that will always be its ultimate defense against foreign foes.

Whenever we hear the calls for “more jobs” or “job creation” or “better jobs” - whether in the 1960's (when Goldwater wrote) or in the present - the answer is always to reduce regulation, reduce taxation, and let creative people explore new ideas in industry and business. Steve Jobs was allowed to create the iPod, iPhone, and iPad because of this economic freedom. Future creative geniuses will be able to continue such artistry only if government gets out of the way and lets them work.

Economics in the 1960's

President Lyndon Johnson, with the cooperation of a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress, created two of the nation's biggest spending schemes: the war in Vietnam, and the "Great Society" programs. These big-ticket items created deficit spending and debt which would continue for decades. Looking back, we can see the fiscal disaster, but at the time it was not so obvious. There were some people at the time who saw clearly the looming financial disaster which LBJ's programs would cause. Senator Barry Goldwater wrote:

Here is an indication of how taxation currently infringes on our freedom. A family man earning $4,500 a year works, on average, twenty-two days a month. Taxes, visible and invisible, take approximately 32% of his earnings. This means that one-third, or seven whole days, of his month labor goes for taxes. The average American is therefore working one third of the time for the government: a third of what he produces is not available for his own use but is confiscated and used by other who have not earned it. Let us note that by this measure, the U.S. is already one third "socialized." The late Senator Taft made the point often. "You can socialize," he said "just as well by a steady increase in the burden of taxation beyond the 30% level we have already reached as you can can by government seizure. The very imposition of heavy taxes is a limit on a man's freedom."

From our later perspective, an annual salary of $4,500 may seem small, but the percentage numbers are still relevant. If we add together sales tax, income tax, property tax, gasoline tax, cell phone tax, and dozens of other taxes on everything from beer to airplane tickets, we realize that the government is taking a greater and greater portion of every working American's income. We're feeling the pain of such taxes now, but the seeds of this suffering were planted in the 1960's.

Pondering MLK

Books, articles, and movies have been produced in great quantity, narrating and honoring the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The amazing amount of material produced about him is appropriate: he is pivotal in the history of the twentieth century. Almost everything that can be said or written about him has already been said or written.

We might ask about the causes of his success - both during his short lifetime, and in the decades afterward. There were many leaders in the civil rights movement; few rose to his heights during their time on this planet, and few have endured in human memory so vividly after they left it. What was it about MLK which made him so distinctively impactive? Historian William F. Buckley, Jr., writes:

What moved so many about what King had had to say was its ground, not in constitutional exegesis, but in Christian dogma. Equality under the law, in America, had been a focus constitutional evolution - blacks, women, minors. The Constitution, as everybody knows, implicitly condoned slavery. The approach to equality continues to be progressive. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, Plessy vs. Ferguson authorized a prolongation of inequality, Brown vs. Board of Education reversed Plessy, the Civil Rights Acts parsed equality. The ground of this evolution has been a religiously transcendent view of human beings, in the absence of which the bell curve is king.

In the absence of spiritual view of humans, in which each human life carries equal worth and dignity, we are content to value some people as more valuable than others. If we adopt MLK's worldview, we demand that every human being be acknowledged, in Jefferson's words, as having a "sacred and undeniable" right to life and liberty.

"The lights that motivated Martin Luther King (by his own words) are" essentially spiritual: he was a clergyman, who earned his paycheck preaching the New Testament. He challenged America to live up to the words of its founding documents, but in order to issue such a challenge, he stood on a still deeper form of foundation. This is what gives MLK's enduring legacy such power.

Electoral Disconnect

More than once it has happened that voters elect a candidate, even if his views aren't theirs. Such instances illuminate the question of how voters cast their ballots - do they elect the candidate as an individual, or do they see him as a bundle of issues?

In the 1964 presidential election, voters overwhelmingly rejected Barry Goldwater, and elected Lyndon Johnson. Yet the polling data revealed that voters were more likely to agree with Goldwater on major national questions. Historian William F. Buckley, Jr., reports that

no less than 94 percent of the American public believed that the government had been lax in security ... 88 percent agreed that prayer in schools should be reinstated ... sixty-four percent believed that Goldwater was uniquely serious about wanting to curb extremist groups; 60 percent felt that government power should be trimmed; and, again, 60 percent agreed that state welfare without stringent eligibility rules encouraged laziness. A solid 50 percent believed that Goldwater would do a better job than Johnson on the issue of morality and corruption in government.

So most voters agreed with Goldwater, but voted for LBJ. Why? Possible answers: the 94% statistic about security may have overstated the public's sentiment in the wake of Walter Jenkins scandal. Johnson had been coy on the school prayer issue, simply deferring to the Constitution's separation of powers rather than expressing a concrete view. In recent legislative matters, Johnson had departed from his segregationist views long enough to endorse the 1964 Civil Rights Act during an election year; Goldwater had departed from his integrationist views long enough to cripple his political capital by opposing the same legislation, not in principle, but on a technicality.

It was not the first time, nor the last, that the American voters would choose a candidate with whom they disagreed and rejected a candidate with whom they largely agreed. These are the cases which keep campaign managers employed.

Breaking Ranks

Occasionally in the history of politics we see an individual who decides to move in a direction opposite to his party - whether out of conscience or out of cold calculation: someone who chooses to do the antithesis of what his party is doing.

The modern civil rights movement in the United States produced a dizzying array of legislation: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was followed by The Civil Rights Act of 1960, and the same for 1964 and 1968. In addition, there was The Voting Rights Act of 1965, and numerous other bills introduced into the House of Representatives and into the Senate during these years.

All of these pieces of legislation had one thing in common: they were carried through Congress by the votes of Republicans. The Democrat party had its power base in the Old South, or the Deep South, and was firmly segregationist. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, for example, had the votes of 97% of the Republicans in the Senate, while a group of Democrat Senators worked against it.

But there were exceptions: Senator Barry Goldwater, a Republican from Arizona, joined with the Democrats in the Senate in opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We'll probably never know whether he did this out of personal conviction, or as a political strategy: he was running for president at the time, and perhaps hoped to get Democrats to vote for him, if he voted against the Civil Rights Act.

In any case, his fellow Republicans were dismayed. The political party of Abraham Lincoln had maintained its record of supporting African-American civil rights for more than a century; Goldwater would be a blemish on the party's record if he joined the Democrats in the filibustering and obstructionism. Rather than help Goldwater, his choice would actually hurt his chances of becoming president. Historian William F. Buckley, Jr., recalls:

But it mattered that there was continuing, even hardening, opposition to Goldwater's voting position on the Civil Rights Act then before Congress. Only five other Republicans had announced their opposition to the bill, which would come up for a vote later in June.

The response to Goldwater's decision was harmful to his presidential aspirations. The informal and unwritten power structure in Congress had left the Democrats in control for decades, allowing Jim Crow laws to flourish in the South. The Republicans, a large minority in Congress, had developed a successful tactic by persuading a few Democrats to vote with the GOP on civil rights bills, creating a coalition large enough to vote them into law:

The Democrats' leverage over Congress had been achieved, over several decades - including the decades of Franklin Delano Roosevelt - by the most artful dissimulation in American political history. The Democratic Party was hailed as the party of reform, of social conscience, the progressive vessel of a modern and permanently altered nation born with the New Deal. For two decades the Democrats' life and strength had depended critically on the party's hold on the U.S. Senate. And this had been effected with the compliance of a dozen Southern senators given power by the rules of seniority. And all of them were agents of the Jim Crow Southern tradition.

The electorate was waking up to the irony that the political party which labeled itself 'progressive' was in fact the party which had kept segregation firmly in place - the voters were realizing that the Democrat party, hailed as the compassionate party, was in fact the party which instituted and maintained Jim Crow laws after the Republicans lost their influence in the South at the end of the Reconstruction era.

As a heightened awareness of civil rights arose among the public, the Democrats were in an awkward position. Within their ranks were the staunchest segregationists, yet in the searching light of public opinion, they needed to be seen as promoting equal opportunity. Thus it was that LBJ saw fit to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which many in his own party opposed.

What they faced now, with Lyndon Johnson reborn, was a looming transformation by the Civil Rights Act. In the spring of 1964 it lay in the bowels of Congress like a fetus teeming with life, but not yet quite born. It was ardently backed by President Johnson, whose backing was all the more eloquent for his historical anti-civil-rights legislative and executive devices. But today he was the principal champion of a bill that would assert a federal right to seek out discrimination in every quarter of Southern life and to harness the dormant engines of the federal government to fight such discrimination. It would bring to life equality before the law in the little courthouses of the South which, pleading states' rights, had for so long devised means of frustrating the liberal passions of the high-minded.

The complexities abound: President Johnson was now supporting the type of civil rights legislation he had previously opposed; he was now in conflict with members of his own party. Goldwater, on the other hand, was now opposing the legislation which his party supported. LBJ, a renegade Democrat, was opposing his own party by supporting the civil rights legislation; Goldwater, a renegade Republican, was opposing his own party by opposing the civil rights legislation.

Whether LBJ and Goldwater were acting out of calculation or conviction, the results of history are clear. Goldwater lost the support of many in his own party, and so lost his chance to become president. LBJ gained momentary plausibility as a supporter of civil rights, but over time failed to persuade the voters that he was a true champion of equality for Blacks.

The lesson is that one must not only be right, but be right consistently.