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From Rough Edges, James E. Rogan, 2004

. . . Like most young people of that era, I saw the long-concluded Vietnam War as a quagmire. Unlike many of its protesters, I came from a pro-military, Uncle Jack-revering family—and I retained those values. I thought our mistake in Vietnam was that we ignored General Douglas MacArthur�s sensible prescription for war: �There is no substitute for victory." I agreed with Uncle Jack, who fought in a world war, Korea, and Vietnam: American soldiers should �go in, kick the [x] out of the enemy, and come home alive.� U.S. troops shouldn�t be deployed in combat unless they�re sent in to win. With Berkeley�s open hostility to anything military, my pro-military bent alienated me from the politically correct [?] line. When I once mentioned in class that I tried to enlist post-Vietnam, classmates hissed me. While student protesters clamored to have ROTC booted off campus, I enrolled as a civilian in a few ROTC military history and military science classes as a show of support, and because of genuine academic interest. My contemporaries thought this all freakish: They questioned my liberal credentials, and I questioned their sense.

When it came to raw militancy, my classmates were mere pikers compared to some on the faculty. One kept a framed picture of Karl Marx in his office; another hung posters lionizing Angela Davis and the Oakland Black Panthers. In lecture halls, professors treated students to the wonders of the Soviet command economy, the genius of the welfare state, and the patriotism of Alger Hiss. Classroom analysis of Republicans tended to be more cartoonish than analytical: Gerald Ford? Dumb. Nixon? Crooked. Goldwater? Nutty. Reagan? Nuttier, Dead Republican presidents fared no better: �Taft? Too fat. Coolidge? Too silent. Harding? Too horny. All of this sounded a bit off kilter, but since the faculty was mostly liberal and (presumably) Democrat, to me it still meant their hearts were with the little guy. That made it easier to overlooked their academic bias.

Rough edges : my unlikely road
from welfare to Washington / James E. Rogan.
New York : Regan Books, 2004, pages 116-7.

As of 2005 : is one to blame �The Republicans� for ruining Woodrow Wilson�s League of Nations ?

Is one to blame �The Democrats� 2005 for Harry Hopkins, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, Klaus Fuchs, etc. ?

The latter might seem more nearly true ; did not Dean Acheson, for example, try to link the defense of Hiss with the welfare of the Democratic Party U.S.A as a party ?

But the issue probably was, rather : who exactly were the hoaxers, and who exactly were the hoaxees.

But yesterday a title happened into my hands, �Two Democracies� by some Edmund Wilson (possibly a pseudonym), published in the early 1930�s. The two �democracies� belaboured in the text were the U.S. and, guess what you might — the Soviet Union (1930�s).

On my view of the text : obscene communistic propaganda, couched in a somewhat polite language, published broadly in the U.S.A. 1930�s by the author of a number of other titles.

I do not suppose that my interpretation be "objective". Please, the reader, examine the volume, which might (like a considerable quantity of such literature) still litter the shelves of many a library. Does this look like there having been no communist conspiracy present in the U.S. (et caetera) during those times — and after ?

Lenin�s stated (in 1919) policy was : �Join them ; bore from within, etc.�. Apparently, the Democratic Party U.S.A. had been affected more visibly than �the other party�. (That does not mean, by the way, the �the other party� was not affected or even infiltrated).

That could have been a mere chance occurrence : the Kremlin had lost, for a time, in China in the late 1920�s. Were it not the Democratic Party who was in power in the U.S.A. 1930�s, the other party could have been just as well concentrated upon by the Kremlin and infested with spies and, what seems was not any less dangerous, �ideologues�.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the Democratic Party with its �party-line� was the more fertile ground for spreading the Bolshevik �world revolution� (progressive world ruin more like it). Still, the problem was never¹ inherent with "the Democrats� ; it only become pronounced in the 1930�s. Or so it seems.

From the point of view of the American public, these issues were often reduced to the �two party�-system contest. As a matter of the historic record, the actual contest was between those people in the world who had preferred no �communist paradise� and the Kremlin-based racket who had intended to take over the entire planet, by their own statements.

That issue was larger than the �two-party� contest in the US, yet it seems that this has been often overlooked in the context of said two-party contests within the U.S.

At stake was (and is) the security of the entire planet, one might remark. "America first" does not mean turning the blind eye to what might be happening elsewhere. The Soviet agents, moles, saboteurs, provocateurs, etc., had been either sent or managed from outside.

W. Paul Tabaka.

    ¹ The problem could not have been inherent with "the Democrats" because the problem in question did not exist before 1900. — (WPT).

Rogan, James. Title(s) Rough edges : my unlikely road from welfare to Washington / James E. Rogan. Edition 1st ed. Publisher New York : Regan Books, c2004. Paging xiii, 333 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm. Notes Includes index.