Hide Article Text (OCR)
who participated in the battle over domestic Communism from the anti- Communist side, so to speak, is why this immensely important information, which was known to a few insiders by the mid-40s, was never made public as a definitive answer to the furious contro versy Now, in a fascinating article in the June 30 issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Novak reveals a previously unsuspected footnote to history that may explain that baffling silence. Some think that President Truman was never told what the Venona Papers revealed. According to this account, General of the Army Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took personal responsibility in 1949 for insisting that Truman not be told. There is, however, another and very different account of the facts. Novak has tracked down a retired Army cryptana lyst named Oliver Kirby, who asserts that his superior, Brig. Gen. Carter Clarke, met with President Truman in the Oval Office on June 5, 1945 — just six weeks after Truman took office and told him (at the urging of Gen. George Marshall) of the Venona decryp tions then under way. But Truman was unimpressed. He didn’t understand the decoding process, and told Clarke the whole thing sounded like a fairy story. As late as 1948, when Bradley (accord ing to Kirby) informed Truman of new Venona discoveries, the president told Defense Secretary James Forrestal there were “too many unknowns” in the dis patches, and that “even if part of this is true, it would open up the whole red panic again.” Even in 1950, when Bradley told Truman that Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White were identified in Venona as Soviet spies, Truman kept his eyes firmly shut: “That goddamn stuff. Every time it bumps into us it gets bigger and bigger. It’s likely to take us down.” So the struggle over domestic Communism roared on, while Harry Truman, who (at least according to this account) knew the truth and could have ended the battle by telling it, kept the information deeply buried. A new (and Republican) administra tion took over in 1953, but how much it was told about Venona is unknown. Much of this account depends on the veracity of Oliver Kirby, whose versions of these various conversations are impossible to check. But it is a fact that Carter Clarke did talk with Harry Truman in the Oval Office on June 5, 1945, just as Kirby asserts. William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.
Newspaper Details
Xenia Daily Gazette
Xenia, Ohio, US
Fri, Aug 01, 2003
Page 4
Full Page
Clipped by
Roger M.
USA 01 Jul 2026
Other Publications Near Xenia, Ohio
Xenia Evening Gazette
Daily Gazette
Morning Republican
Evening Gazette
Xenia Daily Gazette and Torchlight
