While Ann Coulter and I, well, let's just say the honeymoon's over, ie, I don't care for most of her stuff anymore, I do have to say that she has been shown to be right over and over again in the case of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In one of her recent columns, she takes on George "Clueless" Clooney (by the way, the worst Batman of ALL time) and his film "Good Night and Good Luck." Ann shows how Hollyweird cannot produce one person unjustly accused by Joe McCarthy.
She cites how Ed Murrow was wrong in defending Laurence Duggan, who committed suicide after being questioned by the FBI. Murrow defended Duggan in his reporting, but, it turns out, Tailgunner Joe was right about Duggan. Well, not exactly. Even though Joe gets the credit, it was actually the folks in the Alger Hiss spy case, such as Richard Nixon and Whittaker Chambers, who went after Duggan. As usual, the MSM got one wrong. Way wrong.
Duggan was a Soviet spy. Here is the story from Tech Central Station:
According to the account of Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (1999), when in 1937 a man named Ignatz Reiss broke from Stalin's secret service, a pair of KGB assassins hunted down the defector in Switzerland and killed him to stop him from blowing the cover of Laurence Duggan and another American official who secretly assisted the KGB out of devotion to world communism and the Soviet Union, Noel Field...
Laurence Duggan was one of several "romantic radicals" in the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s, to borrow a phrase from The Haunted Wood's chapter on Duggan. He is described there as an idealist in the cause of revolution who would not deign to take money from the Russians for risking his career to give them intelligence. The double life of the spy apparently took a severe toll. Judging from the Soviet records plumbed by Weinstein and Vassiliev, Duggan was one skittery pigeon. First there was his anxiety to protect his job, his family, and his reputation as a loyal American. Then -- and more interestingly -- there was his stricken conscience as he took in news of the bloody political purges in Moscow during the late 1930s. It bewildered and embarrassed him, his Soviet handlers wrote to headquarters, that famous Bolshevik heroes of the October Revolution were being tried and executed, one after another, as "Trotsky-fascist spies." Some of the Soviet diplomats he knew were getting recalled home and liquidated, to his horror.
Like guidance counselors fussing over a fragile high school student, Duggan's handlers conferred with Moscow repeatedly on strategies to reassure Duggan so he would not lose faith in the revolution or lose the nerve to keep serving it clandestinely. He was worth their trouble. Unlike some of the other sources in government positions in Washington, Duggan gave Moscow information it valued highly, including the U.S. Navy's data on war materiel that foreign governments were ordering from manufacturing firms in the United States. He did beg off for certain periods, but Borodin would coax him into resuming, into the mid-1940s, his pilfering of official information.
After years of betraying the people he worked with at the State Department, Duggan finally had to leave government, amid suspicions that he was a security risk. He returned to New York, first to a United Nations job and then to take the helm of the Institute of International Education. Then, the Hiss case broke; the FBI knocked on the door of the Duggan home in Scarsdale; and the fear and even perhaps the shame may have welled up in Laurence Duggan past all enduring.
Ann gives us more:
Well, now we know the truth. Decrypted Soviet cables and mountains of documents from Soviet archives prove beyond doubt that Lawrence Duggan was one of Stalin's most important spies. "McCarthyism" didn't kill him; his guilt did.
During the height of the Soviet purges in the mid-'30s, as millions of innocents were being tortured, exiled and killed on Stalin's orders, Murrow's good pal Duggan was using his position at the State Department to pass important documents to the Soviets. The documents were so sensitive, Duggan had to return the originals to the State Department before the end of the day. Some were so important, they were sent directly to Stalin and Molotov.
On at least one occasion, Murrow's dear friend Duggan sat with his Soviet handler for an hour as the handler photographed 60 documents for the motherland. In other words, Duggan was the kind of disloyal, two-faced, back-stabbing weasel you rarely see outside of the entertainment industry. (He certainly was perceptive, that Murrow.)
All this time, people Duggan knew personally were being falsely accused and executed back in the Soviet Union. Duggan expressed concern about Stalin's purges with his Soviet handler, but he didn't stop spying.
So, as with Dan Rather and Co., Big Media got it wrong as usual. Was McCarthy a great person? Certainly not. A showman and prima donna? Quite possibly. Did his anticommunism kill anyone? No. Which is more than we can say about who Laurence Duggan was working for.
But, that doesn't stop George Clueless and the rest of the Hollyweird Elite and the MSM from talking about a Black Cloud of Fascism during the McCarthy years. As usual, the liberal mantra is followed: don't let the truth get in the way of a good smear.
