McCarthy in a mini
 Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, Ann
Coulter, Crown Forum: 368 pp., $26.95

By Jacob Heilbrunn, Jacob Heilbrunn is an editorial writer for The Times.

Ann Coulter is a trailblazer. In the 1990s, she paved the way for a bevy of
blond, leggy Torquemadas in miniskirts to earn notoriety on television by
denouncing feminists and Bill Clinton. "It's enough" to be impeached, she
declared in her 1998 bestseller "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "for the
president to be a pervert." Now that George Bush is president, she's widened
her assault on liberalism to include the last 50 years of American history. Her
aim is to depict not simply Clinton but liberals generally as traitors. The
result is "Treason."

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, much new scholarship has detailed the
role of American Communists and fellow travelers who spied for the Soviet Union
in the 1930s and 1940s. To some extent, it has amounted to a dotting of the i's
and crossing of the t's when it comes to the likes of Alger Hiss or Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, for example, have confirmed
that the American Communist Party really was, as Theodore Draper argued decades
ago, largely the creature of Moscow. In "The Haunted Wood," Allen Weinstein and
Alexander Vassiliev offered juicy tidbits about pro-Soviet aides to Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Anyway, as George F. Kennan observed in his memoirs, the Roosevelt
administration was unconscionably lax in ferreting out members and agents of
the Communist Party who had entered government, but the problem was largely
corrected by the late 1940s.

But Coulter, whose Web site displays a photo of her aiming a rifle from a back
porch, will have none of this. Her farrago of a book pilfers the latest
scholarship in the hopes of creating some shock and awe about an immense
liberal conspiracy that has functioned since the Roosevelt administration to
paralyze the United States. Whether her latest exercise in self-promotion will
create either is another question.

In outlining the liberal web of deceit, Coulter seeks to revive the charges
that the right made against Harry S. Truman and advisors such as Secretary of
State Dean Acheson during the early years of the Cold War. Richard Nixon
denounced the State Department as "Dean Acheson's cowardly college of communist
containment." Sen. William E. Jenner damned Acheson as the
"Communist-appeasing, Communist-protecting betrayer of America" who had lost
China to the Reds.

But no one of course was a greater enemy of Truman than Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Central to Coulter's case is that McCarthy had it right. Drawing on Arthur
Herman's fanciful biography, "Joseph McCarthy," Coulter dispenses with any
pretense of scholarly throat-clearing and objectivity to announce that "The
myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. The
portrayal of Senator Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent
lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism." Far from cowering in fear from McCarthy,
liberals were besmirching his name and wrecking the ability of the nation to
defend itself from the traitors who had infiltrated the government. Hiss is
thus trotted out as Exhibit A of liberal perfidy — as though anyone but a few
hapless souls still cling to the belief in his rectitude. (Incidentally,
Coulter grossly inflates his importance in the State Department hierarchy,
comparing his position to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz's, when
he was, in fact, one of a number of assistants.)

In her zeal to revive the passions of a bygone era, Coulter dilates upon her
contempt for the patrician types like Acheson with his British suits and
mannerisms, claiming that they had an XXY chromosome anomaly that led to overt
treason. "Angry ethnics," she says, "like Joe McCarthy made much better
Americans." Even McCarthy's drunkenness is adduced as a sign of his virility in
contrast to Democratic effeminacy: "After a solid night of drinking, McCarthy
still was never at a loss for a clever comeback."

Jews, like Army Capt. Irving Peress, dubbed the "pink dentist" by McCarthy,
don't fare much better at Coulter's hands: "[N]eedless to say, the scrawny
pinko was also a failure as a soldier." By the time Coulter is done, Peress and
the Rosenbergs are responsible for the gulag and the Soviet nuclear threat.
Coulter's less than charitable streak also manifests itself when she refers to
an alleged Soviet operative named William Remington, who, we are told, was
"later killed with a bar of soap in prison by a patriotic inmate." Perhaps the
most bizarre passages in Coutler's book are about a harmless black code clerk
named Annie Lee Moss, who worked in the Pentagon. According to Coulter, "Moss
played the fool when she testified before McCarthy's committee." Moss said
there were other people named Annie Lee Moss in the Washington phonebook.
Coulter declares that at most there was an Anna Lee Moss and an Annie Moss as
well, constituting irrefragable evidence that "the poor put-upon washwoman was
lying."

Beyond Coulter's bargain-basement attempt at aping McCarthy is the problem that
the right was MIA before and even after World War II when it came to communism.
The GOP was isolationist. Kennan sounded the alarm about Moscow's global
ambitions. Truman launched the Cold War against the express objections of the
leader, mind you, of the Republican Party, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, who
inveighed against foreign entanglements as the road to a corrupt American
empire. Does he count as a traitor as well?

By the time she's reached the present, Coulter has drawn a straight line from
Roosevelt's perfidy to the flaccidity of liberals in confronting Islamic
totalitarianism. "[W]hen confronted with terrorists who despised both America
and the Jews," she writes, "there was no doubt whose side the left would take."
Hold on there, Ann. What about Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman, who have
decamped from the left to their own brand of neoconservatism to support the war
in Iraq? Given the scope of the conspiracy Coulter purports to have uncovered,
it is amazing that the United States not only won the Cold War but also remains
the most powerful nation in the world.

Coulter's latest jeremiad is occasioning much tut-tutting in conservative
circles. Coulter, you might say, is the alter-Iago of the movement. After Sept.
11, she was disbarred from the National Review for calling for a crusade to
convert the Muslim world forcibly to Christianity. Now, Andrew Sullivan and
others detect someone giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Her unhinged attack,
so the thinking goes, plays into liberal stereotypes about conservatives. The
real traitor, it seems, is Coulter! But conservatives may be being a little coy
in piously distancing themselves; it was Sullivan, after all, who warned of a
potential "Fifth Column" in the ranks of what he called "the decadent left" on
both coasts after Sept. 11. Sullivan may have regained his senses, but when it
comes to Coulter, what else is new? Coulter's true cause isn't conservatism but
something different. In accusing almost everyone else of treason, Coulter has
remained loyal to one thing: herself.

copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times