This is the latest installment in a weekly series of exclusive interviews with Dr. Paul Kengor, professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, who has just released a major book revealing how communists, from Moscow to New York to Chicago, have long manipulated America’s liberals/progressives. Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century, is based on an unprecedented volume of declassified materials from Soviet archives, FBI files, and more, and is being hailed as groundbreaking. Herb Meyer, special assistant to the CIA director from 1981-87, says that Dupes “alters our understanding of the 20th century.” Big Peace’s own Peter Schweizer calls it the “21st century equivalent” to Whittaker Chambers’ classic Witness.
In our two previous interviews (click here and here), Kengor looked at Ted Kennedy, and specifically the late senator’s confidential overtures to the Kremlin, made against both President Jimmy Carter and President Ronald Reagan. Today, Kengor considers Frank Marshall Davis, a mentor to a young man named Barack Obama.
Big Peace: Frank Marshall Davis is probably the biggest revelation in your book, given his relevance today and the materials you’ve found on him that no one else has reported, which you reproduce in the book. You show that he was an actual communist. But first, let’s establish his relationship with Barack Obama.
Kengor: Sure. In Dreams From My Father, Obama writes warmly, fondly, of his relationship with “Frank,” whose full name he wisely withheld, but whom no one, from either side of the aisle, disputes was Frank Marshall Davis.
Big Peace: How close was the relationship?
Kengor: Davis was introduced to Obama by Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who was a pal of Davis. Dunham saw the need for a father figure for his teenage grandson, whose biological father and stepfather were absent. Curiously, not many grandfathers would choose as a role model someone called to testify before the U.S. Senate for a lifetime of communist associations and for writing pro-Stalin newspaper columns, but such was the politics of Barack Obama’s grandfather.
Biographers of Davis and liberal journalists describe the relationship as close, as fatherly. I document a bunch of examples in the book, with many notes, but, to cite one, an August 2, 2008 AP profile called Davis “a constant figure in his [Obama’s] early life,” and an “important influence,” who Obama “looked to,” like a “father,” like a “mentor,” for “advice on living.” And Obama, in his own account, notes that Frank offered him advice: on women, on race, on college, on life. “I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama in Dreams From My Father, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”
As for liberals angry at some of the wild speculation over the relationship, they have only themselves and their media to blame for not asking any direct questions whatsoever to Obama, as a candidate and still today. It’s unthinkable that we could have president, in office for two years now, and the media hasn’t asked him about someone so significant in his adolescence. It’s quite unprecedented, but not surprising, since the job of liberals in the media is not real journalism on Obama but to protect Obama.
Big Peace: Interestingly, though, these sympathetic accounts don’t touch the issue of Davis being a communist, right?
Kengor: That’s right. I quote a bunch of quite shameless examples in the book, including from some mainstream liberal journalists who I respect. They profile Davis as a civil-rights crusader, a fighter for “social justice,” who was unfairly hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As is so often the case with the left, this has no connection to reality. In fact, Davis was called to testify before Senate committees that were run by Democrats, and it was a 1957 Senate report, aptly titled, “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” that listed Davis as “an indentified member of the Communist Party.” For readers who have my book, turn to pages 275 to 279 to see those documents.
By the way, it’s funny that certain traditional Democrats and moderates and independents voted for Obama in November 2008 as “another Jack Kennedy.” In fact, JFK was a relentless anti-communist, and it was he and other stalwart anti-communists in the Senate who were investigating the likes of Obama’s mentor.
Big Peace: So, the U.S. Senate reported, as a matter of fact, that Frank Marshall Davis was a party member?
Kengor: The exact wording in the 1957 report is that Davis was “an identified member of the Communist Party.” See page 275 of my book for a photo of that page of the Senate report.
Big Peace: You say that even the local NAACP in Hawaii was suspicious of Davis.
Kengor: Indeed. Some NAACP members called him “Comrade Davis,” and were irritated at how he “sneaked” into NAACP meetings with (as one member put it) “the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line.” They were very concerned that Davis would join fellow Stalinists in hijacking the NAACP and (as another member put it) converting the local branch into a band of “yelping Stalinists and their dupes.”
Big Peace: You found additional evidence of Davis’s party membership.
Kengor: Yes, consider two Davis biographers, both highly sympathetic, neither a conservative: First, there was a 1999 book by James Edward Smethurst, who is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard. He recorded that Davis “was almost certainly a CPUSA member.”
Second, and more conclusive, was John Edgar Tidwell, who is a professor at the University of Kansas and the leading authority on Davis. Tidwell documented: “Sometime during the middle of the war [WWII], he [Davis] joined the Communist Party.” In one book, Tidwell quoted Davis himself admitting he joined the party, producing a letter where Davis stated flatly: “I have recently joined the Communist party.”
Big Peace: Those are compelling, but you have an even higher level of evidence.
Kengor: Yes. The real smoking gun is Davis’s declassified FBI file, which, laid end to end, would probably stretch from my back porch all the way to the White House. I got it through a FOIA request by a fellow researcher. It takes maybe an hour of reading that file to see that the man was a communist. As viewable evidence, we have published pages from the file in the appendix of Dupes. One FBI document lists Davis’s actual Communist Party number: 47544.
I repeat 4-7-5-4-4. That actual document is on page 507 of my book. You can see it yourself.
Big Peace: That’s it. That proves it.
Kengor: Yes, it does. Also, if you want to take it even deeper, that five-digit number is consistent with others who joined the party in that period.
Big Peace: And even with all that, you have other material on Davis that’s even more revealing, and that you say ought to infuriate Democrats.
Kengor: I found all of Davis’s weekly columns from 1949-50 for the Honolulu Record, the CPUSA organ in Hawaii. They are unbelievably outrageous, demonizing the Democratic administration of Harry Truman, excoriating everything from the establishment of NATO to our efforts to rebuild West Germany after the war and spare it from a Soviet takeover. Davis was following the Moscow line.
I quote these columns in such detail that they constitute the longest chapter in the book. We include actual photos of the columns as they appeared in the newspaper. A former student of mine who now lives in Hawaii went into a university library and printed them on microfiche. They’re repulsive–pure Soviet propaganda, the Stalinist line. When you read see them, you’ll see why our senators, Democrats and Republicans alike, summoned Davis to Washington to testify.
Of course, Davis pleaded the Fifth Amendment. He wasn’t as vocal as he was when praising Stalin’s regime.
Big Peace: Next week, let’s talk about what some of those columns said, and the effect that they–or Davis–had on Obama.
Kengor: Let’s do that. As a teaser, Davis’s enemies ranged from the Marshall Plan to General Motors. Yes, General Motors, which he thought the federal government should be running. Imagine that. Of course, if you can’t wait ’til then, buy the book!
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