On campus, the costs of rewriting communism

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IN DENIAL: HISTORIANS, COMMUNISM AND ESPIONAGE

By John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr

Encounter, $25.95, 300 pages

REVIEWED BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN

For parents who are spending tens of thousands of dollars in annual tuition fees, for those concerned with intellectual honesty in the academic profession, for college students enrolled in American history courses, and for members of Congress who appropriate taxpayer money to support the American university, the report in this book is a startling, even explosive expose of where the money and their trust are going.

The authors of "In Denial," (John Earl Haynes is the Library of Congress expert on American radical history and Harvey Klehr, a professor at Emory University, is the leading historian on American communism) have described the outrageous rewriting of communism and communist espionage history by major American historians in these words:

"[A] sizeable cadre of American intellectuals now openly applaud and apologize for one of the bloodiest ideologies of human history, and instead of being treated as pariahs, they hold distinguished positions in American higher education and cultural life."

I have been studying and writing about the Communist movement for years. Nothing I have read over that time prepared me for the growing shock as I turned the pages of this heavily footnoted book. What is depicted in these pages is a scandal of epic proportions in the American university. I have asked myself: If our history faculties were loaded with Holocaust-revisionists as they are loaded with Gulag-revisionists how long would they last, tenured or not?