Tom

Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is

calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But

Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if

Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill

Ayers constitute McCarthyism.

Bernstein,

now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of

this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says

in his book about them, Loyalties, “I

am proud of the choices they made.”

The

Hayden and Bernstein pieces have to be understood in the context of the

Democratic Party being on the verge of nominating a “working class hero” as

their presidential candidate who does not attract many votes from the working

class. And that is why Senator Clinton sees an opening and believes she can

still seize the nomination. But she’s got some skeletons in her closet, too.

The

basic message of Hayden and Bernstein seems to be that the Democrats should

abandon the practice of linking either presidential candidate to communists

because they are both tainted. But we’re just beginning to get to the heart of

the issue. Do we have candidates that are in any way linked or sympathetic to

the greatest killing machine in the history of planet earth? The Black Book of Communism puts the

death toll from communism at about 100 million. A memorial to the

victims of communism has been erected in Washington,

D.C.

On

one of the major issues of our time, have these candidates been right or wrong?

We know where Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright

stands. We know that his

charge that the U.S.

created AIDS was based on Soviet disinformation. But he also had this to say in

his National Press Club speech: “Our congregation stood in solidarity with the

peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua,

while our government, through Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal, was

supporting the Contras, who were killing the peasants and the Miskito Indians

in those two countries.”

In fact, Ollie North, a member of the staff of

the National Security Council, was implementing a policy of the Reagan

Administration to thwart a communist takeover of Central

America. Some of the Miskito Indians were actually helping in the

fight against the Soviet- and Cuban-backed Communist Sandinistas.

Whose side was Obama on during the fight for Central America?

Hayden’s Pro-Communist

Record

One

can understand why Hayden, a member of “Progressives for Obama,” takes offense.

Hayden and Ayers were key members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS),

the violence-prone group that laid siege to college campuses in the 1960s. One

of their main goals was making sure the communists conquered South Vietnam.

Ayers, of course, would go on to plant bombs as a member of the SDS-spawned Weather

Underground communist terrorist group. Hayden would win notoriety as Jane

Fonda’s husband and become a politician.

“Progressives for Obama” is quite a collection. A quick review discloses two names from the Committees

of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, an off-shoot of the old

Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA (CPUSA). They include Carl Davidson,

formerly of SDS, and Jim Campbell. Two other names come from the Democratic

Socialists of America (DSA), whose Chicago

branch has backed Obama from the start. They are Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel

West. West showed up at Jeremiah Wright’s National Press Club speech to cheer

and whistle.

Hayden

is almost as controversial as Ayers, a self-described communist. A leader of

protests against U.S.

involvement in the Vietnam War, Hayden wrote a June 4, 1968, “Dear Col. Lao”

letter that ended, “Good fortune! Victory!” This was a letter to a North

Vietnamese official. So here we have someone who was cheering for the communist

enemy killing Americans. They openly displayed flags of the Viet Cong, the

organization sponsored by the regime in Hanoi,

North Vietnam,

also known as the National Liberation Front.

Hayden,

in brief, played a pivotal role in America’s

Vietnam

defeat and the deaths of millions.

Hayden’s

letter to Col. Lao was designed to introduce him to Robert Greenblatt, the

coordinator of the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. The

MOBE was run by a group that included members of the Communist Party, the

Socialist Workers Party, the Workers World Party, the SDS, and other such

organizations.

Is

this the kind of “patriotism” that Obama approves? What does Senator Clinton

think of an Obama supporter who worked for an enemy victory in Vietnam?

It

is apparently acceptable to somebody because Hayden’s website boasts that he has received awards

from such groups as the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the

Rainforest Action Network, and Paw-PAC (animal welfare).

Isn’t

it interesting how someone who became a cheerleader for the communists now gets

awards for protecting trees and animals?

By

contrast, the book, A Viet Cong Memoir, includes a note of apology “to my betrayed comrades, who believed they were

sacrificing themselves for a humane liberation of their people.” One of the

authors, Truong Nhu Tang, a founder of the Viet Cong, escaped the communist

takeover in a boat. He was one of hundreds of thousands of “boat people.”

Hayden’s

failure to apologize indicates he’s a true believer. And he’s enthusiastic

about Obama.

Spanking Hillary

Hayden

currently contributes to the far-left Huffington Post website and The Nation

magazine, where he made

much of Hillary’s work for a communist law firm. One of his citations is

Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary, A

Woman in Charge. This is actually an old story. We covered it in an AIM Report back in 2003. Hayden, of course, doesn’t really care whether she associated

with communists. He calls her work there “honorable.” He just thinks she’s a

hypocrite for calling attention to Obama’s communist ties, such as the

“imagined association” between Obama and Ayers. (Their relationship is

described by the Obama campaign as “friendly.”) Hayden also finds fault with

Hillary for making an issue out of Obama’s association with his pastor Jeremiah

Wright.

Hayden

decries the “campaign of defamation” against Obama, who has “transformational

appeal.”

Carl

Bernstein added his voice to the controversy, saying in a dispatch on the

Huffington Post not only that Hillary worked for that firm but that her linking

of Obama to Ayers might be “21st century McCarthyism” or

“ideological demagoguery.”

This

is what “McCarthyism” has become―telling the truth about communists.

Bernstein

has a personal conflict of interest, having written a book, Loyalties, about his parents Al and

Sylvia Bernstein being members of the Communist Party USA. He reveals that

Democratic liberal Senator Edward Kennedy helped him obtain government

documents about his father’s case in particular. His father was questioned

about a possible relationship with a member of a Soviet espionage network named

Louise Bransten.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Bernstein

says that he feared coming upon some “parental Pumpkin Paper.” But his father

explained away the Bransten connection by saying he had only attended a “party”

with her. That closed the case for Carl Bernstein, who was part of the

Washington Post investigative team that brought down President Richard Nixon in

the Watergate scandal. As journalist Victor Lasky would later point out in It Didn’t Start With Watergate, it was a

scandal in which Nixon or his staff stood accused of using tactics employed by

previous Democratic administrations.

Nixon

was a special target. As a Congressman, he had seized upon the hidden documents

known as the Pumpkin Papers of former communist Whittaker Chambers in order to

make the case that former State Department official and United Nations founder

Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Chambers had publicly named Hiss as a communist.

The Pumpkin Papers proved it.

In

his father’s case, Bernstein writes that documents showed that Louis B.

Nichols, the assistant director of the FBI for internal security matters, said

that he would be probably be able to furnish a witness identifying Alfred

Bernstein as a Communist Party member. (Bernstein confirms that his father and

mother were members). Later, Bernstein writes, Nichols would become “the

Bureau’s liaison to Richard Nixon’s White House.” Bernstein includes this

information as if it’s damaging to the FBI, Nixon, or both.

But

whatever one can say about Nixon, he was not naïve about the communist threat.

And he was right on target about Hiss.

The Pattern

Bernstein

and his partner, Bob Woodward, worked for a paper, the Washington Post, whose

late owner, Katharine Graham, was known as a prominent liberal committed to the

success of the Democratic Party. Less well-known is the fact that she had

worked for a time as a reporter in San

Francisco and developed a rather sympathetic view of

“radical” labor leader Harry Bridges, who turned out to be a secret member of

the CPUSA central committee. “One of her [Katharine Graham’s] sources was Harry

Bridges, the head of the longshoremen’s union,” says the official

Washington Post website, still unable to set the record straight about this

notorious communist agitator.

After

Watergate and the forced resignation of Nixon, Bernstein would turn his

attention to the sins of the Central Intelligence Agency, writing a piece for

Rolling Stone, the rock-and-roll publication, entitled, “The CIA and the

Media.” He also spent some time at ABC News trying to expose secret U.S. support for anti-communist fighters in Afghanistan

during the Soviet occupation.

Getting

to the Hillary connection, in his Huffington Post dispatch on “The

Question of Hillary Clinton’s Guilt-By-Association Tactics,” Bernstein

wrote about Jessica Mitford, the “muckraking journalist” whose husband Robert

Treuhaft, ran the communist law firm where Hillary worked.

Bernstein said, “In the 1980s, Jessica Mitford

visited the Clintons at the governor’s mansion

in Little Rock.

She and Treuhaft had left the communist party in 1958, years after the

revelation of Stalin’s murderous crimes, but―Jessica Mitford wrote in her

memoir, A Fine Old Conflict, she quit ‘not primarily over some issue

of high principle, but because it had become dull….boring. Rather like London’s debutante

circuit.’”

He goes on, “When Jessica Mitford died in 1996, Hillary

Clinton wrote Bob Treuhaft a lovely condolence letter from the White House…”

But does any of this make Hillary a Stalinist, he asked. Or a Communist sympathizer?

Of course not, he replies. All of this is just silly, he says. And it’s just as

silly, he suggests, for Hillary to make an issue of Obama’s ties to Bill Ayers.

But wait. In Mitford’s 1977 book, A Fine Old Conflict, she writes about

how Al Bernstein signed her up as a member of the United Federal Workers Union,

which she considered “a step towards finding the Communist Party.” The union,

she adds, had been publicly denounced by the House Committee on Un-American

Activities as Communist-dominated. This charge was “not wide of the mark,” she

admits.

The afterword of another Mitford book, Poison Penmanship, is written by

Bernstein, who praises Mitford for educating the public about how journalism

should be a “simple process” of seeking “the best obtainable version of the

truth.”

They Can’t

Handle the Truth

If this is the case, then why is Bernstein

afraid of pursuing the truth about Obama? Why the outrage over Senator Clinton

drawing attention to a well-documented personal connection between Obama and a

communist terrorist? Is there something else more damaging that has to be

hidden from public view? Does new information have to be discredited in advance

as “McCarthyism?”

The information may have to do with Obama’s

upbringing. Obama says that he was raised by his mother and grandparents. But

those aren’t the only people who had influence over him during his formative

years. His own book, Dreams From My

Father, talks about a mysterious “Frank” giving him advice, reading poetry,

and telling him not to believe that―expletive deleted―about the American way of

life when he went off to college. We know who “Frank” is. He was a member of

the Communist Party who started writing for the Honolulu Record at the

suggestion of Paul Robeson, another secret member of the CPUSA, and Harry

Bridges. His “poetry,” like the sermons of Pastor Wright, was laced with anti-American

sentiments.

Don’t wait for Carl Bernstein or the Washington

Post or the rest of the major media to cover any of this. But it will come out.