A brief diversion before it all really gets rolling in our politics Wednesday. Once, when I wrote a book, I took as one of its primary avatars one Ignatius Donnelly, the Prince of Cranks. Donnelly, whose escapades in politics, literature, and intergalactic crackpottery are unsurpassed in American political history, and also are far too extensive to detail here, once wrote down his essential philosophy of his place in the world.

“I believe what I write is true,” Donnelly mused. “Or, if not true, at least plausible.”

Which brings us to the latest pronouncement from Congressman Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas and Padishah Emperor of the Crazy People for life. On Tuesday, discussing the subject of Russian ratfcking, Gohmert delivered himself of this fascinating lesson in American political history. From Roll Call:

“It’s been going on for 70 years,” he said. “It helped Truman get elected in ’48. Eisenhower called the Russians on it in ’56 and manipulation there.” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev bragged about throwing the election to President John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Russia helped Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, Gohmert said. “So, I am thrilled that we are going to get help across the aisle to get to the Russian input stopped,” he said.

Now, I have had an unconquerable sweet-tooth for fringe American rightwing theorizing ever since my father had me read None Dare Call It Treason over one rainy weekend before my freshman year in high school. I have fashioned myself a lifetime pass down any number of rabbit holes. But I admit that Gohmert’s assertions had me banjaxed. But, one thing I do know, is that rarely do American wingnuts make such assertions without some kind of misunderstood or misread documentary evidence behind them. So, I went spelunking through the Intertoobz to find out what, if anything, Gohmert was talking about.



Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas on Capitol Hill in 2017. Getty Images

OK, first, Truman. In 1948, he was supposed to lose to Thomas Dewey. He didn’t. Now, for those of us steeped in historical reality, the idea that the godless Soviet Communists were rigging things to give another term to the guy whose administration put in place the Marshall Plan, NATO, and who adopted wholesale the policy of containment of Soviet global ambitions is a few stops beyond laughable. But Gohmert had to get it from somewhere, and I think I found out where. From The Daily Beast:

The man the Russians sought first to help was Henry A. Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of Commerce. Wallace became the first public figure to oppose Harry Truman’s “get-tough policy” with the Soviets, which he adopted after it became clear that the Soviets were seeking to expand their empire to control Eastern Europe, not to reach a road to peace through negotiations with the United States. Back in 1943, Wallace already had made his views clear in a speech in which he said that “fascist interests motivated largely by anti-Russian bias” were trying to “get control of our government.”

Henry A. Wallace in 1948. Getty Images

In October of 1945, while he was still secretary of Commerce, Wallace secretly met in Washington, D.C. with Anatoly Gorsky, the station chief of the NKGB (forerunner of the KGB.) KGB files show that Wallace told Gorsky that he wanted to share the secrets of the a-bomb with the Soviets, complained that Truman was being influenced by an “anti-Soviet group” in government that wanted the Anglo-Saxon bloc to have dominance in the world, and that he hoped that the Soviet Union could help Wallace’s “smaller group significantly.” For a member of the President’s Cabinet asking the Soviets to intervene to help his side win an internal battle within the administration was more than indiscreet. It was the action of a willing tool of Moscow. Eventually, Truman fired him in September 1946.

Of course, this information shows that Wallace was canned for doing precisely that on which Paul Manafort et. al. are currently facing charges. But the story does contain the words “Russians,” “help,” and “Truman.”

Now, Ike. It’s true that Red-hunting nutballs accused Eisenhower of being in thrall to the godless Communist menace. (John Stormer went long on this particular theory in None Dare Call It Treason.) But the idea that the Kremlin helped JFK in 1960 seems to be based on some jocularity exchanged between Kennedy and Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev at the 1961 summit meeting in Vienna that ended so badly for the new president. From The Washington Post:

According to Khrushchev's memoirs, he told the U.S. president: "You know, Mr. Kennedy, we voted for you." The comment (which was also published in a slightly different wording in a later version of the memoirs) was described as a joke. But beneath that humor lay a serious point.

Uh-oh.

On May 1, 1960, a U-2 surveillance plane operated by the CIA was shot down by the Soviet air force while flying near the city of Yekaterinburg. The U.S. initially said the plane had been studying weather patterns for NASA and had simply strayed off course. Information recovered from the plane's wreckage quickly proved otherwise.

The U-2's pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was taken prisoner and put on trial for espionage, eventually being sentenced to a decade in a Soviet prison. Powers's fate became a point of tension in the Cold War, ruining a planned summit in Paris between the superpowers. Making matters worse, an American RB-47H reconnaissance bomber was shot down by Soviet forces in July and the Soviets took the two survivors captive.

As tense as things were, Khrushchev believed those events also gave the Soviets a small amount of influence over that year's presidential race between Nixon and Kennedy.

"My comrades agreed, and we did not release Powers," he wrote. "As it turned out, we'd done the right thing. Kennedy won the election by a majority of only 200,000 or so votes, a negligible margin if you consider the huge population of the United States. The slightest nudge either way would have been decisive."

Frankly, I think the ol’ shoe-pounder is giving himself a little too much credit here. I believe that a certain number of deceased Chicagoans had more to do with the outcome of that election than did upon whose watch Powers was released. (Plus, does Gohmert really want to open up Nixon’s jacking with the Paris Peace Talks in 1968, or the curious events surrounding the release of the hostages in Iran in 1980? I didn’t think so.)

President Kennedy shaking hands with Nikita Khrushchev outside the U.S. embassy in Vienna in 1961. Getty Images

But Jimmy Carter? I had absolutely no idea where Gohmert had got that idea. Did the Soviets really have a dog in the fight between accidental president Gerald Ford and a heretofore unknown governor from Georgia? A New York Times story from the fall of 1976 reported that the Soviets were flummoxed by the campaign between two relative unknowns on the world stage.

Both Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter have been taken to task in the Soviet press for some tough remarks about the Soviet Union. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda told Russians recently that “the policy of aggravating tension is rejected by broad sections of the American people.” The President has been faulted a number of times for having made concessions to the Republican right wing in his bitter fight with Ronald Reagan and for having permitted a hard line on the Soviet Union in the Republican Party platform...

Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford debate in 1976. Getty Images

...The Russians seem frustrated that they do not know much more about Mr. Carter's foreign policy views than they did when he came to their attention last spring. “He's a prophet, not a politician,” a prominent Soviet journalist quipped privately. “Who can tell anything about prophets?”

However, deep in the January, 2017 assessment compiled by the intelligence community concerning Russian ratfcking in the previous November’s election, I found this short passage.

In the 1970s, the KGB recruited a Democratic Party activist who reported information about then-presidential hopeful Jimmy Carter’s campaign and foreign policy plans, according to a former KGB archivist.

No name. And all that was passed along was this person’s assessment of what Carter might do overseas if he got elected, which apparently left the Soviets as baffled as they were before they contacted this person. Not the greatest thing to do by whoever this was, but certainly no possible indication that the Soviets had their thumb on the scale for that prophet guy. But, again, the story contains the words “Soviets,” “contacted” and “Carter,” and that’s enough material to spin the tale.

So, this is what you have. Harry Truman’s Secretary of Commerce gets so chummy with the Soviets that Truman fires him. Khrushchev trying to get into JFK’s head about how the latter won with Khrushchev’s help. And some guy in the Carter campaign who told some KGB clerk what Carter might do if Carter got elected president. Put that thin gruel in the roiling stewpot that is Louie Gohmert’s brain, let it bubble in there awhile with whatever other ingredients Gohmert half-heard the last time he chatted with Alex Jones and, voila! Instant history, suitable for spouting and delivered in nice bite-sized chunks to an audience that, at this point, will believe anything. Watching the way that works is always fascinating.

Not true, but plausible, especially if you're a sucker.

Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect that Henry Wallace was Truman's Secretary of Commerce. He was Vice President under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.



Getty Images

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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