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Originally Posted by westhavendave
This is like McCarthy reincarnated, when do the hearings start?
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Hearings started before McCarthy. The House Un-American activities committee was already having hearings on Communist infiltration of the administration before McCarthy said anything. McCarthy wasn't necessarily trying to start a hearing in the Senate. He didn't want to expose the names of Communists on his list publicly because some of them may have been erroneously included. He was bringing attention to the matter to the Senate in order that the those correctly identified would be removed. The Democrat Senators forced a hearing in order to discredit McCarthy. They assumed they could show that McCarthy was unjustly accusing those on his list. They managed to smear him with sneaky tactics including an outright fabrication, and made the whole thing go away. Eventually, McCarthy was basically proven to be right. But the situation was even worse than McCarthy knew.
The Venona Project, a U.S. Army counter intelligence program, uncovered many more names. The release of some KGB files corroborated most of the Venona material. And the FBI had been discovering the Commie infiltration all along. It had even alerted the administration. But Russia was an ally during the war, so nothing was done about it. That was a big mistake.
Some of the most influential soviet agents in the administration including the closest advisors to FDR worked to put in effect policies that favored Communist expansion. Advice FDR received by them influenced his decisions to back Stalin's desires in the Yalta conference which resulted in the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe and East Germany. Soviets in the administration convinced it to abandon Chiang Kai-Shek in his war against Mao who he was defeating with the aid of American military supplies. In the meantime, the Soviets were arming Mao's forces. So the tide turned. Consequently, China and much of East and South Asia (eventually resulting in a Communist North Korea), as well as Eastern Europe, all fell into the hands of the Soviets.
As well, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in a way orchestrated by Soviet agents in the FDR administration. Japan was a severe threat to Russia, as had been demonstrated by its defeat in the earlier Russo Japanese war. Having to fight a war on two fronts, Hitler in the West and Japan in the East, would have been difficult, a major stretch on Russian resources. Japan tried to make a pact with the U.S. in order to stave off what was a near certain entry of America into the war against Hitler. Japan and Germany were allies, which would pit the U.S. against Japan, stretching Japanese resources beyond its ability to attack Russia while fighting the Americans. Harry Dexter White, a top Treasury Dept, official and also a Soviet agent, convinced FDR that Japan could not be trusted, and helped create the ten point ultimatum adopted by the administration that basically was a casus belli. Drawing the U.S into war with Japan freed the Soviets of having to fight that war.
We don't need congressional hearings. Just an honest and open discussion about the political direction of our country.