Operation Solo (6 page)

Not long after this report was written, Browder relayed a Comintern directive instructing Morris to seek election to the United States Senate as the communist candidate from Illinois. Simply by conducting a dignified campaign, he could, at least in the eyes of some, coat the party with a veneer of respectability and insinuate Soviet themes into American political discourse.

Morris ran on a platform advocating “JOBS, SECURITY, DEMOCRACY, and PEACE” and United States intervention against Germany, Italy, and Japan. Echoing Soviet propaganda, his speeches inveighed against the evils and dangers of Nazism. The
campaign against the Nazis earned plaudits from the Comintern and Browder, from his Canadian friends Carr and Buck, from rank-and-file party members, and even from some noncommunists.

Less than a year after the campaign ended, the Soviets mortified him by striking a deal with these very same Nazis. They pledged not to interfere with a German invasion of Poland; in return, the Nazis promised them a slice of the country they were about to devour.

Morris called Browder. How do we explain this sudden, perfidious collusion with the Nazis? What do we say? Equally dumbfounded and without instructions from Moscow, Browder had no answer. In public, Morris tried to mute or evade the issue. Privately, he tried, with only partial success, to dismiss it from his thoughts just as he tried to dismiss multiplying rumors of mass terror and murder in the Soviet Union.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 6, 1941, restored his moral equilibrium. Once again the Nazis were bad, and he led cries for American action against them. To Jews who had quit the party in disgust, he offered a new Soviet rationale for the deal with Hitler. Far from being a pact with the devil, it was a brilliant ploy by Stalin to gain time to fortify Soviet defenses.

The German declaration of war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941, overnight made the United States and the Soviet Union allies, and transfigured communists throughout the land into seeming patriots. Having fomented labor strife for years, Morris now called for a ban on all strikes. They were unpatriotic. Desperate for U.S. arms and supplies, the Soviet Union cared more about increasing American war production than about the lot of American workers.

As a sop to the western allies, Stalin in 1943 ostensibly abolished the Comintern, which symbolized Soviet subversion worldwide. In reality, it continued to function as the International Department of the Central Committee, although wartime chaos diminished its ability to function as effectively as before.

Browder, however, thought the dissolution real and construed it as a signal that the Soviets meant what they said about friendship with their ally, the United States. In further wishful thinking, he concluded that the Soviets wanted communists to be a positive, progressive
force in American society rather than subversives. Accordingly, he disbanded the American Communist Party as such and re-formed it as the Communist Political Association dedicated to supporting the war effort and political candidates who favored harmonious U.S.–Soviet relations, irrespective of their party affiliation.

The most important such candidate in 1944 was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sought reelection to an unheard-of fourth term. Morris organized a huge stadium rally in Chicago, and Morris and Browder spoke in behalf of the president. Morris directed communists infiltrated into the labor movement to exert all their influence to align their unions behind Roosevelt. And he personally appealed to John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, to put aside his personal hatred of Roosevelt in the interests of the country and labor in general.

Probably more favorable entries were recorded in the secret Moscow dossier on Morris, and anyone reviewing it in 1944 would have seen the profile of the quintessential Bolshevik. A worker himself, Morris was the son of an anti-czarist worker. He loyally and ably had served the American party from its inception and helped deliver control of it to Stalinists. In the Soviet Union, he had passed every test and distinguished himself both as a student and an informant of the secret political police. He had exhibited physical and moral courage. August leaders of international communism could and did vouch for him. Never had he deviated from the party line delineated by the Comintern. Repeatedly, he had proven himself to be in every sense Moscow's man.

Immersed in a righteous cause, able simultaneously to serve the United States and the Soviet Union, Morris in 1944 was a happy man until the wife of his youngest brother, Phillip, received a telegram that began: “The War Department regrets to inform you…” Phillip, an army lieutenant, had been killed in battle in France.

Morris, Jack, and their younger brother, Ben, sank into grief and depression.

three

FORSAKEN AND FOUND

MORRIS SUFFERED A HEART ATTACK in the summer of 1945 and consequently did not learn all the details of the coup until Eugene Dennis came from New York to see him in August.

Dennis also was Moscow's man. A graduate of the Lenin School, he demonstrated his allegiance to the Russians by leaving his small son Timothy in the Soviet Union for them to raise. He succeeded Morris in Milwaukee and the two long had been friends, or so Morris thought.

The account Dennis gave may be summed up thus: Browder, by disbanding the party, had angered the Soviets and forfeited their confidence. They wanted a vigorous, organized American Communist Party back in the business of spreading communism in the United States. At their behest, Dennis and William Z. Foster had engineered the expulsion of Browder and had reconstituted the party. Dennis was now its leader, and his most urgent task was to reconcile factions loyal to Browder with those loyal to Foster, who
had become national chairman. He wanted Morris to help by serving as his deputy in New York.

Soon Dennis had another problem. Louis Budenz, editor of the
Daily Worker
, renounced communism and joined the Catholic Church, creating much mirth among anticommunists. Dennis needed someone with prestige, in and out of the party, to replace him as editor. Would Morris take the job? After Dennis dismissed his protests that he had no journalistic experience, Morris, the good soldier, agreed.

The ensuing correspondence evokes something of the atmosphere of the time. Party Treasurer Charles Krumbein on September 18, 1945, wrote Morris:

Dennis on October 5 wrote:

However, some of the party leadership virulently opposed the appointment of Morris on grounds that he was a “Browderite.”
Dennis on December 17, 1945, sent word that his opponents had been routed:

Morris moved to New York and began his duties as editor in early 1946. Shortly afterward, Sam Carr unexpectedly burst into his office in high alarm. Code clerk Igor Gouzenko had defected from
the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and identified a number of people, including Carr, as Russian spies. “I can't go back,” he said. “I need to get in touch with the Russians but I don't know how. What shall I do?”

While Jack sequestered Carr in the home of a wealthy party sympathizer, Morris telephoned Tim Buck in Canada. A week or so later Soviet agents spirited Carr off to Moscow. As far as United States and Canadian authorities were concerned, he simply vanished.

In 1947 Dennis asked the Soviets for permission to send a
Daily Worker
correspondent to cover a Moscow conference of foreign ministers beginning in March. They replied, “We want Morris.” After Labor Editor George Morris applied for a visa, they sent another message: “We want Morris Childs.”

Rumors that Stalin had renewed systematic persecution of Jews circulated in New York, and Paul Novick, editor of the Yiddish newspaper
Morning Freiheit
, urged Morris to appeal to the Soviets to cease the persecutions. He also gave Morris penicillin and other medicine to take to Jewish artists and intellectuals in Moscow.

Morris flew to Moscow in the company of thirty-four other American correspondents, among them such noted journalists as Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, and Kingsbury Smith. Molly Perlman, a South African communist working in Moscow, came to the hotel where the press corps was lodged and announced that the Soviets had designated her to act as his secretary. She gave him a ticket to the ballet and told him he absolutely must attend.

The next evening two representatives of the International Department (aka Comintern) joined him in a box at the ballet. They pressed him for details of all that had transpired in the American party since 1943, an appraisal of its current condition, and evaluations of its principal leaders. They also asked for an appraisal of President Harry Truman. Morris characterized him as a “tough bird” and said he was not as sure as the American press seemed to be that Truman would be defeated in 1948.

During the day, Morris followed the routine of other correspondents, attending press conferences and briefings and filing stories. On most evenings he secretly conferred with the Soviets. When he raised the issue of persecution of Jews, they feigned
shock that anyone but malicious imperialists could even imagine such a thing. It just wasn't so, and they would be glad to send Soviet Jews to New York to reassure the Jewish community. As for the artists and intellectuals, for whom he had medicine, they were in dachas or sanitoria receiving good medical treatment.

As gifts for old friends from his days at the Lenin School, Morris brought Kentucky bourbon, Camel cigarettes, medicine, perfume, nylon stockings, and Spam, a canned meat made popular in Moscow by American wartime aid. The presents won him invitations to Russian apartments where heavy drinking was customary. He ordinarily did not drink alcohol but among Russians he forced himself to drink to show that he was one of them and to be one of them.

During long drinking bouts, he heard appalling confidences. The Jewish artists and intellectuals were not in dachas or sanitoria; they were in prison awaiting almost certain execution. Other mutual friends had disappeared. Morris already knew that Carl Radek, Leo Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin, all of whom lectured at the Lenin School, had been shot. So had countless other loyal party members, generals, scientists, intellectuals, and intelligence officers. Millions of peasants and their families had been deported to slave labor camps, and in Ukraine Stalin had deliberately starved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, to death. Moreover, Stalin, no strategic genius, had bought time to gird Soviet defenses by making a deal with Hitler. He was a fool who trusted Hitler and believed that through a union of German industry and Soviet natural resources, communists and Nazis together could dominate the world. His trust had been so complete that he had unconscionably rejected warnings from both Soviet and British intelligence services of the impending German attack in 1941. When the predicted attack came, it rendered him literally speechless. He skulked in shock for days, and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had to be the first to call the nation to arms.

Collectively, these revelations from unimpeachable confidants confirmed the vilest of anti-Soviet slanders and struck at the foundation of his faith. And, Morris thought, I have been an apostle of all of this for almost twenty years.

The other American correspondents refused to accept Morris as
a colleague. They regarded him as a Soviet apologist rather than a bona fide journalist, and they scorned the
Daily Worker
as a “commie rag.” Howard K. Smith who, as a result of seating assignments, shared a table with him in the hotel dining room, was polite but avoided serious conversation. The rest spoke to him either curtly or not at all.

At a reception given for the press by the U.S. ambassador, General Walter Bedell Smith, Morris stood awkwardly and conspicuously alone until Mrs. Smith approached and asked why he was not joining in the festivities.