I submitted a column to Salon on Wen Ho Lee with the following reference to Scheer's politics: "While we were divulging the secrets of America's electronic intelligence agency in the pages of Ramparts back in the '60s, Scheer was joining the Red Sun Rising Commune [in Berkeley] and becoming an acolyte of North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung." A Salon editor contacted Scheer to ask him about the veracity of the claims about his dalliance with Kim Il Sung that I had intended to include in the column. He stated flatly that they were untrue. I let the denial pass at the time, and the mention was not included in my column.

When I called Collier, my old Ramparts co-editor, he reminded me that Scheer had taken a delegation from the Red Family Commune to visit Ramparts editor and Black Panther minister of information Eldridge Cleaver, who was a fugitive in North Korea, having ambushed two San Francisco police officers and fled the country in 1968. The Red Family was a "guerrilla foco" that Scheer and Tom Hayden had formed. A member of the Scheer delegation named Jan Austin was a copy editor at Ramparts, and she came back with glowing tales about North Korean communism, Kim Il Sung's "Palace of the Children" and the gourmet spreads the government had laid out for them. Subsequently, a carton of the "Collected News Conferences of Kim Il Sung" arrived, by mail, in the Ramparts office, and Collier and I amused ourselves by opening one volume that began with a question to Kim, and was followed with a 300-page answer.

Thirty years is a long time, however, and even though I was familiar with Scheer's brazenness, I could not help being shaken by the absolute character of his denial to Salon. Maybe Austin's opinions were hers and hers alone. So what was at stake? Why would Scheer lie? What would he have to hide but the embarrassment of youth?

Collier recently became the publisher of Encounter Books, and a week ago he sent me the manuscript of one of his upcoming titles. The book, "Commies: The Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left," is the autobiography of another old friend, Ronald Radosh. I had not discussed these incidents with Radosh because he had been an East Coast radical, and I had no reason to think he had spent time with Scheer in his Red Family days. As I read the manuscript, I came across the following passage:

At the time [circa 1969], my friend Louis Menashe and I had a regular radio program on the Pacifica Network, a weekly political discussion show in which we interviewed movement figures and engaged in political and theoretic discussion. Since Scheer was still considered an important figure on the Left ... I got out my trusty, top-of-the-line SONY that WBAI had recommended we purchase, and began the interview. Scheer, however, said that he would talk on the record about only one topic -- the only topic that mattered -- the realization of the socialist utopia in Kim Il Sung's North Korea.

For over two hours, Scheer talked and talked about the paradise he had seen during a recent visit to North Korea, about the greatness of Kim Il Sung, about the correct nature of his so-called juche ideology -- evidently a word embodying Kim's redefinition of Marxism-Leninism in building Communism against all obstacles and with the entire world in opposition. At one point, I asked him incredulously: "Bob, do you really believe this crap?" Scheer responded with complete earnestness that he did -- that Kim had charted out a path that other nations could and should take as an example of the art of the possible.

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