Saturday, Jul 5, 2008
From '60s socialist to Wen Ho Lee defender: The political odyssey of Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer.
Feb 20, 2001 | Over the past two years, Robert Scheer has become the nation's leading defender of suspected spy Wen Ho Lee, whom he has lauded as "an American Dreyfus" and about whom he has written a dozen columns for the Los Angeles Times -- all proclaiming Lee's innocence while portraying him as a victim of an anti-Asian conspiracy. Scheer has now been hired as a technical consultant for an upcoming four-hour whitewash of Lee. "Suspicion Matrix" is to be produced for ABC TV by longtime "peace" activist Robert Greenwald. And a book on Wen Ho Lee by Scheer is on the way.
Although Scheer has been a leftist supporter of America's adversaries since the onset of the Cold War, when he was my boss at the New Left magazine Ramparts in the '60s, his immoderate defense of an accused spy was reckless enough to surprise me. After all, every single communist spy identified by the FBI in the half-century since the Cold War began (the Rosenbergs, Morton Sobell, Joel Barr, Judith Coplon, William Remington, Alger Hiss et al.) had been proved guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. At the same time, every one of those spies had been defended as innocent by progressives like Scheer and Greenwald. Why would Scheer want to expose himself to that kind of embarrassment? The only answer I could come up with was that Scheer had not been paying enough attention to realize his exposure.
This is a strong statement to make about a man who was for 17 years the Los Angeles Times' national correspondent and is now its featured columnist, but it is one that comes from having observed Scheer for nearly half a century, beginning with our joint arrival in Berkeley at the outset of the '60s. Later in the decade Scheer hired me as an editor at Ramparts, and later still I led a '60s-style staff rebellion that ousted him.
I had not seen Scheer in nearly 20 years when my longtime writing partner and Ramparts collaborator Peter Collier ran into him at the 1988 Republican Convention. Peter and I were both working as speechwriters for Bob and Elizabeth Dole, part of our odyssey from the ranks of the left to the other side of the political barricade. Scheer was there, too, covering the convention as national correspondent for the L.A. Times. His only words to Collier and me were "Deutscher was right."
For veterans of that decade like us, Isaac Deutscher provided the key to our continuing radical faith. A famed biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, Deutscher explained the monstrosity socialism had become in a way that made it possible for us to retain our socialist beliefs. He described the Soviet Union as still being encrusted with the tyranny of the old Russia, even though it had been transformed by socialist economics into a world power and economic giant. The scientific logic of socialism, he assured us, would soon transform the country's tyranny.
Scheer's parting taunt to Collier and me expressed his belief that the reforms of glasnost and perestroika then taking place under Mikhail Gorbachev would transform the Soviet Union into a modern, democratic socialist state. A year after our encounter with Scheer, however, the Berlin Wall came crashing down, and the Soviet empire with it. Its collapse revealed not the superpower of Deutscher's imaginings but the pathetic shell of a third world backwater, whose economic output was less than South Korea's.
Scheer was wrong too, but that didn't cause him to miss a beat. His retro Marxism had done nothing to impede his upward climb in the capitalist media world he loved to milk and despise at the same time, and he saw no reason to adjust his views to the changing facts.
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