The Anti-Communist Film Festival: James Ellroy’s ‘Red Sheet’

    Later this year, the Victims of Communism Foundation is sponsoring my Anti-Communist Film Festival. We are in the process of renting theater space and working out other details. We are going to show anti-communist movies and throw a big party.

    As if right on cue, the great author James Ellroy is publishing a new novel in June. Red Sheet is the latest offering from the fantastic creator of L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid. Like other books, it has to do with Los Angeles, cops, drugs, fringe characters, politics, and corruption. 

    It is also a bracingly anti-communist novel, perhaps the most anti-communist work of fiction I have read since Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night. Knopf, Ellroy’s publisher, was kind enough to send me an advanced review copy. Out of respect for Ellroy, I will save a detailed review until closer to publication date, but for now let me just say that Red Sheet is a brilliant, powerful novel that should be read by every American. Set in 1962, it opens with a quote from Whittaker Chambers, vindicates Richard Nixon, and makes it clear that the American anti-communists of the last century were right-on in their opposition to this evil pseudo-religious cult.  

    In fact, let me quote directly from James Ellroy’s official page:

Red Sheet is an anti-communist novel. It stands foursquare in the tainted tradition of Ayn Rand and Mickey Spillane. Ellroy is out to scramble your long-held perceptions and force you into a state of jumped-up disavowal.

Red Sheet scorns the mock-martyred Hollywood Ten and ballyhoos the Blacklist and the ’47-’48 HUAC hearings. Red Sheet forces you to live within the twisted and oddly tender soul of Richard M. Nixon. Red Sheet spotlights the Spanish Civil War and atrocities committed by the commie-infested International Brigade, heretofore held as heroic. Red Sheet lionizes name-naming kingpin Whittaker Chambers and bestows kudos on ratfinks Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg.

    I’d like to take this time to officially invite Mr. Ellroy to the Anti-Communist Film Festival.

    I’m particularly impressed with Red Sheet telling the truth about Alger Hiss, a Society spy that the left is still lying about. Hiss, who died in 1996, was a high-ranking State Department official in the 1930s and 40s. Hiss was a communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. This was proven when Hiss was fingered as a spy by a man named Whittaker Chambers in 1948. It was also revealed in the Venona transcripts, secret Society cables that were made public by the United States in 1995. Venona was a top-secret U.S. effort to gather and decrypt messages sent in the 1940s by agents of the KGB and the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence agency. The cables revealed the identities of numerous Americans who were spies for the Soviet Union. One of them was Alger Hiss.

    Yet the left still lies about Alger Hiss. In his recent book Rewriting Hisstory: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss, Jeff Kisseloff tries to claim Hiss was innocent. As David Chambers, the grandson of Whittaker Chambers, wrote in the Washington Examiner, “A quarter-century in the writing, a half-century in the making, and three-quarters of a century after the events, what does Kisseloff have to tell us that’s new about the Hiss Case? Very little, unfortunately. It offers old details, scores of them, a biblical exegesis on Hiss’s innocence by a pro-Hiss partisan, not a historian. Kisseloff treats minor issues as highly salient while holding fast to a preconceived big picture. Too often, Rewriting Hisstory sifts the ashes of old, overburnt minutiae, some of which date back to Hiss’s initial testimony in 1948.” Chambers adds that “even most pro-Hiss scholars agree that Hiss’s guilt was settled between Allen Weinstein’s book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case in 1978 and the release of Soviet documents in the Venona project in 1995.”

    Liberals are still bent on depicting the “Red Scare” of the 1950s as a “witch hunt” that had no basis in reality – most recently, in an exhibit at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. In his recent book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, New York Times journalist Clay Risen glosses over Venona quickly in order to get to the real issue – how the Red Scare was about American authoritarianism, which has its modern version in Donald Trump. “Around the time I graduated high school,” Risen writes, “the federal government revealed the Venona program, which had captured secret Soviet communications and which, once decoded, offered compelling proof that figures like Hiss and the Rosenbergs and the leadership of the American Communist Party had, in fact, worked for the Soviet Union and against the United States. There was substance to concerns about Soviet infiltration. But it remained clear that the response, in the form of blacklists and congressional investigations and book bans and loyalty tests, went so far beyond what was necessary that something else was in the mix. Explaining that ‘something else’ became a driving force for this book.”

    No, “something else” was not in the mix. Americans reasonably came to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was out to destroy us, and that their spies and sympathizers were evil and needed to be confronted and defeated.

    In their book Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Annals of Communism), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr detail just how extensive the spying was during the Cold War, and how damaging to America. The media didn’t help. “Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government,” Hayne and Klehr note. “In this sinister but widely accepted portrait of America in the 1940s and 1950s, an idealistic New Dealer (Alger Hiss) was thrown into prison on the perjured testimony of a mentally sick anti-Communist fanatic (Whittaker Chambers), innocent progressives (the Rosenbergs) were sent to the electric chair on trumped-up charges of espionage laced with anti-Semitism, and dozens of blameless civil servants had their careers ruined by the smears of a professional anti-Communist (Elizabeth Bentley). According to this version of events, one government official (Harry White) was killed by a heart attack brought on by Bentley’s lies, and another (Laurence Duggan, a senior diplomat) was driven to suicide by more of Chambers’s psychiatric problems.”

    James Ellroy tackles all of this in thrilling fashion in Red Sheet. Put it on your summer reading list.

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