Full Budenz essay here: https://www.newspapers.com/image/13403573
Link to pdf of original article here: Budenz Transmission Belt 1954
Excerpts from Delaware County Daily Times (Chester, PA), Friday, November 5, 1954; p. 26: “Moscow Orders McCarthy Destroyed, Dupes Many Into Frenzy Against McCarthyism”
Ex-Communist Louis Budenz, Nov 5, 1954, on the Stalin-Led, “Frenzy Against ‘McCarthyism’”, to destroy McCarthy, & “kill off all Congressional investigations of the Communist conspiracy”
It was not until 1953 that I got to know Sen. Joe McCarthy well. During three preceding years, beginning with his famous speech in Wheeling W. Va., I had met him only three times. On those occasions we merely exchanged greetings. I was aware though that Communists were bent on his political destruction. In my library at Crestwood [NY] I studied hundreds of current Communist documents. I watched with growing concern the frenzied Communist attack on him. At a special meeting of the Red national committee in March, 1950, Communist leader Gus Hall ordered McCarthy’s political liquidation. Hall, incidentally, later became a fugitive from justice, being finally picked up in Mexico. During the three years from 1950 to 1953, I pored over hundreds of copies of the Daily Worker which fanned the official flames of the assault on McCarthy. From my experiences in the conspiracy, I realized in 1950 that the Reds’ organized hysteria against McCarthy and McCarthyism would soon pass into non-Communist opinion-forming organs. In a comparatively short time after Gus Hall’s order, what the Communists ordered to be said about McCarthy was being repeated by outstanding public figures, certain leading newspapers, and television and radio commentators. The same “transmission belt” method which had led the United States to betray Poland, China, and other countries was now working successfully to prevent this country from defending itself. …Moscow officially threw fuel on the flames. In October 1952, Joseph Stalin gave an important directive to his agents in non-Communist countries. He called upon Communists of the “bourgeois” nations to raise higher the banner of “bourgeois civil liberties.” This call was dutifully published here in Political Affairs, the official Communist theoretical organ, and hailed as a “momentous” declaration. The arrogance and insincerity of this call were apparent to all who could read it. Most unfortunately, very few Americans bothered to examine it at all, and this was true of most of our national leaders. The effect of this call was even greater frenzy against “McCarthyism” in the Communist press, and consequently among the friends and puppets of the Communists. They all followed the order to attack McCarthy in the name of “civil liberties.” By June 1953, Political Affairs could feature an article of directives for Stalinites here entitled, “Anatomy of McCarthyism.” The official Red line pictured McCarthy as “an unscrupulous demagogue and adventurer.” The comrades were instructed in this article that the attack on “McCarthyism” was not for the purpose of destroying the Wisconsin senator, alone, but for killing off all Congressional investigations, and every other effort to curb the Communist conspiracy. The article directed that “the main fire in the struggle for democratic liberties be directed against McCarthyism.”
