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The Times came back and asked Von Hagen if he thought the prize should be returned, taking into account only those articles for which the Pulitzer had been awarded. Von Hagen said yes, the prize should be returned on the basis of those articles alone.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the Times, then wrote to the Pulitzer board that he had decided to keep the award. To return it, he said, would be the same as the “Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.” Times executive editor Bill Keller agreed with the nincompoop’s rationale, saying, “The notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps.”6

Von Hagen replied incredulously in a letter to the editor, “Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty’s prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.”7 The Times held Von Hagen’s letter for two weeks before publishing it.

Twenty years after one Times reporter was covering up the Ukrainian famine, another Times reporter was writing mash notes to Fidel Castro in his Cuba reportage. Herbert Matthews, who, like Duranty, moved to communist whitewashing after serving in the Times’s Paris bureau, described Castro as “the rebel leader of Cuba’s youth.”

In an interminable front-page article after his first date with Castro, Matthews claimed that “thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands.” He blithely assured the Times’s readers that Fidel’s plan—the “new deal”—was “democratic and therefore anti-Communist.” Indeed, “Senor Castro,” in Matthews’s hilarious locution, spoke with “extraordinary eloquence” about his “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the Constitution, to hold elections.” Castro assured Matthews that “you can be sure we have no animosity toward the United States and the American people.”8 And you can take that to the banco.

After Castro seized power, canceled elections, and began confiscating private property, National Review ran a cartoon parody of a Times “Help Wanted” ad, with Fidel joyfully announcing, “I got my job from the New York Times!”

Liberals helped Mao get his job not only from the pages of the New York Times but from inside the Democratic administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

New York Times reporter Brooks Atkinson wrote glowing reports about Mao, describing the Chinese Communist Party, which would go on to murder 78 million people, as an “agrarian or peasant democracy.” He reported that Mao was not a communist but simply objected to China’s “lack of democracy.” Calling the communist city of Yan’an “a Chinese Wonderland City,” he raved about how the soldiers provided for themselves “without imposing any burden on the people.”9

By contrast, Atkinson said our ally, the anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek, operated “a moribund, corrupt regime that is more concerned with maintaining its political supremacy than driving the Japanese out of China.”10

Meanwhile, Soviet agents working for the Roosevelt and Truman administrations (Harry Dexter White, Solomon Adler, and Lauchlin Currie), as well as Soviet sympathizer John Stewart Service, conspired to send damaging information back to Washington about Chiang Kai-shek. Most damagingly, they blocked a crucial gold shipment to Chiang’s Nationalist government as it was being besieged by Mao’s communists.

American liberals were hysterically opposed to war with Germany—as long as Stalin was allied with Hitler. Only when Germany attacked Mother Russia were these stone-cold pacifists seized with war fever.

Back in the halcyon fifties, Democrats were merely obtuse about communist dictatorships. For example, Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson casually announced at the National Press Club in January 1950 that America would not defend South Korea—leading, like night into day, to a Soviet-backed invasion from the North