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Hayden decries the "campaign of defamation" against Obama, who has "transformational appeal."

Carl Bernstein added his voice to the controversy, saying in a dispatch on the Huffington Post not only that Hillary worked for that firm but that her linking of Obama to Ayers might be "21st century McCarthyism" or "ideological demagoguery."

This is what "McCarthyism" has become - telling the truth about communists.

Bernstein has a personal conflict of interest, having written a book, Loyalties, about his parents Al and Sylvia Bernstein being members of the Communist Party USA. He reveals that Democratic liberal Senator Edward Kennedy helped him obtain government documents about his father's case in particular. His father was questioned about a possible relationship with a member of a Soviet espionage network named Louise Bransten.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Bernstein says that he feared coming upon some "parental Pumpkin Paper." But his father explained away the Bransten connection by saying he had only attended a "party" with her. That closed the case for Carl Bernstein, who was part of the Washington Post investigative team that brought down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal. As journalist Victor Lasky would later point out in It Didn't Start With Watergate, it was a scandal in which Nixon or his staff stood accused of using tactics employed by previous Democratic administrations.

Nixon was a special target. As a Congressman, he had seized upon the hidden documents known as the Pumpkin Papers of former communist Whittaker Chambers in order to make the case that former State Department official and United Nations founder Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy. Chambers had publicly named Hiss as a communist. The Pumpkin Papers proved it.

In his father's case, Bernstein writes that documents showed that Louis B. Nichols, the assistant director of the FBI for internal security matters, said that he would be probably be able to furnish a witness identifying Alfred Bernstein as a Communist Party member. (Bernstein confirms that his father and mother were members). Later, Bernstein writes, Nichols would become "the Bureau's liaison to Richard Nixon's White House." Bernstein includes this information as if it's damaging to the FBI, Nixon, or both.

But whatever one can say about Nixon, he was not naïve about the communist threat. And he was right on target about Hiss.

The Pattern

Bernstein and his partner, Bob Woodward, worked for a paper, the Washington Post, whose late owner, Katharine Graham, was known as a prominent liberal committed to the success of the Democratic Party. Less well-known is the fact that she had worked for a time as a reporter in San Francisco and developed a rather sympathetic view of "radical" labor leader Harry Bridges, who turned out to be a secret member of the CPUSA central committee. "One of her [Katharine Graham's] sources was Harry Bridges, the head of the longshoremen's union," says the official Washington Post website, still unable to set the record straight about this notorious communist agitator. (web site)

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