If Barack Obama wanted to dispel doubts about his national security credentials, he hasn’t done so with the announcement of a new “Senior Working Group on National Security” that includes Dr. Tony Lake, a former national security adviser to Bill Clinton.
Lake became a laughingstock for expressing doubts as to whether Alger Hiss, the founder of the United Nations and a top State Department official, was a communist spy. Lake’s doubts led to a controversy that caused him to withdraw his nomination as Clinton’s CIA director.
Interestingly, Lake had expressed those doubts on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” during an interview conducted by the late Tim Russert. It went like this:
Russert: You’re a student of history. Do you believe Alger Hiss was a spy?
Lake: I’ve read a couple of books that have certainly offered a lot of evidence that he may have been. I don’t think it’s conclusive.
Hiss, as most people know, had been convicted of perjury for denying he was a communist agent and decoded Soviet transcripts later confirmed his guilt. What does Obama know about this case?
Did he personally approve Lake’s addition to his prestigious foreign policy group? Lake could conceivably end up as nominee for CIA director again.
A CIA
analysis notes that Lake was “
unlikely to be the last casualty of the Hiss case.” How prophetic. It appears that Obama could be another. That is, if we have a media willing to hold him accountable for the atrocious pick of Lake.
At the same time, Lake’s appointment to Obama’s foreign policy team should generate more interest in Obama’s personal involvement in Marxist politics in Hawaii and Chicago and lead to questions about what lessons he learned from his childhood mentor, Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Last year, when Lake’s role as a fundraiser for Obama came to our attention, we urged our members to send him a postcard saying:
Professor Anthony Lake
School of Foreign Service
Georgetown University
37th and O Streets, N.W.
Washington, DC 20057
Dear Professor:
It has been reported that you are now backing and raising money for Senator Barack Obama for president. Since that means you have an influence of some kind on his thinking, especially in foreign affairs, we would like to know the following:
(1) Do you still doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy?
(2) What Is Senator Obama’s position on the question of Hiss’s guilt?
Thank you for your attention to these matters.
We are still waiting for answers to these questions. Perhaps you can have some luck. Lake’s email address is listed as
lakea@georgetown.edu
Meanwhile, Obama himself got caught glossing over his well-documented relationship with communist Frank Marshall Davis in his June 15 Father’s Day speech. “I know what it means to have an absent father, although my circumstances weren’t as tough as they are for many young people today,” Obama said. “Even though my father left us when I was two-years-old, and I only knew him from the letters he wrote and the stories that my family told, I was luckier than most. I grew up in Hawaii, and had two wonderful grandparents from Kansas who poured everything they had into helping my mother raise my sister and me―who worked with her to teach us about love and respect and the obligations we have to one another.”
Obama neglected to mention that his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, selected Frank Marshall Davis as Obama’s father-figure during his time in Hawaii. This is how his grandparents helped his mother “raise” Obama. Davis, a black communist writer and poet, was a role model for Obama during a time when Obama needed someone to look up to and was formulating his thinking. Davis filled Obama’s head with anti-American thoughts.
Obama keeps this information concealed from voters because he and his campaign strategist, David Axelrod, understand that Davis was a hard-line member of the Communist Party USA and a Stalinist agent. Any relationship with such a figure would not go over well with voters, especially in Obama’s case when other controversial relationships with anti-American figures have already surfaced.
The Importance of Davis
It’s one thing to be associated with communist terrorist Bill Ayers. It’s another thing to sit through the anti-American sermons of Jeremiah Wright and belong to his church. But to have a father-son relationship with a top Communist? This might be hard for voters to fathom. That is why the information has to be concealed from voters at any cost. And this is why Obama went to such lengths to conceal Davis’s identity, referring in his book, Dreams From My Father, to Davis as just “Frank.”
Unfortunately for Obama, Professor Gerald Horne, a writer for a communist publication, blew the whistle, disclosing that Frank was Frank Marshall Davis. Horne was proud of that fact and spoke in glowing terms about the relationship to a mostly communist group at Tamiment Library at New York University, which received and now houses the sanitized Communist Party archives. After being alerted to the Horne speech by New Zealand blogger Trevor Loudon, we confirmed the true identity of “Frank” with Dr. Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii. She said Davis was a significant influence over Obama for a crucial three or four years of his life before he went off to college. Veteran anti-communist investigator Herbert Romerstein has written an
entire report (PDF) on the communist network in Hawaii that included Davis and influenced Obama.
Since we put the final pieces of this puzzle together several months ago, making it crystal clear that “Frank” was a Communist and that he was Obama’s childhood mentor, many in the media haven’t quite figured out how to handle this smoking gun. Some like the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank have tried to ridicule or ignore the evidence. Others, including various Fox News personalities and even one prominent “conservative” news service, have deliberately ignored it. They would prefer to blather on about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, who have largely become old news.
The Pattern of Associations
To be sure, Wright and Ayers are important personalities, and much more needs to be investigated and told about their role in influencing Obama, but they figure in Obama’s later life during the Chicago phase of his career. By contrast, Frank Marshall Davis was there in Hawaii―at a crucial time according to Obama himself―to mentor a young Obama, who was desperately in need of a father-figure. These were the crucial growing-up years. As a father of three sons, I know how important these years can be. Obama knows, too.
The Davis influence over Obama helps explain why Obama, when he went to college, admittedly selected Marxist professors as friends, attended socialist conferences, and discussed neocolonialism. Davis, in short, explains the rest of Obama’s life and career, including his subsequent associations with Ayers and Wright. It adds up to a list of controversial connections and associations that would clearly disqualify Obama from ever getting a federal security clearance. But as a presidential candidate, he doesn’t need one.
We thought at first that conservative media figures were shying away from this explosive information because they feared being labeled as “McCarthyites” if they raised it. Then, in the case of Fox News, we learned that Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox News parent company, News Corporation, was
publicly saying nice things about Obama’s presidential run, calling him a “rock star” and other nonsense and saying he will probably win the White House. However, Murdoch stopped short of a full personal endorsement of Obama, saying he wanted to meet with him first. It is a fact, however, that his New York Post newspaper had already endorsed Obama as a “fresh face” in the Democratic presidential primaries, and Murdoch says that he was instrumental in arranging that.
It goes without saying that it might be difficult to arrange a Murdoch-Obama meeting if Bill O’Reilly were ranting and raving on a daily basis about Obama’s relationship with Frank Marshall Davis. The leftist Nation magazine reports with glee that “some Fox executives are following Rupert Murdoch’s new tone” on Obama. Would it be surprising if the new tone were to filter down to the on-air personalities?
With former network news star Linda Douglass now in place as Obama’s press spokesman, it figures to be quite a ride for Obama and his media friends. Having just announced that he intends to bypass the federal public financing campaign system and privately raise and spend perhaps $250 million or more to capture the White House this November, it looks like many in the liberal and conservative media will now treat him as the inevitable winner and compete for his affections by avoiding coverage of anything that could remotely be considered by the campaign to be a “smear.” Not so coincidentally, Obama has just launched a “Fight the smears” website.
The Cover-Up
The message to the media is to stay away from anything that could seriously tarnish Obama’s image. A relationship with a Stalinist agent could certainly do so. So the information will have to be suppressed, even by Fox News.
Of course, bringing up the role of Frank Marshall Davis in raising Obama is not a smear. It is a fact. But facts can be inconvenient things when there is a political will to ignore them. Likewise, Tony Lake’s nonsensical views about Alger Hiss will likely be ignored. Many reporters probably don’t even know who Alger Hiss was. So what does it matter that people like Alger Hiss and Frank Marshall Davis were communist agents? And that Obama is now being advised by someone who turns a blind eye to the evidence of communist infiltration of the U.S. Government?
Does anybody in the major media care about the truth anymore? And what has happened to the conservative media as well?
