Media Cover Up Obama’s Ties To Communist Davis

By PAUL KENGOR
Posted 07/16/2012 06:34 PM ET

He blasted Wall Street, big business, big banks, big oil, “excess profits,” “corporate profits” and “fat contracts,” “millionaires” and the “wealthy.”

He called out the “corporation executive” for not paying his “fair” share.

He attacked “GOP” tax cuts that “spare the rich” and “benefit millionaires.”

He trumpeted the public sector over the private sector.

He advocated wealth redistribution from greedy “corporations” to “health insurance” and “public works projects.”

He favored taxpayer-funding of universal health care. He supported government stimulus to rescue America from (allegedly) another Great Depression.

He wanted to rid America of “huge funds” finding their way into the “pockets” of “Wall Street.” “Instead,” he declared, “money should be spent for the benefit of the people instead of the corporations.”

He supported nationalization and singled out General Motors for government action.

He favored the Russians at the expense of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

He rejected Winston Churchill, and wanted the heralded prime minister nowhere within the White House.

He insisted that American foreign policy was about “big profits” for big oil.

He cited the American Founders and the U.S. Constitution, and described himself and his policies as “progressive,” while his detractors accused him of being a communist.

He adopted slogans like “Forward” and “Change.” He wanted to transform America through what he called “fundamental change.”

Who is this man?

If you answered “Barack Obama,” you’re only half right. The answer is Frank Marshall Davis, Hawaii mentor to Barack Obama, and Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member No. 47544.

And only now, four years into Obama’s presidency, are we finally learning about this mystery man ignored or downplayed by sympathetic Obama biographers and journalists.

Frank Marshall Davis (1905-87) was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, literal card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

He edited and wrote for Party-line publications such as the Honolulu Record and the Chicago Star, which included contributors who actually served as agents to Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Soviet Support

Davis did outrageous Soviet propaganda work in his columns, at every juncture agitating and opposing U.S. attempts to slow Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

He favored Yalta and Red Army takeovers of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole.

In China, he urged America to dump the “fascist” Chiang in support of Mao’s Red forces. He wanted communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. He was adamantly, angrily anti-NATO, anti-Marshall Plan, anti-Truman Doctrine.

He argued that U.S. officials under President Harry Truman and under secretaries of state George Marshall and Dean Acheson were handing West Germany back to the Nazis, while Stalin was pursuing “democracy” in East Germany and the Communist Bloc.

He portrayed America’s leaders as “aching for an excuse to launch a nuclear nightmare of mass murder and extermination” against the Soviets and the Chinese.

Moreover, in what ought to be an eye-opener to President Obama’s Democratic base, Frank Marshall Davis’ targets were chiefly Democrats, especially President Truman.

Why target Truman? Because Davis’ peak period of pro-Soviet propaganda work was the latter 1940s, when Stalin’s Red Army was rampaging through Eastern Europe. Standing in Stalin’s way was Harry Truman.

And so, Davis’ Chicago Star trashed Truman with headlines like “White House to white hoods: KKK hails Truman’s policy as its own” and “TRUMAN KNIFES HOPE FOR PEACE.”

Davis excoriated the Democratic president as trigger-happy Truman, pursuing “a new world war,” a “program for World War III,” in a bloodthirsty bid to “rule Russia.”

He framed Truman’s Marshall Plan as a new form of “colonial slavery,” intended “to re-enslave the yellow and brown and black peoples of the world.”

Truman was not Davis’ only target. Davis harbored a special hatred for Winston Churchill. He warned of Churchill teaming up with Truman in a two-nation U.K./U.S. alliance seeking “Anglo-American world domination” and “super-imperialism.”

When Churchill came to Fulton, Mo., in March 1946 to warn the world that an “Iron Curtain” was closing across Europe, Frank Marshall Davis was livid.

He and his CPUSA comrades mocked Churchill; they maintained that the only “Iron Curtains” were those being erected by Davis’ worst demons: anti-communists in the American press and General Motors.

The problem was not Stalin’s Iron Curtain, scoffed Davis, but “G.M.’s iron curtain,” being raised by “General Motors’ Hitlers.”

In short, Frank Marshall Davis’ work and writings were irresponsible and outrageous.

Congress certainly noticed. In December 1956, the Democrats who headed the Senate Judiciary Committee summoned Frank Marshall Davis to Washington to testify on his pro-Soviet activities. He pled the Fifth Amendment.

The next year, the Democratic Senate, in an official report titled “Scope of Soviet Activity in the United States,” publicly listed Davis as “an identified member of the Communist Party.”

Davis’ political antics were so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index, which meant he could be immediately detained in the event of a national emergency, such as a war breaking out between the United States and U.S.S.R.

Influence On Obama

All of that is troubling enough, but how does it relate to Barack Obama?

Frank Marshall Davis influenced Obama throughout Obama’s adolescence in the 1970s. It was Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who introduced Davis to Obama for the purpose of mentoring.

In my research on Davis, I quote over a dozen biographers and associates of Obama and Davis describing Davis as a vital, lasting influence. One Davis biographer and close friend, a University of Hawaii professor, says that Davis instilled in Obama a belief that “change can happen.”

In fact, we know about Davis because of Obama’s own lengthy acknowledgment. In “Dreams from My Father,” Obama notes that Davis offered him advice at several significant levels: on race, college, women, his mind, his attitudes, on life.

“I was intrigued by old Frank,” writes Obama, “with his books and whiskey breath and the hint of hard-earned knowledge behind the hooded eyes.”

Obama directly mentioned “Frank” 22 times over the course of thousands of words and every section of his bestselling memoir, from Hawaii — the site of visits and late evenings together — to Los Angeles to Chicago to Germany to Africa, from adolescence to college to community organizing.

Frank is always one of the few (and first) names mentioned by Obama in each mile-marker upon his historic path to Washington.

When Frank is not physically there with Obama, Obama literally imagines him there. Obama felt a connection to Frank that he painfully concedes he was unable to find in anyone else.

Tellingly, though Frank Marshall Davis’ influence on Obama is acknowledged in “Dreams from My Father,” Obama never once disclosed the CPUSA member’s full name. No doubt this was because Obama knew about Davis’ extreme past.

I believe that Davis is reflective, and helps explain, how and why America’s current president is further to the left than any president of our generation.

He sheds light on how our president developed into a man of the left, ultimately ranked the most left-leaning member of the Senate by National Journal in the final year before he ran for president.

And yet, this radical influence on our president has been thoroughly ignored by the media. No Republican president with a mentor this extreme to the right would escape such scrutiny.

Not many presidents can count a card-carrying CPUSA member among their mentors.

The man now in charge of history’s mightiest economic engine was influenced, to some notable degree, by a pro-Soviet communist.

That is unprecedented; a relationship that at long last merits our attention.

• Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and author of the new book, “The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor.”