Treason misses the mark: in Treason, Ann Coulter fires both barrels at stupid liberals and inept Democrats, but, like a poor marksman, she keeps missing the real target: a deeply entrenched conspiracy.

Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, by Ann Coulter, New York: Crown Forum (a division of Random House, Inc.), 2003, 356 pages, hardcover, $26.95.

If you're looking for a book that excoriates liberals and Democrats, Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism will do the trick. But if you believe that the term "conservative" has been co-opted by liberals and made virtually meaningless, and that the differences between high-level Republicans and Democrats no longer include even table manners, then Coulter's excessively publicized tome will likely raise your blood pressure. Throughout hundreds of pages, the author champions her brand of conservative and gushes over anyone wearing a Republican hat.

"Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," says the newest conservative heroine in her very first sentence. On page two, she insists that Republicans are "more patriotic" than Democrats. Incessantly, she pounds away at her twin targets, all the while ignoring the equally harmful activities of numerous left-of-center carriers of the GOP banner and the many closet liberals who masquerade as conservatives. While aiming her barbs at Democrats, she salutes Eisenhower, Nixon, two Bushes, Ashcroft and several other Republicans--even though many of their deeds merited severe condemnations. If any of these men were Democrats, it's a safe bet they would have earned her scorn.

Treason and Conspiracy

Lawyer Coulter knows that the U.S. Constitution (which she manages to ignore throughout her book) defines treason as "levying war against them [the United States], or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." But to make that charge stick, the Constitution requires "the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." A very difficult undertaking. Coulter, however, repeatedly claimed to find "treason" without applying the standard of the Constitution. For her, the term serves as a supercharged measure of her intense dislike for stupid liberals and inept Democrats. No conservatives earn her sensation-seeking accusation. Nor do any Republicans, not even the most socialistic and internationalist "moderates" within the GOP.

Ignoring or praising the harm done by Republicans and phony conservatives is a marked feature in this barb-filled book. But shunning evidence of conspiracy is its greater shortcoming. For the record, recall that conspirators are deliberate evildoers. Anyone who arrives at the conclusion that a conspiracy is afoot, therefore, doesn't merely hope for the best or expect that hurling ridicule at adversaries will turn a conspirator into a remorseful patriot. Coulter, though, excels at ridicule and relies on it here. Such a tactic gives the impression that stupidity alone is at the root of the "treason" Coulter has found. This is a dangerous and false impression.

The author could have applied her legal training (University of Michigan), legal experience (private practice in New York City), and government service (staff duty handling crime issues for Michigan Republican Senator Spencer Abraham) to conclude that her Democrat and liberal targets weren't merely stupid or blindly loyal party hacks. In several places, especially in her well-researched and welcome defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, she actually makes the case for a Communist conspiracy by demonstrating how a slew of subversives worked together--and worked continuously--to wreak havoc on America. But, in the circles where Coulter regularly displays her blonde tresses and issues her snappy one-liners, applying the word "conspiracy" to the undoing of America is strictly forbidden. "The first job of a conspiracy," said a sage 40 years ago, "is to convince the world it doesn't exist." In Treason, Coulter bends over backwards to keep its existence hidden.

She could have relied oil the instructions given to the jury by Judge Irving Kaufmann in the 1951 trial of atomic bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Treason mentions the Rosenberg trial without referencing Judge Kaufmann's definition.) The judge stated: "A conspiracy can be defined as a combination of two or more persons. by concerted action, to accomplish a criminal and unlawful purpose...." Coulter presents plenty of what Kaufmann said was needed to arrive at the existence of conspiracy, but she preferred to look the other way.

McCarthy and His Foes

In its first 100 pages, Treason recounts the courageous 1950-1954 efforts of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) to expose the Communist horde serving in sensitive government posts such as the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Army. With acknowledged help from McCarthy historian M. Stanton Evans and reliance on the recently released Venona transcripts corroborating McCarthy's charges, she capably shows that McCarthy should be revered, not condemned, and his name should never have been made the symbol for everything nasty or dirty in America.

Along the way, she details the feverish efforts of Democrats and liberals who employed a pattern of lies, distortions and treachery to block McCarthy's work. Had she applied Judge Kaufmann's definition, or one of many other available definitions of conspiracy, it would have been a no-brainer to conclude that the campaign against McCarthy was organized, deliberate and criminal--ergo, a conspiracy. She even could have relied on McCarthy's own assessment of what he faced: "a conspiracy on a scale so vast as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man." But the conspiracy that placed Communists in high government posts, the same conspiracy that successfully impeded McCarthy's important work, not only wasn't exposed then, it continues to inflict its deadly harm today.

Coulter concluded that Army officials who protected Communist underlings were guilty only of "egregious stupidity" for "employing ridiculous security risks." The Democrats who attacked McCarthy for attempting to rid the U.S. government of Soviet agents were "inept" and the liberals who joined in were suffering from a "psychological block." After competently noting McCarthy's success in identifying actual Communists in government, a cause of severe embarrassment for the Truman administration, she rightly complained that his good efforts resulted in an investigation, not of the responsible government officials but of McCarthy. But she then concludes that the anti-McCarthy committee led by Maryland Democratic Senator Millard Tydings was "a joke," something it certainly was not. In page after page, she presents evidence that should logically have led her to conclude that government officials, media luminaries, academics and others were indeed conspiring to thwart McCarthy, shield Communists and their patrons in government, aid the Soviet Union, and harm America. But Coulter blames the incompetence of "inept government bureaucracies," not conspiracy, for the torpedoing, of McCarthy's investigations.

Protecting Republicans

Treason excoriates plenty of Democrats and liberals. But Republicans and Coulter's brand of conservatives are awarded the whitest of white hats. After lauding President Dwight Eisenhower for his politically motivated charge that Communists could be found in the Truman administration, she mentioned only in passing Eisenhower's 1954 "executive privilege" order that kept McCarthy from investigating high-level Republicans. Arguably this order was the most important turning point in McCarthy's efforts; it was all downhill for the senator once the president intervened to protect guilty friends. The Senate immediately should have voided Eisenhower's unconstitutional act. Instead, with the White House participating in the Stop McCarthy campaign, the anti-McCarthy cabal revved up its engines and succeeded in getting the Senate to condemn him on two baseless charges. Had Coulter followed through with a thorough condemnation of the Eisenhower intervention, she would necessarily have included Republicans among those she targeted, and she would have had a tough time avoiding the charge of conspiracy.

Displaying naivete at the very least, she repeatedly referred to the work of the "House Un-American Activities Committee" or "HUAC." The committee's actual name was "House Committee on Un-American Activities." But the Communist press consistently referred to the committee as the "House Un-American Activities Committee" as opposed to a committee on "Un-American Activities" so as to suggest that the committee, and not the subject of its investigations, was Un-American. The Communists were so successful in this sleight-of-hand that numerous establishment sources--including Ann Coulter--have wittingly or unwittingly adopted the Communist version of the committee's name.

Vietnam and Korea

Coulter blames Democrat President Lyndon Johnson and Democrats in Congress for the Vietnam defeat. Johnson and John F. Kennedy surely deserve blame, but what about Republican President Richard Nixon? Excusing Nixon's willingness to continue the policies he inherited in a war where victory was never the goal, Coulter claims, "President Nixon came into office [in 1969] and made the best of a bad situation." Military officials repeatedly claimed that the war could have been won except for the restrictions initially placed on them by Democrats and then largely kept in place by Republicans. She insists that a "Republican President either wouldn't have started the war or would have won it pretty fast." But she completely omits mention of the early U.S. involvement in the region begun during the Republican Eisenhower administration, ignores the manipulations of Nixon appointee Henry Kissinger that led to defeat and the abandonment of most of the POWs, claims that Nixon ended the war in 1973 "honorably," and even maintains that he would have done better except for his Democrat-inspired Watergate woes.

Republican Richard Nixon's minor role in exposing Alger Hiss wins Coulter's praise as the sole reason for the highly placed Communist's eventual conviction. For it and for his defeat of extreme leftist Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, Nixon is her idol. Yet, in a burst of honesty, Coulter managed to include the following negative assessment of her Republican hero: "Nixon imposed wage and price controls, established relations with Communist China, engaged in detente with the Soviet Union, created the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded the federal food stamp program, hired Henry Kissinger, and put Harry Blackmun [of Roe v. Wade fame] on the Supreme Court." Evidently, small attention must be given to the harm produced by a Republican who was once a cautious "anti-communist." That is, Nixon is a good American despite his flaws be cause a Republican can't be otherwise.

Treason informs readers that liberals bungled the Korean War but omits the role played by the United Nations, and avoids the fact that the state of war begun with UN authorization in 1950 has continued through 10 administrations, half of which have been led by Republicans. She blames "the left" for mishandling the threat from North Korea's current nuclear saber-rattling but fails to mention that the nuclear weapons capability possessed by Kim Jong II arrived from Communist China. Beijing's tyrants benefit from favors dispensed by Republicans and Democrats, even though Chinese leaders declare our country to be their "number one enemy."

Aiding the Enemy

It can hardly be ignorance when Coulter paints the 1991 war against Iraq as a victory while ignoring President George H.W. Bush's clear and repeated insistence that his goal was to bring about "a reinvigorated United Nations" leading to a UN-dominated "new world order." Over and over, she gushes about the oft-repeated claim that Ronald Reagan had single-handedly won the Cold War. Is it possible that she has never heard of Anatoliy Golitsyn, the top-level Soviet defector who warned the West (long before the sea-change events transpired) that the Berlin Wall would come down, that a younger and more liberal Soviet leader would emerge, and that the apparent demise of Communism was in fact a false liberalization designed to win concessions from the West and to pave the way for economic and political merger? Golitsyn's books New Lies For Old and The Perestroika Deception indicate that conspirators, not Reagan's actions, ended the Cold War for their megalomaniacal purposes.

Does Coulter fail to mention decades of massive U.S. aid to the Kremlin because Republican Presidents supported such treachery? Republican Senator William Armstrong told Senate colleagues in 1982 that the West, chiefly the United States, had supplied the Soviet Union with "more than $50 billion worth of sophisticated technical equipment the Communists could not produce themselves." He zeroed in on the USSR's use of the aid to "produce nuclear missiles, tanks and armored cars, military command and control systems," and more. Much of this aid, he said, was "financed in part by American and Western European banks," and much of that was guaranteed by U.S. government-backed loan guarantees. Yes, there was a Cold War, but it was a war between two adversaries who had the same supplier.

The buildup of the Soviet war machine started during the Eisenhower years and continued throughout Republican and Democratic administrations. Perhaps Coulter never heard of Lincoln P. Bloomfield's 1962 State Department-sponsored report detailing what was needed to bring about "A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations." Bloomfield pointed out that successfully subordinating all nations to overall UN control was unlikely while the Cold War raged. There was, he wrote, a need "to transform and tame the forces of communism." That transformation and taming, at least as far as the former USSR is concerned, has indeed made effective control of the world by the UN much more attainable. In other words, Coulter and others ought to do some important homework before crediting Ronald Reagan with the dramatic but dubious implosion of the USSR.

Treason in Context

Much of the huge amount of publicity given Treason has focused on Coulter's defense of Joe McCarthy as if the whole book contained little else. But her later chapters heap praise on George W. Bush for attacking Iraq in the interests of "national defense." She insists without proof that Iraq aided the 9-11 terrorists, that "Saddam was developing nuclear weapons to hand over to Al-Qaeda," and that the Iraqi regime possessed and intended to use weapons of mass destruction. She ignores the current President Bush's repeated assertions that he decided to go to war against Iraq to enforce UN Security Council resolutions. She fails to mention the Constitution's requirement that war can be declared only by Congress and not launched by a president. Was the congressional war power ignored because Republicans, not just Democrats, are guilty of allowing this dramatic circumvention of the "supreme law of the land"? She protests that a preemptive war against Iraq was necessary in the interests of "national defense." But empire building under the UN's umbrella is a far more apt description of the war.

Praising the government's response to 9-11, Coulter concludes, "No one could name one thing Ashcroft bad done that would alarm any normal person." Incredible! Acting for the Bush administration, U.S. Attorney General Ashcroft announced plans to suspend habeas corpus, overturn the Posse Comitatus restrictions on use of the military against civilians, employ millions of citizens to spy on one another in Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), and conduct various other attacks on the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Coulter skips over the administration's desire to initiate military tribunals, and she defends the Homeland Security Act as though no threats to liberty could be found in its scary provisions.

Coulter's book will delight the neoconservatives who dominate the Bush administration. Republicans will chuckle broadly at her targeting of Democrats. And the many way-out leftist movie stars she savages won't like her book either. But Treason isn't what America needs. The late Gary Allen hit the nail on the head with his 1972 None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which targeted Republicans as well as Democrats, and liberals as well as phony conservatives. America isn't being victimized by stupidity and blundering. And it won't survive if many more Americans don't begin to realize the true nature of their enemy--so they can fight it with exposure, the only weapon a conspiracy really fears.