To the Editors:

In his review of Diana West’s American Betrayal (“Red Herrings,” December 2013), Andrew C. McCarthy also discusses the critique I wrote of her book that appeared on Frontpage magazine’s website on August 7, 2013. He accuses me of making the “inaccurate” claim that Ms. West is a conspiracy theorist, a charge that he writes “lacks merit.” Indeed, he says that there was, in fact, an actual conspiracy, which I ignore. Moreover, he argues that I exaggerate what West says. She does not claim, he writes, that “every decision-maker touched by the Soviet conspiracy” was a Communist. But I never made such an assertion. McCarthy then interprets West’s argument to be that “there was an ambitious Communist effort to steer American policy in directions that aligned with Soviet interests.”

If that were all that West argued, I would actually have little trouble with it. What West does argue is something else entirely. She asserts, time and time again, that decisions—particularly those made by fdr—which affected the Soviet–U.S. military alliance were made because the United States was an occupied power, its government controlled by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and subverted it.

On this point, McCarthy writes that my interpretation of her “ ‘occupation’ metaphor” is “overwrought,” and that I was intimating that West asserts American policy “was fully controlled, rather than significantly influenced, by the Kremlin.” McCarthy is wrong about this. Throughout her book, Diana West makes it