The Communist
by Paul Kengor, Ph. D.
400 pages
Mercury Ink, July 2012
biography/memoir/African-American/political
Read in 10 days
My Rating:
My Review: The story of Frank Marshall Davis is not a pretty one, but it had to be told. Unfortunately, those who should know the story of this mans life will not read it. They are the ones who blindly voted Barack Obama into office for reasons other than the content of his character. If those who voted for Barack Obama bothered to take a small peek into the content of his character and where exactly he got his morals and sense of values from, they would have no choice but to look at the man behind the “Frank” our President so conveniently mentions in his first book about his own life. The MSM, as usual, chose to either gloss over this mans mention, so much so they did not even bother to investigate who he was. Why should the MSM have cared? Well, wouldn’t you be interested to know who was so influential that he needed to be mentioned over a dozen times in an autobiographical book written by a man who, at the time, was a shoe-in for being our President? Instead we left “Frank” alone, until now, when Paul Kengor, Ph. D. had the courage to stand and tell us the facts about a man who, at one point, was on the FBI’s watch-list! That is not an easy list to get on and once you’re on it you remain there till you die.
Why was he placed on such an exclusive list? Well, besides the fact that he became a card carrying communist? To me that was reason enough. If you want to know the rest of his life I suggest you read this book. And while I agree with the author that Frank Marshall Davis’ life was not the best lived by any means, I hardly consider the “obstacles” he faced warrant enough to behave the way he did. He, like any other red blooded American, is entitled to believe and think and express those beliefs and thoughts with words however he so chooses, until those words can be used to incite violence of any kind. Once your words become a weapon and an instrument for bad things happening it must be noticed and monitored. He was noticed. He was monitored.
Why was a man who was a card carrying Communist, considered by Obama himself to be his closest and perhaps longest mentor? What appealed to him about Davis? Aside from that, why was this question never posed during his campaign in 2008 or after he won the DNC nomination? Or even after he won the Presidency? Read the book to find out the answer to those questions and so much more you wouldn’t even think of asking or needing to know about the man who influenced our President profoundly.
Summary: “I
admire Russia for wiping out an economic system which permitted a
handful of rich to exploit and beat gold from the millions of plain
people. . . . As one who believes in freedom and democracy for all, I
honor the Red nation.” —FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS, 1947
In his memoir, Barack Obama omits
the full name of his mentor, simply calling him “Frank.” Now, the truth
is out: Never has a figure as deeply troubling and controversial as
Frank Marshall Davis had such an impact on the development of an
American president.
Although other radical influences
on Obama, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, have been scrutinized,
the public knows little about Davis, a card-carrying member of the
Communist Party USA, cited by the Associated Press as an “important
influence” on Obama, one whom he “looked to” not merely for “advice on
living” but as a “father” figure.
While the Left has willingly
dismissed Davis (with good reason), here are the indisputable,
eye-opening facts: Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro–Red China
communist. His Communist Party USA card number, revealed in FBI files,
was CP #47544. He was a prototype of the loyal Soviet patriot, so
radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security
Index. In the early 1950s, Davis opposed U.S. attempts to slow Stalin
and Mao. He favored Red Army takeovers of Central and Eastern Europe,
and communist control in Korea and Vietnam. Dutifully serving the cause,
he edited and wrote for communist newspapers in both Chicago and
Honolulu, courting contributors who were Soviet agents. In the 1970s,
amid this dangerous political theater, Frank Marshall Davis came into
Barack Obama’s life.
Aided by access to explosive declassified FBI files, Soviet archives,
and Davis’s original newspaper columns, Paul Kengor explores how Obama
sought out Davis and how Davis found in Obama an impressionable young
man, one susceptible to Davis’s worldview that opposed American policy
and traditional values while praising communist regimes. Kengor sees
remnants of this worldview in Obama’s early life and even, ultimately,
his presidency.
Kengor charts with definitive accuracy the progression of Davis’s
communist ideas from Chicago to Hawaii. He explores how certain elements
of the Obama administration’s agenda reflect Davis’s columns advocating
wealth redistribution, government stimulus for “public works projects,”
taxpayer-funding of universal health care, and nationalizing General
Motors. Davis’s writings excoriated the “tentacles of big business,”
blasted Wall Street and “greedy” millionaires, lambasted GOP tax cuts
that “spare the rich,” attacked “excess profits” and oil companies, and
perceived the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his vision for the
state—all the while echoing Davis’s often repeated mantra for
transformational and fundamental “change.”
And yet, The Communist is
not unsympathetic to Davis, revealing him as something of a victim, an
African- American who suffered devastating racial persecution in the Jim
Crow era, steering this justly angered young man on a misguided
political track. That Davis supported violent and heartless communist
regimes over his own country is impossible to defend. That he was a
source of inspiration to President Barack Obama is impossible to ignore.
Is Obama working to fulfill the
dreams of Frank Marshall Davis? That question has been impossible to
answer, since Davis’s writings and relationship with Obama have either
been deliberately obscured or dismissed as irrelevant. With Paul
Kengor’s The Communist, Americans can finally weigh the evidence and decide for themselves.
***
There were hundreds of thousands
of American communists like Frank who agitated throughout the twentieth
century. They chose the wrong side of history, a horrendously bloody
side that left a wake of more than 100 million corpses from the streets
of the Bolshevik Revolution to the base of the Berlin Wall—double the
combined dead of the century’s two world wars. And they never
apologized. Quite the contrary, they cursed their accusers for daring to
charge (correctly) that they were communists whose ideology threatened
the American way and the greater world and all of humanity. They took
their denials to the grave, and still today their liberal/progressive
dupes continue to conceal their crimes and curse their accusers for
them. We need hundreds and thousands of more books on American
communists like Frank, so we can finally start to get this history
right— and, more so, learn its vital lessons. To fail to do so is a
great historical injustice.
We especially need to flesh out
these lessons, which are morality tales in the truest sense of the word,
when we find the rarest case of a man like “Frank” managing to
influence someone as influential as the current president of the United
States of America—the leader of the free world and driver of the
mightiest political/economic engine in history. Such figures cannot be
ignored.
The people who influence our presidents matter.
—from The Communist: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor
