The Frank Marshall Davis Cover-Up Is Over
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | August 27, 2008
Jon Meacham writes in Newsweek that Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was “a strong voice for racial justice” and political activist whose “writings on civil-rights and labor issues” had “prompted a McCarthyite denunciation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.” Meacham is suggesting that Davis was the target of false allegations that he was a communist.
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KINCAID WROTE: “The attacks don’t usually dispute any facts but instead launch personal attacks on the authors of investigative pieces about Obama.”
RESPONSE: I guess I must be the exception, because I have directly disputed the misrepresentations that you falsely label “facts,” with NO answers from AIM. I have documented an extensive list of AIM’s misrepresentations on my blog, to no avail, including (but not limited to) AIM’s false claims that:
1. Davis told Obama blacks have a right to hate whites
2. Davis was a lifelong member of the Communist Party USA
3. Four different AIM misrepresentations of the 1949 Congressional testimony by Honolulu NAACP rookie board member Edward Berman, including FALSE statements that:
a. Berman criticized Davis for allegedly sneaking into NAACP meetings, while allegedly having the “avowed intent” of converting the same meetings.
b. Davis tried to take over meetings of the Honolulu NAACP
c. Davis tried to take over the NAACP itself.
d. Roy Wilkins supposedly criticized Davis directly when he “rightly noted of Davis and his comrades: they would now destroy the local branch of the NAACP.”
4. Davis was a “Stalinist,” because “He stayed with the Communist Party even after the Hitler-Stalin pact. That’s why I refer to him as `a Stalinist agent’, and that “His values, passed on to Obama, were those of a communist agent who pledged allegiance to Stalin.”
5.. False claims that claims Gerald Horne, CPUSA, “noted” that Davis “became the young man’s mentor” and influenced Obama’s “career moves” Horne actually said that Davis gave Obama career advice, rather than influencing his career moves, and did NOT state that Davis became Obama’s “mentor.”
6. Claims Obama “developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis” when this is NOT supported by Obama’s book.
7. Claims that “Obama had covered up the true identity of this “Frank,” when in reality a cover-up is concealment of a scandal, which requires wrongdoing. There WAS no wrongdoing in the Davis-Obama relationship, so there was no scandal and no cover-up!
The bottom line, according to Edgar Tidwell, whom AIM’s Cliff Kincaid cites as “an expert on the life and writings of Davis,” demolishes right-wing misrepresentation of Davis’s radical influence in one simple paragraph:
“Although my research indicates that Davis joined the CPUSA as a “closet member” during World War II, there is no evidence that he was a Stalinist, or even a Party member before WWII. Further, to those attempting to make the specious stand for the concrete, there is no evidence that he instructed Barack Obama in communist ideology. Frank Marshall Davis did NOT believe in overthrowing the USA. He was committed to what the nation professed to be. For him, communism was primarily an intellectual vehicle to achieve a political end-a possible tool for gaining the constitutional freedoms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL Americans.”
To selectively use some of Tidwell’s conclusions, without using his bottom-line conclusions, is stacking the evidence. It is intellectual dishonesty. To make all of the documented specific misrepresentations concerning the Davis-Obama relationship, which consistently exaggerate Davis’s radical influence on Obama, is journalistic fraud. Cliff Kincaid would do well to heed the lessons of Stephen Glass’s journalistic career at The New Republic magazine during the mid-1990s when HIS serial journalistic fraud was exposed. But then again, Accuracy In Media is not TRULY dedicated to accuracy in media, is it?
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