Browsing through the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings on "Subversive Involvement in Disruption of 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, Part 1," I came across fascinating Page 2260 (screenshot above). It is testimony from committee staffer James L. Gallagher, who was discussing some of the 82 Old Left to New Left groups and publications (some with ties to foreign Communists) the Committee had identified as fomenting mayhem and violence at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Ramparts was the ninth group on the short list. (Note: Both the convention "disruption" and this congressional hearing took place in 1968; David Horowitz was not yet editor of Ramparts. By his own account, Horowitz was not part of the Ramparts contingent that travelled to Chicago for the convention.)

There are several points of historical interest in this testimony. As Gallagher points out, the pro-Communist and revolutionary Ramparts had come to Chicago to serve as "the principal source of information for the demonstrators in Chicago." According to Gallagher, however, Ramparts passed on offers of assistance from other subversive groups on the ground to help with Ramparts' planned press run of 20,000 papers. "Ramparts stated, however, that: `David Canter [C-a-n-t-e-r] has lines [sic] our production facilities for us, and has been a great help. We wouldn't be anywhere without him.' " (Emphasis added.)

Both Rampart's gratitude to Canter and Canter's "production facilities" are equally worth flagging. By 1968, Canter was already famiiar to the HCUA as a known Communist, having come before it in 1962 to answer questions -- or, rather, to be asked questions, since he refused to answer them -- about Translation World Publishers, a publishing company Canter co-owned with another known Communist, LeRoy Wolins. (Wolins also stonewalled the Committee in 1962.)

Translation World Publishers, as HCUA counsel Chester D. Smith summarized (above), "was an outlet for the distribution of Soviet propaganda. The committee found that this publishing house was subsidized by Soviet funds and created by known Communists to serve the propaganda interests of the U.S.S.R." Two payments the committee identified in 1962 total over $40,000 in 2014 dollars.

On p. 2354 of the same 1968 HCUA hearing, it is stressed that Canter "was in charge of organizing the printing of the special issue of The Ramparts newspaper."

While there is no indication whether Translation World Publishers itself was operational in 1968, the Canter-Ramparts printing link is of interest on a couple of counts, one of which concerns the old question of funding for Ramparts. Did foreign (Soviet) money ever sluice through its coffers -- or somehow or other pad its way? Suspicious US authorities searched for Moscow money, apparently in vain. For one week in 1968 at least, there may have been a not so indirect tie-in: Commie Canter, known as a recipient of Soviet money and a conduit of Soviet propaganda -- one perfect definition of "agent" -- provided crucial assistance to Ramparts, the pro-Communist, pro-Hanoi, pro-Castro revolutionary rag.

There is another reason the Canter-Ramparts link is worth noting. As Paul Kengor highlights in The Communist, his 2012 biography of President Obama's mentor Frank Marshall Davis, Canter was himself a mentor of Obama political mastermind David Axelerod. The association between Axelrod and the Canter family started in the early 1970s. Going back to the 1940s, as Kengor also lays out, David Canter and his Communist father, Harry Canter -- Harry, a former leader of the Massachusetts Communist Party, and, with son David and the rest of his family, a former resident of the Soviet Union -- were also close associates of Frank Marshall Davis. Meanwhile, as Kengor further and stunningly reveals, Obama-mentor Davis worked in that same Chicago Communist hotbed alongside Vernon Jarrett and Robert Taylor, later father-in-law and grandfather of Valerie Jarrett, who is to this day Obama's closest advisor.

In other words, today's White House "troika" of Obama, Axelrod and Jarrett claims direct political ancestry to notorious Chicago Communist circles frequented by Davis, Canter, Jarrett and Taylor. More here.  Rather fascinating to see Ramparts fit right into this Chicago-Red nexus, shepherded by one of its more prominent Moscow-front agents.

Meanwhile, the fact that such close political links to a cadre of Communists, which, after all, took orders from Stalin, did not/does not impinge on (disqualify) Barack Obama's candidacy for president is probably the ultimate marker of the ideological victories Communism achieved in the so-called Cold War. To this day, Communism remains not just bullet-proof but also camouflaged, buffered, softened. After all, imagine if Obama and his two closest political advisors had been mentored by a coterie of leading Nazis. Obviously, they wouldn't have had a chance with voters. Here is where we get to the fascinating if also repellent double standard Communism has enjoyed, due, as I argue at length in American Betrayal, to its successful covert incursions via agents and fellow travelers into practically every US institution, cultural, religious and across the political spectrum.

Bless the congressional investigators in both House and Senate who tried to bring the dark rot to light, from Dies to McCarthy -- to Edwin E. Willis, the chairman of HCUA in 1968.

More on the Canter family and Translation World Publishers from Trevor Loudon here. Note the bit uncovered in 1989 by Herbert Romerstein and Stanislav Levchenko, who, while examining Soviet efforts to smear Barry Goldwater, found that Domino Publications, source of a 1963 booklet slandering the GOP nominee-to-be as a racist and leader of an upcoming "Bircher" putsch, had the same address as Translation World Publishers.

Romerstein, who, lamentably, passed away last year, was also the investigator for the HCUA hearings on Chicago 1968.