One of the United States’ earliest and most important anticommunist magazines was founded eighty years ago by Isaac Don Levine, a former radical who, with financial help from Alfred Kohlberg, launched Plain Talk. It was an especially auspicious time for such a journal, for this was the same year that George Kennan sent his Long Telegram from Moscow and Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Missouri before an audience that included President Harry Truman. The next year, Truman announced a program of aid to Greece and Turkey known as the Truman Doctrine, Kennan pseudonymously authored the “X” article in Foreign Affairs urging the containment of Soviet power, and James Burnham authored the first book of his Cold War trilogy The Struggle for the World. These were also the years when civil war in China was renewed with vigor by Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Plain Talk under Levine’s editorship sought to shine the light on what was at stake in that civil war and the Cold War in general, and it laid the foundation for the appearance of other anticommunist journals in the early Cold War years such as The Freeman and National Review.
In his important book Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism, Richard Gid Powers noted that the origins of Plain Talk came from a meeting at Levine’s Norwalk, Connecticut, home between Levine; Kohlberg; Father John Cronin (who would mentor a young congressman named Richard Nixon on the communist threat); three former FBI agents; and Benjamin Mandel, a researcher with the House Un-American Activities Committee who had in the mid-1920s enrolled Whittaker Chambers in the communist movement. After Chambers broke with communism in the late 1930s, it was Levine who had accompanied Chambers to meet with the State Department’s Adolf Berle at Berle’s home in an effort to expose active communist cells in Washington, D.C. (one of whose members was Alger Hiss).
At the Connecticut meeting, Kohlberg agreed to put up $25,000 to finance the magazine and provide a rent-free office to house the journal. Levine was appointed editor. In an introduction to a collection of Plain Talk articles published in 1976, Levine recalled that he told those at the meeting that Plain Talk would “not reveal more than 15 percent of the facts about the Communist conspiracy, as the American people would find the whole truth utterly unbelievable.” Plain Talk’s purpose was to awaken Americans to the communist threat at home and abroad.