I didn’t mention it in today’s Morning Jolt, but Casey Michel’s new book, Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World, offers a few more details about Samuel Dickstein, the eleven-term New York Democratic congressman and New York State supreme court justice who was also a spy for the Soviet Union.
The Soviets, as the records opened decades later revealed, got their own money’s worth. Dickstein used his congressional leverage to expedite Soviet access to American passports — making it far easier for Soviet citizens, and Soviet agents, to travel through the United States. Dickstein also covertly shared “materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister,” and more, according to the Soviet documents. At one point, Dickstein even passed information about a Soviet defector to his handlers; soon thereafter, the defector was found dead in his hotel room.
I’ll bet you’ve sure heard a lot about the Red Scare in your education, but you’ve probably never heard of Samuel Dickstein. New York City still has a plaza named after him.
Michel concludes:
It wasn’t until Soviet archives opened up that, as author Peter Duffy wrote, Dickstein was revealed as the “only known” elected federal official to have served as a covert agent of a foreign power.
But Michel notes that, as his book was going to publication, another lawmaker joined the infamy alongside Dickstein. Earlier this year, New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez was convicted on all 16 counts against him, including bribery, extortion, acting as a foreign agent, obstruction of justice, and several counts of conspiracy.