The Case of the Nazi Propagandist

WASHINGTON – As a young but trusted legal lieutenant at the Justice Department in the early 1980s, Judge John Roberts Jr. was assigned some of the agency’s most politically sensitive duties, including fielding the requests of conservative heavyweights who sought to exert influence in ongoing cases.Records released by the National Archives on Tuesday show that one missive that crossed the future Supreme Court nominee’s desk was a three-page letter sent to President Reagan in 1982 from the editor of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., seeking relief for a former Yale lecturer and Nazi propagandist whom the Justice Department was attempting to strip of his American citizenship.Writing on National Review letterhead, Mr. Buckley declared that he and others were “outraged” at the Justice Department’s treatment of Vladimir Sokolov, a Russian emigre and staunch anti-Communist. Sokolov, who began teaching Russian language at Yale in 1959, resigned in 1976 after the university was roiled by press reports that he wrote virulently anti-Semitic newspaper pieces in Nazi-occupied Russia during World War II.Mr. Buckley told the White House he feared Sokolov would be deported to the Soviet Union and “presumably he would be executed.”While conceding that Sokolov “in all probability [wrote] some anti-Semitic material,” the “Firing Line” host and Yale graduate suggested the embattled Russian linguist had shown no animus towards Jews. “The charge astonished everyone at Yale who knew him as either a colleague or as a teacher, because there was never any evidence that at any time had he uttered a pro-Fascist, or anti-Semitic remark,” Mr. Buckley wrote.Mr. Buckley also invoked the name of a Time magazine journalist and Yale trustee, Strobe Talbott, who once studied under Sokolov. Mr. Talbott, who became deputy secretary of state under President Clinton, considered the attacks on the former lecturer to be “wildly off-target,” Mr. Buckley said.“I checked with Talbott over the telephone (I have known him over the years) and he reaffirms his feelings on Sokolov, and tells me that the high probability is that the whole operation against Sokolov is a KGB operation. On this he would not like to be quoted,” Mr. Buckley wrote.Mr. Buckley declined to be interviewed for this story. “He remembers that the incident happened, but none of the details,” an aide to the National Review editor, Linda Bridges, said.On other occasions, Mr. Buckley has been credited with driving anti-Semites out of the conservative movement. In 1993, he fired a longtime staffer at National Review, Joseph Sobran, over his anti-Jewish writings.Mr. Talbott, now president of a Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution, did not respond to messages seeking comment about the episode.The high-level intervention on Sokolov’s behalf angered some at the Justice Department, such as the man who ran the Nazi-hunting unit, Neal Sher.“I remember that letter very well,” Mr. Sher said in an interview. “I was stunned, number one, that William F. Buckley would take the time to write about it, and that he would invoke Strobe Talbott’s name without knowing a bloody thing about the case.”Mr. Sher said the articles Sokolov wrote, under the name V.I. Samarin, were the vilest kind of anti-Semitism. “He was really scum, this Sokolov. The crap he wrote was just unbelievable,” the former prosecutor said.Mr. Sher said his office received a lot of angry correspondence about the case, most of it from “Eastern European emigre communities who were claiming we were dupes of the KGB.” However, Mr. Buckley’s letter required a reply, Mr. Sher said. “It was just unusual that someone would personally approach the president about that, so they had to deal with it,” he said.The letter indicates that Mr. Buckley raised the deportation case with Reagan in person on at least one occasion.Precisely what Judge Roberts, then 27, did in connection with the Sokolov case is unclear, but there is no indication in the records that he or his colleagues interfered in the proceeding. On a May 10, 1982, note in the file, the future nominee wrote, “pending case, can’t comment,” and “keep RR, AG out,” apparently referring to Reagan and the then attorney general, William French Smith.Mr. Buckley’s letter prompted the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, D. Lowell Jensen, to send Smith a memo outlining the case against Sokolov and describing his wartime propaganda in unsparing terms. “The articles are not only viciously anti-Semitic (they refer to kikes’ as ‘crooked-nosed big brown rats with bared teeth’), but they listed the names and occupations of local Jews, all of whom were apparently murdered,” wrote Mr. Jensen, who is now a federal judge in California.Mr. Jensen dismissed Mr. Talbott’s alleged claim of a KGB plot as “highly unlikely.” The criminal division chief pointed out that Sokolov conceded that the articles were genuine, but insisted that Nazi censors forced him to insert the anti-Semitic material.Mr. Jensen, following the outline in Judge Roberts’s notes, proposed that Reagan send Mr. Buckley a brief letter saying “it would be inappropriate for me to take any action or to comment on the case.”Mr. Jensen also penned a letter to Mr. Buckley explaining that the pending case involved only Sokolov’s citizenship and would not result in his immediate deportation. The Justice Department official also explained that it was far from certain that Sokolov would be sent to the Soviet Union if he were deported.On June 11, 1982, the attorney general, Smith, sent the entire package of correspondence to the White House counsel, Fred Fielding. It is unclear what action Reagan took, but records indicate that Mr. Fielding’s deputy agreed with the proposed response to Mr. Buckley’s complaint.Ultimately, the case against Sokolov went forward. During a trial held in Westbury, Conn., in 1985, he argued that Nazi censors altered his work and that no deaths could be attributed to his writings, the New York Times reported. The following year, a judge ordered that Sokolov be stripped of his citizenship for willfully misrepresenting his past.An appeals court panel upheld the denaturalization order. Sokolov asked the Supreme Court to take up his case, but in 1988 it rebuffed that request.Sokolov, who lived in Milford, Conn., did not show up for a subsequent deportation hearing, and it soon emerged that he had moved to Montreal and applied for refugee status from the Canadian government.The application led to a legal tussle between Canada’s leading Jewish group, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and the government. “Canada’s response to alleged Nazi war criminals and Nazi enablers was very weak,” the group’s CEO, Bernie Farber, said.While the litigation was pending, Sokolov passed away. “The bottom line is we were never able to get justice on him because he died while we tried,” Mr. Farber said.Mr. Farber said he was surprised to hear of the efforts Messrs. Buckley and Talbott made on Sokolov’s behalf. “My only hope is they didn’t know his record, “the advocate for Canadian Jews said. “Otherwise, it’s a bit of a scandal.”Mr. Farber said Sokolov’s behavior at Yale, and the pro-Zionist views he expressed after coming to America, were beside the point. “It shouldn’t be surprising to anybody that someone who was a vicious and cruel anti-Semite and Nazi enabler during the war, when he sought refuge in the United States or Canada, kept silent,” Mr. Farber said. “It just happened time and time again.”During his 15-month tenure at the Justice Department, Mr. Roberts also fielded entreaties from another conservative celebrity, Charlton Heston. The actor, who went on to become president of the National Rifle Association, wrote to Smith twice on behalf of an Indian man who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for attempting to firebomb a ship.Mr. Heston viewed the conviction as a “grave mistake.” Mr. Roberts drafted tactful replies that said Smith could not interfere in the case.

The Case of the Nazi Propagandist

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