The late editor of Encounter magazine, Melvin Lasky, used to tell a yarn about a rugged frontierswoman out in the Wild West. From the door of her homestead she views her husband squaring up to a vast grizzly. “Go to it husband, go to it bear,” she shouts with exquisite neutralism. In Lasky’s mind, the tale perfectly encapsulated the “moral equilateralism’ of much of the American and European left of the Cold War era. They would not take sides on the greatest issue of the times – the struggle between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the Free World.

I thought of this anecdote this past week when reading in the New York Times and Washington Post the very generous obituaries of the co-founder of the hard-left Institute for Policy Studies, Richard J. Barnet. I employ the word “generous” in several senses. The first is in the considerable length of the appreciations for a relatively unknown “policy wonk,” though the space taken is wholly justified if one takes the war of ideas seriously. Second, both articles were generous in the way they largely skated over the most controversial aspects of Barnet’s career. For his world view was far more noxious than that of the housewife in Lasky’s fable. Despite IPS’s proclaimed desire to speak truth unto power, Barnet hardly ever criticized the Warsaw Pact countries or revolutionary Third World regimes. Rather, the cutting edge of his dissatisfaction with the contemporary order was directed at his own country and its allies.

It is perhaps understandable, therefore, that both newspapers – many of whose writers enjoyed most cordial relations with the IPS through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s – should not have examined Barnet’s opinions or activism in any depth. The New York Times headlined its valedictory piece “Founder of a Liberal Research Institute” and in its first paragraph pointed out, accurately, that he had been a Kennedy administration official. It continued to highlight the most “respectable” aspects of his career: a stint at Harvard’s Russian Research Center, over a dozen books on a wide range of subjects, and Op-Eds in the New York Times. Indeed, according to S. Steven Powell’s study of the institute, “Covert Cadre,” IPS fellows appeared more often in the opinion columns of that newspaper in the early 1980s than the scholars of any other comparable foundation.

Curiously, neither obituary made much of Barnet’s role as a conduit for the leaking of one of their greatest “scoops”: the Pentagon Papers, the classified study compiled by the Defense Department in the late 1960s of how successive administrations took the country into the war in Indochina. Nor did the articles mention this decent old liberal’s journey down the Jane Fonda trail to Hanoi in 1969 to meet with North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong – where he told his hosts that they were struggling “against the same aggressors that we will continue to fight in our own country.”

Also omitted were Barnet’s excuses for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the repression of Solidarity in Poland, and the Soviet shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007, to name but a few of his apologetics. As he observed in his 1969 book “The Economy of Death,” “the U.S. has no alternative to offer the poor nations which is any better than revolution, which for all its brutality, has had some spectacular successes. The rapid modernization of backward Russia and her transformation into the world’s second power, the end of massive starvation in China, and the great progress in literacy in Cuba are a few examples of what regimentation and the shake up of an old corrupt order can do.”

What gave these views their potency was something that any good Leninist would understand: organization. IPS, a nonprofit organization established in 1963 and headquartered at Q Street near Dupont Circle, became an early practitioner of the kind of policy entrepreneurship that later became so fashionable inside the Beltway. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then IPS can truly claim to be a great success. Indeed, the conservative activist Paul Weyrich was reported as telling Sidney Blumenthal that he partly modeled the Heritage Foundation on IPS. With its blend of scholarship and activism, it soon became a major transmission belt for New Left ideas to a Washington establishment that was turning away from liberal anti-communism.

Beneath an exterior of chaotic informality, IPS gave tremendous practical impetus to the fashionable “anti-anti-communism” of the 1960 and 1970s: There was hardly a liberal Democratic congressman or staff member specializing in national security who had not had some contact with IPS during this critical period. The work of IPS and its offshoots played a particularly significant role in the congressionally led crippling of American intelligence in the 1970s – the legacy of which continues to bedevil the clandestine agencies to this day. Some of these important staffers later also found employment in the Carter and Clinton administrations. A distinguishing feature of IPS was the willingness of Barnet and some of his colleagues to associate with Soviet and Cuban “diplomats.”

It would be easy to dismiss Barnet’s career and those of his foes as period pieces of the Cold War. Certainly, the immediate circumstances of that superpower confrontation no longer obtain, and new institutions and groupings have come to the fore to advocate some other pet IPS causes, such as the evil of multinational corporations. Nonetheless, the abiding theme of Barnet’s work – the perniciousness of American power – remains of relevance to the left and its Islamist allies in the post-September 11 world. As Bertolt Brecht once observed, Nazism may be dead, but the bitch that bore her is in heat again. Likewise, the Soviet Union may be dead, but Richard Barnet could still have the last laugh.