Almost a century later it is hard to think of a better call to action for national security whistleblowers operating from higher ground but faced with the peculiar torment of having to fight against heavily-armed bandits well ensconced in the bureaucratic swamp.

The path urged by McKay amounts to nothing less than a fight for the common rediscovery of a key part of our national heritage, the right to demand redress of grievances, in these uncertain times.

It was McKay who in his 1940 book, Harlem: Negro Metropolis , wrote of the Soviet Union's propaganda campaign: "Harlem [in the late 1930s] was overrun with white communists who promoted themselves as the only leader of the Negros. They were converting a few Negros into Bolshevik propagandists, but they were actually doing nothing to help alleviate the social misery of the Negros."