John Barron, R.I.P.

John Barron, 75, passed on days ago and is almost certainly in heaven.

He was, as even the liberal Washington Post conceded in its obituary, "an investigative reporter whose meticulously researched articles and best-selling books helped unravel the mysteries of Soviet espionage and the Khmer Rouge's mass killings in Cambodia."

For 11 years, until his 1991 retirement, I was one of John's fellow writers and editors at Reader's Digest, the world's most widely read magazine. His splendid writing there helped save our planet from the left, Communist and Kennedy. He spearheaded the Digest's February 1980 investigation of Chappaquiddick that sank forever the presidential prospects of Senator Edward Moore Kennedy (D.-Mass.)

"Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman," said the late Susan Sontag in 1982.

"Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism?" asked Sontag, quoted in a beautiful March 14 tribute to John Barron by National Review's John J. Miller.

"The answer, I think, should give us pause," concluded the hard leftist Sontag. "Can it be that our enemies were right?"

The heroic and clear-headed anti-Communism embodied in John Barron -- a naval intelligence officer, award-winning journalist for the Washington Star, and from 1965 onward a writer-editor for Reader's Digest -- has been vindicated by records and testimony from the collapsed Soviet Union that the late Susan Sontag and so many other American leftists worshipped.

Many of those leftists live on, self-righteous as ever, unrepentent, without a word of apology or regret for their eagerness to sell out our country and our freedom to Communism. If they had a scintilla of decency, the fellow-travelers who run The Nation and their ilk would fold up their red tents and disperse their huge fortunes to the families of the millions of innocents they have conspired to kill, enslave and betray.

John Barron was targeted for smear and destruction by the Soviet KGB and its agents in the Western media and elsewhere. Like Whittaker Chambers, Barron had the courage to take on Communism when the left had near-total dominance of our media and it still appeared possible, even probable, that the Soviets would win. Had Jimmy Carter won a second presidential term, followed by a Ted Kennedy presidency, the world today might well be under Soviet domination.

Thanks to heroes like John Barron, whose writings gave added strength to President Ronald Reagan's policies, the left lost -- and is now sliding into the garbage disposal of history. Rest in Peace, John, and thank you.