Katherine Kersten, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Long-time Minnesotans remember John Earl Haynes as an architect of the famous "Minnesota Miracle." As Gov. Wendell Anderson's tax adviser, he designed the school finance and tax reform plan that Time magazine featured in its 1973 cover story....

Haynes came to Minnesota in 1966 to begin a history Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. DFL bigwigs recognized his talent when he volunteered for Hubert Humphrey's 1968 presidential campaign.

Haynes first heard hints about Communist influence in Minnesota politics as a campaign volunteer. "The old DFLers would tell me about how Uncle Hubert had run the Reds out of the DFL," he says.

"I would listen patronizingly and laugh. I'd learned as a graduate student that there was never any serious Communist presence in mainstream American politics. It was a myth, a product of McCarthyism and Cold War exaggeration."

But in the mid-1970s, Haynes began digging through musty archives at the Minnesota Historical Society to complete his dissertation on the history of the DFL. "I discovered, to my astonishment, that the old guys were right," Haynes says. "In the 1930s and '40s, Humphrey and his colleagues were engaged in a desperate fight for control of the DFL with 'progressives,' who were secretly controlled by the Communist Party USA."

Haynes knew that the subject was "politically radioactive." But, in 1984, he wrote a book about it -- "Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party." ....

In 1992, he and fellow historian Harvey Klehr gained access to formerly top-secret Soviet archives, with the help of Yale University Press. They discovered more than 430,000 microfilmed pages, which detailed the American party's activities and relations with Soviet intelligence agencies in the 1930s and '40s. "The dust was still on them," Haynes says. "No one had touched them in 50 years."

The documents revealed that the Soviets had infiltrated most major American government agencies, as well as the White House. Haynes' and Klehr's 1995 book, "The Secret World of American Communism," generated headlines around the world.

Their revelations created pressure on the U.S. government to open its own secret records. In 1995, the National Security Agency opened the files of the Venona project, a World War II-era code-breaking effort to identify Soviet spies and their American sources. Haynes' and Klehr's book, "Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America," included "a virtual king's ransom of top-secret bombshells," wrote Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report.

"It's almost impossible to overestimate the importance of John Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's work," says Jonathan Brent, editorial director of Yale University Press.

Haynes' research has played havoc with much conventional academic wisdom. "In the 1950s, the public was overwhelmingly convinced that Communist influence posed a serious security threat here," Haynes says. "Then came the Vietnam War, the rise of the radical New Left, and a backlash against Sen. Joe McCarthy, who was a demagogue and a thug. The idea arose that the whole anti-Communist enterprise had been a mistake, a hysteria. In fact, however, there were Reds under some beds."

Today, Haynes has come full circle. Years ago he laughed at the old Minnesota DFLers. Now, many of his fellow historians dismiss him.

"They still see Communist Party USA members as idealists focused on social justice -- just 'liberals in a really big hurry,' " he says. But Haynes is hopeful that the facts will prevail. Younger historians are more receptive, he says. "They don't have the same investment in the academic conventional wisdom as the Sixties generation, who often try to rewrite history to suit their own agenda."