LOL, I enjoyed reading your post...that is the story of many people, and is one reason I try not to be too hard on young college kids.
There are few things as insufferable as a 21 year old college student, the kind who come home to Thanksgiving dinner, and rail about some thing they learned at college that shook up their world view...:)
It is funny, because all of us have been there to one degree or another. I was extremely conservative even as a very young kid, but I even had my things that make me wince now.
If I could recommend one book out of that group above all others, it is the “Blacklisted by History” book. It is meticulously researched and footnoted, and M. Stanton Evans was a cub reporter at that time that was all going down, so he had memory of it all.
It is most fascinating to hear of his chase for information, and how thoroughly they tried to cover their tracks.
He had one document in particula, a quite important State Department document, that was supposed to be in the government archives that would have shed light on the perfidy and infestation of communists. When he went to the government archive to look at the State Department archive that was supposed to contain the document, sure enough, there was a document IN the record that acknowledged the receipt of the important document for the official record and the date that it came in.
But when he went to that part of the record to view it...the document was gone. All that remained was a staple with a little scrap of paper under the staple, indicating it had simply been hastily ripped out. No documentation on that. In the time frame that document was received, the the chronological order with the date of the next document NOT ripped out, you could see the time frame in which the document had been inserted.
During the Congressional Testimony that McCarthy was overseeing, he had the woman testifying who had been the Librarian of the security documents around that time, and she testified that for a year, there was a high placed State Department employee who had been working in the State Department documents section during that time, who day after day, requested the key to let himself in and out after hours when everyone else was gone, so that he could “work with the records”. When asked the name of that employee, it was John Stewart Service who got out of being prosecuted by a DOJ rigged grand jury (evidence of the rigging was found in an FBI wiretap of DOJ officials who were speaking to a verified (by Venona) Soviet agent, Lauchlin Currie about how to get Service out of the indictment.
I recommend that book highly.
Thanks; I’l get that one ordered today from Amazon.