Posted on 11/05/2007 8:37:40 AM PST by AwesomePossum
Book Description Accused of creating a bogus Red Scare and smearing countless innocent victims in a five-year reign of terror, Senator Joseph McCarthy is universally remembered as a demagogue, a bully, and a liar. History has judged him such a loathsome figure that even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous with witch hunts.
But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking book. The long-awaited Blacklisted by History, based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans’s revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.
Drawing on primary sources—including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States—Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration. All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.
Blacklisted by History shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.
Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.
In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.” Blacklisted by History provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing exposé of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.
One often hears from liberals that McCarthy (a Senator) was the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which , during the “McCarthy era” was actually chaired by John S. Wood (D-Ga.) and Harold H. Velde (R-Ill.).
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Philbrick also was featured in the television show “I Led Three Lives” in the mid-1950’s. Internet surfers can probably locate recordings of these programs.
With all due respect to Larry Kudlow, McCarthy’s story is the greates story never told.
The Cold War was the ultimate battle between good and evil. McCarthy was the loud squeaky wheel that everybody wanted to mock. His name is now a perjorative. The only problems is - he was right.
My attitude back then was that any enemy of communism was a good person. It hasn't changed one bit.
(applause)!
I have a friend who has a bumper sticker that says: “McCarthy was Right”.
I cannot understand why ANYONE who remembers that era would EVER vote for a Democrat. I see little difference between Democrats and communists. They just haven’t been able to gain quite enough power to become dictators yet. Hillary is trying. I remember the era vividly.
:}
IIRC Useful Iidiots was written by Mona Charen.
Thx, wasn’t certain if that was the name, but it was definitely one of Coulter’s.
Sam, the commies were very skilled at sacrificing lower level operatives in order to protect major assets.
It seems that they are still there (they're called RATS now), and Bush seems to have found a way to get rid of them in the past week.
Very true.
And the Reds in Hollywood have been getting their revenge ever since.
School's out on that one, RC. A case can be nmade that McCarthy set back the hunt for Communists in our government.
The reason: The Commies threw him very small fish to fry, while protecting their major assets. They thoroughly confused and bamboozled the investigation. Major KGB Coup, aided and abetted by the very people McCarthy should have been after.
Then, using their people in the MSM, they were able to pillory the man until he became a laughing stock.
Eventually he had no support in the congress beyond a few personal loyalists from largely Catholic districts ... among them the young playboy, JFK, who got RFK a spot on the Senator MacCarthy's committee!
Classic case of a guy who was right, but handled it wrong. Tragic.
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