BookTV (C-Span2): "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy"

About the Program

M. Stanton Evans argues that Joseph McCarthy does not deserve the
bad reputation he has been assigned by historians. Mr. Evans says
that McCarthy was correct in his assessment of the threat posed
by Communists in the United States during the so-called "Red Scare"
and that his detractors knowingly covered up the extent of this threat.

It is not true than Evans disapproved of Coulter’s use of his research. In fact, Coulter sent him her chapters on McCarthy before publication, and he made suggestions to clarify certain points, some of which Coulter incorporated into the final draft of “Treason.”

Not only is it not true that Evans disapproved of Coulter's work, it is, he told me, “the exact opposite of the truth.”

You may be confusing Evans with Ronald Radosh, who was quoted by Andrew Sullivan saying Coulter “uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say.” Radosh implies that Coulter misused research reported by him and Klehr in their book, “The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism.”

In that book, Radosh and Klehr reported correctly that one McCarthy target, Foreign Service Officer John Stewart Service, lived with Soviet agents Solomon Adler and Chi Cha’o-ting in Chungking in 1944, and that Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie conspired with “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran to fix the Amerasia case to get Service off, but Radosh and Klehr concluded that Service was innocent.

Coulter reported the same facts in “Treason,” but concluded that Service was guilty, as does Evans in “Blacklisted by History.” In fact, Coulter’s primary source here was not Radosh and Klehr, but the FBI’s Amerasia file — including the FBI wiretaps of the Corcoran-Currie fix — which she got from Evans.

Incidentally, National Review assigned Radosh the task of reviewing “Blacklisted by History. ” Word is that they received his copy over a month ago, but have been holding up publication for unknown reasons. Editor Jonah Goldberg blogged recently that a friend “who knows a lot about the subject matter” told him that the book was “a triumph of historical research. ” (William F. Buckley once co-wrote a well-researched book on the subject, "McCarthy and His Enemies.")

Okay, I’m glad to hear that. Honestly, I heard Evans’ name associated with the disapproval of Coulter’s book—I assure you I’m not mixing the names up in my memory—but the source I obtained the information from, likely another post on FR, probably mixed the names up while posting.

Apologies for the mix-up, and thank you for the correction.

Roosevelt must have known that there were Communists in his government.

I am currently reading Witness by Whittaker Chambers and he cites how he met with and outlined the Washington, DC spy apparatus with names to the Deputy Secretary of State for Security prior to WWII and when, during the war, he finally was contacted by two FBI agents while working at Time he called the Deputy Secretary and asked permission to talk to them. The Secretary had said that Roosevelt had been given the report of the original disclosure and dismissed it as unimportant.

The original meeting, ten years before the hearings and trials that pitted Chambers against Hiss's denials, had the Under Secretary of States critical notes, in re-typed form, finally surface.

Additionally, after Chambers outlined the Soviet apparatus to the FBI agents, he was never contacted again until long after the war. Meanwhile, Hiss sat at Roosevelt's elbow at Yalta. White, another member of the apparatus, founded the World Bank.

When Hiss died not too long ago at the age of 93 the LameStream Media still promoted it as a "accused" communist. This was after the Soviet era papers had been long public confirming yet again, the fact that Hiss was a Soviet agent of Soviet Military Intelligence.

Chamber's outlined in his biography from the fifties why he thinks Roosevelt and others in the Democratic Party didn't concern themselves about the communist activity. As I recall, he attributes it to two reasons. Prior to the Soviet Pact, the Soviets were seen as another opponent of Fascism. Secondly, the world socialist goals were similar to Democrat tendencies, it was felt that the revolutionary nature made it better to change from within and the Bolsheviks were seen as fringe elements.

That point is much the same as Hillary's Masters Thesis that has recently come to light.

You are quite correct, Nixon was not impeached. As I recall, the House committee voted out articles of impeachment and it was a foregone conclusion that the whole house would then impeach Nixon. He resigned and short-circuited the process. I should know all this because I once argued that I had won a bet that Nixon would be impeached and convicted in impeachment. But my partner welshed, saying that Nixon resigned but was not impeached.

Needless to say, I did not pay him either.

That is a very interesting point about Hillary's masters thesis. Was that actually a masters thesis or an undergraduate thesis?

Chambers was clearly a gifted writer and a singular intellect. Despite his eccentricities and proclivities, he was a man of courage who wittingly forsook what he regarded to be the winning side and selflessly came over to the side of anti-communism, which he regarded to be the losing side, because he was a patriot and because he saw the evil they do.

I found this to be very revealing of Chambers' character.

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