The book is amazing. It shows how the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were riddled with Communists, and the Administration and Democrats in Congress went all out to hide the fact.
Posted on 02/23/2008 6:52:27 AM PST by rlmorel
I just finished reading the book "Blacklisted by History:The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and his Fight Against America's Enemies".
My thoughts on the subject of Senator McCarthy changed dramatically after I read Ann Coulter's book "Treason" back in 2003. To some, it might seem odd that a book that is regarded by some people as a screed would have had an impact on anyone who considers themselves thoughtful on the subject matter at hand.
But I will say, when I read Ann Coulter's book "Treason", I was perplexed, nearly dumbfounded.
I was puzzled why her account of the famous encounter between Joseph Welch and Joseph McCarthy was so completely and diametrically different from the accounts I had grown up with and been taught.
It wasn't just a little different, it was COMPLETELY different. So I did what the Internet allows you to do these days: I researched. I obtained the transcripts of the actual hearings, and read them.
Ann Coulter was spot on in her characterization of that hearing, and the others as well. After I read that, I began to read everything that didn't appear to be completely slanted against McCarthy. I read three separate books on Venona, and then capped it off with the book that was, for me, the most important political book I have read in my life.
That book was "Witness", by Whittaker Chambers.
I was completely astounded by that book, and it explained a lot of things for me. It explained why the Left viewed Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy the way they did, and why all three of them, Chambers, Nixon, and McCarthy were villified and slandered by a poisonous and biased media.
I have a web page on my site devoted to this issue at: http://web.mac.com/rlmorel/iWeb/Site/Whittaker%20Chambers.html
What is perhaps most disturbing of all is to see that the Left practices the exact same form of character assassination warfare today that it practiced fifty years ago against Whittaker Chambers. Exactly.
I admit freely that it was a disillusioning time for me. To realize that all my teachers, people I had no reason to distrust, fed me a steady diet of falsehood regarding Joseph McCarthy. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever.
So, this recent book, "Blacklisted by History" by M. Stanton Evans was one of the more difficult books I have ever tried to absorb, as it is pretty dry in its presentation, and is heavily footnoted. There are so many entities in the book, that I was reminded of a "Peanuts" cartoon I read years ago where one of the characters complained about the difficulty of reading "The Brothers Karamazov" with the multitude of varied characters with all those Russian names. This was the same way.
But the thing that makes this book completely worthwhile is the jaw-dropping illustration of the evasion, obfuscation, unadulterated lying and outright stonewalling of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and all the agencies involved on their behalf, particularly the State Departments and the Treasury Deaprtments under them. This is well illustrated by Mr. Evans using the technique of comparing various statements under oath and on record to the actual documented evidence (that has been released under Freedom of Information Act and other evidence that has been available all along)
The bottom line is that our government was crawling with communist agents at very high levels, in large numbers. Instead of fixing the problem, it was first ignored by Roosevelt, then stonewalled by Truman.
To read this book by Mr. Evans, you realize just how corrupt the Tydings Committee was. People from the State Department and the Treasury would simply deny the charges or outright lie, and this was accepted as definitive proof by the committee. The Truman administration used the analog of the Executive Privilege argument used by Vice President Cheney today, but instead of invoking it to combat fishing expeditions by liberals looking to simply find a way to discredit the administration, the Truman Administration was not only well aware and complicit in the problem, but understood exactly just how much McCarthy knew about the problem. They stonewalled, hid documents, had in some cases the very people who were in cahoots with those being investigated actually scrubbing the documents to remove incriminating papers.
Instead of using the McCarron Rider (legislation created specifically to deal conclusively with security threats embedded in the government) the Truman Administration created a Rube Goldberg bureaucracy that they used as a hiding place for documents, knowing full well when they would be due for surrender to a subcommittee, then explaining some component of their loyalty boards had it in their possession at that time. They would ping-pong these documents between the components so they could never be found.
The Tydings Committee actually used documents PREPARED by the State Department (The primary entity being accused and investigated by McCarthy) to defend them and let them off the hook. They were accepting on face value statements from the body they were investigating (The State Department) and used them as evidence the charges had no substance!
The book is a real eye opener, and will make you realize one thing:
Joseph McCarthy was an American hero.
He knew full well the seriousness of the problem with communist infiltration in our government, and sacrificed himself and his reputation fighting nearly singlehandedly for years against, powerful, smart, dedicated and tireless foes with vast resources in both the Government and Media. He was slandered and defamed by the same type of people who practice the same types of tactics on their enemies today.
Those were McCarthy's Reds. That brings me to the topic of OUR Reds.
Chinese industrial and technological espionage is rampant today, and there are people at various levels of government that have been bought lock, stock and barrel by the Red Chinese.
Who will be our Senator Joseph McCarthy today?
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (there was no HUAAC as the Left liked to call it).
And what is termed “McCarthyism” began holding hearings in the 1930s.
Even the Crucible was written before McCarthy’s “scandal”.
What’s more there ARE witches in The Crucible.
We are told that it is wrong to take the testimony of convicted witches to prosecute more witches. So why is Congress holding a witchhunt to determine if Roger Clemens used Human Growth Hormone and convicting him of perjury based on the hearsay evidence of other HGH users?
The Ugly Truth (as even confessed in the periodical “Dissent” back in the 1950s) is that they saw nothing WRONG with being a Communist even one in league to aid Stalin’s USSR in defeating the USA.
Reds are evil and practice seditious overthrow of our Constitutional form of government.
For those who don't know the trick, in general you can Google the name of a book followed by "site:worldcatlibraries.org". WorldCatLibraries collects "card catalogs" from libraries everywhere and makes them searchable to Google.
You must read,”Witness”.All Americans should.My son thinks the real heroes of that era were the poor blacklisted Hollywood types.
I will make him read “Witness.” “Radical Son” is also excellent...Horowitz.
“Radical Son” was another book that was a real eye-opener for me. After reading it, I understand the hate the left has for him, because he is considered to be an apostate of the liberal religion.
He was red to the core until he worked with the Black Panthers, and they murdered a woman who worked with them. That opened his eyes.
More likely his head. He is still alive you know. Still on the radio too, mainly satellite radio. Liddy Official Website
A lot. First, congratulations on an excellent essay. And congratulations for doing the hard work to learn truths that should be taught daily in every school in America and, by grand design, are not.
I've lived with the awareness of this Big Lie for most of my lifetime (I was in college when most of the McCarthy stuff came down.) I've watched the anti-American traitors do their dirty character assassinations over and over -- work that would be impossible without the full compliance of academia and the media. It's reassuring to know that there are at least a few others around who can see matters from the same perspective I do.
Evans's book has to be scholarly, dry and accurately footnoted to defend against the attacks he knows will be forthcoming from the same group who destroyed McCarthy. They still hold all the academic high ground (read "In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr).
What's more important, the Marxist Left still controls most American media. Getting McCarthy's truth told in a way that will reach great numbers of people is just a wispy dream. It won't happen, and the Marxists know it. Their great secret weapons from the beginning have been a lazy and uninformed American electorate, the Big Lie, historical revisionism and control of mass communications media. Despite Venona, the opening of the Soviet archives and the hard work of many scholars attempting to set the record straight, the Marxists are expert at demolishing "inconvenient truths about themselves."
As for your last point, I'm sad to say I doubt there will ever be another politician with McCarthy's courage or principles. The personal price that must be paid is far too high. I also believe most Americans, including some here on FR, have discounted the totalitarian evils of Marxism/socialism, again thanks to the revisionism of apologists for Communism. Good social deeds must be done voluntarily, not at the point of a gun or under threat of being sent to a PC "mental" hospital or gulag. There's a monstrous gap between the teachings of the Good Book and Mao's Little Red Book, but those distinctions have been greatly blurred over the years.
Even PBS had to admit that Communist spies were in the U.S.
A few years ago, they ran an excellent 4-part series, “Red Files”.
The “Secret Victories of the KBG” segment was stunning.
The Rosenbergs were minor, sacrified by the KBG to protect the much more destructive Cohens. Then there’s Ted Hall.
Yes, this one I've read. I put it at one of the top three autobiographies of all time.
The book is amazing. It shows how the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations were riddled with Communists, and the Administration and Democrats in Congress went all out to hide the fact.
Very much alive. But I doubt that he’ll allow any revelations until he’s gone.
I don't think it's true that "Joseph McCarthy . . . knew full well the seriousness of the problem with communist infiltration in our government." He didn't know the half of it, and even at that the charges he levied were dynamite.The pervasiveness of the rot can only be explained by the fact that Big Journalism was sympathetic to it. And that I explain by the fact that journalism as an institution is a modern, post-Samuel Morse development. Before the telegraph, newspapers were local affairs with no ability to obtain news which was distinct from the peddlers and travelers that everyone else talked to. So before the telegraph, "news" wasn't such a hot commodity that people looked to tomorrow's newspaper for - indeed, "newspapers" were often weeklies rather than dailies. Before the telegraph, newspapers were idiosyncratic and opinionated - and certainly not in any position to claim to be "objective."
It is the Associated Press which put the newspapers into the journalism business. That is, the First Amendment was written before the advent of journalism. Journalists call themselves "the press" in order to wrap themselves in First Amendment protection and to promote themselves as guardians of the people's rights under the Constitution - but in fact journalists were in the vanguard of promoting McCain-Feingold, which subverts the constitutional rights of everyone except journalists.
McCain-Feingold has it exactly backward - far from being the only ones who have a legitimate right to criticize politicians during an election campaign, journalism (which is singular, not plural, because it is unified by the incentives of the Associated Press) actually is a special interest which is uniquely situated to merit muzzling while the rest of we-the-people use the internet as our "poor man's soap box" to inform each other of the pros and cons of the candidates.
The Market for Conservative-Based News is a fuller discussion which I think you might find interesting.
He was shown a Potemkin Village. One of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books about the Gulag mentions it, but right now I can't recall which one.
I have heard a lot about this...it is on my list, although I must admit, I do not think I will be at all surprised by it.
How is the Clarence Thomas book?
Thanks for your opinion. I have a good deal of respect for your postings I have read on Free Republic on the role of journalism, and appreciate the pings I get on them.
I have always thought that McCarthy knew more than he ever let on, and this book only strengthened that opinion. Makes me wonder if he was privy to Venona decrypts in some way through some source. Can’t prove it, but after all these years, he has been shown to be uncannily correct.
As Ann Coulter said in her book, Senator McCarthy did our country a great service by actually making being a communist disreputable.
I thought her description was quite accurate regarding the perception of Ivy League types with three names (like James Vincent Carter, George Catlett Marshall, John Stewart Service, Harry Dexter White, etc.) who dabbled in communism and socialism, and how it was acceptable and tolerated, and was just a phase they would grow out of.
Thank you for posting this. It clearly explains the basic faith and tenacity of Communism.
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