Ms. Coulter has not just set about rehabilitating McCarthy as a martyr destroyed by anti-American leftists--she has also set about rehabilitating the most notorious of his cases, the kind dramatized in famous film clips of the period. Cases like that of Annie Lee Moss, a black code clerk who had lost her job at the Pentagon when she was hauled before McCarthy's committee as a security risk and Communist Party member. She had been confused with a different Annie Lee Moss, the witness explained--and who Karl Marx was she could not even say. So evident was Ms. Moss's confusion at what she was doing there that applause erupted in the hearing room when Democratic Sen. Stuart Symington declared he believed her.
But the evidence against Ms. Moss was not insignificant, the author of "Treason" now maintains. The code clerk had said there were two other people called Annie Lee Moss listed in the Washington phone book--whereas the two others were actually Anna Lee Moss and Annie Moss. Dynamite evidence, as far as Ms. Coulter is concerned--case closed. After all, an FBI report had identified her as a Communist.
This is terribly, damningly dishonest reviewing, as ant reader of Ann's book knows.
Ann makes the point, when discussing the Moss case, that
(1)although Moss claimed that there were other "Annie Moss"'s in the DC phonebook, the Communist Party newspaper and other literature were delivered to the witness Annie Moss's house, not the other Annie Moss'es, and that whenever the witness Annie Moss moved the subscriptions moved with her -- seemingly eliminating the possibility that they were mailed by mistake.
(2) Annie Moss worked in the most highly secret area in the Pentagon, where secret messages were decrypted, the code room -- and as Ann pointed out in the book, some of the interception/decryption programs were so secret that their existence was withheld from Truman! (because Truman was not deemed trustworthy).
(3) Annie Moss's claim that there were other Annie Moss'es was factually untrue and easily verifiable, but the unttruth was accepted by the investigating senators without any reasonable due diligence.
Reading this, I can only wonder if Ms. Rabinowitz even read "Treason". The whole point of Ann's mention of Annie Lee Moss is that far from proving that she was NOT involved with communism in some way, the evidence (testimony of an FBI informant, Communist Party records, etc.) suggested that she was (she was in fact the ONLY Annie Lee Moss in D.C. at the time, and she had been receiving the "Daily Worker" (a communist party newspaper) at both her current and previous addresses. Furthermore, Communist party records listed one "Annie Lee Moss" at the address where this "poor put-upon wash woman" testified that she lived. But Rabinowitz writes this: "She had been confused with a different Annie Lee Moss, the witness explained..." Rabinowitz presents the questionable testimony of "the witness" (um, that would be Annie Lee Moss herself) as fact, as if it had proven somehow that McCarthy had the wrong Annie Lee Moss. This is like saying that because a murderer said he wasn't the one who committed a murder, he didn't do it.
Lastly, the investigation of Annie Lee Moss was for the purpose of removing her (if there were strong enough suspicions about her loyalties) from her security-sensitive postion within the Code Room at the Pentagon. She was free to be a communist, she just wasn't free to be a communist and work in areas of national security importance.
Regardless of how educated Rabinowitz might be, or how wonderful a "journalist" she might be, this is clearly an uninformed hit-piece on Coulter and this book.