Have you read the Radosh review? It wasn’t an “attack” on Evans, much less slanderous. It’s a mixed review, agreeing with and praising some aspects of Evans’ book but taking issue with him on a few key points.
Nor does one have to be a leftist to have qualms about McCarthy. Whittaker Chambers didn’t care for him either.
Well, I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings as a college student, and I agree that McCarthy was not an attractive guy. He had worse five o’clock shadow than Nixon, and he really looked sinister.
But, on the whole, he was absolutely right. There were Communists in high places, and a lot of people didn’t want to know about it.
Coincidentally, my faculty adviser at Harvard when I first went there, Wendell Furey, was one of McCarthy’s targets, which kind of got me PO’d, because he was too busy dodging investigations to teach me nuclear physics or tell me which courses to take.
At the time I took the media portrait of him as the gospel truth. Over the years, I have come to realize there was a lot more going on than we were being told about.