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.
I basically agree with Coulter’s point that the refusal to admit the extent of Communist penetration of the FDR administration is far more serious than anything McCarthy ever said or did. The reasons for this ongoing scandal are complicated and start with the longterm split in American history between urban sophisticates and the men and women of the frontier. During the thirties, Communists portrayed heartland politicians as ignorant rubes, proto-fascists, and the tools of decadent capitalism, only marginally better than HItler. Liberals in the media and politics often shared this anti-American, pro-utopian socialist bias. They also tended to identify with people like Alger Hiss (he was one of them).
I’m familiar with the research that went into the Radosh/Klehr book on the Amerasia case. I’d say that John Service was pretty clearly not a spy, or even a Communist. But he was heavily targeted by Communist agents during his time in China. They preyed on his naivete and personal ambiiton and turned him into a first-class dupe.
Coulter is entitled to disagree with the Radosh review and maybe she doesn’t like him personally, but I know him well enough to be sure of two things: 1. he wouldn’t review a book he hadn’t read. 2. he isn’t trying to “curry favor with liberals.” That ship sailed for him a long time ago.