Free Republic

In "The Age of Anxiety," Haynes Johnson makes a depressing observation: "Although McCarthy and the leading players of his time… have long since passed from the scene, McCarthyism remains a story without an ending." ...McCarthyism... has become an all-purpose incantation, referring to everything from genuine political repression to folks not buying a singer's records.... Calling someone a McCarthyite has become a form of McCarthyism. ...Mr. Johnson ignores the genuine threat that communist spies posed to the U.S.; he elides the justified anticommunist efforts of the 1930s and 1940s with the abuses of McCarthyism; and he compares McCarthyism with modern-day conservatism....

The faculty at Bard College, a liberal arts school at Annandale, NY, includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of...

<p>In 1992, Russia's first post-Communist leader, Boris Yeltsin, made a historic decision to open the nation's archives to Western scholars and historians. Yeltsin was anxious to expose the misdeeds of past Soviet leaders, and his decision opened the floodgates on evidence that proved profoundly discomfiting to apologists for the Communist system.</p>