Accused of creating a bogus Red Scare
and smearing countless innocent victims in a five-year reign of terror,
Senator Joseph McCarthy is universally remembered as a demagogue, a
bully, and a liar. History has judged him such a loathsome figure that
even today, a half century after his death, his name remains synonymous
with witch hunts. But that conventional image is all wrong, as veteran
journalist and author M. Stanton Evans reveals in this groundbreaking
book. The long-awaited Blacklisted by History, based on six years
of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy
and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant
loyalty risks working within the U.S. government. Evans’s revelations
completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the
Cold War. Drawing on primary sources—including never-before-published
government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned
from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow
spymasters and their agents in the United States—Evans presents
irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our
government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking
of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this
danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration.
All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.Blacklisted by History
shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert
Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been
identified by Communist leaders as a party member; that high-level U.S.
officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade
before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White
House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and
covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had
been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy
came on the scene.Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve
been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of
the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the
McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that
casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect
Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and
much more. In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues
and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The
real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled
error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.”
Blacklisted by History provides the first accurate account of
what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the
Cold War. It is a revealing exposé of the forces that distorted our
national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history
since.
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