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.
