by M. Stanton Evans
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Product Description
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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Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Not Politically Correct! Thank heavens, 2008-09-30
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Cry Havoc: The Great American Bring-Down and How It Happened
Blacklisted by History is a gripping story, which in many parts reads like a suspense novel of the highest order. But it really happened, and M. Stanton Evans captures the drama of the times. It is a welcome addition to the previous books, Seeds of Treason by Ralph de Toledano, and Witness by Whitacker Chambers.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 A Real Life Spy Story, 2008-09-20
This book is a real "eye-opener" to what took place in the 1930's, '40's, and '50's in the US. Joe McCarthy took the fall for exposing a government that was infiltrated with Soviet communist operatives, part of a world-wide communist spy ring. This is a thoroughly documented and well researched expose.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
I had no idea..., 2008-09-05
I had no idea the extent to which our Government agencies had been infiltrated by Communists. After having read other books on the subject (if you have not read Whittaker Chambers' 'Witness'...please do) I have a better understanding of American History in the 20th century. To this day there is a tug of war between Americans who want to preserve the republic envsisoned by the Founding Fathers and those who want to replace that model of government with a socialist system. The book discusses the undermining of Chang Kai-Shek in his battles with Mao as well as American support of the Soviet Union in leftist circles. Joseph McCarthy was stonewalled at every turn by Maryland Senator Millard Tydings and dozens of others who attacked him rather than evaluate his charges objectively. The author describes McCarthy's detractors up to the level of Harry Truman, which really surprised me. This book takes patience and is slow going. It is heavily footnoted and has fabulous documentation such as old newspaper stories and photographs. If you want to learn more about the 1950's in America and Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover you won't be disappointed. Of course, it helps to read several books on a particular historical or political topic to get it from different angles and viewpoints but this would be a good starting point.
9 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
A Different View of Senator McCarthy, 2008-08-15
M. Stanton Evans is a journalist and long-time follower of the history of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The central theme of this well written and very readable book is that McCarthy did a great service to the Nation in calling attention to two circumstances that represented a threat to the USA:
(1) that there were people employed by the federal government who were Soviet agents or Communist ideological sympathizers and who were in positions (a) to influence US policy, (b) to access government secrets, including highly sensitive military data, and (c) to disseminate through government channels (including Voice of America) propaganda and disinformation favorable to the interests of the Soviet Union and leftist causes worldwide; and
(2) that although the Truman and Eisenhower administrations had taken some steps to screen such people and terminate or transfer some of them to less sensitive positions, these steps were half-hearted and ineffectual, had left many such people in place, and new systems had to be implemented to avoid further harm to the country.
Senator McCarthy first called attention to these circumstances in a speech at Wheeling, WV in February, 1950, where he said that he had a list of Communists who were then employed in the State Department. It is well to recall that by early 1950, the Soviet Union had installed by main force a series of puppet governments in Eastern Europe that were repressive and undemocratic, and that in 1949 mainland China had finally succumbed to the Asian flavor of Communism under Mao Tse Tung. What is more, based on historical research in the last 50 years, there is now no doubt that throughout this period the Soviets had a large underground espionage apparatus operating in the United States, whose mission was not only to obtain secret military and diplomatic information but also to disseminate propaganda favorable to the Soviet Union and Communist doctrine in general.
To one reading McCarthy's Wheeling speech in 2008, and thus far removed from the Cold War politics of 1950, it seems like a level-headed, sensible warning to the Nation. Reasonable people in 2008, I would think, regardless of their political views, would say that these assertions by McCarthy were serious and should be investigated. If they were not correct, that could be determined. Instead, the Truman White House, State Department, Congressional Democrats, and the intellectual and academic communities saw them as "Red bating" and reacted with a fury that is difficult to reconcile with the nature of the charges. Rather than making a good faith effort to see if McCarthy's charges were true, these forces launched a personal attack on McCarthy, which in its intensity and vehemence is puzzling in the extreme.
The author tells the story of the Senate Committee, headed by Democrat Millard Tydings, that was ostensibly created to investigate McCarthy's charges, but in fact did nothing but investigate McCarthy. Rather than answer his assertions on the merits, the State Department made vicious personal attacks against McCarthy, all of which were accepted by the Tydings Committee on their face. As Evans points out, the issue of Communists in the US Government was a long-simmering flash point that went back to the 1930's, long before McCarthy joined the Senate in 1947, and exploded with his Wheeling speech:
"Among its many side effects, the war [WWII] would make the United States and the Soviet Union allies, a condition that gave rise to beliefs and actions spawning many future troubles. In particular, the pro-Soviet atmospherics of the war would accentuate the problem of Communist infiltration that had developed during the Great Depression. What had been a serious problem in the 1930's would now become a truly massive penetration." (p. 71).
This Soviet penetration of the US Government had been the subject of many Congressional inquiries long before McCarthy arrived on the scene. The Dies Committee, which evolved into the House Committee on Un-American Activities, made early attempts in the 1930's and 1940's to call attention to the problem and contain it. But the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, and their powerful bureaucracies in Washington that controlled the machinery of government, along with their left-wing supporters in the press and academia, reacted defensively, as if McCarthy's charges were a political attack on the "progressive" politics of the New Deal. They lashed out at anyone who sought to expose the many Communists in the Executive Departments and other New Deal agencies. They characterized all such inquiries as right-wing, political witch hunts, and viciously attacked those who attempted to identify Communists as the worst liars and charlatans. In reading this material in 2008, one can only wonder what raw nerve was touched by McCarthy's statements.
These tactics of ignoring the merits and personally attacking the one sounding the alarm can be clearly seen in the Whittaker Chambers/Alger Hiss episode that played out in 1948-1950, immediately before McCarthy's Wheeling speech. Despite overwhelming evidence that Hiss, with the help of his wife and brother, was a devoted member of the Communist party and a Soviet agent -- a fact that has now been confirmed by a high level KGB defector in the 1980's, the Soviet archives made available in the early 1990's, and the US Venona decrypts released in 1995 -- his legion of supporters in and out of government attacked Chambers as a liar, concocted stories that he had been treated for mental illness, tried their best to use their many close contacts in the Truman Justice Department to get him indicted for perjury, and otherwise accepted Hiss's web of lies and denials.
This methodology of personally attacking those who claimed that there were Communists and Soviet agents in the government was used with exquisite success against McCarthy by the Tydings Committee, and thereafter until his censure by the Senate in 1954. From the very outset, Tydings and his Democratic colleagues, in cooperation with the Truman State Department, the very same agency that the committee was supposed to be investigating, set out to discredit and literally destroy McCarthy. They claimed that he had no list of Communist employees in the State Department, that he could not name a single name, that if he did have a list, it was an old list going back to 1948 and that everyone on it had been thoroughly vetted by Congress and cleared. They accused McCarthy of being a massive liar on the basis of the most trivial and irrelevant points - for example, they said that in the Wheeling speech he had said that he had a list of 205 State Department employees whereas McCarthy later said that his list had a smaller number. When Tydings exhorted McCarthy to "name the names" in open session, the committee called several of them as witnesses and accepted their simple denials as conclusive of the falsity of McCarthy's charges.
When the Report of the Tydings Committee was finally released in July, 1950 (the Report is not available on line, only in US Depository Libraries), its tenor and phrasing were shocking, even by the standards of the time. It contained violent and abusive language that can only be explained as the tactics of personal destruction. Its broadsides against McCarthy were so extreme, so vicious, and so personally disparaging that they caused an uproar in the Senate. The Report accused McCarthy of perpetrating a "fraud" and a "hoax" and used epithets - "despicable," "vile," "sinister" -- that reflected an emotional dimension that one rarely sees in a deliberative legislative body like the US Senate, especially in describing one of its own members. Tydings sought to have McCarthy prosecuted for perjury and expelled from the Senate for allegedly falsely asserting that the State Department was harboring Communists.
Author Evans, however, goes into exhaustive detail in showing that virtually every one of the individuals named by McCarthy in proceedings before the Tydings Committee was the subject of an intensive FBI investigation and as to whom there were mountains of evidence that they were either Soviet agents or Communist supporters and enablers. In addition to the record of the many McCarthy hearings, Evans uses three recent sources to support his conclusions: (1) the Venona decrypts released in 1995, (2) Soviet KGB archives temporarily made available to researchers in the early 1990's, and (3) FBI files released in recent decades principally as a result of FOIA requests (pp. 19-20).
Evans lays out instance after instance where if one goes to the trouble of digging out the actual facts, rather than relying on media sound bites and an historical record created largely by a hostile academic establishment, it appears that McCarthy's charges were accurate.
A good example is the case of Annie Lee Moss, who was employed by the Army Signal Corps as a code clerk. Appearing before a Senate panel chaired by McCarthy, an FBI agent working undercover at the DC Communist party headquarters testified that Communist Party records showed that Moss was a dues-paying member of the party. After several delays, Moss finally appeared and flatly denied that she was, or ever had been, a member of the Communist Party, and in testimony set up with the Democratic members of the committee, suggested that she must have been a victim of mistaken identity since there were three "Annie Lee Mosses" in the DC telephone directory. McCarthy was then pilloried in the press for falsely accusing this humble government employee and this is the version of Annie Lee Moss that was broadcast to the nation and forever memorialized in the historical record.
Evans points out, however, that the transcript of Ms. Moss's testimony shows her saying that " . . . we didn't get the Communist paper anymore until after we had moved southwest to 72 R St," (I was not able to find the transcript of Ms. Moss's testimony on-line) and that the Annie Lee Moss identified by the undercover FBI agent was precisely the one who lived at 72 R Street. In addition, Evans writes that the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) thereafter started a proceeding before the Subversive Activities Control Board attacking the veracity of the FBI agent who had identified Ms. Moss as a Communist. After hearings, the SACB found that the testimony of the undercover FBI agent was 100% accurate and that Annie Lee Moss of 72 R Street was indeed a member of the CPUSA. According to Evans, the historical record makes no mention of these facts and continues to portray McCarthy as a brutish, loud-mouthed bully with nothing to support his wild charges against this low-level government servant.
A second example of this distortion of the historical record involves the celebrated sound bite condemning McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" The powerful import of this sound bite is the notion that McCarthy falsely accused people of being Communists, with no evidence, and in indecent displays of bravado on the public record, where the mere asking of the question inflicted the harm intended. Evans tells the complete story of this remark. It was spoken by Joseph Welch during the McCarthy-Army hearings of 1954, a proceeding so absurd as to defy rationality. This was a proceeding in which McCarthy, not unlike the Tydings Committee proceedings four years before, was put on trial. What heinous crime, one might ask, what "high crime or misdemeanor," was McCarthy said to have committed. The answer is that McCarthy and his committee counsel, Roy Cohn, were formally charged with having tried to use leverage in their investigation of the Army to get special treatment for an Army private, who had been a staff member of McCarthy's committee and was suddenly drafted into the Army in the midst of the Army investigation. These "special privileges" were things like extra leave or light duty, and in the final analysis the evidence adduced at the hearings made a mockery of these frivolous charges. At any rate, Joseph Welch was not a witness, or even a lawyer for a witness, but a high powered lawyer from a white shoe law firm in Boston, who was brought in to these ludicrous proceedings, undoubtedly at public expense, to represent the Army.
The "decency" remark was made by Welch in connection with a lawyer in his Boston law firm named Frederick Fisher. At one time, Mr. Fisher had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a Communist front organization. Fisher had initially been part of Welch's legal team for the Army proceedings, but when Welch discovered his Communist history, he took him off the team and sent him back to Boston. During the hearings in June 1954, a major theme of which was that McCarthy's charges were false and that there were no Communists in the government, McCarthy alluded to the fact that a former member of the Army's legal team had belonged to a Communist organization. Welch responded with the infamous "decency" speech in which he accused McCarthy of having no decency in revealing on the public record the Communist past of this "lad," and that is the way that history has recorded it. As Evans points out, however, Fisher's Communist history had been the subject of a New York Times article in April 1954, two months earlier, in which Welch himself "confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr. of his own Boston law office, because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell Jr., the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization." (The New York Times, April 16, 1954). Thus, Welch was able to turn this incident on its head, and the public has accepted this distortion ever since. It was Welch himself, not McCarthy, who spread the Communist history of this "lad" on the public record and to the extent it was not "decent" to do so, who should take the blame for that?
In the final analysis, one's view of McCarthy and his crusade against Communists in the US government must depend to a great extent on one's view of the potential threat to the United States posed by the Soviet Union and its international Communist goals. There are five predicate propositions that underlie that issue:
(1) the Soviet Union was a regime that enslaved its own citizens, systematically tortured and murdered tens of millions of people, and ran a government so repressive as to set the gold standard of "government by terror" in the history of the world;
(2) the expressed goal of the Soviet Union was to foment a socialist revolution in the capitalist countries of the world and thereby replace their governments with Soviet-styled governments like the ones that were established in Eastern Europe and China after World War II;
(3) the Soviet Union had a worldwide organization of spies and agents, aided by socialist doctrinal sympathizers, whose mission was to provide confidential diplomatic and military documents and information to Moscow, to undermine the governments of the capitalist countries, and to disseminate propaganda and disinformation favorable to the Soviet Union;
(4) this Soviet worldwide organization had succeeded in placing its agents and operatives into positions of trust in the US Government (e.g., Alger Hiss, Lauchlin Currie, Harry Dexter White, all of whom are confirmed in the Venona decrypts), where they were enabled not only to influence policy but also to obtain and provide to Moscow secret information; and
(5) the Communist Party of the USA was an organ of the Soviet Union controlled and partially funded by Moscow.
Those who believe that these propositions are fairy tales, that the Soviet Union represented a shining light of social justice in a new world order, and that the Soviet Union posed no real threat to the United States, invariably believe that McCarthy was a monster who trampled on individual rights and political freedoms in order to promote himself. But if one believes that these propositions are true, and that they have been confirmed by contemporaneous history and an avalanche of recent scholarship, then McCarthy's service to the Nation in alerting it to the risks it faced cannot be denied.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent Book, 2008-07-31
This is one of the best books I've read all year. While the topic is dated, who now a days cares about Communist intrusion in our government, it was a book that got my blood boiling. It is amazing to me what the Government of this country can stoop to when it is lead by liberals of either party. Shameful.
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