Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies

By M. Stanton Evans and M. Staton Evans

Book Overview

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 expos of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0082PRDL4
• ISBN13: 9781400081066
• Release Date: November 2009
• Publisher: Forum Books
• Length: 672 Pages
• Weight: 1.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

McCarthy Revisited

As a young man I was fascinated by McCarthy and campaign to unearth Communists that he said had infiltrated the US government. In short order his liberal enemies had succeeded in destroying him and making his name an epithet for baseless and malicious accusations. Now with the advantage of the revelations of Venona and of the Soviet intelligence archives is an ideal time to examine anew the career of Senator McCarthy. There is no doubt now that the Soviets succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in infiltrating the US government. Recently a man named Koval died in Russia. He had been another of the Americans who spied for Stalin and stole for him US atomic secrets. He joins Ted Hall, the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs as Stalin's agents who pentrated Los Alamos. Hundreds of other Americans reported to Soviet intelligence operatives in the US. At Yalta in 1945 one of them sat next to Roosevelt across from Churchill and Stalin. He was Alger Hiss. Anyone who still believes that McCarthy invented false charges has kept his head in the sand. He should read The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein in which the author reveals what he found in the Soviet archives about Soviet esponiage in the US, and Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by Haynes and Klehr. And by all means read Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. McCarthy was no angel and he played rough but Stalin and the Americans who betrayed their country are in a class of villainy that makes the Senator from Wisconsin seem almost benign.

One of the greatest books in 60 years

This brilliant, meticulous, heavilly documented book by Stanton Evans is about much more than Joseph McCarthy, great patriot that he was, as is amply demonstrated herein and anyone who doesn't come away from this book with the belief that McCarthy was indeed a great warrior and patriot, hasn't bothered to read it in its entirety. Just as important, it presents a picture of Washington politics during WWII and the early cold war and provides an insightful and intimate view of the extent to which the FDR and Truman administrations were riddled by the penetration of top soviet agents at the highest levels. Evans presents some compelling, but as yet incomplete evidence that soviet agents in both Washington and Japan worked tirelessly to make the US and Japan buy into the inevitability of war between the two countries, thus facilitating WWII. Moreover, Evans documents the extent to which these gullible presidents ignored security issues, the extent to which they sold out China, the Balkans, and all of Eastern Europe to communist Russia, under the influence of some of their trusted advisors who were known (even at the time by the FBI as Evans shows) as top soviet agents working directly for Moscow. The FBI's findings were subsequently confirmed in the Venona decrypts when made public and Evans concludes that the FBI was definitely effective in gathering the evidence that many in the State Department were agents for Moscow at the time, although FDR and Truman ignored and denigrated Hoover's findings, even (in the case of the Truman administration)trying to blame the FBI for not briefing them when McCarthy and others made the information public. McCarthy was able to bring much of this information before the Senate in hearings, before the powers in and out of the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations ultimately destroyed him, thus alerting most Republicans (although the Eisenhower administration was unconsionably hostile to McCarthy) and many Democrats to the seriousness of the soviet penetration of all levels of government. As Evans sums up,"It's a remarkable but generally neglected fact that EVERY major McCarthy investigation in the period 1953-54 resulted in some significant change in governmental practice" (p. 604) The lying tactics used by Truman, especially, attempted to cover up the fact that the State Department was not only run by communists, (Hiss, Vincent, Service, and dozens of others, and White, Adler, Coe and others in Treasury) but the Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, and Under Secretary, Dean Acheston, appear to have been either communists, communist sympathizers, or useful idiots. For example, Truman was repeatedly warned about White, Hiss, Robert Oppenheimer, Service and other top soviet spies by the FBI as is minutely documented in this book, but he completely ignored the warnings. Whether Oppenheimer passed Atomic secrets to the Soviets is another detailed book that still needs to be written, as far as I know. A speec

Publisher's Weekly....ignorant assumptions

In the Publisher's Weekly review above, it is said that QUOTE:"But the history Evans relates is already largely known, if not fully accepted.":UNQUOTE. This is an incredible assumption on their part. They have no idea of the number of people who use McCarthy's name the way Hitler's is used. It may be common knowledge to the folks at Pub Weekly, but it seems like they only grudgingly concede that McCarthy was not Satan after all. More people could use a wake-up call to this fact, because it is certainly NOT COMMON KNOWLEDGE, not even among my professors, who have all alluded to McCarthy in the usual way. No, this is not common knowledge, but it should be.

Don't listen to the Publisher's Weekly review of this book!!

This book is very well written, using facts. Publishers Weekly's review of the book tries to deflect the import of this book by claiming that it is common knowledge that McCarthy was right about the inroads Communism had made into the U.S. government. The fact that McCarthy is still today called by Publishers Weekly "the egregious scourge" proves that what they say is not true. PW goes so far as to lump Evan's into a category of conspiracy theorist himself. Buy the book and don't trust Publishers Weekly. They are on the side of the American Communist movement. You will get a real history lesson that is very pertinent today, where the liberal media is seeking to rewrite history to try to convince the masses that "evil is good" and "good is evil".