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

M. Stanton Evans is the author of seven books, including The Theme Is Freedom. A contributing editor at Human Events, he served for many years as director of the National Journalism Center. Evans was previously the editor of the Indianapolis News, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, and a commentator for CBS and Voice of America. He lives near Washington, D.C.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Evans's lively book seeks, first, to demonstrate that Communists worked, often successfully, to undermine American security during the Cold War. It tries, second, to defend Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the egregious scourge of American Communists and fellow travelers, against those who, in Evans's (The Theme Is Freedom) view, have unjustly ruined his reputation. On the first point, save for some new details, Evans, a contributing editor to Human Events, treads worn ground. Most scholars, having also used Soviet archives, concede his position and argue now only over secondary matters, like the guilt of Alger Hiss. On the second point, Evans has a tougher case, which he seeks to make as a defense attorney would: by conceding nothing to McCarthy's detractors. Evans is also given to conspiracy thinking-an approach that, by its nature, yields claims that can neither be confirmed nor falsified. Defense attorneys and debaters like Evans follow different rules than historians-they try to score points, not to advance knowledge. Evans is good at the former, his propulsive style carrying much of the argument's burden. But the history Evans relates is already largely known, if not fully accepted.. 20 illus. (Nov. 6)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Third Rail
Prologue: The Search for Joe McCarthy     3
An Enemy of the People     15
The Caveman in the Sewer     26
He Had in His Hand     37
"Stale, Warmed Over Charges"     49
Unthinking the Thinkable     61
Back Story
The Witching Hour     75
The Way It Worked     87
Chungking, 1944     98
Reds, Lies, and Audiotape     110
When Parallels Converged     123
What Hoover Told Truman     135
Inside the State Department     148
Acts of Congress     162
Blowup
Wheeling, 1950     179
Discourse on Method     194
The Tydings Version     206
Eve of Destruction     219
A Fraud and a Hoax     233
Of Names and Numbers     246
The Four Committees     263
File and Forget It     276
All Clear in Foggy Bottom     288
The Man Who Knew Too Much     301
Mole Hunts
The Trouble with Harry     315
A Book of Martyrs     331
Some Public Cases     345
Tempest in a Teacup     360
Little Red Schoolhouse     373
"Owen Lattimore-Espionage R"     385
Dr. Jessup and Mr. Field     399
A Conspiracy So Immense     411
The Battle with Benton     425
Hardball
The Perils of Power     443
Uncertain Voice     455
The Burning of the Books     467
Scott McLeod, Where Are You?     478
The Getting of J. B. Matthews     490
The Moles of Monmouth     502
A Tale of Two Generals     515
The Legend of Annie Lee Moss     528
At War with the Army     542
On Not Having Any Decency     557
End Game
The Sounds of Silence     573
Sentence First, Verdict Later     585
Conclusion: Samson in the Heathen Temple     599
Notes     607
Appendix     631
Acknowledgments     641
Index     644