Category — Book Reviews

Some were surprised or even disappointed at how graciously Mitt Romney exited the 2008 race and then endorsed John McCain. The acrimony between them, while Romney was still in the race, was widely noted. To some observers, it was largely attributable to McCain’s bad temper and dirty tricks. But this may be a matter of perception.

Whatever it’s genesis, the conflict and its apparent denouement brought to my mind, on this President’s Day, one of the more remarkable relationships in the political history of the United States — that between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I share here a few insights on their relationship, courtesy of David McCullough’s John Adams. [Read more →]

From the Rutgers’ University Eagleton Institute of Politics, listed in the Eagleton Digital Archive, under the heading of “McCarthyism and the ‘Red Scare’”:

“In February 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin, gained national prominence when, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he held up a piece of paper that he claimed was a list of 205 known communists then employed in the State Department. McCarthy never produced documentation for a single one of his charges, but for the next four years he exploited an issue that worried many as the Cold War provoked fear of nuclear confrontation.”

The above is a typical capsule history of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assault on Communist infiltration of the United States Government during the 40s and 50s. That’s what we always “knew” about Joe McCarthy. [Read more →]