Re-Examining Joseph McCarthy

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. But M. Stanton Evans, a contributing editor at Human Events, a contributor at National Review and for many years director of the National Journalism Center, offers thoughtful readers another take on the Senator from Wisconsin, arguably the most controversial figure of the 1950s. Given the almost-universally negative view of McCarthy that quickly became entrenched, many, if not most, readers will raise an eyebrow to anything that disturbs their long-held views.

So what could anyone possibly say that would redeem Joseph McCarthy from the dung heap of history? Evans spent six years gathering evidence from Soviet archives relative to the activities of the GRU and KGB released since 1990 in the post-Soviet era, the Venona decrypts, formerly classified FBI counterintelligence archives, and other primary sources, in concert with the memoirs of former intelligence officers. In 663 carefully documented pages, his stunning new book, Blacklisted by History, appears to establish both the truth of what McCarthy said and, most surprising to this writer, the propriety of his methods. Click Re-Examining Joseph McCarthy to read the full book review in Adobe pdf format.