Amazon.com
If Joseph McCarthy hadn't existed, someone would have had to invent him--the communist witch-hunt he unleashed on 1950s America was, after all, the stuff of epic fiction. Now, it seems, someone has invented the senator from Wisconsin, or at least revised him. And that someone is none other than archconservative political pundit and sometime novelist William F. Buckley Jr., whose 12th work of fiction presents McCarthy in what many readers will consider an original light: that of a hero.
To do so, Buckley starts stacking his deck very early. In a prologue to The Redhunter, a history professor and former McCarthy colleague named Harry Bontecou sits reading a newspaper in a London club. The year is 1991, and as Harry muses over reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, his mind wanders to the similar carnages committed by Stalin, the Nazis, and the East Germans. Only the arrival of an old, not entirely welcome acquaintance interrupts his reverie:
"Say." The insistent tone was off register in the quiet of the Garrick Club. One had the impression the leather volumes winced at Tracy's voice. "Didn't you used to be Harry Bontecou?"
Obviously the leather volumes are prescient, for the reader soon realizes that Tracy Allshott is both drunk and boorish. After unsuccessfully baiting Bontecou on his early support of McCarthy, he announces priggishly that "there were those of us back in the fifties during the anti-Communist hysteria who were far-sighted and courageous enough to resist McCarthy and McCarthyism."
Whether it is Allshott's ungentlemanly accusations or an ensuing conversation with a repentant former Soviet spy, Harry soon resolves to tell his version of the McCarthy years and The Redhunter really starts to roll. Buckley is too accomplished a writer to hand us a Joseph McCarthy free of sin--indeed, as the story of the senator's life unfolds, we are made privy to such offenses as the teenaged Joe hiring a classmate to take a final exam for him and the young politico Joe stretching the truth to the breaking point in a dirty campaign against his opponent. But the essential morality of the House Un-American Activities Committee is never questioned. In Buckley's view, the threat of Communism was a real one--so real, in fact, that it superceded any notion of due process, free speech, freedom of association, or any of the other little liberties guaranteed in the Constitution. Regardless of how you view McCarthy's actions, however, Buckley's novel offers an entertaining and eye-opening account of his rise and fall, complete with the media frenzy, senate hearings, and back-room maneuverings we've come to expect from literary intrigues Washington-style. This may not be the most objective treatment of the McCarthy years (Buckley ends his novel with a eulogy by Senator Everett Dirksen that describes McCarthy's "reward" for suffering "the vindictive fury which was unleashed against him" as "the living, pulsing shrine of hundreds of thousands of hearts in America"), but for readers with a short memory, it's above average entertainment. --Margaret Prior
Book Description
"I have heare in my hand....a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."
From America's most celebrated conservative writer, William F. Buckley Jr., comes an engrossing and unexpected historical novel about one of the most controversial figures in American political history - Senator Joe McCarthy.
Senator McCarthy rose and fell in just four years, yet he gave a name, lastingly, to an era. In 1952 he was the most lionized and the most hated man in America. But little was known about the man or his background. McCarthy's personal charm and single-minded determination took him from Wisconsin and his indigent life as a chicken farmer to Washington, D.C., as the youngest United States senator. But it wasn't until February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, that McCarthy bewitched the nation - and unleashed a crusade - with his claim that Communists had infiltrated the United States government.
In THE REDHUNTER, a wondeful blend of fact and fiction, Buckley tells the story of Harry Bontecou. Freshly graduated from Columbia, Bontecou joins McCarthy and remains at his side for three critical years. But when McCarthy's judgement becomes clouded by prosecutional zeal and reckless extravagance, Bontecou delivers the ultimatum: McCarthy must choose between Bontecou and Roy Cohn, McCarthy's ruthless aide. By then we have seen at close hand Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Dean Acheson in memorable portraits of leaders in action.
Customer Reviews:
Fact and fiction intertwined to make a good story of a bad time.......2006-02-12
Senator Joe McCarthy is now considered to be one of the worst politicians this country has ever seen. One of the most effective rejoinders to someone who is pressing a personal political issue is to accuse him or her of "McCarthyism." Effectively used, it can destroy an argument before it even gets started. I recently saw the movie "Good Night and Good Luck", which was a recapitulation of how the news media finally fought back against the charges McCarthy was making. It painted him in a very negative and dangerous light. However, there was another side to McCarthy, he was a very intelligent man who worked hard for his success against long odds. Those good qualities that he possessed are also described in this historical novel.
Buckley is very good in keeping to the facts as much as he can while maintaining a good story. He lauds McCarthy when it is warranted and criticizes him for his excesses. The fact that McCarthy probably damaged the anti-Communist cause more than he aided it is well made. McCarthy was also severely damaged by the actions of his aid Roy Cohn, who spent more time trying to get his homosexual partner out of military service than he did work for McCarthy.
In the final analysis this is a work of fiction, based on a great deal of facts. If you understand the history of that era, then you will be able to separate the two. If you do not know the history, then you can still enjoy it, but as a novel rather than a piece of past. Don't use it to either praise or criticize McCarthy, because the fiction and fact are significantly intertwined.
A view you don't hear much........2003-02-05
Until I read some of the reviews, I thought that Harry was a real person. It seemed to tell a reasonable tale that you never hear because everyone seemed to think McCarthy was a nut. Well from what history really tells us is that a lot of it was true. Like the atomic secrets from reading "The Making of the atomic Bomb" by Richard Road to finding out how they were copying all our industrial processes from spys in civil production plants. I got that from "Dark Sun" from the same author.
I found the story to be interest like the problem with Harry and his girl. Also I didn't know the whole thing fell apart because of that David Schine thing. What a load of crap that was.
What I didn't like about the books were all the obscure references. I'm only not 60 so I didn't recognize everything that was going on. I felt like I had to do research while I was reading the book. The author could have helped by adding a notes section in the back to explain the references like I have seen in books like Crime and Punishment or The Jungle that explained some of the references of the time.
I don't know why there was such a big deal about McCarthy after this. You may enjoy it if you don't know the history.
A great book about a less than great man.......2002-01-23
If you're a conservative with a lot of liberal friends than you know all about the Great McCarthy Excuse, the leftist argument that essentially runs as follows: "Well, sure, Bill Clinton may have permanently corrupted the American political system and killed innocent civilians in pointless military campaigns designed to keep him from getting impeached, but hey, at least, he wasn't Joe McCarthy!" Nearly fifty years after his disgrace and death, Joe McCarthy remains an all-purpose boogeyman to be trotted out whenever it appears that the Republican Party might be on the verge of making a valid argument. Never mind that McCarthy was a former Democrat and, outside of his anti-communist crusade, was known as a bit of a tax-and-spend liberal. Never mind that conservaitve intellectuals were some of the first denounce him even while such liberal icons as the Kennedy Family continued to support him. Nope, McCarthy is the all-purpose right-wing demon of the leftist imagination and nothing's going to change that. And anything done wrong by a "liberal" will apparently always be justified by the memory of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Republican of Wisconsin.
If you're like me, you got wise to the shallowness of that argument early on and soon became rather irritated at the way the name "McCarthy" was used an all-purpose justifyer for any amount of fuzzy-headed thinking. That's what makes William F. Buckley's novel, The Redhunter, such a joy to read. Telling the story of Joe McCarthy's rise and fall, the book never defends the man's excesses (and, indeed, no true conservative would ever defend the trampling of civil liberties seen during the McCarthy era) but at the same time, never makes the mistake of using McCarthy's mistakes to downplay the very real treat that Stalin's Soviet Union and its totalitarian brand of Marxism posed to the world. And, most signifigantly, it is perhaps the first and only book -- fiction and nonfiction -- to actually make an attempt to show Joe McCarthy as a deeply flawed human being as opposed to some mustache-twirling villian from a '30s melodrama.
The book tells two parallell and intersecting stories of two young men. The first concerns Joe McCarthy himself. Beginning with his own rise to power from a small-town Wisconsin pig farmer to a member of the U.S. Senate, the book paints a sympathetic but still very critical picture of the man. McCarthy comes across as neither a saint nor an ogre but instead a rather insecure if charismatic man who, paradoxically, dealt with his insecurity by entering politics and trying to get every voter to love him. Once in the Senate, McCarthy proves himself to be less than an intellectual giant and, desperate not to lose the love of the voters, latches onto the anticommunist movement as a way to save his own career. The book makes no secret that McCarthy was often exagerrating when he spoke of his evidence of "communists" in the State Department and it is also unflinching in showing that McCarthy didn't have the backbone to stand up to the more unscrupolous aides who attached themselves to his star (especially Roy Cohn, who appears only fleetingly in the book's final sections). McCarthy's crimes are portrayed not so much as crimes of malice but instead as crimes of stupidity and Buckley is very deft in showing how 1950s liberals cannily exploited that stupidity to obscure the truth about communism and further their own goals. Its a rather compelling and totally valid interpretation of the era that, in these politically correct times, is rarely allowed to be heard and Buckley is to be commended for finally allowing this view to see the light of day.
The other main character is Harry Bentecou, a young academic and anti-communist who is an obvious stand-in for Buckley himself. Harry becomes an aide to McCarthy and sadly watches as the Senator's excesses get out of control and lead to both his downfall and the temporary descrediting of the American anti-communist movement. If Harry's scenes occasionally reek a bit of melodrama, they still present one of the great untold facts of American political history and that is that the modern conservative movement was founded by often-ridiculed anti-communist intellectuals like Harry. This is the movement that would be presumed dead after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 just to eventually make a triumphant come back with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Full of sharply drawn characters and perfectly realized scenes, the Redhunter is perhaps Buckley's finest novel to date. With humorous but devastating portraits of such historical figures as Eisenhower and especially Dean Acheson, The Redhunter is a valuable book that gives us a compelling view of history that, unfortunately, we aren't usually allowed to consider. All in all, a triumph that will be loved by conservatives and liberals willing to read with an open mind.
A good effort.......2001-08-17
The Redhunter tells the story of Joe McCarthy, one of the most hated persons in American History. The books does a good job of describing the career of McCarthy, how demagoguery and alcohol ruined his career and how ultimately he did much more harm to his cause than good. The book is somewhat sluggish when dealing with the personal life of Harry Bontecou, a fictional aide to McCarthy. It is from Bontecou's point of view that we see the rise of fall of McCarthy.
The Truthhunter.......2000-05-24
Fiction can sometimes be more revealing than a bare recital of fact. (One need only think of Dickens' novels and how he described 19th century England to see how this can be so.) Buckley's book accomplishes this with his portrait of Senator Joe McCarthy. The novel's subplot, involving the fictional Harry Boncteau (sp?), is compelling, and is woven nicely into the overall story. The McCarthy Buckley describes is ambitious, blind to some aspects of human nature, and prone to excess, but basically good, and, as we now know, right in his basic thesis: Communists had systematically penetrated American institutions, with subvursive intent. Art imitates life in Buckley's portrayal of the seething class hatred for McCarthy on the part of the Left/Establishment. It was/is part and parcel of their animus toward anyone who dared to expose the truth: Nixon, Chambers, and sepecially McCarthy. This novel, which I read in one sitting, finishing in the wee hours, is both compelling literature and thought-provoking in terms of it's ideas. Hopefully, with Soviet archives open and their records validating much of what he said, this book will become the basis for a reexamination of a controversial American life. -Lloyd A. Conway
Customer Reviews:
Pivotal events and not for the better.......2007-02-02
A thorough, disturbing account of the man and the era. The first section gives biographical details about McCarthy, including his tarnished record as a supposed war hero and his zealous advocacy of some highly dubious causes. The author then spends more than 300 pages detailing the career of McCarthy the Red-Baiter, at times giving the reader the sensation of a descent into some nightmarish Wonderland -- very much the way the era felt to those still around to describe it. The final section describes the many ways McCarthy actually undermined the security of the United States: by intimidating people who were politically incorrect but insightful about our futile support of strongmen like Thieu and Chiang; by making our leaders afraid to act on their best judgment for fear of being accused of being too weak; and by inflaming all the worst sentiments of people so that a nation that was unchallenged from without began tearing itself apart from within. You will not sleep better after reading this book, but you will sleep wiser.
Cook knew corruption.......2006-01-08
Cook's book The FBI Nobody Knew was the impetus for Rex Stout's The Doorbell Rang. This means that Cook knows valuable things about freedom and democracy. The author of the other review of this book worships Anne Coulter, and for her brain, no less! Nuff said.
A Larf Disturbance.......2002-06-27
I cannot call this a laugh riot, as Mr. Cook is humorless. Yet there are laughs to be culled here by those who believe in a single standard of conduct. The author deplores the very IDEA of innuendo, guilt by aquaintance, and "wild charges"--then proceeds for several hundred pages to list every nutty and outrageous claim about McCarthy and to damn just about anyone who ever thought Stalin belonged in the nogoodnick file. He does not, however, mention Paul Hughes, who sold a false story to leading liberals that McCarthy was stashing guns in the Senate basement, and that the New York Post food editor was a right-wing agent. No, Mr. Cook is selective--and an ink blot test of what liberals WANT to believe. For a non-emotional view--and better history--pick up "McCarthy and His Enemies" by Buckley and Bozell or "McCarthy" by Arthur Herman. The only thing worthwhile here is a snicker.
Amazon.com
Richard Rovere, a longtime New Yorker staff writer who died in 1979, combined three all-too-rare journalistic traits--legwork, style, and bravery--to create this 1959 J'accuse, which Walter Lippman called "the definitive job." Rovere had a handle on the particulars, as illustrated by his surgical disassembly of Joe McCarthy's fantastic autobiography, and the abstract principles, as illustrated by his comment that McCarthy's victories were mostly in "matters of an almost cosmic insignificance." His causes celebres were causes ridicules. The University of California Press is to be congratulated for this paperback reissue. After all, even if anticommunism is on sabbatical, demagoguery is not, and it pays to stay up on the tricks of the trade.
Book Description
The story of Senator Joseph McCarthy's rise to unprecedented power and the decline of his influence is a dramatic one. Richard Rovere documents the process by which a clever, power hungry individual came to mislead and manipulate members of Congress and the American public and to damage countless lives. A new foreword for this edition by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. places the book in historical context and relates it to current issues in American public life.
Customer Reviews:
Place McCarthy In A New Perspective.......2007-08-04
"Senator Joe McCarthy" is an account of the four years, 1950-1954, during which Sen. McCarthy held the attention of the nation and the world. Author Richard H. Rovere was serving as a correspondent covering McCarthy during the period of his national prominence.
This book contains some material on McCarthy's earlier life and political career and a little about his personal life. It, for the most part, focuses on McCarthy's time as the Communist hunter in chief. Little is said about McCarthy's attractive personality and his close friendships in the Senate, particularly with Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
This book makes the case of McCarthy as a demagogue, seeking nothing more than personal glory. He makes the case that McCarthy was misguided and that, if the Communists in government issue had not been available, McCarthy would have pursued some other issue with equal vigor. He makes the case that McCarthy was misguided in that the Communist threat was in the form of external aggression rather than internal subversion. He claims that, for all of his ranting and raving, McCarthy got no Communists out of government. He makes the claim that McCarthy's preparation was sloppy and that his evidence did not support his charges. He criticizes McCarthy's treatment of witnesses as merely being an attempt to make McCarthy look good rather than a legitimate attempt to discern the truth.
Rovere does give McCarthy credit for the immense power which he wielded and the influence which he had, for better or worse. He credits McCarthy for ending the career of Gen. George C. Marshall and other, less distinguished, officials. He explains how McCarthy took the issue of recognition of Red China out of the realm of public debate. He identifies Senators who, after incurring McCarthy's wrath, were defeated for reelection and issues on which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were terrorized into positions which they, in the absence of McCarthy, might not have taken.
I began this book with the expectation of disliking it. I expected a hatchet job of Sen. McCarthy, but really did not find it. Rovere makes cases for his opinions. He does not dig into the slime of gossip to support his criticisms of McCarthy. He raises the claim that McCarthy was a homosexual, and then concludes that there is no evidence to support it. He comes down very hard on staffers Roy Cohn and David Schine, but limits McCarthy's culpability to the decisions to hire them and subsequent failure to properly supervise. First published in 1959, it lacks some of the historical perspective that more modern works may have. It makes a reference to America falling behind in the arms race with the USSR, an issue which was important in the 1960 election, but which was later shown to have been unjustified. The subsequent opening of KGB archives may place the issue of Communist infiltration of government in a different perspective. The later success of his Senate cronies, Kennedy and Nixon, may shed a different light on the McCarthy's Senate career as evaluated by his colleagues. Rovere repeatedly refers to surveys which found McCarthy to be the worst senator. The quality of his friends may give added stature to McCarthy's career.
This book changed my impression of Joseph McCarthy. He portrayed McCarthy as an opportunist who fought the wrong battle at the wrong time and fought it poorly. While I am grateful for those who carried on the battle against Communism, I am forced to consider McCarthy a flawed knight who lent his words, but not his heart, to the battle. Any book that can change my impression of history has value to it.
American Madness: The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy.......2003-10-19
Just before the American Civil War, a Southern congressman explained why Abraham Lincoln's election was a sufficient cause for secession. He said that it was not merely the election of dangerous man, which he realized was part of the political process. Abraham Lincoln, he argued, was elected because he was dangerous.
Senator McCarthy was not elected because he was dangerous. That McCarthy came to dominate American politics for the last years of the Truman administration and the first few couple of years of the Eisenhower administration was unforeseen by anyone, least of all himself. His rise from anonymity to become among the strongest people in the Unites States, and therefore in the world, was sudden. His decline was even faster, and if McCarthy started 1954 as a major player, by January 1955 Vice President Nixon could report that he was no longer any danger to the administration.
Richard H Rovere, a journalist and an observer of the politics, wrote in 1959 what was seen at the time as the definite account of the Senator from Wisconsin. Rovere, a master of prose, is best when making a psychological portrait of McCarthy, seeing him as an empty cynic, a vain man who believed in nothing, who hunted not for power, but for money and glory. He was a dangerous man, who turned America away from important foreign policy issues and focused on looking for spies, traitors and "bad security risks" - and, although he terrorized the government, forced conformity, and shrank American freedoms, never found any.
Yet there is also a certain mischievous appreciation in Rovere's description. He says that McCarthy was not in the Republican San Francisco convention of 1956, and that it was duller for his absence (p. 242). His descriptions of McCarthy's manipulation of the press, the way he knew how to create a story, appreciates the ingenuity of the Senator. And if McCarthy was a cynic, who ruined people who have not sinned, he also did it without spite or malice. As Rovere has it, McCarthy never took himself seriously, even as the world did (p. 58)
Perhaps the best insight Rovere has into McCarthy is his description of McCarthy's great innovation "The Multiple Untruth". Not a single lie or even a few, McCarthy's lies were so huge and inconsistent, that they were almost impossible to disprove. Any part of it that you knocked down would also make the rest seem the more solid. McCarthy blew so much smoke that people assumed there must have been a fire somewhere.
Rovere's greatest weakness is in explaining the chronology of McCarthy, and the background. Much of it is because he wrote for people of 1959, who knew the general outline. But for people with only a very general knowledge of the 1950s, Rovere's book never quite explains things all the way through. This is especially bad in his description of the Army-McCarthy hearings. As someone who is not very familiar with the events, I emerged from that vital part only slightly more enlighted then before.
Another failure is the journalistic defense of sources, which keeps several of the people involved disguised. It is a little annoying to have pages devoted to either an "unnamed reporter" or to an "X".
Both failures could have been addressed by the introduction, written in 1996 by historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr. Unfortunately, except for a few none too revealing comments on Rovere himself, Schlesinger chose to waste his introduction on a summery of the book's argument.
If the lack of background and specifics make the book a less then perfect history of McCarthy and his time, Rovere's fantastic prose make it a most pleasurable read nonetheless.
His discussion of the effectiveness of McCarthy's networks of informants: "If any communists [existed in the government agency], they were so well hidden that the sort of people who were in the underground [i.e. McCarthy's informants], would never find them - unless, of course, some of those in the underground were communists, which was not altogether out of the question". (pp. 197-98)
Elsewhere, Rovere comments that "Hollywood has always been a hotbed of conformity, and advertising it always ready to ride with any hounds. By their very nature, these institutions yield before external pressure; it is, in fact their substitute for inspiration".
Though dated, Rovere's is still a fascinating and very well written study.
Verdict from 2002: Onesided and Hopelessly Outdated.......2002-07-30
A lot has transpired since Richard Rovere died in 1979 that makes his book outdated and irrelevant: Venona and the disintergration of the Soviet Union, for example. Both have put paid to such questions as "if there were Communists in the State Department." Arthur Herman's book "Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator" --using the revelations and documents from the former Soviet Union-- clarified these issues once and for all. McCarthy may have been an eccentric demogogue and an alcoholic (so what makes him different from many other politicians?) but history shows that he got it essentially right. Diehard communists, progressive communist sympathizers and all those misguided souls that believed and still believe that it was a "noble" cause-- will never forgive him for getting it right.
Check the Facts.......2001-11-14
Richard Rovere should consider himself a comedian. The book has so many flaws about Senator McCarthy that I can't believe Mr. Rovere can be classified as a legitimate historian.
Declassified Soviet documents are proving that Senator Joe McCarthy was right. Biased historians like Rovere should be academically scorned for thier years of lies and distortions.
an interesting but dated biography.......1998-03-28
No one will be offended by Rovere's much-racking depiction of Joseph McCarthy. Seriously, how many people are there left in America, or anywhere around the world, still willing to stand up and smugly look you in the eye and say Joseph McCarthy was a necessary man fighting for American freedom in a time when Communists were hiding in every shadow? But the book, written in 1959, just isn't all that up-to-date. Of course much of the information we now know was suppressed at that time and J. Edgar Hoover--viciously complict in the development of all the Red Scare and blacklisting craziness--was still in power at the time of publication. Nobody would want to make an enemy of Hoover, so anything dealing with McCarthy and Hoover's contact is treaded over very lightly. This, unfortunately, makes the book somewhat inaccurate, which is a shame because so many dark secrets and shameful public deeds are recorded with a passion and an obvious intense desire to destroy the image of the drunken old demogogue. In 1959, just three years after McCarthy's death, and five years after his disgrace, this was an important book because so many people were still unsure of their opinions towards Tailgunner Joe. I imagine that this book made quite a difference as even Hoover himself took the opportunity to smear the late Senator, drawing comparisons to Krushchev's posthumous denunciation of Stalin. The book is certainly worthwhile for anyone interested in a recreation of the terror of the 1950s, written from the perspective of the 1950s, but there are several more contemporary biographies of Joseph McCarthy and, regardless of the fact that this one is likely written with more beautific prose, in a case study like this, information beats out pretty words every time.--Lance Polin
Book 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.
Customer Reviews:
Finally the whole story!.......2006-03-03
I loved it! Finally I got to see and hear everything that happened in the McCarthy censure hearings. This book is a gem for a researcher -- and there is no way to impune the author.
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