Sunday, December 28, 2008

Blacklisted by History or Founding America

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

Author: M Stanton Evans

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 AlgerHiss 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

Bob Nardini - Library Journal

If a book set out to choose the most disreputable American political episode on which to bestow respectable historical standing, Joe McCarthy's era of influence might serve. The Wisconsin senator's brief ascendancy is all but universally seen as a period of shame. In his massively documented work, longtime conservative journalist and editor Evans (former editor, Indianapolis News; The Theme Is Freedom) argues that "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." In his dragnet, Evans looks closely at FBI files, congressional hearing transcripts, private papers, and other sources, some only recently available, and concludes that just about everything written on McCarthy from his 1950 Wheeling speech to the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings is wrong. Evans's McCarthy, while sometimes lacking nuance, was onto a real problem with the issue of Communists in government, one that his critics, contemporary and ever after, have been less concerned about than they have been with disposing of McCarthy. The author charges most prior historians and biographers with having been light on primary research but steeped in conventional wisdom. His crisply written study may daunt some readers owing to length and may not win over most McCarthy critics. But it will certainly send historians to the primary sources and is recommended for academic and larger public libraries.



Table of Contents:
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

Read also Yoga for Wellness or The Beauty Prescription

Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Author: Jack N Rakov

Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights, by Various, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

  • New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
  • Biographies of the authors
  • Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
  • Footnotes and endnotes
  • Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
  • Comments by other famous authors
  • Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
  • Bibliographies for further reading
  • Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
  • All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

    Modern American politicians refer to "the founders" so often that they're in danger of becoming clichйs. But Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and the other authors included in this new collection were awholly unique—and complex—group of individuals, graced with extraordinary intellectual powers, a profound dedication to their ideals, and a striking ability to articulate those ideals in clear and passionate prose.

    This original anthology of their writings, many of them far less familiar to us than they should be, demonstrates the depth of their thinking—and of their disagreements. It covers the full range of events from 1773 to 1789: that is, from the early debates about whether the North American colonies should declare their independence from England, to the ratification of the Constitution and the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights).

    Among the documents included are papers from the first and second Continental Congresses, the Articles of Confederation, Washington's Farewell Address to his armies, and extensive excerpts from the Federalist papers and the Madison–Jefferson correspondence on the Constitution.

    Jack N. Rakove is W.  R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author of four books on the American Revolutionary era, including The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History.



    No comments:

    Post a Comment