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

by M. Stanton Evans (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From 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)
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Product 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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Crown Forum (November 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140008105X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400081059
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.1 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #66,305 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

471 of 569 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't listen to the Publisher's Weekly review of this book!!, November 7, 2007

By	R. Smith (Crown Point, IN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is very well written, using facts. Publishers Weekly's review of the book tries to deflect the import of this book by claiming that it is common knowledge that McCarthy was right about the inroads Communism had made into the U.S. government. The fact that McCarthy is still today called by Publishers Weekly "the egregious scourge" proves that what they say is not true. PW goes so far as to lump Evan's into a category of conspiracy theorist himself.

Buy the book and don't trust Publishers Weekly. They are on the side of the American Communist movement.
You will get a real history lesson that is very pertinent today, where the liberal media is seeking to rewrite history to try to convince the masses that "evil is good" and "good is evil".

34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth with Surprises, November 15, 2007

By	CW De Spain (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An excellent well written and well researched book if one wishes to read the facts with multiple qualified references instead of listening to someone else's preconceived ideas of what the truth is. I was surprised however to find that Senator McCArthy was very good friends with the Kennedy family and even dated one of the Kennedy family's daughters which the Democrats have been doing their very best to squash, ignore and, or even admit for all these many years. Also at the end of the book, there is a list of the names of all the Communists that were in our Government and under investigation at that time. I believe we call them Socialists today. Again, buy this book if you enjoy a good read and just want the truth with facts to back it up.

100 of 120 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the greatest books in 60 years, November 14, 2007

By	Patricia A. Helvenston (Flagstaff, Arizona) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This brilliant, meticulous, heavilly documented book by Stanton Evans is about much more than Joseph McCarthy, great patriot that he was, as is amply demonstrated herein and anyone who doesn't come away from this book with the belief that McCarthy was indeed a great warrior and patriot, hasn't bothered to read it in its entirety. Just as important, it presents a picture of Washington politics during WWII and the early cold war and provides an insightful and intimate view of the extent to which the FDR and Truman administrations were riddled by the penetration of top soviet agents at the highest levels. Evans presents some compelling, but as yet incomplete evidence that soviet agents in both Washington and Japan worked tirelessly to make the US and Japan buy into the inevitability of war between the two countries, thus facilitating WWII. Moreover, Evans documents the extent to which these gullible presidents ignored security issues, the extent to which they sold out China, the Balkans, and all of Eastern Europe to communist Russia, under the influence of some of their trusted advisors who were known (even at the time by the FBI as Evans shows) as top soviet agents working directly for Moscow. The FBI's findings were subsequently confirmed in the Venona decrypts when made public and Evans concludes that the FBI was definitely effective in gathering the evidence that many in the State Department were agents for Moscow at the time, although FDR and Truman ignored and denigrated Hoover's findings, even (in the case of the Truman administration)trying to blame the FBI for not briefing them when McCarthy and others made the information public. McCarthy was able to bring much of this information before the Senate in hearings, before the powers in and out of the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations ultimately destroyed him, thus alerting most Republicans (although the Eisenhower administration was unconsionably hostile to McCarthy) and many Democrats to the seriousness of the soviet penetration of all levels of government. As Evans sums up,"It's a remarkable but generally neglected fact that EVERY major McCarthy investigation in the period 1953-54 resulted in some significant change in governmental practice" (p. 604)

The lying tactics used by Truman, especially, attempted to cover up the fact that the State Department was not only run by communists, (Hiss, Vincent, Service, and dozens of others, and White, Adler, Coe and others in Treasury) but the Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, and Under Secretary, Dean Acheston, appear to have been either communists, communist sympathizers, or useful idiots. For example, Truman was repeatedly warned about White, Hiss, Robert Oppenheimer, Service and other top soviet spies by the FBI as is minutely documented in this book, but he completely ignored the warnings. Whether Oppenheimer passed Atomic secrets to the Soviets is another detailed book that still needs to be written, as far as I know. A speech that Acheson gave on Jan 12, 1950, literally invited the communist North Koreans to invade South Korea, which they did on June 25, 1950, thus beginning a "police action" as Truman called it that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers. In this context, and with much of the evidence Evans makes public for the first time, a re-evaluation of the McArthur-Truman showdown, and the context in which it took place during the Korean "police action" is in order.

Evans documents specific communists and their written comments who were able to shape the Truman state department, such as Prof. Owen Lattimore (and earlier the FDR administration) to pull off these enormous land and people give aways to the communists world wide, leading to over an estimated 100 million deaths attributed to communists before the fall of the Soviet Union.

The tactics used against McCarthy are documented in this book in great detail and provide some of the best evidence available of the treasonous deceptions of some in the Democratic Party 70 years ago, which are the same strategies as used by the Marxists who control the party today. Nothing has changed - except that the lies are bigger and more and more of the American Public is "too busy", too ignorant or too lazy to learn what's going on. Even conservatives who have suspected or known some of the information presented by Evans for over half a century will find this book stunning in its revelations. It will open eyes and teach lessons well worth knowning for today's world. Far from being "Old News" as the marxists are trying to argue with the publication of this book, it contains such detailed facts, never-before-published-for-the-general-public, that there are literally more than 600 pages power-packed with new information. I can't recommend it too highly.
Patricia A. Helvenston, Ph.D.