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

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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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Review

"the greatest book since the Bible"
-Ann Coulter, Creators Syndicate
 
"It takes M. Stanton Evans's meticulous investigative journalism to show what Joe McCarthy's short stay on the national stage (a little under five years, from February 1950 to December 1954) really was about."
-Robert Novak, Weekly Standard
 
"So comprehensive is Evans's research that it will be a foolish historian who does not consult Blacklisted by History when a question arises over some person or event that comes into the McCarthy story."
-John Earl Haynes, co-author, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America
 
"This book will change forever how you think about Sen. McCarthy and the Soviet penetration of the U.S. government and society."
-Bob McMahan, Foreign Service Journal
 
"Evans goes through extensive files and transcripts with complete mastery of complex material and an engaging turn of phrase that makes more than 600 pages of painstaking analysis both a triumph of historical scholarship and a gripping detective story."
-David Ashton, The Salisbury Review
 
"Of the hundreds of books on the McCarthy era, Stan Evans has written the best—a nuanced, incredibly detailed work of scholarship."
-William Schulz, The American Spectator
 
"In this masterful instant classic, M. Stanton Evans sets out to tell the 'Untold Story of Joe McCarthy' and does so definitively."
-Jack Cashill, WorldNetDaily
 
"This is a master newspaperman at work: digging, interviewing the record, pulling apart and putting together the details of deeds done mostly by the politicians who ran our imperfect national government in the nineteen fifties."
-John Willson, Chronicles
 
"After combing through masses of declassified documents from Congress, the FBI, the State Department and other federal agencies, Stan Evans has produced a masterpiece of tru th."
-Terry Jeffrey, Human Events
 
"Evans, a veteran journalist, doesn't shout. He displays, instead, a deadly meticulousness that is, at last, overwhelmingly convincing."
-William Rusher, United Features Syndicate
 
"the most thorough scholarly examination of [McCarthy's] career"
-Cliff Kincaid, Accuracy In Media
 
"brilliantly documented"
-Wes Vernon, RenewAmerica.us
 
"monumental ... the result of six years of reading primary sources. Evans proves that almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and wil l have to be revised.... one of Reagan's old radio commentaries referred to Evans as 'a very fine journalist.' He is, indeed, but this book shows that he also is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective who chased every clue to find the truth and to write accurate history in elegant prose..... Everyone who henceforth writes about Joe McCarthy will have to check his facts with Evans' documented discoveries."
-Phyllis Schlafly, Creators Syndicate
 


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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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 (103 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,998 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

480 of 584 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".

55 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars McCarthy Revisited, November 22, 2007

By	Manuel H. Rodriguez "m h rodriguez 'mhr" (burbank, ca.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As a young man I was fascinated by McCarthy and campaign to unearth Communists that he said had infiltrated the US government. In short order his liberal enemies had succeeded in destroying him and making his name an epithet for baseless and malicious accusations. Now with the advantage of the revelations of Venona and of the Soviet intelligence archives is an ideal time to examine anew the career of Senator McCarthy. There is no doubt now that the Soviets succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in infiltrating the US government. Recently a man named Koval died in Russia. He had been another of the Americans who spied for Stalin and stole for him US atomic secrets. He joins Ted Hall, the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs as Stalin's agents who pentrated Los Alamos. Hundreds of other Americans reported to Soviet intelligence operatives in the US. At Yalta in 1945 one of them sat next to Roosevelt across from Churchill and Stalin. He was Alger Hiss. Anyone who still believes that McCarthy invented false charges has kept his head in the sand. He should read The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein in which the author reveals what he found in the Soviet archives about Soviet esponiage in the US, and Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by Haynes and Klehr. And by all means read Blacklisted by History by M. Stanton Evans. McCarthy was no angel and he played rough but Stalin and the Americans who betrayed their country are in a class of villainy that makes the Senator from Wisconsin seem almost benign.

109 of 133 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.