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

by M. Stanton Evans Narrated by Tom Weiner

Overview

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 US government. Evans' revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.

Drawing on primary sources, 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 US 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.

Evans 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, the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, and much more.

In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. 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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.
—Bob Nardini

FEBRUARY 2011 - AudioFile

The time is ripe for a reassessment of Joseph McCarthy. The opening of Soviet archives and the more general acceptance that Soviet agents were active in the United States during the Cold War have set the stage. Unfortunately, this is not the book. Evans limits himself almost entirely to the information available to McCarthy and, in defending the Senator, confuses (as McCarthy did) leftism with disloyalty and embraces (as McCarthy did) guilt by association alone. Tom Weiner does a clear and professional job of presenting the voluminous lists of names, dates, and assertions that Evans offers. While this book certainly has value for a conspiracy theorist with a highlighter and endless Post-it Notes, it is almost incomprehensible to the casual listener. F.C. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169718843
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	07/23/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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