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

Evans aims to give empirical proof that those Senator McCarthy accused of spying for the Soviet Union in the 1950s were guilty of it: e.g. two decades of House and Senatorial memos, 1930s Congressional spy investigations, government reports on security, official lists of named security risks, two decades of FBI reports with margin notes, transcripts of FBI wiretaps, notes from political strategy meetings squirreled away in boxes, and so forth. This pastiche of evidence plays the devil with the book's narrative for the first few chapters. Be that as it may, if one accepts these documents as factual, then one must accept the guilt of those McCarthy accused. In Evan's view, McCarthy was more sinned against than sinning. He conducted his inquiries fairly, did not slander, and did not steamroller anyone. He was an exceptionally bright, lower-class, self-made man who raced through high school and law college. He was a judge while only in his thirties. As junior Senator from Wisconsin (age 41) he threatened to mortify the Whitehouse, Democratic Senate, and State Department, with revelations of a "massive" communist penetration of the U.S. government. Each threatened institution had enough individual power to poleax him. Despite that, the first wave of retribution couldn't touch him, because what he said about communist infiltration was "old news" in Washington circles, and there was years of evidence to prove it. When Democrats lost the House and the Presidency in 1952, McCarthy alienated Eisenhower by soundly condemning George Marshall for losing China, then going after some of Eisenhower's job nominees as communists sympathizers (which Evans argues they were). By 1954 McCarthy held a tiger by the tail, and it finally ate him with some Republican help.

According to Evans, those who brought McCarthy down did to him what legend says he did to others--they smeared him by innuendo, told outrageous lies about him, even deleted or altered sections of Senatorial reports, to make him look not just bad but horrible. It worked. Newspaper cartoonists of the day drew pictures of him coming out of sewers walking on his knuckles; Hollywood films have ever since depicted him as a Neanderthal booze-hound . . . hence the title: Blacklisted by History. Yet, writes Evans, what the junior Senator from Wisconsin charged was practically dead-on correct in nearly every instance. He was being fed information by fed-up government insiders. (Interestingly enough, notes Evans, several important items connected to the truth of McCarthy's charges, once in government archives, were removed decades ago. Their titles are still listed but the documents are gone.) Evans put forth an argument for reevaluating who and what Joseph McCarthy was. Perhaps most important of all, he suggests that a counterfeit, confabulated story of "McCarthyism" is the dominant one held to this day by popular history.

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.

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".