Review: Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America by M. Stanton Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Apparently, there is a target audience out there of people who think McCarthy had no Communist Party (CP) operatives to uncover in the State Department of something like that. Well, this book should straighten them out. Before this, I could have named Whittaker Chambers and Alger HissM. This book educated be on the doings of the Silvermaster spy ring, Elizabeth Bentley, and more largely backed up by the Venona decrypts. I would have really like to have read about dead drops and secret radios, but this is not about tradecraft. This is about the politics of the pre-Eisenhower Democratic presidencies (FDR, Truman) comfortable with their Russian allies in the fight against Nazism leading to (CP) penetration and a State Department gently trying to clean house (allowing suspects to resign rather that be unmasked, etc.) and save face under Joe McCarthy's continued scrutiny.

Much is made here of the bad reporting made of a supposed list of "205" "men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" that maybe he never vocalized. Also undercut is the force of the "Have You No Sense of Decency?" rebuke by exploring how the named Fred Fisher had already been outed. For those that get their history from the silver screen, also taken apart is Good Night, and Good Luck .

This book is about boosting McCarthy and avoiding the excesses that later came to be called McCarthyism. That's unfortunate. I am interested in how the Right went from digging up spies to attacking civil liberties. In my life I have seen Russian election interference in 2016 and 2020 while it is not a rare Republican that does not believe Russia interfered in U.S. elections. Considering elections, "GOP-led states enacted 102 new election penalties after 2020". So, my real concern is, Can we have The Right partner in fighting illegal foreign influence without lurching into eroding the democratic institutions we seek to protect? This book has no answers or elucidations on that.

BTW, I took this in as an audiobook and after nearly every chapter (all?) there is a "postscript". I kept thinking this long work was over, only to be mislead!

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