Scarcely better is Kessler’s repetition, as supposed fact, of the discredited notion that McCarthy claimed a list of “205 Communists” in the State Department, then crawfished and changed the number to 57. (McCarthy’s version was that he never claimed 205, but had said 57 all along.)... Oh, puh-leeze. The fact that a politician issues a denial when caught in an embarassment does not "discredit" it. By this logic, every single charge ever made against Clinton (either one) has been "discredited".
bs9021, too bad your snippet didn’t include the next few
sentences in the article. It might have changed steve-b’s
response.
The next sentences from the M. Stanton Evans article:
I devote two chapters to this issue, showing (a) that the
alleged documentation of McCarthy’s supposed lying about the
numbers was a backstage concoction of the State Department, and
(b) that the charge of McCarthy’s having claimed 205 was
debunked in 1951 by investigators for a Democratically controlled
committee of the Senate. (Curiously, after the investigators
turned in a 40-page report that in essence backed McCarthy,
their memo would abruptly vanish—to be recovered later.)