Worth noting that Evans is the guy whose research Ann Coulter used, with permission, when writing Treason. IIRC, Evans claimed that if he had known what Coulter was going to do with his research, he wouldn’t have given permission. I have no idea what to make of that.
“I have no idea what to make of that.”
Evans (in the BookTV) seems to have an fairly laid-back, good-guy
sort of personna.
Maybe he just didn’t gather than Ms. Coulter is hyper-driven...
and given a green light was bound to make the most of getting access to
a gold mine of info.
IIRC, Evans says he (and his group) got something like 100,000 pages
of source info in doing their research.
“Evans claimed that if he had known what Coulter was going to do with his research, he wouldn’t have given permission. I have no idea what to make of that.”
Nor do I. That is disappointing.
Here’s a shot in the dark. Perhaps Evans is an overly-nuanced academic who doesn’t want to dirty himself with AC’s blunt, fact-based, in-your-face takedowns of the disgusting Left.
Treason was the first book I read of Coulters’ and it was the best presentation of McCarthy and how over the years his critics have tried and have been somewhat successful of discrediting his works and hearing of outing communism in government. Was a very good read IMO.
I didn't know that. I'm presently reading "Blacklisted by History" and it was Ann's book that piqued my interest in the facts about McCarthy.
I've enjoyed the book and I would recommend it to anyone who has any interest.
Not only is it not true that Evans disapproved of Coulter's work, it is, he told me, “the exact opposite of the truth.”
You may be confusing Evans with Ronald Radosh, who was quoted by Andrew Sullivan saying Coulter “uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say.” Radosh implies that Coulter misused research reported by him and Klehr in their book, “The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism.”
In that book, Radosh and Klehr reported correctly that one McCarthy target, Foreign Service Officer John Stewart Service, lived with Soviet agents Solomon Adler and Chi Cha’o-ting in Chungking in 1944, and that Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie conspired with “Tommy the Cork” Corcoran to fix the Amerasia case to get Service off, but Radosh and Klehr concluded that Service was innocent.
Coulter reported the same facts in “Treason,” but concluded that Service was guilty, as does Evans in “Blacklisted by History.” In fact, Coulter’s primary source here was not Radosh and Klehr, but the FBI’s Amerasia file — including the FBI wiretaps of the Corcoran-Currie fix — which she got from Evans.
Incidentally, National Review assigned Radosh the task of reviewing “Blacklisted by History. ” Word is that they received his copy over a month ago, but have been holding up publication for unknown reasons. Editor Jonah Goldberg blogged recently that a friend “who knows a lot about the subject matter” told him that the book was “a triumph of historical research. ” (William F. Buckley once co-wrote a well-researched book on the subject, "McCarthy and His Enemies.")