History Shows Joe McCarthy's Reputation is Undeserved

Ronald Reagan was dismissed by the intelligentsia as just an actor who read speeches written by others until Kiron K. Skinner discovered a box of Reagan's original radio scripts written in his own hand on ruled yellow paper from 1975 to 1979.

Since he had no staff to research and write for him in those years, the scripts prove that Reagan was a one-man think tank, well versed in political philosophy and history, fully capable of writing his own speeches.

Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and an associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon University. In December 2005, he was appointed to the National Security Education Board by President George W. Bush.

Skinner's discovery, and the subsequent publication of many of Reagan's more than 1,000 handwritten radio commentaries, changed the way history now respects Reagan.

M. Stanton Evans, journalism professor and board member of the American Conservative Union, has performed a similar transformation for the most reviled American in modern U.S. history, Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Evans' 663-page work, "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies" (Crown Forum, $29.95), is the result of six years of reading primary sources. Evans proves that almost everything about McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised.

It's an interesting sidelight that one of Reagan's old radio commentaries referred to Evans as "a very fine journalist." He is, indeed, but this book shows that he also is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective who chased every clue to find the truth and to write accurate history in elegant prose.

Evans' vindication of McCarthy was made possible by recently released files, such as the Venona papers (the secret messages between Moscow and its U.S. agents decrypted by our government and released in 1995), data from Soviet archives, and executive-session transcripts of Senate committees that were finally opened after a 50-year ban. Evans' book is copiously documented and reproduces some critical pages from never-before-released files.

In the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy was one of the most popular men in America. Average U.S. citizens recognized him as Horatio at the Bridge battling against our nation's sworn enemies, the Soviet Communists.

McCarthy understood, long before Reagan, that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, one of whose strategies was to infiltrate agents into our government in order to guide our policy to favor Communist goals. In fact, our government was much more infested with Soviet agents than McCarthy imagined.

It's now well known that Communist agents imbedded in high-ranking positions included White House confidant Lauchlin Currie, State Department official Alger Hiss and Treasury Department official Harry Dexter White. Evans quotes FBI files identifying atom bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer as a secret Communist as early as 1942.

Taking on the anti-communist mission locked McCarthy in mortal combat against powerful forces: two U.S. presidents, the vast federal bureaucracy, malicious adversaries in Congress, left-wing lobby groups and the left-wing media who made him their daily target.

McCarthy was concerned only with Communist security risks who influenced U.S. policies. He never targeted Communists in Hollywood or academia.

One of McCarthy's early investigations exposed the gang of Communist agents embedded in our government whose mission it was to change U.S. policy to abandon our wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek and turn China over to the Communists. Owen Lattimore was the point man for articulating the Communist line, and the magazine Amerasia was the communications outlet for an interlocking network of soviet agents.

Evans describes how McCarthy deserves the credit for exposing the Amerasia scandal. Evans publishes for the first time McCarthy's lists of security risks employed by the State Department, proving that his charges were amply supported by FBI files.

Recent unrelated political controversies have shown that the cover-up is often worse than the crime, and the cover-up was McCarthy's prime target. He fought the federal bureaucrats who tolerated and even encouraged the widespread infiltration of our government by Communists whose first loyalty was to Russia.

The administration of President Harry S. Truman and the Democrats in Congress engaged in a massive cover-up, circling the wagons with their media friends. Their game plan was to deny the problem, evade political responsibility for tolerating security risks in government, and kill the messenger.

Evans' book proves that there was not a single innocent victim of McCarthy's investigations. The Senate committee transcripts prove that he was patient with witnesses, and never allowed anyone to be named a Communist or subversive unless he was given the chance to respond directly.

Joe McCarthy himself is probably the most investigated man in U.S. history, far more investigated than the Communist agents. Much of his energy had to be spent in defending himself against vindictive investigations initiated by the Democrats.

McCarthy's career came to an end after he was censured by the Senate, but 45 out of the 46 charges had to be dismissed as baseless. He was censured only for failing to pay proper deference to the committees that were maliciously bent on destroying him.

Everyone who henceforth writes about McCarthy will have to check his facts with Evans' documented discoveries.

Phyllis Schlafly is a national leader of the pro-family movement, a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Feminist Fantasies.

And in addition to the opportunities communism presented to Jews, there was a biblical antecedent for jewish communists in the bible in the person of Joseph in Egypt because the relationship between Jews to Joseph’s Egypt maps over well to that between Jews and Communist Russia. And the history of the Jews from Joseph to Moses looks very similar to the rise to prominence of many Jews in the soviet communist bureaucracy from the 1917-1970 and the decades long expulsion of Russia’s jews after 1970 when it became clear that communism was not working.

Unfortunately, in my haste to defend Rabbi Kahana’ (zt”l; Hy”d) I completely missed this paragraph in which you dare to attack Yosef HaTzaddiq (a’h”sh) and the holy Jews of the Torah as precursors of the Communists! This is the very same theory preached by such as the late, unlamented neo-Nazi Francis Parker Yockey (y’sh”v!), who claimed that Joseph had imposed “the new deal” on Egypt(!!!).
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Read this again. You have it backwards.This is no attack on Joseph and the holy jews of the Torah. When you abolish G-d as the Jews speak of him or God as the gentiles speak of him—you place Man on the thone. This is what the communists did. This is what the pharoh did as well. Only the pharoh placed himself on the Throne directly. He declared himself God. It is no coincidence that the communists embalmed Lenin in red square. The impluse came from the same place as that of the pharohs.

When the Russians became communist fools it was their problem—just as it was a German problem when the Germans became Nazi fools.

Your brief synopsis of Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League is off base. The JDL was not a reaction to any events of the McCarthy era and was founded a considerable time thereafter.
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This is true. Yet it should have been the case that as JDL offices were opened in the heartland — if the Leftist view of America was true —then the JDL should have encountered violent resistance—on a scale far greater than what they encountered in the cities.

My point was that the JDL didn’t encounter violent resistance when they opened offices outside NY & LA. Therefor the Leftist view of America was flawed.

Perhaps you are confusing him with the lamentable Irv Rubin, the pseudo-conservative “Republican” who took over the US JDL after Rabbi Kahana’ moved to Israel. Unlike Rabbi Kahana’, Rubin did indeed have a problem with the American heartland at once burnt a Confederate flag.
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You may have me on this one. But the point remains the same. Despite the provocations of the JDL—under Rubin—there was no “Christian” backlash.—as there should have been — had the leftist view of America been true.

On another issue, the Soviet government (though unquestionably antisemitic) never “expelled” Jews. Rather, c. 1970, they began to begrudgingly let some oppressed Jews out of the country in response to international protest. The goal of the Soviet communists was to rid the Jewish population of its religious, cultural, and ethnic identity so it could completely assimilate into “good” communists. Those who got in the way were severly punished.
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That’s a shift of emphasis. The way Wikipedia puts it is:

As Israel was emerging as a close Western ally, the specter of Zionism raised fears of internal dissent and opposition. During the later parts of the Cold War Soviet Jews were suspected of being possible traitors, Western sympathisers, or a security liability. The Communist leadership closed down various Jewish organizations and declared Zionism an ideological enemy. Synagogues were often placed under police surveillance, both openly and through the use of informers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union
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I’m not saying you’re right or wiki is wrong. Rather I’m saying that wiki’s account is the more popular version of history here.

After the birth of Israel — it was part of Stalin’s fear as well that the Jews in the politburo were not fully loyal to him.

That’s the way I make the connection.

While we’re on the subject of liberals making scapegoats of people, if you ever read Evans’ book on McCarthy you will read that it was not “Protestant America” but Roman Catholicism (McCarthy was Catholic) which the liberals made into a big bugaboo, even making a big show of defending Protestants when one of his staffer (a Protestant himself) allegedly “attacked” them. Believe me, as one of FR’s most notorious “anti-Catholics,” I take no pleasure from this observation!
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This may be so. Certainly, JFK’s father Joe Kennedy believed that McCarthy was right. But by the time I got to the upper west side of Manhattan in the 1970’s liberal distrust had moved on to all things christian.

this had more to do with Nixon’s HUAC than with McCarthy. The communists were active in Hollywood all through the 40’s. When the showdown with Nixon’s HUAC came in the early 50’s—Nixon won the early rounds but ultimately America today resembles more the communist vision than that of HUAC.,

I was one of those people who unthinkingly believed about McCarthy what my teachers taught me in school, and what I saw in the newpapers, magazines and on television.

I admire your courage in admitting your mistake!

My own journey of political awakening followed a path of increasing skepticism of America's typically conservative political villainy that "everybody knows" about. I actually started laughing out loud at the absurdity of Halberstam's over-the-top caricature of Nixon as a pure evil one dimensional cartoon cutout villain.

Yet [Nixon] was of a different class, he was not of [the Chandlers, publishers of the Los Angeles Times] Buff [Chandler] had always found something lacking in him, and years later, when it all had gone sour and he had disgraced himself, she would remember the she always thought he was a little tacky. Indeed, the first time she had met him, on election night in 1946, when all the good winners dutifully came by the Times building (as they now go by the television studios) for the anointing by Palmer, she had not liked him. Nixon with his parents and brothers had gone upstairs to the Chandlers' private suite in the building, where there was a buffet. Someone asked the Nixons what they wanted to drink and the Nixon women said milk, so the Nixon men also said milk, and then as Buff was going out the door for milk, Nixon had taken her aside and asked for a bourbon - "Can you get me a straight? I don't want my mother to see me drinking it." It was a quick flash, but she did not like, a grown man concealing a drink from his mother.

The truth will set you free. - Jesus Christ

If I indeed misinterpreted your statements about Joseph and his generation I apologize. I suppose I was quick on the trigger because I know that Yockey (y’sh”v) said that Joseph imposed the “New Deal” on Egypt.
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God does not “learn” anything. He already knows all. Its men who learn things and God who reveals more of himself to men. Joseph was a righteous man for he feared and trusted God. It was pharaoh who put himself in the place that is God’s and paid the price. Pharaoh took all his people’s property and then he enslaved his own people.
Genesis 47:

18 When that year was over, they came to him the following year and said, “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. 19 Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”

20 So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh’s, 21 and Joseph reduced the people to servitude, [c] from one end of Egypt to the other. 22 However, he did not buy the land of the priests, because they received a regular allotment from Pharaoh and had food enough from the allotment Pharaoh gave them. That is why they did not sell their land.

23 Joseph said to the people, “Now that I have bought you and your land today for Pharaoh, here is seed for you so you can plant the ground. 24 But when the crop comes in, give a fifth of it to Pharaoh. The other four-fifths you may keep as seed for the fields and as food for yourselves and your households and your children.”

25 “You have saved our lives,” they said. “May we find favor in the eyes of our lord; we will be in bondage to Pharaoh.”

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Exodus opens with a pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph—as he had passed away.

I'm looking forward to reading this book by Evans, it may well surpass Coulters noble effort.

While Coulter's book stands on its own, her riff on McCarthy was based almost entirely on Stanton Evans's research. He opened his notes to her.

His own book contains all of what can still be discovered about McCarthy and is much more comprehensive than Coulter's. It's an absolutely essential read for anyone who fancies themselves conservative. It fills in an enormous revisionist black hole in American history.

First, good for you! It astonishes me how many Freepers and others bitch and speculate on what happened to land us in this mess, but very few actually do the necessary reading to find out. It's all in book form now and is easily available. In order to fix a thing you first have to know what's wrong with it. These books tell us.

"Witness" is the most important book ever written about Communism's impact on America. No one can claim to be informed on the subject without reading it and several other prime sources. I wish it could be required reading in every college in the country but of course we know why that will never happen. For that reason it's very important for people like us to spread the word.

Like you, other readers will learn how history has been suppressed and how character assassination has been a Marxist tool in America for about 80 years. It might make them wonder about people other than McCarthy who've been savaged by the Marxist machine. J. Edgar Hoover, for instance. Anyone who's fought effectively against Communism/Marxism in this country has been utterly destroyed. I don't know for certain Hoover was such a victim but have strong suspicions. He was largely the source of McCarthy's information and probably the most effective anti-Communist in American history.

I checked out your website but it doesn't seem to work with my latest Firefox browser. Heading text is superimposed on body text and it's impossible to read. Hope you get it fixed and more power to you!

I have the copy of BLACK LISTED BY HISTORY. (The untold story of Senator Joe McCarthy). Crown Forum. 2007 M.Stanton Evans.

With a chill one becomes aware of leftist hysteria. That is what it was. The technique was said to be introduced to the West by a Willi Munzenberg. The basis of it was that one has to tell lies, in order to get at "truth". I found this in "Hoodwinked" by Jack Cashill. (2005 Nelson Current Books). (P 16-17).

What is the real gold in M.Stanton Evan's book is the reproduction of printed material. It is the telling and much quoted speech by Joseph Welch of the Army Counsel.This was in reference to a young lawyer, who merited some inquiry. Welch refered to "this young man". Then attacked McCarthy ie:

"Have you no shame, sir?".

The left revels in this quote, as the greatest put down of Senator McCarthy. Now we have in front of us a clipping from the New York Times. April 16th 1954, before Welch's speech. P 568.

"The Army charges were signed by the new special counsel,Joseph N.Welch. Mr Welch today confirmed reports he had relieved from duty his original second assistant,Frederick D. Fisher Jr. from his Boston law office,because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed,by Herbert Brownell Jr; the Attorney General, as a Communist-front organization".

Ah, have you no shame indeed!.

I've requested a copy(of Evans' book) be ordered for our local citizens library. Hopefully I'll be reading it in a couple of weeks.

Coulter's Treason covers the "Have you no shame" episode as well. It's my understanding that Evans provided Coulter with his research to help her with her book.

According to Coulter, Welch, after putting on his whining, wimpering act for the press corps while attacking McCarthy, stormed out of the hearing. Once outside earshot of anyone but an aide, he asked; "Well,how did I do?"

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