M. Stanton Evans Reveals the Truth About McCarthy

Human Events, Nov 19, 2007 by Winter, Tom, Ryskind, Allan

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Human Events Editors Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind last week interviewed M. Stanton Evans, the author of Blacklisted by History, at his Washington, D.C., office at the Education and Research Institute, where he was surrounded by stacks of books, archival papers and thousands of FBI files on which so much of his book on Sen. Joseph McCarthy is based. In both the interview and the book, Evans portrays a far different view of the famous Red hunter than what the liberal establishment has worked so hard to have everyone believe.

Evans says that McCarthy's, charges of massive Soviet penetration of our government were actually "understated."

He accuses Sen. Millard Tydings (D.-Md.) of letting his committee of deliberately ignoring its chief obligation: to investigate the McCarthy cases. "His [Tydings'] committee covered up the facts and engaged in wholesale deceptions," says Evans. "McCarthy had the goods, but the fix was in."

Evans takes on key findings of anti-McCarthy scholars David Oshinsky and Thomas Reeves, who suggest that the senator was bluffing about his charges. Evans insists that famed physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was, indeed, a Communist Party member-contrary to the thesis* promoted by the authors of the Pulitzer-prize-winning American Prometheus.

Annie Lee Moss, a black code clerk in the Pentagon, is considered the poster child for those McCarthy allegedly smeared. Evans conclusively demonstrates, however, that she had, indeed, been a Communist Party member.

Evans concentrates much of his fire on the powerful and widespread pro-Red Chinese faction in the U.S. government-a key McCarthy target. Evans says this group played a critical role in bringing down our war-time ally, Chiang Kai-shek. More disturbing, Evans says that the U.S. government actually hatched plans to assassinate Chiang when he was on the Mainland and then plotted to topple him when he escaped to Taiwan.

You must be very pleased with the reception of your book.

M. STANTON EVANS: I'm flabbergasted. I never imagined anything like this happening. I've written a lot of books in my time and to write a book about Joe McCarthy and have some of the major media paying attention, I'm not used to that.

Conservatives around the country are very supportive. Ann Coulter has given it a big boost and helped it climb to No. 14 on Amazon.com at one point.

EVANS: It was No. 1 on Amazon under "history," and Tom Brokaw second. But today I was second and he was first. However, these numbers change pretty rapidly and seem to reflect a lot of media feedback. Ann's column was a terrific send-off.

One of the print reviews we've seen is from Publishers Weekly, and basically the idea was that your book is all old hat

EVANS: I don't think that person ever read the book. The review implies mat I had written it out of the Soviet archives, which I didn't, and in so doing, I was reworking old materials. Most of my documentation is from the FBI, and the stuff I have is completely different from other studies of the subject.

You retrieved a sizable amount of new information from the FBI, various historical archives, and you've got the papers of Ralph de Toledano and Willard Edwards, both prominent journalists who covered McCarthy's doings, and you've got other relevant materials as well. Why don't you tell us a little about your treasure-hunting and the mystery of the disappearing documents.

EVANS: We have in our offices about 100,000 pages of FBI files on these cases. I went looking for certain specific information at the FBI and found all this other stuff I had no idea existed. You remember the day-after-day experience of my coming back from the FBI to meet you guys for lunch, trundling this big case full of these documents. I did that for a couple of years and the stuff was just amazing.

A lot of this information, you relate, was known as early as 1945.

EVANS: What happened was that in 1945, Elizabeth Bentley, who'd been a courier for the Communist Party and the Soviet conspiracy and had been working with Communists in the American government, broke with the party, went to the FBI and gave them a tremendous amount of information about the level of Communist infiltration, and the Bureau laid on a huge investigation of the suspects she named. These included Harry Dexter White and Solomon Adler at Treasury and Alger Hiss kind of marginally (although most of Hiss's activities had been flagged by Whittaker Chambers). There was Robert Miller, a Soviet agent named by Bentley, and many, many other suspects. The FBI followed these people around, wiretapped them, opened meir mail, learned everything about them and that's where these files came from [Evans points to a big stack of files]. The files we have on the Bentley cases alone run to about 50,000 pages. It's called the Gregory case, which was the FBI's code name for Bentley.

If you look at these cases, those names, and you look at the State Department security records, some of which I also got from the National Archives, you see it's the same folks, all leading up to Joe McCarthy's charges. What was happening was that the FBI was getting the information, funneling it to the State Department security office, which then dealt with these suspects within the department.