Looking Again at Radosh's Vicious Attack on McCarthy Book

Human Events, Dec 17, 2007 by Coulter, Ann

Blacklisted By History By M. Stanton Evans Crown Forum, 2007 $29.95, 663 pp.

Available at HEBookService.com

The October 2007 Vanity Fair had a long, gaseous article explaining how the pro-Bush bias of the mainstream media cost Al Gore the 2000 presidential election. (For you kids out there too young to remember, Al Gore is a morbidly obese former Clinton Administration official who raised campaign cash from Buddhist monks and claimed he invented the Internet.)

Meanwhile, Republicans can barely remember that just a few years ago, former Clinton crony and current Hillary adviser Sandy Berger stuffed top-secret national security documents in his pants, snuck them out of the National Archives and destroyed them.

'Old News'

But liberals are still fighting the 2000 presidential election-if only to take a break from fighting the 1973 Chilean coup by Augusto Pinochet. They never rest, they never give up and they never stop lying. Liberals he and lie and lie and then, the moment conservatives respond, they shout: OLD NEWS!

By my rough estimate, there have been one zillion books, movies, plays, allegories, interpretive dances and limericks about the Dark Night of Fascism Under Joe McCarthy (DNFUJM).

The anti-McCarthy oeuvre has zippy titles, such as The Nightmare Decade: The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy, Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism: The Hate That Haunts America and How I, Al Gore, Stopped Joe McCarthy's Hate Campaign-although that last one may have been made up during the 2000 campaign by a hostile media.

Fifty years later, the only true history book ever written about McCarthy has finally been released: M. Stanton Evans' Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies. Liberals have responded with vicious attacks and-naturally-claims that the book merely recites "old news."

So I think I'm entitled to at least a few columns on the book that finally tells the truth about the DNFUJM.

"Historian" Ronald Radosh's slanderous attack on Evans' book in the December 17 National Review delusionally claims that Evans used Radosh's own crappy book, The Amerasia Spy case: Prelude to McCarthyism, as a primary, uncredited source for Blacklisted by History.

It is now painfully clear that Radosh was the Yoko Ono of that collaboration. Radosh's co-author, Harvey Klehr, at least went on to write wonderful, scathing accounts of liberal collaboration with communism, including Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, as well as one of the greatest books ever written, In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage.

Consequently, I shall now refer to Klehr's only bad book as "Radosh's book."

Here is a complete summary of Radosh's book on Amerasia: Liberals were wrong-but so were right-wingers! Now, let's talk some more about the failings of right-wingers.

Radosh's book hints at the fact that John Stewart Service, U.S. diplomat and Communist collaborator, connived to turn China over to Mao Zedong and passed hundreds of pages of classified government documents to Soviet spies working at the magazine Amerasia. (Or as Radosh put it, liberals whose careers "suggested" they were Soviet spies.)

Radosh then massages these facts to death until the whole story is whittled away to nothing. This allows Radosh to turn to the real knaves of the story: right-wingers.

Not surprisingly, a few years after the release of Radosh's snoozefest of a book, the New York Times' obituary on John Stewart Service could say that Service "filed prescient reports" from China on the weakness and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists-who happened to be our allies, under siege from Mao Zedong's Communists.

As Evans' book makes eminently clear. this is like saying, "John Hinckley wrote prescient reports that Reagan would be shot."

Although it is possible, with a great deal of work, to slog through Radosh's endless "on the one hand, on the other hand" disquisitions in order to glean an occasional fact from his Amerasia book-presumably inserted by his co-author Klehr-it is not possible to believe that Evans got a single comma from Radosh's book.

Radosh's boast is a bit like claiming that Martin Scorcese's film The Last Temptation of Christ was a primary, uncredited source for the authors of the holy Bible.

Evans' copiously footnoted book makes clear that his Amerasia information comes directly from the FBI's files. Not only that, Evans has been writing about the FBI files on Amerasia since at least 10 years before Radosh's book.

Among the reasons we know this is from Radosh's own book-published in 1996-in which Radosh attacks Evans by name for an article Evans wrote about the FBI's Amerasia file in Human Events-in 1986. Radosh's book is so bad, apparently even he can't bear to read it.

So it takes a special sort of fabulist to write, as Radosh did in National Review: "Full disclosure: Harvey Klehr and I are co-authors of The Amerasia Spy case: Prelude to McCarthy ism, a book from which Evans takes virtually all of his material and which he does not acknowledge."