Stan Evans Answers Radosh's Plagiarism Charge

Human Events, Dec 17, 2007

As suggested by Ann Coulter's column this week (See page 6.), conservatives are buzzing about a recent onslaught against Stan Evans's book on Joe McCarthy launched in the pages of National Review by historian Ron Radosh.

Among other things, Radosh accused Evans of defending supposedly indefensible statements by McCarthy, making unsupported charges if his own arid plagiarizing material from Radosh's previously published work about one of McCarthy's famous cases. Since some of the material written by Evans and discussed'by Coulter originally appeared in HUMAN EVENTS, we asked Evans to give us a comment on the matter, above and beyond the reply he made to National Review. He gave us the following statement:

While the misstatements by Radosh are many, by far the most outrageous is his charge that "virtually all" of my material on the so-called Amerasia case was plagiarized from a book he published in 1996 with Prof. Harvey Klehr. As may be seen by anyone who compares that volume with my discussion, this is an incredible falsehood.

All of my documentation on the Amerasia case, the cover-up by the Justice Department, the fix that let the culprits walk and the wiretaps that revealed these things, came directly from the FBI here in Washington. I have several thousand pages of formerly classified FBI archives on the subject, accumulated over a span of years dating from the 1980s. My end notes are citations from these records.

The Klehr-Radosh references to the same matters are taken mostly, though not entirely, from a collection of FBI records pertaining to Amerasia at Emory University, where Klehr is a professor. Because of this discrepancy, the end notes of the two volumes are based on different indexing systems, so that one can't be derivative from the other. Even a cursory examination of the notes will be enough to show this.

As the Amerasia affair was, in many ways, McCarthy's No. 1 case, I devote three separate chapters to it, with collateral discussions in still other chapters. In all, I have at least 20,000 words about the case and the main suspect in it: John Stewart Service. On reviewing my own performance, I find that of those 20,000 words, exactly two, having nothing to do with the FBI records (that Service was the "designated leaker" for Soviet agent Lauchlin Currie in the White House), were gleaned from the Klehr-Radosh discussion.

Interestingly, and apparently unknown to Radosh, I asked Prof. Klehr to read my book before publication, with particular emphasis on the Amerasia chapters. I have the utmost respect for Klehr and his expertise, and I wanted to know if he saw any factual errors in my treatment. He did differ with me on a couple of points and chided me for not having mentioned his book as a matter of authorial pride, but nowhere suggested that I had plagiarized my material from it. Nor, obviously, had I done such a heinous thing, would I have given the book to him for his minute examination.