A reputation rescued: anyone interested in the McCarthy era will not want to miss this compelling and factual account of the valiant senator from Wisconsin.(Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy)(Book review)

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy, by M. Stanton Evans, New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2007, 664 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

I have a vivid personal memory of my father banging his fist on the kitchen table, angered because of the way numerous politicians and media pundits were trashing Senator Joseph McCarthy. "I know he's tight and these characters are coveting up for their communist friends," said my dad.

That happened more than 50 years ago--before I went off to college and found myself amongst a swarm of others telling me that McCarthy was a scoundrel, that he unfairly and viciously attacked innocent people, and that America had nothing to worry about because there really weren't any communists or communist sympathizers in government.

In the early 1950s, I'd never heard of Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, Samuel Klaus, and several others who had already sounded grave and credible warnings about the communist penetration. Elizabeth Bentley had served the Communist Party as a courier carrying messages and data from one spy cell to another in Washington and New York. She gave her information to the FBI in 1945, but nothing was ever done about her revelations until Joe McCarthy emerged. Whittaker Chambers, the former communist who told State Department officials in 1939 that the Roosevelt administration was loaded with communists, and who was the key figure in the exposure of top State Department official Alger Hiss as a communist agent, stated in one of his books that he felt he had left the winning side (the communists) and joined the losing side (those loyal to America). In 1946, State Department official Samuel Klaus delivered his lengthy memo to superiors detailing communist infiltration at the State Department but nothing was done. Bentley, Chambers, Klaus, and others had sacrificed much--even placed themselves in jeopardy--for what seemed to be nothing. McCarthy eventually made their efforts meaningful.

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Nor did I have in the 1950s the benefit of digesting the amazing Venona Intercepts, the back-and-forth messages between Moscow and their U.S. agents during and after the 1940s. The contents of these messages, known to government officials as they were being transmitted and transcribed for posterity, confirmed the identities of those communist agents inside our country and inside our government. Again, nothing was done to remove the communists, however. Though these Venona documents provided corroboration for what McCarthy would later charge, they weren't made available to the American public until 1995.

Another treasure trove of information vindicating McCarthy became available during the apparent demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. Not only were many Kremlin files opened for inspection by researchers from our country, so too were the records in various former Soviet satellite capitals. Author Stan Evans took the time to avail himself of all of this information, dig more deeply into the files of the FBI and other government agencies, and put all this material together in a single volume to show that Joe McCarthy should be praised, not condemned.