http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/harvey-klehr/setting-the-record-on-joe-mccarthy-straight/print/
Harvey Klehr’s note: The talk printed below was delivered at the Raleigh Spy Conference in 2005 and new archival materials uncovered in the past eight years would lead me to make a number of small changes to various parts.
Rather than make alterations, however, I would simply note that several of the people whom I say are unidentified have been identified – including the two atomic spies, Quantum and Fogel.
I would refer interested readers to Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, that I co-authored with John Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev for the details. It turns out that Senator McCarthy did identify a few additional Soviet spies – but only a few – and I feel no need to change the assessment of him that I offered then.
*Was Joe McCarthy Right?
I am tempted to start my talk by saying: “I have here in my hands a list of names.” That, of course, was the phrase made famous by Senator Joseph McCarthy, who built his political career in the early 1950s, the history books tell us, on exaggerating the extent of Communist subversion of American life. He also gave his name to a phenomenon that has become a term of opprobrium in American political life. To accuse someone of McCarthyism or to label a person a McCarthyite is not to issue a compliment. The implication is that a person so named has made scurrilous and unwarranted accusations and is engaged in unethical and sleazy maneuvers. The late Senator from Wisconsin even gave his name to the period. The McCarthy era is commonly depicted as one where America, consumed by a paranoid and irrational fear of domestic communism, went on a witch-hunt. In fact, the one work of literature that virtually every very high school student in American will read is Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, an account of the Salem witch trials, in which the main character is pushed and pressed to name his fellow citizens as witches. John Proctor’s refusal to falsely implicate innocent people leads to his own condemnation and execution. Miller wrote his play during the heyday of McCarthyism and consistently maintained that it should be read as a parable of what happens when a community begins searching for and persecuting heretics.