2 weeks Ago
Book Review Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America By Clay Risen Scribner: 480 pages, $31 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Early in "Red Scare," Clay Risen's thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.
S., the author makes a point of explaining what his subject is — and isn't. "There is a lineage to the American hard right of today," he writes, "and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare.
It did not originate then, nor is Trumpism and the MAGA movement the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them." For 480 detailed, tension-packed pages, Risen lays out that line without stepping over it, allowing the past to become prologue.
He trusts the reader to make the connections between then and now, and he doesn't stray from the task at hand, or the specifics of time, place, conflict and culture that led to a protracted period of national shame. "Red Scare" burrows deep not just into the well-known major players, including Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss and the Hollywood Ten, but also the myriad committees, opportunistic enablers and the long, long line of scapegoats who paid for the mid-20th-century anti-communist witch hunt.
Told by a friend that he had endured a "dry crucifixion," J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb who was dragged through the mud (and had his security clearance revoked) largely for publicly wondering what he had wrought, replied: "You know, it wasn't so very dry. I can still feel the warm blood on my hands.
" "Red Scare" has the integrity to operate on a "yes, and ...
" basis, rather than indulging in the easy "either or." Risen takes pains to point out that yes, a great many Americans did join the Communist Party, especially in the 1930s, when American capitalism teetered on the..
. Chris Vognar.
