XDA

It's always a pleasure to deal in real history that is contrary to the consensus history. It's like you found a buried treasure or the key to the highway. The consensus history is that Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) was a crazy drunk who exploited the red scare following WWII and ruined scores of innocent Americans by making up stories of their disloyalty vis a vis the Soviet Union. This is false history. Except about the drinking part.

The first stumbling is that there seems to be an intractable conflation, in most people's minds, of McCarthy's efforts in the Senate with the House Un-American Activities Committee ("HUAC" for short). Many people (and not just on the left) will readily admit that McCarthy's 'irresponsible' allegations ruined lives. When asked who? Those people blink, check the interior memory logs and either have nothing or offer something lame, like the Hollywood 10 (HUAC).

Let's get to brass tacks. We broke the Japanese, German and Soviet codes during WWII. Although the Soviet codes were the hardest and they kept changing them, we managed to crack and translate, sometimes only partially, nearly 2000 (out of several hundred thousand) of intercepts from Moscow to operatives here in the United States, manly during the war years. These are the Venona Intercepts. They were declassified in 1995. A few years earlier, in 1992, the first post-Communist leader, Boris Yeltsin, opened the KGB archives to historians from America and other nations. Spasibo glasnost.

Two historians, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, have done the heavy lifting and written several books about the subject. These include Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, which is about the intercepts themselves, and the more interesting, In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage about the reluctance for many lefty historians to let go of the lie and embrace the truth--the American Government was indeed riddled with Soviet spies and sympathizers during the Cold War. Alger Hiss was in fact a Soviet agent. The Rosenbergs were indeed atomic spies.

There were about 350 operatives found in the intercepts, each with his or her own code name (which changed from time to time). Only a small percentage of these have been identified. They were almost certainly scattered throughout the U.S. government, from the White House to the Army. These guys and girls were spies. The KGB archives have identified others, but really not that many, as it's always good spycraft not to write down the real name of the spy, ever.

Here is a comparison of the lists of people Senator McCarthy said were either spies, sympathizers or security risks during the first part of his accusation period. Only a double handful of people on the list were identified either by Venona or the KGB archives as spies, but that lack of identification means nothing regarding their status as Communist sympathizer or security risk.

Some of those on the left minimize the fact that McCarthy named real spies by comparing McCarthy to a stopped clock or blind hog. I call these guys and girls seriously in denial. What an amazing co-incidence that a few dozen of the 160 or so McCarthy accused of being a spy, sympathizer of security risk vis a vis the Soviet Union were in fact Soviet spies, based either on Venona or the Soviet's admissions. Far from a stopped clock's minimal correctness, that is exactly what one would expect, only a few would be spies while the great majority would be sympathizers without actively becoming traitors. Even more could simply not be trusted and therefore were security risks.

The fall back position of the left is to say that even if there was a kernel of truth to McCarthy's accusations, his excesses hurt the movement by giving it a bad name, McCarthy's own. This is a remnant of Communist propaganda. As you can plainly see from the number of active spies the Soviets had in our government, we were indeed riddled with spies not to mention sympathizers and security risks, just as McCarthy said. The scope of McCarthy's accusation was dead on. His details were a little less reliable, but only somewhat. He is now a symbol for irresponsible and inaccurate accusation almost solely because of the lefty backlash, the largely in-denial whitewash or cover-up of the Soviet efforts to subvert our government during the long, cold war, which whitewash continues to the present from those on the left ignorant of the facts or seriously in denial.