If this were 1952, at least we would have a number of Senators investigating disloyalty and communism. There were quite a few, but the best known one, of course, was Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. He was a very brave man, a patriot, and one of my personal heroes. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that have come to light since his death show that even though he made some mistakes, the thrust of his claims was true. In some cases, the evidence shows the threat to our national security was even worse than Joe McCarthy or anyone else suspected.
The Venona Cables, which are decrypts from a long-running effort by the U.S. Army to intercept coded Soviet diplomatic messages, were published by the government in the 1990's, after the fall of the Soviet Union. They and several other sources of information prove that Stalin's KGB had penetrated a couple dozen federal agencies with agents--there were several complexly interrelated rings of larger and smaller fish whose total membership was at least several hundred--who were working against this country's interests. Some of the people McCarthy and his committees were investigating were thoroughly disloyal, outright foreign agents working for Moscow. The evidence vindicates McCarthy, and it helps explain why Bobby Kennedy, who worked as one of his top assistants as a young lawyer, thought so highly of him. So did his brother Jack, who was then a Senator.
For anyone interested in this period, I recommend the beautifully written and very thoroughly documented book from 2007 that has already become the authoritative history of Sen. McCarthy's efforts, Stanton Evans' "Blacklisted by History." Commies of course try to dismiss it and run it down, just as they tried to silence McCarthy with a propaganda campaign to smear him personally. Even today, leftist dim bulbs, whether out of dishonesty or simple ignorance (no shortage of either in their ranks) try to peddle anti-McCarthy slanders. But they won't find it so easy to deny the book's many hard, detailed facts, which are based on original sources. Attacking Evans personally would better suit their witless style.
