"Just after reading M. Stanton Evans's remarkable book, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies (New York: 2007), I was talking with a close friend, a man with a broad interest in American politics and history. Normally I don't inflict book reports on innocent bystanders, but in this case, the book was too important to ignore.
Soon I arrived at the key point: the fact that during the Cold War, the liberal establishment in the media, academe, and government condoned the activities of traitors such as Alger Hiss and thus endangered our national security. The central question that Evans raises is just as pertinent today: How could so many Americans, including so many apparently well-intentioned liberals, lend their implicit support to activities that served the interests of our sworn enemies? In the case of Alger Hiss, even after his conviction for perjury and proof that he had turned over classified documents to the Soviets -- tens of thousands of pages, as it turned out -- liberals continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. Yet what Hiss and others did led to the enslavement of hundreds of millions of human beings in China and Eastern Europe. It cost the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans who later fought against communism in Korea and Vietnam, and it undermined our national interests around the world."
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