Poor Ron Radosh is still hoping liberals will forgive him.
He wrote a good book a quarter-century ago with Joyce Milton — "The Rosenberg File" — which was supposed to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, but instead concluded that Rosenberg was guilty of Soviet espionage.
Radosh has spent the rest of his life apologizing to liberals for that book.
This week, he's apologizing in the pages of the increasingly irrelevant National Review with a nasty review of the greatest book since the Bible, M. Stanton Evans' "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy."
Radosh makes misstatements of fact about the book, misstates facts about the cases and falsely accuses Evans of plagiarism. Other than that, it's a good review!
The review makes it comically obvious that Radosh didn't so much as glance through the pages of Evans' book. (Please forgive me, Eric Foner!) At least Kelly Ripa skims the summary cards written by her assistants who actually read the books when she interviews an author. Radosh doesn't even manage that.
It must be painful for Radosh to read a thrilling historical account of Soviet espionage without every accusation against a liberal having to be surrounded by 400 excuses, as in Radosh's excruciating books.
This contemptible Uriah Heep patronizingly writes, for example, that "Evans does an impressive job of reminding readers how serious the issue of Communist penetration was" — something Radosh's own books failed to do because he's too busy denouncing right-wingers like Joe McCarthy.
But Uriah Radosh complains that Evans "does not emphasize, although his own data make it clear, that most of the knowledge about these people came before McCarthy was on the scene. After all, Elizabeth Bentley first went to the FBI in 1945, and named key members of Soviet networks."
This is extensively covered in Chapters 10 and 11 of Evans' book. Extensively. There are even never-before-released charts in those chapters that you'd notice by merely flipping through the book before purporting to write a review of it. So even people who just read Evans' book for the pictures will know that he's covered that point pretty exhaustively. This includes one intricately detailed FBI chart mapping out Bentley's Soviet contacts. But thanks for reminding us about Elizabeth Bentley, Ron!
All of this information, incidentally, was delivered to the Truman administration, where it was promptly ignored.
This is the central fact that apparently must be explained to liberals over and over again. I will understand the rules of football before liberals will grasp McCarthy's point.
It is true that most of the high-value targets whom McCarthy cited to prove Democratic perfidy had been identified as Soviet spies before McCarthy came on the scene.
But the essence of what McCarthy was saying was: Let's get into this a bit. How could Whittaker Chambers meet with FDR's Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939, reveal massive Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration, and still have these same Soviet spies swarming through Democratic administrations a decade later?
How could Truman have nominated known Soviet spy Harry Dexter White to be U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund in 1946? How could Truman still be denying Alger Hiss was a Soviet agent in 1956?
Democrats want endless, pontifical investigations into how 9/11 happened, but they can't comprehend why McCarthy wanted an investigation into how an immense network of Soviet spies managed to run rampant through the Democratic administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.
After Hiss, the Rosenbergs and the loss of China, there was considerably more reason for McCarthy to investigate the State Department than there is for the current Congress to investigate Bush's firing of his own U.S. attorneys.
By exposing the Democrats' absolute blindness to Soviet totalitarianism, McCarthy shattered forever the nation's confidence in the Democrats' capacity to govern. For that, the Stalinist hate machine attacked him viciously and has never let up — as detailed in "Blacklisted by History," a book Ron Radosh might want to read someday.
But Radosh is not about to let the first book to render a full and honest historical account of Joe McCarthy ruin his blissful ignorance. Radosh knows less about McCarthy than I know about fly-fishing. He gets cases wrong, sources wrong, hearings wrong. He's been pulling this nonsense for 25 years now. The sole point of his current cliche-ridden ramblings in National Review is to make yet one more special pleading to liberals.
DEAR RON:
No matter how hard you try, they'll never forgive you. You still can't get a job teaching at any university in America.
DEAR NATIONAL REVIEW:
Your fake dispatches from Lebanon are more interesting than whining liberals writing book reviews of books they haven't read and don't have the guts to write.
