This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!

James David Dickson seems to excuse the Capital Times for recycling falsehoods that were thoroughly debunked in Blacklisted by History, on the grounds that the newspaper once "felt McCarthy's power." That "power," notes Dickson, consisted of an alliterative dig over which the editors still sulk. (No mention of any zingers the paper may have slung McCarthy's way.)

If McCarthy's exercise of his First Amendment rights justifies lying about him by the press, Fox News Channel has license to slander any number of political figures, up to and including Senator Hillary "Vast right-wing conspiracy" Clinton.

Dickson calls McCarthy a "self-appointed Town Crier, a finger-pointing Puritan content to drag whomever necessary through the mud if it suited his purposes."

Dickson provides no evidence for any of this. If McCarthy was willing "to drag anyone through the mud," falsely impugning the character of innocent people, why doesn't Dickson name any of those McCarthy thus damaged?

His evidence consists solely of clichés: "It's no coincidence that 'McCarthyism' is a four-letter word in American politics. Where there's smoke, there's fire." Sure, McCarthy may have been right, but "even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

Sadly, Dickson even repeats the Nazi slander from the Tydings report, that McCarthy was a virtual Hitler, willing to tell "The Big Lie." But, as Blacklisted by History proves, it was Sen. Tydings who was lying, as he was eventually forced to admit under oath.

Mark, how's it going?

We actually met at Mr. Evans's Blacklisted book party.

Look. It's a great book. Mr. Evans is a great historian.

But I'm not sold on McCarthy. It's quite telling that McCarthy himself couldn't have, and didn't, mount a defense anywhere near as thorough in the five intervening years between the end of his career and the end of his life.

If you're looking for someone to drink the Kool-Aid, though, I'm not that guy. I'll never let anyone use my unwillingness to sign on 100% with what they're saying as a negative. Sorry!

No need to be sorry. I will defend to the death your right to disagree with me, or Stan Evans' books. I think your review is better than some others I have seen that praise the book without reservation.

My grounds for criticism are not disagreement with your opinion, but rather what I see as a lack of evidence supporting it.

Since publication of Blacklisted by History, it is no longer sufficient to assert that McCarthy was a liar, or that he ruined innocent lives. The book challenges us to say what Big Lie he told, to name the innocents he dragged through the mud.

In any event, I am very happy for you that this review got picked up. Any criticism I have of this piece is minor compared to my pleasure at your success, my friend. As I mentioned in my e-mail, I think your review is much better that the one by Ron Radosh in National Review.

One other nit-pick: McCarthy didn't have five years between the end of his career and the end of his life. He was still serving as a senator on May 2, 1957, the day he died.

It is hardly surprising that McCarthy could not mount the defense that Evans presents. The evidence mustered by Evans includes FBI files that were classified at the time; the Venona decrypts, declassified in 1995; Soviet archives that became available in the 1990s; McCarthy's own committee's executive sessions, released in 2000; etc. Even the Subversive Activities Control Board report that vindicated McCarthy in the case of Annie Lee Moss was not released until after his death.

That McCarthy could not publicly present this evidence during his lifetime is not a mark against his character.

Basically, Evans repeats the same material that William Buckley used. Joe McCarthy represented the frustration that many in the West felt after the end of World War Two when it seemed as though, as Churchill put it we had "killed the wrong pig." It was Churchill who invented the term "Iron Curtain." All of a sudden all of the evil fascists were gone, and now we faced the communists. People like Henry Wallace, once highly favored, became political lepers.
We were still searching for some middle ground, and Truman was just simply too shaky. By 1953, some imagined asked if Eisenhower was the new Hindenberg and (gasp) if McCarthy the new "Hilter." All of a sudden, the left had invented an enemy. By Kennedy's time, anti-Communism had become mainstream. Fast forward to today and I see America as a fading Empire. The people who were proven "right" were the Robert Taft types, and look what happened to Ron Paul.
BTW. Evans skips over the fact that, correct or not, Hiss maintained that Chambers had used "forgery by typewriter." If Hiss had been more cautious after his first mis-trial, his second trial could well have misfired also, whcih would have discredited Chambers. As it was, Hiss was simply out-lawyered.

"Basically, Evans repeats the same material that William Buckley used"?

Buckley and Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies in 1954. The material with which Evans builds his argument was not even available then.

The building blocks of Evans' case are FBI files, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act since the 1970s; Soviet archives, briefly opened after the fall of the USSR; the Venona decrypts, declassified in 1995-97; and the executive sessions of McCarthy's own committee, made public in 2003. None of this material was available when Buckley and Bozell published in 1954.

M. Stanton Evans' book "Blacklisted by History" is an example of a well researched and elegantly written piece of historical journalism. Evans' book turns conventional wisdom about McCarthy on its head, and many who were brainwashed by the hundreds of tracts demonizing Senator McCarthy will find fault with it. Nearly everything written about McCarthy since his death fifty years painted him as a dreadful human being, a sociopath and nihilist, a brutal amoral lout with no redeeming features. Perhaps the only recent exception to this view was Arthur Hermann's truly undetached biography of "America's most hated Senator." From now on any researcher or historian who even thinks of writing about McCarthy had better consult Evans' book.

Personally what I found most instructive about Evans' book is the way he skillfully lays out the historical background preceding the McCarthy era convincingly documenting not only the extent of the penetration of the State Department, the Treasury, White House etc. by communist agents, moles, fellow travelers and sympathizers, but the influence they yielded on key policy decisions. And he names names, names and more names; enough names to make your head spin. Lists beginning with ten known spies on page 39 -Adler, Belfrage, Bisson, Coe, Currie, Glasser, Karr, Keemey, Mins and Nuemann. And this followed by hundreds more that make the reading of this book a surrealist experience. Today, we can confirm many of them by the Venona revelations, soviet archives and declassified FBI files. Together they provide irrefutable triangulating evidence that McCarthy was not only right but perhaps even underestimated the extent of the penetration, as Haynes and Klehr suggest.

This also puts paid to red herring arguments dangled ad nauseam that none of the suspects McCarthy named went to prison. But that was not his job; he simply wanted them out of the government. Were his tactics too "inquisitional" depends on one's political perspective and perception of communism. If one accepted communism as a benign utopian ideology, the wave of the future ― as many on the left religiously wanted to believe― then of course you would think that hounding anyone with communist sympathies was terrible. However, if one viewed communism as the enemy, an ideology responsible for the butchery of scores and scores and scores of millions of victims, then you had a legitimate reason for concern about communists in the government. On this point only those who lived under communism are entitled to an opinion, and among them the verdict is unanimous: communism was the most murderous regime in history ― a fact that thousands upon thousands misguided sympathizers in the U.S. and elsewhere chose to ignore.

Another point that needs elucidation and that Evans might have articulated more fully, is the unanswered question of "how was one to know that the named individuals actually represented all agents and moles in the government?" Assuming even perfect knowledge of the existence of hundreds of agents and moles (something we now know with near complete certainty)--could there have been additional thousands that escaped FBI's detection? Or were the ones named by McCarthy just the tip of the iceberg? Not even Hoover could have been certain if the FBI identified all of them because gathering evidence on communist agents was not much different from getting evidence about the secretive Cosa Nostra. If you were lucky you got a few pieces of information here and there, but in final analysis will never know if you got the full picture.