Faculty Bibliography

The history of American anti-Communism is being rewritten as we speak. The impetus is the emergence of recently declassified files in Russia and the United States that were secret for decades. These documents have confirmed that Soviet intelligence gained a foothold in the American Government in the 1930's and 40's, and that Russian spy masters could count on their comrades in the United States for support. In the wake of these disclosures, there is baseless concern that dangerous anti-Communists, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, will be rehabilitated. In fact, historians have long been aware of Communist spying. The files are a treasure trove for researchers, but the overall effect of the new information is not surprising. Furthermore, McCarthy, who was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died of alcoholism three years later, had no part in the great espionage dramas of his time. What set him apart was his enthusiasm for lying on a grand scale

An article argues that secret, pro-segregation files assembled by the Mississippi state government from 1956 to 1977 should have been reopened

Few periods in American history have been as thoroughly mined by scholars and journalists as the Cold War years of the late 1940s and 1950s, known to millions as the McCarthy era. Named after the Red-hunting Republican Sen. Joseph Raymond McCarthy of Wisconsin, it is vividly recalled as a time of great anxiety over communist expansion, when civil liberties were trampled in the relentless search for spies and subversives. Recently, however, the release of classified documents from U.S. and Russian archives has led researchers in a different direction. While the historical portrait of McCarthyism as a dangerous assault on American values remains solidly intact, the evidence accumulated about Soviet spying in the United States has reinforced the critical role played by America's Communist Party. As a result, defending the party, a labor of love for certain scholars, has become a much tougher job. In "Many Are the Crimes," author Ellen Schrecker, a history professor at Yeshiva University in New York, is candid about her beliefs: "I do not think that I conceal my sympathy for many of the men and women who suffered during the McCarthy era," she writes, "nor my agreement with much (though not all) of their political agenda." And Schrecker, to her credit, is careful to note that the main targets of McCarthyism were not "political innocents" who attended the wrong meeting, but rather people who joined the Communist Party or were close to its cultural orbit

"The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House" by Douglas Brinkley is reviewed

David M. Oshinsky reviews the book "The Children" by David Halberstam

Hillary Rodham Clinton's recent accusation that a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' exists to destroy her husband and his political agenda was bound to strike a nerve. There has been a lot of loose and malicious talk about the President, the right has spread much of it, and our culture feasts on conspiracy theories. But Mrs. Clinton's allegation is not exactly new. She asserts that an extremist minority, unable to defeat the President at the polls, is trying to thwart the will of the majority through a systematic campaign of slander. In the 1830's, Andrew Jackson attributed the same motives to his most strident critics. Later Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson did the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was attacked more bitterly, perhaps, than any other modern chief executive, played the conspiratorial card shrewdly during his 1936 re-election campaign. He did so in reply to the American Liberty League, an organization of ultraconservative millionaires that spent a small fortune on advertising and promotions to portray him as 'the foul breath of Communist Russia.'

In June 1955, following his college graduation, David Halberstam tossed a suitcase into his banged-up Chevy and headed south to begin his journalistic career. His first job, at a small-town Mississippi newspaper, lasted less than a year. He was fired for publishing some freelance pieces sympathetic to the emerging civil rights movement. But he landed a position at The Nashville Tennessean, one of the region's most influential newspapers. Though Tennessee bordered the Deep South, racial repression there did not approach the levels of Mississippi and Alabama. The state's senators, Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver, had refused to sign the infamous "Southern Manfesto," which preached resistance to court-ordered integration, while Gov. Frank Clement had staked out a moderate position on racial issues. Nashville, the state capital, was home to several black colleges, the progressive Vanderbilt Divinity School and a newspaper that covered civil rights in an objective manner. It seemed a model of racial harmony. In 1959, the Vanderbilt Divinity School admitted two blacks as a token gesture, and Nashville would never be the same. One of these students was James Lawson, the key player in "The Children," Halberstam's powerful, densely packed, often unwieldy account of the "Nashville kids" who were instrumental in sparking the civil rights movement and helping to bring legal segregation to its knees. The son of an Ohio minister, Lawson went to Federal prison during the Korean War for refusing to register for the draft. Committed to the pacifist teachings of A. J. Muste, he worked for three years as a missionary in India, learning about nonviolent activism from Gandhi's disciples. Arriving in Nashville, Lawson supplemented his religious studies at Vanderbilt with a workshop designed to train local students for the struggle against racial injustice. He was, Halberstam notes, "as absolutely clear in his mission as he was of his own vision of what America should be."

Oshinsky reviews "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes" edited by Stanley I. Kutler

David M. Oshinsky reviews the book "Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade" by Jeff Shesol

On a blistering August afternoon in 1948, a conservative journalist accused a liberal former government official of belonging to the Communist Party a decade before. The journalist was Whittaker Chambers, an editor at Time magazine; the former official was Alger Hiss, then president of the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace. Chambers' testimony before the rabidly right-wing House Un-American Activities Committee set off a political firestorm that smolders to this day. Was Hiss a traitor or the victim of a right-wing witch hunt? Was Chambers a liar or a born-again patriot with a crucial story to tell? Sam Tanenhaus devotes about half of his splendid biography to these questions, and his verdict is clear: Chambers told the truth. Yet it is the other half of his book, apart from the Hiss case, that constitutes the more interesting and original part of the story. The Whittaker Chambers we meet in these pages is a brooding loner who sees every human event as a struggle between good and evil, with nothing in between. He is both a relentless crusader and a perfect fatalist - always ready for battle, fully prepared for defeat. Born outside New York City in 1901, Chambers grew up amid lunacy and pain. His only sibling committed suicide, his grandmother roamed the house with a hatchet and his bisexual father often deserted the family for months. A talented but troubled young man, Chambers withdrew from Columbia University after writing a "blasphemous" play and then lost his job at the New York Public Library when stolen books were found in his locker. In 1925 he joined the infant Communist Party, barely 7,000 strong. "He was used to being outnumbered," writes Tanenhaus. "He had at last found his church."