Faculty Bibliography

"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.'

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