Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book is Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. Before that, he was an award-winning reporter at The Boston Globe, where his primary beat was medicine. He also served as the Globe’s environmental reporter, roving national writer, investigative reporter, and sports writer. Tye, who graduated from Brown University, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993-94. He taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, and Tufts.
I wrote...
Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy
America’s first Red Scare happened in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution when there was a widespread fear that anarchism, radicalism, and revolution were spreading here. The second Red Scare, which was more pandemic and lasted longer, occurred in the wake of World War II and coincided with the launch of the Cold War. The terror this time was that communists were infiltrating our government and stealing not just the formula for the atomic bomb but America’s very soul. The backlash – to believers, it was pinpointing the risk, to foes, it constituted unfounded fear-mongering – became an ism named for its loudest tribune, Senator Joe McCarthy.
Our increasingly polemical and ideological domestic divides, and building tensions with China and Russia, suggest we could be in for a Third Red Scare, and that readers might want to bone up on the defining one from seventy years ago. Here are some books they might not know about, but ought to.
The fairest way to begin to explore the conspiracy McCarthy and his backers feared is to hear it from the Cassandra himself. Joe lays out his case in this thin volume.
Straight from the middle of the Cold-War era, then-Senator Joe McCarthy outlines his mission to reclaim America from the threat of communism, offering what he calls "documented answers to questions asked by friend and foe." A chilling set of documents then...and now. This is the original publication from 1952, NOT a modern reprint, in paper wrappers with McCarthy's photo on front cover,101 pages + Index in rear. Condition is downgraded to only Good due to external edgewear, light rubbing & some corner creasing. . Protected in mylar collector bag Free! Please see our photos--they show the Exact book you will…
Wechsler was the editor of The New York Post, a short-lived Communist and lifelong liberal, and a favorite target of McCarthy and McCarthyism. Wechsler’s razor-edged analysis of the era is the ideal counterpoint to McCarthy’s, and offers a lens into the scare’s flesh-and-blood victims.
Bayley, a political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal during McCarthy’s rise and reign, offers riveting details about how the press enabled the Red Scare in a book that is at the same time dispassionate and telling for today.
This is a book for historians, journalists - and for all of us who need to remember this turbulent time in our nation's past, and its lessons for today. ""No one who cares about liberty will read Mr. Bayley's masterful study without a shudder about the journalistic cop-outs that contributed to making the nightmare called McCarthyism. This book reminds us that it could happen here, but perhaps will make it harder to happen next time."" - Daniel Schorr
Haynes and Klehr are two of the few Cold War scholars who could be considered neutral, which means they enrage both colleagues who see the second Red Scare as a paranoid reaction and those who see it as a Godsend. In this volume, Haynes and Klehr use newly-unveiled cables between Soviet spies and spymasters to unwind fantasy from reality in the charges leveled by McCarthy and his fellow alarmists.
Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages-documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early…
Reds weren’t the scare’s only bogeymen, as historian Johnson makes clear in this best-ever telling of how McCarthy and his fellow travelers used their trademark tactics to ignite and sustain what became known as the Lavender Scare.
In Cold War America, Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed tremendous support in the fight against what he called atheistic communism. But that support stemmed less from his wild charges about communists than his more substantiated charges that "sex perverts" had infiltrated government agencies. Although now remembered as an attack on suspected disloyalty, McCarthyism introduced "moral values" into the American political arsenal. Warning of a spreading homosexual menace, McCarthy and his Republican allies learned how to win votes. Winner of three book awards, "The Lavender Scare" masterfully traces the origins of contemporary sexual politics to Cold War hysteria over national security. Drawing…
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart McLean, Joni Mitchell, Peter Gzowski, and more. And it's for people who want to know how to make radio.
Crafted with gentle humour and thoughtfulness, this is more than just a glimpse into the internal workings of CBC Radio. It's also a prose ode to the people and shows that make CBC Radio great.
"In dozens of amiable, frequently humorous vignettes... Mahoney fondly recalls his career as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio technician in this memoir... amusing and highly informative." — Kirkus Reviews
"What a wonderful book! If you love CBC Radio, you'll love Adventures in the Radio Trade. Joe Mahoney's honest, wise, and funny stories from his three decades in broadcasting make for absolutely delightful reading! — Robert J. Sawyer, author of The Oppenheimer Alternative''
"No other book makes me love the CBC more." — Gary Dunford, Page Six *** Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's…
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