| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Canada and the United States

Arthur Herman. Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator. New York: Free Press. 2000. Pp. 404. $26.00.

It has become something of a cliché among those of us who write about the home front in the early Cold War that McCarthyism was much more than the career of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. After all, McCarthy did not get into the headlines until 1950, by which time Alger Hiss had been convicted, the Hollywood Ten were about to go to prison, Klaus Fuchs was already there, and the federal government's loyalty-security program had been in operation for nearly three years. Still, McCarthy's hyped-up accusations of subversion in high places so intensified the political rancor of the period that there is some historical justification for giving his name to the whole anticommunist mess. 1

Whether there is any justification for writing a new biography of the man is more questionable. Two fine ones already exist: Thomas Reeves's exhaustive The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy: A Biography (1982) and David M. Oshinsky's more nuanced A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983). For the work under review, the European historian Arthur Herman did not gain access to any important new archives or uncover any new aspects of McCarthy's past. On the contrary, his research is perfunctory, to say the least. With a few excursions into some Army files and oral history interviews, he relies almost entirely on the standard published sources. There is nothing new here—and more (I assume) sloppy factual errors than a reputable piece of scholarship should contain. Although only espionage afficionados may know that Justice Department employee Judith Coplon was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on a New York City street, not a subway, surely a European historian should know that the Berlin blockade occurred in 1948–1949, not 1961. And there are many more such blunders. . . .

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