Revisionist historians have proposed substituting the term Trumanism for McCarthyism because, they argue, Harry Truman accelerated the domestic witch hunt when he signed Executive Order 9835 in March 1947, which established a loyalty-security program for all federal employees and revived the Attorney General's list of subversive organizations. More recently, the historian Ellen Schrecker proposed that it be called Hooverism, after FBI Director J. Edgar, who presided behind the scenes over the anti-Communist crusade. The claims of the new cadre--those we may call the counterrevisionists--matter because, in the first place, until we come to terms with our cold war past we seem condemned to persist in its outmoded assumptions and thought patterns; and in the second, those whom one writer has dubbed "the new McCarthyites" (see below) would use the past to discredit the left-liberal project today. Thus the debate about the domestic cold war--including what to call the repression that was part of it--tells us that while the cold war may be over, its ghosts linger on. And they continue to haunt.

The reconsideration of Senator McCarthy may be said to have been jump-started in 1995, with the unveiling and release by the intelligence community of the Venona Project, nearly 3,000 decryptions of early 1940s cables between Soviet operatives working in New York, San Francisco and Washington, and their masters in Moscow. It has proceeded episodically in reviews and essays, books, documents retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act and from other archives, memoirs and even a novel, The Redhunter, by that old private-sector red hunter himself, William F. Buckley Jr. Much of that output has been made possible courtesy of right-wing foundation funding, although it's not merely a matter of the right: My friend the iconoclastic Nicholas von Hoffman, anything but a right-winger, has written in the Washington Post, "point by point Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him"; and "McCarthy may have exaggerated...but not by much." To me, "twenty years of treason"--McCarthy's famous charge against the Democrats--is "much," but oh, well.

It surfaced most blatantly with the publication of a new biography, Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator, by Arthur Herman, the coordinator of the Western Civilization program at the Smithsonian Institution, which argues, as the New York Times's reviewer, historian Alonzo Hamby, accurately summarized, that McCarthy "was an unfairly maligned patriot who ultimately became a victim of the immense conspiracy he was attempting to expose."

In March of 1999 Joshua Micah Marshall had complicated the matter. Writing in the liberal biweekly The American Prospect, he identified a cadre of middle-aged historians--among them Radosh, Harvey Klehr, John Haynes and the formerly radical journalist David Horowitz--as practitioners of what he called "the New McCarthyism," which he said "seeks to paint liberalism in general as a philosophy that is careless of the national interest, prone to being hoodwinked by malevolent forces, and even capable of sinister acts of betrayal." Moreover, "the New McCarthyism seeks not only to discredit Cold War liberalism by revising history, but also to attack liberal internationalism in foreign policy today by using the tactics pioneered by the red-baiters of a half century ago."

The New York Times Magazine lumbered into the fray some months later, in November, with an article titled "Cold War Without End" by Jacob Weisberg, although it dealt less with the substance of the issue than the psychology of those "obsessed" with these particular culture wars of yesteryear. Weisberg also observes in his Times magaziner that Herman's book echoes McCarthy and His Enemies, a forty-five-year-old apologia by Buckley, then a fiery young right-winger, and his brother-in-law Brent Bozell. Buckley puts forth a more warty take on the Senator in his fiction, which he calls "a documentary novel." Weisberg quotes Harry Bontecou, the character who stands in for Buckley, as saying, "It was one of Joe McCarthy's ironic legacies that it became almost impossible in future years to say that anyone was a Communist because you'd be hauled up for committing McCarthyism." Weisberg goes on to argue that "what unites Herman and Buckley is the belief that 'McCarthyism' is a millstone that shouldn't hang around the neck of the American right any longer."

But Weisberg's most original thought is that the deeper one delves into such battles, the greater the feeling that

these are not primarily arguments about historical fact at all. Espionage charges, initiated by subterranean and frequently unreliable sources, are a way of arguing about the past as if it were still present, a continuation of ideological politics by other means among people who are, charitably put, obsessive. Listening in, you get the sense that these arguments are less a posthumous sorting out of the cold war than a sublimated continuation of it.

The New Republic was nevertheless right about one thing: Most of the historians and journalists cited above--including, by the way, Weisberg and Marshall--share in the "consensus" that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, defendants in the two most famous cold war cases, and scores if not hundreds of others, were Russian spies. Further, they believe that, as Radosh, Klehr and Haynes collectively put it in The New Republic, "the CPUSA was not just another American political party.... Its Soviet ties defined its very raison d'être." It was, in other words, primarily an instrument of the international Communist conspiracy.

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