But a funny thing happened on the way to the rehabilitation. The same cadre of historians and journalists who share the consensus and would seem to be endorsing the von Hoffman proposition that McCarthy was, after all, more right than wrong, still want to distance themselves from McCarthy himself. David Horowitz, for example, took to cyberspace to make clear that neither he nor any of those dubbed New McCarthyites by Marshall deserved the label. Each of those denominated, he complained in a column he writes for Salon,

is on record as a sharp critic of McCarthy and McCarthyism, specifically his demagoguery and recklessness with the facts, his contempt for legal process and his unscrupulous attacks on innocent or half-guilty individuals. Each member of the group, me included, has also been careful in his writings to credit anti-Communist leftists with their actual achievements in the battles against domestic totalitarians and not to confuse them with the pro-Communist factions of the "progressive" cause.

And so they have. Radosh, Haynes and Klehr, for example, wrote in 1998 that "if Americans are ever going to understand their history, it is essential that McCarthyism and anti-Communism be disentangled."

At a conference on "McCarthyism in America" held on February 9, 2000, sponsored by the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, the Yale University Press and the National Archives and Records Administration, although scores of historians and journalists were present, including many of those mentioned above (but not Herman), not a single one was willing to endorse Herman's thesis, his attempt, in a book "frankly admiring of his subject," as Sam Tanenhaus wrote in The New York Review of Books, "to vindicate McCarthy's claim to being the leader of a serious responsible movement." Tanenhaus, by the way, is the author of a frankly admiring biography of Whittaker Chambers.

During the darkest days of America's domestic cold war, many liberals (and others as well) would say of McCarthy, We approve of his (anti-Communist) goals but we detest his methods. What is new about the counterrevisionists is that they would disown the man and his methods but would retain his main contention: that the United States was seriously threatened by an internal red menace. To paraphrase another icon of the period, Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I am not arguing the merits here. Of course the Russians spied on us, even as we spied on them. And I believe there is much to be learned from Venona and other archives in the way of hypotheses about who stole what from whom in the great game of cold war espionage.

So, let us assume for the purposes of argument that any or all of the above are on to something. I include: Jacob Weisberg's dismissal of the combatants as better explained by Freud than Marx; David Horowitz and Radosh-Klehr-Haynes's call for disentangling McCarthyism from anti-Communism; Sam Tanenhaus's evisceration of Arthur Herman for attempting to refurbish McCarthy's image; and even Joshua Micah Marshall's mugging of most of the above as New McCarthyites. What is significant is that much as they may disagree with one another, they have three things in common: (1) They all make absolutist pronouncements about cold war matters that at best are still ambiguous--particularly with regard to the symbolically loaded Hiss case; (2) they all ignore or downplay evidence that contradicts what they increasingly prefer to call the "consensus"; and (3) they all treat those who challenge the so-called consensus with condescension. This is not the place to sift through the voluminous and complicated evidence--new and old--on the great cold war spy cases. It is, however, appropriate to note the fragmentary, incomplete, half-blacked-out, unsourced, out-of-context and ambiguous basis on which some of the more dogmatic claims have been made, and the ways in which inconvenient and contradictory evidence has been ignored.

Take, for example, the Hiss case, which post-cold war historians cite as Exhibit A when they argue that in effect McCarthy & Co. were right all along. Technically, the case had to do with whether Whittaker Chambers was lying when he called Hiss a Communist and produced microfilm of State Department papers that Hiss had allegedly passed to the Soviet Union through him. But the Hiss case is symbolically important, because as his accuser Chambers wrote in his bestselling 1950 memoir, Witness, "Alger Hiss is only one case that stands for the whole Communist penetration of government." Of what does the new evidence consist? There is, first and foremost, the single Venona cable (out of 2,900) said to implicate Hiss. As Time wrote, "the Venona message seems to remove reasonable doubt about Alger Hiss's guilt."

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