Diana West, author of American Betrayal, has been hit by smear pieces about her new book. Former marxist, historian, and neo-conservative writer Ronald Radosh viciously attacked West for assertions made in her book regarding connections between former Soviet Russia and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration among other issues. Radosh had previously attacked on National Review author M. Stanton Evans for his 2007 book Blacklisted by History, which lionized Senator Joe McCarthy. That piece has since been removed. In his attack on West, Radosh calls her “McCarthy’s heiress.” :
Diana West, who expands the scope of this conspiracy in American Betrayal, is McCarthy’s heiress. She argues that during the New Deal the United States was an occupied power, its government controlled by Kremlin agents who had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration and subverted it. Like McCarthy, whom West believes got everything correct, she believes a conspiracy was at work that effectively enabled the Soviets to be the sole victors in World War II and shape American policies in the postwar world.
Author Ann Coulter, who defended McCarthy in her own book Treason, went after Radosh in 2007 for his attack on Evans saying Radosh likely did not even bother to read the book he was attacking:
Poor Ron Radosh is still hoping liberals will forgive him.
He wrote a good book a quarter-century ago with Joyce Milton — “The Rosenberg File” — which was supposed to exonerate Julius Rosenberg, but instead concluded that Rosenberg was guilty of Soviet espionage.
Radosh has spent the rest of his life apologizing to liberals for that book.
This week, he’s apologizing in the pages of the increasingly irrelevant National Review with a nasty review of the greatest book since the Bible, M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.
Radosh makes misstatements of fact about the book, misstates facts about the cases and falsely accuses Evans of plagiarism. Other than that, it’s a good review!
The review makes it comically obvious that Radosh didn’t so much as glance through the pages of Evans’ book. (Please forgive me, Eric Foner!) At least Kelly Ripa skims the summary cards written by her assistants who actually read the books when she interviews an author. Radosh doesn’t even manage that.
It must be painful for Radosh to read a thrilling historical account of Soviet espionage without every accusation against a liberal having to be surrounded by 400 excuses, as in Radosh’s excruciating books.
This contemptible Uriah Heep patronizingly writes, for example, that “Evans does an impressive job of reminding readers how serious the issue of Communist penetration was” — something Radosh’s own books failed to do because he’s too busy denouncing right-wingers like Joe McCarthy.
Radosh had attacked Coulter’s pro-McCarthy book Treason in 2003:
One of the most reputable scholars who has studied the McCarthy era in great detail, Ron Radosh, is appalled at the damage Coulter has done to the work he and many others have painstakingly done over the years. “I am furious and upset about her book,” he told me last week. “I am reading it – she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments. You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of Herman’s book on McCarthy; well, she is ten times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument.” Now Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy’s victims were indeed Communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter’s crude and inflammatory defense of McCarthy. “I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don’t stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap.”
It should be noted that Conrad Black also brutally attacked West at National Review. Interestingly, when the same happened to Evans by Radosh on the same site, Coulter wrote at the time:
DEAR RON:
No matter how hard you try, they’ll never forgive you. You still can’t get a job teaching at any university in America.
DEAR NATIONAL REVIEW:
Your fake dispatches from Lebanon are more interesting than whining liberals writing book reviews of books they haven’t read and don’t have the guts to write.
Evans has praised West’s work in an editorial review saying, “This explosive book is a long-needed answer to court histories that continue to obscure key facts about our backstage war with Moscow. Must-reading for serious students of security issues and Cold War deceptions, both foreign and domestic.”
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