A Line to be Cherished: From a Reason Magazine review of In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage ("an improbably riveting dispatch from the battlefields of historiography by scholars John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr," according to the piece):

The end of the Cold War has produced many such numbing silences. The speed with which the Soviet empire imploded and the economic ruin and popular revulsion that were revealed have made it clear that baby boomer intellectuals and journalists, viewing the world through the distorted lens of Vietnam, overwhelmingly got it wrong. Peasants ate less and were slaughtered more on the other side of the Iron Curtain; the jails were fuller; the KGB's list was a lot longer and a lot deadlier than Joe McCarthy's. A team of French historians calculated the worldwide death toll of communism during the 20th century at more than 93 million. When Hoover Institution historian Robert Conquest used newly available data from the Soviet Union to update The Great Terror, his account of Stalin?s murderous purges of the 1930s, his publishers asked for a new title. "How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?" Conquest suggested.

Whole thing here.

More: This is funny:

Ellen Schrecker has written several thousand times . . . that "McCarthyism did more damage to the Constitution than the American Communist Party ever did."

If that’s true, it’s not for want of trying by the CPUSA. If Franklin Roosevelt had died just nine or 10 months earlier, his third-term vice president, Communist sympathizer Henry Wallace, would have become president. Wallace once said that if he were president he would appoint Harry Dexter White treasury secretary and Laurence Duggan secretary of state. Both of them, we now know unambiguously from Venona cables, were Soviet spies.

Harry Truman, accidental savior of American democracy. No wonder his fellow Democrats cringed when they realized the Mizzooruh farm boy would be in line to succeed the ever more feeble Roosevelt.