Argues that during the Cold War the FBI was given increased powers that circumvented legal controls

Douglas M. Charles reveals how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover catered to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's political interests. Between 1939 and 1945, the Federal Bureau of Investigation monitored the political activities of President Roosevelt's anti-interventionist foreign policy critics. Hoover, whose position as FBI director was tenuous within the left-of-center Roosevelt administration, catered to the president's political and policy interests in order to preserve his position and to expand FBI authority.

Product Description: During times of conflict, Americans have worried that enemies within would twist freedom of speech into a weapon of propaganda and use freedom of assembly to unleash violent internal chaos. As a result, the government isolated and confined within federal communities groups that they deemed dangerous...read more

Product Description: When the U.S. government forced 70,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps in 1942, it created administrative tribunals to pass judgment on who was loyal and who was disloyal. Muller relates the untold story of exactly how military and civilian bureaucrats judged these tens of thousands of American citizens during wartime...read more

Joe McCarthy first became visible to the nation on February 9, 1950, when he delivered a Lincoln Day address to local Republicans in Wheeling, West Virginia. That night he declared, 'I have here in my hand a list of 205 [members of the Communist Party] still working and shaping policy in the State Department.' Anticommunism was already a cause embraced by the Republican Party as a whole; McCarthy tapped into this current and turned it into a flood. Little more than five years later, after countless hearings and stormy speeches and after incalculable damage to ordinary Americans and the nation itself, McCarthy's Senate colleagues voted 67-22 to censure him for his reckless accusations and fabrications. We know today that not one prosecution resulted from McCarthy's investigations into communists in the U.S. government.--Publisher description.An examination of Joseph McCarthy's record attempts to discover the motivations behind his demagoguery, as the anti-Communist cause already had been embraced by the Republican Party as a whole, a cause that turned into a flood.

A collection of secret government files on past and present celebrities includes coverage of Errol Flynn's suspected work as a Nazi spy, Marilyn Monroe's knowledge of top White House secrets, and the possibility of John Lennon's state-sponsored assassination. Original. 15,000 first printing.

The son of a Cleveland rabbi dives into his family history, presenting a candid but compassionate portrayal of his father, who walks a tenuous line between his politics and his public role as a clergyman, and his mother, a Shakespearean scholar whose independence causes strife in the family. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

In late 1953 and early 1954, Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly's See It Now television documentary broadcast a series of four programs that dealt with abuses of McCarthyism: "The Case of Milo Radulovich, " "An Argument in Indianapolis, " "A Report on Senator McCarthy, " and "Annie Lee Moss Before the McCarthy Committee." Each program focused upon elements of McCarthyism - the blacklist, the suspicion of anything "liberal, " the Congressional hearing and immunity, even the political tactics of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy himself. These justifiably acclaimed telecasts have been credited with forever defining the form of television documentary and with greatly contributing to the "downfall" of the senator and the movement that took his name. Rosteck studies these programs for what they reveal about the rhetoric of television documentary and the ideological representations within. He considers the four programs as artifacts that expose a crucial era in American political life and represent cultural and ideological struggles. Specifically, Rosteck analyzes the programs as instances of public discourse that symbolically reframe McCarthyism, and he provides us with the first sustained exploration and case study of documentary television as a discrete genre. He explores how the programs "work" as public argument in a way that goes beyond an analysis of content or propositional "logic." Indeed it may be, Rosteck says, that See It Now uses the form of the documentary medium and the myth it fosters - that of the open and free exchange of ideas - as "argument" against McCarthyism. Because he sets the programs in their particular situation and historical context, Rosteck also helps us understand a unique era in recent American history what one historian has called "The Decade of Fear" when the national mood was one of mistrust and suspicion. The See It Now programs influenced the development of both the television documentary and the television industry. Rosteck identifies t

In the third volume in the author's monumental narrative history of America, the author of Wilderness at Dawn and A Shovel of Stars looks at the evolution of American anti-communism, from a policy that originated during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, through the McCarthy Era and Cold War, to the present day. Reprint. 10,500 first printing.

Product Description: Not long ago, Communists seemed to be everywhere: among our politicians, neighbors, favorite actors--even in our drinking water. Red Scared! is a wry tour of the frosty decades of Soviet and American adversity, when anti-Communist hysteria produced fairly hysterical pop-culture items...read more

Product Description: The anticommunist crusade of the FBI and its legendary director J. Edgar Hoover during the McCarthy era and the Cold War has attracted much attention from historians, but little is known about the Bureau's political activities during its formative years...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A re-interpretation of one of the most hated figures in American history shows that many of McCarthy's general suspicions about security risks and communist infiltration did have a basis in truth. (view table of contents)

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A noted scholar of the period offers an exhaustive analysis of the McCarthy phenomenon with the benefit of newly released FBI files, private papers, and interviews, tracing the inexorable machinations of anticommunism in creating a culture of fear and suspicion. (view table of contents)

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Red Scare is a remarkable document of the anti-Communist hysteria that began in the 1940's and altered forever the American political landscape, a time when one's beliefs and associations could lead to financial ruin and a prison cell. (view table of contents)