Red Scare or Red Menace?
By RORIN M. PLATT

The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—The Stalin Era.
By Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev. (Random House, 1998.
402 pages. $30.)

“Was the government infested with Communists and Soviet agents during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt? Was the Communist menace a real threat or a “Red Scare?” Was State Department official Alger Hiss a Soviet spy or an innocent victim of anti-Communist hysteria designed to discredit New Deal liberalism?” [FULL TEXT]

 

New Insights into the Cold War
By RICHARD SCHENCK

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
By John Lewis Gaddis (Clarendon Press, Oxford. 1997.
425 pages. $14.99 paper.)

“The United States was building an empire as well. But our domestic experience made it natural to try to do so by consensus, compromise, and consultation, resulting in an empire in Western Europe by invitation. In the long run, democratic market capitalism proved superior to deterministic, command socialism. The former released positive forces making its alliance viable; the latter suppressed them.” [FULL TEXT]