 McCarthy and His Enemies, Revisited
By LARRY I. BLAND
Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America’s Most Hated Senator
By Arthur Herman (New York: Free Press, 2000. Pp. vi, 404. $26 cloth.)
 “According to Herman, McCarthy was justified and correct in all important political ideas and actions. The senator’s liberal enemies in academia, government, and the media were elitist gullible fools (at best). Sometimes they were irresponsibly blind (‘in complicity with evil,’) to the enormous danger communist subversion and propaganda posed to American society, but just as often they were actual traitors or Marxist-inclined dupes. Revisionist and antiwar writers of the 1960s and after are the ideological descendants of this evil crew.”” [FULL TEXT]
 Poor Forgotten Gorby: The First Bolshevik’s
Last Apologist
By KATHERINE A. S. SIBLEY
On My Country and the World
By Mikhail S. Gorbachev. George Shriver, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Pp. 300.)
“If not for the wily Boris Yeltsin, who double-crossed him by pursuing Russia’s independence in 1991, Gorbachev suggests that he and his allies would have successfully completed the transformation of the Soviet Union into a new Union of Sovereign States, with Gorbachev, presumably, its first leader. Instead, we had the ‘tragedy’ of the Soviet collapse.” [FULL TEXT]
 Europe Sans War, 1914: Kaiser Bill and John Bull As Co-Hegemons
By JOHN H. MAURER
The Pity of War
By Niall Ferguson (New York: Basic Books, 1999. Pp. 606. $30 cloth.)
“Ferguson’s aim, in essence, is to demonstrate that Britain need not have fought against Germany in 1914. He paints a decidedly rosy picture of what German hegemony in Europe would have looked like if Germany had defeated France and then Russia.” [FULL TEXT]
Announcing a new feature:
American Diplomacy's
SIGNIFICANT BOOKS SURVEY
All who have an interest in U.S. diplomatic history (probably almost everyone who has visited this Web site) will wish to take part in this survey, in which we invite readers to list their selections of the ten most important books in American diplomacy of the twentieth century. In this issue, we lead off with three of our own editorial staff members' sample lists. Don't miss it!
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