Red Scare

Risen resists making this simply a Joseph McCarthy biography, tracing instead the full machinery that made the anti-Communist purges possible: executive loyalty boards under Truman, congressional committees, and media outlets willing to run with unverified accusations, which together pushed out an estimated 2,700 federal employees and forced 12,000 more resignations. The structural argument is that McCarthy was a symptom of infrastructure already in place rather than its sole author, and that the same mechanisms operated across Hollywood, universities, and labor unions well before and after his censure. Reviewers praised the book's narrative pacing, crediting Risen with making committee-hearing testimony from seventy years ago feel tense rather than archival, while also reading it as a pointed, if implicit, warning about how quickly similar mechanisms of repression could be reassembled.