So it’s back to the books. One of the black holes of the Cold War, and closely related to the impulse to “move on” after its end rather than reckon with the whole truth, is appraising the full extent of Soviet efforts to infiltrate and influence American government. My old mentor M. Stanton Evans, along with co-author Herbert Rommerstein, is out with a new book entitled Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government.

The co-authors are certainly well qualified to tell the story. Romerstein (whom I met several times through Stan) was on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee for years, and also was the head of the Office to Counter Soviet Disinformation at the U.S. Information Agency in the 1980s. Stan’s previous book was Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Joseph McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, also very much worth reading. It is by far the most serious defense of McCarthy since the Buckley-Bozell book in the 1950s. Stan used to twit liberals at cocktail parties by saying, “I didn’t agree with what McCarthy was trying to do, but I sure admired his methods!” It was amazing how many liberals took him literally. Stan decided to write this current book with Rommerstein because, as he told me on the phone recently, “Blacklisted by History just wasn’t controversial enough.” You can see why we like Stan around here.

Because of Romerstein’s vast knowledge, they’ve got new details about Alger Hiss, Elizabeth Bentley, Owen Lattimore, Harry Dexter White, Eleanor Roosevelt, and especially Harry Hopkins. From the conclusion:

[T]here can no longer be any serious question, at least among serious people, that Communist and pro-Soviet penetration at the American government was extensive, involving many hundreds of suspects, and that by the era of World War II and the early stages of the Cold War reached up to significant levels. The now available documentation to this effect is massive.

The book will be formally released next Tuesday, but you can pre-order it today at the link above!