Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America

On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, New York Times award-winning reporter Clay Risen discusses his new book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America .

Risen examines how Senator Joseph McCarthy and a vast network of government officials and organizations led a ruthless campaign that systematically destroyed thousands of lives in a paranoid crusade against alleged Communist conspiracies.

He writes, "The Red Scare had inflamed a passionate core of hard-right conservatives, who were prepared to believe the worst about the government and liberals, and to act on it. The era left a permanent scar on the left, one measured not only in lives and livelihoods lost, but in the deepened and lasting divide between moderates and progressives. But it transfo