Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics

John Earl Haynes · Harvey Klehr

Aug 2006 · Cambridge University Press

About this eBook

Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the US State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book, first published in 2006, reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss-Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often-frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.

About the author

John Earl Haynes is a 20th Century Political Historian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He is the author or editor of four books: Calvin Coolidge and the Coolidge Era: Essays on the History of the 1920s (editor, 1998); Red Scare or Red Menace? American Communism and Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (1996); Communism and Anti-Communism in the United States: An Annotated Guide to Historical Writings (1987); and Dubious Alliance: The Making of Minnesota's DFL Party (1984).

Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of five books, Communist Cadre: The Social Background of the American Communist Party Elite (1978); The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (1984); Biographical Dictionary of the American Left (1986); Far Left of Center: The American Radical Left Today (1988); The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (1996). He was honored with the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award for Emory College in 1983.