Clay Risen, "Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Oct 8, 2025

Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter and author, dives into the chilling legacy of McCarthyism in his new book. He discusses how the Red Scare erupted fueled by Cold War paranoia and political opportunism. Risen reveals the devastating impact of Truman's loyalty program and probes whether there was indeed a genuine left to root out. He connects McCarthy's tactics to today's political landscape, and highlights the disturbing intersection of anti-communism and racial hostility. Risen's insights draw compelling parallels to contemporary challenges.

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INSIGHT

Cold War Rhetoric Shapes Curiosity

Clay Risen links his interest in McCarthyism to growing up during Reagan-era Cold War rhetoric.
He says that cultural context seeded later historical curiosity and framing for his book.

INSIGHT

Opening With A Human Witch-Hunt

Risen deliberately opens with Helen Reed Bryan to evoke a witch-hunt analogy without naming Salem.
He wanted a vivid personal story that readers could immediately map to broader repression.

INSIGHT

American Left Was Marginal Nationally

Risen argues American leftist movements were always small compared with European counterparts.
He notes the Communist Party never gained broad mainstream electoral traction in the U.S.

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From an award-winning historian and New York Times reporter comes the timely story about McCarthyism that both “lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible…[and] describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end” (The New Yorker)—based in part on newly declassified sources.

Now, for the first time in a generation, Clay Risen delivers a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). This period, known as the Red Scare, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, and the terrifying onset of the Cold War. Marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria, this was a defining moment in American history, completely unlike any that preceded it. Drawing upon newly declassified documents and with “scenes are so vivid that you can almost feel yourself sweating along with the witnesses” (The New York Times Book Review), journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.
Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, courage, and delirium of those years. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists and toward a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the Left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

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