Although his efforts are often confused with the House investigation, Joe McCarthy was a Senator investigating Communists who infiltrated our government during the FDR years. And he found some, including Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s aide. Evidence—in the form of Venona-decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy’s subcommittee—has partially vindicated McCarthy by showing that some of his identifications of Communists were correct and the scale of Soviet espionage activities in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s was larger than many scholars had suspected.

Lately the communists in government don’t even bother to hide it. This isn’t progress.