"Hiss Is Your Life"

"The 'pumpkin papers' helped convict Hiss of perjury in 1950, which transformed public opinion, convincing Americans for the first time that communism posed a real danger to the country. The obscure congressman named Nixon who pushed the Hiss case won a Senate seat the year Hiss was convicted and got the vice-presidential nomination in 1952; a month after Hiss’s conviction, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave the speech in Wheeling, W.Va., that launched his career and gave the new, virulent anticommunism its name. For the next 45 years, the Cold War served as the iron cage of American politics.
"Conservatives had hoped this site would provide a place where the public could be told that the Communist Party did not just defend a totalitarian regime but also recruited its members to spy on that regime’s behalf. Thus the hunt for communist spies was not 'McCarthyism'; it was a noble cause.
"But, like the other Cold War commemorative efforts, the pumpkin patch National Historic Landmark is remarkable primarily as a failure."

Salon publishes an excerpt from Jon Wiener's new book, How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey Across America.

And David Chambers responds.