In the famous opening words of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848, “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Updated for our own time and continent, it would be more accurate to observe that the spectre of the late, unlamented Roy Cohn, in the person of his Oval Office-dwelling avatar, has returned to haunt America.

Cohn served as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, when the Wisconsin senator was riding roughshod over the American Constitution and in the process forever lending his name to the malevolent political phenomenon known as “McCarthyism.” In his post-McCarthy career, Cohn practiced law on the shady side of the street, in and out of legal jeopardy himself. He was famous for fighting back against his accusers with a well-honed strategy that might be summarized as attack, don’t settle, get off the issue, never apologize. And, in what proved a calamitous coincidence for the future of the United States, Cohn became a valued adviser to the young Donald Trump during the latter’s rise as an obsessively self-aggrandizing but seemingly inconsequential real estate mogul and celebrity in the 1970s and ’80s. Cohn, Trump wrote admiringly in The Art of the Deal, “was no boy scout. He once told me that he’d spent more than two-thirds of his adult life under indictment…. That amazed me.”

Amazed and, more importantly, inspired, Cohn’s protégé came to channel his mentor’s cornered-badger-like ferocity. Which wouldn’t matter much—other than to the contractors and customers Trump stiffed—had he not, in the fullness of time, just happened to become President of the United States. Not long into his first term, the forty-fifth President began to employ not only the chronic aggressiveness but also the lurid red-baiting rhetoric that the younger Cohn had wielded, cynically and effectively, a generation earlier. (For an example of the latter, see Cohn’s 1954 publication Only a Miracle Can Save America from the Red Conspiracy.) In Trump’s case, an early example came, characteristically, in a fit of petulant self-pity. “You’re up there, you’ve got half the room going totally crazy, wild—they loved everything, they want to do something great for our country,” Trump commented after delivering his State of the Union address to Congress in February 2018. Those who “loved everything” he had to say that evening consisted of, not surprisingly, the Republicans in attendance. However, furious that the Democrats had not joined in the standing ovations, he questioned their loyalty not only to his exalted sense of his own brilliance and benevolence, but to the nation: “And you have the other side…they were like death and un-American. Un-American. Somebody said, ‘treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not? Can we call that treason? Why not?”

Roy Cohn, Clay Risen writes in Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, was the “distillation of everything” that right-wing Republicans “loved about McCarthy,” including “his vindictiveness [and] his willingness to lie.” Except that he was a lot more disciplined than his “slovenly” boss, becoming “the chief executive of McCarthyism, Inc.” Risen is an established journalist (and onetime editor at this journal) whose current beat is on the obit desk at The New York Times—a role demanding a gift for brief but deft character sketches that is much in evidence in Red Scare. He is also a prolific historian who has published well-received books about Teddy Roosevelt, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the King assassination. His latest effort, written in the shadow of Trump’s first term in the White House, came out in the opening weeks of the second Trump term, following a reelection campaign in which the once and future President promised to root out the “Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, Fascists, Marxists, Democrats, & RINOS, who are seriously looking to DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” Considered purely from a marketing perspective, that’s exquisitely good timing. While the parallels between the McCarthy and Trump eras are not exact (for one thing, Joe McCarthy was never elected President), Red Scare reminds us of where our ingrained national propensity for bouts of public hysteria and official intolerance may lead yet again.

Terms such as “McCarthyism” or “the McCarthy era” are of course, largely misnomers. McCarthy played a minor role in the first half-decade of the post-World War II Red Scare, emerging as its public face only in February 1950, when he claimed in a speech to a Republican women’s gathering in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had a list of 205 Communists then currently employed by the State Department. The sensational nature of the accusation, and the populist resentment it drew upon and fanned, made the heretofore obscure senator from Wisconsin a national celebrity. “It has not been the less fortunate…who have been selling this nation out,” McCarthy declared that evening in Wheeling, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer…the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give.” Wielding the investigative powers of the Senate, McCarthy went on to blacken the reputations of victims ranging from obscure academics to celebrated generals. What he failed to do, in a four-year political rampage that made him a dominant figure in the Republican Party, was uncover the presence of a single actual Soviet agent in the American government.

Although Risen pays extensive attention to congressional hearings in the 1940s and ’50s about the Communist threat to national security, as well as the prosecution of actual and alleged Communists in federal trials on a variety of charges, he rejects the idea that the McCarthy era “was mostly about fights in Congress and the courts.” Rather, he argues, it needs to be understood, “first of all, [as] a cultural war.” And reading Risen’s description of McCarthy’s most zealous supporters seven decades ago, it is hard to miss the striking resemblance to their MAGA descendants in the past decade:

They had grown up thinking that America—real America, at least—meant small farm towns where government stopped at the mailbox, led by a white, male, business elite…. They had never stopped believing in such a country, and they were determined to get it back. They lashed out at Democrats and left-leaning elites as anti-American, allegedly forcing alien ideas onto a country that in their minds was still the domain of conservative, Protestant white men.

McCarthy’s prominence in our memories of the era derive, in some part, from his personal embodiment of such small-town, small-minded resentments (although he was himself a Catholic, and McCarthyism needs also to be understood as the moment when conservative Catholicism became an integral component of the American right wing, thanks both to McCarthy and, more respectably, to William F. Buckley). As Risen writes, “Even Americans who detested his politics recognized in him a culture that validated the unthrottled American…determined to live life on his terms…. He was the cartoonish version of the postwar American man.” And, as historians have increasingly noted in more recent histories of the Red Scare, the panic about Communists in high places mirrored anxieties about dangers lurking elsewhere in 1940s and ’50s America, including in bedrooms, bathrooms, and the backseats of cars, which is to say fears of women stepping out of their place and of “moral perverts,” i.e., gay men, corrupting innocents. At its most irrational, Risen writes, anti-Communism “was both a catalyst and symptom of the return to traditional, rigid gender roles, and with it a hard turn against homosexuality as a threat to the older ways.”

The history of McCarthyism is a well-trodden field, and Risen draws upon and gives due credit to those who have written on the topic over the preceding three-quarters of a century. Where he excels, and what makes his book a timely contribution to our understanding of a tragic and all-too-relevant past, is in crafting set-piece narratives of the principal confrontations of the era. These include, among many others, the 1948 hearings before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington, D.C., in which admitted former Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of espionage, and the trial the following year in New York City in which 11 top leaders of the Communist Party were accused of violating the Smith Act (a 1940 law that made it a crime to conspire to teach and advocate the desirability of overthrowing the government). Hiss would be convicted of perjury for his testimony before a grand jury and serve nearly four years in prison. The Communist defendants in the Smith Act trial were all found guilty as well, and most served five-year sentences.

Even buildings become memorable characters in Red Scare. “If there was a main stage” for the Red Scare, it was the federal courthouse on Foley Square in lower Manhattan, where both Hiss’s trial and the Smith Act trial took place. The courthouse, Risen writes, presented “an overpowering façade” to the street, with “a wide staircase” topped by “ten Corinthian columns…. Practically every surface is detailed with symbols of law and order: owls, sheaves of wheat, busts of Plato and Moses. The overwhelming impression is one of justice, fairness, and equality before the law.”

Was justice served in the proceedings that took place in such stately surroundings? As Risen suggests, it’s complicated. The Communist leaders on trial in 1949 were, for the most part, not exactly innocents: Party leader Eugene Dennis, for example, was directly involved with the recruitment of Soviet espionage agents in the 1940s. But that’s not what he and his co-defendants were charged with. Rather, they were on trial for committing a crime of advocacy (“conspiracy to teach and advocate”). Red Scare’s recreation of that Smith Act trial—the first of many such trials that eventually led to the convictions of nearly a hundred Communist Party leaders—was of particular interest to me since, full disclosure, my uncle Abraham Isserman was one of the defense lawyers representing Dennis’s comrades. The federal prosecutor in the 1949 trial, Risen notes, “was walking a thin line,” since the only evidence of the defendants’ guilt lay in the realm of beliefs rather than acts: Outside the realm of theory, they had taken no steps (such as storming the Capitol building, as others have done more recently) to actually overthrow the government. Luckily for the prosecution, “the defense pursued a disastrously unconventional strategy” of attacking the legitimacy of the trial, including with personal attacks on the presiding judge, Harold Medina. Of course, even a less confrontational, more civil liberties-centered defense strategy wouldn’t necessarily have saved the defendants from conviction in the political climate of 1949, a year that saw the victory of the Communist revolution in China and the detonation of a Soviet atomic bomb. But it just might have kept the Party’s lawyers out of jail. (My uncle wound up serving four months in jail for contempt of court.)

McCarthyism wasn’t all about populist resentment and toxic masculinity, and Risen does not mean to suggest as much. There were, of course, genuine threats to American national security in the years following the Second World War, and Risen gives them due attention in Red Scare. The Soviet Union had emerged from the war as one of the world’s two great superpowers, expanding its repressive rule over much of Eastern Europe, soon to see its allies come to power in China and elsewhere in Asia, and acquiring nuclear weapons before the 1940s drew to a close. And although fears of Communist penetration and subversion of the American government under Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were vastly overblown by the Republicans for partisan purposes, American Communists had in fact colluded with Soviet espionage agents in gathering political and military intelligence in the 1930s and ’40s, even participating in the successful penetration of the wartime project to develop the atomic bomb. The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 is one of the masterly set pieces Risen presents in Red Scare. Julius, he makes clear, was guilty as charged of atomic espionage; Ethel was not, included in the indictment as “a wedge to use against Julius to get him to name the rest of his ring.” The couple’s conviction was thus simultaneously just and unjust. Roy Cohn, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School, was an assistant prosecutor for the government. That his next career move was to join McCarthy’s staff was one of the reasons, Risen suggests, why some European observers incorrectly concluded that the whole Rosenberg case was nothing but a crude frame-up.

On the other hand, other democracies confronted the same threats from an expanding Soviet empire without succumbing to the hysteria that prevailed in the United States in the 1940s and ’50s. The Communist Party USA never had more than 75,000 members, and by the time the 1950s ended it had fewer than 5,000 left—a number of whom were FBI informants paying party dues only to continue to collect a government paycheck. France and Italy, in contrast, had sizable Communist parties with millions of followers, and additionally, in the event of a third world war pitting the Soviets against the Western capitalist powers, faced a plausible threat of invasion by the Red Army. And yet they managed to get through those years without establishing committees on un-French or un-Italian activities. In an odd way, the United States may have suffered from McCarthyism because it had too few, not too many, Communists. In France or Italy at the time, a typical Communist might have been your wrongheaded but well-known next-door neighbor, brother-in-law, grocer, or even mayor. The overwhelming majority of Americans, outside of a few neighborhoods in places like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, had never met an actual Communist. That made the Reds all the more susceptible to being demonized, imagined as they were to have virtually supernatural powers of deception and intrigue.

If there was a saving political grace present, however feeble, in the McCarthy era, it lay in the White House. Neither Democrat Harry Truman nor Republican Dwight Eisenhower were exactly pillars of civil liberties in their years in office, but neither were they entirely committed to the Red Scare. Risen writes that Truman “used anti-Communist scare tactics when they served his foreign policy interests.” But he worried about the political passions aroused by the issue and assumed that “domestic Communism was doomed to fail because of the strength of the American economic system and the democratic sensibility of the American public” (which proved, decades later, to be pretty on the mark). As for Eisenhower, while he avoided direct attacks on Joe McCarthy, even when the senator was attacking his friend and mentor General George C. Marshall as an agent of Soviet subversion, he did not share the conviction of the hard-right Republicans that the New Deal had to be rolled back in the name of preserving the republic from Soviet conquest. Instead, “like progressives he believed in the fundamental goodness of government and its workers, and its power to improve the lives of their fellow citizens.”

Today, unfortunately, we have no similar assurance of relative sanity prevailing at the top. Roy Cohn’s best student is calling the shots this time. Since 1983, presidents have generally noted early in their annual addresses to Congress that “The State of the Union is strong.” In March 2025, Donald Trump had another message to deliver in his opening lines: “America is back.” Right, alas, if what he meant by that claim was that he intended to return the nation to the rancid, destructive cultural war of the McCarthy era. Red Scare can be read as solid history of the years it depicts—and chilling prophecy of the years to come.