The Age of Anxiety; McCarthyism to Terrorism

Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2005. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, [2], 609, [1] pages. Illustrations. DJ has slight edge wear. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper. Inscription reads: For Beverly Walcoff, Best Wishes, Haynes Johnson, Sept 7, 2006. Includes Prologue, as well as sections on McCarthyism; The Past as Prologue; Dealing With a Demagogue; Prelude to Power; Witch Hunts; Judgment; and Legacy. Also includes Epilogue as well as About Sources; Source Notes; Bibliographical Notes; Acknowledgments; and Index. For five long years in the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade dominated the American scene, terrified politicians, and destroyed the lives of thousands of American citizens. In this masterful history, Haynes Johnson re-creates that time of crisis--of President Eisenhower, who hated McCarthy but would not attack him; of the republican senators who cynically used McCarthy to win their own elections; of Edward R. Murrow, whose courageous TV broadcast began McCarthy's downfall; and of mild-mannered lawyer Joseph Welch, who finally shamed McCarthy into silence. Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when fear again affects American behavior and attitudes, for he believes now, as then, that our civil liberties, our Constitution, and our nation are at stake as we confront the ever more difficult task of balancing the need for national security with that of personal liberty. Compelling narrative history, insightful political commentary, and intimate personal remembrance combine to make The Age of Anxiety a vitally important book for our time. Haynes Bonner Johnson (July 9, 1931 - May 24, 2013) was an American journalist, author, and television analyst. He reported on most of the major news stories of the latter half of the 20th century and was widely regarded as one of the top American political commentators. In 1957 Johnson joined the Washington Evening Star where he worked for 12 years, variously as a reporter, copy editor, night city editor and national reporter. He covered conflicts in the Dominican Republic and India, as well as the Vietnam War. Johnson joined The Washington Post in 1969, serving first as a National correspondent, as a special assignment correspondent at home and abroad, then as the paper's Assistant Managing Editor and finally, as a national affairs columnist. Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1966, for his coverage of the civil rights crisis in Selma, Alabama. The award marked the first time in Pulitzer Prize history that a father and son both received awards for reporting; his father, Malcolm Johnson, won in 1949 for the New York Sun series, "Crime on the Waterfront," which was the basis for the Academy Award-winning film, On the Waterfront. He was the author or editor of sixteen books, five of them bestsellers, including his most recent work, co-authored with Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz, The Battle for America: 2008. Johnson also was a regular commentator on the PBS television shows Washington Week in Review and The News Hour. Derived from a Kirkus review: Give a demagogue a pliant press and colleagues fearful of losing power if they protest his excesses, and you have McCarthyism—or perhaps the current Congress. The early Cold War years were dislocating: Fear was everywhere in the air, and all a power-hungry politico like Joseph McCarthy had to do was find the right nerve to probe. He found it in the widespread fear that Commies lurked under every bed and in every closet, and for a couple of years he ran the nation. "In retrospect," writes Johnson in this incisive portrait, "it's incredible to recall the depths to which McCarthyism descended and the damage it wrought." But, Johnson adds, McCarthy would not have succeeded had he not been backed by "an ever-expanding network of anticommunists," including conservative media commentators, think-tankers and clerics, to say nothing of employers and advertisers who withdrew support from those whom McCarthy denounced. Overall his point holds: The current political climate is much more reactionary, he writes, than that of McCarthy's time, and it wouldn't take much to break a democracy that in so many ways already appears broken. A well-crafted book full of pointed lessons in how not to run a country.