In the first full-scale history of American anticommunism, Richard Gid Powers - author of a widely praised biography of J. Edgar Hoover - reminds us what this struggle was really about.

Bringing to life such figures as Whitakker Chambers, Sidney Hook, Hamilton Fish, Roy Cohn, and Clare Booth Luce, Powers documents the complex history of this volatile movement - with its ethnic and religious antagonisms, political warfare, and ideological crusades - and reveals it to be not a marginal alliance of eccentrics, superpatriots, and xenophobes but a mainstream political movement that was as varied as America itself. There were Jewish anticommunists, Protestants, blacks, and Catholics; there were Socialists, union leaders, businessmen, and conservatives; there were ex-Communists and former fellow travelers. They quarreled among themselves about philosophy, tactics, and everything else except the evil of communism itself.

For above all, Powers shows, theirs was a movement whose ideas and political initiatives were rooted not in ignorance and fear, but in real knowledge and experience of the Communist system.