History disjointed

I don't know if you have ever had this experience. You are at a party in an interesting conversation with a couple of people. You are interrupted to be introduced to somebody and it is a few minutes before you are able to return to the interesting conversation. When you do return, they are talking about the same subject but they are at a completely different point than you would expect. You missed something big. Sometime while you were gone the conversation took a significant turn and you don't know what it was or how it happened.

Growing up and being educated in the early seventies through the early eighties, it seemed that the established party line on spying in the Americas by the Soviet Union was that it did happen but that conservatives in the US grossly exaggerated its extent and that many people such as the Rosenbergs and Hiss were unjustly accused and railroaded. Joseph McCarthy was clearly a hot-headed, mean-spirited, malevolent character and Whittaker Chambers a spineless liar. As a young person, it was my impression that there were several miscarriages of justice and that to some extent it was much ado about nothing.

I couldn't now tell you which particular history books gave me that impression but I am sure it was pretty much your run of the mill textbooks along with what I would term the mainstream media which were my normal sources of general news; The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, The Herald Tribune.

As a reader, I am not particularly drawn to the field of spy-stories and as interested as I am in history, I can't say that I have ever particularly paid a lot of attention to the long tangled tale of Soviet spying in the US.

In the past couple of years, though, and not unlike returning to a conversation that has taken a different turn than expected, I have read a number of accounts and book reviews (many based on post-perestroika and glasnost documents from the former Soviet Union) that seem to indicate that in fact most of those that were held to be unjustly charged, the Rosenbergs, Hiss, etc. were in fact exactly guilty as accused. I have seen numbers indicating that the Soviet Union had some hundreds of US citizens divulging information in some capacity or another at different points in time to the Soviet Union.

I am sure there were many instances of false accusations. Joseph McCarthy still seems an entirely unpleasant and unreliable character. At some point, though, it seems as if the balance has shifted and that perhaps, there was more to the story than was acknowledged at the time and that, almost reluctantly, we have had to acknowledge there was merit to many of the accusations. It feels as if the argument has moved from denying that there was extensive spying to arguing that the American spys were not very effective.

This would seem to be a fairly momentous shift but I don't seem to have seen anyone actually pick up the point and acknowledge it. Am I off base? Was I misreading the consensus then? Am I misreading the judment now? All of this is of course, and unfortunately, caught up with the heated rhetoric of culture wars, left versus right, etc. but it would be nice if there were a single, reasonably objective single book out there to which one could turn for a balanced view of the state-of-play then and now. Any ideas?