Errata, etc.
In which I own up to a few mistakes in "Red Scare."
My new book, Red Scare, is full of facts. Lots of them. And, it turns out, a tiny number of them are wrong. It’s no consolation to know that this happens in any book, or that the mistakes are not egregious, at least as far as I’m concerned.
In the interest of full disclosure, though, I’m going to keep a running list. And I encourage readers to tell me when they find more. I’m not looking for fights over debatable points. If you think I’m wrong for saying Alger Hiss was guilty, that’s a conversation for somewhere else. I’m looking for clear factual errors — the sort that I should have caught in the many, many hours I spent editing and rereading the text.
I’ll correct them in the paperback, but for now, consider this the book’s “corrections” page.
Page 30: This one’s a doozy. I write that early in his career, Harry Truman had been a cog in the St. Louis political machine. As many readers from Missouri have written in to tell me, he operated in Kansas City.
Page 138: I write that Emma Goldman was among the many communists that Paul Robeson got to know in New York City. He did meet her, but she was no communist. She was an anarchist, and later a staunch critic of the Soviet Union.
Page 307: I write that physicist Klaus Fuchs, a part of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage ring, was Jewish. He was in fact the son of a Lutheran minister who later became a Quaker. For what it’s worth, this is a common mistake: The National Park Service and the Museum of the Jewish People in Israel, among others, make the same error.
Unfortunately, this is probably an incomplete list that will grow with time, especially now that I’m inviting close readers to flag errors for me. Bring ’em on.