From Publishers Weekly
Syndicated columnist and CNN commentator Charen offers a moral indictment of those public figures-politicians, entertainers and professors-who, she says, stubbornly refused to see communism for what it was: a brutal, dictatorial death machine. Throughout the Cold War, some public figures and activists cheered the Communist movement and berated America for its capitalist ways. Famous actors traveled to Cuba to smoke a cigar with their favorite dictator; posters of Che Guevara, Castro's military leader, adorned college dorms during the '60s; the Soviet Union was praised and defended for its social progress. Charen particularly singles out the media as having played a significant role in distributing tendentious if not false accounts of world events. One example tells of Katie Couric's visit to Cuba in 1992. Upon her return, according to Charen, Couric raved about Cuba's "terrific health-care system," but uttered not a word about the men and women detained in Cuban prisons. The author highlights the kind of historical revisionism and self-hatred that marked some of America's most noted public figures and warns that the lessons learned from communism are just as relevant today. The tragedy of September 11, Charen says, has produced a cadre of left-leaning pundits who wasted no time in blaming America for the violence perpetrated by terrorism. Charen is operating as a polemicist here, and some readers will object to her tarring all liberals with the same brush. But there is a strong market for conservative polemics today, and many readers will cheer Charen on. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Political gab-show regular Charen does a bang-up job of summarizing one of the Right's oldest complaints: that left liberals--whom she distinguishes from anticommunist liberals such as Vietnam-era U.S. senator Henry Jackson--never saw a communist regime they didn't like. She opens the indictment at the cold war's end, which left liberals wouldn't report as a free-world victory because, she says, they idolized Mikhail Gorbachev, overvalued communist full employment, and were (and are) knee-jerk anticapitalists. In subsequent chapters on Vietnam and its aftermath, liberals' love affair with Stalinist Russia, and the overturning of Grenada's and Nicaragua's revolutionary regimes, Charen quotes one liberal's embarrassing statement after another and juxtaposes them devastatingly with the tolls of death, imprisonment, and impoverishment in communist states. She is wonderfully convincing until she comes to the Elian Gonzalez affair and the war on terrorism, where principled conservatives may demur that the Clinton administration did the right thing--returning Elian to his father--very poorly, and that the present administration is reacting wrongly to what are crimes, not casus belli. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2003
"[a] riveting chronicle of the lies and evasions among Western journalists, politicians and intellecutals"


National Review, March 24, 2003
"Mona Charen has given us something invaluable.... [She] writes with energy, indignation, and heart"


Book Description
This book is a perfect example of how today's liberals have completely rewritten history to cover up their own role on the wrong side of the Cold War.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jane Fonda, Dan Rather, Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, and all the other liberals who were -- and are -- always willing to blame America first and defend its enemies as simply "misunderstood." These are the liberals who flocked to Castro's Cuba and called it paradise, just as a previous generation of liberals visited the Soviet Union and proclaimed its glorious future. They are the liberals who saw Communist Vietnam and Cambodia -- in fact, Communism everywhere -- as generally a beneficial force, and blamed America as a gross, blind, and blundering giant. Now that the Cold War has been won, these liberals, amazingly, are proud to claim credit for the victory -- conveniently forgetting their apologies for the Communists and their vicious attacks on Cold Warriors such as Ronald Reagan. But nationally syndicated columnist Mona Charen isn't about to let them rewrite history.

In her shocking new book, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, she exposes: Prominent liberals who served in the Clinton administration -- such as Madeleine Albright, Sidney Blumenthal, and Strobe Talbott -- all of whom turned a blind eye to the Soviet "Evil Empire," but now want to be counted as Cold Warriors; Media figures who clucked with praise for Communists and smirked with snide disdain for America -- including Bill Moyers, Phil Donahue, Bryant Gumbel, and Katie Couric; Professors who poisoned the campuses with anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism at top universities such as Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Georgetown; Entertainers -- such as Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, Meryl Streep, Martin Sheen, and Ed Asner -- who used the megaphones of their fame to blame America first. In Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First, Mona Charen holds liberals accountable -- and reveals the horrifying crimes that these liberals helped defend and cover up for the Communists.

FROM THE CRITICS

I prayed that such a book would be written but doubted anything so wonderfully readable and instructive at the same time would come along. But here is Mona Charen's great explication of the central conflict of our times.—National Review

Publishers Weekly