I thought the Red Scare was a great way to examine that ... It’s going to be a war fought through propaganda, through espionage, subversion and all these things that suddenly gave fuel to ...

Early in “Red Scare,” Clay Risen’s thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S., the author makes a point of explaining what his subject is — and isn’t.

At the height of the Red Scare, Margaret Chase Smith was willing to pay the price of taking on Joseph McCarthy. Clay Risen, a reporter at The New York Times, is the author of “Red Scare ...