Telling It Like It Was : Seventy recount their experience with McCarthyism : RED SCARE Memories of the American Inquisition: An Oral History <i> By Griffin Fariello(W.W. Norton & Co.: $29.95; 576 pp.) </i>

“You know what blackballing means?” a former security officer for the State Department named Peter Szluk asks the journalist Griffin Fariello during one of the 70 oral histories that make up “Red Scare.” “They’d end up on a breadline somewhere, and I didn’t give a hoot. Blackballed everywhere--we could do it, yessiree, boy. . . . Get rid of that son of a bitch. Put him on a breadline. And we did.”

With that single burst of braggadocio, Fariello as interviewer and Szluk as subject eradicate 40 years of time, 40 years that blur all but the keenest memories of the anti-Communist fervor that gripped America during the most frigid period of the Cold War. It is Fariello’s achievement to have plumbed those memories so skillfully that this collection terrifies, outrages and saddens even at the remove of two generations.

By the subtitle alone, Fariello makes no pretense of producing anything but a polemic, a documentary of the merciless persecution of the innocent, and I will leave the inevitable ideological debates over that thesis to others. In the pages of “Red Scare” we hear from such martyrs of the McCarthy era as Alger Hiss, Ring Lardner Jr. and John Service. From the Rosenberg case to the Peekskill riots to the Hollywood Ten blacklist, the totemic events of the postwar Left recur across the testimonies. The book ends, quite pointedly, with Sylvia Thompson recounting the prolonged struggle to have the ashes of her husband, a Communist Party leader and a World War II hero, interred in Arlington National Cemetery.

Yet “Red Scare” succeeds most greatly when it surpasses the predictable depiction of party members as idealist and patriots who wanted only a more just America. Fariello mines the survival instinct and gallows humor of radicals both within and without the Communist Party. It seems clear that he listened especially closely to what the screenwriter Paul Jarrico advised in one interview: “You have to be careful not to picture the casualties of that war purely as victims. It’s true that there were casualties, but they were casualties in a fight, and the people who took the casualties more or less knew there was a price to pay for dissent in this country.”

From “Red Scare” one learns that a blacklisted writer in Hollywood could work steadily under his own Social Security number--providing his pseudonym sounded Jewish enough not to attract undue attention. One learns that naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee was known as “walking the Gang-plank,” in reference to Martin Gang, the attorney who represented many friendly witnesses. A peace-movement activist and former party member named Edith Jenkins even recalls of HUAC’s summonses, “It was a question of prestige, and the people who didn’t get them suffered from ‘subpoena envy.’ ”

Neither Fariello nor his subjects, however, skimp in recounting the consequences of resistance--prison terms, shattered careers, relentless surveillance, pressure to disassociate even from family members. As familiar as those episodes seem to anyone familiar with the period, “Red Scare” often penetrates a more subtle and intimate level of experience. Gene Dennis, the son and namesake of the Communist Party leader indicted under the Smith Act, recollects an outing in the late 1940s:

“I went with my mother to the movies to see ‘Ivanhoe’ with Robert Taylor; and the second feature was a film about the Red Menace and I was feeling kind of uncomfortable and anxious while it was on. And then came a big shot of my father and the other Party leaders who were indicted coming down the Foley Square courthouse steps. Then came the anger and fear in this dark movie house. I was glad it was dark. It was one of the first times I had felt that kind of public venom. . . .”

“Red Scare” seems most singular of all when it leaves the accused to probe the consciences of those who informed or divine the motives of those who hunted. If anything, I wish that Fariello had given an even greater portion of his book to these participants in the grand and hideous pageant. There is a startling honesty, a bracing originality, when a former FBI agent named M. Wesley Swearingen ponders the paradoxes of his vocation:

“I felt, and most of the agents felt, that Communists were the scum of the earth. Our attitude was if they don’t like it there they can go someplace else, and that was that. But after a while, when I was following Bill Sennett around and looking in his place all the time, I thought to myself--and even mentioned to others after a few years--’You know, if he quit and went to work, he could really make a lot of money because he’s a hard worker.’ The hours he put in for the Communist Party were just unbelievable, and he was intelligent and he made a good appearance.

“Then later on, when we weren’t doing so many bag jobs and I was a case agent on . . . a bunch of the others, I’m reading their speeches and what they write and listening to what they say, and I’m thinking, ‘Gee, this isn’t all that bad. They want equal rights in the union for minorities and blacks and equal pay for women. What the hell is wrong with this?’ ”

The ultimate proof of Fariello’s ability to engage his sources lies in the oral histories from several witnesses who reluctantly cooperated. Still pariahs after nearly a half-century, they emerge from the book as even more wounded by the anti-Communist campaigns than the friends and colleagues who went underground or into prison. If that judgment sounds unduly generous, it is worth remembering that no less an exemplar than Martin Luther King Jr. buckled under presidential pressure and removed the suspected party members Stanley Levinson and Jack O’Dell from his circle of key strategists.

“I felt so badly about having named names that I shoved it out of my memory,” Fariello quotes a professor named M. Brewster Smith as saying. “Many years later, a progressive psychology organization I belonged to . . . was planning a 50th anniversary of its founding. They asked if I would be willing to comment about McCarthyism. I said, ‘Yes, yes, I would. I had experience with it.’ In order to do that, I requested documentation under the Freedom of Information Act. When I got the stuff, I realized I had repressed the fact that I gave names I never intended to give. I received those transcripts and I couldn’t look at them. When I finally mustered up the courage, I saw why I didn’t want to: I saw the very unheroic role that I played.”

But while Fariello understands the complexity of human emotion, his sense of history occasionally strikes me as simplistic and even disingenuous. He presents the Communist Party on the one hand as the vanguard of American leftism--builder of unions, crusader for civil rights, educator of the masses--while simultaneously suggesting it was really far too insignificant for the prosecutorial attentions it attracted. Surely the Americans who expressed their radicalism through the anarchist, socialist, Trotskyite and Labor Zionist movements, to name just a few, might dispute Fariello’s estimation of the Communist Party as the epitome of social conscience.

I also find dubious Fariello’s contention that those who attacked the party were really attacking the New Deal. Surely that was true for many right-wingers, but not for Harry Truman and the anti-Communist elements of organized labor and the political left. It could be argued that such figures endorsed and encouraged the program of loyalty oaths and security checks, at least at the outset, precisely as a way of preserving the New Deal. Tens of millions of Democratic voters certainly had no trouble separating their self-interest in Social Security and massive public-works spending from whatever terrors they felt about the putative enemy in their midst.

In “Red Scare,” for instance, we hear twice from the attorney Joseph Rauh about his brave and vigorous legal battles on behalf of the accused. But we hear nothing about how the organization he virtually personified, the Americans for Democratic Action, undertook its own version of Red-baiting to cripple Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign. And without pointing out how the American left contributed to the toxic atmosphere of the 1950s, “Red Scare” misses an important opportunity to deepen our understanding of a time this book otherwise exhumes to chilling effect.