The Cold War came to broadcasting in 1950. In that year, just as the Korean War was about to erupt, there appeared from a small publisher a booklet called Red Channels, which listed 151 suspected Communist sympathizers in broadcasting. Within months the blacklist in radio and TV began. The purge of the airwaves, distinct from the better-known blacklist in the movie industry, provoked one of the American media's great free-speech controversies. It affected scores of writers, directors, and actors, yet it was instigated by only a handful of anti-Red watchdogs-three ex-FBI agents, a former naval intelligence officer, and a grocer from Syracuse. A Shadow of Red follows the efforts of these five guardians of the broadcast media in a revealing history of the period, based on interviews, personal correspondence, FBI reports, and court transcripts....

Around the time of his own father's funeral ten years ago, David Everitt reads a letter from a friend of his mother's first husband, Sam Kramer, who was killed in combat just days before the end of World War II. The letter establishes once and for all that Sam was a war hero, and that his death was not merely an accident of war. While Everitt had consciously ignored the history of his mother's first marriage, even though she had saved each of Sam's letters from the battlefront, he is now prompted to learn more about Kramer and about his mother's past. As with the remarkable film The Best Years of Our Lives, Remembering Sam takes readers back to World War II America, to the days of Rosie-the-Riveter patriotism, the brutality and terror of the front lines, and the aftermath of war on its civilian survivors....