CLAY RISEN

Clay Risen is the author of five books: Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (Scribner), The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, (Scribner 2019), The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act"(Bloomsbury, 2014), American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation's Favorite Spirit (Sterling Epicure, 2014), and A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Wiley, 2009). He also co-edited "The New York Times' Disunion: Modern Historians Revisit and Reconsider the Civil War from Lincoln's Election to the Emancipation Proclamation."

Risen is a staff editor at The New York Times; previously he worked as an assistant editor at The New Republic and the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He has written for numerous national magazines and newspapers, including The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Fortune, The Oxford American, Garden and Gun, Inc., Men's Journal, Popular Science, and The New York Times Magazine. 

Clay Risen lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the making of modern America

As relevant as it is comprehensive, Red Scare tells the story of McCarthyism and the Red Scare—based in part on newly declassified sources—by an award-winning writer of history and New York Times reporter.

The film Oppenheimer has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation, Red Scare presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal progressives, coupled with the terrifying onset of the Cold War. This defining moment in American history, unlike any that preceded it, was marked by an unprecedented degree of political hysteria. Drawing upon newly declassified documents, journalist Clay Risen recounts how politicians like Joseph McCarthy, with the help of an extended network of other government officials and organizations, systematically ruined thousands of lives in their deluded pursuit of alleged Communist conspiracies.

Beginning with the origins of the era after WWI through to its conclusion in 1957, Risen brings to life the politics, patriotism, opportunism, courage, and delirium of those years through the lives and experiences of a cast of towering historical figures, including President Eisenhower, Roy Cohn, Paul Robeson, Robert Oppenheimer, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Richard Nixon, and many more individuals known and unknown. Red Scare takes us beyond the familiar story of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklists to a fuller understanding of what the country went through at a time of moral questioning and perceived threat from the left, and what we were capable of doing to each other as a result.

praise for the Red Scare

"Risen’s book usefully lays out the many mechanisms of repression that made the Red Scare possible, from executive orders and congressional-committee hearings to conservative control of vital media outlets. It also describes how something that once seemed so terrifying and interminable did, in fact, come to an end." — The New Yorker

“‘Red Scare’ author lets past political hysteria teach us about the present… [A] thorough, impassioned but even-handed study of Cold War hysteria in the U.S… Detailed, tension-packed… The New York Times journalist, who has also written books about the Rough Riders, the Civil Rights Act and whiskey, chronicles how national hysteria can take on a life of its own, like a deadly fever dream that overtakes the public consciousness.” — The LA Times

“Scarily relevant, Clay Risen’s “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America” (Scribner) transports readers back to the witch hunts of the early 1950s. America had led the Allies to victory over the Nazis, but alongside postwar peace and prosperity the country grappled with paranoid conspiracies that saw enemies everywhere. Risen, a New York Times journalist, vividly recalls an era that may feel all-too-familiar.” — The Boston Globe

“In his new book “Red Scare,” my colleague Clay Risen writes about a 1952 Supreme Court case allowing for the deportation of three immigrants who had each joined but later left the Communist Party. Justice Hugo Black, who had dissented in the case, said that the country at that moment was in “more desperate trouble on the First Amendment than it has ever been in… Even though some Americans really did spy for the Soviet Union, it became clear that domestic subversives did less damage to America than the desperate, fevered campaign to root them out.” — The New York Times Opinion

“Risen’s feverish prose perfectly captures the chaos of McCarthyism, from the book bans to the power grabs to the lives forever altered in the scuffle. He plumbs this well-trod territory with verve and achieves angles not previously seen. In examining this turbulent era from the vantage of our own charged moment, Risen goes beyond the spectacle to arrive at the gritty center. Frightening yet thoroughly affecting, Red Scare is propulsive history at its most striking.” — Starred Booklist Review

“In his deftly written history, Risen attributes the rise of anti-communist paranoia to an atmosphere of isolationism and conspiracy theory—there’s that lineage to today—as well as to an anti-labor movement that expelled leftists from the union rank and file and leadership alike… A sweeping history of the campaign to suppress liberal dissent via blacklisting and harassment… An exemplary work of political and cultural history that invites a gimlet-eyed look at our own time.” — Starred Kirkus Review

"I thought I had read basically everything written on McCarthyism and the scars it left on America, but Clay Risen’s deep, gorgeous new history is as revelatory to me as it is moving. This is political history, yes, but also a lyrical and sensitive tolling of what this monstrous type of politics does to the human beings in its way. Today especially, we need much more careful and important public history like Red Scare —bravo. " —Rachel Maddow

“Clay Risen’s sweeping portrait of a nightmare moment when America lost its faith in itself is a vivid reminder of what happens when we trade our founding ideals for easy answers and false security. It’s  a troubling parable for our own perilous times.” — Todd Purdum, author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

“In a narrative both eloquent and incisive, Clay Risen has produced the most complete history of the Red Scare that has ever been written. His judgments about the characters - both famous and obscure— who mattered in this low, dishonest era are always persuasive. While a delight to read, the book explains why the conspiratorial style of politics that dominated America 75 years ago is with us still.” — Michael Kazin, author of What It Takes to Win: A History of the Democratic Party and a history professor at Georgetown University.

“What a marvelous book! The story of America’s postwar Red Scare has lost none of its historical importance or contemporary resonance, and Risen brings it beautifully to life in this deeply researched, incisive, and elegantly written work. The implications for today are all too clear.” — Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 and a history professor at Harvard University

"Clay Risen has written a gripping genealogy of the McCarthyist right and the Red Scare, full of people — including my grandfather — howard fast. People whose stories of confronting anti-Communist witch hunts shaped American history and continue to echo down to the present.” — Molly Jong-Fast, Vanity Fair, special correspondent

advance praise for the crowded hour

“A revelatory history of America's grasp for power.” — Kirkus (STARRED REVIEW)

“Risen’s lively and extensively researched social history illuminates a transformative moment in America’s past.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Scrupulously researched and dramatically narrated, The Crowded Hourshowcases Theodore Roosevelt in all of his Rough Rider glory. Clay Risen, a marvelous historian,  brings the Spanish American War and the Gilded Age back to life in these vibrant pages. All of TR’s undaunted hubris, bedrock patriotism, derring-do, and political genius are captured in this fast-paced war epic.” — Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America

“Here, in cinematic fashion, Clay Risen captures the nearly inexhaustible energy and irrepressible charisma of Teddy Roosevelt at the moment of his meteoric rise into the national consciousness. Through careful sifting and resourceful reporting that runs both broad and deep, The Crowded Hour brings fresh insight and a modern sensibility to this classic episode of American history.” —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder and On Desperate Ground

“Crowded Hour is a marvelous book. There is no finer account of the fighting in the Spanish-American War, and the author’s clear-eyed examination of the war’s most celebrated hero, Theodore Roosevelt, is as powerful as it is original.”  — Patricia O’Toole, author of When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House

"Clay Risen has given us an illuminating and elegant account of how Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders in many ways founded what would become, in Henry Luce's phrase, the American Century. Restless and brave, flawed and noble, TR and his compatriots embodied an emerging global nation—for better and for worse. It was indeed a crowded hour, not only for Roosevelt but for America."
—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

PRAISE FOR AMERICAN WHISKEY BOURBON & RYE: A GUIDE TO THE NATION'S FAVORITE SPIRIT

“[Risen] offers takes on excellent whiskies, and doesn’t hold back while describing the bad (“Drinking George Dickel No 8, I can’t get away from the thought of Robitussin poured over cornflakes”), lending authority to his assessment of an overwhelming number of choices. The book will help whiskey lovers single out the good-to-great, but Risen also offers suggestions for lower tier whiskeys like Evan Williams that are perfectly fine for mixed drinks.” – Publishers Weekly

Professional Cocktail.com Book Review, February 7, 2014

CLAY'S ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS

The New York Times, How Dreams and Money Didn't Mix at a Texas Distillery, December 27, 2014