https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Arguments_for_vindicationARGUMENTS FOR VINDICATION
McCarthy remains a controversial figure. Some scholars assert that new evidence—in the form of Venona-decrypted Soviet messages, Soviet espionage data now opened to the West, and newly released transcripts of closed hearings before McCarthy's subcommittee—has partially vindicated McCarthy by showing that many of his identifications of Communists were correct and that the scale of Soviet espionage activity in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s was larger than many scholars suspected.[146][147][148] After reviewing evidence from Venona and other sources, historian John Earl Haynes concluded that, of 159 people identified on lists used or referenced by McCarthy, evidence was substantial that nine had aided Soviet espionage efforts. He suggested that a majority of those on the lists could legitimately have been considered security risks, but that a substantial minority could not.[149] Many other scholars, including some generally regarded as conservative, have opposed these views.[which?][150]
Among those implicated in files later made public from the Venona project and Soviet sources were Cedric Belfrage, Frank Coe, Lauchlin Currie, Harold Glasser, David Karr, Mary Jane Keeney, and Leonard Mins.[149][151][152][153][154][155][156]
These viewpoints are considered by historian David Oshinsky to be fringe revisionist history.[157] Challenging efforts aimed at the "rehabilitation" of McCarthy, Haynes argues that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping.[158]
Diplomat George F. Kennan drew on his State Department experience to provide his view that "The penetration of the American governmental services by members or agents (conscious or otherwise) of the American Communist Party in the late 1930s was not a figment of the imagination ... it really existed; and it assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also not trivial." Kennan wrote that under the Roosevelt administration "warnings which should have been heeded fell too often on deaf or incredulous ears."[159] However, Kennan made his assessment before the revelation of the Venona decrypts. The previous cautious assessments had to be revised. Not a few but "hundreds of American Communists abetted Soviet espionage in the United States" in the 1930s and 1940s. No modern government had been more thoroughly penetrated. Plus, only a tiny fraction of the Venona intercepts have been decrypted (about 3%), so no one knows the entire extent of the penetration. All anyone can know for sure is that the Soviet penetration into the United States government was massive
