Harvey Klehr's new book, The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole: The Twisted Life of David Karr is a rarity: a biography of a man so interesting that you wonder why you never heard of him before. Of course, a biography of someone unfamiliar to the vast majority of readers is a bit of a difficult sell for those uninitiated into the work of Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus at Emory University. In a perfect world, Klehr's groundbreaking contributions as a historian would automatically make any new book of his a matter of significant public interest.
But as it happens, the 73-year-old's life's work amounts to reporting on the history of the communist movement in the United States, and a significant part of that amounts to his uncovering the startling extent to which various influential Americans and U.S. institutions were willing participants in Soviet espionage. It's clear that our political Left, our academics, and our journalistic establishment (but I repeat myself) would gladly ignore Klehr's scholarship altogether.
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