Age of Suspicion, The

In the early 1950s the Post was, after Wechsler's appointment as editor, the leading liberal, anti-communist and anti-McCarthy daily in America. As Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., the distinguished civil rights attorney, says in his introduction to this edition: "Wechsler was a pioneer in recognizing that the two great threats to civil liberties in America at mid-century were FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy, and that they were in truth a combination in restraint of freedom...No newspaper editor manned the ramparts against those two despotic figures more forcibly than James Wechsler." And Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote at that time: "All people who care about America should take heart from Jimmy Wechsler's puncturing of the McCarthy invincibility myth."