In “Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America” (1999), John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr write the following:

A number of liberals and radicals pointed to the excesses of McCarthy’s charges as justification for rejecting the allegations altogether. Anticommunism further lost credibility in the late 1960s when critics of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War blamed it for America’s ill-fated participation. By the 1980s many commentators, and perhaps most academic historians, had concluded that Soviet espionage had been minor, that few American Communists had assisted the Soviets, and that no high officials had betrayed the United States. Many history texts depicted America in the late 1940s and 1950s as a “nightmare in red” during which Americans were “sweat-drenched in fear” of a figment of their own paranoid imaginations. As for American Communists, they were widely portrayed as having no connection with espionage. One influential book asserted emphatically, “There is no documentation in the public record of a direct connection between the American Communist Party and espionage during the entire postwar period.”

Consequently, Communists were depicted as innocent victims of an irrational and oppressive American government…

According to Haynes and Klehr, how might the dekrypted Venona cables, declassified in 1995, prompt us to think differently (or not) about the material we have studied so far in our seminar?