"In Denial shows how, beginning in the late 1960s, the study of American communism was taken over by "revisionist" historians who attempted to portray the United States as the aggressor in the Cold War and saw the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as an admirable force for democracy. Haynes and Klehr discuss the astounding intellectual contortions that leading academics, including two former presidents of the Organization of American Historians, go through in order to distort the historical record on American communism and Soviet espionage.

They detail how revisionists have either ignored the revelations from the Soviet archives and Venona or tried to minimize their importance, and how they continue to insist, against all evidence, that Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie and others who betrayed the United States were more sinned against than sinning."--Jacket.