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    Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era
    Unavailable
    Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era
    Unavailable
    Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era
    Ebook516 pages9 hours

    Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era

    By Lauren Kessler

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Communists vilified her as a raging neurotic. Leftists dismissed her as a confused idealist. Her family pitied her as an exploited lover. Some said she was a traitor, a stooge, a mercenary and a grandstander. To others she was a true American heroine—fearless, principled, bold and resolute. Congressional committees loved her. The FBI hailed her as an avenging angel. The Catholics embraced her. But the fact is, more than half a century after she captured the headlines as the "Red Spy Queen," Elizabeth Bentley remains a mystery.

    New England-born, conservatively raised, and Vassar-educated, Bentley was groomed for a quiet life, a small life, which she explored briefly in the 1920s as a teacher, instructing well-heeled young women on the beauty of Romance languages at an east coast boarding school. But in her mid-twenties, she rejected both past and future and set herself on an entirely new course. In the 1930s she embraced communism and fell in love with an undercover KGB agent who initiated her into the world of espionage. By the time America plunged into WWII, Elizabeth Bentley was directing the operations of the two largest spy rings in America. Eventually, she had eighty people in her secret apparatus, half of them employees of the federal government. Her sources were everywhere: in the departments of Treasury and Commerce, in New Deal agencies, in the top-secret OSS (the precursor to the CIA), on Congressional committees, even in the Oval Office.

    When she defected in 1945 and told her story—first to the FBI and then at a series of public hearings and trials—she was catapulted to tabloid fame as the "Red Spy Queen," ushering in, almost single-handedly, the McCarthy Era. She was the government’s star witness, the FBI’s most important informer, and the darling of the Catholic anti-Communist movement. Her disclosures and accusations put a halt to Russian spying for years and helped to set the tone of American postwar political life.

    But who was she? A smart, independent woman who made her choices freely, right and wrong, and had the strength of character to see them through? Or was she used and manipulated by others? Clever Girl is the definitive biography of a conflicted American woman and her controversial legacy. Set against the backdrop of the political drama that defined mid-twentieth century America, it explores the spy case whose explosive domestic and foreign policy repercussions have been debated for decades but not fully revealed—until now.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061740473
    Unavailable
    Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era
    Author

    Lauren Kessler

    Lauren Kessler is the author of ten books, among them the Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club: The Life and Times of Pancho Barnes and Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family. Kessler directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

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    Reviews for Clever Girl

    3.5/5

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    • 2/5
      This is a biography of Elizabeth Bentley, born in New England to a conservative family and Vassar educated. She was in her 20's when she fell in love with a KGB agent and embraced communism. The book is well-researched and tells the detailed story of her spying (clever girl was her code name) and how her identity was uncovered during the McCarthy years. The first part of the book is an interesting look at what kind of person she was but towards the end gets bogged down in detailed descriptions of the HUAC hearings in Washington.