When the novelist and essayist Mary McCarthy died in 1989, she was praised for her character as much as her writing. Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College, where McCarthy occasionally taught, said McCarthy was “a person of great character.” The novelist Mary Gordon observed that McCarthy “combined purity of style with a kind of rigorous moral honesty.”

Did the many observers who lauded McCarthy’s character read what she wrote about Colonel Robbie Risner, an American prisoner of war whom she met when she visited North Vietnam in 1968? She trashed him in Hanoi (1968) and in “On Colonel Risner,” which appeared in The New York Review of Books in March 1974. Writing about Risner, a pow who had been tortured repeatedly for defying his captors, McCarthy makes unsubstantiated allegations that recall those made by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the Army–McCarthy Hearings. On June 9, 1954, Joseph Welch, the chief counsel for the United States Army, famously said to him: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

Colonel Risner spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war.

Mary McCarthy and Colonel Risner have one thing in common: both were on the cover of Time. In 1955 Time called McCarthy “quite possibly the cleverest writer the U.S. has ever produced.” Ten years later Time put Risner on its cover too. He was