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1- Liberal college history books state FDR knew in advance about the Pearl Harbor attack
Um, no. No reputable textbook makes this claim. FDR's advisors knew there was a possibility of attack--in fact on Dec 7th the US's new air craft carriers were out on maneuvers preparing for such an eventuality. But claims that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to be bombed is strictly tinfoil territory. Show me a historian or textbook making this claim and I'll show you a universally ridiculed quack.
2- The most common image in US textbooks is the KKK
It's a good visual and a uniformed terrorist organization with a specific social agenda and significant levels of public support is important, newsworthy if you will. Not showing them would be negligent. Is it okay that they're show "more than JFK or the moon landing"? Well, JFK was president for 3 years. The moon landing was a culmination of a twelve year program. The Klan was around from 1866 till now--so, not surprisingly, they show up more than John Kennedy.
3- Truman A-bombed Japan to intimidate Russia with "atomic diplomacy"
There's half a dozen reasons why Truman ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Secretary of State Byrnes wrote a memo specifically stating that very rationale, that Russia would be easier to deal with if they knew we were willing to drop the Bomb. To deny this was part of Truman's motivation is to cover up part of history. I do know a number of books still use the erroneous projection of "one million American lives" that would be lost if the US had to invade Japan conventionally--best estimates ran between 20,000 and 100,000 lives, depending on which scenario got used. But that's a "conservative" lie, so it's not part of Hannity's story.
To try and understand the end of WW2 without figuring how our leaders wanted to position the country for the Cold War is again an effort to ignore the broader strategic issues of our history. Both the US and Japan were horribly worried about a potential Soviet occupation of part of Japan. If textbooks miss anything, they tend to ignore the fact that Japan's motivation for surrendering had a heck of a lot more to do with the fear of Russia than it had to do with the fear of more atomic bombings.
Hannity's guest saying that there's "no evidence" that the Japanese were going to anything but fight to the finish is plain old wrong. The Japanese war cabinet was divided on the question of negotiating peace and some feelers had been sent out through a couple of channels trying to sound out the Americans on a conditional surrender. The American rejected these feelers (the Japanese were offering unacceptable terms), but there was at least an opening for talks. I happen to think the A-bombing policy made sense, but to deny the facts as Hannity's guest wants to do is academically dishonest.
4- Joe McCarthy concocted the Red Scare; there was nothing to fear from Communist subversives
Every textbook I've seen mentions a number of Communist spy plots in the Cold War. That part of history may be underreported, but what I've seen consistently is that text books show that the Red Scare preceded McCarthy's exploitation of the fear of communism, not that he himself concocted it. What he concocted was the lists of confirmed communist agents in government jobs. He himself constantly changed the number of spies & fellow travelers on the lists that he claimed to hold. McCarthy in all his career never uncovered a single communist spy. The hysteria he whipped up did damage many innocent lives. The cost of public hysteria is an important lesson from history--one Mr Hannity apparently doesn't want you think about.
5- Gorbachev, not Reagan, ended the Cold War
Another oversimplification. The textbooks I see give multiple causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War. Reagan's arms build up certainly pushed the Soviets far down that road, as books I've seen invariably agree. His moralization of the case against communism was a big deal toward motivating the Warsaw Pact nations to start resisting sovietism. Of course there was resistance to sovietism in 1956, 1968, and 1981 as well; those uprisings got put down on orders from the Kremlin. In the 1989 uprisings, the Kremlin acted differently. That matters.
You have to look at the other causes, as serious college textbooks do, to get the big picture--something hopefully history textbooks aspire to. More important than Reagan's economic pressure on the USSR were the complete unworkable fraud of the Soviets' centrally planned economy and Gorbachev's refusal to crush political dissent in Eastern Europe in early 1989. A good textbook will look at these direct causes of Russia losing the Cold War in addition to Reagan's more indirect contributions. Hannity's pushing a Reagan hero-worship agenda and has to ignore basic facts to get there.
The core of his complaint seems to be that history books are treating US history in a balanced manner.
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