Eminentoes/Tailgunning for the Hollywood Ten

...the Ke-fauver crime investigations...

...This, I should emphasize, is not at all concerned with the overall question of some general reconciliation among all the stars in this drama...

...In the abstract," he says, "Americans would probably subscribe to E.M...

...Senator La Follette's civil liberties investigations...

...We, of course, did nothing to clear those who were leaders in the effort to destroy the industry," he later said...

...loyalty when it come to possible questions about unsavory activities of friends and accomplices...

...The parade of repentant (or at least regretful) ex-true believers was not an elevating civic spectacle...

...I tried to point out some of the more obvious differences between Buchenwald and Berkeley, but I had a sense it was a losing cause...

...Though at the height of the blacklisting crusade he drafted a SAG resolution attacking the Association of Motion Picture Producers for banning the "Hollywood Ten" (Navasky's heroes), he had no illusions as to what he was doing...

...I read Naming Names with fascinated stupefaction...

...Were one to take Navasky's ethical issue seriously, as it has figured in twentieth-century congressional investigations, surely someby Paul Seabury thing like a Fox's Book of Martyrs could be compiled, showing the many occasions when loyalty to friends collided, either with the law or with considerations of civic propriety...

...The ritual of confession, by those who had broken with the Party for whatever reason, was unpleasant...

...If asked whether a stool pigeon is more, or less, admirable than someone who takes the First or Fifth Amendment, most of us probably would prevaricate and first ask to be told about the concrete circumstances...

...Morgan, Fritz Kuhn (of the German-American Bund), Father Coughlin, Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, Jimmy Hoffa, John Dean, Jeb Magruder, Richard Nixon, and many, many more-including Victor Navasky's heroes of the American Communist party...

...Navasky, interviewing the survivors of this ordeal many years later, explores in subtle ways the various considerations leading each to choose and justify his own course of action...

...In his memoirs of that time, Where's the Rest of Me?, Reagan is perfectly clear about this matter...

...Another, Albert Maltz, disagrees: "People who commit crimes, even moral crimes, must be punished...

...Between these extremes there were many possibilities and motives...

...So also in Hollywood...

...the inquiry into Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters...

...the House Un-American Activities Committee inquiry into Fascist, Nazi, and Communist operations...

...Navasky gives a sophisticated answer...

...Nor was the subsequent widespread blacklisting of individuals tainted with Communist affiliations...

...Navasky's parallel, between this congressional inquiry and Hitler's death camps, tells more about the author'than about his dramatis personae...

...One of them (a man named Dalton Trumbo) feels that those who freely testified before HUAC deserve rehabilitation: "(I]n a country which, after a reasonable period of punishment, returns murderers and rapists to society...

...things were much worse in the latter inferno...

...For Navasky, since the hard-core "Hollywood Ten" "have emerged in the culture as moral examplars," the question is whether they should forgive those who betrayed themNavasky refers this question to the survivors of the "Ten," and they disagree among themselves...

...The names of their victims (or "victims") would include clouds of witnesses and martyrs-Albert B. Fall, Andrew J. Mellon, J.P...

...Hannah Arendt's strictures on the evils of the totalitarian state . . . should not be manipulated to obscure the profound differences between Marxists, who identifiedf with the weak and spoke the language of social justice, and fascists, who identified with an elite and spoke the language of racism and violence...

...Among other things, he reported: I read an excerpt from Navasky's book* and found it interesting...

...Typical of these is Nicholas von Hoffmann's endorsement, which appears on the dust jacket...

...Forster's famous sentiment: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.'" Stool-pigeoning, he says, goes against the Judeo-Chris-tian ethic also-as in the famous instance of Judas Iscariot...

...Chief among the latter were the tough Communists-a not unoriginal observation...

...What is interesting is that the people themselves are not very important...

...At the time there seemed to me something contradictory in these observations: screenwriters and actors not important-at a time when our next president was and is an actor...

...But Navasky fails to mention one exception the camp Communists made to the rule of non-collaboration...

...Thus Navasky's ultimate justification of Communists lies in their fine motives, courage, and human imperfection...

...He approvingly quotes a statement of one of the hardest of them, John Howard Lawson: "The idea that true radicals are obligated to adhere to the rules of disclosure imposed by their oppressors seems too fantastic to merit discussion...

...Maltz would protect it from contamination by those he regards as still unclean...

...His is no objective book...

...There would be many chapters: Teapot Dome...

...It would be a "mistake," he argues, "to repeat one of the great political confusions of the 1950s-the merging of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism...

...Communists, after all, do not subscribe to the famous dictum, pas d'ennemi a gauche...

...A reader might want to know why Navasky regards those movie Stalinists as having noble qualities when, from time to time, he acknowledges the excesses of Stalin...

...How could E.M...

...Some, but not all...

...This congressional investigation of the film industry, as also the subsequent McCarthy hearings of the U.S...

...In the camps (here he cites Bruno Bettelheim and others) there were those inmates who broke, who collaborated...

...Regardless of the question of how influential the Marxist-Leninists in Hollywood then were, their attempt to dominate Hollywood surely was a fit matter for public inquiry...

...I love all that gossip about people who squealed on whom...

...By the way, on election night I found myself with a group of people which included a formerly blacklisted screenwriter...

...the Nye munitions investigations...

...Considered as a sandwich, this book is more interesting for its bread than for its filling-for what its first and last chapters say about Na-vasky's moral vision...

...Navasky informs it with what is to him an overarching cosmic question: Is it evil to squeal on friends...

...The squalid shouting matches between Marxist-Leninist witnesses and committee interrogators (typical, incidentally, of many other such investigations of Communist activities at the time) was deftly exploited for propaganda purposes by hardliners on both sides...

...Now, when the hardline Communist "Hollywood Ten," and others less connected with the Party in that city in that troubled time, were summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the purpose of the investigation was to explore (and to advertise) the extent of Communist influence in the motion picture industry, while the purpose of hardline Communists then was to turn the occasion into a tactical propaganda clash between the Committee and themselves...

...All he can say is that "Hellman, Trumbo, Maltz and their comrades resisted and prevailed...

...There was, he says, a difference between what happened in Hollywood and what happened in Buchenwald...

...To some, they were he--roes...

...Since jackets have a way of disintegrating, as time goes on, von Hoffman's comment should be preserved in the amber of The American Spectator...

...Attempting an analogy with the behavior of Nazi concentration-camp inmates (many of whom collaborated with their captors), Navasky writes, "In much the same way did many liberals form an unholy alliance not only with the congressional investigators but with the whole entourage of informers, collaborators, guilty bystanders, and go-alongers...

...There is yet a quaint feature at the end of this book that may explain Navasky even more...

...Navasky interprets their differences as follows: Despite their disenchantment with the Communist Party, each remained involved with the community of those who share socialist-humanist values: Trumbo would strengthen it by inviting the informers back in from the cold...

...He asserts that we Americans have made up our minds on the subject...

...Wechsler, for example, when later subpoenaed by Joe McCarthy's Internal Security subcommittee, appeared voluntarily, "named names" of Communists, but at the same time used the occasion to defend loyally the integrity of his calling, the Press, against McCarthy's ruthless savag-ings...

...Forster's dictum apply to liberal anti-Communists like the columnist James Wech-sler or Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who surely were no friends of Navasky's idols...

...Despite the excesses of zeal which each of these inquiries contained, it must be said that the justification of each lay in some particular civic purpose...

...If one of Reagan's purposes was to protect individual actors and writers from false accusations, it was not his purpose to shield Communists from true ones...

...when heroes disagree, who should judge between them...

...I hope everyone with even half a care for justice, civil rights, or, simple individual eccentricity reads Naming Names.l eccentricity reads Naming Names...

...Navasky covers himself before launching into his study of comparative repression...

...His book contains fascinating depictions of painful events in this sordid battle...

...At that time, as now, Marxist-Leninists were no friends to America...

...What is less well known today is that, as president of the SAG, Reagan with many others fought to save the industry- not just from Communist control, but also from anti-Communist vigilantes whose excesses of character assassination threatened the livelihood of hundreds of decent people, and the industry itself...

...his conversion came in his fight in the 1940s with Hollywood Communists who sought to control the Screen Actors' Guild and the film industry...

...Navasky has his bad guys and good guys...

...Toward the end, Navasky includes a chapter which he titles "On Forgiveness...

...Screen writers, actors, and movie composers hardly represent the cream of American culture, after all...

...I have no intention of fanning the embers of justifiable hatred which burned so brightly twenty-five years ago...

...It is a unique, valuable, and dramatic description of a society without defenses against the destruction of its own best values...

...Communists still do...

...then there were those who did not break...

...With that qualification out of the way, Navasky proceeds to use the experience of the concentration camps to drive home a moral point...

...What is remarkable about this publishing event is not so much the contents of the book as it is its rave reviews...

...This creates a contradiction...

...flut stay...

...As might be expected, Navasky approaches this historical drama from a quite different perspective: that of the Communists and ex-Com-munists in the industry...

...and, of course, Watergate...

...But Navasky-at least for the purposes of argument in this partisan work-is of a different mind...

...the brightest and best were the hardliners (i.e., the "Ten") who chose to clam up...

...Navasky himself dodges this momentous issue...

...Reagan's road to Damascus was Hollywood Boulevard...

...When summoned to testify before a congressional committee as to some alleged misdoing, crime, or conspiracy, a witness frequently is faced with the dilemma of conscience vs...

...Nor is it concerned with whether "we" should consider the participants in it as eligible for pardon or amnesty, or whether they and their latter-day sympathizers should be forgiven by "history...

...The single way in which Communists deliberately collaborated in the camps was to squeal to their captors about their enemies in the camps (Social Democrats in particular)-not exactly a nice thing, but true nonetheless, and quite in accord with the Party's iron discipline...

...An interesting feature of Navasky's book is his exploration of the varieties of ways in which subpoenaed witnesses chose to respond to questions...

...Logically, one might assume that Navasky should concede the honorableness of Wechsler's response, at least on these grounds...

...Its cast of characters-congressmen, staffers, lawyers, and witnesses-is not such as to convert us to Spinoza's benign view of human nature...

...Or do I become a "cooperative witness," tell all, and save my own skin...

...Yet when all is said, whatever the abuses of investigatory procedures, one cannot quarrel with the authority of Congress to inquire irito this matter...

...But instead Navasky sees Wechsler as a despicable symbol of American liberalism, and, in fact, he condemns all anti-Communist liberals...

...This thought set my mind in motion (since I, too, had been reading Naming Names): If it had not been for the unpleasant events which inspired Navasky to write this book, our current president certainly would be someone other than Ronald Reagan...

...This is the analogy he draws between the Hollywood investigations and the Nazi concentration camps...

...Navasky, as I said, regards HUAC as an enemy...

...The Hollywood Left, having a merciless memory, seems not to have forgiven Reagan for choosing this course of action-saving Hollywood rather than saving them...

...Senate, was a sordid chapter in American political history...

...And both then spoke the language of violence...

...But an intriguing aspect of his moral judgments is that to him the worst enemy was the squealer and, in that category, the liberal squealer...

...So in the end it comes down to whether these "moral exemplars" should punish or pardon their old enemies...

...Since, among other things, the HUAC (Navasky designates it as an "enemy") was on a fishing expedition to have witnesses reveal their associations and associates, the question posed for many a Marxist-Leninist was: Do I refuse to testify and thus protect my friends...

...His affection for his profession transcended whatever interest he had at the time in the welfare of Marxist-Leninists...

...His wife kept pestering me about Reagan's having gassed the students...

...But both movements-Nazism and Communism-when exterminating millions of people, pursued social justice-the one in the name of race, the other in the name of class...