American Document/Scoundrel Times

...But then I received a call from Marilyn MM-din, an Arts and Leisure editor, who told me that the section's chief editor, Connie Rosenblum, had decided it would be best to hold the article another two weeks, giving readers time to see the film and thus better appreciate a critical response to it...

...Nevertheless, I agreed to change the sentence to read: "Since I am neither on the right nor a defender of McCarthyism, Mr...

...Iwas shocked to see the Navasky piece when it ran in the March 31 Times...

...I argued that the film was still important, that the Times had offered no critical analysis of it, and that my piece should be printed...

...Hollywood Reds insisted that their liberal allies support neutrality...

...Their very nature created a situation in which informing became a career in itself, and innocent people were 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 smeared and even destroyed by the accusations...

...his rights taken away without due process...

...Merrill, a man who lives for his craft, is forced to confront his own conscience...

...T hose victimized are, with the exception of the character played by Scorsese, all shown to have been political innocents, sucked in because they cared about people and issues...

...Cole admits that his own membership was "obvious," and that silence about membership in the party weakened his and the party's credibility...

...But in 1939 and 1940, the Communists were attacking those who still wanted to pursue an anti-fascist policy, and were calling the Roosevelt Administration warmongers...

...he too is meant to be seen as another innocent victim...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1991 31...

...She denied that anyone had tried to hide news of the Navasky piece from me, and claimed that they had planned to run both articles, but that the needto give space to New Jack City had made that impossible...

...There is little indication in the film that one could oppose both HUAC and the Communists...

...Winkler says, it was a legal party, and people "were skewered for their political beliefs...

...Winkler, "is that an individual is accused and then blacklisted...

...The investigations and the hearings were often conducted in an appalling manner...

...The film follows the scenario of previous films on the blacklist...

...Such a scenario, Hilton Kramer wrote some sixteen years ago, contains "easily recognized villains, from Congressmen out to grab a headline at any cost to craven industry executives solely concerned to protect their careers and investments to former comrades out to save their own necks...

...Is it not time that Hollywood, which once gave us a comic opera portrayal of villainous Reds in long-forgotten anti-Communist films, not flip over to offering us films in which there are simply no Reds at all, or some who committed no moral wrongs...

...A HUAC member replies sharply that there is too much "Communist filth" in our libraries, and perhaps they deserved to be burned...

...City was "hot," and they had to provide more space for it...

...Winkler argues strongly that he decided to make the focus of his film a character "who was innocent, and who was attacked nevertheless...

...Moreover, by invoking the Fifth Amendment, they may have avoided jail, but they faced a greater political penalty...

...In one memorable scene, a writer in the process of cooperating with HUAC is shown burning his books in a bonfire on his front lawn...

...The opening scene is taken verbatim from the famous testimony of actor Larry Parks, who pleaded that he not be forced to give names and crawl "through the mud...

...A few months before the film opened, I had offered to discuss it for the Times...

...In the meantime, the film opened to favorable reviews, including a rave in the New York Times...

...When a scene like the book-burning is shown, a filmgoer cannot but believe that such things actually happened...

...But the film, while fiction, uses a composite story to tell what is supposedly a truthful account of the blacklist years, and these little details seem as true as the ones depicted that actually did take place...

...Yet, despite his disclaimer, the film, and the onscreen information at the beginning and conclusion, shows that Mr...

...Certainly, scared Communists may have got rid of or hid Marxist tracts and Communist literature—but Catcher inthe Rye...

...This is fiction," he says, and "I hope it blends a certain amount of reality to make the fiction more truthful to the audience...

...Is this what he was doing when he worked for peace...

...The Communists refused to support it, and they allowed their coalition to fail rather than have it turn against Stalin...

...An editor called me to say that this was slander, and that they could not print it...

...I ndeed, the film presents almost all those accused as completely innocent—as people who inadvertently, because "they were people caring about people," as one of the film characters puts it, found themselves going to a few meetings of groups which a decade later were declared to have been Communist fronts...

...It had been her idea to delay it for two weeks, Rosenblum added, for which she apologized...

...Evidently he could slander me, but I was not allowed to respond...

...Merrill, who we are told is a political innocent, is incredulous...

...Merrill in particular says he sought out "new ideas" in 1939 and 1940, which is why he went to a few meetings...

...When Merrill appears before HUAC at the film's end, he asks the Committee whether they know that the man who named him was burning books...

...He advises his clients to save their careers and to give HUAC what it wants—the names of old friends who once cooperated with Communists...

...Indeed, the political infighting of the forties and fifties was often about the tenuous alliance of liberals with Communists...

...their belligerence before HUAC, and their claim that their main goal was simply to defend the right of privacy isolated them from mainstream liberals, who were put off by the Ten's charges that they were fighting an America that was going fascist...

...And the editors still claim that the decision to kill my piece was not political...

...Such a film waits to be made...

...The truth is that no such incident has ever been reported...

...It was episodes such as these that revealed to the liberal community the sordid face of Stalinism...

...In 1951, HUAC is shown confronting him with evidence that he and his ex-wife appeared at a "ban the bomb" rally organized by a pro-Communist group...

...But the only campaign the party supported against atomic weapons was the Stockholm Peace Petition, an innocuous call for nuclear disarmament that was started by the international Communist movement, and which carefully refrained from opposing testing of atomic weapons, since the Russians had a great amount of their own to carry out at that time...

...But he points out that the "cloak of secrecy surrounding party affiliation" was insisted on by the leadership, since "open identification would provide more ammunition for the enemy propaganda against us...

...They were hardly political innocents, acting like any American who participated in the political process...

...Even if one was a Communist, Mr...

...He cannot believe he must become a friendly witness and purge himself, as he says, "just for going to a couple of meetings...

...Financed by Warner Brothers and filmed with the cooperation of 20th Century Fox, whose current directors were willing to acknowledge the sordid role their predecessors played a few decades back, Winkler clearly hopes to make a contribution towards both understanding this era and helping to prevent any reoccurrence...

...and co-author of The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth...

...The film also makes the McCarthy era actually more repressive than it was...

...He argues that his film is about how the rights of all Americans, regardless of their political opinions, were trampled upon during the McCarthy era...

...While their investigations often violated America's democratic standards, that did not mean that true democrats had no reason to worry about Communism...

...In parting, she expressed hope I would do something else for them in the future...

...In the original, I noted that, by linking me with Pat Buchanan, Navasky was guilty of his own form of McCarthyism...

...Lester Cole, a top Hollywood Communist and one of the Hollywood Ten, explained in his autobiography, Hollywood Red, that the affirmation of his party membership would harm his public role as an officer of the Screen Writers Guild...

...Navasky seems to be guilty of engaging in his own guilt by association...

...Winkler, who considered using that statement as an epilogue, decided that while Trumbo could forgive, as a filmmaker, he could not...

...The result is the absence from Guilty by Suspicion of nuance or shading—and another picture of villainous devils pitted against unflawed heroes...

...Herewith, the article that proved even hotter than New Jack City: T he blacklist era of the 1950s has fascinated our makers of culture for quite some time...

...Winkler has framed his film in a style familiar to viewers of docudramas...

...Unaware of this decision, however, I spoke with Mindin a few days later...

...By making Communists an almost non-existent symbol for HUAC's unpardonable behavior, the film implies that HUAC's intended victims were genuine defenders of democracy—not Stalinists...

...The next day I spoke again with Min-din...

...In a speech accepting a Screen Writers Guild award in 1970, Trumbo magnanimously argued that "it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none...

...It was too much for Douglas...

...I responded that, by implying I was a McCarthyite of the right, Navasky was demeaning my integrity, and in effect justifying the Times's decision to spike my piece...

...n the postwar period, Communist leaders insisted that every front group condemn the Marshall Plan...

...In the early thirties, the Communists had formed a broad anti-fascist coalition, which shared the support of liberals such as the actor Melvyn Douglas...

...The letter was printed without that sentence...

...A modern audience watching this can only think how awful it is that someone who wants nuclear disarmament could be called a Red...

...Navasky was upset that the hero of the film is depicted as blacklisted although he was completely innocent of Communist involvement...

...Missing from the film are the actual Hollywood Communists, as well as the context in which the HUAC hearings were held—after the bitterly fought Hollywood wars of the 1930s and '40s, which pitted Communists and anti-Communist liberals in the film world against each other...

...AMERICAN DOCUMENT SCOUNDREL TIMES O n Sunday, March 31, the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times ran a discussion of the new film, Guilty by Suspicion, by Victor Navasky, editor of the Nation...

...Soviet tensions on the Truman Administration...

...By defying the House Un-American Activities Committee, Navasky implies, the Communists proved themselves courageous defenders of American democracy...

...She'd been out of town, she responded, and learned of the decision not to use my piece only after her return...

...Is it not time for a more balanced and accurate picture of what really took place in the 1950s...

...She did confirm, however, that the Times had asked Navasky to write about the topic only after receiving my article...

...Winkler has sought to both inform and convey what he believes is an accurate and essential depiction of the blacklist era, and to tell for the first time what it did to the community of creative artists in Hollywood...

...The books he is destroying include those of James Joyce and the recently published novel Catcher in the Rye...

...There is a name for such indiscriminate lumping as Navasky's—it is McCarthyism...

...She said not a word about their decision to run Navasky's piece in place of mine...

...When the Hollywood Ten were first called, the large liberal-left community came to their defense...

...It ran on April 7 —cut, despite Mindin's promise that it would run in full...

...Mindin called me after the editors received my letter critical of Navasky's piece...

...Not even that was enough for the Times...

...But the next day, chief editor Rosenblum phoned to say they would not be using the piece...

...By all accounts, it was one of the most traumatic events of our recent history...

...No problem...

...The one actual Communist, director Joe Lesser—played by Martin Scorsese and patterned after Joseph Losey—is treated as a talented director whose views are his own affair...

...Virtually all the Hollywood Communists, as Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, the two authors of the definitive study of the blacklist era, The Inquisition in Hollywood, write, "defended the Stalinist regime, accepted the Comintern's policies and about-faces, and criticized enemies and allies alike with an infuriating self-righteousness, superiority, and selective memory which eventually alienated all but the staunchest fellow travellers...

...HUAC's hearings were clearly punitive—their 1951 investigations turned up nothing, and were meant to force recalcitrant witnesses to engage in a humiliating game of contrition by offering the Committee names it already had...

...They were unfairly treated and punished, but they were not without their own degree of sin...

...The Russians "were our allies," he tells Merrill, and now he is being forced to give names or lose his livelihood...

...Joe Lesser is based on director Joseph Losey...

...We rarely pull a scheduled article at the last moment," she informed me...

...A ficby Ronald Radosh tional story is developed with main characters based on a composite of actual people—"fiction," Winkler puts it, "that blends a certain amount of reality to make the fiction more truthful to the audience...

...Winkler captures the belligerent, bullying, and retrograde stance of HUAC, many of whose members failed to see any difference between loyalty and security, dissent and treason...

...It was in this context that HUAC began its investigation of Hollywood in 1947...

...Only the contrite could gain absolution, and the proof was to confess one's sins...

...On the Monday before my article was supposed to appear, I spoke with Min-din...

...He introduced a resolution denouncing both "Nazi aggression" and "Soviet perfidy...

...The Hollywood Communists, who had renewed their affiance with FDR liberals during the war, became completely intransigent once the Cold War was on...

...They placed all blame for U.S...

...there were only victims . . . none of us—right, left, or center—emerged from that long nightmare without sin...

...In other words, if a Communist was called a Red, he was to meet the charge by a countercharge of Red-baiting, and to refuse to admit his true views...

...His best friend Bunny Baxter, played by George Wendt, is shown to have had one minor slip...

...Merrill is shown to have attended a few meetings in 1939 and 1940 because he wanted peace and was interested in "new ideas," and with his ex-wife, to have marched at a "ban the bomb" rally placed somewhere in the early fifties...

...But that was a policy the Communists never followed...

...They could have chosen to assert their Communist affiliations, proclaim them proudly instead of insisting on their right to keep them private, and, after explaining the issues as they saw them, agree to face the consequences...

...To add insult to injury, they allowed Navasky to link me with Pat Buchanan, an unabashed defender of McCarthyism, as part of the "right, which has its own reservations about the film...

...Winkler admits that the scene "may be an exaggeration," although he claims to have heard such an incident did take place...

...She confirmed that the piece was going to run as scheduled...

...But none has treated it so directly as the new movie Guilty by Suspicion, written and directed by one of Hollywood's top producers, Irwin Winkler...

...HUAC, for its part, was careful to focus its attention and its subpoenas on the small group of actual Communists and fellow-travelers, and to ignore the active and large liberal community...

...Winkler uses real names—Darryl Zanuck, actor Howard DeSilva, and HUAC member Robert E. Stripling...

...At that point, the studio would cave in, and put him on a blacklist...

...Moreover, the most famous judgment about the blacklist was that of Dalton Trumbo, the most celebrated member of the Hollywood Ten...

...Others are meant to suggest figures such as Roy Cohn, or actors such as Gary Cooper...

...She too said nothing about the Navasky decision...

...What is important," says Mr...

...Going after an attractive girl, he let her take him to a Russian War Relief fund meeting in the middle of the war years...

...The only stipulation, editor Lawrence Von Gelder told me by phone, was that if I were going to be critical of the film's politics, I would have to interview director Irwin Winkler and give him ample space to make his own case...

...Besides, interest in Winkler's film had dwindled, and they simply had no space for a discussion...

...The scene in which the one avowed Communist, Joe Lesser, affirms his party membership, clearly does not ring true in its depiction of Communist behavior...

...Therefore, whether the accused were actually Communists is said to be irrelevant...

...Other characters are clearly identifiable—the Broadway producer Abe Barron is obviously meant to depict Abe Burrows...

...Acknowledging that I would be paid "a piddling check," Rosenblum said that they had planned to use it, but New Jack Ronald Radosh is professor of history at the City University of New York...

...It is the first time," Winkler says proudly, "that Hollywood has ever examined the role it played in what was a black time in America...

...Douglas resigned in protest...

...Working at Fox for Darryl E Zanuck, Merrill is told by the studio chief that if he is to continue work on his current project, as well as another film Zanuck would like him to direct, he must agree to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and give the members what they want—the names of friends with whom he attended Communist meetings years earlier...

...You protect yourself against self-incrimination," he tells Merrill, "but you end up guilty by suspicion...

...But the Ten's insistence upon hiding their own beliefs...

...Viewing the degradation to which those of his friends who cooperate have fallen, Merrill realizes that he has but one choice if he is to maintain any integrity—that of refusing to cooperate with HUAC...

...The film tells the story of a fictional director, David Merrill, played brilliantly by Robert DeNiro...

...in reality, according to Navasky, the real victims of the HUAC hearings were American Communists and fellow travelers...

...It turns out, as Navasky acknowledged to The American Spectator, that the Times editors had mentioned my pending piece to him...

...It brokeapart the moment the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in 1939...

...Zanuck sends Merrill to see counsel Allan Graff, played by the once blacklisted actor, Sam Wanamaker...

...If Merrill chooses to cite the 5th Amendment, which guarantees the right not to incriminate oneself, Graff points out that the message sent is that the witness is trying to hide something, and that to the Committee, the only thing one has to hide is Communist party membership...

...The editors of the Arts and Leisure section commissioned the piece...

...Since the 1970s, there have been scores of films which have used it as a backdrop, including The Front, The Way We Were, Marathon Man, The House on Carroll Street, and Fellow Traveler...

...But in reality, most of those brought before HUAC were ardent Stalinists or fellow travelers, whose own record of politics was hardly that of moral propriety...

...The article, handed in well in advance, was scheduled to run the Sunday after the film opened on March 15...