Naming Names

...And if we are in for another period of repression—which I hope will never again be the case—it is well to be reminded in such a thoughtful and persuasive way of what not to do...

...Maltz incorrectly assumed that Trumbo was saying that everyone was equally a victim...

...I thought at the time, and think now, that the first strategy was proper, both morally and politically...

...When the shift to cold war intransigence came, they had to work doubly hard to accommodate to the new tough line...

...But there was another dimension to their tactics...

...Do we call him an "informer" because of his earlier wrongs...

...19 December 1980: 729...

...He therefore felt that it was critically important in the antiMcCarthy fight to make the transcript of Commonweal: 726 his testimony in executive session public...

...Indeed, even Lillian Hellman said in Scoundrel Time that she would have reported "subversion or disloyalty" to "the proper authorities...

...Navasky does not denounce and document this outrage from a double standard point of view...

...Later he became a vociferous opponent of the Vietnam war, an active New Leftist, the Senatorial candidate of the Peace and Freedom party in California, and a friend of the Black Panthers (he lost a considerable sum when Eldridge Cleaver jumped bail...

...On the first day John was grilled mercilessly and attacked for, among many other things, hiring me (a socialist), Paul Jacobs (an ex-Communist and then socialist), and the distinguished social scientist Marie Jahoda (who had been a member of the Austrian social democratic movement...

...Wechsler wanted to prove mat an anti-Communist liberal was an anti-Communist and an anti-McCarthyite...

...Moreover, Navasky also understands that almost all of the people in the industry charged by HUAC with being Communist had in fact been, or were still, members of the party...

...Still, enemies of dissent now occupy significant positions of power...

...Michael Harrington (HUAC) held a week of hearings...

...If informing is a violation of trust, how do we evaluate the actual consequences of concealed membership...

...In 1970, the now "rehabilitated" Trumbo received the Screen Writer's Guild's highest honor...

...The Communists were, in some cases, secret members...

...Indeed by the fifties the Communists themselves realized how foolish they had been...

...I think Wechsler was wrong (so, I suspect from one quote in Naming Names, does Wechsler...

...In addition to the Communist associates whom Wechsler had already named—all of them quite public in their admission of past party membership—he would have to bring a larger list if the transcript was to be published...

...And the importance of Navasky's book is its political clarity, its relentless exposure of all of the phony arguments for informing during the time of the blacklist...

...Which proves that even Homer nods— and deserves forgiveness, not from God, but from human beings...

...Victor Navasky's book is a significant contribution, not simply to the political literature of our time, but to our moral consciousness as well...

...Why, John and I asked, was she kept from working...

...But was he then, as Lillian Hellman has said, "a friendly witness...

...If I think it necessary to see the complex situations which led people to do wrong, that is not to defend the wrong...

...There was, I should note, one humorous aspect of this problem...

...Some in the Hollywood Communist leadership had been enthusiastic "Browderites" —''rightwing" Communists in a period when Moscow, because of its alliances with the capitalist democracies, was taking that tack...

...There was no higher duty to cooperate with die scoundrels on the Committee, and even those who named only names that had been cited previously injured themselves and the society in the process...

...The central issue, John Cogley and I used to say to one another, is whether you are willing to defend the continuing employment of a card-carrying member of a political party which—whatever the subjective decency of at least some of its members and even their contributions to union, anti-racist, and other strugglesis the political defender of a totalitarian society...

...Navasky notes that there were two strategies in the antiMcCarthy, anti-HUAC movement...

...I am not one who believes that fascism is at hand because of the appalling results of the 1980 elections...

...He said, The blacklist was a time of evil, and...

...What must be said of the fascinating debate between Albert Maltz and Dalton Trumbo, both blacklisted, and neither friendly witnesses...

...When his two-volume study of the phenomenon appeared—it made, I think, a major contribution to the beginning of the end of the list—the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities NAMDIG MAMES Victor S. Navasky Viking, $15.95,468 pp...

...There were a few of those mistakes, but, on the whole, HUAC's allegations were factual, which does not make them less despicable...

...Of course," he writes, "Stalin's terror, torture, deceptions, paranoia, murder, and gulags were worse than McCarthy's red hunt...

...Caught in a situation that passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to...

...That is relevant to the meaning of what is being said...

...Paul Jacobs, as he himself freely and sadly admitted whenever asked, was a key figure in advising the CIO on how to expel the Communists in California...

...He was hauled before McCarthy's (Senate) Committee...

...none of us—right, left, or centeremerged from the long nightmare without sin...

...But enough of my fundamental agreement with Navasky on the issues...

...It asserted agreement with Lillian Hellman's remark that "Forgiveness is God's job, not mine...

...And were his actions "prototypical" of the liberals in ADA, given the fact that his good friend, Joe Rauh, was Lillian Hellman's lawyer in her famous appearance before HUAC...

...About twenty-five 19 December 1980: 725 years ago, when the evil was still very much alive, I talked to a good many of the people whom Navasky has now interviewed or, in the case of the dead, researched through historical records...

...I repeat: "under the conditions...

...Finally, I agree with Navasky's careful refutation of all the rationales for naming names...

...The ritual of naming names was indeed a ceremony of degradation having absolutely nothing to do with die national security of the United States and everything to do with a Joe McCarthyite campaign to create a mood of suspicion and fear that would intimidate dissidents of every stripe, not just Communists...

...Naming Names names names...

...I prefer Trumbo's more existential reading of what happened...

...While one Hollywood Communist was telling John and me that he was just a progressive, that's all, I was straining my neck to be able to read all of the titles in his excellent Marxist library...

...But what about the human beings who held that view...

...And in doing so the Communists'involved people, including some who became their enemies in Hollywood, in fronts whose real purposes were concealed, real purposes which were to hurt, or haunt, at least some of the innocents...

...There were opponents of the blacklist at that time who liked to think that all of the names on it were of men and women mistakenly said to be Communists...

...That, in turn, poses yet another complexity...

...One has, I think, the obligation to be sensitive to the complex reasons which led people to the wrong, indefensible decision to cooperate with HUAC...

...Navasky quite rightly points out that the word "subversion" is unfortunate when she might have said "espionage...

...At least some of those who held the "anti-anti-Communist" position did so in part because they had a lingering sense that somehow, despite it all, Moscow was' 'progressive.'' I thought, and think, that they were wrong, that, as the former Communist E. P. Thompson put it in a recent book, there is a gulf between democratic radicals and totalitarians no matter how many times the latter quote, and pervert, Marx...

...Because the letter she wrote explaining why she had taken the same position as the Communist fraction in her union insisted on explaining that convergence rather than simply denouncing it...

...Exactly...

...Period...

...Let me make this moral point somewhat more political...

...I understand the reasons why: that they might be persecuted if they were public about their affiliations...

...Like Winston Smith in 1984, one was supposed to understand that Big Brother wanted your love, not merely your reluctant submission to power...

...Even as I disagreed with them at the time, I often respected them and understood the considerations which led them to their erroneous conclusions...

...I went with John on almost all of the interviews in New York and Hollywood, talked endlessly with him about the moral and political problems which the issue raised...

...I rejoiced in the memory of every German officer who broke his oath to Hitler and betrayed the trust of his comrades...

...He then changed his mind radically and was on the staff of the blacklist project (the Hollywood Communists would not talk to him...

...Thus, even though one knew, and even detested, the crimes of Soviet totalitarianism, one should remain silent about them...

...There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides...

...and almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of those antithetical qualities in his own person, his own acts...

...The question, though, is whether to fight the deathlist it was necessary to support the blacklist, whether collaboration with the American informer system was the price of fighting the Soviet gulag system...

...John was magnificent, so the Committee then brought in four days of witness who were allowed to engage in uncontested speculation and slander...

...Take an analogous case...

...An ex-Communist and militant liberal, he denounced McCarthy and his works, morning, noon, and night...

...Wechsler did...

...Wechsler was the editor of the New York Post at the time (it bore no relation to the disgraceful tabloid now carrying that name...

...I remember being told by a studio executive that an actress then on the blacklist (who is not mentioned in Naming Names) was not a Communist and never had been...

...To return to the main point, these reflections are not intended in any way to excuse the inexcusable, which is informing under the conditions Navasky describes...

...That was my tack, and Navasky respectfully acknowledges it and the role of Dissent magazine, a center of mat point of view...

...But McCarthy had a price...

...I welcomed John Dean's informing even if it did not make me like the man...

...One of them lied under oath, charging that, in the event of a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, I would support the Soviet Union...

...I suspect that this is the one area in which I have differences with Navasky—but it should be remembered that they are a matter of nuance, of emphasis within a shared framework...

...But Maltz's essential point did not depend upon that error...

...Even Senator Joseph McCarthy himself was merely a vicious, unspeakaCommonweal: 728 ble reactionary, and not a fascist...

...In short, I do not come to Victor Navasky's new study of the blacklist with a tabula rasa...

...The American people have the right to know whether someone is applying one standard to this country and another to the Soviet Union (or China or anywhere else...

...With some authority, then, I can report that Navasky has all of the main facts right and, more important, that his fascinating moral and political analysis is quite compelling...

...no one caught on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil...

...Take the case of James Wechsler, as Navasky does...

...The friendly witnesses were stool pigeons, finks,traitors...

...If we are not thus sensitive, then we are morally equivalent to those blacklisted who demanded that ex-Communists, real and alleged, simply denounce their past and not explain it...

...I am not an absolutist...

...McCarthy, unlike HUAC, made scattershot, often erroneous allegations of Communist sympathies...

...Is a serious error made by a man who on so many other occasions honorably and effectively fought McCarthyism reason for calling him a friend of McCarthyism...

...I think not...

...They were also trying to lay a legal basis for avoiding jail, which was perfectly sensible...

...But the party also used that secrecy to pretend that it was something—a group of plain old Jeffersonian Americans—which it was not...

...And one of the witnesses who later named names, Edward Dmytryk, had voluntarily placed himself under party discipline at the hearing even though he had long since dropped out of the movement, and was appalled at the confrontationist tone adopted by the others among the Ten...

...Even the original Hollywood Ten, as Navasky notes, were not total purists in their appearance before the Committee...

...One was adopted by anti-Stalinist radicals and liberals who denounced the witch hunt and the gulag, and fought those liberals and others who believed in making a deal with HUAC in return for public recognition of their anti-Communism...

...Another tactic said that any public assertions about the crimes of Stalin and his heirs would only play into the hands of the witch-hunters...

...At the same time he worked with Jewish groups which cooperated with HUAC...

...He died, quite possibly as a result of exposure to radiation when he covered atomic tests as an anti-nuclear journalist in the fifties...