Notebook Portrait of a Turncoat
Evanier, David
One summer day in 1962, I was walking along Boylston Street in Cambridge toward the Charles River. Hearing my name shouted and the honking of a car horn, I turned and saw the two...
...He broke with P.L...
...Phil Luce had a knack for creating skirmishes with the establishment that brought a new life to the organization, or so it must have seemed to Foreman in those days...
...He gained a good deal of publicity by his defiance of HUAC and his leadership of a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Times Square...
...I thought him to be an adventurer, and his later metamorphoses—into a leader on the extreme Left—during student trips to Cuba, of anti-draft and Vietnam demonstrations in Times Square —and into a member of Progressive Labor, did not surprise me...
...During the time I knew him, Luce was always, in his way, rather gracious to me...
...There was a constant sense of frustration about him...
...When Luce came to New York in 1961, I met him in the office of Mainstream, the CP-oriented cultural magazine...
...secution, afraid of saying something that might offend and hence cut off their checks...
...newspaper...
...and fled to HUAC...
...He liked the stand-up bars where we ate roast-beef sandwiches and drank beer...
...Clark Foreman was, and still is, director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and Phil Luce had recently become his assistant...
...I remember mentioning, when Phil had started work for the E.C.L.C., that he must be charming all the old ladies and gentlemen at meetings by his mere youthfulness, by being a true "representative of the youth," as they still phrase it in those circles...
...I do not think he acknowledged the irony of my observation on that occasion, or on any other...
...Hearing my name shouted and the honking of a car horn, I turned and saw the two grinning faces of walrus-mustached Phil Luce and Clark Foreman...
...I am sure something of this was working in Phil Luce, among other things...
...Phil and I were among a small group of writers approached by the young managing editor to attend several meetings with a view toward joining a new editorial board...
...Mainstream was planning to fold and be reincarnated again with a set of new faces...
...Old people walked silently up and down the stairs of the small brownstone, crushed by their own loss of firm belief and by government per...
...They were distrustful of young people, and he wanted a quick recognition...
...He started his career in 1951 by writing a series of articles for the New York Daily Mirror entitled "I Was a Kid Communist...
...One summer day in 1962, I was walking along Boylston Street in Cambridge toward the Charles River...
...has taken over its myths and slogans and shouts them hysterically from a void out in space...
...I do not recall conversations with Phil ever touching much upon politics at all...
...he seemed very intent on what he was doing...
...He says he was told he'd be going abroad, either to China or Cuba, "for further instruction in underground work," which he took to mean schooling in terrorism and espionage...
...we had been to the theater and were having a good time...
...What stays with me unforgettably about that world was party headquarters, which I visited several times on 26th Street, and the Jefferson Bookshop...
...When he went into Progressive Labor and the May Second movement, I did not keep in touch with him...
...Phil and Clark were jubilant: Ohio State, Phil's alma mater, had recently banned his scheduled speech there, and an enormous ruckus was created, garnering headlines for him in the newspapers...
...But he kept fairly close to the CP world for some time, hoping to use Mainstream as a literary vehicle...
...Its quality of unreality and hysteria, its thinness in numbers and subsequent need for leaders, its humorlessness and extremism, its slogans like "Whip Imperialism," and its groping for the spotlight seemed appropriate for him...
...The need for success, for society's approval become the determining things, and self-fulfillment, with all its confusion and abortive failures, seems an impossible task...
...later there was an unsuccessful meeting with Gus Hall which I did not attend, and the idea was abandoned for the time being...
...Where in the world would they find work if they were cast out...
...While the CP has been consumed by self-doubt, the P.L.P...
...I felt my evening would be disturbed by an anger that projected itself at all times—an anger expressed in rational political words but which had its roots elsewhere...
...chicks or before a television camera...
...He was scouting around for a decent-paying job in a Left organization...
...The odds are too great...
...We went to a preliminary meeting with James Allen of International Publishers...
...The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee was, and is, an organization mainly of the old fellow-traveling Left (although Foreman himself is an independent sort...
...when, he claims, he was informed he was to go "underground" permanently, where he was to be trained in the techniques "of disguise, forgery, wiretapping, karate, and the evasion of surveillance...
...I don't think I ever saw Phil Luce as happy as on that day, nor as friendly...
...Foreman had struck up a kind of fatherly friendship with him, and he seemed to be more at ease with Foreman than I'd ever seen him with anyone...
...The young people (say, to 35) hung around the bookshop, and presented a strange array...
...I was with my girl friend...
...Once, emerging from the subway, I saw him morosely coming down the stairs...
...While getting a decent job is a normal pursuit, the intention to find it on the Left was not the kind of idealism I met with among young people even around the CP...
...He moved up quickly and wound up as editor of the P.L...
...He dedicates the book to Isaac Don Levine and Herbert Romerstein...
...I pretended not to see him...
...the results are rather frightening...
...On that occasion, as on all others, I was never able to take Luce seriously as a leftist...
...and it seemed to me that these places made him feel like a writer—certainly not like a political activist...
...then he would settle down in New York for good...
...I suppose Phil was peculiarly suited for P.L...
...He was delighted with this observation, and went on to tell about various meetings in which he had indeed charmed the golden-age clubs around the CP...
...There seems to be no way to put the pieces together and remake your life in the way you want to...
...Now he is a supporter of the Vietnam War, a cooperator with the FBI, and a booster of National Review...
...Romerstein, currently an investigator with HUAC, has been a professional expert on radical youth for fifteen years...
...Phil didn't care for Hall's suspicious, managerial response, nor for the CP world...
...At this time he was already under indictment and threatened with a jail term...
...Progressive Labor takes at face value what its leaders learned growing up in the CP...
...This was quite different from preaching revolution to a clubhouse of pretty P.L...
...According to his recent book, The New Left, Luce seems to have been traumatically shaken out of his involvement in P.L...
...In the mid-twenties, there comes a time for the somewhat sheltered person, when things become desperate, overwhelming...
...His first gravitation was toward the Communist party...
...Within the rigid confines of the totalitarian Left, he seemed to silently reach out to me as a fellow writer who didn't know all the an swers...
Vol. 13 • November 1966 • No. 6
