My Parents Belonged To the Communist Party
BERNSTEIN, CARL
My Parents Belonged to the Communist Party The Journalist Who Broke the Watergate Scandal Recalls His Childhood in the McCarthy Era CARL BERNSTEIN Reams of transcripts—the testimony of my...
...I was signed up with a tutor, in Riggs Park, whom I went to see two evenings a week to learn Hebrew...
...From the evidence available to us, that is right," he confirmed...
...with her at the Washington lunch counter sit-ins...
...My mother usually arrived before the other women, who came in part time...
...I always thought of peaceful means . . . Look, I'm in a different stage of my life now...
...For about ten seconds neither of us spoke...
...It was my responsibility to stuff envelopes, fetch coffee, unpack cartons of literature sent from New York, and insert mimeographed appeals for funds into copies of the Book...
...Moral suasion on the question of desegregation was the stated policy of the organization...
...the adults of B'ri B'rith, while not exactly brokering t convention, had steered it toward debate over whether their Youth Orga ization should be involving itself matters outside the mainstream American Jewish custom and practk the fundamental question was the sar one that had been raised by the Jewi bondswoman in Greensboro: whether radical agenda might endanger tl security—economic and social—of Je' in their communities...
...I remember the look on his face, the agony, the sadness, the dismay...
...I argued that it was time to go beyond collecting old sweaters and dungarees for donation to the poor—that we should begin to exhibit some sense of "social awareness" and start to participate in the events of the day...
...Perhaps someone had suggested that Robbie and I looked somewhat alike...
...There were a series of names actually: Emanuel Bloch, Helen Sobell, Ethel Weichbrod, Michael and Robbie, others...
...It certainly was never mentioned at the shule...
...I'm not sure my feelings are the same...
...For months afterward they followed him off and on, cataloguing the addresses and doorways where he would linger for a minute or two...
...There's no question in my mind that it's only in recent years that I talk about it at all openly to people...
...Six or seven, maybe eight...
...She kept her nails short enough to type, and I thought there was something magical about the way she could move her fingers on the keyboard with incredible speed and carry on a conversation with me at the same time...
...Everyone was still there . . . ," she remembers...
...Thousands and thousands of people, the crowd overflowing into Lafayette Square...
...He was out of breath from running, and his belly heaved over a garrison belt that sagged with canisters, and batons and a hol-stered revolver...
...We weren't moving, I said—without considering the implications...
...To the group, I announced that anybody who didn't want to get arrested should get back on the train...
...The union was the United Federal Workers of America, established by a small band of dissidents from the American Federation of Government Employees of the AFL, John L. Lewis was putting together the CiO at the time...
...In San Francisco the peer pressure to join the Party was incredible," my mother says, without a hint of the defensiveness her words might suggest...
...Then everyone in the room was sobbing, wailing, and some people got sick...
...That was how much emotion and purpose and mission we invested in it...
...We are talking in half-sentences now— and gestures...
...More than five hundred were handled by my father in his capacity as director of negotiation for the union...
...I had not realized the extent to which I used the Lincoln Torch as a manifesto, in between all the columns and articles about our ball games and dances and sweater-collecting...
...It was a reign of terror...
...The next day her picture appeared on the front page of the Washington Daily News—arm upraised, being sworn...
...I don't like to think about it...
...I know this not from her but because her application for appointment to the Bureau is in her FBI file—part of the 2,500 pages, it turns out, that the Bureau amassed on my parents over a thirty-five-year period...
...To the best of my knowledge, I had never heard the term "bar mitz-vah" before we moved from Chesapeake Avenue to Silver Spring...
...Finally a stack resolutions was passed affirming B'n B'rith's commitment to civil rights, ai I was elected Honorary Grand Ale] Godol, a compromise to which I relu tantly acceded in an emotional ceremoi in which I was given a gavel with n name engraved on it, and sent off...
...The twelfth witness was Courtney Evans, acting chief investigator of the Committee on Un-American Activities...
...Sobell had been convicted with the Rosenbergs...
...When you went with the union what did you want to do...
...There were secret AZA handshakes, in which you could feel the pulse of brethren members, a lot of ball games, and a bit of community service work, most of it done at the new Hebrew Home for the Aged...
...observed or overheard were members the Communist Party or were thoug to be...
...My mother would bring food in...
...Goldstein, said she was very well known in Greensboro, and described her as a Jewish bondswoman...
...I cannot say precisely how old I was when the Rosenbergs became a presence in our house...
...Was it apparent to you right away that you wouldn't be able to do that at a specific point...
...A radio played...
...He would be lucky if he could feed his wife and children...
...Even today when I look at that picture, it evokes grief—not fear as it did then, but a sense of utter helplessness...
...I don't know who was the first to try it, but word spread quickly that a living could be made—if just barely— in laundry...
...held me, but I was screaming by then, lost, hysterical.' 'You wouldn't stop," she remembers...
...We all bought a great deal too much about the Soviet Union," my mother tells me sadly on a winter afternoon in Florida...
...He had become an untouchable...
...AZA (and its sister organization, BBG, from the crypto-English B'nai B'rith Girls) thrived in the Maryland suburbs...
...The story on page one of the next morning's Washington Post described my mother and ten other witnesses as "stubborn" and quoted the chairman as saying that their appearance had convinced him "there is a hard core of the Communist Party operating in the Nation's Capital...
...he is looking toward her through the mesh...
...He won about 80 percent of them...
...By '49 we were trying to hold on to our local...
...The notion of my father at the barricades is unlikely...
...He was already two years out of a job by then, a Columbia Law' School graduate learning the laundry business, a Marxist turned reluctant capitalist, proprietor of his share of America, the Georgia Avenue Bendix Automatic Laundry, twenty-six machines filled with the dirty diapers and socks From Ijiyalliti itv Car...
...Indrvtoueh were not accused of any crane, and the hearings were not a court of law...
...It was my plan to run for Grai Aleph Godol the next summer, f president of the whole shebang, but wh I finally arrived at Camp Blue Star, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, it was cle that I hadn't a prayer...
...After we moved to Silver Spring, I began agitating for a bar mitzvah almost immediately...
...We were the Lincoln AZA chapter No...
...many of its members lived in the South...
...I was going to stay in the labor movement for the rest of my adult life...
...My first memory of the White House is from a picket line...
...McCarthy Turned National Hysteria Into Political Power Senator Joseph R McCarthy (RWrsj spurred the anti-Communst witchhunts of the 1950i by asserting that public officiate and other Americans were disloyal and a threat to the nation's security...
...Cassettes, voices from the grave, heaped in boxes...
...Often they had little kids with them, who would be put down in a bed here and a bed there...
...The voice is weary and wary...
...The purposcfulness of some of these episodes never occurred to me or my parents, who, as I recall, attributed most of the difficulties to nothing more dialectical than the pernicious influence of my friend Johnny Cianaris...
...They had come to realize that in the public schools these subjects were evaded or distorted, and were grateful for this realization...
...I never had'any problem with not joining the Party...
...Twelve pepple testified those two days, eleven of them people known to me since my childhood...
...We'll send you to San Francisco...
...I watched it from the steps in my pajamas...
...After about an hour the chief of police, or perhaps he was the deputy, moved to the front of his men...
...it is to include a section on his union, the United Public Workers, and on the explusion of the left-wing unions from the CIO in 1950...
...Robbie and Michael Rosenberg were pictured on the back...
...We all thought it would become an ideal place"— though "wonderful" is the word the FBI said she used when Military Intelligence interviewed her in 1942, at J. Edgar Hoover's request...
...And with each the fear intensified, palpable, physical, suffocating, a feeling that caused me to squeeze my mother's hand so tight that I could feel my knuckles lock...
...Afterwards we drove back to the White House, just drove by to see how it looked...
...She does appear to be intelligent, ambitious, and resourceful, but she appears to be a bit too self-possessed...
...Her round, rather pretty face is separated by a wire screen...
...I had a president] travel budget of roughly twelve hundn dollars...
...Selflessness rewarded, suffering compensated...
...When I read the individual cases, however"—and here he moves his hand to his brow and pushes against it, hard—"especially cases that were lost, then the real horror comes back...
...My clearest memory is of interminable talk...
...Pictures of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and of their sons, solemnly held aloft...
...it was unalterably opposed to what it regarded as "direct action" by its membership...
...It is doubtful whether she would be amenable to discipline...
...You had to live it to know it...
...A couple of times the committee members asked her to keep her voice up...
...I went to a couple of meetings...
...The CIO was organizing the electorate—it was a big pan of FDR's constituency...
...I have never heard my father talk like that, have never known him to reach for a cliche...
...My father's mother and George Jessel's mother were first cousins Every time my mother's mother saw Jessel on television she would telephone...
...He pauses...
...The cases I lost...
...My view was simple at the time I joined...
...My father and mother never did...
...My social life in Silver Spring revolved around AZA, Aleph Zadik Aleph, the largest Jewish youth organization in the world—a fraternity of sorts, but, unlike the Greek-letter fraternities, this one took its name from the Hebrew alphabet...
...Both my mother and father like to play poker...
...The Rosenbergs had been married on June 18, 1939, the same day as my mother and father...
...Even now, only with somebody I'm close to, who knows something about what went on then...
...I was with her when we ran in panic from the charge of the Park Police cavalry during the battle to integrate the swimming pools...
...That was the basic allegation, read to her by the chief counsel from an informer's testimony...
...Wk A y mother's mother had wanted her I^YI daughter to mam someone who III would make money, command respect—a doctor, a practicing lawyer, a dentin even—flesh-and-blood evidence that her struggle had been worth it...
...Those who were willing to admit that they were or had been Communists were required—unless they pleaded the Fifth Amendment—to list the names of mends and associates whom they suspected of being Communists, Communist sympathisers, or members of groups on the Attorney Genera's irst Tha list was created m 1947, after President Harry S Truman established loyalty boards to review the loyalty of government officials Finally, the Senate, Mowing the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954...
...I was shaking...
...The overcoats always led me to imagine that the picture had been taken in some sort of van that was hauling them off to Sing Sing or wherever they were taken the night they were arrested...
...Ann's, rejoining them in the afternoon to try out for the Catholic Youth Organization football team, stuffing my pockets full of malted-milk balls from the Sean candy counter...
...I saw the need for it...
...Finally they relented...
...My mother's first testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee on July 14, 1954, followed that of Irv Winik, whose daughter Marsha was the first girl I kissed (we were bobbing for apples at the shule...
...All I knew was that people came every evening to see him and that he wrote down a lot of notes and that these strangers were in some kind of trouble and arrived very upset...
...Returning in the afternoon from synagogue, I would reopen the dispute...
...You won't let^Wie be Jewish...
...Rarely did I ever mention it to the people I worked with...
...We went back to Inspiration House and waited for the telephone to ring...
...You could really say that...
...Robbie was three years younger, the same age as my sister Mary...
...At 2 A.M...
...I know this because it's in Herb Raincr's file: "Subjects met at the usual hour at the home of Martin Mafia11," it says...
...There are a lot of pauses in his sentences, and his voice becomes almost inaudible...
...To a child the connection was unavoidable: if they could be executed, what was to prevent the execution of one's own parents, particularly one's own mother...
...During that period...
...Turn on Channel Four, your cousin is on," she would say...
...They wanted to know everything about the Soviet Union, about China, about the controversies raging around the trade unions and about politics in the USA...
...The Rosenbergs too were progressive people—and they were going to die for it...
...Subject denied that she was a Communist or was a member of the Communist Party, but she admitted that the Russian form of government was wonderful...
...Michael was my age...
...At no point is a Communist Party meeting described...
...Again, I said that anybody who didn't want to be arrested should get back on the train...
...This order decreed that a person who was perceived to be disloyal couldn't hold a government job...
...The CIO had begun its own purge...
...the train ride was a major part of the attraction: a twelve-hour trip, with six-packs of beer iced in coolers in the vestibules, the lights dimmed in our chartered cars, and sparks flying from the AZA boys necking with the girls from BBG...
...Everybody stayed...
...I was interested in the union...
...Every boy my age on the block took Hebrew lessons, and the rewards of a religious life, spiritual and material, seemed worthwhile...
...She thinks she remembers my father saying, "This might be a problem," on their way out west...
...I sat in a chair that resembled a throne, elevated from the congregation, among them the pillars of Washington radicalism, most of them like my own parents, Jews who weren't religious...
...People out of work, children ostracized...
...He was daring, radical, oblivious...
...Mass with the kids from St...
...9835, my parents had returned to Washington [because Bernstein's father was transferred back there...
...I won, on the fifth or sixth ballot, over my friend Bruce Fingerhut...
...Sometimes I screamed...
...My mother was working next to the White House at the time, in the War Department as a secretary...
...Death House Letters of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...I was in the Giant picking out a head of lettuce, and right next to me picking out a head of lettuce was Maurine Gilbert...
...We were the conscience of the city," he says...
...Then the phone rang...
...They also established the Washington shule, which, like many things in my mother's childhood, was above a store, at Seventh and O Streets...
...Difficult," he says...
...The FBI was across the street, taking down license numbers, which is how they picked up my Uncle Itzel's Dodge...
...There is a poem, by Ethel Rosenberg, "If We Die," on the first page of the book, and I can recall asking my mother to explain its lines to me: "Mourn no more my sons, no more...
...He identified her as Mrs...
...The shule's monthly newsletter stated that the CJCS students "wanted answers that would explain why they and their parents should be progressive Jews...
...Thus, beginning with Friday-night Sabbath services and extending through Saturday-midnight breakfast, my weekends were largely occupied by devotion and celebration...
...If the phone rang before eight o'clock, it meant that Eisenhower had granted clemency...
...He became a shop steward and started signing up low-paid white-collar workers and unskilled people...
...Mostly I remember being taught a smattering of Yiddish and reading books in English that explained how the Israelites had been oppressedby the Pharaohs and that, having been victims of oppression themselves, Jews would liberate oppressed peoples (always with an s) everywhere, particularly if they were black...
...I want a bar mitzvah...
...Bloch was the Rosenbergs' lawyer...
...Clippings from the paper's morgue ("Bernstein, Sylvia, Local Commie," says the file headingon my mother...
...At no point in all 2,500 pages of their files is there a single word about any remotely subversive activity, about any suggestion of disloyalty to the country, about any instruction from Moscow, from the CP, etc...
...Back in Washington, I spent my nigl writing letters and planning trips spread my particular interpretation the AZA gospel...
...Both of them are wearing overcoats...
...The great accomplishment of my mother's parents and their comrades was a camp they built in Drury, Maryland, on the Patuxent River—Camp Nit Gedayget, meaning "Not to worry," or' 'No worries," the same name as the big Socialist camp in Beacon, New York...
...Above all my father is a cautious man, a believer in weighing the consequences of behavior before choosing a course, or so he has always seemed to me...
...There is a certain logic—a consistency of temperament and intellect—that guides my father's politics...
...Which held a certain attraction for my mother...
...When he took the job, he was also designated by the union as its principal organizer on the West Coast...
...When you look at all this stuff, with all this behind you, what do you think of it all in terms of your own life—being excluded at a certain point from participating . . . ." And here his voice breaks and becomes a whisper...
...Many of the letters, my mother explained to me, were written to Michael and Robbie from Sing Sing...
...I asked...
...It's a long time ago, Carl...
...In the Washington of the 1920s, Yiddishkeit— the vibrant blend of Jewish secular culture that often embraced radical politics— revolved around "Branch 303 Workmen's Circle...
...I just remember being all over the ground with this kid...
...And even today, her voice breaks, and the tears roll down her cheeks, and she cannot go on...
...All of a sudden all contact was just cut off...
...By 1947, when Truman issued Executive Order No...
...Mostly it was boring," my mother says of her experience in the Communist Party...
...You won't let me do anything...
...After all their years together, my mother is the belter poker player of the two...
...It was very hot, people were packed into our living room...
...It was a conscious decision...
...and underwear of poor blacks...
...And money...
...Yet she always seemed to me the more militant, the more active...
...It also seemed unlikely that the FBI would come to my bar mitzvah...
...And at that point, in the car, I couldn't go on and I started to shake and cry...
...Of the traditions and philosophy of Judaism I learned nothing, except what I picked up in the synagogue...
...At first they were just a name, the subject of dinner-table conversation between my parents...
...I've never seen my mother more at ease than • when she was at work in that office...
...I sang my haftorah satisfactorily...
...Dad worked the Griffith Stadium area, Mike Samols had Congress Heighlv Leon Malkin was in Mount Pleasant, Iz Paskoff was in Dupont Circle, and Bill Hayes was in Georgetown...
...And waited...
...I am quoting here from a June 1959 edition of the Lincoln Torch, found in the bottom of a box that my mother sent over when she and my father moved from Silver Spring to be nearer their grandchildren...
...By this time I was occupied fully handling loyalty cases...
...she, much more than he, values comfort, safety, security...
...It is my mother who is the mystery to me...
...It was the closest he came in his life to practicing law...
...So why had he joined the Party in 1942 when he got to the Coast...
...That must have been the worst time of all for him...
...there is not a single activi substantively described, only the nol tion that a car belonging to so-and-showed up or that a meeting was he at such-and-such an address and so-an so was seen to enter or that someboi was planning to go to somebody els house or office...
...And that was basically my platform the next December, in Richmond, when I ran for regional (from Washington to North Carolina) president of AZA...
...Many were black...
...I got involved with the Party...
...She was called to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities on July 14, 1954...
...The day after my testimony I went to the Giant [supermarket]," she recalls...
...I ran against Jerry Akman, who lived directly across the street, and he won by two or three votes, after a long and high-minded campaign in which the nature of our "community service" work became the central issue...
...What is evoked when, 35 years later, my father holds the onionskin of his cases between his fingers, reads his objections, remembers the hearing room...
...This little packet of plush velvet became the symbol of my rebellion: If I knew my parents were having their friends over, I would slip it onto the ledge in the entryway so it could not be missed when the front door opened...
...My father's handwritten notes— the interviews, his preparation and his observations—are tucked inside, the hand surprisingly like mine, seemingly illegible upon confrontation then yielding itself upon examination, the tortured bends and turns flowing somehow into coherence and purpose...
...They were dead...
...I left the government to do that...
...A few minutes later a large contingent of the Greensboro police force arrived, threatening to arrest all of us for being in the black waiting room...
...We joined MCJC, the Montgomery County Jewish Center, and became part of the flock of Rabbi Tzvi Porath, who agreed to forgo the usual requirements of lengthy study in anticipation of a contribution to the building fund...
...I was twelve...
...As good a fight as I ever got into...
...My mother helped run it...
...Recommendation Unfavorable...
...What it did to innocent people, you know...
...Even on Saturdays when I did not know anybody having a bar mitzvah, I often went to services...
...In 1937 my mother applied for a job at the FBI...
...My mother and her friend Ethel Weichbrod organized the Washington Committee to Secure Justice for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...There were 12,859 of these cases filed between 1947 and 1953...
...Everyone had his own turf, and ) think there must have been a gentleman's agreement, just like in the Mafia, about territory...
...What happened to us would have happened anyway, without the CP membership...
...Automatically the suspect employee was notified of his or her possible dismissal from the government, and informed of the right to a hearing before his or her agency's loyalty board...
...My father came to Washington in the spring of 37, one of the bright young men hired by Harry Truman's friend Max Lowenthal to conduct the Senate Commerce Committee's investigation of the rail industry...
...Hers is a face I felt curiously drawn to, and to this day my vision of a Jewish Madonna is that face...
...There was a big party at our home on New Year's Eve...
...Some little fucker on the playground said something to me about my mother being a Communist...
...My mother testified for four minutes...
...I got interested," says my father as if that explains everything...
...My Parents Belonged to the Communist Party The Journalist Who Broke the Watergate Scandal Recalls His Childhood in the McCarthy Era CARL BERNSTEIN Reams of transcripts—the testimony of my mother, my father, of those who held me and bathed me and taught me...
...And by the next morning someone had gone to the national leadership and said to the effect of "You aren't going to believe what your kids were doing in the train station last night...
...There was no Hebrew, no Torah, and sparse mention of God...
...My mother and Irv Winik had gone to the shule together as children, too...
...She plays every Thursday in a game that remained under FBI surveillance until 1966...
...Almost every Friday night and Saturday morning somebody's brother or cousin or best friend was having a bar mitzvah...
...His religious upbringing had been traditional: His own father was what was known as a "two-day-a-year man," religious in the sense that he observed the High Holidays...
...The term "loyalty" was not defined...
...There were sit-ins around much of the South at the time, even in Silver Spring, where the local ice-cream parlor refused to serve blacks, and at the segregated movie theater in Bethesda, and at the amusement park at Glen Echo...
...He died scon after, in 1957...
...You gave up an awful lot for being accused of this—maybe that's why your dad won't discuss it...
...The presents, in terms both of numbers and of quality, were staggering: television sets, leather-bound dictionaries and atlases, portable typewriters, Rolls razors from England (though hardly anyone shaved yet), pigskin travel totes, 35-millimeter cameras, indoor-outdoor barometer-thermometers, jeweled tie clasps, and gold pocket watches...
...Several dozen people were there, waiting, waiting...
...Housewife Takes Fifth," said the caption...
...For a while you couldn't even do that, because you'd become unemployable...
...why the lies and smears were framed / the tears we shed, the hurt we bore / to all shall be proclaimed...
...Nobody moved...
...I was excited by the whole CIO movement...
...censured the Senator for making reckless and unsubstantiated charges...
...When the union was getting thrown out of the CIO, were you thinking about what was going to happen to you...
...Casey Gurewitz, who went to school with my mother (and testified before HUAC the same day as she), played the piano and led us in songs from an edition of The People's Songbook with Paul Robeson's picture on the cover...
...I shook and cried uncontrollably that night, can still summon the terror—and the fury at my mother for risking her life, the utter despair...
...Each summer AZA held a convention in a camp high up in the Great Smokies...
...Now the words came even more slowly...
...At his side was a woman...
...The room was overheated, it smelled of sweat, and I had worn a wool suit and a tie, the same one I had worn to my bar mitzvah, and to understand the drama it is necessary to understand the fanatical commitment to this organization that we all shared...
...And I said I thought that we had doi a great thing, that we had demonstrati that Jewish youth in the South f( strongly about civil rights...
...D.C...
...The policeman seemed confused, and went to a telephone...
...The reception was held in our living room...
...Sylvia Bernstein was a member of the white collar section of the Communist Political Association and when her husband returned from the service, she was transferred to the underground club of the Communist Party...
...Sometimes I hated him for it, and I articulated my rage through whatever misdemeanor was closest at hand: smashing to bits those 78-rpm Asch recordings of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and the Almanac Singers, going to 8 A.M...
...She tried to calm me...
...Again we were told to leave...
...the Torah I read from was blessed, in Hebrew, by my Uncle Itzel, by Joe Forer, and by my father...
...There would be a huge party afterward...
...Surely by 1942 it was possible to foresee that membership in the Communist Party, ir discovered, would be ruinous...
...With the exception of that decision to join the Communist Party, I do not know of a single act in his adult life that might be characterized as reckless...
...He did the union work in the evenings, during lunch hours, on his leave time, calling meetings during shift breaks, talking with workers at the water cooler and waiting for the cleaning women and the elevator operators to leave at midnight...
...She told us we were endangering the whole Jewish community of Greensboro and urged us to reboard the train...
...It was not pan of her plan that her only surviving child, secretary-treasurer of the Young Democrats of the District of Columbia, v/ould fall in love with someone with equal disregard for the excellence of his mother-in-law's cooking and the importance of taking his bar exam He had graduated from law school, and then decided against practicing law...
...he appointed hijvbrother Denny to head a nationwide organizing drive for government workers...
...Well, you fought as long as you realistically could...
...What must he have thought when he looked across the witness table at Senator Jim Eastland's fat face, listened to Eastland tell him that he was on the receiving end of an investigation into "treason and a bunch of traitors...
...by then I had had time to consider the situation...
...The photographers had a field day, judging from the papers...
...I have the transcripts of a couple hundred of these star-chamber proceedings, carbons typed on onionskin (for this was before the age of xerography) and preserved in textured blue folders...
...And wham, that was it...
...indeed, very little has to do with the Communist Party except that the subjects have been accused of membership, and therefore their every movement will be scrutinized...
...with her in the offices of the Defense Committee on the night the Rosenbergs were executed...
...Over the next couple of years some of the names became faces and everything became terrifyingly real...
...yarmulke...
...The articles of my faith were stored next to my bed in a deep-purple velvet case emblazoned with a yellow Star of David: the siddur (prayer book...
...A sense of helplessness and doom mitigated only by faith, by some desperate belief that nothing as terrible as this would be permitted to happen, that some law of humanity or the universe would intervene, that clemency would be granted at the last moment...
...I remember the man on the radio said that all lights around Ossining had dimmed when they threw the switch...
...A personnel officer sent a memorandum to Clyde Tolson, the deputy FBI director, friend and confidant of J, Edgar Hoover...
...I would go with her sometimes that summer...
...It was like electing a new pope, with the smoke going up, I supposed...
...He was an investigator earning two thousand dollars a year, Tex Goidschmidt, later one of Lyndon Johnson's political operatives, took him to his first union meeting in a hall on Seventeenth Street, next to Casey's Bar...
...I'm not exactly sure when the notion of my father being "different" from other fathers began to lug so strongly, but the sense of shame, of being threatened, of being vulnerable to something over which I had no control, came early...
...And she didn't say a word...
...He must have seen the purpose in his life being drained from him, realized then that he would no longer be a respected member of the community, part of the establishment of the city, of the civilized fraternity...
...perhaps I had thought it...
...They arrived through the regular mail, finally, boxes stacked knee high...
...And then I wrote my parents a note saying they were atheistic Jewish Communists and that that was why they didn't want me to have a bar mitzvah...
...Listen...
...In a way it was part of the New Deal...
...I quit just a month or two before the union fell apart completely...
...RE IRENE SYLVIA WALKER— The above applicant appeared at this office on June 22, 1937, and was afforded the stenographic and typing tests in which she received the above grade: 87 percent...
...The next day was hell," I said...
...I was summoned before a council of the adult leadership...
...He played to the national hysteria over real or enagwied Communist threats to the 'American way,' generated by the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union Then he used tha tear to gam prominence by prornemg to purge the government, as well as prwate institutions—such as the film industry, universities and labor unons—of Communsts...
...they were going to fry...
...I basically believed in the trade-union movement," my father says...
...For some reason I always identified with Robbie, though he was the younger, the object of his older brother's protection in that picture...
...She didn't get the job...
...Or so I was told when we got to camp...
...Nothing doing," I said...
...Out of the trade-union movement I took some stands on international issues—fronts, the League against the War and Fascism...
...The signs and the silence, the only sounds footsteps on the pavement...
...He looks equally Jewish, his long face framed by rimless Army-issue-type spectacles, the kind that can transform almost any Semitic face into a revolutionist's when worn above a mustache: the classic portrait of the Jewish aesthete, that face, not at all like my father's but the face of any number of men who had been in our house— friends...
...In the front of that same book is a picture of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and I can remember staring at it as a child...
...For years they were kept under the steps in Silver Spring...
...On the day of the execution, June 19, 1953, we spent most of the afternoon in front of the White House...
...The visitors stayed until late into the night, until the grownups were calm and whatever business at hand had gotten taken care of...
...And she'd comfort the wives and husbands...
...The money was used to open an office for the committee in Inspiration House, on Kalorama Road...
...My father is a man who wanted more than anything else to participate in the events of his day, who came to Washington to be a participant and, by the age of forty, found himself excluded...
...My parents were opposed...
...And I couldn't stop until I had taken a lot of deep breaths...
...Anywhere from one thousand to three thousand dollars in checks and savings bonds, if my friends were to be believed...
...But they did...
...I became a union leader there...
...he and Morton Sobell's wife, Helen, came to visit us...
...She sighed...
...I didn't know what it was all about...
...There would be many other picket lines for the Rosenbergs...
...tejillin (phylacteries), tallis (the prayer shawl that I insisted the maid iron every week...
...The FBI amassed 2,500 pages of files on my parents over a 35-year period...
...I pick this moment to ask my mother whether she had wanted a revolution in this country—a question that is probably more revealing of a 1950s education in Washington than it is of anything else...
...Then, as now, B'nai B'rith was the largest Jewish fraternal organization in the world...
...in fact, the accused never learned the identity of the accuser—only that an allegation of disloyalty had been made...
...he was asked by the chairman...
...the crush of what seemed like thousands of people walking past the iron gates, the signs begging clemency, my mother's hand clasped over mine...
...There isn't any doubt about the fact that there is an active Communist conspiracy right here in our midst, is there...
...In the picture Michael's arm encircled Robbie—two boys, very much alone, totally vulnerable...
...The applicant has only a fairly good personal appearance, is well poised, and has good personality...
...The next morning my mother said that six hundred dollars had been raised...
...Bemslrin...
...Between 1956 and 1960, there we more than two hundred surve lances undertaken on my pi ents—by FBI agents, by wiretap, i neighbors...
...The Rosenbergs were familiar...
...I thought she was going to die...
...I have tried to learn what happened in our family, and to set it down...
...Don't write now...
...Uncertainly we stepped onto the platform and filed into the station, toward a corner where we saw people eating...
...Beneath these notatio are citations alleging that the individu...
...Accused could not confront accuser...
...At first people wept quietly...
...Everything that happened in Washington, opening up the cafeterias to black people, beginning a consumer movement, hiring black bus drivers in the city, setting up the restaurant picket lines—that was our people...
...Hers has a lamb's-wool collar...
...I was interested in the organization of government workers into a force...
...he was still making his rounds, collecting subscription money from those few Yiddish-speakingjews left in Washington, who took the paper...
...I worked with them...
...As the files of the FBI note, my parents moved to San Francisco in July 1942, when my father was appointed senior West Coast investigator for the Office of Price Administration...
...WMe McCarthy rarefy proved anything against individuals, he attracted a tot of publicity, and the myth ol conspiracy grew...
...I was a labor leader, and a good part of the labor movement on the West Coast, the leadership, was leftist—members of the Party...
...My father tells .me he is being interviewed for a book about the Labor movement...
...That he would be out of a job, out of his chosen profession forever...
...And it was her appearance before a congressional committee, three years after my father and Senator Eastland exchanged words, that in my mind marked us as a family, isolated us, endangered us...
...The pattern is always t same...
...The Book was a paperback, blue cover with black lettering...
...A moment later the door swung open and a cop burst through and said that we couldn't be served, that we had to move to the other side...
...Copyright *I988 by Carl Btnuicin Reprinted by pcrmisicn of Simon and Schuilcr...
...I knew these guys...
...By the time I attended, the shule had moved to a ramshackle house at the other end of the Seventh Street-Georgia Avenue streetcar line and was formally known as the Cooperative Jewish Children's School of Greater Washington—the same way it was listed on the Attorney General's roster of subversive organizations for the year 1951, the first year I was enrolled...
...I was taking a journalism course (getting a C finally) and became editor of my AZA chapter newspaper, the Lincoln Torch...
...In due course, I ran for president of the chapter...
...My bar mitzvah came and went...
...She just went away . . . ." I was trying to explain this to Bob Woodward, in the car, driving out New York Avenue toward Route 50...
...we reached Greensboro, North Carolina, where the train broke down...
...was a reign of terror...
...It seemed unlikely that the FBI would look there...
...She looks so gentle in that photograph, gentle and uncomprehending and resigned—and Jewish...
...Her picture made the front page of all the Washington papers...
...But this was no cliche...
...It was the black restaurant...
...He must have known that he would never organize another group of workers...
...or were known to associate wi Communists or persons thought to \ or were active in the Progressive Pai or in any one of one hundred orgai zations on the Attorney General's rosl of subversive organizations—outf supposedly "sympathetic to the aim of the Communist Party...
...My father's personal files—musty, mildewed—are here, loo...
...there is nothing about the plans of the Communist Party...
...For the next four hours, the cops just watched, until the train got repaired...
...They must not have realized that Uncle Itzel, though in his seventies, was still the circulation manager for the Forvilz, the Jewish Daily Forward...
...And I was writing (a little grandly) that Jewish kids, Jews perhaps more than any other people, belonged in the civil-rights movement...
...each of them, according to ritual, touched the corner strands of the tallis to the holy scroll then brought them to his lips and kissed them...
...In so doing I may or may not have committed an act of disloyalty...
...The loyalty board determined finally who was loyal and who wasn't...
...eventually he organized guards in the federal prisons, orderlies in the veterans' hospitals, welders in the navy yards, custodians and maintenance workers in the Capitol, cafeteria workers in the agencies...
...But even when nothing could be proven, people often mere fired from their pbs and bUcfchsted from other )0bs simpry because they had been catted to testify they were often branded "Communist" and professionally mined...
...At my bar mitzvah, the FBI was across the street, taking down license numbers...
...We had not seen the white side of the station...
...If ever some historian of laundry chronicles (he trade in a definitive manner, it will be dutifully recorded that in Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s the neighborhood laundry business turned left...
...It was scandal—there really is no other wo for it—because B'nai B'rith had assi uously limited its role to passing res lutions and encouraging quiet commu ity work by its Anti-Defamation Leagt Nothing more...
...But I've seen these people coming into hearings shaking, quivering—because they'd gone to a meeting or really just normally exercised their citizenship rights...
...It was a single room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, bare except for an old government-surplus desk, a file cabinet, a few bookshelves, and some wooden swivel chairs...
...Eight o'clock came and went...
...A Federal Employees' Loyalty-Security Program was established...
...We wouldn't have talked before Congress...
...He smiled and thanked her for coming down at that hour of the morning...
...Then we reboarded and, triumphant, headed on to our convention camp...
...I said nothing in reply...
...Chaw of the Committee on Government Operaborts, McCarthy headed its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was known as the "McCarthy Committee' It was not so much the committees loyalty hearings that created the phenomenon catted McCarthyism—the House Committee on Un American Activities (HUAO had been conducting loyalty hearings since 1945, indudwg the famous Alger Hiss inveshgabon—but the out/a geous accusations that were never substantiated and the outnght sensational lies that McCarthy declared were true...
...On my father's side were Czechs—Bohemian Jews who came to this country around the lime of the Civil War...
...I'm comfortable...
...My father, always rational, was an atheist by the time he was in college...
...But I was only a half-assed member of the Party...
...Instead of a bar mitzvah, my father offered a trip across country...
Vol. 14 • August 1989 • No. 5
