Liberals, Stalinists and HUAC

...He never confronts the Stalinist-liberal issue head-on, although he leaves little doubt how he feels about it...

...claim the privilege for any other part of the same matter...

...Here I have to declare an interest, for I appear as a leading villain in Navasky's account...

...He does quote a letter in which I.F...

...You would not gather from Naming Names that anti-Stalinist liberals, including such scoundrels as James Wechsler and me, were attacking McCarthy, the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover—and being attacked by them in return...

...The goal of the anti-Stalinist liberals, he writes sarcastically, "was to demonstrate to the state and the culture at large that, contrary to what the right-wing ideologues said when they lumped liberals with Socialists with Trotskyists with Communists, it was possible, indeed, desirable, in fact inevitable, to be liberal and anti-Communist at the same time...

...When V.J...

...In one passage he lists the credits of such "most talented writers in Hollywood" as Alvah Bessie (The Very Thought of You and Objective Burma), Herbert Biberman (Meet Nero Wolfe), Lester Cole (Objective Burma), John Howard Lawson (Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara), Dalton Trumbo (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes...

...He even claims, quite falsely, that "cold war liberals" considered people like Bernard De Voto, Henry Steele Com-mager and Alan Barth fellow travelers...

...So, as he omits the Philip Dunnes from the Hollywood story, he minimizes and misrepresents the general role of anti-McCarthy, anti-Stalinist liberals, with exemptions for "a tiny minority of anti-Stalinist Socialists...

...He tells us twice, for example, that the "waiver doctrine," according to which a witness who testifies about himself waives the Fifth Amendment privilege and cannot refuse to testify about others, was not established until 1951...

...He sees Stalinists as liberals, only more ardent, idealistic and courageous than the rest...

...The view I urged at the time, and have never repented since, was that liberalism and Stalinism had nothing in common, either as to means or as to ends, and that a liberal must by definition be both anti-Stalin and anti-McCarthy...

...This is the view that Navasky evidently regards as the source of great evil...

...The reference to "George Stevens, later head of the American Film Institute," confuses father with son and does not inspire confidence in the author's total mastery of the scene...

...It is discouraging to think that the elementary point about the two-front struggle has to be made again every decade...

...Navasky, a graduate of Yale Law School, is no credit to that institution...

...In Navasky's view, such works must have been either mischievous contributions to a gratuitous anti-Stalinism or else irrelevant to America...

...He forgets that this term describes a perfectly real phenomenon and was put into circulation not by Red-baiters but by Trotsky when still in the Soviet regime (in Literature and Revolution...

...That is why none of us—right, left, or center?emerged from that long nightmare without sin...

...His general tone is that, while Stalinism was not so good, anti-Stalinism was really unforgivable...

...Thus he goes on throughout the book about "the civil war among the liberals," the "fight within the liberal community itself," as if Stalinists and liberals had equal claim to membership in that community...

...And Maltz wins on biology—viscerally one responds to his sense of outrage...

...In the main, Navasky tells this story well...

...Albert Maltz's shaming recantation of literary heresies under party pressure can be understood...

...I can't pretend he's a libertarian, so I'd better stay away...

...He probably would not complain if dissident Teamsters or gangsters or Nazis or CIA agents informed against their comrades...

...recantations before the House Un-American Activities Committee are inexcusable...

...His insistence that "the demand for names was not a quest for evidence...

...One book is about theinquiriesof the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac) in the 1950s into Communism in Hollywood—one of the most indefensible, scandalous and cruel episodes in the entire history of Congressional investigations...

...Nevertheless, Navasky's description of the brutaliza-tion of Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee, though flawed, is a useful contribution to history...

...Where Maltz remained rigid and unforgiving, Trumbo displayed a sense of the complexity of the situation for informers as well as for victims: "In the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange...

...Such concessions carry Navasky farther than he understands and reduce his Informer Principle pretty much to the question of whose ox is gored...

...They can be dealt with separately...

...But he cannot take seriously the notion that the righteous and unconditional defense of the Stalinist record by Communists and fellow-travelers in the United States might provide American liberals with a sufficient motive for seeking separation from Stalinists...

...the proposition that it was possible to be anti-Communist and anti-McCarthy at the same time...

...Stone declined to appear at a tribute to V.J...

...Nothing mattered less to the safety of the republic than the presence of a few Stalinists and fellow-travelers in the film industry...

...Jerome, the cpusa's cultural commissar, because he would feel "like a stultified ass to speak at a meeting for Jerome without making clear my own differences with the dogmatic, Talmudic, and dictatorial mentality he represents...

...His second book is studied in its evasions...

...Trumbo wins on polemics—he's funnier...

...One hopes that this tricky book will not unduly impress a new generation for whom Stalinism is an historical event about as remote as the fall of the Roman Empire...

...One finds only the most passing allusions to Darkness at Noon or The God That Failed...

...Yet Navasky condemns others who drew the same line...

...Seeing through the illusion of the "two-front struggle," Navasky derides the idea of "simultaneously denouncing the hunters and dissociating themselves from the hunted...

...The expedition was a classic instance of what the Supreme Court forbade in 1957 in Watkinsv...

...He acknowledges Lillian Hellman's statement: "I do not like subversion or disloyalty in any form, and if I had ever seen any, I would have considered it my duty to have reported it to the proper authorities...

...He admits that American Stalinists opposed civil liberties for Trotskyites and independent thinking by Communists and fellow-travelers, but this does not worry him unduly...

...But, as long ago as Wigmore's Code of Evidence, it was hornbook law that if a person "testifies to any part of a matter known to him to be criminating, he may not afterwards...

...The second book is an indictment of American liberals on the ground that, by dissociating themselves from the Stalinists, they legitimized the anti-Stalinist atmosphere which led to the Hollywood excesses...

...Many people have wondered why, if the Stalinists were so courageous, they did not declare their faith before the investigating committees instead of posing as defenders of a Bill of Rights a Stalinist regime would instantly have abolished...

...The phrase "fellow-traveler" infuriates him...

...Navasky offers token criticisms of Stalinist atrocities in the Soviet Union...

...Jerome and John Howard Lawson bully their associates for deviating from the party line, do not rush to judgment: Lawson was only "struggling to work out a satisfactory understanding of the relationship between art and the social forces that helped to shape and were in turn shaped by it...

...This is a really disingenuous book—as shown by the fact that it does not even address seriously its purported subject, naming names...

...Navasky's own verdict on the exchange is revealing...

...Biologically there is no doubt where Navasky, under his pretense of fair-mindedness and objectivity, stands...

...The Hollywood Committee for the First Amendment was not, for example, formed to support the Hollywood Ten, nor did it disappear when the Ten retreated from Washington...

...His approach is curiously parochial, as if American Stalinism were a local problem, unrelated to tendencies elsewhere...

...The Hollywood book, however, is imbedded in a second one with larger and murkier purposes...

...Having criticized Trumbo in the past, I want to say now that his part in the correspondence shows insight and humanity I would not have expected...

...Perhaps he leaves Watkins out because that case, the most emphatic ruling on the constitutional right of silence, was argued and won by Joseph Rauh, who was also the lawyer for Lillian Hellman and for Arthur Miller, and who, as a robust anti-Communist, is the living refutation of Na-vasky's thesis that it was impossible to be simultaneously opposed to Stalin and McCarthy...

...More serious is Navasky's failure even to mention the crucial case in any study of naming names?Watkins, where the Supreme Court decided that no Congressional committee can require a witness to name names unless it states for the record "the subject under inquiry at the time and the manner in which the propounded questions are pertinent thereto...

...it was a test of character," that "the act of informing was more important than the information imparted," is quite right...

...Navasky's discussion is further muddied by long, meandering ruminations on what he calls the Informer Principle...

...He also acknowledges Richard Rovere's point that if anti-informing is to be erected into a "universal principle," we ought to supplement the Fifth Amendment with another amendment saying that no man can be required to incriminate another...

...Toward the end, Navasky prints a fascinating exchange of letters in the 1970s between Maltz and Trumbo...

...He vividly evokes the atmosphere of the time, exhumes symptomatic personalities like Dr...

...The Committee's inquisitorial zeal had no justification in the protection of national security, nor in the need for legislation, nor in the oversight of government, nor even in the discovery of unknown facts, since it had independent access to Communist Party membership lists in the Los Angeles area...

...Later, doubtless in an effort to improve Trumbo's standing, Navasky attributes to him the authorship of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted...

...E. Philip Cohen, the Hollywood psychiatrist whose patients cooperated in suspicious numbers with the Committee, and supplies arresting documentation in the form of interviews with and correspondence from some who informed on their associates and some who declined to do so...

...In an astonishing exercise in tortured reasoning, Navasky tries to show how virtuous they were to deny their real beliefs...

...United States—the use of "Congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure"—and a pure case of breaking butterflies upon a wheel, except that the consequent wreckage of human lives makes lighthearted metaphors tasteless...

...These were not perhaps the most memorable films of the day...

...Na-vasky's speculations on issues of conscience, guilt, survival, and forgiveness, though discursive and repetitious, are often subtle and interesting...

...There is no mention of Philip Dunne, who helped found that group, or of other Hollywood liberals who were both anti-huac and anti-Stalinist...

...one a venial, the other a mortal sin...

...Navasky is most unhappy about goring the Stalinist ox...

...The Committee gratified the prurience of a set of fourth-rate, mean-spirited, publicity-seeking Congressmen, ruined the careers of a number of Hollywood figures and forced others into a demeaning process of abasement, confession and betrayal...

...This does not have any bearing on the way the Committee treated them, but it does suggest his own bias...

...Too late, I salute his spirit...

...Navasky greatly exaggerates the artistic contributions of the Hollywood Stalinists...

...He does get some things wrong...

...He concedes that in some circumstances informing is OK—when citizens report a hit-and-run driver, or John Dean turns in his Watergate pals, or whistle-blowers disclose government malfeasance...

...Dunne's recent memoir, Take Two, offers a more accurate picture of the Hollywood reaction...

...There are too many pretentious digressions into experimental psychology and cultural anthropology, but the concept of "degradation ceremonies," borrowed from the sociologist Harold Gar-finkel and applied to the Congressional hearings, is apt and illuminating...

...The self-incrimination privilege has always existed exclusively for the protection of the witness and cannot be claimed on behalf of third per' sons...