'I Have Here in My Hand a List'
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television 'I Have Here in My Hand a List...' By Reuven Frank One day in the early 1950s, I got word to see my boss, the head of NBC News. When I arrived at his office he was on the...
...A tall and strikingly handsome Trinidadian, Carmichael was one of the young leaders of the civil rights movement in this country and an early advocate of "black power" who may have coined the phrase, "black is beautiful...
...Although most of his hearings were not televised live, they were always conducted in the presence of cameras working for the three networks' evening newscasts...
...Both NBC and CBS sported moneymaking daytime schedules, so they moved in and out of the hearings...
...What far fewer realize is that the hunt for Communist subversion was not purely a product of the Cold War but had much earlier origins...
...The most important of those was State Department official Alger Hiss, unmasked by a Congressman from California named Richard M.Nixon...
...Constitution...
...Reports surfaced of Spanish Civil War veterans being denied enlistment in the United States Army...
...J. Parnell Thomas ended up in jail for defrauding the government...
...These two books, and others that have surfaced, are written by authors who were still children, if indeed yet born, when Joe McCarthy's powers were at their peak...
...The McCarthy-Army hearings were indeed a narrative, a drama beyond experience...
...There were the pusillanimous townspeople headed by Chairman Mundt...
...When the resultant Republican majority took over in the Senate, McCarthy assumed the chair of the investigating committee...
...He had gained his constituents' support by facilitating their relatives' immigration...
...Dancing," he insisted, "is a contact sport...
...At this point McCarthy had gone too far in the eyes of his Senate colleagues and the White House...
...He turned up frequently in gossip columns, where he was once quoted as saying, "I don't want to know what the law is...
...There has been renewed interest of late in what is loosely called the "McCarthy era"—a time when the Soviet menace abroad and Communist "infiltration" at home generated a series of government inquiries, professional blacklisting and, especially, disregard for rights and protections assumed to be guaranteed by the U.S...
...In the same spirit, it can be denied that television is a visual medium...
...There were the good guys, following the banner of Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, a wise and sophisticated man who, like Kefauver, masqueraded as a country simpleton...
...They did not live through the period, read its newspapers, watch its television, or hear whispers about somebody's father in a high school corridor...
...There was barely a respite during World War II, although the hunt moved to other fields...
...The ensuing scandal prompted the Senate to vote that McCarthy himself should be investigated...
...One of them, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), most notably while under the chairmanship of J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, mounted the play within a play of the McCarthy era...
...The inquiry reached into the Cabinet...
...If there were, McCarthy did not find any, and the House Un-American Activities Committee found few...
...He seized on an incident in respected CBS News commentator Don Hollenbeck's past andkeptpressing it mercilessly for weeks, until Hollenbeck filled his apartment with gas and was found dead...
...From then on he would never say or do anything in public without receiving starlevel media coverage...
...Cohn pulled every string he could to prevent Schine's induction, and when that failed he threw all his weight into getting him special treatment...
...Speaking to an audience of Republican women in Wheeling, West Virginia, he said he held in his hand a list of Communists working in the State Department...
...John Henry Faulk had to leave CBS radio, but many years later emerged the victor in a libel suit and made a comeback in television...
...Corridor gossip had it that we were subjected to fewer inconveniences than the other networks because RCA, NBC's parent company, was a defense contractor already under the unblinking eye of government watchdogs...
...Meanwhile, the movie companies and networks maintained lists of artists ineligible for employment because of alleged (and often unsubstantiated) Communist connections...
...He moved to Africa after his denunciations of the Vietnam War landed him on the government's list oftroublemakers...
...Television is a narrative medium...
...The recently released Venona papers removed any lingering doubt of their guilt...
...Some government personnel offices took to using the term "premature antifascist...
...McCarthy himself, an obscure junior Senator whose only distinction was unseating the legendary Robert M. LaFollette Jr., first attracted national attention at a 1950 Lincoln Day dinner...
...IN 1941 when I interviewed Dickstein, he told me how, in 1937, concerned about the rise of nativist and German-inspired fascist groups, he had with great difficulty introduced and gotten passed the resolution that created HUAC...
...McCarthy's staff found that he had belonged to a Leftist organization, or had attended a benefit concert, or had been mentioned by name in the Daily Worker...
...The postwar "McCarthy era" was, therefore, not an aberration...
...She wanted to know if Roy would be 'on the television' tonight...
...they became the province of completely different Congressional bodies...
...Some time later, Jack O'Brian, a minor gossip writer at Hearst's New York Journal-American, was made its TV critic...
...One thing led to another...
...When they launchedthe historic See ft Now, Edward R. Murrow and his producer, Fred W. Friendly, characteristically deemed their work too complex for CBS News cameramen and contracted the crew of the MGM-Hearst newsreel, News of the Day...
...Football is a hitting sport...
...I worked at NBC News for several months on a temporary basis while the "paperwork" was being straightened out, and finally formalized my employment by filling out a job application that included a statement I signed declaring that I did not belong to an organization advocating the overthrow of the United States government...
...Murrow was so incensed that See It Now canceled its contract with the Hearst newsreel and hired away its cameramen...
...I have no idea if he was right, but neither of us considered it implausible...
...Philip Loeb, who played the father on The Goldbergs, was dismissed from the program and within a few years, driven by other causes as well, took his own life...
...Red-baiting also fomented internecine disputes in the media industry...
...McCarthy and his minions came upon a dentist named Irving Peress who was serving in the Army...
...It was customary, he told me, for the author of a bill to be named chairman of the resulting committee...
...To some of these commentators, and many of their readers, the "McCarthy era" and "McCarthyism" refer to a host of official and unofficial activities and excesses that dominated American journalism in the 1950s...
...Broadcasting executives, timorously trying to nurture a fledgling medium into profitability, were sensitive as never before to the fact that they depended on a Federal license for their existence, and they did whatever it took to avoid trouble...
...That was Roy Cohn's mother...
...Even President Harry S. Truman, whose record proves he knew better, felt compelled to require every Federal employee to sign a loyalty oath...
...In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, ending his spectacular run on the public stage at less than five years...
...Dies received the same level of public attention in his day as Parnell Thomas would in his...
...You will never guess who that was," he said after hanging up...
...The great coach Vince Lombardi once rejected the idea that football was a contact sport...
...McCarthy didn't have a chance...
...Ann Coulter's diatribe, Treason, proclaims from its perch on the New York Times bestseller list that McCarthy really did a lot of good, alerting the country to dangers within...
...But this process claimed some famous victims...
...McCarthy died a broken man...
...Those hearings were televised...
...Thomas sent nine Hollywood writers and one director to jail for contempt of Congress because they refused to answer the committee's questions...
...Throughout the '20s and '30s, the Hearst press and their ilk had inveighed against "Godless Communism" and sensationalized defectors' horror stories of murder and starvation...
...Almost every day...
...A state park in Texas is named for Martin Dies...
...That was a stunning spectacle of villains and heroes which almost propelled Kefauver to the White House...
...Whoever asked was told the letters indicated "speech defect...
...Their facts and conclusions derive from archival documents, yellowing photographs and smeary kinescopes...
...probing into organized crime...
...For instance, HUAC was ironically initiated by a small, crude, unpleasant man named Samuel Dickstein, the Representative of New York's Lower East Side for most of the years between the World Wars...
...Oh, come on, Stokely," the writer scolded...
...He was counsel and coinquisitor of the investigating arm of the Senate, the Committee on Government Operations, chaired by Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy...
...The public and the politicians had already learned about the power of live television coverage from the hearings three years earlier by Senator Estes Kefauver (D.-Tenn...
...Many Americans, and most of the American Left, refused to accept the Soviet threat to the country's and the world's security and tended to dismiss reports of hostile espionage and military buildup...
...Thus under a different chairman, Senator Karl E. Mundt of South Dakota, McCarthy's own committee investigated him...
...Stokely Carmichael, the exile, replied, "What if there are Communists under the bed...
...Then Roy Cohn's close friend G. David Schine, a scion of a family that owned hotels who had been hired by the McCarthy committe as a researcher on Communism without any demonstrable qualifications, was drafted into the Army...
...When I arrived at his office he was on the telephone, but he motioned me in...
...The IBM personnel cards that accompanied every Army officer (Form 66-1) or enlisted man (Form 20) included a little box marked only "SD...
...But his political cachet was so minuscule that, except for the omnipresent Associated Press, none of the national media bothered to cover his speech...
...All that my colleagues and I knew was what we read in the papers...
...In another subplot, independent entrepreneurs published lists of purported Communists and sympathizers among actors, playwrights and songwriters...
...The most prominent of these was Red Channels, avidly read in the broadcast business, particularly by advertising agencies...
...ABC, less burdened by the prospect of fiscal sacrifice, carried them live gavel to gavel, with commentary by an amiable Washington news veteran, Bryson Rash...
...Print is a visual medium...
...Dickstein grew bitter when, after a few passes at investigating the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, the Dies Committee concentrated exclusively on the search for Communists...
...I asked...
...Unfortunately, we would eventually learn that Hearst and his editorials were not entirely wrong...
...Some years after all this Rolling Stone magazine tracked down Stokely Carmichael in West Africa, where he was living under the name Kwame Ture...
...During the interview Carmichael mentioned the CIA...
...Roy, after his service with McCarthy ended, pursued a lucrative law practice in Manhattan for an array of high-end corporate and personal clients...
...Many years after his death, the Venona papers revealed that Samuel Dickstein worked for a long time as a paid Soviet agent, passing on mostly useless information about Congressional activities...
...Those who hold this view believe that in the tremulous atmosphere following the Soviet Union's initial explosion of a nuclear bomb the Jewish prosecutors, Saypol and Cohn, and the Jewish judge, Irving R. Kaufman, feared appearing lenient to fellow Jews...
...You knew the characters were Russian because they added "-ovich" or "-ski" to words like "truck" and "prune...
...According to Richard H. Rovere's biography, McCarthy that day proclaimed: "While I cannot take the time to name all of the men who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department...
...He took to Communist-chasing with relish...
...But many contend that had the Rosenbergs not been Jewish they wouldn't have become the only Americans ever executed during peacetime for spying...
...In Dwight D. Eisenhower's November 1952 landslide Presidential victory, McCarthy's attacks helped retire at least four Democratic Senators...
...Former FBI men, cops andjust plain busybodies set themselves up as highly paid consultants, claiming expert ability to vet performers...
...He had recently been elevated to the rank of Major...
...Their comic strips depicted "Bolsheviks" as evil, fuzzybearded little men carrying sputtering bombs that looked like cannon balls with wicks...
...The Republicans, by and large, including the austere and upright Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, embraced McCarthy's fame and fulminations for their political firepower...
...The new fascination ranges from the polemical to the academic...
...Entertainers and actors were of no interest to McCarthy...
...It was more dramatic than anything a playwright could imagine...
...Like any doctor or veterinarian, he was drafted as an officer and received promotions at regular intervals...
...subsequently he raised it to 81, but did not ever disclose who was on the list...
...Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens was subpoenaed to testify...
...He learned how many reporters and newsreel cameras could be lured to a hearing room by summoning and then browbeating movie stars...
...The AP report, carried in hundreds of newspapers around the country, stirred the apprehensions ofthat nervous period...
...It reflects the spirit of the time that this was enough to drag the Major General in command of the post where Peress was stationed before the committee to be asked, under oath, why he had allowed the promotion of a dangerous subversive...
...The discredited Senator fell ill, succumbed to alcoholism and retreated into obscurity...
...There was a gang of bad guys, headed by McCarthy and Cohn...
...It had roots deeper than usually acknowledged and sturdier than its victims understood...
...The CIA sees Communists under the bed...
...Cohn had been recommended to McCarthy by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was impressed by the young lawyer's work as assistant to Irving H. Saypol in the successful Federal espionage prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg...
...Does she call often...
...For those who tuned in late, Roy M. Conn—short, thin, sallow, slick-haired, squirrel-cheeked, popeyed, still in his 20s—was then one of the most feared men in the United States...
...In the Senate shortly thereafter, he reduced the figure to 57...
...a sergeant in the Classification and Assignment section told me it stood for "suspected disloyalty...
...Most people are aware that McCarthy's "era" involved several inquisitors and lasted longer than the Senator's own four and a half years...
...Suddenly McCarthy was famous...
...Still, it remains fair to say the main achievement of both the House committee andMcCarthy's in the Senate was the noise they made...
...Cohn's father, Alfred, was a New York State judge and a stalwart of New York City Democratic politics...
...In negotiations over his fees he displayed a greed that led his handlers to refer to him as "the Crook...
...The question remains: If there were no television, would there have been Joe McCarthy...
...Leonard Bernstein and others were routinely denounced as "portsiders" (Lefties...
...Cold War, Cool Medium, by Thomas Doherty, a professor of American film studies at Brandeis University, argues—counterintuitively—that rather than serving as McCarthy's handmaiden, as many intellectuals have charged, the infant television actually destroyed him...
...An entertainment executive told me the names of artists about to be engaged had to be sent to NBC's outside law firm, and what they did with the list nobody wanted to know, until the answers came back: hire or do not hire...
...He focused all his attention on government employees...
...But Democrat Sam Rayburn, the House Majority Leader, was persuaded by members of the Jewish community that it would be unwise for a Jew to be prominent in such activities, so the chairmanship went to an equally undistinguished Congressman from Texas, Martin Dies Jr...
...I want to know who the judge is...
...He moved from mere speeches to hearings, and he ruled the news...
...Its hearings aimed at rooting out of movies, literature, and the new television industry whatever it deemed subversive...
Vol. 86 • November 2003 • No. 6
