Era of blacklisting

...He has listened with patient non-judgmental ear to the elaborate explanations and indignant justifications of the informers...

...In Naming Names Navasky demonstrates that he is a direct heir to James Madison's political philosophy...

...Navasky shows how the blacklist was created and how it was administered...

...Naming Names is a vivid, moving account of what happened when we, the people, failed to resist forces that threatened our freedoms...

...The terror and anxiety that hovered over the broadcast industry were appalling...

...Its proclaimed purpose, that of searching out a criminal conspiracy against the United States, was, in reality, a great hoax...

...Long after countless American citizens were put through the dehumanizing ritual of fingering fellow actors, writers, directors, producers, et al...

...It deals with that unhappy period in our nation's history thirty years ago when our population was seized by a fever of anti-communism and was stampeded by hysterical fear of a communist conspiracy into the Cold War...

...John Henry Faulk new book, Naming Names by IB Victor Navasky, is important ¦ A and altogether timely...

...While this does not make for happy reading, since many of these persons suffered blacklisting, one cannot but admire the latter, and share with Navasky the feeling that these persons really exemplify our American tradition of justice and decency...

...Once in court, their goose was cooked, in spite of the fact that they called in their allies in HUAC and the FBI to bail them out...

...I had the satisfaction of seeing my persecutors revealed to the public in their true colors, not as patriots but as racketeers...

...They were bound by rules of evidence and could not indulge in their usual wanton character assassination and distortions, the tools of their trade...

...He sued the blacklisted and ultimately won the largest libel judgment ever awarded by a jury...

...But I had the benefit of a determined attorney, and I sued my black-listers...

...It was a period marked principally by virulent injustices and political persecutions...

...In doing so, Navasky cleverly and incisively delineates the whole scope of the hysteria and repression that rolled over the United States and how it affected every community...

...I was in New York on network radio and television during the period about which he writes...

...He understood, as we should, that when the servant begins to assume the role of master, the republic is in trouble...

...I publicly criticized the excesses of a self-appointed group of political vigilantes, AWARE, Inc., that made it a point to blacklist performers...

...In short order I ended up getting blacklisted...

...His book, "Fear on Trial," was dramatized in a CBS television movie...

...It was a bitter experience...

...He also relates the experiences of persons who refused to name names, who defied the agents of repression...

...In the process of relating these personal histories, Navasky, with scholarship and perception, traces how certain elements in government and in the private sector launched a systematic assault on those institutions that we have always maintained to protect our freedoms (free speech, free press, the right of people peaceably to assemble) and, with the assault, corrupted and debased our whole system of justice...

...Now that there are signs around the land that we just might be headed into another Cold War, the study is pertinent indeed...

...The naming names process was thus nothing more than what Navasky calls a "Degradation Ceremony," a ritual calculated to make its victims cower before the Congressional inquisitors...

...As Navasky makes clear, most of the victims of the blacklist were not as fortunate as I was...

...His profound understanding of the vision and wisdom of Madison and the others who brought our republic into being is what renders this work such a valuable and important key to the understanding of the disgrace of yesterday...

...For instance, down in Texas, an old ne'er-do-well made a small fortune from banks and local businesses by organizing a Committee to Combat Communist Subversion in Texas...

...Actually the FBI and HUAC had all the names long before the first hearing was held...

...before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), it was revealed that the whole process was a cruel charade...

...The book deals with the impact of the McCarthy era and its repressive character on Hollywood and Hollywood personalities...

...takeover had occurred in Texas since his organization went into action...

...The book is a must for any student of American history who desires to understand what happens when we turn our backs on our American heritage and begin to ape the totalitarian methods of our adversaries...

...He would point with pride to the fact that not a single incidence of communist John Henry Faulk of Madisonville, Texas, is a political commentator and social critic whose blacklisting during the McCarthy era drove him out of network radio and television...

...Navasky, now editor of The Nation and a superb investigative reporter, writes in dramatic detail and with great compassion of some of the individuals who publicly informed on friends and former friends, thus destroying careers and blasting livelihoods...

...Indeed, the whole shabby business of blacklisting, holding innocent people up to public scorn, branding blameless citizens with infamy and destroying their livelihoods, elevating psychopathic liars to the status of patriot and prophet, stage-managed hearings conducted by HUAC, and all the other grotesqueries of that distorted period which Navasky recounts, were part of the hoax: a baseless hoax which victimized the American people, undermined rather than shored up our national security, and one from which we have reaped a harvest of such tainted fruits as Vietnam and Watergate...

...The Founders, he knew, had erected a charter of government which made the people the master, the government the servant...

...not with the government over the people...

...As James Madison, the father of our Constitution and first proclaimer of most of our most cherished freedoms, declared in 1794: "If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power lies with the people over the government...