Witch Hunt, with Witches

...But Crum was really addicted to commotion and politics, to the overdrive life of high-level campaigning, to his view of himself as a crusading Noemie Emery writes often of culture and politics...

...What really is enough to make you puke is that in the face of this and many other revelations, no such confession has come from the Hollywood Left...

...The Star, the left-wing tabloid he was trying to publish, took a mortal blow when he endorsed Truman over Henry Wallace...

...It was when he agreed to defend the Hollywood Nineteen (later the Ten) in their defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee that Bartley Crum walked into the buzzsaw between them, a buzzsaw that cost him his peace, his health, his illusions, some of his clients, some of his honor, and later—it seems likely— his life...

...Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer was not "pilloried for his friendship with [Haakon] Chevalier," the left-wing professor of literature, nor was Chevalier pilloried for his political theories...

...The ideal solution would have been to have let the first group alone, to go on being fatuous, while the second was punished for its deeds, not its thoughts...

...In books of this kind, there is a Fitzgerald sense of having been damned and beautiful, and, sure enough, the flap copy compares Crum to Gatsby...

...To this time, Crum's political life had been happy...

...hero...

...But they were not irrelevant to the way that he was treated by them...

...One problem in dealing with this book and this era is that there are in them two kinds of Reds...

...The Communist lawyers on the legal team held meetings without him, took instructions from Moscow, forced on him a policy of confrontation and secrecy, and frustrated the civil-rights defense he planned to make...

...A Capraesque soul in the wrong kind of movie, Crum was destroyed in part by his government's agencies...

...Many things done were indeed witch hunts...

...Through a campaign in the 1930s for Earl Warren, he became plugged in to the grid of California state politics and afterwards was never out of it...

...But every now and then, there was a witch...

...Her father, Bartley Crum, was a Hollywood lawyer serving corporate clients and film stars like Rita Hayworth and Montgomery Clift, fond of the nice things their high fees could bring him...

...But Reagan, as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, had run into Communists at a time when infiltration of unions was considered so serious that people like Rep...

...He thought of it as telling the truth," writes Bosworth...

...It is not also, it seems, the forte of his daughter, who makes some startling errors of judgment...

...Crum Goes to Washington— turned into film noir all too quickly...

...While HUAC and Hoover are hardly innocent, other parties emerge as equally guilty...

...But who he brings to mind more is Dr...

...If there's nothing to hide, then why hide it...

...and Truman against Dewey and Wallace in 1948...

...But also by his clients and friends...

...His view of himself as a populist hero— Mr...

...that Reagan in fact was right when they weren't...

...But this sort of discrimination was the forte of no one—not of HUAC, which treated as criminals many people who were merely silly, nor of left-wing propagandists, who treated all Communists as martyrs to the First Amendment cause...

...his belief that a people so scientifically advanced had to be civilized was wrong...

...Because they were, as this tragic book tells us...

...It was enough to make you puke," Bosworth quotes one of the Nineteen as saying about Reagan's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee...

...there is, it appears, a matched set of villains, who are as one in their ruthlessness, their disregard for the law and for decency, and their lack of interest in the individual, his rights and his interests, when these conflict with their special agendas...

...His political crush was Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940...

...His daughter, who adores him, and has never recovered from his death, has set out now to tell us his story in Anything Your Little Heart Desires...

...Bosworth does not add that this unlovely creature has been vindicated by history, and the dapper Hiss exposed as a liar and spy...

...It may not be the story Bartley Crum's daughter thought she was writing...

...For years, he laughed off those labels...

...Crum was also savaged when he advised one of the Ten who recanted, and later, when he gave a few names—of people already known to be Communists—as a desperation gesture to the FBI...

...Crum served as a go-between for Willkie and Franklin Roosevelt, and later campaigned in 1944 for Roosevelt, himself no unglamorous figure...

...These things all add up to a fairly false picture...

...Whittaker Chambers is described only as "an overweight depressive with appallingly bad teeth [who] had confessed to spying for Russia" and accused Alger Hiss of doing the same thing...

...If [they] told the truth . . . the conspiracy idea would melt away...

...In a statement written years later, he said he believed that "progress lies in the free exercise of individual energy . . . in the ultimate freedom of all individuals and groups from totalitarian oppression . . . [that] the power of government . . . should be used for the purpose of maintaining the conditions within which individual enterprises could thrive...

...Petersburg, containing victims of Stalin's 1938 purges...

...But the reason he agreed to name (a few) names was the same one as when he agreed to defend the Ten (or Nineteen) in the first place...

...There is the obligatory swipe at Ronald Reagan, who, Bosworth implies, collaborated in a reign of terror...

...That they supported a vicious regime does not seem to disturb them, nor does the fact— revealed in this book and others— that their tactics in domestic politics were as nasty as those of the worst of their enemies...

...Bartley Crum's innocent and highly individualistic view of human rights collided with the agenda of both the far Right and the Communist party, both of which used him for roadkill...

...In 1948, he was still telling friends that "Communist infiltration . . . could be handled," at a time when people like Eleanor Roosevelt were forming Americans for Democratic Action (Communists excluded) because they had learned from experience that it could not...

...As this book makes clear, Crum was hired entirely to sanitize their proceedings, used to get them good press, and raise funds from the public, while on matters of strategy he was completely outvoted, overruled, and then ignored...

...Crum's troubles began not with them, but with the inevitable contacts with the Hollywood Left, then as now a hotbed of sanctimony and atrocious political judgment...

...As Bosworth explains, "He supported the rights of his Communist colleagues while he in no way defended their policies, which were completely irrelevant...

...But it is the one she relates...

...As the Washington Post reported, "More than 41,100 people, many of them among the elite who disappeared during the Great Terror, were shot and buried at the site...

...But it was the collapse of the Star, the persecution by the FBI, and the vilification by those he had defended that turned his golden life darker, brought on the depressions and the desperate drugging, the failed suicide attempts, and finally, the successful one in December 1959...

...Roosevelt in 1944 against Dewey...

...Crum was an old-fashioned political liberal who supported Willkie against Roosevelt in 1940...

...For this, he was called a scab and a traitor...

...Her _ mother, ominously called "Cutsie," was a onetime novelist addicted to shopping and adultery, sometimes with dangerous people...

...that his characterization of communism as the "Evil Empire" was only too flattering, as those who lived under it have been known to attest...

...That this was the opposite of the Communists' creed—in which the individual was seen to have little importance—did not stop him from trying to speak in Communists' favor when he thought that their rights were abused...

...No admission that their faith, if sincere, was misplaced and mistaken...

...It is a strange sort of book, one where the theme and the facts seem in conflict...

...It was surely not the forte of Bartley Crum, who regarded them rather as he did the Taft Republicans—as people with whom he had deep disagreements, but who were legitimate parts of the dialogue...

...After he saw a concentration camp in 1945, Charles Lindbergh had the grace to admit, at least in his journals, that his pre-war assessment of Germany had been mistaken...

...There, he was also attacked by the Left, when he broke ranks with "progressive" theology...

...eventually he stopped laughing, but by then it was too late...

...Earlier, Crum had shown signs of pill and alcohol dependency and a mild form of manic depression...

...John Kennedy eagerly joined Richard Nixon in combating this threat...

...readers defected, and he lost the backing of his most substantial patron, a radical heiress who gave a million-dollar grant to someone else...

...Some weeks after Bosworth's book was published, a mass grave was found outside St...

...Dick Diver, the protagonist of Tender Is the Night and another romantic consumer of parties and people, who was also used, used up, and then discarded, by people harder and crueler than he ever thought possible...

...Witch Hunt, with Witches The Story of Bartley Crum By Noemie Emery Like Brooke Hayward, whose book Haywire hers resembles, Patricia Bosworth barely survived a golden childhood filled with luxurious homes on both coasts, the company of famous and talented people, and parents perhaps too scintillating for their own or other people's good...

...For this association with people he disliked, distrusted, and who disregarded his input, he attracted the permanent attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who tapped his phones, had him followed, and made his life hellish, even years after the trials had ended, when he had relocated to New York...

...For years he was teased by friends for being 'used' by the Communist Party, for being a 'dupe,' " writes Crum's daughter...

...Like Hayward's, hers was also a two-suicide family—one sibling, one parent—filled also with booze, pills, manic depression, and a relentless search for the two poles of peace and excitement...

...Within this group was a smaller one, a conspiracy that worked for the Soviet Union in ways that went far beyond politics...

...One kind were people who went to meetings and sometimes raised money, but were not conspirators, except in their imaginations...

...Both got into trouble when Chevalier asked Oppenheimer to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, a form of speech not protected by the First Amendment...

...The story Bosworth seems to want to be telling—of a liberal destroyed by witch-hunting red-baiters, Ronald Reagan among them—is undermined and derailed by the facts she presents...