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May
8, 2003
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Mickey
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May
10, 2003
Season of the Witch Hunts
One on One with
Joe McCarthy
by WILLIAM MANDEL
In 1953 the countryside seen from a train window
between Washington and New York was still chiefly pastoral. But
in March the bare branches of the trees, the dark brown of the
fields, the black of the asphalt roads, and the cold gray of
the sky, deepened by early nightfall, corresponded to the mood
of the nation: gloomy and fearful.
I felt the same way. I should have been
elated. I had gone to Washington in response to a subpoena from
Sen. Joe McCarthy and had been determined to do as much as any
single person could to destroy him. Now, convinced that I had
damaged the senator severely, I was scared. I was sure he knew
that he had lost, and badly. This was borne out by a personal
attack on me in his newspaper column five weeks later.
I had had no doubt before being called,
and even less after confronting him personally on consecutive
days, that his was truly a fascist mentality. And fascists use
physical violence to dispose of their opponents. He was immensely
powerful, having brought the State Department to its knees and
having already attacked the former head of the country's armed
forces, Gen. Marshall. Prime Minister Clement Atlee of England
said to Parliament that year that he sometimes wondered whether
it was Gen. Eisenhower or Joe McCarthy who was president of the
United States.
Back in New York that evening, I learned
that the most sensational parts of my attack on him had been
carried on national TV news, in addition to the complete live
coverage during the day. Later, NBC pre-empted its very popular
radio show, "Music At Midnight," to rebroadcast forty-five
minutes of my testimony. The next day words of mine were front-page
news in the New York Times, which wrote: "Mr. McCarthy reddened
at times." Time Magazine wrote: "The week's most agitated
performance came from a blazing-eyed New York advertising copywriter."
It is a mark of the times that Time chose to identify me not
as a scholar subpoenaed because a book of his was in the State
Department's Overseas Libraries, the target of McCarthy's investigation,
but by the work to which I had to turn for a livelihood after
I was blacklisted.
I went into work the day after the hearing,
and my employer at a Madison Avenue advertising agency told me
to stay home for a few weeks, and that my salary would continue.
When I got home, a telegram had arrived from a fellow-employee
with whom I had never had any association except at work. It
read: "Dear Bill. The following is my telephone number Plaza
35198. The following is my address 153 East 51st St. If I can
be of any service to you please call. Anna Santoro."
I began receiving letters from total
strangers who had gotten my address from media reports as well
as from acquaintances. Most reflected enthusiasm that someone
had finally taken McCarthy down. A few were antagonistic. One,
signed by a woman with a Ukrainian name in Chicago, was sent
to me care of the McCarthy Committee, which dutifully forwarded
it. It contained a very interesting sentence: "You can see
there is a temptation to get violent with your type of people."
It was not a stupid letter, and had some very pertinent things
to say about lack of civil liberties in the Soviet Union, the
country my sinful book had dealt with.
A man in Richmond, Indiana hoped I wouldn't
lose my job, and wanted to write my employer. I provided the
firm's address. He did write and send me a carbon copy. In a
large, bold, sweeping, almost 19th-century hand, he made a particularly
fine statement about the nature of the fight against McCarthyism.
He wrote that I had defended my: "basic American privilege
of writing books and putting into them what he feels is the objective
truth, as he sees it. To me this attitude (freedom to think and
speak), plus the bravery and courage to defend it, constitutes
the true American way of life...that the authors of our Constitution
and Bill of Rights envisioned." The man also hoped that
my "way of making a living would not suffer."
A lot of good it did me. My employer
canvassed all his clients -- Parke-Davis, then the major drug
manufacturer, Parkside Laboratories, Heublein, which was nonmusical
-- and asked whether I should be fired. None supported doing
that, but neither did they urge my retention. They wanted no
problems with McCarthy. Who knows what he might investigate next?
After my month's paid leave, I was fired and paid another month's
salary as severance pay, although I had been there only a year.
Conscience money.
My main satisfaction lies in what I know
I did for people in what Lillian Hellman dubbed "the scoundrel
time." From Shreveport, Louisiana, a Jack Hooper wrote me:
"Any time that I become depressed, due to the operations
of the Nazi Fascist McCarthy Committee, I play your record and
truly get a 'lift'." I had made an LP from an excellent
wire recording a friend had made from the NBC rebroadcast. Ordinary
citizens did not yet possess tape recorders.
Those who heard the proceedings or read
the news stories had no way of knowing what went on in my heart
and mind in preparing for it. When I was handed the subpoena
by a process server who rang my doorbell at about noon on a Saturday,
I was packing an overnight bag in preparation for a lecture that
evening at a synagogue in New Haven. I had been invited to speak
by the rabbi who married Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. The
subpoena demanded that I appear on Monday at 2 p.m. How was I
to find a lawyer in Washington from New York City on a Saturday
afternoon? I was lucky. I had a lawyer uncle who knew the right
man in Washington.
I weighed the alternatives: should I
go to New Haven to carry out my speaking engagement? The purpose
of such subpoenas was to silence the people to whom they were
served. I went to New Haven, spoke, came home, and spent Sunday
making notes. With a wife and three young children, six, eight,
and thirteen, I wanted to avoid a contempt citation and jail
sentence. Every additional person who went to jail added to the
atmosphere of fear of McCarthy himself and McCarthyism practices.
So did everyone who stayed out of jail by caving in. I wanted
to discredit McCarthy and yet avoid imprisonment.
I knew that the hearing would be televised.
I was perfectly aware and, from his behavior, so was he, that
this was theater. My job was to be the dignified scholar, which
I was, and prosecutor when I got a chance. The senator knew that
people were very dubious about his methods, and wanted to look
and sound judicial.
I feared that my lawyer's office would
be bugged, because he had represented many "unfriendly witnesses,"
as we were called. Therefore I wrote out my questions in clear
longhand and handed them to him instead of stating them out loud.
I asked whether I could query McCarthy about the relative size
of his savings and salary, which I did in the public hearing,
to good effect. My list of possible challenges to him continued:
Why did you defend Nazis who murdered U.S. prisoners of war?
Why do you want war with China?
I could not refuse to answer a question
if it flowed logically from my own answer to a previous question.
This would be a chess game. I had to avoid checkmate -- being
put in a position where I would have to name other individuals
or go to jail for refusing to do so.
I was called as one of the witnesses
on the first day of an investigation into how books by bad people
like me and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who was subpoenaed to appear on
the same day, found their way into U.S. Embassy Information Office
libraries overseas. DuBois' attorney, former Congressman Vito
Marcantonio, who had cast the sole vote against the Korean War,
called McCarthy's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, beforehand and asked:
"Do you really want the whole Negro population down on the
neck of the committee?" DuBois' subpoena was withdrawn.
My barely teenage daughter and her boyfriend
of the same age had their own personal FBI tail, presumably on
the assumption that they might lead them to the boy's father,
whom the Communist Party had sent underground when it was made
illegal by the McCarran and Smith acts and trials of its national
and state leaders. This terror had serious effects upon Phyllis
and Keith, her husband-to-be, all their lives.
Prior to my McCarthy hearing, a telephone
caller identified himself as an FBI agent and asked me to come
down to see them. I said no. They made further attempts to see
me, at home. The fright it caused in our children was expressed
in irrational fears for years to come, requiring a period of
hospitalization for one of them.
I take great pleasure in the fact that
I have written this piece at the request of my daughter. She
wants no repetition of the McCarthy era under the Patriot Act
and Homeland Security today.
***
The title of my autobiography, SAYING
NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is based on my demolition
of Sen. Joe McCarthy and later of HUAC in hearings of 1953 and
1960. It is a history of how the American people fought to defend
and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 85) employing the
form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved
in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts
to prevent war with the USSR and Cuba, civil rights South and
North, women's liberation [my late wife appears on 50 pages],
37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk radio, of
whose previous existence I had been unaware], civil liberties,
and opposition to anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see
my testimony before the three different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era
witch-hunting committees [used in six films and a play]) on my website, I am the author
of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC Berkeley,
and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at
Stanford's Hoover Institution. The book may be ordered through
all normal sources. For an autographed copy, send me $24 at 4466
View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
William Mandel can
be reached at: wmmmandel@earthlink.net
Yesterday's
Features
Julie
Hilden
When It's a Crime to Visit Your Son
Mickey
Z.
Partisan Protests?
Mark
Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does
David Lindorff
The Coming Senior Revolution
Abu
Spinoza
The Detention of Dr. Huda Ammash
Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
Norman
Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security
State: a Dispatch from Brazil
Stew Albert
Pushovers
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/08
Website
of the Day
Department of Sexual Security
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