American Reds (1997-2023)

In my last years as a columnist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the early years at the Seattle Times, I made an effort to review books about Communists in America during and after World War II, including books about Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon and Elizabeth Bentley. The story I’d grown up with was that the Communist trials were all a “witch hunt,” and I wanted to correct that story. (The photo above is of a Communist rally in New York City in 1931.)

My first crack at this topic was a review of Whittaker Chambers: A Biography by Sam Tanenhaus, published by Random House in 1997. My review ran on April 9, 1997 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where I was a business reporter and columnist.

“Communist conspiracy” is still a phrase with the ring of paranoia about it. Thank Joe McCarthy for that. Because of him, the Communist hunt of the late 1940s has gone into the popular mind entirely as a witch hunt, neatly summed up under the label “McCarthyism.” In fact, all of McCarthy’s bluster didn’t expose one real risk to the nation. But Whittaker Chambers did.

Chambers was the accuser of Alger Hiss. The Hiss case, which raged from 1948 to 1950, was one of the great trials of the century.

The central figure was Chambers, a fearful and tortured figure, a fat man with rumpled, baggy suit and bad teeth. A senior editor of Time magazine in the 1940s, Chambers had lived a secret political (and sex) life in the 1930s. This none-too-appetizing figure appeared under the klieg lights of the House Un-American Activities Committee and accused the handsome, dapper, Harvard-educated Hiss, a former State Department official, of being a Communist.

Chambers named several former government officials as Communists, and said he had passed on their dues to Soviet agents. Most of the accused refused to testify; Hiss testified. To the cheers of the establishment, Hiss denied the accusations and sued Chambers for libel. Chambers raised the ante by accusing Hiss of having been a Communist spy.

Who would make such accusations? Why? In his new biography, Whittaker Chambers, historian Sam Tanenhaus has provided the fullest answer we’re likely to get. He portrays Chambers as a figure of deep but changing beliefs. Asked what was the point of he and Hiss destroying each other, Chambers said, “A religious age would have no difficulty at all in understanding this story.”

Tanenhaus sets the story in the atmosphere of the time. Chambers was in the underground beginning in the early 1930s when communism was a fresh, vital faith, yet to be compromised by Stalin’s show trials and the pact with Hitler. Chambers fingered his ex-conspirators in late 1940s when the Iron Curtain was falling over Europe and the Russians got the Bomb.

Tanenhaus does not flinch from historical judgment. Hiss was a Communist spy, he says, as were a whole cabal of Washington officials. Half a century after the Hiss trial, a historian who calls himself a secular liberal can admit Hiss’ guilt without any betrayal of his “side.”

Tanenhaus has written neither a liberal nor conservative book. Whittaker Chambers’ life was strange enough told straight: the weird family he grew up in, his bohemian youth, his descent into work as a Soviet spy. There follows Chambers’ fearful break with the underground and his attempt to redeem his secret past by using his position at Time magazine as a bully pulpit.

Much of this book retells the Hiss-Chambers case. It includes for the first time dialogue from the House Un-American Activities Committee’s closed sessions, declassified in 1974.

The book also covers Chambers’ life after the trials, including his quiet warnings about McCarthy and his reluctance to condemn McCarthy in public.

If McCarthy is the one who is remembered today, it is partly because he provided a simple lesson in civic morality. Whittaker Chambers’ story is a more complex tale of belief and redemption. Tanenhaus’s book tells it well.

By 2002, I had moved to the Seattle Times as a member of the editorial board. The next piece is a review of Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s The Spy Who Seduced America, published by Invisible Cities Press. It ran in the Times of Sept. 22, 2002.

Judith Coplon, 27, was arrested on the streets of New York on March 4, 1949. She was an analyst in the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Section. With her was Valentin Gubitschev, of the Soviet mission to the United Nations. In Coplon’s purse were sensitive government documents.

What was going on? Love, she said. Spying, the government said.

Thus began two of the sensational trials of the Cold War — trials of a woman the press called a cutie pie, a Mata Hari and the girl next door. This book is about those trials. At its conclusion it is about facts, but along the way, it is mainly about arguments, because the case offered by the government was entirely circumstantial.

Coplon did have a right to have the documents in her purse. She had not passed them to the Russian; the government said she had intended to do it.

Furthermore, the FBI had arrested her without a warrant, though agents could easily have obtained one.

In 1949, unlike today, wiretapping was illegal. In the first Coplon trial, a whole string of FBI agents claimed they had “no personal knowledge” of it. In the second trial, her defense attorney asked the question in a smarter way, and the truth came out. The FBI had been wiretapping people since FDR gave permission in May 1940, at the outset of World War II. It had wiretapped Coplon, including conversations with her attorney.

Did Coplon love the Russian? No, the government said; as evidence of her inconstancy, its attorneys said she had spent a weekend in a hotel room with another man. They told the story in open court in front of her mother, who was shocked.

The public was fascinated. The “girl next door” was more interesting than they had thought.

Like the trials of Alger Hiss and of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the case of Judy Coplon divided Americans along lines of political belief. One side saw Communist treachery. The other saw the government limiting political discourse by cooking up a case against a Jewish progressive from Brooklyn.

The last view has become standard. Popular culture has named this period “the McCarthy era” after the least cautious and most buffoonish of the anti-Communists. It has used the term “witch hunts,” which neatly suggests a hunt for something that did not exist.

But spies do exist. Through the story of the two trials, of the doddering judge who lets the defense attorney run wild, of the government’s fumbles and lies, Coplon’s innocence is never clear. It was always a leap of faith to believe she was carrying those documents as notes for a book.

This book’s two authors began their research with opposite assumptions. Thomas Mitchell, a former FBI agent, listened to some of the wiretaps. He writes, “I heard the panic, and, I was certain, the guilt in her voice.”

His wife, Marcia Mitchell, reasoned that if Coplon had really been a spy, the government would have brought a much stronger case.

And it could have. At the end of the book, the authors explain why it did not.

Coplon was a spy. In the 1990s, the government declassified intercepts of coded messages from the mid-1940s between Russian agents describing her in unmistakable terms. But the intercepts could not be used in the trial because it would have blown the cover of the government’s code-breaking. All of which explains why a half-baked case was presented with such insistence.

It was true that the Coplon case — and those against Hiss and the Rosenbergs — stigmatized left-wing views. But the case was not about that. It was about spying, and the spying, the authors conclude, was real.

This is a review of Lauren Kessler’s Clever Girl: Elizabeth Bentley, the Spy Who Ushered in the McCarthy Era, Harper, 2003. It ran in the Seattle Times of August 15, 2003.

In 1945, Elizabeth Bentley turned herself in to the FBI and claimed to be the courier for two Soviet spy rings. She accused dozens of mid-to-high-level employees of the Roosevelt-Truman administrations of spying — charges that were made public in 1947 before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Dubbed by the press as “the Red Spy Queen,” Bentley offered an intricate story but no tangible evidence. Her testimony sank a number of government careers, but resulted in only two convictions for perjury and none for spying.

Most of those she accused took the Fifth Amendment. One, a former adviser to FDR, ran to Colombia. One ran to Mexico. The most prominent accused, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, asserted his loyalty and two days later dropped dead of a heart attack. Another man denied everything and sued Bentley for slander.

Was she lying?

Many said so. In mainstream history, the rooting out of communists after World War II has been labeled “the McCarthy era,” and vilified for accusations against the innocent.

“What many came to believe,” writes biographer-historian Lauren Kessler, “was that communist subversion was a myth.” But it was no myth. She writes, “A `communist conspiracy’ did, in fact, exist.”

Bentley was in it. She was not lying. A secret FBI project called Venona had decoded diplomatic traffic between the Soviet embassy and Moscow during World War II. The Venona intercepts show that the people Bentley accused were spies. In this case, the liars were those who declared their innocence.

This book is Bentley’s story. She was a blue blood, a Connecticut Yankee with hardscrabble roots and a Vassar education. She had lived in Italy, where she got to know both amore and fascism, and returned with leanings to the left. Come the Depression, she was living in a tiny apartment in New York, eating off a hot plate and attending meetings of earnest communists.

Bentley slipped into being a spy by a kind of self-recruitment. Her KGB handler, Jacob Golos, became her partner “in bourgeois sin and Leninist bliss.” Bentley’s role was to travel regularly from New York to Washington and collect the pickings from her cadre of moles — war plans, weapons-production figures, diplomatic gossip, even the notes of columnist Walter Lippmann, courtesy of his secretary. As World War II went on, there was so much paper and film that she would come back with a shopping bag full.

Bentley’s informants, Kessler writes, “operated with the kind of offhand American informality that drove [the Soviets] crazy.” Golos tolerated it, but in 1943 Golos died in Bentley’s apartment. Bentley’s new handler wanted her out. He got his way, and in doing so wrecked the best spy network the Soviets ever had.

This is only the first half of the story. Then comes Bentley as FBI informant, then Red Spy Queen. It is also the story of Bentley’s relations with men, money, the bottle — and, at story’s end, an exasperated FBI. It was no easy life being what A.J. Liebling called “the queen bee of the informer set.” There was no salary in it, and little peace of mind.

Kessler’s story of Bentley the woman is superb, bringing to life the loneliness, the fear and the thrill of her life as spy and anti-spy. But Kessler shies from drawing political conclusions. “Clever Girl” is one of several post-Venona retellings of the 1940s spy cases, which include Marcia and Thomas Mitchell’s “The Spy Who Seduced America” (2002) and Sam Tanenhaus’ “Whittaker Chambers” (1997). Together, this new history demands that our handed-down story of “the McCarthy era” change.

That does not deny that there were law-abiding people accused of being communists (some of whom were) and hounded out of their jobs. But the people named in this book were guilty of more than being communists. They were spies for Josef Stalin. Most of them got off, in the midst of a supposedly harsh time, with nothing more than losing their government jobs. It ought to be remembered now that those who defended them were factually wrong, and those who sought to expose them, including Elizabeth Bentley and J. Edgar Hoover, had their facts right.

This is a review of G. Edward White’s Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars (Oxford University Press, 2004). It ran in the Seattle Times, June 6, 2004.

In the last half of the 1940s, America was worried about communists. Our wartime ally, Stalin, was imposing communism in Eastern Europe, and Mao Zedong was spreading it in China.

In Washington, D.C., the House Un-American Activities Committee, which included a congressman named Richard Nixon, was taking testimony about government officials being Reds.

One of them was Alger Hiss, who had been undersecretary of state in the Roosevelt administration during World War II. The accuser was a man who claimed to have been a Soviet courier in the 1930s.

Other government officials were accused and acted in a way that seemed guilty. A former White House adviser fled to Colombia. A State Department official fled to Hungary. Many stayed but refused to testify. In contrast, Hiss acted like an innocent man. He went right to the committee and declared his innocence. And when the accusation got really serious — that he had been a spy — he continued to act like an innocent man.

Convicted of perjury, he went to federal prison for 3-½ years, got out and still acted like an innocent man. Always there was an aura of ambiguity around him.

In the 1990s, researchers found documents in which Russian operatives refer to Hiss as their agent, sometimes under the code name “Ales” and sometimes under the name Hiss. “Alger Hiss can no longer be seen as a figure of ambiguity,” says author G. Edward White, law professor at the University of Virginia.

White’s book retells the story of Hiss’ life with the ambiguity stripped away. That Hiss spent his life trying to clear his name; that he wrecked his marriage over it; that he enlisted his son in it, creating a book in which he told a lie and put his son’s name on it — all this looks different now that we know Hiss was faking it.

Hiss’ defenders also appear in a different light. “Alger Hiss fooled a large number of people for many years,” writes White. “It is worth reflecting on how that happened.”

In hindsight, the case brought against Hiss in 1949 and 1950 looks remarkably good. Hiss’ accuser, Whittaker Chambers, offered secret State Department documents from 1938 that he said had been supplied by Hiss. Experts said the copies had been made on the Hiss family typewriter. For 50 years, Hiss spun a story that the government had reverse-engineered a typewriter in order to frame him.

One of the strengths of White’s book is to show how patience and public relations overcame the evidence. Hiss merely had to wait for a generation that had never heard the case against him. They saw him as a victim of Nixon. They liked his politics so they accepted his innocence. Besides, he acted innocent.

In 1978 came Perjury, a book that should have pulled down the Hiss tent. The author, Allen Weinstein, had begun his research by expecting to side with Hiss but changed his mind. Weinstein proclaimed Hiss guilty, reviewing the old evidence, and some new evidence, in a solid case. Hiss’ campaign was set back but not wrecked.

White shows how Weinstein, an academic unaccustomed to partisan combat, undercut himself by being drawn into a fight with the very partisan editor of The Nation, and became labeled as a partisan himself. Weinstein also made a mistake on a footnote, got sued for libel and had to pay. These missteps allowed people to dismiss him.

The ambiguity around Hiss remained. In 1983, PBS produced a dark and intriguing four-part reenactment called Concealed Enemies, with Edward Herrmann playing Hiss. Deliberately ambiguous, the teleplay left open the possibility that Hiss had been framed.

Hiss died in 1996, maintaining his innocence to the end. But the evidence was overwhelming that he was not.

The strength of this book is its reinterpretation of 50 years of politics and public psychology. The weakness is that White’s portrayal of Hiss’ psychology “behind the looking-glass” can be deduced but not verified. “Hiss quite naturally left no candid record,” the author writes. That is the problem of writing a book about a man who presented a false front to the world. You can write about the front and its falseness but never quite see behind the front. In that sense only, the ambiguity remains.

Apart from the cases of Soviet spies was the story of the Hollywood Ten and the charge that Hollywood had been influenced by pro-communist screenwriters. The following is a combination of a review of Red Star Over Hollywood(Encounter Books, 2005) by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh and Mission to Moscow, a Warner Brothers film from 1943. It ran in Liberty, October 2005.

Propaganda in the movies will always be with us. The movies I saw as a boy contained a fair amount of it: I still enjoy The Longest Day (1962) but wince at the mini-speeches. And that was made two decades after the war. Consider some of the movies made during World War II: even Casablanca (1942), which is canonized as a classic about old lovers, ends with the conversion of a cynical Humphrey Bogart who sacrifices his private love for the war against Hitler.

Mission to Moscow (1943) is a classic of a different kind: of propaganda for the Soviet Union. It is difficult to find a copy of it, and for a good reason. It deals with Soviet history from 1936 to 1939, a period few people care about now, and it lies about the history it does present. That it was made at all is a telling comment on the political atmosphere in 1943, when Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was our gallant ally. It is the most pro-Soviet movie ever produced by Hollywood.

This docudrama is based on the book of the same name by Joseph Davies. President Franklin Roosevelt named Davies, a liberal businessman, ambassador to the USSR from 1936 to 1938. Davies saw himself as a straight shooter, untainted by the sophistries of diplomats. He was totally taken in. He came home and wrote his book, which portrayed the USSR as a wonderful country to have as an ally. The book hit the market at the right moment — three weeks after Pearl Harbor — and became a bestseller.

Jack Warner agreed to make it into a movie, in furtherance of the war effort. The screenwriter was Howard Koch, a leftist who had co-written Casablanca. The “technical adviser” — actually political adviser — was a communist, Jay Leyda, who had made a political pilgrimage to Soviet Russia. But it’s not as if they twisted Davies’ message. The former ambassador had an unusual control over the script, and appears at the beginning of the movie to endorse it.

Mission to Moscow tells at least four big lies: that social conditions in the Soviet Union were good; that the show trials of 1936-38 were genuine; that Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler because France and Britain forced his hand; and that he was a friend of the United States.

In Mission to Moscow, everything about the Soviet Union is good. The food is tasty, the soldiers tough and the women capable. (The first Soviet woman we see is a smiling train engineer.) Mrs. Davies goes shopping at a cosmetics store with Mrs. Molotov and compares the store to Fifth Avenue in New York. Foreign diplomats, playing billiards in Moscow, pooh-pooh the Five-Year Plan — “big plan, small fulfillment” — but Davies goes on a tour of smelters, dams and collective farms to see for himself, and is impressed.

Davies meets an American engineer who tells him that the Soviets have done great things. There is one problem, though: an epidemic of sabotage. This is said in the movie by the American, giving it credibility. The movie then shows a magnesium plant in flames, and the factory manager saying it is sabotage.

By that time, Stalin’s government had held highly publicized campaigns against “wreckers” for several years, and they had been denounced in the West as fakes. Davies should have recognized these fantastic charges as bunk. A diplomat would have known it, and the character in the movie who says this is a diplomat — but it is the Japanese ambassador. The message: to doubt the show trials is to swallow an Axis line.

The audience has already seen the Soviet secret police, who follow Davies’ car openly, with no more skill than small-town American cops. His response is to call to them in jocular fashion: “Don’t you GPUs get any sleep?” He also takes it lightly when the Italians find a microphone in their embassy. He refuses to allow a search in the U.S. embassy, saying, “Let them listen. Then we’ll be friends that much faster.” When the GPU arrests old Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek, and the secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda, the audience has been cued to see them just as Russian cops.

Bukharin, Radek and Yagoda are put on trial. They confess: they are tools of a plot by Leon Trotsky to seize power.

“Our plan” says Bukharin, “Was to seize the Kremlin, financed by the fascist governments.”

Was there pressure to confess? “None whatsoever,” Bukharin says. Davies believes it, and the movie audience is urged to believe it, too.

After the trial, Davies watches the 1938 May Day parade in Red Square and takes satisfaction in the show of Soviet military power. “At least one European nation with no aggressive intentions is ready for whatever comes,” he says. “And thank God for it.”

No aggressive intentions? Why, then, in August 1939 did Stalin ally himself with Hitler, annexing the eastern third of Poland? Why did he order an attack on Finland in November 1939, demanding territory? Why in 1940 did he annex Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and the eastern reaches of Romania? These things and more had happened by the time Mission to Moscow was filmed.

In the movie, Davies has an interview with Stalin (played by Walter Huston), who says, “We feel more friendly to the government of the United States than any other nation.” Stalin intimates that he would like to ally with the West against Germany, but that “reactionary elements in England” won’t cooperate. “We may be forced to protect ourselves in another way,” he says.

On his way home, Davies stops in Britain to visit Winston Churchill, who is not yet prime minister. He tells Churchill he is fearful that the democracies will drive Stalin into Hitler’s arms.

Thus the Hitler-Stalin pact is Britain’s fault.

And the invasion of Finland? The Soviets needed some strategic pieces of territory to defend against Hitler, and the Finns refused to swap some other land for it. The Soviets had to take it in order to defend themselves.

About the Baltic states and Romania, nothing. It is already forgotten.

The movie Mission to Moscow (which appeared in the same year as Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead) ends by asking the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” A voice answers, authoritatively: “Yes, you are.” A chorus sings, “You are your brother’s keeper; now and forever you are.”

The end.

Was there a substantial communist influence in Hollywood? Yes. In Mission to Moscow, they showed their colors. Song of Russia (1943) was another wartime suck-up to Soviets, as Ayn Rand testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947. So was The North Star (1943), a movie about Ukrainian partisans written by Lillian Hellman, who admitted being a party member from 1938 to 1940, and was later glorified by Jane Fonda in the movie Julia (1977).

Ronald and Allis Radosh’s new book Red Star Over Hollywood chronicles the Hollywood reds. It has an entire chapter on Mission to Moscow. It also lists other movies with pro-communist portrayals: Hangmen Also Die (1943), written by Bertolt Brecht and John Wexley; Action in the North Atlantic (1943), written by John Howard Lawson; and Cloak and Dagger (1946), written by Ring Lardner Jr. and Alvah Bessie. Lardner, Bessie and Lawson had all been Communist Party members and would later be among the Hollywood Ten. Brecht, hauled in front of HUAC at the same time as the Ten, claimed to be a mere anti-fascist, but soon after moved to the German Democratic Republic.

Besides these, Communists and fellow travelers wrote screenplays for a number of movies — Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Joe Smith: American, Watch on the Rhine, Sahara, The Great Dictator, Action in the North Atlantic — not known as propaganda films. Red Star Over Hollywood focuses more on the Hollywood communists’ allegiances rather than their work, leaving them open to the criticism, “So what? So a handful of movies were pro-Soviet during the time when the USSR was our ally. Big deal.”

I suspect the influence of the Hollywood reds was wider than this book documents. For many years after the war, there were far more anti-Nazi movies than anti-communist movies. But that is not a thread followed here.

The Radoshes are more interested in leftists and their political connections. Ronald Radosh was a red-diaper baby who went to communist schools and summer camps, became an academic, opposed the Vietnam War and went on pilgrimages to Cuba and Nicaragua. He began turning rightward in the late 1970s, when his investigation of the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg unexpectedly convinced him that Julius was, in fact, a Soviet spy. He made the case in The Rosenberg File (1983). The reaction to his book from the left — that the facts didn’t matter, that people had to believe the Rosenbergs were innocent, whether they were or not — moved him rightward, until a decade or so later he had left the left altogether. He chronicled his political odyssey in Commies (2001).

The most fascinating part of Red Star Over Hollywood is about the fall of the Hollywood reds. Though the HUAC finished them off, the Radoshes show that the reds were already in deep trouble. The main reason was geopolitical: from 1941 to 1945, Stalin was our ally against Hitler. It was OK to praise Stalin and Soviet Russia then; and the Communist Party, U.S.A., ingratiated itself by supporting the U.S. war effort and President Franklin Roosevelt. That put them on the side of liberals and patriotic Americans. But in 1945, Stalin broke with the West. The new communist line was that President Harry Truman was encouraging fascism and war against the innocent Soviet Union, and should be opposed from the left.

Political groups in which liberals and communists coexisted began to break apart. In June 1946, actress Olivia de Havilland, a liberal, was supposed to deliver a speech for one such group at a rally in Seattle. She was given a text written by communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, later one of the Hollywood Ten. The speech condemned “the drive of certain interests toward a war against the Soviet Union.” She refused to give it; instead she gave her own speech, telling liberals they had to distance themselves from Moscow.

The battle was also fought in the labor movement, between anti-communist AFL unions and pro-communist CIO unions. In 1946 came jurisdictional battle for Hollywood backlot employees between these two forces. The anti-communist union won, narrowly. In 1946 came another fight, which the anti-communists won decisively. This was the fight in which Robert Montgomery and Ronald Reagan persuaded members of the Screen Actors Guild to cross the pro-communist union’s picket lines. More than anything else, the Radoshes write, losing these union battles brought “the golden era of the Hollywood Communists…to an end.”

A battle was also fought inside the Communist Party over politics and art. The Party’s new line in 1945 put more pressure on working screenwriters. Some buckled under; the book’s saddest story is of the artistic rebellion of Albert Maltz, the Party’s “struggle session” against him, and his “abject self-abasement.” Other followers broke away. One was Robert Rossen, writer, producer and director of All the King’s Men (1949). After his picture appeared, the Party hacks called him to a struggle session: his movie, based on the life of Huey Long, was read as an attack on the dictatorship of Stalin. Rossen stood up and said, “Stick the whole Party up your ass,” walked out and never came back. In 1953, he named 50 names to HUAC.

HUAC played a role by subpoenaing the testimony of the leftist writers and producers known as the Hollywood Ten, but it didn’t do so until 1947, when, the Radoshes write, “the Communists’ position in Hollywood was precarious.” By then, Eastern Europe was going Communist and Berlin was under Soviet blockade. In 1948, the nation would be riveted by the Hiss-Chambers spy case, and former Vice President Henry Wallace, the only pro-Soviet candidate for president, would get 2 percent of the vote against a triumphant Truman. In 1949 China would fall to Mao Zedong and in 1950 America would be at war with reds in Korea. No one in Hollywood was going to make any movies like Song of Russia or Mission to Moscow.

The Ten, all writers and directors, were sent to prison for short terms — not for being Communists or pro-communists, but for contempt of Congress. They had refused to answer questions about their Party membership. In fact, they had been so snotty that they alienated their liberal supporters, who had organized a group to defend their First Amendment rights. Humphrey Bogart, the most prominent member of the liberal group, disavowed them afterward. They hugely embarrassed the studios, who blacklisted them and other reds.

What of the blacklist?

“It is right to condemn the blacklist,” the Radoshes write. “It was wrong to deprive artists of their livelihood because of their political views.” I’m not so sure about that; a private blacklist is private business, and people who hate communism may not want to give reds their trade. Probably at that moment in history, I would have been happy to boycott commies. A Dalton Trumbo, of course, could still get work under an assumed name, because he was highly skilled. A John Howard Lawson, party-line enforcer and second-rate writer, would be ruined. Well, too bad.

Congress should have kept out of it; as Ronald Reagan said to HUAC, the best way for opponents to combat communism was to “expose their lies when we came across them.” Reagan, to his credit, opposed outlawing the Communist Party. “As a citizen,” he said, “I would hate to see any political party outlawed on the basis of its political ideology.” But there was political hay to be harvested by the resurgent Republicans, and they did it. The harvesting turned the reds into victims. The story was created that is now culturally dominant: that the 1940s the heroic leftists were run out of Hollywood by a right-wing witch hunt.

There is some truth in that: the reds were run out of Hollywood, and the right wing gave them the final kick. But not the only kick. And the Hollywood reds were not witches, or any other sort of mythical being. They were quite real.

After this came out, I got a message from a woman in Oregon. Could I make her a copy of Mission to Moscow? Her father was an extra in it, and she’d never been able to find a copy of it. I made her a copy.

It’s a rotten movie.

The serious summer movie of 2023 was Oppenheimer, a biopic about the Father of the Atom Bomb. The following is from a review I wrote for the web page PostAlley.org.

Much of the film is about how in the mid-1950s, Oppenheimer was accused of having been a Communist and was stripped of his security clearance. The film does show that in the late 1930s, when you could be a Communist and a New Dealer at the same time, and American Communists were loud opponents of fascism, Oppenheimer had, in fact, been a Communist sympathizer. It showed that his first wife was a party member who tried, and failed, to get him to join. It shows him resisting Gen. Groves’ security measures — because Groves is trying to corral scientists, and they resent military interference in their work. In all this, the film does mention that Oppenheimer’s colleague Klaus Fuchs (who was not an American) was, in fact, a Soviet spy. It shows Oppenheimer being asked by an American colleague to slip information to the Soviets, and declining — but not reporting the incident to Gen. Groves.

The film defends Oppenheimer as a loyal American who was hounded out of a position of respect and trust. That’s accurate. The Red Scare was a shameful episode in American history because it was overdone. The shame part is a lesson that Hollywood, and academia, especially like to tell — because they were targets of red hunters, and their politics have long leaned to the left. What we don’t get out of Hollywood are the stories in which the “scare” was justified: the big Communist spy cases of the 1940s and early 1950s, especially the cases against Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Those stories have a different lesson — that some American Communists were, in fact, spies for Stalin; that when they were publicly accused, the liberals and progressives of the day defended them. And on that point the liberals and progressives were wrong.

If you doubt that, read the books that have been written about all these cases — or Beverly Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, published last year. In the Hiss case, for example, Gage writes, “Everyone took the side that best fit their own assumptions” — the liberals saying Hiss was innocent and the conservatives saying he was guilty. And about Hiss, the preponderance of the evidence is that the conservatives were right. And about Oppenheimer, they were not.

The Hiss case, in particular, would make a fabulous three-hour movie of the same rank as Oppenheimer. Better than Oppenheimer, I think. The only attempt to tell that story that that I know of was the four-part, 3-hour, 39-minute TV miniseries called Concealed Enemies. It was produced in 1984 by American Playhouse and shown on PBS. It has Peter Riegert as a worried and calculating Richard Nixon, Edward Hermann as a self-assured and outraged Alger Hiss and John Harkins as Hiss’s long-suffering and deeply troubled accuser, Whittaker Chambers. Concealed Enemies was produced before anyone had support from FBI and Soviet archives that Hiss was in fact a Soviet agent, which is now conceded by most historians. Concealed Enemies tries to play the story right down the middle. In hindsight, it was too credulous regarding Hiss, but it is still a gripping account — dark and foreboding, loaded with personality and drama.

Concealed Enemies won an Emmy award. On the Internet Movie Database it is rated 8.3 out of 10 — but by only 49 people, because it never came out on VHS or DVD. In 2003, a user wrote on its IMDb page, “Years ago this excellent and riveting mini-series was shown on late night Australian TV for the first and last time. Why is it never shown anymore and why isn’t it available on video? If an Emmy award doesn’t justify showing something of this quality more than once what does?” Twenty years later, it’s still a good question.

Regarding the ‘Red scare” period, Hollywood gives us Trumbo (2015, IMDb 7.4, rated by 83,000 people), in which Brian Cranston plays a famous screenwriter who was blacklisted for being a Communist. (Trumbo was a master of his craft; he later was the principal screenwriter for Spartacus (1960)). When Hollywood makes a movie about the anti-Communist period it most often concerns people who were falsely accused (like Oppenheimer) or who were accurately accused but were no threat to national security (like Trumbo). To Hollywood, the “Red scare” was a witch hunt — a term that implies that it was the pursuit of an imaginary danger.

But in some big, important cases, it was not imaginary at all: the cases of Hiss, Coplon, and Rosenberg especially, but also Elizabeth Bentley, Julian Wadleigh, Harry Dexter White and others. In Concealed Enemies, Wadleigh (played by Frank Maraden) nervously admits to passing State Department documents to the Soviets in the late 1930s. But the Communists were fighting fascism then, he says in a tormented voice, in the civil war in Spain — and nobody else was. And in World War II, the Soviets were our allies.

My memory of the Wadleigh character in Concealed Enemies is that he sounded not too different from Oppenheimer, except that Oppenheimer was innocent and Wadleigh was not. Each story is true. Hollywood tells us one and not the other.