Naming Names

Naming Names

by Victor S. Navasky
Naming Names

Naming Names

by Victor S. Navasky

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Overview

Winner of the National Book Award: The definitive history of Joe McCarthy, the Hollywood blacklist, and HUAC explores the events behind the hit film Trumbo.

Drawing on interviews with over one hundred and fifty people who were called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee—including Elia Kazan, Ring Lardner Jr., and Arthur Miller—award-winning author Victor S. Navasky reveals how and why the blacklists were so effective and delves into the tragic and far-reaching consequences of Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts.
A compassionate, insightful, and even-handed examination of one of our country’s darkest hours, Naming Names is at once a morality play and a fascinating window onto a searing moment in American cultural and political history. 

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781480436213
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 10/01/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 498
Sales rank: 342,581
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Victor S. Navasky authored Naming Names, which won the National Book Award, and Kennedy Justice, a National Book Award finalist. For many years the editor of the Nation, and then its publisher, Navasky taught at a number of colleges and universities including Princeton University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he chaired the Columbia Journalism Review. He contributed articles and reviews to numerous magazines and journals of opinion, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a George Polk Award. Navasky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences up until his death in 2023 at the age of 90.

Read an Excerpt

Naming Names


By Victor S. Navasky

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1991 Victor S. Navasky
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-3621-3



CHAPTER 1

The Espionage Informer


By March 1946, when Winston Churchill made his famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, the cold war was already under way. "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent allowing 'police governments' to rule Eastern Europe," he said. Although his analysis was defensible, his speech had about it the air of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The years which followed saw the dialectic of escalating suspicions, mistrust, and armaments speeding up. The Russians rejected U.S. aid. The United States announced the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan of economic and military aid to stop Communism. The Russians rejected the American offer to neutralize the "secret" of the atomic bomb through international controls and instead exploded one of their own. The diplomat-scholar George Kennan, writing as Mr. X, elaborated a doctrine of containment of Soviet Communism, a notion that guided American foreign policy for the next decade. The Russians blocked traffic to and from Berlin and appeared to be suppressing one East European government after another. The United States joined what was euphemistically called a "police action" against North Korea after its army had crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea.

Revisionist historians argue that the roots of Soviet actions lie more in national fears going back to Peter the Great than in the ideological imperatives of Marx and Engels, that its moves in Eastern Europe might be more usefully understood in terms of Russia's postwar needs for markets and raw materials than any demon drive for world conquest, that Truman rather than Stalin was the true father of the cold war. But whether or not this is the case, the fact is that in the 1930s the domestic American consensus was that the United States was defender rather than aggressor in the cold war. A major contributor to this "wisdom" was the ex-Communist whose testimony helped to create, confirm, and fix the image of the Soviet Union as subverter of American capitalism, to link Soviet imperialism abroad to the "red menace" at home, to persuade Americans that "the Russian fifth column in the United States is greater than Hitler's ever was."

Of all of the ex-Communists, Whittaker Chambers left the most indelible imprint. After Alger Hiss sued Chambers for libel, Chambers, who on sixteen previous occasions had denied that any espionage was involved in his past Communist activities, reached into his pumpkin, pulled out five rolls of microfilm, and changed his accusation against Hiss from mere Party membership to one of espionage. The next day Congressman Richard Nixon was on the front page, waving the microfilm rolls and calling them "secret government documents" that provided proof, "conclusively established," of the existence of a vast Soviet spy network operated by members of the Communist Party in America. Looking at the microfilms for the press with a magnifying glass, Nixon was quoted under banner headlines saying, "This conspiracy comprises one of the most serious series of treasonable activities which has been launched against the government in the history of America." In Witness, Chambers wrote, "Alger Hiss is only one name that stands for the whole Communist penetration of government." Whether or not Hiss was guilty, Chambers was certainly correct about what he symbolized.

Nonetheless Chambers, despite the increasingly accusatory nature of his tale, the inconsistencies in his story, and his chronic inability to distinguish fact from fantasy, was transformed in the public eye from nut to prophet. A gifted short-story writer and translator (Bambi was his), he quickly put his story into powerful best-seller form and critics hailed his autobiography as a literary and political masterpiece. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., compared it favorably to the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, and John Dos Passos put it "somewhere between Dostoievsky's The Possessed and the narratives of the adventures of the light within like Pilgrim's Progress."

The real messages in Chambers' pumpkin had nothing to do with Hiss's guilt or innocence. They were: that to be a Communist Party member was to be a spy; that to be a Russian was to foment worldwide revolution; that to be an informer was to be a patriot; that to be a New Dealer was to be a dupe; and that other ex-Coms should be heeded, no matter how improbable their tales. Along with Chambers came Elizabeth Bentley, whose story of life in the red underground had been discounted when she first approached the FBI in 1945. As with Chambers, it is impossible to know where Miss Bentley's truths stopped and her fantasies began, but that is part of the point—the press, for the most part, didn't bother to try to make the distinction. There is no reason to doubt that the "blonde spy queen," as others called her, or the "red spy queen," as she called herself, had been the lover of one Jacob Golos, an admitted Soviet agent, as she claimed; and there is every reason to believe that he tried to use her to obtain information for his government. (The pattern of Soviet male diplomat-agents using women for espionage purposes is well-known in other countries and contexts.) What can be said with certainty is that her gift for the telling example gave resonance to her stories of the Soviet menace.

One example is Bentley's claim that she brought her Soviet lover the exact timing of the D day invasion of Europe. Her ability to summon up such detail lent her stories an air of verisimilitude and made good copy, since it gave the American reader concrete images of the long reach of the Soviet conspiracy. (As it happens, this particular "recollection" may have been flawed. Because of weather and logistics, the Allies had set a time bracket rather than a specific date for the invasion; the decision to proceed on June 6 was not taken until June 5; according to Winston Churchill and the head of our own military mission to Moscow at the time, the Allies kept the Soviets posted on invasion planning all along, including the approximate date. Despite this, Bentley was unflappable in carrying out her professional activities as anti-Communist witness. Time and again she repeated her D day story and others no less shaky.)

Bentley's symbolic importance to the state was less than Chambers', since no great spy case hinged on her testimony. Yet, since her map to the espionage underground had received wide dissemination and acceptance in official circles, the government had a stake in map to the espionage underground had received wide dissemination and acceptance in official circles, the government had a stake in preserving her fragile reputation: Miss Bentley had charged in more than a score of witnessings before various juries, committees, and other tribunals and in her memoir, Out of Bondage, that she was in touch with forty spies and two spy rings—one headed by Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, an economist with the Farm Security Administration, and the other by Victor Perlo, an economist with the War Production Board. The depth of the state's commitment to the good reputation of her testimony is well seen in the unhappy case of William Remington, a Commerce Department employee who attacked her veracity: he denied her allegations that he had passed secret government documents to her, documents she claimed she then gave to Golos, her NKVD lover.

There were a number of obvious and real parallels between the Remington and the Hiss cases (two bright Ivy Leaguers accused in congressional hearings by ex- Communists of having transmitted classified information to the enemy and subsequently convicted of perjury); there were also differences that needn't concern us here, but one of them was that in February 1950 Remington won a $9000 settlement in a libel suit against his accuser. By the spring of 1950, Miss Bentley was in trouble. Her usefulness to the government as a witness was declining, and she supported herself by lecturing and writing about her career as a spy. But none of the other persons she had publicly named as spies was prosecuted, and Remington had been cleared by the government's loyalty review board fifteen months earlier. If his version of events were now permitted to stand, Miss Bentley's already sagging reputation might be fatally undermined. A new grand jury was convened in May 1950, and in addition to Remington, his former wife, Ann Moos Remington, was called as a witness.

The extraordinary pressure put on Ann Moos Remington to discredit her ex-husband's testimony becomes comprehensible only in the context of the government's interest in protecting the reputation of one of its more visible informers. Remington was indicted and tried twice. (The guilty verdict at the first trial was reversed on appeal but the indictment stood.) At the second trial, which began in January 1953, he was convicted on two counts of perjury. On appeal the grand jury minutes of the original indictment surfaced—in the course of a dissenting opinion by Judge Learned Hand that resists paraphrase:

For myself, the [original grand jury] examination [of Mrs. Remington] went beyond what I deem permissible. Pages on pages of lecturing repeatedly preceded a question; statements of what the prosecution already knew, and of how idle it was for the witness to hold back what she could contribute; occasional reminders that she could be punished for perjury; all were scattered throughout. Still she withstood the examiners, until, being much tried and worn, she said: "I am getting fuzzy. I haven't eaten since a long time ago and I don't think I am going to be very coherent from now on. I would like to postpone the hearings.... I want to consult my lawyers and see how deep I am getting in." This was denied, and the questioning kept on until she finally refused to answer, excusing herself because she was "tired" and "would like to get something to eat ... Is this the third degree, waiting until I get hungry now?" Still the examiners persisted, disregarding this further protest: "I would like to get something to eat. But couldn't we continue another day? Or do I have to come back?" Thereupon there took place ... what proved to be the coup de grace, after which she made a full disclosure of what she knew: a very large part of it what Remington had told her during their marriage and before they separated in January 1947.

... I shall assume for argument that, had there been nothing more than I have mentioned, the indictment might have stood up. It is the added circumstance that, as I have already said, a very large part of Ann Remington's testimony consisted of confidential communications from her husband to her, that satisfies any doubts I might otherwise have had. That was testimony as much privileged in a federal court as in a state court; moreover, the privilege extends to a proceeding before a grand jury. Although I have found no federal decisions, I accept it also as the law that her later separation and divorce from Remington did not open the witness's mouth; indeed, any other view would be completely inconsistent with the theory of the privilege. It will have been observed how important a part this played in the result, for in his final admonition that effected her breakdown, Brunini [foreman of the grand jury] not only threatened her with contempt proceedings, but expressly told her that she had no privilege. His language is worth repeating: "Now, I have already pointed out to you that you have a question from the Special Assistant to the Attorney General: Did your husband or did he not give this money to the Communist Party? You have no privilege to refuse to answer the question." Read literally, that was true; but, read as the witness must have understood it—that is, whether her husband had not told her so—it was altogether false.


Thus William Remington, a minor figure in Elizabeth Bentley's tales of Washington spy rings (she had said she dropped him because he never had any useful information), suddenly became extraordinarily important—for the reason that he had chosen to fight back at her. As his counsel, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., argued in his 1953 appeal brief:

In their five-day examination of Remington, both Brunini [the foreman] and Donegan [the prosecutor] likewise demonstrated their preoccupation with the rehabilitation of Bentley. Again and again they came back to the question of Remington's libel suit against Bentley and demanded to know why he thought the $9000 settlement was a "vindication" in his struggle against Bentley. They asked him about his relations with Daniel Lang and Alan Barth who had written pieces in The New Yorker and The Washington Post siding with Remington in his battle against Bentley. They asked who was financing his fight against Bentley, who was paying his investigator, Mr. Bielaski, whether the American Civil Liberties Union was paying anything, and what Bielaski had found out about Bentley. They asked what Remington's own lawyers had told him about Bentley and denied the relevance of the attorney-client privilege before the grand jury.... On an even lower level, [Remington] was asked irrelevant questions concerning his divorce, whether he had ever struck his wife, whether he had ever committed adultery, whether he had ever had psychiatric treatment, whether he had sought to avoid combat service during the war, and whether he had ever shared the same bed with a male roommate.


Since Remington had appeared before a federal grand jury in New York City in April 1947 and had not been indicted, and before another grand jury in the District of Columbia in May 1950 and had not been indicted, Rauh's conclusion was that the main reason Remington was summoned yet again later that month was to rehabilitate Bentley. Rauh's analysis of the motives for the prosecution seems persuasive, and remains so even if Remington was guilty of perjury. The state had rehabilitated one informer by creating another, albeit a reluctant one. (Ann Remington frankly told the prosecutor that she preferred not to testify against her former husband, because if he were convicted that might imperil the support payments he gave for the children.)


If the state legitimized and then protected the informer by assaulting his detractors, the media romanticized him. As Whittaker Chambers moved from the congressional committee room to the top of the best-seller list, other espionage exposers were celebrated on stage, screen, and radio, in print, and even in the streets. There were ceremonies, awards, and banquets in their honor. Boston declared a Philbrick Day to honor the man who led three lives (as Communist, as FBI informant, and as private citizen). It was even suggested that informers be given medals for gallantry like those awarded to soldiers who had distinguished themselves on the field of battle. After Morris Appleman told HUAC he became a Communist because his father was an atheist, he returned to Denver, where he was asked to appear before the board of the Denver Hospital, where he worked as executive secretary, to hear his fate. On Sunday morning, January 13, 1952, The Rocky Mountain News editorialized that unless Denver rewarded his honesty after thirteen years as an agent of a foreign power, there would never again be a chance for "honest fugitives from the tyranny of the Communist Party to expect sanctuary or understanding, to encourage them in ever breaking with the Party." That Sunday afternoon the hospital board gave Appleman a unanimous vote of confidence and, as NBC reported it, "All Denver commended him and stood by him." Pittsburgh declared Matt Cvetic Day in 1951 on the occasion of the film premiere of I Was a Communist for the FBI, ostensibly based on his real-life exploits. After a luncheon in his honor, Cvetic marched through downtown Pittsburgh in a parade which passed in front of the courthouse where a Smith Act trial just happened to be in progress.

Angela Calomiris, a witness in the Dennis case, won a citation for patriotic assistance to the FBI, and this was announced in a press release during the course of the trial. Although television was just coming into its own, its view of politics-as-entertainment infected all major media and seemed especially suited to the task of dramatizing the ways in which informer Davids fought the Communist Goliath. As the sociologist Edward Shils has written, "The new technique of reporting, the tone of the news in the popular press which was interested in sensation, in the dramatic and the scandalous ... influenced the tone of political discourse. The journalist ... brought into political reporting an imagery and a conception of the world which pushed politics into the direction of melodrama and crisis." Shils found that the popular journalist's interest in an event only if it is at its most intense level of melodrama matched "the journalist's own professional view that the world is a melodrama and that practically all that falls outside the extremes is dead, stale stuff which can interest no one and which is of no significance." The red menace of the early 1950s was ready-made for such reportage. Religious and moral considerations aside, what made the media's presentation of the informer-as-intrepid-hero an undertaking at once Herculean and delicate were the incessant distortions, fabrications, inaccuracies, and outright lies attributable to those who specialized in exposing the red blueprint for world domination, the red fifth column.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Naming Names by Victor S. Navasky. Copyright © 1991 Victor S. Navasky. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

  • Cover
  • Dedication
  • Foreword
  • A Note on Vocabulary
  • INTRODUCTION: THE INFORMER AS PATRIOT
    • 1. The Espionage Informer
    • 2. The Conspiracy Informer
    • 3. The Liberal Informer
  • PART I: NAMING NAMES
    • 4. HUAC In Hollywood
    • 5. The Collaborators
    • 6. Guilty Bystanders
  • PART II: STARS, STRIPES, AND STIGMAS
    • 7. Elia Kazan and the Case for Silence
    • 8. The Reasons Why
      • RICHARD COLLINS
      • EDWARD DMYTRYK
      • BUDD SCHULBERG
      • LEO TOWNSEND
      • DAVID RAKSIN
      • ISOBEL LENNART
      • ROY HUGGINS
      • SYLVIA RICHARDS
      • LEE J. COBB
      • ROLAND KIBBEE
      • MICHAEL GORDON
    • 9. The Reasons Considered
    • 10. Degradation Ceremonies
  • PART III: VICTIMS
    • 11. The Intended Victim
    • 12. The Community as Victim
    • 13. The Informer as Victim
  • PART IV: LESSONS
    • 14. The Question of Forgiveness
    • 15. The Question of Obedience
    • 16. The Question of Candor
  • Afterword
  • Afterword to the Third Edition
  • About the Author
  • Notes on Sources
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
    • Y
    • Z
  • Copyright
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