The most relentless force in the war against the Left was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The Bureau was at the heart of the Red Scare, sending and receiving muddied streams of rumor and misinformation through a network of professional informers, security officers, law enforcement agencies, anti-Communist pressure groups, and newsmen around the country.
Hoover’s skillfully created (and largely false) public image as top crime fighter and domestic watchdog allowed him to inflate an equally false image of the Red Menace. Decrying that “cowardly, slithering mass of humanity, too evil and slinking to assume their true identities,” that “‘ism’ scum . . . seeking to engulf Americanism,” he greatly expanded the power and numbers of his beloved agency. In 1939, Hoover had 785 agents; by 1952, he had more than 7,000, the vast majority of whom earned their pay prowling for homespun subsersives. Hoover’s vision for America was bleak and monotheistic—a puritanical triumvirate of Christianity, Big Business, and the FBI. Armed with a massive publicity machine, his secret files, and an army of agents, he attempted to enforce nationwide conformity in belief, thought, and action.
Hoover called upon neighbor to inform on neighbor, schoolchildren to inform on their teachers—and for everyone to shun the Left. He blackmailed those who challenged his power—including at least one President.1 Agents burgled, tapped, and bugged, suborned perjury, intimidated and blackmailed. During this period, the Bureau stockpiled more than 25 million files on American citizens. From 1941 to 1975 virtually every civil rights group, left-of-center labor union, and left-wing political organization (approximately 13,500 in total) was monitored by the FBI.
By 1956, with the Communist Party down to less than five thousand members, one out of every three members was an FBI informant. So riddled was the CP that informers named other informers, and many a meeting was held where the majority worked for the government. In order to maintain their viability, a number of informers recruited friends and acquaintances into the Party, only to turn them over to the FBI.
But the professional witnesses’ main job was to identify political heretics, and once their well ran dry, they plucked personalities from newspaper columns, branded their critics as subversives, and recycled rumors from Hoover’s files. Those named were required to prove their innocence, yet to be named was a burden almost impossible to overcome. Admitted membership in the Communist Party was considered conclusive of subversive intent; even to hold a parallel belief with the Party was to be guilty of the same. Claims of innocence were scorned as cynical manipulations of the judicial system, while evidence of a rock-ribbed establishment life merely revealed the cunning of the Communist intrigue.
With Truman’s loyalty program came the rise of the security officer. Every department and agency of the Executive Branch was required to “develop and maintain . . . a staff specially trained in security techniques.” In 1952, the State Department alone staffed 322 security officers to police the thoughts of its eleven thousand stateside employees, with a proportionate number assigned to monitor its nine thousand overseas employees.
These men commanded enormous authority, empowered as they were to scrutinize the personal behavior, associations, and sex lives of employees in their departments. “They relish the collection of derogatory information,” wrote S. A. Goudsmit, chairman of the physics department of Brookhaven National Laboratory. “Their job is an outlet for their frustrated hatred of men. They are biased against intellectuals and anyone who reads a book.” Journalist Elmer Davis once acted as a reference for a woman who had applied for civilian employment at the Navy Department. When visited by a security officer from Naval Intelligence, Davis praised the woman’s mental capabilities. The officer commented, “These intelligent people are very likely to be attracted to communism.”
Soon nearly every corporation and university in the country secreted a security officer somewhere in its bowels; many were former FBI agents who remained loyal emissaries of Hoover’s empire.
On May 3, 1972, with Hoover safely expired for at least twelve hours, the WashingtonStar commented, “Hoover suffered neither fools nor Attorneys General gladly, and occasionally he confused the two.” During the half century of Hoover’s dominion, he served under sixteen Attorneys General. Indeed, Hoover’s power was such that it was difficult to determine who worked for whom, especially in the years after World War Two.
Tom Clark, Truman’s first Attorney General, showed no interest in supervising Hoover and rubber-stamped his every request. Clark rarely read the reports Hoover sent him and turned over all wiretap requests to an assistant, as he “didn’t want to know who was tapped or who wasn’t tapped.” Clark would later claim that he was much less concerned with the Communist menace than was Hoover, and would dismiss most of the cases as “somewhat squeezed oranges,” but he prosecuted them anyway. Hoover repaid this accommodation by presenting his boss with one of his used bulletproof limousines, after Clark had okayed Hoover’s purchase of a new one.
But the apex of Hoover’s power was achieved during the Eisenhower years. William Sullivan, a former assistant director of the Bureau, believed Ike to be a “very gullible man,” explaining that Eisenhower “blindly believed everything the director told him, never questioned a word. . . . Hoover soon had him wrapped around his finger.” Richard Nixon had also long been enthralled with the director, and as Vice President he dutifully phoned Hoover twice a day.
Attorney General Brownell, whose story is included here, gave Hoover free rein, although he probably had little choice. “I have full confidence and admiration for Mr. Hoover,” Brownell once remarked, “I like to stress that whenever possible.” By now, Hoover was helping to shape White House policy, particularly in law enforcement, internal security, and civil rights. The AG and his subordinate clashed on only one substantive issue. Brownell had proposed new civil rights legislation (the first since Reconstruction) to create the Civil Rights Commission and to give federal courts the power to enforce voting rights. As Sanford Ungar has noted, Hoover’s opposition on rather narrow-minded and bigoted grounds was “probably a major factor in President Eisenhower’s decision not to push for the Brownell civil rights program.”2
But more often than not, the Attorneys General were the White House bulldogs on the hunt for Reds. In 1948, Tom Clark—later appointed by Truman to the Supreme Court—clearly expressed his sentiments on political dissent: “Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States.”
In 1954, speaking at the request of President Eisenhower, Herbert Brownell called for a “stepped-up anti-Communist program” designed to “utterly destroy the Communist Party U.S.A. and its activities.” The package included elimination of the Fifth Amendment by compelling testimony under “immunity,” widening the definition of perjury, legalized wire-tapping, power to outlaw labor unions, the removal of citizenship from native-born citizens, and the death penalty for peacetime espionage. He also proposed the formation of an “anti-treason” division within the Justice Department which would devote itself to cases of spying, treason, and the loyalty of federal employees. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal thought some of the proposals to be extreme, but Brownell went on television to assure the nation there would be no “McCarthyist taint.” Two months previously, he had set the stage for the package by announcing the discovery of twenty thousand documents on spies in government “lost” by the Democrats.
A special agent of the FBI from 1951 to 1977, Swearingen was assigned to Chicago for ten years, where he did “political” work on the internal security detail. His duties included surveillance, illegal break-ins, and maintenance of the Security Index—a list of Americans to be placed in concentration camps during time of “declared national emergency.” For more on the FBI, read Swearingen’s FBI Secrets (South End Press).
For about five years, from shortly after I arrived in Chicago, I was doing illegal break-ins—bag jobs, as we call ’em. At that time we picked on the leaders of the Communist Party. When a few of them were indicted under the Smith Act and went underground,1 then we started picking on people we thought might be contacts, members of the family, relatives, and people we thought might be couriers.
First we’d get permission from Washington to do a survey. That amounted to finding out where the person lived, whether it was an apartment building or a private residence, whether the landlord or superintendent was cooperative, and whether we knew the hours that the person would be away from their apartment—and how many people lived there. If someone was sharing an apartment with someone else then we’d have to do an investigation on them also. Then if everything looked good, we usually got permission from Washington. I don’t know if it actually came from Hoover or not, but everything theoretically came from him. It could have come from Clyde Tolson2 or someone in the Domestic Intelligence Division. We’d go ahead, and if we found something we would photograph it, and if we didn’t we’d go on to the next one. But if we found something important, then we might do it again a month later.
We tried to be careful. If there were papers we’d make little sketches, measure the distance of the papers from the edge of the desk and make notes. It became a little easier when Polaroid developed the instant camera. We could take a picture, wait sixty seconds, and we had a picture of how things were arranged on the desk.
We found things like membership lists, or what could be construed as membership lists, and correspondence to some of the fugitives who were in the underground. But never any evidence of anything illegal. Well, of course, the Communist Party was considered subversive—but we never found any evidence of any crimes, it was all political.
I was counting bag jobs for a while. Not all of them involved my going inside, because you take turns. If the case is assigned to you, you have to go inside. You can’t dump that on somebody else. There were different kinds of assigned positions—you can be lookout man or you could be involved in surveillance. I figured I was involved in about five hundred bag jobs myself, and that doesn’t involve other agents who were doing jobs at the same time. Sometimes our squad had bag jobs going on at the same time, one in one spot and one in another spot. Then there were times that I did as many as three in one day—and quite often. I don’t know whether it was my attitude, you know, I was fairly calm, cool, and collected, and I was younger than just about anybody on the squad.
We had a group of twenty-four agents on the squad, and we’d split up in teams of twelve. So if a bag job involved a large family, like William Sennett, for instance, who was married and had two kids, then we would have to follow him to work, and we’d have to follow his wife to work, and we’d have to follow the two kids to school. The two kids went to different schools—one kid went to grade school and the other one was in junior high. We had to make sure that both kids went to school, and that involved at least four agents, two on one and two on the other, and four on the wife and four on Bill, so we got twelve right there. Then you need two or three to go inside and one on the outside, so we’re now using men from the other team. If what’s left of the other team could do a relatively small bag job, then they could go out and do one while we’re doing one on Sennett.
Then there was one person who at times would disappear on us—he would get up early in the morning, or leave at all hours of the day and night—and when we wanted to do a bag job on him, we’d find out that he wasn’t home. So we would spread twelve or fifteen agents at the ends of the street, at the subway entrances and exits, and at the various bus stops that he could get off at. We’d do a bag job on his place not knowing where in the hell he is. Which is really touchy, because he could suddenly appear and he’s got two minutes to walk from the bus stop or the elevated station to his apartment and so we’ve got two minutes to collect our papers and get out of there. That was a real tense situation, and not too many people wanted to go in there. Some of the agents turned into alcoholics, a couple of them had real bad cases of ulcer.
Most of us rather enjoyed the excitement. I know I did. You could get an adrenaline high that was fantastic—the thought of doing this without getting caught. We’d go in without our guns and badges and credentials. If we got caught we couldn’t say who we were, that was an added thrill. And if we got caught we’d probably be fired. At least that was what we were told, but some of us thought, “We’ve got twenty-four guys out here, how’s Hoover going to fire us?” We were pretty naive, because he’d have fired twenty-four of us without batting an eye and claimed that was a rogue operation out there in Chicago.
None of us worried too much about the illegality, because most of us were veterans from World War Two. Gee, all you had to do is wave a flag and we’d stand up and salute and do all kinds of things. And after the indoctrination we got in training school about communism and the Communist Party and how they were trying to overthrow us, it was like war all over again, just that no one was shooting at anybody yet. We all thought, “This is great, we’re defending the country and nobody knows anything about it.”
One of the things you’d do on your survey for a bag job, or if you’re going to verify a person’s employment, is a full field investigation on their neighbors. If we found that the neighbor was a World War Two veteran, we had it made. All we had to do is tell somebody who served in World War Two that the guy next door is a member of the Communist Party and that’s all she wrote. The guy would probably go over and help us on a bag job. Any World War Two veteran was one hundred percent, and if he belonged to AMVETS, boy, it was cinched. If we found that the neighbor on the other side of the house had been to a few demonstrations, then we wouldn’t even bother approaching him, because we figured the first thing he would do is go tell his neighbor.
SURVEILLANCE
There were two families in Chicago that we had twenty-four-hour surveillance on for a while—relatives of some of the fugitives we were looking for. That was the wives of Fred Fine and Gil Green.3 I’m sure New York and Los Angeles must have had operations like that too.
Twenty-four-hour surveillance involved a combination of wiretaps on the telephone and a bug in the apartment. If someone left the house at eleven o’clock and they were going to meet someone downtown for lunch at twelve o’clock and then do something else, we would usually go ahead and move into where they were going to have lunch rather than just follow them from the house to downtown, so the surveillance would be more discreet.
In most instances they knew they were being followed. I don’t recall ever following any of these Communist Party members who didn’t make a U-turn. They’d drive about three or four car lengths and make a U-turn, which shakes everybody up because we’re all set up to go in one direction and someone will have to make a move to stay with them. But after a while we got used to that. We just figured that they were going to make a U-turn and set up accordingly.
I recall one instance, a real top-secret meeting, where a man got on a subway—actually he was with an informant of ours—and we tried to follow him but we lost him on the subway. Later, the informant said this guy got on and off the subway so many times he lost count.
THE ARREST OF CLAUDE LIGHTFOOT
Claude Lightfoot was the chairman of the Communist Party of Illinois in Chicago. He had been indicted by a grand jury under the Smith Act. I arrested Claude in 1954.4
All of our surveillance didn’t do anything, it was a stroke of luck that we found Claude. Two agents were driving home one night. They lived over in Hammond, Indiana. They saw this gray Plymouth that we had surveilled for months, maybe even years, that was owned by Sam Kushner, but Bill Sennett and just about anybody would be driving it at different times. Anyway, they recognized the car, so being the good agents that they were, they said we’re not going home yet. They made a U-turn and followed it to the south side of Chicago and lost it in traffic. That was a Friday night. Saturday morning we called in the whole security section of the office, about one hundred and twenty-five agents out of two hundred and fifty.
We were paired off and given quadrants, and what we did was drive up and down the alleys and streets until we found the car. After about an hour we found it parked on the south side. We set up a surveillance. About five o’clock that afternoon in the middle of summer, Claude finally came up to the car and got in and drove away. At that time, I had been sitting in a panel truck with no ventilation. It was about ninety degrees outside and about a hundred and fifty in the truck. It got so damned hot that we stripped down to our shorts. We were soaking wet. We called and said, “We can’t take this anymore, you’re liable to find a couple of corpses in here.” So our supervisor came over and drove us down to the gas station, and just about that time Claude hopped in the car and drove away.
Claude was pulled over by the agents near a housing development. So we hop back in the van and run down there. Claude is black, and about the time I get there he’s surrounded by all these white agents. We didn’t have any black agents back then, only chauffeurs in Washington and a chauffeur who was a clerical employee in Chicago that was black, but he wasn’t an agent. Anyway, Claude is standing there in this housing development and they’re having a little discussion. I walk up and say, “What’s going on?” [Chuckles.] Claude is a fugitive—you don’t stand around and discuss the time of day with a fugitive, you throw those handcuffs on him. Claude turned to me and said, “These guys said that I looked like somebody who just left an apartment where there was a burglary.”
I couldn’t believe it. I pulled out my credentials and said, “Claude, I’m Special Agent M. Wesley Swearingen. You’re under arrest for violation of the Smith Act.” Claude just kind of wilted. I handcuffed him and we marched him off to a car and took him to the office.
One of the things you were supposed to do is search him. I searched Claude in the housing development to make sure he didn’t have a gun or a knife. When we got back to the office, I made him empty his pockets, took everything out, and wrote up an inventory. Agents were standing around like it was some kind of a news event, and I wasn’t getting too much assistance. I was a relatively young agent, but all these guys that had been sniffing around watching Communists all these years were afraid to let anybody know who they were, that’s how paranoid they were. They were afraid the Communist Party would get their name. I don’t know what they were afraid of, maybe that the Communist Party was going to do some of the things to them that we were doing to the Communist Party, like go down and break into their house or maybe threaten their kids. When I signed the inventory, the dollars and cents and everything that was in Claude’s wallet, I needed a witness. I turned around and I couldn’t get another agent to witness that thing.
There must have been half a dozen agents there who had witnessed everything, because it was a big event in their life—it was the first time they had ever arrested anybody. At that point I was fairly disgusted. Claude could see right away how things were going and he says, “Gee, I think you’re short . . .” I forget how much he said. I said, “Come on, Claude, this is between you and me. You decide how much money you had when you came in here, and I’ll change it, then I’ll go ahead and take the money out of my pocket, but you and I are going to sign this thing even though we can’t get anybody else in here to sign it.” And he laughed, he said, “Okay, that’s the right dollar amount.”
COINTELPRO5 started in 1956, and some guys felt that since they had a badge and were doing what Hoover wanted them to do, they could do just about anything. Some of the guys on surveillance would put sugar in the gas tank, which really louses it up. I never wanted to do that, because you screw up somebody’s car and all they’re going to do is break down and sit there and then you have to sit there. So I thought that was kinda dumb. But this is the kind of sick, sadistic thing that some guys would like to do.
I would do what you would consider COINTELPRO. If I had someone working someplace and it was a fairly good job, if I had the inclination I might get them fired. But then again, if it was a place that was fairly secure and I knew where they were, I might just decide to leave them there. We had requirements when someone changed their employment—we’d have to go and find them again, and that’s always a problem. They might stay for five or ten years in a good-paying job.
And there were those subjects who worked in what was considered national security plants. Most of the major corporations that had government contracts fell into that category. I felt it was better to have someone working where you could check on them through security. In those large corporations, the security agents were usually former FBI agents. So you had a perfect source who could watch this person.
We would tell security that so-and-so is a member of the Communist Party, but we don’t want you to fire him. We’d like you to keep an eye on him and if we get word that he might try to sabotage something, we’ll let you know right away. Most of the time I would do that. Of course, if you got someone who was just a miserable personality—antisocial and antiestablishment: he didn’t like Hoover, didn’t like the FBI, didn’t like the U.S. government—then you might pick on him and get him fired all the time. Every time he gets a new job you go in and tell them that this guy’s really dangerous and if anything happens he’s liable to sabotage the plant. That’s all they have to hear and they’ll figure out some way to get rid of him.
I felt, and most of the agents felt, that Communists were the scum of the earth. Our attitude was if they don’t like it here they can go someplace else, and that was that. But after a while, when I was following Bill Sennett around and looking in his place all the time, I thought to myself—and even mentioned to others after a few years—“You know, if he quit and went to work, he could really make a lot of money because he’s a hard worker.” The hours he put in for the Communist Party were just unbelievable, and he was intelligent and made a good appearance.
Then later on, when we weren’t doing so many bag jobs and I was a case agent on Richard Criley6 and Claude Lightfoot and Bill Sennett and a bunch of the others, I’m reading their speeches and what they write and listening to what they say, and I’m thinking, “Gee, this isn’t all that bad. They want equal rights in the union for minorities and blacks and equal pay for women. What the hell is wrong with this?” And I couldn’t find that anybody was breaking any laws. Maybe someone would get a parking ticket, but that happens to anybody, except Hoover, because he didn’t drive his own car so he was never responsible for overtime parking. As far as I could see, they just wanted to have things a little bit better and that’s all.
That was the start of my disillusionment. And as it went on, I thought I’d better not say anything to anybody because they’re going to look at me cross-eyed. Once in a while I might get a sympathetic ear and then somebody would say, “Yeah, but they’re still trying to overthrow the government by force and violence.” But I could never see where their force and violence was coming from. There was never any evidence of it. They didn’t go out and march and demonstrate like the Weathermen did in 1969 in Chicago.7 It would be easy to believe that they might do something like that, but the police departments could pretty well handle just about any small groups. So in a practical sense they weren’t about to overthrow anybody. Get themselves thrown in jail was about the extent of it.
There were a couple of real good ones. Morris Childs8 was the best informant in Chicago. He was said to be the courier between Moscow and the Party. In fact, he was such a high-level informant that if we got word over the wiretaps that somebody like Claude Lightfoot was going to meet with him, we had to discontinue the surveillance. We were not permitted to go anywhere near Childs on surveillance. It made him nervous, and we didn’t want anyone to know we were aware of him.
He was being paid more as an informant than I was as an agent! In fact, I think he was paid double what my salary was. In ’52, ’53, I was making about fifty-five hundred dollars, which wasn’t too bad. I think he was probably making ten or eleven thousand dollars a year, or maybe twelve, as an informer. Childs was definitely reliable, and one of the ways that we could check would be information from other informants. Of course, when you couldn’t corroborate it, you had to just hope he’s not giving you a con job.
We had a program developing informants, and it got so that at one point we had three informants in a three-man cell9 in Chicago. We had informants reporting on informants. It was ridiculous. Of course, when that cell met with another cell and there was only one informant in the other cell, then we had four informants we could compare information on. When six people met or if a dozen people met, we might have seven or eight informants and we could see how accurate they were. So if we had one informant that was giving us a bunch of crap, then we’d just discontinue him and go someplace else.
I’d say toward the late fifties—along about 1960 and from then on—probably close to fifty percent of the Chicago Party were FBI informants. It went way up, about three out of five in the higher levels of the Party. I’m not going to mention any names, ’cause I’m not allowed to. So you can guess from here on out.
Starting after World War Two, I’d say for thirty years, we knew everything that was going on inside the Party, except maybe when somebody goes to the bathroom. I’m being ridiculous at this point, but whatever’s going on in the Party, we knew.
HOOVER’S FANTASY
You have to understand that Hoover was obsessed with what he called “commonism,” and he couldn’t even pronounce the word properly. When someone is that fanatic, if you want to keep your job, you just go along with it. You tell him what he wants to hear, make him happy. A lot of agents weren’t going to do that, so they were quitting. One time in the mid to late fifties when Hoover gave the percentage of turnover in the FBI, I sat down and figured out if no one else in the FBI quit except the ones that I knew were quitting in Chicago—which was one or two a week—the figure would be larger than what Hoover was giving in Congress. And I knew that agents were leaving New York like crazy, because New York was one of the offices you could get to after about a year or two in the FBI. So if there were that many vacancies being filled in New York and the New York agents weren’t going to Memphis or Louisville or other places, then they must be resigning.
It was a period of such hysteria. I think it was all generated by Hoover and his sycophants who wanted to rise in the Bureau and would do whatever he wanted. Of course, we had an indoctrination and training school—they gave us practically two weeks of lectures about the Communist threat. So everyone was adequately brainwashed. The only ones who didn’t believe it, I guess, were the ones doing criminal work—they could care less.
They thought a lot of that was bullshit. Like Bill Roemer, who has written two books on the Mafia. We used to do bag jobs together, from 1954 to about 1957. He was thoroughly disgusted. He wanted to get on the Top Hood program10 and start putting these gangsters in jail, which he did. There were others that transferred. In fact, I’d say about seventy-five percent of what ended up being the Top Hood squad in 1959 came from the Security Division, because guys were just fed up with Hoover’s imaginary Communist Party.
But some people, you give them a gun and a badge and they’ll work for nothing. It’s a little bit like . . . how can I describe it? How can I describe a sheriff in the South who’s so fat he can’t get his gun belt on, enjoying beating blacks on the side of the head? I don’t understand it, but there were agents like that, who just enjoyed it. They had the full backing of Hoover and the FBI, and they were getting paid for it. Some guys are that way. How do you explain people in the Gestapo?
SECURITY INDEX
When I got to Chicago in the summer of ’52, the Security Index was already well under way—that was a list of people to arrest in case of some national emergency.11 And you know a national emergency could have been just about anything that somebody like Richard Nixon wanted to make. Then Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which put a lot of people on the Security Index who were members of the Communist Party—although 10450 doesn’t say that, that’s the way it was interpreted—and the Attorney General’s list of organizations. So we had a writing project that took us away from bag jobs for a few months because we were literally putting thousands of people on the Security Index.
You know, when FBI officials testified before the Church Committee12 they said, “At one point we had fifteen thousand people on the Security Index.” Expressing it like that you get the feeling that at one point we had as many as fifteen thousand. But that’s like saying that when you’re filling up Soldier Field for a football game, at some point you have fifteen thousand in the stadium. But wait a few minutes and you’ve got several thousand more. This is the way the FBI gives the information to Congress, and Congress doesn’t know what the hell they’re saying. They think: “Well, at some point that’s the maximum that we had,” which is not true. At some point we had fifteen thousand—leading up to a hundred thousand.
If we did a bag job and we came across a list of names that didn’t say “membership” at the top but you could interpret it as possibly membership, then to be on the safe side we’d say, “Yeah, this is probably membership,” and we’d go with it from there. Or we’d say something like T-1, of known reliability, advises on such-and-such a date that so-and-so’s name was in possession of the Communist Party. And if we had positive information like Morris Childs saying that so-and-so is a member of the Communist Party, that’s good, he gets on the Security Index and he’s on there forever.
During the Church Committee hearings, one of the senators asked James Adams, who was then associate director of the FBI, how long a person would stay on the Security Index. I think they were talking about one individual who had been on there something like twenty or twenty-five years. And the senator said, “Did you have any information that he was still a member of the Communist Party?” And Adams’s response was, “We didn’t have any information that he was not a member of the Communist Party.” Which means that if some informant doesn’t tell us that this guy dropped out of the Communist Party, then we’d keep him in there and we’d keep him on the Security Index. Sometimes we would get information that someone did drop out of the Communist Party, but we wouldn’t believe it anyway. Bill Sennett stayed on the Security Index almost ten years after he quit the Party because no one would believe it.
We had what was considered an active Security Index, then we had a Reserve Index. We had a list of about a hundred thousand people just in Chicago. The Reserve Index was a list of people who had been around for a long time but we didn’t have anything real current on them. In order not to get the Security Index so large that we couldn’t handle it, we’d put them on the Reserve Index. After we round up all the ones that were considered a real threat, then we’d go after these other people.
How many in the country altogether? I suppose there was an equal number on both lists in San Francisco, Los Angeles, maybe close to the same number in Detroit, maybe double or triple the number in New York City. Altogether, possibly close to a million people, if we really got down to the nitty-gritty. But the practical point of view is that we couldn’t have put a million people anyplace. But we probably had names on or information on that many people that we could have, but that was one of the reasons that we watched the size of the actual Security Index in Chicago, because we knew that it would be a matter of logistics. You can’t go out and attest a hundred thousand people. There weren’t enough FBI agents and police officers in Chicago to do that. So we had to keep the Security Index at a reasonable level.
We knew definitely we would be rounding people up when Khrushchev was banging his shoe on the table. During the Cuban missile crisis, we were within a hairbreadth of actually activating a roundup. We knew darn well that when the first missile comes flying from Cuba, we’re going to be out there throwing people in a camp. We didn’t have any orders, it was just the general atmosphere, and of course if a national emergency had been declared, then we would not have waited for anything else. It would have just been a matter of getting a phone call from someone like Alan Belmont in the Domestic Intelligence Division to put the Security Index program into effect, which meant that we’d pull all the cards from the geographical areas; we’d get hold of the local police officers and we’d go out and start arresting people. I don’t know where in Chicago we were going to throw them. One time, I figured out the only place we could put so many people would be in Soldier Field.
The government still has a form of this program which they now call the Administrative Index, which was created out of the pressure exerted from Congress and the Church Committee. The legal authority for the Security Index expired in 1971, or something like that, but the FBI was not going to give it up. Then when the Church Committee started their investigation, headquarters realized, uh-oh, we’ve got problems, so we had better take these people off the Security Index and call this something else. So when Kelley was director,13 we had a program of culling the names of what you might call the most revolutionary from the Security Index and putting them on the Administrative Index, the ADEX. The Attorney General ordered the remaining names from the Security Index destroyed, but they weren’t.
The agent that testified before the Church Committee that there was no way that they could make up a list of the names that had been deleted perjured himself, because what we did was take the names from the Security Index, stamp them “Canceled” with a date, and put them in a different file cabinet. So we didn’t throw any of the cards away, they were just in the file cabinet next to the ADEX, and if anything happens, all we have to do is go pull them out.
And of course Congress didn’t know that we had those, because they assumed that they were all destroyed. We were playing the same old game that Hoover was doing back in the forties and fifties with the Attorney General, he didn’t tell him anything. So when we were canceling the Security Index, we didn’t tell Congress that we took them out of one drawer and put them in another. Congress would have had a fit had they known it—and they still don’t know it now.
WHAT WAS GAINED
In Chicago, fifty percent of our work was political. We had two hundred and fifty agents. Half of them were on the security squads and half of them were on the criminal squads. We had five security squads and five criminal squads, so there are about twenty-five men per squad, it was right down the middle.
I can’t think of anything we uncovered during those ten years that was worthwhile in terms of national security. About the most productive thing I did was arrest Claude Lightfoot, and then the Supreme Court said the Smith Act was unconstitutional, so what was that? During all that time that was the only arrest I made. It strikes me now, and it struck me then after a few years, that it was a waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money. But it contributed to my total years of retirement and pension, so you look back and it’s not all that bad, because I have a real nice retirement. But that’s about the only benefit I can see out of it. Of course, some people say we kept the Communist Party in check; well, I don’t know if we did that.
Three years after he joined the Communist Party in 1947, Harvey Matusow dropped a nickel into a public phone and dialed the FBI. He offered to become an informer. He was soon one of the Justice Department’s top professional witnesses, with a flair for publicity that brought him national celebrity. He campaigned for Senator Joe McCarthy, dined at the Stork Club with J. Edgar Hoover, and even married a millionaire. Less than three years later, Matusow publicly confessed that the testimony which had damned so many had been a complete fabrication. The Justice Department struck back, charging Matusow’s recantation to be a Communist plot to malign the professional witness program. Eventually, Matusow was convicted of perjury—not for his previous falsehoods, but for his disavowal of them. He served four years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. He now runs a private shelter for the homeless in Tucson, Arizona.
We had an association of professional witnesses, the Federation of Former Communists, literally a club where we could get together—for mutual protection, really.1 A good part of society didn’t like what we did in a very heavy way. So it was a question of fighting off the attacks. Let’s say that Paul Crouch2 was being attacked by so-and-so because of some stuff on the stand. So we’d get together, “Oh, so-and-so, yeah, I knew him.” And we’d figure out how we could counterattack and help each other.
I was not as well known nationally as Herbert Philbrick,3 because he had the TV series I Led Three Lives, and Matt Cvetic4 had I Was a Communist for the FBI, the film and TV series. They were the superheroes because movies were made about them, but I was the only young informer.5 The government witnesses of the time were all in their forties, fifties, and sixties. And here I came along, a young war veteran who served well during World War Two. My field was mainly youth. It was what people wanted to hear about, youth—and the media, because I’d been a member of the Newspaper Guild. Nobody until I came on the scene talked about the Communist entrapment of youth. Which was all rubbish anyway.
My attacks on Pete Seeger and the Weavers,6 the whole folk song movement, you know, “It’s a way of trapping the youth.” Nursery rhymes, folk songs, square dances, I never believed what I was doing. The stuff’s not believable. But the McCarthy forces, and particularly the Hearst newspapers, took advantage of it and made a media blitz of it.
There were high school assemblies that were convened for me to talk about Communism and young people. We were media heroes. I remember in Montana I spoke at a drive-in movie between the films. I was the advertised guest speaker. They had me on the microphone and they were showing the film My Son John,7 with Robert Walker. In 1952, television was not that big; I did a tremendous number of radio talk shows across the country. So among the informers, I was very well known.
I was very easily attracted to the Communist movement. When I came home in ’46, a year after the war ended, the Communist movement took all the altruistic feelings I had and directed it in a way that I felt comfortable. But it wasn’t long before I discovered that the Communist movement was as weird as any other movement, and politics was politics, whether it was Communist, Republican, or whatever. And when the witch hunt started in ’47, and ’48, when the first indictments came down on the Communist Party, I found it inconceivable that I was asked to go underground.8 I didn’t believe in it, and that was where my break with the Communist Party came. Basically, that’s why Joe McCarthy and I got on well, because we had that same morality. If you’re going to be something, be up front about it, or don’t be it at all.
In 1950, when I contacted the FBI and became a double agent, I was a street kid covering my bet on both sides. That’s another way of looking at it, and I can detach and see that. Here also I was this very bright dyslexic kid who was totally miserable because I couldn’t make it to college. The frustration that I had at that point in my life was beyond belief. When I was a kid in high school my IQ was 150 and I couldn’t write an English sentence. The only way I got out of high school in 1943 was to join the Army in my senior year. I was failing everything.
This was also one way for acceptance in the higher plane of American life. I’m a twenty-four-year-old high school dropout and the leaders of the country are getting advice from me as to how to run the country? I had U.S. senators, members of the cabinet, coming to me for advice. It was surreal. I lived in a house in Washington with twenty-six rooms that’s now the German ambassador’s residence. Every week we had leaders of the country coming to our dinners. A few years earlier, I’d been working for a bookie in the Bronx and now I’m dealing with the power brokers of America and the world? As long as I played this charade, I had access to this power, and it was hard to walk away from.
But another thing happened—and this was not part of False Witness.9 The Communists talked about the underground movement in France, how they had infiltrated the Nazis and worked to undermine them. And these discussions sat heavy on my heart and my intellect. I had a Walter Mitty fantasy that I was going to gather material on the right wing by infiltrating it as the French Communists had infiltrated the Nazis. When I contacted the McCarthy forces and all the people I’d worked for on the Right, I used to take stuff from their files, and that’s how I was able to write False Witness. I collected this huge amount of documentation because I knew someday I was going to drop the shoe. Now, I can’t say now whether that fantasy was a moral justification that I gave myself for what I did. I don’t know, because the mind is a strange thing, and I can’t really go back and say, “This is exactly what I did,” because I was a kind of free spirit. I still am, that’s the one consistency in my life. I think the total amount I got paid in all the time I was an informer was under two thousand dollars.10 But remember, I married a woman who had millions of dollars.11 I didn’t need that money. The money I got as an informer I usually gave away. I never did it for the money. I did it for psychological reasons. I don’t do anything for money.
I met Hoover a couple of times, had dinner with him one night at the Stork Club, with Roy Cohn12 and Walter Winchell.13 I used to hang out with Winchell a lot and ride around in his Caddy when he went out chasing police calls. But that dinner was surreal. I guess we were talking about Communists and anti-Communists and all that garbage. The conversation was nothing, all stereotypes and clichés. I had a social life with Cohn. I used to go out on double dates with him. He was more than just the attorney, you know, we were two kids from the Bronx.
See, Hoover and Cardinal Spellman14 and Cohn were part of a kind of closet gay group. Cohn’s rise to political power came because of his gay relationship with Cardinal Spellman. It was a high-level group of closet gays who kind of kept to themselves. If you look at Nazi Germany, there was a similar group in Germany that built the Nazi Party.
There were three different parts to my job. There was the category “Who did you know to be a Communist? We want their name and your associations with them.” Then there was “We’re going to feed stuff into the record through you, even though you had no knowledge of it.” And three, be an investigator and just sort of dig up stuff and find other witnesses for them.
I made a rule of thumb. I never volunteered a name they didn’t already have. And it was very easy to give testimony, like when the FBI called me in and they’d say, “Do you know John Doe?”
“John Doe?”
“Yeah, he hangs around in the Tompkins Square area.”
“Oh yeah, I know John Doe.”
“Do you know Mary Doe?”
And then they’d give me a little background. Of course I knew John and Mary Doe. But unless I knew they knew the people, I didn’t know them. There are many people who I never named, ’cause my rule was only tell them what they knew.15 It was easy to con them into believing that I was giving them fresh information. They were naive. At one time I said I knew ten thousand Communists, and nobody knew ten thousand people as Communists. But they never questioned it. When I said there were one hundred and twenty-five Communists working for the Sunday Times, and the Sunday Times only employed ninety-two people, they never questioned it. I was able to give them the names of seven or eight Communists that I knew, ’cause I’d been in the Newspaper Guild, but they had those names anyway.
A good example: because I was involved in youth, the committee wanted to get headlines; so they found out that in 1926, the year I was born, the Communist Party had set forth a plan to infiltrate the Boy Scouts. They had some documentation, some leaflets and other bullshit, and that’s all there was. So the House Committee on Un-American Activities research director, Benjamin Mandel, gave me the documents. He said, “We want to enter this into the record.” So when I testified and committee members asked me about the Boy Scouts, I pulled out the documents and said, “Well, the Communists attempted to infiltrate the Boy Scouts.” Now the next day, there were headlines across the country, stating that the Communists are infiltrating the Boy Scouts. And nowhere in those stories did it make reference to the fact that this was something that happened a quarter of a century earlier.16
The committee used witnesses like me to help beat the drums and bring the tempo up to where people would be afraid. So the naming of names was almost a minimal part of your testimony. It was more working with the committee counsels—people like Roy Cohn or Donald T. Appel, the committee investigator who found the Pumpkin Papers17—in bringing up stuff that the committee members could use to get headlines, like the Boy Scouts.
When I said I knew ten thousand people by sight as Communists, that was an out-and-out lie. But it was never really the question of the out-and-out lie, it was the innuendo, the half-truth, that you built upon. The Mother Goose Rhymes was part of the whole bit. You see, the trade union movement in a couple of campaigns had these nursery rhymes:
“Jack be nimble / Jack be quick / Don’t let the poll tax / Make you sick.”
“Jack and Jill / Have had their fill / Of congressmen who spurn them / They’re making notes / To cast their votes / For men who really earn them.”
“Jack Sprat could eat no fat / His wife could eat no lean / Because the Congress done them in / And picked their pockets clean.”
Those were the three I quoted. So, instead of saying it was the trade union movement, I said, “The Communists have written these nursery rhymes to corrupt our children.” And that made headlines.
The government was naive. They didn’t know anything. But look at the government agent, some FBI agent who had trained at Quantico, Virginia, who had no reality to the world. He naively believed whatever any witness told him, ’cause he wanted to believe it. This came out during the Senate hearings in Salt Lake City in the first week of October ’52. There was a strike at Kennecott Copper, so in Salt Lake City they arranged to hold hearings of the Senate committee investigating the Mine Mill Smelter Workers Union, and that’s where this whole thing came about.
Clinton Jencks18 had been a Communist. I mean, I never saw his Communist Party card, but Jencks was a Communist.19 But I used the Jencks case to set the government up. Because in all my contemporaneous reports to the FBI, I said, “I never knew Jencks to be a Communist. I think he’s a Communist, but I have no knowledge of it.” And then when he went to trial, I said, “I knew him to be a Communist.”20 The result was the Jencks case, the Supreme Court decision which was the first thing that opened up the door for Freedom of Information and the mandatory disclosure of evidence held by the prosecution that might help the defendant.21
This thing about sabotaging the Korean War effort by going on strike in the copper mines, that was kind of fabricated. Oh, Jencks and I did talk about stuff like that, you know, if there’s a strike the Korean War effort could be sabotaged.22 It was just small talk. And the committee wanted me to say that. It didn’t come from Jencks. It was the desire of the committee for me to say that the Communists planned to have a copper strike to sabotage the Korean War effort. We’d be sitting down, having dinner or coffee, and just talking.
“Well, how can you do it?”
I’d say, “Well, obviously they want to sabotage the war effort.”
“Well, say it.”
Just as when Cohn was preparing the Smith Act case against Trachtenberg,23 who was head of International Publishing, and he wanted to introduce the book The Law of the Soviet State by Vishinsky.24 He said, “Did you ever discuss it with him?” And I said, “Well, we discussed every book that they published.” He said, “What do you mean?” Well, I worked in the bookstore and Trachtenberg would come in at least twice a week and since I was one of the clerks he’d ask me, like any publisher, “How’s our book selling?” So I discussed the book with him, and on that we built a fabrication that he discussed the book with me. And that was all Cohn needed to introduce the book into evidence. Because Vishinsky in the book talked about the force that will overthrow the government—that was the basis of convicting Trachtenberg.25
See, I didn’t lie. He did discuss the book with me. And that’s why Trachtenberg was one of the two defendants to get released, get a new trial. The people who my testimony was material to all were released. The reality is, I’m the only person that went to jail for anything I did. Nobody else.26
The president of Queens College, John Jacob Theobald,27 came to my house, and I would talk to him about how the Communist teachers worked. It was all bullshit, but he wanted to hear it. I’m sure he used it to fire some people.28 But even to this day, I have to tell you, I don’t see economic deprivation as pain. I don’t see that as being hurt. I mean, if you’re hung up on the material world, then it’s pain. If your world isn’t based on that, they can’t hurt you with it. And mine has never been based on the economy, because it’s a charade. That’s why I can live the way I do now, communally. I’m still a Communist, ’cause I believe communal living is the finest thing that we can do.
During the ’52 primary campaign, McCarthy was ill. He’d ruptured his diaphragm and had this operation. And his staff was panicked because they really wanted some people to feed the flames. I think it was somebody at the Hearst organization who suggested to the McCarthy staff that I go out and fill in for most of his major speaking engagements in Wisconsin.29 I was contacted and went down to Washington and met some of his staff people, his wife-to-be, Jean Kerr, and they set up a series of speeches for me. My first one was to be in Green Bay, that was the test, and the McCarthy people were out to monitor how the speech was received, and it was very well received. After that I spoke in Madison and Milwaukee and Wausau and Ashland and all over the state. The speeches were very successful, and the McCarthy people attributed a lot of the energy toward helping him win that primary to my work.
I’d never met McCarthy at this point; he was in the hospital.30 So one day his campaign manager, Urban Van Siesteran, said, “Would you like to meet Joe? He’s coming out of the hospital.” He said, “We’ll be at the hotel. Why don’t you come by at three o’clock?” What I didn’t know when I got to the hotel was that McCarthy didn’t like other people to answer his phone. He always answered his own phone. And frequently he’d put on a voice and make believe it wasn’t him, it was just one of his ways. So I called the room and asked for Urban Van Siesteran and I recognized McCarthy’s voice. He said, “Who wants to speak to him?” and I said, “This is Harvey Matusow.” “Are you the Harvey Matusow making speeches for Joe McCarthy?” “Yeah, I’m making speeches for that fascist son of a bitch!” And he broke up laughing. “He called me a fascist son of a bitch!” He repeated that about three or four times. He couldn’t stop laughing.
The very first day I met McCarthy, he told me to my face, he said, “You’re just like me, Harvey. You’re a practical joker, and someday you’ll turn on me.” After I recanted, he sent word to me—he wouldn’t see me directly—in essence, he said, “I know why you’re doing it, and it’s okay. I don’t hate you.” He knew why I was doing it.
All right. How did it all end? Well, I was getting bored with it. I had married Arvilla and we talked about it and felt it was best if I pull out. My conscience was starting to get to me, and I started to feel strongly that I had to stop. One day I was real depressed and was sitting in Central Park on Fifth Avenue, near the Jewish Theological Seminary, and engraved up in stone on the wall was the biblical quote “Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with thy God.” It touched me, and I felt that that’s what I had to do.
I called up the New York Times and met with their correspondent Gladman Hill, and gave them an affidavit saying that I had lied. Now they could have broken the case then, instead of waiting for False Witness to come out, but they put my affidavit in their safe and never did anything with it. Then I called up Time magazine and gave them a similar affidavit and then I called up the New York Post and gave them an affidavit. None of these papers acted on any of my information. I then went to the Communist Party attorneys and said, “I’d like to do something,” but they wouldn’t talk to me. I went to see Bishop Oxnam,31 and he finally talked about it. I went down to Washington, where I’d been very friendly with Drew Pearson. I wrote the sample chapter of False Witness plus the outline on Jack Anderson’s32 typewriter. Jack Anderson actually helped me with proofreading and stuff.
The fact that I had been to the New York Times and Time magazine and the New York Post and had written the first chapter of the book on Jack Anderson’s typewriter long before I met Cameron and Kahn, that undermined any attempts of the government to get a conspiracy indictment against them,33 which is what they were trying to do.
I believe the FBI wanted to kill me. Hoover wanted me dead. They would’ve killed me if they’d found me walking down the road. I would’ve ended up in the desert somewhere.34 Hoover’s had more people killed than you’ve got fingers on your hands. You ask me what proof I have; I don’t have proof. But I know that the FBI was looking for me and every agent in the United States—and in every office, there was a bulletin to find me. The fact that I got to Taos, New Mexico, and I left Taos and the FBI was in Taos looking for me within three hours of my departure.
We could trace it down, and the FBI records show this. They were always: “Where is he? Find him!” I was not wanted for any crime, but Hoover wanted me.
I went to prison because I said Roy Cohn had suborned perjury, that Cohn and I had worked together at fabricating the story of Trachtenberg and The Law of the Soviet State. Which is true, Cohn and I did it together. But the government couldn’t allow the charge to stand that Cohn had suborned perjury or had knowledge of my perjury at the stand, so they prosecuted me on perjury charges for saying that. I was innocent of what I went to prison for. Not that I had not committed perjury, but I was completely innocent of that specific act. Cohn knew I’d been lying through my teeth about Trachtenberg, no question about it. He also suborned perjury when he was chief counsel at the McCarthy Committee and he knew I was bullshitting when I said I knew one hundred and twenty-six people working for the New York Times who were Communists when only ninety-two people worked on the staff. Today, with Cohn’s reputation being what it is, who’d deny my charge? The government never would have prosecuted.
I don’t think the McCarthy period is going to be understood until everybody’s dead. The Germans still can’t look at Hitler, and America has a difficult time looking at the McCarthy period. My friend Bill Duffy said to me three weeks ago, “It makes no difference, anybody who has worked for McCarthy will always be a villain to many people.” And I suspect that’s true—regardless of what I do and how well I do it, there will be people who totally discredit me. I suspect that long after I’m dead, there’ll still be a tremendous amount of hatred toward me. I run into it all the time.
An attorney at Lord Day & Lord, Barrett Smith for sixty years, Brownell served as campaign manager for Eisenhower’s 1952 presidential run and then as Attorney General until 1957.
It was a tough assignment, being Attorney General at the height of the Cold War. I got used to being accused by both sides of being on “the other side” in the continual battles over national security matters. I think McCarthy accused me of Communist tendencies.
There were some excesses in infringing individual rights that had to be stopped. But I think the government had to have a program against Communist aggression. I was convinced of that at the time, given the situation that the Soviets were subsidizing the American Communist Party in cash every month,1 and no doubt were using people in the government to get classified information—that was proven in a number of cases. The government had to do something to try and stop that kind of infiltration into government circles. It just was an impossible situation where we had to take some defenses. They were tapping our embassies and all that sort of thing, and subverting government employees.
You don’t need it today, I don’t think, but at that time you had people like Alger Hiss2 and Harry Dexter White,3 high government officials who were sending classified information to Russia, and that’s pretty serious. But, thank God, with the collapse of communism and all, I can’t believe that there’s any internal danger anymore from Communist agents.
It’s hard to recreate the atmosphere that there was in the forties and fifties. The FBI was into it, committees of both Congresses were in on it, their constant investigations and so forth. It became a political issue, which it never should have, of course, but it did. So by the time the Eisenhower administration got in, it had been one of the great issues in the presidential campaign of ’52. It was politicized and was complicated by the fact that McCarthy was so irresponsible and was blowing it up for political purposes. I think he was trying to run for President on it. I always thought so, anyway.
Everybody was relieved when Harvey Matusow recanted.4 He got himself into a position where, instead of being a witness, paid by the hour or something of that sort, he was really on the government payroll.5 He testified in many of the cases and became somewhat of a stooge of the prosecution. I personally put a stop to that.6 After I found out what was happening, we never again used him as a witness in any government cases.7 Some of the convictions his testimony figured in were overthrown on that basis, as they should have been.
The FBI counterintelligence program was set up under an executive order of Franklin D. Roosevelt.8 There were many civil liberty questions involved. For example, FDR didn’t limit the FBI as to the methods it was entitled to use in carrying out his executive order.9 They went ahead and wiretapped, as it hadn’t up to that time been declared illegal. But they went too far in their enforcement tactics, in my opinion, and so when I came in as Attorney General, I tried to get court decisions which would give instructions to the FBI and to all the government agencies as to what means they could use in fighting government subversion and what fair procedural rules there should be, like facing your informers and not using anonymous information to convict anybody.10 It gradually worked out, but it took maybe five years or so for the courts to get around to lay down those rules. It was a period of chaos and confusion in the area of internal security. Later on, too, Congress passed legislation curbing the use of certain enforcement methods.
There was strong support for outlawing the Communist Party. It was a very divisive issue for a long time. Civil libertarians thought that the Communist Party had as much right to run candidates for office and to speak up as anybody else, and I agreed.11 The Supreme Court said when Communists conspired to overthrow the government by force and violence, however, then that was a statutory offense and they could be sent to jail, as they were. In other words, I prosecuted those who so conspired. A big trial before Judge Harold Medina was conducted in the 1940s and the court upheld the statute and a lot of the leaders of the American Communist Party were sent to jail.
Harold Stassen advocated outlawing the Party, and he debated Governor Dewey on it. Dewey took the civil rights position that it should not be done, that that was the wrong way to attack the Communist menace. After that debate he defeated Stassen for the Republican nomination for President, so that sort of killed off the idea.
Eisenhower never had to take a stand on that particular issue—it was settled really before he came into office. I don’t think anybody after 1948 seriously contended that the Communist Party had no rights.12 The individual leaders of the Communist Party were American citizens and they had the right to speak their piece, and people had a right to vote against them or their candidates and all that sort of thing. But to outlaw them was wrong.
There was no doubt there was a spirit of fear created by some of these wild charges of McCarthy and innocent people got hurt. But there were no rules, so prosecutors or committees could go pretty far in badgering these witnesses. But we finally got the courts to draw the guidelines, so I think those things were corrected eventually. But it was a period of pretty difficult problems for the government and for government employees.
Considering the conditions at that time, I think I would’ve done some things differently in tactics. I realized the necessity for an employee security program,13 but in the absence of guidelines from the courts, I think we used some tactics that were shortsighted. On the government employee program, for instance, I think we could have confined it to people whose job was to handle security information instead of examining all government employees.
Since the FBI’s counterintelligence program was established by executive order of FDR and was not changed by Truman or Eisenhower or the Congress in any material respect, I limited my efforts in the internal security field largely to getting definitive court rulings on where to draw the line between the needs of national security and the constitutional rights of individuals.
A member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) since 1927, Roy Brewer came to Hollywood in 1945 as international representative to resolve a jurisdictional dispute with the left-wing Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). As an officer of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), Brewer allied himself with HUAC and the American Legion, rising to unprecedented power in the movie industry. He scrutinized film projects and careers alike for the fatal Red taint, and his word could stop both in their tracks. Brewer became a studio exec for Allied Artists in 1953.
Historically, this was a country of honest people. We didn’t have too many disciplinary problems because most people did the right thing. If a law was passed it was their obligation to obey the law, even if they didn’t like it. But, the Communists started on an entirely different premise. First of all, they think any belief in God is an instrument to deceive the people and therefore it’s their duty to destroy that influence. And with them, right is what the Communist Party says is right; it has no relation to fact so far as the Communists are concerned. The extreme example is that the Communists built their structure in this country as anti-Hitler, that’s how they got recruits in the early part of the twentieth century. But when it served their purpose, they went to bed with Hitler.1
The failure of the American people to understand was considerable, because if a man swears to you he’s telling the truth, and he has any semblance of integrity, Americans tend to believe him. The Communists play on this. You can’t use a lie detector test on a Communist because a lie detector test is a way to detect a subconscious guilt feeling. Since they feel no guilt when they lie, because it is their duty, the test passes them with flying colors!
It’s a very interesting and a very long story. I’ll try to at least touch the highlights because this book you’re doing tends to serve the Communist purpose. Understand now, the person that is going to read this will give the same credence to a Communist who’s programmed and trained to lie as a man like myself who’ll tell you the truth! The public has either believed or been confused by the lies to the point that we have had no defense. And we have no defense today against the secret underground Communist apparatus. They have completely intimidated Congress to the point that they won’t even mention the name on the floor. I say this, because I’ve been through it. I’m one of the very few survivors. I never was fooled, I attacked them right from the beginning.
You see, in 1934, the Soviet Union dispatched funds to certain American Communists in order to finance the takeover of the motion picture industry. The idea was to use motion pictures as propaganda to soften the peoples of the world toward communism.
Not long after, two people showed up on the scene, Jeff Kibre2 and John Howard Lawson.3 Kibre was to organize the trade unions, but he was rather quickly exposed through some letters that he had written to the California CIO, which was controlled by Communists at the time, and dropped out of sight by the late ’30s. But Lawson was much more successful. His job was to organize the creative artists, the intellectuals of the community. He organized and led the Screen Writers Guild, which became the center of Communist influence in the industry. Lawson was the commissar of Hollywood and influential in other guilds, unions, and Communist front organizations—that is, up until the House UnAmerican Activities Committee hearings of 1947, after that they were pretty much exposed.
In the early ’40s, the Hollywood AFL unions came under attack from Herbert Sorrell and his Conference of Studio Unions.4 Sorrell was picking up where Kibre left off, there’s no doubt about that. The Communists realized they had made a mistake by having such an easily identified Communist as Jeff Kibre head this drive, so they had Sorrell cancel his membership with the understanding that he would not have to follow Party discipline as far as his union and the building treades went, but otherwise he would support the Communist program.5
Through this attack the Communists infiltrated and undermined the leadership of the AFL unions. The main target was my union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which was the largest union in the industry. That’s how I got involved, and I’ve been fighting the Communists ever since.
On March 12 of 1945, the SCU called a wildcat strike over whether the set decorators, who were represented by IATSE, would go over to the Painters Union, which was affiliated with Sorrell and the CSU. At the time, we thought this was just a minor jurisdictional affair, but it blew up into a major conflict. Out of this came the Hollywood investigations and the disclosures that shocked the world.
I showed up in Hollywood about six hours after the strike began. My original job was to study these jurisdictional problems and come up with a solution. Well, that changed pretty fast. The strike was against my union and I had to do what I could to break it. That meant keeping the studios running at all costs. I had to decide whether a studio could operate or not, or whether a picture could be finished or had to be shut down. It wasn’t a job I was prepared for, but the responsibility was mine. It wasn’t long before I discovered that our union was in an all-out fight for survival against the Communist apparatus! If we didn’t destroy them, they’d destroy us. So we began a program of attack and exposure that eventually paid off. It wasn’t easy, there was great deal of bitterness and violence. For a while, we had guards around my home, and for about six weeks my daughter went to school with a bodyguard.
One thing I learned during that period is this: the communists don’t know how to fight when they’re on the defensive. Their program is nothing but lies, deceit, and deception. Without the opportunity to choose the time and the issue so they can appeal to the emotions and frustrations of the people, they’re exposed for the liars they are and they lose face.
One of the main groups fighting the Hollywood Communists was the Motion Picture Alliance.6 The MPA was not an organization of reactionaries. It was strictly a group that was fighting the infiltration of the Communists into the motion picture industry. I knew that only a small part of these were real Communists. I realized that many of them had been tricked into the Party and then couldn’t get out.
First of all, we laid down a code that would protect the interests of Americans from hidden Communists. Everybody knew that there were some Communists in Hollywood—but who were they? And so, we had a program of separating the hard-core Communist from those who were duped into going along. Once they were isolated and people knew them, then they were no problem. It was a controversial program, very few people understood it. But it was a sound program one we hoped to carry off successfully! As links showed up, the MPA would publicize them. For example, if something surfaced that proved a certain person was a Communist agent, we would simply expose it. That’s all you needed to do. Once they were exposed, they couldn’t work. Any man that admitted that he was a Communist during that period would’ve been fired. And there was no blacklist, in its true sense.
Now, one of the most honest accounts of this period is John Cogley’s book financed by the Fund for the Republic.7 Although he criticizes the so-called blacklisting, he also documents the screenplays written by Communists. He had this to say about my role: “Brewer was careful not to make errors. Though he was quick to charge others with being ‘soft on communism,’ he was slow to charge anyone with actual Party membership. This was known to the studios and in the anti-communist power centers, where Roy Brewer had become a name to be reckoned with.”
I didn’t mind if the Communists would come out in the open and say, “I think this is a better system.” I wouldn’t say a word. But they lie about being Communists and try to seduce people. Every person that’s decent and honest ought to object to that. The evil was the secrecy of it, the deception. You can’t have a decent world that’s built with people who lie in order to try to use other people.
Look what they did to John Garfield.8 They got him married to a Communist woman so they could control him. The poor little guy. He was not an intellectual, but he had acting talent, and they used his talent. Early on, Garfield was scheduled to be called before the committee, they had his card number and his wife’s card number. He wanted his wife to go with him; he wanted to tell everything and get it off his chest. She wouldn’t let him and he argued with her.
Garfield did appear before HUAC, but he didn’t tell the truth.9 He didn’t admit that he’d ever been in the Party, and I knew he had been. Then he couldn’t get a job anyplace. Nobody would touch him with a ten-foot pole, because they had evidence he was a Party member and he denied it. Then I started getting signals—“Louis Nizer10 would like to talk to you.” Garfield wanted out and Louie Nizer was going to set him free. Nizer had a file of all the things Garfield had done; he’d been to the Boy Scouts and all this, he couldn’t be a Communist. I looked at what Louie Nizer had and said, “It won’t work,” because he was denying the facts. Now Garfield was in the Party. His wife got him in and she wouldn’t let him out.
Well, I found out that Nizer didn’t want my advice, he just wanted my approval. He got kind of short with me, because I was this upstart. All we wanted Garfield to do was tell the truth: “I got in the Party. There’s the reason I got in.” We’d expect him to say, “I made a mistake by getting in, but here’s what happened.” And who helped you? We insisted that he had to come clean. Name names? Absolutely! Because they had no right to be secret. Do they have a right to maintain a secret organization and victimize people in the interests of the foreign policy of a country which is an enemy of ours? A thief doesn’t have a right not to expose his accomplices. These men are criminals in my book. They’re still a part of the conspiracy if they conceal it—that’s the theory, and I think it was absolutely right. If they want to be Communists, let ’em be Communists. And you can judge them on the basis of the truth. But if they conceal the truth so they hurt somebody else, no society can tolerate that.
I met with Garfield before he died. I went to dinner with Garfield and Victor Riesel,11 and we were going to help him get out. Garfield died before he could clear himself. He had a heart attack.
I did not want Communists making our motion pictures, I’ll tell you that! I would’ve fought them if they were in the open, because they did put propaganda in our films. But the trouble is most people didn’t know propaganda when they saw it. I’ll tell you a scene they put in The Best Years of Our Lives, one of the finest pictures of that period. It was released in 1946, before we discovered that the Soviets were not going to be our allies.
Now Dick Walsh12 and I went to see the premier of that picture, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it. But here’s the scene. Two of the characters are gathered around the bar. Dana Andrews13 was the soda jerk who was being mistreated. Because he could not get a job that was commensurate with the skills he had displayed in the military, he had to settle for being a soda jerk. Harold Russell was sitting at the counter—you remember him, the fellow who lost his hands.14 In walks this man you’ve never seen before, and he says something about the lousy Russians. Andrews says, “What did you say?” “Oh,” the man says, “it looks like we fought the wrong people.” Andrews says, “What? You say all of our sacrifices were in vain? Why, you dirty louse!” He grabs him and punches him in the nose. He falls down and Harold Russell picks the American flag out of his lapel button with his mechanical hand. Thus it created the image of the American “firster” who later became the basis of the Communist attack to discredit anyone who tried to question Russia’s place in the world scene.
Now, I thought: “Millions of people are going to see that!” I said to Walsh, “Boy! They got their licks in on that scene!” And Dick Walsh said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “That scene there, identifying as anti-American everybody who criticized the Russians. That’s really what it did. They pulled the flag out of his lapel.” “Oh, well,” he says, “if that’s the best they can do.” [Laughs.] That was Dick Walsh. He was my boss. But let me tell you something; that was a tremendous scene. How did it get in there? It wasn’t in the original script. We don’t know for sure who put it in. Willie Wyler15 was the director. Willie was not a Communist, but he was soft. He didn’t like the charges against people. He got his neck out on the Committee for the First Amendment.16 But the associate producer of that picture was a man by the name of Lester Koenig. He was a Communist. He’d been identified.17
You can tell we didn’t go half-cocked on these things at all. Now, I never made an issue of that movie, because it was such a fine picture that it took so much explaining to get people to understand, and if my own boss didn’t understand it . . . But nonetheless, it may have delayed our recognition of the Soviet betrayal for quite a while.
Edward Dmytryk is a fine man.18 He had a brilliant mind and worked his way up to being a director. He had this guilt complex that a lot of ’em had. His father was a trade unionist and he wanted to do something for the programs that his father fought for. Now whether his father had any Communist leanings or not, I don’t know. But as far as I know, Dmytryk didn’t distinguish between them. He thought they were working for the same things his father did.
After he got out of prison, he had time to think it through and he looked at himself and said, “What am I doing? I am not a Communist!” Dmytryk went to Ike Chadwick19—Ike was the head of what they called the Poverty Row producers—and he said, “I’ve made a fool of myself. I haven’t been a Communist since ’46. I want a chance to prove to the toughest anti-Communists in town that I’m not a Communist.” And so Ike brought him to me. I called a meeting of the MPA and we set up a committee to talk to him, because, to be honest about it, we didn’t believe his story. Here he’d been running with Communists and going to jail with them, but he wasn’t a Party member? That didn’t make any sense, but it proved to be true. We had a split in the MPA over that. I said, “If these people are telling the truth and want out, it’s our duty, not only to get the ones that are wrong, but to help the ones that have been victimized.” I think it was the most important decision that I ever made in the whole thing.
There were fourteen people on that committee. Among them was Ronald Reagan and Art Arthur, a writer, later secretary of the Motion Picture Industry Council. We set up this meeting and we listened to his story. We began to see maybe he is telling the truth. So we said, “Well, you made the record, you have to unmake it. But we’ll help you unmake it.” So we had this fellow Murphy, who was a member of the MPA and a writer for The Saturday Evening Post. We asked him if he could get a story in the Post in which Dmytryk would tell the story that he told us.
If Dmytryk was willing to have his story told in the Post, we figured it must be true and we would help him. So he did, and did the Party come down on him. They ran this double-page spread saying he was a liar and he was no-good and everything else.20 So we went to bat for Dmytryk, and we got him restored. And the minute we did that, then Dick Collins21 broke. He wanted help to get out so we agreed to help him also. He really opened it up. His information brought on new hearings that shocked the world. Those hearings established that a number-two official of one of the major studios was a dues-paying member of the Communist Party.22 The Dmytryk case was important because it isolated the hard-core Communists and broke the lines of communication between them and their dupes.
The only one that really lied to us was Lee J. Cobb.23 He told us he never was in the Party. We didn’t have the proof at the time, but later on we discovered he’d lied to us. He named names afterwards, but he lied first. That made it doubly hard for him, because once he lied to us we didn’t care whether we helped him again.
Then there was the case of the screenplay called The Hook, which had been written by Arthur Miller.24 It dealt with a story of corruption in the Longshoremen’s Union on the East coast. This union was bitterly anti-Soviet and at times had refused to unload Russian ships. The script clearly indicated that the union was under control of the racketeers. It was offered to two studios as a package with Elia Kazan, who at that time was a Communist,25 for no money up front, which was an unheard of arrangement because normally this package would have been worth about a quarter of a million dollars for talent of this quality.26 They first sent it to RKO. The head of RKO said to me, “I got this script here that’s got a union angle. I’d like to have you look at it and see if you think we should try to make it.” So I said I’d take a look for him. After I read it I called him back and said, “You not only have a union problem, you have a Communist problem because Harry Bridges27 has announced that he is going to file a petition to try to gain representation for the employees on the East coast waterfront and the picture could play an important role in convincing them to join with Bridges.”
So, RKO says, “Well, Harry Cohn at Columbia just bought it.” So I called the head of labor relations at Columbia and stated my concern. He in turn called Cohn and Cohn said, “Well, you don’t have to worry, we’ll change it.” I made it clear that I was not objecting to any exposé of corruption in the waterfront unions, but I was not going to stand by and see a Communist union take over the members in New York if I could help it.
I told him that I couldn’t see how changes could be made because the problem was inherent in the timing of the picture and the union election. I told Cohn that I thought the motive for making the picture now and giving them the script for such extraordinary terms was an attempt to influence the East coast longshoremen, who had been traditionally anti-Communist. He still insisted that he thought he could change it. Well, I didn’t agree.
I didn’t hear anything more, until one day I had a call from the labor relations director that Cohn wanted to see me. I walked into his office and there was Kazan and Miller. I was supposed to tell them how I wanted the script changed. Well, I realized this was a pretty big order and one for which I was unprepared. They asked me what I objected to in the script and I told them, “You have this progressive fellow being kicked around by the gangsters and it almost parallels the claims of a Communist character that was operating right here in Hollywood in my own union.”
Miller suggested that maybe we could have him accused of being a Communist and he could deny it. I laughed and said, “Look, if he was asked that question and he didn’t deny it, they’d kick him out of the Party, so that’s no solution.” The truth is, the Communists had a rule that the minute you were asked if you were a member, you were automatically expelled from the Party and then you could say, “No, I’m not a Communist.”28
So then I got an inspiration. I said, “Well, maybe if we had the representatives of the People’s Worker come down here”—that was a contraction of the People’s World and the Daily Worker—“and offer their services to help lick these gangsters, and this fellow would tell him, “Get off the waterfront! You’re worse than the gangsters!” [laughs] My suggestion was a way of counteracting Miller’s ridiculous solution to the problem of establishing this man as an anti-Communist.
Miller says “Well, I’m not sure that would be a very good thing. I don’t know.” The meeting broke up, and the next thing I knew, Miller had pulled out of the deal.
I didn’t believe Communists had any business writing our screenplays. If they were going to take dictation from a foreign country as to what to put in our screenplays so as to prejudice our interests against the enemy, they had no right there. That was my position, and I still think I was right. And I make no apologies for that at all.
Everybody that helped them should go kneel and pray for forgiveness, because we may be coming to the time when all this is coming to an end. The course of events are moving toward the basic line of the prophecies perhaps right now. I am not a rabid church-going man, but I believe the Bible is true. You find that most of the basic things are coming true. Don’t forget that the conflict right now is shaping up between the legitimate sons of Abraham and the illegitimate sons of Abraham. Did you realize that? [Sighs.] Yeah, it’s a funny thing.
From the late forties to 1962, Szluk was a State Department security man, the special assistant to the director of personnel. As with many in the civil service, his home is furnished with memorabilia of his travels. Framed on the wall is a letter from J. Edgar Hoover thanking him for a job well done.
The fingering would usually start by somebody sending in a letter—without a name or anything—to our security office in the State Department. It might just say that so-and-so was a registered member of the Communist Party in such-and-such a time. We would turn it over to a fella by the name of Jack. I’m not gonna mention his last name because he’s still around and I don’t want to use the name of somebody that was involved in some really bad stuff. Anyway, Jack and his gang would take the letter and I don’t know how the hell they did it, but they would eventually get to the guy that wrote it. You’d be surprised, just by examination of the envelopes, the ink, they could pinpoint it right down where they can say that’s the guy. Jack and his people were able to do this.
Next, we would interrogate that person, “Now prove what you said about so-and-so.” And ninety-nine percent of the time, it was a bunch of crap. That was my job—especially during the period of that awful Joe McCarthy and those two kikes, Cohn and Schine. Keep in mind that because of my network of informants, I was in a position to know all of the secret vices and leanings of all of these people in government, from the White House right down to the janitor in the State Department. McCarthy was scared of me because he knew I had stuff on him, which I can’t go into. He knew, of course, that I had stuff on Cohn and Schine.
You know, I built this network up by myself, because before I assumed that job of hatchet man for the State Department, well, it was easy come, easy go. But I cleaned house! [Laughs.] I got rid of the people that were undesirable and I cleared those whose name had been besmirched by sons of bitches. So I had a twofold project going all the time: to get those that deserved to be kicked out, and to clear those who had been maligned by vicious, no-good sons of bitches. You’d be surprised how rotten people are to one another, simply because maybe some guy wouldn’t drop his pants for some woman or a man, I’m telling you!
Keep in mind that if they were guilty, the son of a bitch had to go. And if I had any suspicion that this was a besmirching job or somebody was out to get this guy because of some difference between he and she or he and he, I would do everything possible to clear this guy. If he didn’t clear, bang, out he’d go. To this day, nobody knows who some of the people were that I got rid of because they were sodomites.1 I would protect it, particularly because so many of them had families. The only thing I regret in my campaign to rid the State Department of that type of individual was when within minutes, and sometimes maybe a week, they would commit suicide, yeah. I’d tell them, “You’re finished.” The toughest part would be that. One guy, he barely left my office and he must’ve had this thing in his coat pocket—and boom!—right on the corner of 21st and Virginia. That was our office, on 21st and Virginia. Of course, nobody knew that he had been in to see me. It remained a mystery except to me and the security people.
The gay was a pretty large percentage of them.2 But it was all sorts of things, selling secrets to the enemy, any human frailty, we had it. And if it got out of hand, we obviously could not tolerate it, because the Foreign Service was the cream of the crop. You were supposed to be spotless. And if you did anything, regardless of how small or insignificant it might seem to somebody on the outside, to us it meant you’ve had it.
Maybe I would go to the Secretary or the personnel director, but there was no formal hearing. Hearings . . . what the hell for? That was a waste of time! No, I was the hatchet man. Szluk’s got it. Szluk says the son of a bitch is a queer, out he goes! I was a power unto himself. Nobody bothered me because they didn’t dare. Although I had a pretty good reputation among the top people in the department, that I was not the sort of person that would just out of malice grab somebody and get rid of them, because I wasn’t. They trusted me. If anyone deserved to leave the State Department either because of policy, habit, inclination; all right, he had to go. But if it came to my attention that somebody was trying to get rid of this man because of a turndown or disagreement or whatever, then once I was satisfied, the shoe would be on the other foot and sometimes the informant would be given his walking papers.
Leftists were suspect, although I probably leaned towards them, because I believed in free expression. As long as it was not anything that you did or thought that would harm the State Department or our country. Past membership in the Communist Party would be negative but not necessarily a factor which would result in departure from the department, because it would depend upon what had been done. Now keep in mind if the membership was back in the thirties—we are now in the forties, fifties, and sixties—and if this person had demonstrated by an adherence to a major political party a clean bill of health insofar as association, or associations with people and organizations, during that intervening period, no way did I take into account what they had done in their early days. Because I took the position that all young men and all young women commit some indiscretion in the early formative days of their growing up, and this should not be forever after held against them. Don’t you think that was a pretty good philosophy or belief?
But if they were still party members, or kept those associations—out. Then they were blackballed. You know what blackballing means? They’d end up on the breadline somewhere, and I didn’t give a hoot. Blackballed everywhere—we could do it, yessiree, boy. Keep in mind that this is a country that believes in freedom, and these sons of bitches were trying to besmirch that. So I had no tolerance for them, and if we caught them, and if they were Grade A, and I mean Grade A, they were sold on it one hundred percent—get rid of that son of a bitch. Put him on a breadline. And we did.
I didn’t think leftists were a threat to the nation, no way. Because if I had believed that, I would have killed them, literally. Any man that would do anything to harm this country, yessiree. I thought they were jokes. I just thought that they were sad sacks. During Joe McCarthy and that period, which is a sad period in our American history, I never worried that there was a Communist takeover. I thought it was a laugh. Of course, in today’s world we’re buddy-buddy with those people, and I think the danger of their taking over is greater now than it might’ve been back in my time. Back in those days the CP worked behind the scene, and that’s what killed them, but today they’re more out in the open and you don’t know what the hell they’re planning.
I recall on one occasion I met secretly with this high-level official of the department at the New Yorker Hotel. He was still in the Party, but he wasn’t active. But if you were able to show that there was a membership card issued in his name, that was enough. His departure was announced in the press at that time—and I’m not going to mention the year either. It was made to appear that because of some unusual family developments, an illness of some kind among the immediate family, he had decided to leave the service. And he was on his way up from the ambassadorial level into the upper echelons of the department.
He admitted that he’d been conned into it. I said, “You were a young man when you took up with the sons of bitches. Why the hell have you kept this line straight and narrow—narrower with every year—but you still have that line into Moscow?” You see, he had joined the Party like a lot of young people did, back in the Depression. And some of the people that joined retained that strong belief in that philosophy within them and they carried it into adult life. It was a time between their youth and their adult life, when everything was promising. And because they had moved up the ladder, they somehow linked the promise with the moving up the ladder. Which of course was all wrong, because they had moved up simply because they had the talent and the perseverance and the potential which was developed within the department of the Foreign Service. And the only answer he could give was “I don’t know.”
Yeah, a depression could do it, an unfortunate love affair could do it. It always surprised me how many men would go off the deep end into some other dangerous activity that required my eventual attention, simply because of unrequited love.
1In 1941, an FBI agent was assigned to follow suspected Nazi spy Inga Arvad, a former Miss Europe. The agent captured her on tape making love with a young naval officer named John Fitzgerald Kennedy. This was the beginning of Jack’s FBI file, which expanded to include any number of White House liaisons—including one affair with a gangster’s moll. Hoover kept Kennedy well aware of this information, and in turn Kennedy kept Hoover.
2Sanford Ungar, The FBI (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1976).
1For stories of life in the Communist underground, see “Five Minutes to Midnight.”
2Clyde Tolson was the assistant director of the Bureau and Hoover’s longtime and almost inseparable companion.
3Fine and Green were two members of the CP leadership convicted and sentenced to prison under the Smith Act. After their appeals were turned down, they were ordered by the Party to jump bail and go underground. Five years later, they surrendered peacefully, again on orders from the Party.
4In January 1955, Lightfoot was convicted of being a member of the CP while knowing it advocated the violent overthrow of the government. His sentence of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1956, then dismissed in a second appeal in 1961.
5Hoover’s counterintelligence program gave official sanction to “disrupt, disorganize and neutralize” chosen targets. The first was the CPUSA, practically moribund by this date with fewer than five thousand members, some fifteen hundred of whom were FBI informants. The many tactics used included planted news stories alleging criminal conduct; anonymous letters and phone calls disseminating derogatory information, real or manufactured; hang-up calls, lockstep surveillance, and intrusive photography; on-the-job-site interviews; the questioning of teachers (if the target had children) and the questioning of the parents of the children’s friends; IRS audits; and planted evidence which would result in arrests. As new perceived threats emerged—the civil rights movement, the New Left, and black nationalism—COINTELPRO grew more violent, with talk of poisoning children, the sanctioning and encouragement of assassinations, and even murder.
6Richard Criley was a founding member of the National Committee to Abolish HUAC. See his story under “The Fight Against HUAC.”
7What is now known as the “Days of Rage” began on October 8, 1969, when in reaction to the previous year’s police riot at the Democratic convention, up to three hundred of the renegade Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society gathered in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. Armored in protective clothing and armed with clubs and pipes, the Weathermen set out to do battle with more than two thousand of the city’s tough and reactionary police force. When the dust settled four days later, six of the radicals had been shot, 250 arrested, and most of them soundly clubbed. Seventy-five cops were injured.
8For twenty-eight years, Jack and Morris Childs, double agents extraordinary, fed information to the FBI. As couriers between the American CP and the Soviet Union, they reportedly channeled $1 million of Soviet funds a year into Party coffers.
9When selected elements of the Party went underground in 1950 and 1951, those in hiding were organized into units of three to five members, with only one member having knowledge of the membership in the next-higher unit. For more on the Communist underground, see “Five Minutes to Midnight.”
10The Top Hoodlum program was inaugurated in November 1957, just days after Hoover had been disastrously upstaged by a state trooper in Apalachin, New York. The attentive trooper had noted an unusual number of long black limousines pulling into the gates of a nearby estate. What he had detected, and later disrupted, was a convocation of more than one hundred of the most powerful organized crime figures in America. For more than three decades, Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed. Not only did the Bureau not know the mobsters were going to meet, they didn’t even know who they were. The FBI could not identify any of the sixty-two arrested, including Vito Genovese, Joseph Bonanno, and Santos Trafficante.
11A secret Hoover kept from Congress and the public, the Security Index dated from 1939 and was originally dubbed the Custodial Detention list. Along with aliens and citizens of “German, Italian, and Communist sympathies,” radical labor leaders, writers and journalists critical of the administration and the FBI, and certain members of Congress all graced Hoover’s austere adas. In 1943, Attorney General Biddle discovered its existence and ordered Hoover to abolish it. Hoover did so by changing its name to the Security Index, then ordered that it be kept a secret from the Justice Department. Later, Congress provided Hoover a patina of legality with the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950. Along with other draconian provisions, the act provided for concentration camps in times of national emergency to detain without trial anyone who had been a member of the CP since January 1, 1949.
12The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities, 1975–76, chaired by Frank Church (D-Idaho).
13Clarence Kelley, a twenty-one-year veteran of the Bureau (1940–61), was the third permanent director after the death of Hoover in 1972.
1But also with an eye to achieving higher status, recognition, and fees.
2Paul Crouch, who claimed to have left the Party in 1942 after seventeen years, was one of the more brazen liars in the business. Claiming to be a confidant of the Soviet Union’s top military leaders, Crouch entranced gullible congressional investigators with tales of an anticipated Red Army landing in Florida and his own complicity in a Russian plot to subvert the entire U.S. military establishment. It was this astonishing revelation, according to Roy Cohn, that set off McCarthy’s Fort Monmouth investigation.
3Herbert Philbrick was perhaps the best-known of the professional ex-Communists. After years as an FBI mole, he surfaced in 1949 at the first Smith Act trial to help convict eleven members of the Party leadership. His television series was taken from his autobiography of the same tide and portrayed the Communists as plotting to sabotage factories, smuggle drugs, and subvert America’s youth. Up to a few years before his death in 1993, Philbrick continued to lecture on such topics as “The Red Underground Today” and “Christianity versus Communism.”
4Matt Cvetic joined the Communist Party in 1943 on behalf of the FBI and emerged in 1950. He was destined to appear as a witness at least sixty-three times and name more than five hundred people. See Steve Nelson under “The Fall of the Communist Party” for more on Cvetic.
5Matusow was twenty-four in 1950.
6For another view of Matusow, see Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert under “Troubadours of the Left.”
7An amusing but deranged Hollywood melodrama made in 1952. The beloved son of an all-American family is revealed to be a secret Communist. Through the love of his careworn mother, he sees his errors and sets off to confess to the FBI—only to be gunned down by vengeful Red agents. Director Leo McCarey, himself a friendly witness before HUAC in 1947, headed a movement to have all members of the Directors Guild sign a loyalty oath.
8The Party sent dedicated elements of its secondary leadership underground. According to his book and others’ accounts, Matusow’s Party work appears to have been confined to circulating petitions and selling the Daily Worker. See “Five Minutes to Midnight” for more on the Communist underground.
9Attacked by Attorney General Brownell as a Red plot, False Witness (New York: Cameron and Kahn, 1955) is Matusow’s chronicle of his intrigues and fabrications as a professional witness. For more on False Witness, see Angus Cameron under “Arts and Entertainment.”
10Matusow testified at the trial of Clinton Jencks that in 1952 he had made $10,000 as a professional ex-Communist. This would be the equivalent of $47,000 today.
11His bride was Arvilla Bendey, a wealthy contributor to Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist campaign, who was subpoenaed concerning a $10,000 donation that purchased soybean futures instead of a Red-free America. At the request of McCarthy, Harvey spirited the woman out of the country.
12Equally loathed and respected, Roy Cohn began his career with his role in the Rosenbergs’ trial, as chief counsel for Joe McCarthy, and through his friendship with J. Edgar Hoover. Notorious as a power broker to a host of media barons, mobsters, politicians, and glitterati, Cohn’s habitual disregard for ethical niceties led to numerous indictments and professional misconduct charges. He was finally disbarred shortly before his death from AIDS in 1986.
13Walter Winchell was an inveterate Red-baiter and one of America’s most fabled newspapermen. His gossip column and radio show were conduits for much misinformation leaked by his friend J. Edgar Hoover.
14Francis Cardinal Spellman stood at the head of the American Catholic hierarchy. The cardinal frequently taxed the Truman administration with “appeasement” of the American Communists.
15Matusow is credited with turning over 216 names to the Justice Department. While he claims to have named only those the FBI already knew, his book False Witness suggests differently. “My first reports were oral. They . . . included names, addresses, and telephone numbers of college students, working youth, secretaries, and others. . . . The FBI wanted the physical descriptions of my friends. . . . I took pictures of individuals and identified them at the FBI office.” (p. 30)
16“Witnesses Bare Red Plot to Infiltrate Boy Scouts” was the headline on the Syracuse Herald-Journal of August 13,1952. The only documents mentioned are pamphlets from 1930 promoting the Young Pioneers as a rival organization to the Scouts. Matusow named Don West, a Baptist clergyman and “Communist organizer” who had organized Scout troops in his churches—thus “infiltration.”
17The Pumpkin Papers were the bombshell of the Alger Hiss espionage case. They turned up in a superb bit of theatrics one night in December 1948. Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser, led HUAC investigators across his farm to a hollow pumpkin, and from it he extracted five rolls of microfilm. They were said to be secret government documents passed to Chambers by Hiss. Richard Nixon, who cut his teeth on the case, hailed the microfilm as “conclusive proof of the greatest treason conspiracy in this nation’s history.” Twelve of the documents were released a week later, and found to be rather anticlimactic; the rest were not published or produced at Hiss’s trial for “security reasons.” See Alger Hiss under “A Graveyard of Careers.”
18Clinton Jencks was an organizer for the International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in northern New Mexico. See his story under “Breaking the Working Class.”
19In front of a grand jury, Matusow testified that during a stay at a vacation ranch in New Mexico, Jencks had revealed to him his Party membership, thus Jencks was liable for perjury on his Taft-Hartley oath. On the strength of Matusow’s testimony, Jencks was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. There is no evidence that Jencks was a Communist.
20In a hearing on the motion for a new trial after his recantation, Matusow did tell the trial judge that his original reports to the FBI would show that he never identified Jencks as a Party member. Yet in False Witness (p. 192) he quotes a statement he gave to the FBI in October 1951, prior to his first public testimony: “Jenks [sic] told me he was a party member.” He goes on to say that he lied to the FBI.
21Armed with Matusow’s recantation, Jencks appealed for a new trial and was denied. The Supreme Court later ordered a new trial at which the original FBI reports were to be opened to the defense.
22Matusow made front-page headlines with this fabrication: “Charge Jencks Hit War Effort”; “Ex-Spy Vows Red Bosses Ordered Copper Strike.” In his interview, Jencks denies talking to Matusow about much of anything.
23Alexander Trachtenberg, owner and publisher of International Publishers, a press close to the Party, on trial in the second round of Smith Act cases.
24Andrei Vishinsky, Soviet diplomat and author of a reportedly leaden tome. Vishinsky first came to international attention as the chief prosecutor in the Great Purge trials of 1934–38.
25Matusow testified that Trachtenberg had urged him to promote the sale of Andrei Vishinsky’s The Law of the Soviet State, asserting it contained directives for the overthrow of capitalism. Thus, the prosecution was able to tie the hapless publisher to an expression for the need to “overthrow,” therefore conspiracy, and hence convict and sentence him to three years in prison.
26In the second Smith Act trial of April 1952, discussed above, Matusow appeared as one of three professional witnesses against the Party leaders. His job, according to False Witness, was to implicate “each defendant.” These thirteen people did indeed go to jail. They received sentences ranging from one to five years. Three years later, on the weight of Matusow’s confession, only two, Trachtenberg and George Charny, were granted new trials. Both were again convicted.
27Theobald once explained to a discharged teacher, “The Board of Higher Education does not discharge teachers; rather the teacher by his own act in refusing to testify thereby brings about a termination of his employment.”
28See Oscar Shaftel under “Red-ucators.”
29According to False Witness, it was Matusow, swelled with his success at the Smith Act trial, who went to McCarthy’s campaign headquarters and volunteered his services to Jean Kerr. As McCarthy was already out of the hospital, there was no need for Matusow to fill in Joe’s speaking engagements.
30Actually, Matusow met McCarthy on the first day he volunteered at campaign headquarters.
31Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam was a well-known libertarian. He revealed Matusow’s recantation in June 1954 at a Baltimore conference of the Methodist Church. After the press picked up the story, Matusow was called before HUAC and questioned. He then backed off, calling Oxnam “a dishonest man.”
32Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson worked together on Pearson’s column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
33The Justice Department attempted to prove that Angus Cameron and Albert Kahn had bribed Matusow into a conspiracy to recant. False Witness, which was published by Cameron and Kahn, was supposedly the fruit of that conspiracy.
34After Matusow wrote that first chapter in Anderson’s office, he abandoned his book and set off on an eight-hundred-mile bicycle trip across Texas and into New Mexico. By this time, Cameron and Kahn, having heard of Matusow’s desire to write a book from the Oxnam report, were trying to reach him through his parents. “But I was in no hurry,” wrote Matusow, “and I didn’t care if I ever wrote a book.”
1Communist Party records seized in Moscow in 1991 apparently reveal that from 1960 to 1989 the American Party received up to $2 million a year. For reported Moscow financing in earlier years, see M. Wesley Swearingen, footnote 8, earlier in this chapter.
2In 1950, Alger Hiss, a high-ranking and distinguished State Department official, was convicted of two counts of perjury on espionage charges raised by Whittaker Chambers, a former Party member and the sole witness against him. Hiss was sentenced to five years in prison. The case quickly became a totem of the domestic Cold War. See Alger Hiss under “A Graveyard of Careers.”
3The most senior government official named by Whittaker Chambers was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and principal architect of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In 1948, White appeared voluntarily before HUAC and denied all allegations. Three days later, he died of a heart attack. In 1953, Brownell, then Attorney General, publicly charged that Truman had promoted White to the IMF, even though the FBI had informed him that White was a “Communist spy.” This exaggeration (Hoover had only referred to unsubstantiated allegations) set off an angry dispute with Truman, who answered with misstatements of his own.
4At the time, Brownell proclaimed Matusow’s recantation to be part of a “Communist plot” to discredit the Justice Department’s “campaign against subversion.” In February of 1954, he convened a grand jury to uncover the conspiracy. See Harvey Job Matusow earlier in this chapter and Angus Cameron under “Arts and Entertainment.”
5Scores of professional witnesses were on the government payroll, and even bargained for higher pay. One assistant attorney general, seeking more funds before the House Appropriations Committee, complained, “We have to negotiate with them and shop around. That expert witness business is really killing when you consider the rates these fellows charge today.”
6In April 1954, Brownell announced that the Justice Department would discontinue the employment of informer-witnesses as full-time “consultants.” Instead of regular salaries, they would henceforth be paid only for their specific services.
7The Justice Department ceased using Matusow as a witness in midsummer of 1954, but only at Matusow’s insistence. Up to that date, Brownell claimed, there were no grounds for doubting Matusow’s veracity, even though almost a year earlier Matusow had given the New York Times an affidavit attesting to his habit of lying as a government witness. Although Brownell may not have been aware of it, the law firm that represented the Times in obtaining the affidavit was Lord Day & Lord, Brownell’s own firm until his appointment as Attorney General.
8In a 1939 press release, Roosevelt instructed the FBI to “take charge of investigative work in matters relating to espionage, sabotage, and violation of the neutrality regulations.” A year later, in a memo to Attorney General Jackson responding to a Supreme Court decision banning wiretaps, Roosevelt okayed the “limited” use of “listening devices” in cases of “suspected subversive activities.”
9FDR’s 1940 memo stipulated that the Attorney General must approve and authorize each wiretap “after investigation of the need in each case” and further limited the practice to aliens, “insofar as possible.” Hoover, as was his wont, brushed over these restrictions.
10Actually, it was Brownell, with his directive of May 20, 1954, on microphone surveillance, who gave J. Edgar Hoover carte blanche to bug whomever he chose, by any means he found necessary: “Considerations of internal security and the national safety . . . compel the unrestricted use of this technique in the national interest.” Brownell later testified in the 1981 court case Socialist Workers Party v. Attorneys General: “There never was any definition of the methods that were to be used in carrying out the directive. The methods were left to the discretion of the FBI.” In 1955, Brownell, along with Hoover, insisted that national security depended on keeping informers secret in loyalty cases.
11In a televised report to the nation on April 9, 1954, Brownell announced a massive effort to destroy the Communist Party in the United States. He characterized Party members as “scheming and devious men and women dedicated to the destruction of our government and our way of life.”
12Eisenhower, in his 1954 State of the Union Address, proposed depriving American Communists of citizenship. Later that year, he signed into law the Communist Control Act, which stripped the CP of “all rights, privileges, and immunities attendant upon legal bodies.”
13Browncll refers to the Federal Employees Loyalty Program, initiated by Truman and expanded and hardened under Eisenhower. See under “The Purge of the Civil Service.”
1Brewer refers to the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939—41, which called for the cessation of war preparations by each side against the other and divided Eastern Europe into two spheres of influence. The pact came as a shock to everyone in the American Left, as did the Party’s abrupt retreat from its rigid antifascism. While still holding both sides responsible for the war, the Daily Worker reserved its sternest criticism for the Allies and consistentiy absolved the Nazis of any special culpability. In reaction, Left sympathizers distanced themselves from the Party while Popular Front groups crumbled as their membership fled.
2A 1931 graduate of UCLA, Jeff Kibre came from a family of Hollywood set decorators. By 1938, he was an open member of the Communist Party and the head of the IATSE progressives, a splinter group opposed to the mobster-dominated reign of union leaders George Browne and Willie Bioff. In fact, it was Kibre’s complaint to the NLRB of corrupt union practices that eventually led to Browne and Bioff’s downfall.
3A New York playwright, John Howard Lawson made his first Hollywood foray as a screenwriter in 1928. By 1934, he was a full-time resident of the film colony and a member of the Communist Party. A cofounder of the Screen Writers Guild, he was elected its first president in 1933. His career ended in 1947, when, as the leading member of the Hollywood Ten, he refused to answer questions before HUAC.
4A flat-nosed ex-prize fighter, Herbert Sorrell had long been active in the Hollywood unions opposed to IATSE’s dominance. By 1941, he was the business agent for the Moving Picture Painters and the head of the CSU. By 1945 the CSU, with nearly ten thousand workers, was a clear threat to IATSE with its sixteen thousand members.
5Whether Sorrell, an extremely independent exponent of union democracy, was ever a member of the Communist Party is still unclear, but ideologically he was close to the Party and accepted its help when offered. Brewer asserts that Sorrell admitted his membership before his death.
6The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) was founded in 1944 by a prominent group of Hollywood conservatives, foremost among them was its first president, Sam Wood. A successful director and zealous anti-Communist, Wood’s will specified that no heir, with the exception of his widow, could inherit unless they filed an affidavit swearing they “are not now, nor have ever been, Communists.”
7Cogley, John. Report on Blacklisting, 2 vols. The Fund for the Republic, 1956.
8John Garfield (1913–52) was a popular film star of the forties who made his career portraying the tough, defiant young man from the wrong side of the tracks.
9Once a member of the Young People’s Socialist League and active in a number of leftist organizations in the thirties and forties, Garfield desperately insisted before HUAC in 1951 that he couldn’t name any Communists because he didn’t know any. The committee sent his testimony to the Justice Department for possible perjury prosecution. He went to pieces under the strain and died of a heart attack in May 1952.
10Louis Nizer was one of the top attorneys during this period. He later successfully represented John Henry Faulk in his libel suit against Aware, Inc.
11Hearst columnist and professional anti-Communist.
12Richard Francis Walsh was the international president of IATSE at the time of this anecdote.
13Dana Andrews’s career reached its peak in the mid-forties with Laura (1944), A Walk in the Sun (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and Boomerang (1947). He continued to find work as a leading man and supporting player for the next three decades.
14As a World War Two paratrooper, Russell lost both hands in a hand-grenade explosion. He was picked out of an Army documentary by director William Wyler for Best Years and won 1946 best supporting actor for portraying an amputee struggling to adapt to civilian life, as well as a second, special Academy Award “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans.” He is the only actor to win two Academy Awards for the same role.
15William Wyler (1902–81) was a three-time Oscar-winning director, nicknamed “Ninety-Take Wyler.”
16A founder of the CFA, Wyler continued to lobby against the blacklist long after many of the other CFA liberals had jumped ship.
17Lester Koenig, who appeared before the committee in September of 1951 as an unfriendly witness, testified that he was not a member of the Communist Party.
18Edward Dmytryk, director and one of the Hollywood Ten, later cooperated with the committee. See his story under “Hollywood Blacklist.”
19Chadwick was also a member of the Motion Picture Industry Council. Formed by Brewer in 1949, the MPIC was created to bring the “Communist problem” to the attention of studio execs and to “clear” repentant Communists.
20After the Post article, “What Makes a Hollywood Communist,” was published on May 10, 1951, the Hollywood Reporter printed a scathing retort by Albert Maltz, also one of the Hollywood Ten. This in turn brought an answering salvo from the MPIC (again in the Hollywood Reporter), entided “You Can Be Free Men Again!”
21Richard Collins was a ten-year veteran of the Party (1938–48) and coauthor of the wartime heresy Song of Russia. He became one of the Unfriendly Nineteen subpoenaed by HUAC in 1947. He appeared before the committee in 1951 and named twenty-one of his former comrades, including Paul Jarrico, his longtime writing partner.
22Richard Collins named Martin Berkeley who in turn named Sidney Buchman, a writer-producer and assistant to Harry Conn, head of Columbia Pictures. By September 1951, when Buchman refused to name names, he had been out of the Party for six years.
23Lee J. Cobb (1911–76), outstanding character actor of the stage, screen, and television, appeared before HUAC in 1953 and named twenty actors and writers. See Jeff Corey under “Hollywood Blacklist.”
24See Arthur Miller under “Arts and Entertainment.”
25While this story takes place in 1950, Kazan’s Party membership extended from 1934–36.
26As Miller tells the story in Timebends (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), the downbeat script was tough to place, they went to Cohn because he was from the same rough dockside neighborhood as the film setting. Cohn agreed to make the film provided that Kazan make another picture for him, and that the two would receive no money until the film was in profits.
27Harry Bridges (1901–1990), Australian-born leader of the West Coast International Longshoremen’s and Warehouseman’s Union. Many on the Right, Brewer included, believed Bridges to be under the control of the CP. Harry, tough-minded and fiercely independent, freely admitted his sympathies toward Marxism and the Soviet Union, but always denied membership in the Party. For more than twenty years, the government unsuccessfully tried to prove he was a member. See Robbie Bridges under “Red Diapers.”
28As a result of legal prohibitions and popular prejudice, thousands of leaders of public, civil, political, and trade union organizations who privately adhered to Communism were unable to make this affiliation publicly known. For to do so would jeopardize their leadership in those areas which the Party had concentrated for years. Out of this dilemma arose two catagories of membership: those who were openly known as Party members, and those in positions of influence who participated on a semiclandestine level, known in Party argot as “submarines.” While this duality was viewed by many on the Right as evidence of a conspiracy, the Party was actually following the path of least resistance. Whether the Party protected its influential adherents with such Byzantine extremes as outlined by Brewer is dubious.
1In 1953 alone, 425 employees were summarily dismissed from the State Department as a result of “allegations of homosexuality.” U.S. intelligence agencies were unanimous in their belief that “sex perverts in government constitute security risks,” as they were said to be susceptible to blackmail. It was J. Edgar Hoover that proved this to be true, by blackmailing them himself. Nevertheless, in the history of espionage, there were very few gays trapped by their sexual preference compared to the number of heterosexuals lured by the charms of the opposite sex.
2For many conservatives, homosexuality and communism were indistinguishable. In the 1950 and 1952 elections, GOP stalwarts blasted the Truman administration for “harboring sexual perverts.” Thousands of suspected guys were purged from federal jobs. Washington Confidential, a 1951 scandal sheet in book form, touted the State Department’s Homosexual Bureau, manned by “former counterespionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies in Foggy Bottom.” The frenzy scaled lunatic heights with the call of Senator Wherry of Nebraska to guarantee “the security of seaports and major cities against sabotage through conspiracy of subversives and moral perverts.” He, and others, believed in the existence of a “world list” of gays who could be enlisted for espionage, sabotage, and terrorism. Supposedly compiled by Adolf Hitler, the list had reportedly fallen into the hands of Joseph Stalin.