Eight

McCarthy

New York City, 1936

ONLY IN RETROSPECT did Mary McCarthy realize the import of her answer. It was November 1936 and as a young reviewer making a name for herself in literary circles, McCarthy had secured an invitation to a Manhattan party in honor of the veteran cartoonist Art Young. It was a radical crowd: Young, now in his seventies, had twice been put on trial under the Espionage Act for his work with The New Masses. With the cocktails flowing, this should have been a celebration of left-wing solidarity. The Comintern had adopted the Popular Front policy the previous summer; the International Brigades were on their way to save Madrid; the Communist Party of the USA was backing President Roosevelt. But all was not well. “The whole room was under constraint,” McCarthy felt.

The question came from James T. Farrell, a novelist whose depictions of working-class Chicago had earned him the reputation as one of the most influential left-wing writers in the United States: “Do you think Trotsky entitled to a hearing?” McCarthy was thrown. Farrell had become a good friend. He had been impressed by McCarthy’s uncompromising attack on the state of literary criticism in a series of articles for The Nation the previous year. When she went on to deliver a rave review of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, the second novel in his Lonigan series, Farrell sought her out.¹ They were both from the Midwest, of Irish descent, and loved baseball. McCarthy knew that the question was not an innocent one by the way Farrell asked it—this was clearly not idle Party chatter.

McCarthy asked what Trotsky had done. She heard the mutters of disbelief around her. “Where has she been?” She was told that Trotsky supposedly collaborated on a counterrevolutionary plot to murder Soviet leaders. McCarthy looked at Farrell helplessly. “What do you want me to say? I don’t know anything about it.” Farrell kept pressing. “Trotsky denies the charges,” he said. “He declares it’s a GPU fabrication. Do you think he’s entitled to a hearing?” McCarthy felt her mind clear. “Why of course.” She went on to agree that yes, Trotsky, did have the right to asylum as well as a hearing.

And that was that. Farrell moved on to another group, taking his loaded question with him. McCarthy did not think much more of it. She had other things on her mind. She was twenty-four and newly single. She had divorced her husband, Harold Johnsrud, in May and spent the summer out west, in Reno and Seattle, visiting family and doing some freelance writing. On her return she was supposed to join her handsome but feckless lover, John Porter, on a trip to Mexico but, bored of him, she had sent him on ahead with no intention of following. Instead she had moved into a small studio on Gay Street in Greenwich Village and thrown herself into the bohemian pleasures of the Manhattan literary scene.

Her timing was poor—the scene was beginning to sour. Four days after the party, McCarthy received a letter from an organization that called itself the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky and was stunned to see her name above the letterhead. She was furious. “This was the kind of thing the Communists were always being accused of pulling,” she later recalled. No matter her friendship with Farrell, she was determined to pull out as a matter of principle. Then the phone calls started.

The calls were “not precisely threatening” but “peculiar” and they kept coming, almost always after dark, often quite late. The voice on the line would exhort her in standardized phrases to abandon the Committee and then immediately hang up. “Behind these phone calls,” she wrote, “there was a sense of the Party wheeling its forces into would-be disciplined formations, like a fleet or an army maneuvering.” Many of those that Farrell and his Trotsky-supporting allies had cajoled into joining the Committee began to drop out.

F. W. Dupee, the literary editor of The New Masses, had been given a list of names and told to ask those on it to resign. His first call was to McCarthy. She simply laughed. If intimidation had forced some to back out, it had precisely the opposite effect on the stubborn recipient. “I had been saved from having to decide about the Committee; I did not decide it—the Communists with their pressure tactics took the matter out of my hands.”² Again, she responded in the moment, doing what her gut told her was right. The simple decision to leave her name on that letterhead was “a pivotal decision, perhaps the pivotal decision of my life.”³ Battle lines were being drawn over Trotsky and the Moscow Trials and, while the New Yorkers did not know it at the time, the combatants were gearing up for a fight that would go deep into the Cold War—the fight for the future of the left and the role of literature in politics.

McCarthy thought of herself as a woman of the left, but she had always been skeptical of the Communist Party itself. As an undergraduate at Vassar she had had no interest in the “sloppily dressed Socialist girls at college who paraded for Norman Thomas” but in her senior year had suffered a “disturbing shock” when she read about the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchists who had been sent to the electric chair in 1927 for a crime they had clearly not committed.⁴

In June 1933, just one week after graduating, she had married Johnsrud, a theater actor based in New York City.⁵ By that point, the literary world was deeply enmeshed with the radical left. The Communist Party of the USA had only sixty-five thousand members, but among that group were large numbers of intellectuals, a generation that had been shaped by the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. McCarthy was skeptical of front organizations and never joined the Party, but like so many others in her milieu, she was an earnest fellow traveler. She attended the annual May Day parade and went to a debate about the purges that immediately followed the Kirov assassination, but she never shook off her distaste for the way Communists behaved. “The superiority I felt to the Communists I knew had, for me at any rate, good grounding; it was based on their lack of humor, their fanaticism, and the slow drip of cant that thickened their utterance like a nasal catarrh,” she wrote. “And yet I was tremendously impressed by them. They made me feel petty and shallow; they had, shall I say, a daily ugliness in their life that made my pretty life tawdry.” What she never reconciled was the Marxist approach to literature, which she found inflexible, even puritanical. She was not the kind of critic and writer to sacrifice aesthetics to politics—her lacerating reviews were testament to that. She was dedicated to the literary complexity of modernism in a way that she never could be to politics. In the summer of 1934, when Karl Radek ranted and raved about Ulysses at the Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow, McCarthy devoured the newly published Random House edition of Joyce’s novel in her Manhattan apartment.

Still, in the summer of 1936 she came very close to joining the Party. A Communist organizer almost convinced her that what was needed were critics like her operating from within. While out West she wrote a rapturous review in The Nation for Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, a historical novel set in the 1848 revolution in Paris. Warner, the Communist novelist who had so repulsed Spender when they met in Madrid, ended the novel with her embattled heroine uplifted by reading The Communist Manifesto. It made a mark on McCarthy. Like so many writers, she was roused by the fight against rising fascism and became obsessed with the Spanish Civil War. “I read the paper every morning with tears of exaltation in my eyes, and my sympathies rained equally on Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, and the brave Catholic Basques,” she wrote. “My heart was tense and swollen with Popular Front solidarity. I applauded the Lincoln Battalion, protested non-intervention, hurried into Wanamaker’s to look for cotton-lace stockings: I was boycotting silk on account of Japan in China. I was careful to smoke only union-made cigarettes; the white package with Sir Walter Raleigh’s portrait came proudly out of my pocketbook to rebuke Chesterfields and Luckies.”⁶

All the while she was, in her own words, “ignorant of the fissure that was opening,” a fissure caused by the Moscow Trials.⁷ “Nobody had told me of the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev—the trial of the sixteen—or of the new trial that was being prepared in Moscow, the trial of Pyatakov and Radek.”⁸ The speed with which politicians and writers could fall from grace was startling: just two years after being given his platform at the Writers’ Congress and Radek was in the dock. When those late-night phone calls started, McCarthy began asking awkward questions. Some fifty intellectuals signed an open letter, published in The New Masses, urging the board of the Trotsky Defense League to resign. These efforts to silence Trotsky’s supporters only emboldened McCarthy. Curled up on her sofa in her Gay Street studio, McCarthy read transcripts of the second trial. She was the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers, and she made short work of the prosecution’s case. It was full of “glaring discrepancies” and easily disprovable claims, the most obvious of which was that there had been a conspiratorial meeting between Lev Sedov, Trotsky’s son, and E. S. Holtzman at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen in 1936.⁹ The Hotel Bristol had burned down in 1912. The more she read the more obvious it became: it was “a monstrous frame up.”

This was no easy truth to tell in Manhattan. Stalinism was in intellectual fashion, and to be a Stalinist “was what smart, successful people in that New York world were.”¹⁰ To claim the trials were a sham was to commit not just a political heresy but a social one, too. “The Moscow trials were an historical fact and those of us who tried to undo them were uneasily felt to be crackpots, who were trying to turn the clock back,” McCarthy wrote.¹¹ And it was not just the trials. If they were a lie, then what else? The scales began to fall from McCarthy’s eyes. She began to preach with the zeal of a convert. Over lunch with Margaret Marshall, the books editor of The Nation, it emerged that her good friend Dwight Macdonald, who described himself as a “mild fellow traveler,” had swallowed the Moscow line on the trials.¹² “[McCarthy and Marshall] took it for granted that the Moscow Trials—the second of which had just been concluded—were frame-ups,” Macdonald recalled. “As usual, I was incredulous. I said it couldn’t be and why did they confess and so on. And also, as usual, to my credit, I was somewhat shaken. Shaken enough to buy a few days later the transcript of the trial, which the comrades were foolish enough to sell at a cheap price. And when I read the record of the second Moscow trial I concluded that Mary had been right, that indeed it was a frame-up.”¹³

It felt good to have a cause. McCarthy had become concerned about her bohemian lifestyle. “I realized one day that in twenty-four hours I had slept with three different men,” she wrote.¹⁴ She was living at an intense pitch, working as an editorial assistant for the publisher Covici-Friede during the day, writing reviews in spare moments, and attending meetings of the Trotsky committee and socializing with authors in the evenings. While she had been annoyed with Farrell for his presumption in signing her up to the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, her friendship with him survived in large part out of solidarity in the face of Stalinist hostility. A fixture in McCarthy’s calendar were Farrell’s Lexington Avenue parties, which became increasingly fractious as the trials divided former friends. “An orthodoxy was cracking, like ice floes on the Volga,” McCarthy wrote.¹⁵ Trotsky’s supporters were organizing, with Farrell leading the charge. By this time Trotsky, found guilty in absentia in Moscow, was seeking asylum in Mexico and a decision was made to hold a countertrial in which he would be given the opportunity to defend himself against the accusations being made back in Moscow. The Party again mobilized its forces, and an open letter was published condemning these American Trotskyists, signed by Malcolm Cowley, Lillian Hellman, Theodore Dreiser, and other Soviet-sympathizing writers.

In April 1937, a commission of inquiry, chaired by the venerable American philosopher John Dewey, traveled down to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s villa in Coyoacan, Mexico, and spent eight days examining the evidence against Trotsky. The villa was fortified, and armed guards patrolled the streets outside. The Soviet government and the Communist Party USA had been invited to send representatives but unsurprisingly declined. Just as unsurprisingly, the commission found that the Moscow Trials were indeed “frame-ups” and that Trotsky was not guilty. Farrell was in attendance and described it, somewhat breathlessly, as a “spectacle rare in history,” like watching Robespierre or Cromwell defending themselves, although these two obviously lacked the “intellectual breadth” of Trotsky.¹⁶ Farrell relished the drama of the moment; after the hearing, when Trotsky went for a holiday to Cuernavaca, Farrell “took over the guard of Trotsky’s papers . . . sitting on a table with pistols in holsters, bullets strung across his shoulders and chest, and a machine gun in hand.”¹⁷

BACK IN NEW YORK, McCarthy mixed sex and politics. At one of Farrell’s parties she met Philip Rahv, whose intellectual intensity and thick Slavic accent made him a formidable proposition (the writer Delmore Schwartz called him “manic-impressive”). Knowing he spoke Russian, German, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, and that he was living off the little he earned from the Federal Writers’ Project, she commissioned him to read some foreign manuscripts for Covici-Friede. The professional soon turned personal. “My dear,” she wrote one friend, “I have the most Levantine lover!”¹⁸

Rahv had been a true believer in the Communist cause but his faith was failing. As a child in Ukraine, he lived through the revolution, hiding in his parents’ shop during the worst of the fighting. He emigrated to the United States and lived in poverty as a young man, sleeping on park benches and forced to wait in the breadline. He was a determined autodidact, however, and began writing poetry and reading up on radical politics. He was recruited to the Party and began working as a journalist for pro-Communist newspapers. In 1934 Rahv and William Phillips (whose Jewish parents had also immigrated from Ukraine) became the editors of Partisan Review, a magazine founded by the John Reed Club of New York. The John Reed Clubs were Communist organizations, and therefore Partisan Review was expected to follow the Party line from Moscow. Yet even in this early incarnation of the magazine, Rahv and Phillips expressed discomfort with “mechanically applied Marxism” and the “sloganized and inorganic writing” being championed in the Soviet Union.¹⁹ While they made the case for politically engaged literature, they did not think that this should automatically invalidate the great modernist writers they loved, such as Eliot, Faulkner, Joyce, and Proust. These, surely, were writers who attacked bourgeois society, and their works could hardly be read as unthinking expressions of it. The Soviet Writers’ Congress had made an enemy of modernism, however, and it was a position Rahv and Phillips found difficult to reconcile with their own thinking.

Partisan Review folded when the John Reed Clubs were dissolved because they were perceived as too hard-line and doctrinaire to fit with the Comintern’s policy shift to the Popular Front. Adopting a friendlier, more tolerant approach to cultural policy, the Comintern organized the First Congress of American Writers at the Mecca Temple and the progressive New School for Social Research in 1935 to celebrate cultural solidarity in the face of the fascist threat. This was the first time leftist American writers had come together en masse to speak publicly, and the idea was clearly modeled on the Soviet Writers’ Congress of the previous year. In the final session of the Congress, the League of American Writers was established, an organization that was open to fellow travelers as well as Party members.

To Rahv and Phillips, there was something cynical in the way the Party was changing positions, and the Moscow Trials deepened their suspicion. They were bolstered by Sidney Hook, Phillips’s former philosophy professor, who had become the most prominent American Communist to turn publicly against the Party. In the late spring of 1937, McCarthy and Rahv moved into the apartment of one of their friends, on Beekman Place in midtown Manhattan. They read about the May Days fighting in Barcelona, in which Orwell was involved, and were appalled by the way the Communists were treating the POUM. McCarthy recalled a cocktail party at which she got into a furious row with the playwright Lillian Hellman about the murder of POUM leader Andrés Nin. (In her Intellectual Memoirs McCarthy admits her memory of this event is hazy and it might well have been an argument with another ardent Stalinist writer, Leane Zugsmith.)²⁰

McCarthy and her friends knew that they had to keep up the momentum generated by the Trotsky countertrial in Coyoacan. The very day Farrell returned from Mexico, he met with McCarthy, Rahv, and their allies to plan for the Second Congress of American Writers, scheduled for June 1937. The Party, buoyed by the success of the First Congress, had ambitious plans for the sequel and saw in it an opportunity for high-level cultural propaganda. Writers from any background were welcome—the more famous the better—as long as they were anti-fascist. The organizers secured a significant coup in persuading Ernest Hemingway to speak at the opening-night event at Carnegie Hall; he was the most famous American writer around and came fresh from reporting on the front lines in Spain. McCarthy was determined that the Congress should not become an uncritical anti-fascist love-in, and the decision was made to get into the sessions and confront the Stalinists on their own turf.

The night of June 4, 1937, Carnegie Hall sold out all 3,500 seats (Farrell was among many who failed to get a ticket). To the consternation of the organizers, Hemingway did not show up on time, and when he finally arrived, he had clearly been drinking. He paced the wings muttering to himself: “Why the hell am I making this speech?” Despite his tough-guy persona, Hemingway suffered from dreadful stage fright—his only real previous public-speaking engagement had been the reading with Spender in Paris the previous month—and he was only persuaded into speaking at the Congress by his good friend Archibald MacLeish.²¹

If securing Hemingway’s presence represented a triumph for the Congress’s Communist organizers, the content of his speech, with its emphasis on the necessity of the individual writer to tell truth to power, would have made the more doctrinaire among them a little queasy. “A writer’s problem does not change,” Hemingway said. “He himself changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to protect it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”

The remainder of the Congress took place at the New School, where 353 writer-delegates took part in closed sessions. On the Sunday morning, McCarthy, Rahv, Phillips, Macdonald, and Eleanor Clark attended a panel on criticism presided over by the Marxist literary critic Granville Hicks.²² With McCarthy leading the charge, they stood up and attacked the factionalism of the Party and the narrow way in which it interpreted the purpose of literature.²³ The delegates did not take them all that seriously: Earl Browder, general secretary of the Communist Party of the USA, condescendingly dismissed them as “muddle headed,” and Hicks accused them of “sentimentalism.”

Just a week after the Congress a third trial took place in Moscow, although this one was conducted in secret. What the Kremlin called “The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization” was a brutal purge of the Red Army, in which many high-ranking officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a brilliant strategist and hero of the Russian Civil War, were sentenced to death. Once news of the trial filtered out, McCarthy felt “on the one hand, grief and horror; on the other, exultation.”²⁴ Painful as it might be, this small but growing band of left-wing dissenters was being proved right. Now they needed to be heard—they needed their own magazine.

Rahv and Phillips wanted to revive Partisan Review as a platform from which to champion both Marxism and literary modernism but struggled to find the money to operate independently. It was Macdonald who introduced them to George L. K. Morris, a wealthy abstract painter whom he knew from Yale. Morris agreed to put up the $3,000 a year needed to get Partisan Review operating again. Another Yale friend, Dupee, left The New Masses to join this new group of anti-Stalinists (both Rahv and Dupee were promptly kicked out of the Party). In December 1937, Partisan Review was relaunched with an editorial board of Rahv, Phillips, McCarthy, Macdonald, Dupee, and Morris.

The office was in Union Square, where, as McCarthy described it, “radical demonstrations were always held and which was surrounded by cheap dress shops, cafeterias, subway kiosks and run-down office buildings.”²⁵ They were a provocative island of anti-Stalinism surrounded by Communist-sympathizing hostility, a group bonded by their experience of calling out the trials for the shams they were. The editorial statement of the first relaunched edition stressed that the new magazine was committed to independent literature: “Formerly associated with the Communist Party, Partisan Review strove from the first against its drive to equate the interests of literature with those of factional politics. Our reappearance on an independent basis signifies our conviction that the totalitarian trend is inherent in that movement and that it can no longer be combatted from within.”²⁶ It was, according to McCarthy, their commitment to publishing modernist writers of little (or dubious) political commitment that was truly heretical. She wrote that “the daring of our attitude was summed up in the statement that we would print a poem by T. S. Eliot if we could get one (later we did).”²⁷ Eliot was a cultural elitist, a monarchist, and a Catholic convert—about as far from the ideal socialist realist writer as it was possible to get. In 1940, Partisan Review published “East Coker,” one of his obscurely brilliant Four Quartets.

From the first issue, the magazine was saturated with prestige. It included an extract from Farrell’s new novel and a short story by Delmore Schwartz that announced a formidable new talent. There was a strange prose poem by Pablo Picasso, accompanied by etchings depicting General Franco as Quixote, which the editors claimed was Picasso’s first “politically-inspired art” (a bit of editorial exaggeration: he had painted Guernica the previous June).²⁸ There were poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, and book reviews by Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling. Lionel Abel, the playwright, critic, and translator, wrote an admiring piece about the Italian anti-Communist novelist Ignazio Silone (who would be published in the magazine himself in the third issue). The masthead weighed in, too: Dupee wrote an essay on Kafka, Rahv wrote an essay on Hemingway, and McCarthy penned a “Theater Chronicle,” the first of a regular column. Macdonald, in an essay that perfectly summed up the brash self-confidence of the relaunched magazine, wrote a piece that made fun of The New Yorker and its readership. Finally, there was an essay on Flaubert’s politics by Edmund Wilson, arguably America’s foremost literary critic.

For all their efforts to focus on the literary and eschew the political, the issue of the magazine’s perceived Trotskyism was impossible to escape. In the months leading up to the publication of the first edition there were numerous attacks in the Communist press. The most evocative headline belonged to the Daily Worker: “A Literary Snake Sheds His Skin for Trotsky.” In Austria and Germany, the Soviet Union and the Comintern had successfully crushed left-wing groups that did not toe the Party line; in Spain, despite the purported inclusivity of the Popular Front, members of non-Communist Marxist groups, including the POUM, had been imprisoned and murdered; in the Soviet Union anyone even tenuously associated with dissent from Stalin was for the gulag or the execution chamber. Now, in the United States, a new generation of anti-Communist leftists was rallying around Partisan Review. It was a development with far-reaching consequences for the cultural Cold War.

Looking back on this period McCarthy claimed that the Trotskyism of the group was “an exaggeration.”²⁹ This might be a little too much revisionism. Certainly, that first editorial statement warned that the fights ahead would center on charges from the Communists that Partisan Review was little more than a vehicle for Trotsky and his ideas. The editors assumed—correctly—that they would be accused of fascism through the “convenient medium of Trotskyism” and that “every effort” would be made “to excommunicate the new generation.”³⁰ And they did provide a platform, and not just for avowed Trotskyists, such as the American journalist Herbert Solow and Victor Serge, the Russian writer released in 1936 from Soviet prison; by the August–September 1938 edition, they had begun to publish the old man himself.³¹ Trotsky’s “Art and Politics” was a carefully chosen essay—it was Trotsky’s cultural politics, and his belief that literature did not have to be dictated by a Party line, that appealed to those in the Partisan Review circle. Trotsky, it seemed, had found an important new platform for his ideas at the very moment at which the Soviet Union, through the Moscow Show Trials and, eventually, through the Nazi-Soviet pact, was losing credibility with the foreign intellectuals it had fought so hard to seduce.

The trials were not over, however. The accusations might have been elaborate fictions, but the sentences were real. The network of Old Bolsheviks and Red Army heroes who were “complicit” in the murder of Kirov and who had “conspired” with the British, Germans, and Japanese to murder Stalin was broken, all but one of its members executed. Only that one remained at large, and it was time for him to serve his sentence.

SYLVIA AGELHOFF WAS A DEVOTED STUDENT of Sidney Hook at New York University. Impressed by her mentor’s work in helping organize the defense of Trotsky, she became a devoted Trotskyist herself. In September 1938, she arrived in Paris for the first Congress of the Fourth International, a meeting of Trotsky’s supporters, where she was to work as an interpreter. This was not without risk. Trotsky’s son had died in Paris in February of “complications” after a suspicious appendectomy; “Etienne,” an NKVD agent posing as a Trotskyist (real name Mark Zborowski), had checked Sedov into a private clinic and informed Moscow of his actions, with reliable results. In July, a corpse was found in the Seine.³² The head and legs had been chopped off (the legs were subsequently found in a sack; the head was not found). It was Rudolf Klement, Trotsky’s German translator and the man who should have been chairing the Congress.

At the Congress, “Etienne” introduced Agelhoff to a playboy by the name of Jacques Mornard, who claimed to have deserted from the Belgian army. Mornard seduced Agelhoff, buying her expensive gifts and taking her to sophisticated restaurants. Mornard was not really Mornard, though—he was Ramon Mercader, a highly trained NKVD agent. Mercader had been recruited at some point in 1936 by Leonid Eitingon, who ran the Barcelona NKVD station during the Spanish Civil War. Eitingon was the lover of Caridad Mercader, a radical Spanish leftist and Ramon’s mother, and he arranged for her son, who then commanded a Republican army unit, to receive instruction in guerrilla warfare. Ramon was a keen student and helped train foreigners recruited by the NKVD—including, it is speculated, David Crook, the Englishman who spied on Orwell.³³ In the summer of 1937, Ramon traveled to Moscow, where he received further training.

With the Spanish-language skills he acquired in the war and his existing experience as an assassin, Eitingon was charged by Moscow with the mission to kill Trotsky (Operation UTKA, which translates as “duck”). He put his protégé, Mercader, into play. With Eitingon pulling the strings, in the autumn of 1939, Caridad and Ramon relocated to New York, where Mercader resumed his affair with Agelhoff after a six-month hiatus.³⁴ He also assumed a new identity, telling Agelhoff this was to avoid being drafted by the Belgian army. He was now Frank Jacson, a French-Canadian businessman with interests in, of all places, Mexico.

When Jacson-Mornard-Mercader traveled to Mexico City for work, Agelhoff came with him. Her sister, Ruth, had been Trotsky’s secretary, and she was soon making herself useful at his villa. Mercader played a patient game, slowly inveigling his way into the trust of those around Trotsky.

Unbeknownst to Mercader, another assassination mission was being run in parallel. At 4 A.M. on May 24, a group disguised in police and military uniforms and led by the Mexican muralist David Siqueiros and the Soviet illegal Iosef Grigulevich (who’d led the team that captured, tortured, and murdered Andrés Nin), broke into Trotsky’s compound and opened fire. They kept shooting until they were out of ammunition, then fled. Somehow, despite the seventy-three bullet holes the police later found in the walls, they failed to kill Trotsky, who had hidden on the floor of the bedroom. With one exception, nobody had been hurt; the body of the American bodyguard, Robert Sheldon Harte, who had let the assassins in (his complicity is disputed), was found in a well, covered in lime, a month later.³⁵ Grigulevich supposedly put the lack of success down to his team suffering from “fear and tequila.”³⁶

The failed raid should have made Mercader’s job even harder. The security of the compound was drastically increased—more fortifications, more guards—but that was not a problem, as “Jacson” became a trusted part of the Trotsky circle. It was through the trust he built that he managed to get Trotsky alone in his office, ostensibly to read an article “Jacson” had composed about American Trotskyists. Despite the heat, he had a long raincoat draped over his arm, inside of which was $890, a fourteen-inch knife, a .45 Star automatic pistol, and a pick, its handle shortened for concealment.

Mercader struck Trotsky on the head with the pick. The plan had been to kill him with one blow and then to leave as quickly and quietly as possible. His mother and Eitingon were waiting around the corner in a getaway car. Mercader’s courage failed him at the last moment and he closed his eyes as he swung. He smashed a hole into Trotsky’s skull, but his target did not lose consciousness. Blood pouring from the wound, Trotsky let out a wail before jumping on Mercader and biting his hand. Joe Hansen, an American bodyguard, sounded the alarm and discovered the blood-drenched Trotsky stumbling out of his study. Another bodyguard, Harold Robins, beat the dazed Mercader to the floor, demanding he reveal his identity. Mercader denied he was working for the NKVD, even when Hansen broke his own hand punching him in the head. Trotsky was rushed to the hospital, operated on, and slipped into a coma. He died the following day, August 21, 1940.

To McCarthy and the Partisan Review circle it was further proof of Stalin’s cynicism and ruthlessness. Many other writers and thinkers who had remained loyal to the Soviet Union during the trials had finally given up on Stalinism after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact the previous year; in the elegant phrasing of a Partisan Review editorial, the Communist Party USA “molted almost its entire brilliant plumage of fellow travelers.”³⁷ The following year, when Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, he precipitated an allegiance of convenience with the Allies. For a few crucial years, Uncle Joe was a friend of the Western powers. But the anti-Communist left, mourning the death of the last of the Old Bolsheviks and shaken by the reach of Stalin’s hit men, was not about to forget his crimes.