Philip Rubenstein
America’s Red Scare, Part 4: Naming Names, Cohn, McCarthy, McCarthyism

Philip Rubenstein | America’s Red Scare, Part 4: Naming Names, Cohn, McCarthy, McCarthyism | 07.28.21

- Good morning. Good morning, Judy, Good morning, Philip. Again. Philip, I’m so, so excited to listen to the part four of “America’s Red Scare.” So brilliant. You’re so brilliant.

• Well, it does feel a bit like having lived through it all. I have to say.

• Oh my goodness. I’m sure it could go on and on and on.

• I always think everyone who does this feels the same. The hardest thing is you end up with about six times as much material as you can use. And, you know, so you just have to decide what you’re going to use and what you’re not going to use. And, you know, it’s just cut, cut, cut, which it’s a great shame. But, you know, it’s good, ‘cause it means what you’re left with is actually what’s really important.

• I guess, but you know, with us, you don’t have to cut, cut, cut, because, you know, who knows when all of this is going to end. So we keep you with us. You can take your time. How are we doing for time? I always say lots to look forward to. Whatever we haven’t done and whatever we haven’t heard, lots to look forward to. So when you’re ready, I’m going to hand over to you, and thank you for joining us again.

• I’m ready when you are. Should we kick off?

• Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Well, hello, everyone again, and welcome to this last of four lectures on “America’s Red Scare.” We started, for those of you who’ve managed to stick with it from the start, we started a few months ago with the first Red Scare, which was in 1919. The origins of which were with the Great Migrations into the US in the 1880s by Jews, Greeks, Italian, Slavs, other Eastern and Central Europeans. And we’re going to spend the next hour, the final hour, really focusing on the 1950s. And we’re going to particularly meet with a number of the perpetrators and the victims. And then we’ll spend a few minutes towards the end just finishing off, just reflecting on the legacy of the Red Scares. So let me just jump into the slideshow. Where are we? And… Oops, oh, hang on, sorry. Oops. Introduce you to this man, who I’m sure is familiar to everyone.

So this, of course, is Joe McCarthy, Joseph Raymond McCarthy. And here are the words that lit the touch paper to the Red Scare from the very start of 1950. It was the 9th of February, 1950, and the junior senator for Wisconsin makes a speech to a women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. I said Wheeling, Wisconsin last week, and I was quite rightly pulled up on it. It was Wheeling, West Virginia. And midway through his speech, this is what he says, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who were nevertheless still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”

McCarthy was always vague, deliberately vague on numbers and accusations. Within the first couple of days of making the speech, the number of communists in the State Department varied from the 205 that he mentioned in the speech to 57, and at one point, even to four. He gives a press conference at an airport, and the journalists ask if they can see the list, and he says the list is in his other suit on the plane. So it was always difficult to pin him down.

And this carelessness with facts, this carelessness with numbers and with accusations, which was such a hallmark of McCarthy in the McCarthy years, would be lampooned many years later in 1962 in one of my favourite films, “The Manchurian Candidate,” where Angela Lansbury in the famous breakfast scene is playing the evil genius, married to a kind of rather hapless opportunistic senator, played by James Gregory, who’s obviously Joe McCarthy. And I just want to show this just so you can see how the scene plays out.

[Clip begins]

• There’s just one thing, babe. I’d be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of communists I know there are in the Defence Department. I mean, the way you keep changing the figures on me all the time, it, it makes me look like some kind of a nut, like, like an idiot. The boys are even starting to kid me about it. Well, just yesterday in the cloak room they said, “Hey, Johnny-”

• Well, you’re going to look like an even bigger idiot if you don’t get in there and do exactly what you are told. Who are they writing about all over this country and what are they saying? Are they saying, “Are there any communists in the Defence Department?” Of course not. They’re saying, “How many communists are there in the Defence Department?” So just stop talking like an expert all of a sudden, and get out there and say what you’re supposed to say.

• Come on, babe. I…

• I’m sorry, hon. Would it really make it easier for you if we settled on just one number?

• Yeah, just one real simple number that’d be easy for me to remember. There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defence at this time.

[Clip ends]

• It’s a great scene, and for those of you who haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it recently, it’s a magnificent movie, and it’s got a whole backstory of its own. It’s very easy when you look at a movie like that, which as I say is made much later, it’s very easy to just paint an easy, simple picture of Joe McCarthy as a consummate liar, as vain, greedy, self-interested, deeply insecure and a destroyer of lives. And he was all of those things. But even though those things are true of him, it’s not the way he actually started out.

Joe McCarthy was born in 1908, and he was born on a chicken farm in Wisconsin, and he had a tough life. He was the fifth of seven children. He had to dropout of junior high school at the age of 14, because his parents needed him to run the farm. But by the time he got to 20, he was determined to better himself. He had a streak of ambition and a real kind of sense of get up and go. And he goes back to junior high school at the age of 20, where all the kids in his class are 13 and 14. So he had to really suffer the indignity of that. And he graduates from school in a year, and then he works his way through college where he finally gets a law degree.

He starts his political life, not as a Republican, but as a pro-New Deal, pro-Roosevelt Democrat. In 1936, he runs for his first office, which is at a local DA, and he runs on a Democrat ticket. But he only gets a paltry number of votes. And so three years later, he switched sides to the Republicans. He’s now running for office as a circuit judge, and he wins the election. And what’s interesting, is for the next few years as he serves as a judge, it turns out he’s actually quite a decent judge. He’s careful. He knows that he’s got lack of experience as a juror. So he compensates for this by demanding and relying very heavily on precise briefs from the contesting attorneys. He’s a compassionate judge.

So a number of the cases that come in front of him are individuals who committed crimes out of poverty. And remember, this is still the backend of the Depression years. And he’s clearly compassionate in terms of what he does for the defendants. He also hears an enormous number of divorce cases. And it seems that in pretty much every one of the cases, he’s determined to put the interests of the children as his first priority. Even now, and even here, you can see the rot is already starting to set in, because Joe McCarthy won the election as a judge by claiming that the incumbent had held a second job in violation of the county rules. And this turns out to be an accusation with absolutely no merit. But the media ran the story anyway without checking the facts.

Joe McCarthy took two important lessons from this election. The first is that personal attacks work, and the second is that you can lie and get away with it. There’s an element, I think, of Faust, the character Faust about Joe McCarthy. In the legend, Faust is a scholar who’s bored and depressed with his life, and he enters into a pact with the devil, and he trades his soul for magic powers, which will give him for a short period of time all the pleasures of the world. And so too, bit by bit and year by year, it’s becoming obvious that Joe McCarthy is trading in all of his scruples one by one for the irresistible lure of power and money. He stands for Senate, and he invents a war record for himself. He claims to have been Tail Gunner Joe.

Here he is in front of the poster. He’s Tail Gunner Joe, where he flew 25 combat missions over the Pacific. Now it turns out that he was attached to this unit. He was a Marine, but the number of combat missions that he tells everyone that he’s flown in, changes as often as the number of communists that allegedly there are in the State Department. In reality, McCarthy was a ground-based intelligence officer for most of his service in the war. And only very occasionally did he fly, and when he did, it was normally as a camera operator. But he wins election to the Senate in 1946 after the war. And he does so by falsely claiming that his opponent, who’s the incumbent, is a communist.

So again, false accusation, personal attack. There seems to be a winning combination for him. And at the age of 38, he becomes the youngest member of the Senate. So he starts on a high point, but the next four years, he seems to be kind of cast fairly adrift. His first four years in the Senate are something of a washout. He makes very few friends. He’s known as a loose cannon. He’s sacked from the Banking Committee, which he had been on for a couple of years. And more importantly, he starts to lose popularity at home. And now it’s 1950, and he badly needs an issue with which he can reignite his political career. Joe McCarthy was an accidental demagogue.

When he made the speech in Wheeling, his claim about communists in the State Department was made casually, and it was in the middle of the speech. And he never expected the impact it would have or how explosive it would be. But he caught on quickly, and with all of the political instincts that he had, he was determined to make the absolute most of it. And remember, he had the real benefit of timing on his side. For those of you who tuned in last week, and you’ll remember that at the time that McCarthy is going around the country waving his list of names. Look at the slow burn that had happened until 1950. We’d had the HUAC investigations into Hollywood and into Alger Hiss as a spy.

The Soviets had just declared that they had an A-bomb. Mao had taken control of China, and the North Koreans had invaded the South. So communism seemed to be rearing its head in Asia as well as in Europe. And of course, later that year, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be arrested on a charge of spying for the Soviet Union. So when he makes his speech, this is at the absolute height of the hysteria that the Red Scare would have in these years. He repeats the charge over and over again in the Senate, all the time, varying the numbers of Communists. And so the Senate appoints a senator, a Democratic senator from Maryland, Millard Tydings, to lead a senate committee to investigate the claims, to investigate the accusations.

And after extensive hearings, the committee concludes that the selection of cases that McCarthy has used, “Are twisted, coloured and perverted.” “And the allegations,” they say, “are a fraud and a hoax perpetrated on the American people.” The report is signed by the Democrats on the committee, but the Republicans refuse to sign. So here is the Senate Committee, albeit not everyone signed it, saying that he and his accusations are a fraud and a hoax. So why was it that McCarthy wasn’t stopped there and then? Why was it that McCarthy was allowed to operate with impunity for so many years to be the arbiter of who was morally right and wrong, who could have a job and who couldn’t, who was a patriot and who couldn’t? And there are two reasons, I think. And the reasons fall into two categories.

One is ambition and the other is fear. Let’s deal with ambition first. McCarthy never really understood that his true value to others wasn’t unearthing communist subversives or unearthing Soviet spies. He never did either. He never found one genuine subversive, or one genuine spy. His real value to others was in serving their personal interests. He served the interests of Western and Midwestern conservatives who wanted a new get-tough, isolationist foreign policy. He served the interests of the southern racists who were equating communism with civil rights. And he served the interests of those Republicans who found that by dramatising the issue of communism, they had a potent way to discredit Truman and the Democratic Party.

One Republican senator is alleged to have said to McCarthy, “You know, Joe, you’re a real son of a bitch. But sometimes it’s useful for us to have a son of a bitch to do our dirty work.” The other reason I mentioned is fear. Many senators feared him for the four years of his power. And instead of cowering after the Tydings report that found that he’d committed a fraud and a hoax, he did exactly the opposite. He went out on the attack. That year in 1950, Millard Tydings was fighting for his seat. And what did McCarthy do? He went to Maryland to campaign against him, and he manufactured, among other things, this photograph.

On the right is Millard Tydings listening to the radio or seeming to be listening to the radio. And on the left is Earl Browder, who for many years and still at the time, was the Secretary of the Communist Party of the USA. The photo is a complete fraud. It’s a composite. The photo of Millard Tydings was taken in 1938 and the one of Earl Browder was taken in '49, and they were crudely put together. Tydings lost to an obscure opponent by 40,000 votes. And the lesson was not lost on every other Senator, Democrat or Republican, that if you take on Joe McCarthy, you’ll face the consequences.

Let me give you an example of how the Senate cowered in front of McCarthy for all those years. It’s 1951 and he’s making yet another one of his usual speeches on communist infiltration in the State Department. He’s got a pile of cases which are next to him. Well, he’s got a pile of something next to him. Now this man is Herbert Lehman, and he’s the senator for New York, and he’s the son of my Lehman, who was one of the three Lehman brothers who founded the famous bank. Herbert Lehman hears McCarthy say that any senator who wants to, is free to examine all of the cases which are next to him.

So Herbert Lehman stands up, he walks over to McCarthy’s desk, and he asks to see the documents. McCarthy screams at him, “Go back to your chair, old man.” Herbert Lehman looks around the Senate for support. He’s met with silence and lowered and averted eyes from all of his colleagues. Every Faust needs a Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles, if you remember from the legend, is the devil’s representative. It’s Mephistopheles who makes the bargain with Faust promising to serve Faust for a set number of years after which time the devil will claim Faust’s soul. The question was, who was going to be the Mephistopheles for Joe McCarthy?

By 1952, Joe McCarthy had been successful enough that he’d been given his own Senate Committee. So now he had a mandate, he had a budget, he had staff. The only thing he lacked was a Chief Council. For a while it looked like the Chief Council might be Bobby Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, Bobby’s father, had made good friends with McCarthy over a number of years and shared many of his views on communists and the danger they posed to the US body politic. Joe McCarthy was invited on a number of occasions to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. He even dated two of the Kennedy daughters, and he became friends with the whole of the family. The ties with Bobby were forged in those days, and Joe gave Bobby a job as minority council to the committee.

Bobby, through the years always remained a loyal friend to McCarthy, even asking Joe McCarthy to be godfather to his first child. But RFK, Bobby Kennedy, was picked to the post of Chief Council by someone who was more aggressive, more unscrupulous, perhaps in his kind of animal cunning way, cleverer. And that was Roy Cohn. And just look at those eyes, that cold dead stare that you get from Roy Cohn in most photos of the period. Roy Cohn was born to a Jewish family in the Bronx. His father was a judge. It seems to have been a pretty loveless and unhappy family atmosphere in the Cohn household.

Although Cohn lived in his parents’ home until his mother’s death in 1967. His mother Dora would often taunt him for being puny and pale. And many believe that this contributed to his lifelong feelings of vanity and his deep sense of insecurity. Cohn was a brilliant student. He graduates from Columbia Law School in 1946, only at the age of 20. But he pins his colours very early on to the cause of anti-communism, sensing that this is going to be a hot issue and a great career path for him. So he becomes a public prosecutor, and he works with the chief prosecutor Irving Saypol, first of all on a series of trials in the late ‘40s against Communist Party leaders.

And then in 1951, he gets his big break where he becomes junior council to Irving Saypol, of course, as we discussed last week on the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. And he’s instrumental in getting a conviction against Ethel, which he does unethically by pressurising witnesses to testify against her and testify that she had a far greater role than she ever did. He’s also instrumental, perhaps he’s the person who’s instrumental in getting the sentence of execution for the Rosenbergs. Remember all during this period, from 1919 onwards, until the very end of the Red Scares, there’s one man who has a maligned hidden hand in every anti-communist action, in every action against any alleged subversive.

And that man is J. Edgar Hoover. And Hoover appears in the Rosenberg trial feeding information into the prosecution, and he’s the one who notices Cohn’s talent, and he introduces him to McCarthy. And as a result of that, McCarthy appoints him as Chief Counsel. When McCarthy and Cohn get together, their maligned double act takes the whole thing up several notches, and they quickly become known for their aggressive and unscrupulous questioning of witnesses. By 1953, they’re at the very height of their power, and it seems that they and only they determine public rights and public wrong in the USA.

One of the things I wanted to mention, because I think it’s still under-reported, and it’s still not that well known, is around about this time, there was in the US, and similarly in the UK, there was a so-called Lavender Scare, where there was an attempt to label any federal official who happened to be gay. And they were all closeted at the time, for obvious reasons, as obviously subversive and communist. And the theory went that if you were gay, it wasn’t known that you were gay, which meant that you were liable to be blackmailed by the communists who almost certainly were blackmailing you and you were clearly handing over state secrets.

Cohn and McCarthy decided to latch onto this issue with ferocity. And as a result of their actions and the actions of others, it’s estimated that somewhere in the region of 5,000 gay federal officials lost their job or found it very difficult to gain another one. And as a result of all of the pressure that they exerted, Eisenhower issued a ban in 1953 to prevent anyone who was gay from working in the federal government. As I say, many lost their jobs and a number committed suicide. The irony, of course, is that Roy Cohn himself was gay, a fact that he denied to the very end of his life.

One piece of solace, one saving grace, I think we can all take from the examples of Cohn, McCarthy, and before them in the 1920s, Mitchell Palmer, who was responsible along with Hoover for the first Red Scare, is that when people like this who are impelled through a love of power and control, when they get the power, that the power corrupts them to such an extent that at some point or other, they overreach. And in McCarthy’s case, his nemesis was to be the Army. Everyone, when they overreach in these situations, they push the wrong people too far. And in this case, McCarthy decides that he’s going to go for the Defence Department and for the Army. He’s going to claim that there are communists in the Army and Defence Department.

This is in 1954 after four years of exerting terror. And he starts to make personal attacks on the great hero, General George Marshall, and also on a battlefield hero of World War II, General Ralph Zwicker, who he says is not fit to wear a uniform. Again, shades of Donald Trump when he was doing this in his first couple of years with a number of distinguished army veterans. Cohn equally has an undoing. And his undoing is his friend, a 26-year-old blonde beach boy by the name of David Shine. Shine is drafted into the US Army, and Cohn decides that he’s going to get preferential treatment for him. So he decided he’s going to strong arm anyone and everyone in the military from the Secretary of the Army down to Shine’s CO, his commanding officer.

And at one point he even screams down the phone at a senior official that if his demands aren’t met, he’s going to wreck the Army. So the Army decide that they’re going to pressure for some hearings, which become known in 1954 as the Army McCarthy hearings. It’s going to be McCarthy’s own committee that’s going to carry them out, but McCarthy has to recuse himself as the chair. Karl Mundt is going to take over as chair, and the scene is set in February, March, sorry, in April of 1954 for the Army McCarthy hearings to take place. Even before they take place though, McCarthy’s star is starting to wane.

So much so that in March, Ed Murrow, journalist who has been running the successful “See it Now” programme on CBS for a number of years, he decides that he’s going to run an expose of McCarthy and his methods. And so in a report which lasts nine minutes, he uses clips showing Joe McCarthy in his own words, in his own methods, wheedling, whining and terrorising witnesses. And this is how he ends the report.

[Clip begins]

• No one familiar with the history of this country can deny that congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating, but the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one. And the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly. His primary achievement has been in confusing the public mind as between the internal and the external threats of communism.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history, in our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared the right to speak, to associate, and to defend the causes that were for the moment unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation, we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom wherever it continues to exist in the world. But we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Goodnight and good luck.

[Clip ends]

• The fault is in ourselves, says Ed Murrow. And sure enough, one month later, the hearings start, and under great pressure, largely from Eisenhower, who by this time had washed his hands of McCarthy, the hearings are televised. And they turn out to be enormously popular. These hearings became effectively America’s first ever TV reality show. They last for six weeks, and over the course of six weeks, the nation is hooked. Millions are tuning in every day. And what do they see?

They see on one side, they see Cohn and McCarthy whining, wheedling, haranguing, aggressive, using fake photos and denying they use fake photos. And on the other side, they see the Army’s representative, who’s an avuncular lawyer who’s courteous at all times, by the name of Joseph Welch. On day 30, oops. On day 30, 9th of June, 1954, floundering and desperate, Joe McCarthy decides on one last role of the dice. He decides to attack a young lawyer by the name of Fred Fisher.

Fred Fisher works for Welch in his firm, and he dredges out an accusation that Fred Fisher many years ago, was involved with a front organisation that was funded unknowingly by Moscow. And he is trying to use this to undermine all the investigations and to undermine Welch. And we’ll see how this plays out. I showed this clip in lecture number one. So for those of you who’ve see it, you’ll be seeing it again, but I really think it bears repeating. It’s just absolutely extraordinary.

[Clip begins]

• At Welch’s request, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher who has been for a number of years, a member of an organisation which was named oh, years and years ago, as the legal bull work of the Communist Party. And I have hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phoney request to Mr. Cohn here.

• Little did I dream you could be so reckless, and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true, he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.

• You’ll look at Roy Cohn’s face and you’ll see him go, “Oh my God, no, please, no.” But McCarthy won’t stop. He keeps attacking.

• I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it has been labelled long before he became a member, as early as 1944.

• Senator, may we not drop this? I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn.

• [Cohn] No sir.

• And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

[Clip ends]

• That was the moment. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? Have you no decency left?” That was the moment that was the end, the beginning of the end, for Joe McCarthy. And you can see he doesn’t quite know what’s hit him. His popularity ratings plummeted after that, and the spell finally broken, the Senate managed to find the courage to censure him. He’s censured by a vote of 67 to 22. All the Democrats vote against him, and the Republicans are split with half voting in favour and half against. Only one Democratic senator absented himself from the vote. And it’s a family friend by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

McCarthy spends his last three years in the Senate, haunting the halls like a ghost. He’s often unshaven, he’s prone to tears, and he’s desperate for a kind word from anyone. He’d always been a serious drinker, and now he’s become a fully fledged alcoholic. He dies three years later, three years after the censuring vote in 1957. He’s only 48, and he dies of cirrhosis of the liver. One journalist wrote at the time that, “If Joseph McCarthy has achieved nothing else, he has illuminated the timidity of his fellow human beings.”

I want to turn now away from perpetrators and back towards the victims, and to look at who the victims were, and what happened to them, and some of the paces that they were put through by HUAC and by McCarthy and by many of the other committees. The victims who were hounded out of office, hounded out of jobs, had their reputations torn to pieces and many of whom were often driven to end their own life in despair. There were no, even today, there were no reliable numbers of the victims of all the blacklists that were operated in those years from around '47 to the late '50s. And we know roughly the number of people who were imprisoned.

It was in the hundreds. But for those who lost their jobs or who found it difficult to regain other jobs, the numbers aren’t known. The best estimate is somewhere in the region of 12,000 people. There was a Port Security Programme, in addition, just to give you a another example. This was initiated after the outbreak of the Korean War by the Coast Guard, and it resulted in 3,000 seamen and longshoreman who lost their jobs for their real or their suspected affiliations to communism. As for those government employees who were gay and who were outed in the so-called Lavender Scare, as I said, the estimate is somewhere in the region of 5,000 who lost their jobs. In the film industry, by comparison, the numbers are very small.

The number of actors or directors or screenwriters together who were blacklisted is probably only in the region of around 300. But even though the numbers are small, Hollywood being Hollywood, it’s so well documented, and the the stories are so well documented that I wanted to just spend some time looking at some of the Hollywood cases, because the names and faces of those that we know so well. I want in particular to look at the choices that most people who were confronted with an accusation had. Victor Navasky, who wrote probably what’s the definitive book on the blacklist, called “Naming Names,” by Victor Navasky.

It’s a really, really interesting, thoughtful read. He says that when people were hauled in front of HUAC or of another committee, they essentially, they had three choices. The first choice is that they could invoke the First Amendment with its guarantee of free speech and association. Now if you do this, you risk being cited for contempt, and then you’re probably going to get a prison sentence, which was the fate that the Hollywood 10 had. The second alternative is that you can invoke the Fifth Amendment, which is the privilege against self-incrimination. And if you did this, you’d almost certainly, if you were in Hollywood, you’d lose your job instantly.

Because remember, all the major studios had signed the Waldorf Statement, and they’d adopted a policy of blacklisting anyone who refuses to cooperate. Why do people invoke the Fifth? They invoke the Fifth because the question are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, was always followed by a second question, which is, please name names. And so you knew that if you answered one question, you were going to be asked the second question. So here is a constitutional tool, the Fifth Amendment, which was only put in the Constitution because it was designed as a tool against intimidation, and now it’s become a tool of intimidation. The third option to you was that you cooperate with the committee.

What did cooperation look like? Cooperation meant you confessed, you renounced membership of the Communist Party or any association with communism. You praised the committee’s patriotic diligence, but you had to go one step further. You had to name names as well. And only then could you hold on to your job. Let’s look at three people who did it. The first of them on the left there is Lee J. Cobb. Lee J. Cobb, who was born Leo Jacoby. He was born on the Lower East side, and he was the son of a compositor on “The Jewish Daily Forward.” Age 23, he joins a group theatre, which was the collective that was started up by Lee Strasberg and others.

It was basically kind of the precursor to The Actor’s Studio. And it’s here that he meets a number of people who have a kind of a loose association with the Communist Party. In 1951, Lee Cobb is forced to testify in front of HUAC, and he’s asked to name names, and he refuses to name names. He refuses for two years. But in 1953, he’s called back and he relents, and he gives the committee 20 names. Like many actors who name names, Lee Cobb concedes with great remorse that the purpose of naming names was to name his way back to work. He says that writers could always hide behind pseudonyms.

And remember, most of the Hollywood 10 were writers. Writers could hide behind pseudonyms, but as an actor, he said, “This is the only face I had.” Zero Mostel wasn’t particularly sympathetic to him, and Zero Mostel countered, “I’m a man of 1,000 faces, each one of them blacklisted.” It’s easy to sit in judgement of what Lee Cobb and others did. But when he was interviewed a number of years later, this is what Cobb said, “I was pretty much worn down after two years. My wife was institutionalised as an alcoholic. I had no work, no money, I couldn’t borrow, and I had the expenses of taking care of the children.”

Next to him is Edward G. Robinson, born in Romania, born as Emanuel Goldenberg. He’d spent much of the '40s as an outspoken critic of fascism and Nazism long before it was fashionable. And he was also a great vocal supporter of civil rights. He was never a communist. But in 1950, nevertheless, he was called in front of HUAC. He was cleared of any deliberate communist involvement, and he claimed that he was duped by several people who he named, who’d already been named, and he mainly named the Hollywood 10.

The curious thing about naming names, and it’s certainly something I think that all three of these had in common, is as Victor Navasky says in his book, he said, “Naming names was not really intended to discover communists or subversives, because almost every single one of the names that was forced out in the 1950s was known about, and had already been documented in the 1940s.” “No,” he said, “Naming names and the process of naming names was intended as a degradation ceremony. The aim was to stigmatise people. It was to degrade them and often to break them as human beings.” And I don’t think this was true of anyone more so than of Sterling Hayden, who’s the third in our photos on the right.

Sterling Hayden joined the war, joined Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, and he’d subsequently become a party member. In the hysteria that grips Hollywood after the HUAC investigations, Hayden is nervous and he goes to see a blacklist lawyer, specialist blacklist lawyer, who says, “Don’t worry, leave it with me.” He contacts J. Edgar Hoover, and he agrees with Hoover that Sterling Hayden is going to write a story. He’s going to write everything he knows. It’s going to be sent in confidence to a local FBI office, and that’s going to clear his name, and he’s going to be able to get on and work.

Except that this is J. Edgar Hoover. Because it’s J. Edgar Hoover, he tricks Hayden. And instead he feeds the information to HUAC, and eventually Hayden is subpoenaed to appear before the committee. He’s forced to testify and he’s forced in public to name names. He’s eternally remorseful. In the 1960s, he gives an interview where he says, “I was a rat, a stoolie, and the names I named of those close friends were blacklisted and deprived of their livelihood.” Hayden never recovered, and he’s believed to have sunk in a very deep depression that lasted many, many years, that led to alcoholism which fueled his death in the early 1980s.

One of the really curious battlegrounds of this period is the battleground over the image of the informer. And again, this is something that Navasky writes about in great detail. The image of the informer that Hollywood had been feeding the public for years was that the informer is the rat, is the stoolie, the squealer who will always get their comeuppance. But the image, of course, of an informer is much, much older than Hollywood. In Christianity, the idea of the informer invokes Judas, who, of course, has through Christianity and through Christian teachings, has come to symbolise the most repellent of traitors. But in Judaism too, the informer has a deeply negative image.

The rabbis saw the informer as a threat to the entire community, as a potential destroyer of the people. And for those of you who are pious Jews and who say your Amidah, the most important prayer of the day, who say it three times a day, you will every day, three times a day, come to the verse, which starts, and for the informer, let there be no hope. When Zero Mostel was called before HUAC, he took the Fifth, and he refused to name names. Half serious, half jokingly, Mostel says, “As a Jew, if I inform, I can’t be buried on sacred ground.”

But the pro-blacklisters, those who were in favour of rooting out communist subversion, they argued that informing is patriotic. The opposite case. There’s a pamphlet that’s produced by one of the odious blacklisting agencies at the time, an agency called Aware, and it’s called the “Road Back.” And in it they say, “Hatred of communism is like hatred of sin and error. A moral obligation. Informing should be seen in the noble sense of the word. Informing should mean warning, educating and counselling.” And this definition of informing as a moral obligation will set the tone for naming of names. And no one in Hollywood takes this more to heart than Elia Kazan.

Elia Kazan, famous, talented director is born in Turkey, at age four, family of Anatolian Greeks, they immigrate to the US. He joins the Communist Party as a young man in the 1930s. For much the same reason as many Jews and Italians join, he joined because he felt an outsider. He was treated as an outsider. And so he joins the Communist Party, because here is somewhere which will accept him and which won’t judge him. He becomes a huge talented director, and he wins a reputation for really caring about the social content of his work. He directs in 1948, “The Gentleman’s Agreement,” which, of course, is a film about anti-Semitism.

In 1949, he directs “Pinky,” which is about racial discrimination. And in 1952, he directs a film about revolution in Mexico, which, of course, is “Viva Zapata!” And on stage, his closest collaborator is Arthur Miller, and he directs many of Arthur Miller’s plays. He’s pressurised into naming names before HUAC. First he refuses, but in April, 1952, he testifies, and not only does he name names, but for the rest of Hollywood, he makes the great sin of taking out a full page ad justifying what he’s done. And in the ad, he denounces communism and everyone associated with it. And he says, “I did wrong to withhold these names before, because secrecy only serves the communists and is exactly what they want.”

Before his decision to testify, Miller and Kazan, and here they are pictured together, had discussed collaborating on a drama about the waterfront. Arthur Miller had been in the middle of writing “The Crucible,” which, of course, uses the Salem Witch Trials as a metaphor for everything that was happening with McCarthyism at the time in America. But after the testimony that Kazan gives, Miller is disgusted and they go their separate ways. So Kazan collaborates with a script writer called Budd Schulberg, who also had named names. And together they make “On the Waterfront.” And “On the Waterfront” is many things. Brilliant film, of course.

But one of the things it is, it makes the definitive case for the informer. The movie, if you remember, is rife with talk of rats and stoolies and canaries. The central character is Terry Malloy, who’s played by Marlon Brando. And he has to choose between the waterfront ethic, which holds ratting to be the greatest evil, and the moral ethic which impels the conscience to speak truth to power. The former, the waterfront, is represented by the evil, corrupt, vicious, cigar-chomping labour boss, Johnny Friendly. And the latter, morality, is represented by the gutsy, straight-talking priest who is, of course, played by Karl Malden.

The achievement that Kazan and Schulberg together have is that they create the context in which the naming of names is the only honourable thing to do. Terry Malloy comes to maturity only when he gains the courage to inform. So here he is taking on the mob single-handedly, and this is the scene where he confronts Johnny Friendly. And notice who the actor is who’s playing Johnny Friendly. Yes, it’s that namer of names, Lee Cobb. So let’s just watch a little bit. [Clip begins]

• Hey, Friendly. Johnny Friendly, come out of there. Friendly. Come out of there.

• You want to know the trouble with you? You think it makes you a big man if you give the answers. At the right time, I’ll catch up with you. Be thinking about that. Now go on, beat it. Don’t push your luck.

• Wait a minute, you. You take them heaters away from you, and you’re nothing, you know that?

• Yeah, talk yourself in the river.

• You take the good goods away and the kickbacks and a shake down cabbage and a and you’re nothing. Your guts is all in your wallet and your trigger finger, you know that?

• You ratted on us, Terry.

• From where you stand, maybe, but I’m standing over here now. I was rattin’ on myself all them years. I didn’t even know it.

• Come on.

• You give it to Joey, you give it to Dugan, you give it to Charlie. It was one of your own. You think you’re God Almighty, but you know what you are?

• [Johnny] Come on.

• You’re a cheap, lousy, dirty, stinking mug, and I’m glad what I’ve done to you. You hear that? I’m glad what I’ve done. And I’m going to keep on doing it ‘til I get-

• [Johnny] Come on. Come on.

[Clip ends]

• So there’s Terry’s justification. “I was ratting on myself all these years.” Meanwhile, Arthur Miller writes his own waterfront drama, and this is “A View from the Bridge.” And he writes it in 1955, and it’s the story of Eddie Carbone, who’s an Italian immigrant who’s living on the waterfront with his wife and niece Catherine. And he has an incredible attraction to Catherine, a fatal attraction to Catherine. Meanwhile, his Sicilian cousin Rodolfo enters the country illegally and falls in love with Catherine, and Eddie is consumed with jealousy. So what does he do?

He informs on Rodolfo to the immigration authorities, and he suffers the fatal consequences of informing, because having betrayed not only Rodolfo but his own family, he’s rejected by them, he’s rejected by the neighbourhood. He’s got no place to go and he dies. Arthur Miller sends a copy of the play to Elia Kazan. “I have read your play and would be honoured to direct it,” writes Kazan. Miller replies, “I didn’t send it to you because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I wanted to know, I wanted you to know what I think of stool pigeons.” Arthur Miller was called before HUAC in 1956 to testify. He invokes the First Amendment. He says he’s willing to talk about himself and anything that he did, but he absolutely refuses to name other names.

Now, had it been three years earlier, who knows what would’ve happened to him. But it’s still an incredibly courageous thing to do, because Miller is held in contempt, and he receives a jail sentence, and it’s fought over the next two years. And by 1958, on appeal, he wins, and the sentence is overturned. By this time, I mean, last week, you know, I spent an hour talking about the fact that between '45 and '50, there wasn’t any one thing, but the Red Scare was a slow burn. And what we find really after the mid '50s, is that it doesn’t die instantly. It dies a very slow death. McCarthy himself may have been washed up by 1954, but McCarthyism isn’t.

From 1955 onwards, the Supreme Court, which had not distinguished itself in the previous few years, finally starts to get its act together and make several decisions which restrict the ways in which the government can enforce anti-communism. A key figure in ending the blacklisting is someone who’s little known, a man called John Henry Faulk, who was the host of a popular radio show. He’s blacklisted, and on the strength of evidence provided by one of the agencies, he’s fired by CBS, and he’s the first person who decides to sue the agency. And even though the case is interminable and lasts for years, the fact that he’s resisted, the fact that he sues, becomes a potent symbol of resistance.

It takes another few years. January, 1960. So this is six years after McCarthy, for director Otto Preminger to publicly announce that Dalton Trumbo, obviously one of the Hollywood 10, is the screenwriter. He’s going to be credited as the screenwriter of his forthcoming movie “Exodus.” And in October of that year, with “Exodus” still not yet released, “Spartacus” is premiered. And it’s the first movie since 1950 that bears Trumbo’s name as screenwriter. And of course, famously, the decision to credit Trumbo was made by not the director Stanley Kubrick, but by Kirk Douglas. “There are times,” said Douglas, many years later, “when one has to stand up for principle.” The blacklist did eventually end.

But many actors never, ever found work again having been out of work for so many years. The Red Scare lingered into the 1960s in all kinds of ways. And Joan Lessing, who’s a longtime listener, contributor to Lockdown University, sent me a really interesting email a few months ago. And she remembered being in high school in the 1960s when she attended a civil rights fundraising event. And it was picketed by the American Legion and others who were all carrying signs outside, protesting the use of the school for what they call these communes, and they called it the Little Red Schoolhouse. So the attitudes went on for many, many years. And even HUAC, I mean, HUAC survived until the late 1960s, 1969.

It only survived by changing its name, and it was actually finally disbanded and terminated as late as 1975. So what of some of the perpetrators? Whoops, sorry about that. Whoops. Well, Richard Nixon started his career by lying and cheating and smearing others, and ended his career in much the same way. J. Edgar Hoover, who was, as I say, the hidden hand in every Red Scare from 1919 onwards, always there behind Martin, dies in the 1930s, behind Truman with the Loyalty Programme, behind Nixon in the Alger Hiss case, behind Roy Cohn in the Rosenberg trial, behind McCarthy in the witch hunts. He continued, and in the 1960s he found a new enemy, which was the Civil Rights Movement, and in particular, Martin Luther King Jr.

And he tried to smear King and the Civil Rights movement as being communists and subversives. He refused to resign, having made himself virtually un-fireable by every single president. And amazingly, he dies at his desk in 1972. 1972, he was still in office. Roy Cohn, after leaving McCarthy’s employee, had a 30 year career as an attorney in New York City, and he became known as the ultimate trickster and the ultimate shyster lawyer. No job was too crooked or too dirty for Roy Cohn. He made a career, in particular, as the mob’s lawyer, representing a number of mob bosses such as Carmine Galante, Paul Castellano, and John Gotti.

Accusations dug his career of theft, obstruction, tax evasion, bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury, witness tampering. And of course, it’s no surprise that he becomes the mentor to Donald J. Trump, and teaches him, as we now know, everything he knew. Cohn is finally disbarred in 1986 for unethical and unprofessional conduct. And in that same year, he dies of AIDS, and still to his dying day, he denies that he’s gay. So where does all this leave us in terms of the legacy of those days and of McCarthyism? Well, one legacy, as I say, is the name, is the term McCarthyism. McCarthyism was first coined in 1950 by this cartoonist Herbert Block, alias Herb Block, who was one of the great newspaper cartoonists of the day.

And he has that great combination of parentage. He has a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. And Joe McCarthy may have given his name to McCarthyism, but he certainly wasn’t the first McCarthyite in history, and he certainly wasn’t the last. The word McCarthyism has developed a life of its own as a template for witch hunts, for aggressive questioning of a person’s patriotism, for levelling accusations without evidence, for subverting civil and political rights in the name of national security, and for the use of demagoguery. As to legacy, we are reminded that every McCarthyite purge succeeds not just because of the perpetrators, the hundreds of perpetrators, but because of the thousands of enablers.

In the case of the 1950s, it was the politicians, it was the blacklist agencies, it was the mass media, it was the boards of education and many, many more. It reminds us too, that when people feel under stress, too many of us are inclined to go with the mob, to comply and not to ask questions. But it also reminds us that people will resist. They will say no and they will ask questions when they have models of courage. Models of courage, such as the people who we’ve met in the last hour, people like Millard Tydings, people like Herbert Lehman, the Hollywood 10, Ed Murrow, Lillian Hellman, Zero Mostel, Arthur Miller, Otto Preminger, Kirk Douglas, and the many, many others who I haven’t had time to look at in this brief lecture.

I can see we’re getting on in time. So I just want to give the last word to Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood 10. Because for 40 years after the blacklist ended, Hollywood did what Hollywood does very well, which is that it turned in on itself, and it spent so much of those 40 years after the blacklist feuding and criticising those who had named names, and particularly Kazan, with absolute opprobrium. In 1971, Dalton Trumbo makes a speech in which he recounts the blacklist, and he talks about those years. But most of all, he reminds his audience to save their condemnation for the perpetrators and the enablers, not the victims.

And this is what he says. “The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.” He’s talking about all the victims. He’s not talking about the perpetrators here. “It will do no good to search for villains and heroes or saints or devils, because there were none. There were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew or were diminished. But in the final tally, we were all victims, because almost without exception, each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange.”

So I’m going to leave it there. It feels that it’s been an epic journey. And let’s open up for questions and comments.

Q&A and Comments

So right off the bat, Michael has made a reference to Donald Trump. McCarthy’s carelessness just like Trump’s, politically intentional. And whoops, we’ve got a few others. A few other comments on contemporary politics.

Q: Romain asked, “Did power and politics cripple Joe McCarthy’s morality or was he there already before he started on his road to greatness?” A: I think he was well on the way there. I think he was a more complicated character than I’d given him credit for before I started reading about him. But I think it was always there. I think when he saw his opportunity, he took it. But certainly by the time he got to the Senate, any shred of decency that he’d had before had pretty much disappeared. And by 1954, the tragedy is that he was absolutely hollowed out.

Q: “Was Earl Browder related to Bill Browder?” A: I don’t believe so, but that’s interesting. Let’s see.

Irene says, “Although Robert Kennedy was picked to the post of the job, he still enthusiastically prosecuted union leaders.” Yes, he did. Indeed. I mean, later Bobby, he did renounce his time under McCarthy. But everything is timing in politics, and he renounced his time in politics in the '60s, when you can argue that it was politic to do so. So the Kennedy family, as we all know, is a complicated family, and they were all to some extent, were rather under Joe’s thumb.

Gene says, “Just an interesting aside, former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was blacklisted from entering the USA in the 1950s before he was prime minister because of his liberal views.” Yes, that’s absolutely right.

More comments about Donald Trump. And I do think there are some very interesting parallels there.

Joanne mentions Woody Allen’s film. It wasn’t actually Woody Allen’s film, but Woody Allen starred in it. “The Front” about the Hollywood blacklist and says it’s worth watching. Yes, I didn’t have time to mention this, but, Joanne, thank you very much for mentioning it. It’s a really, really interesting film. Woody Allen literally plays “The Front.” He’s the screenwriter. He’s the name who’s used by screenwriters. And what’s so interesting, it’s directed, I think, by Martin Ritt. And what’s so interesting about that film is that almost all of the actors, including Zero Mostel, were themselves blacklisted, as was the director.

So I’m looking at the time now, and we’re 15 minutes over, so I think we should probably leave it there on the questions.

Thank you to everyone for all of the marvellous questions and interesting comments. And now over to Wendy.

• Thanks, Phil. That was absolutely brilliant. I’m sorry that you’ve come to the end of our four-part series, I think we’ll have to tag on.

• We’ll find something else.

• I’m looking forward to that. Thank you, everybody, for joining us, and I just would like to remind you that we have another presentation in 45 minutes. It is and I’m sure it’s going to be extremely interesting. Phil, thanks a million. Send my love to Claudia, to the children, and to Judy, and thank you very, very much.

• Thank you, Wendy.

• Thank you everybody for joining us.

• [Philip] It’s been a real privilege.

• Thank you. Always fabulous. Take care. Night, night. Bye.