A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  Even as she became popular among young women of the 1970s, she did not call herself a feminist. When, in 1976, interviewer Barbara Walters asked her how, in the face of her skepticism about women’s liberation, she accounted for her status as something of a “cult figure,” Lillian replied, only half tongue in cheek, “It is probably due to the fact that I lived with a man so very long without marrying him.” “Do you think they say she really did it when nobody else dared to?” Walters asked. Lillian replied, “Well, you know the younger generation always thinks that nobody did anything before they did it … I wish it were something more solid.” Walters pursued the issue, asking Hellman how she felt about “women’s lib.” Lillian replied, “I think it is an excellent theory,” and continued, “It certainly should be fought for, probably on any ground one can fight it.” But she punctuated each assent with a qualifier: “I wish they’d get more on economic equality than who wears what brassiere,” she added. And again, “I don’t think it can be fought for in the foolish ground.”56 Still, Walters would not let go. How was it, she asked, that she didn’t identify with women’s liberation, “even though you would be perhaps one of the heroines of it”? Hellman responded: “I stayed out of it because I realized I would get into arguments over it; I once conducted a forum on it with very intelligent and educated ladies and I was so in disagreement with most of them I thought I’d better not do this again.”57

  She did not, after that 1972 debate, get into any more fights with adherents of women’s liberation, but she did stick to her guns and in so doing earned the veneration of a generation with whom she had declared herself at odds. For years after that 1972 forum, she told whoever would listen that she had been misunderstood then and that she continued to be misunderstood. “I don’t have to tell you how deeply I believe in women’s liberation,” she told interviewer Bill Moyers.58 But in the same breath, she repeated her assertion that “it all comes down to whether or not you can support yourself as well as a man can support himself—whether there’s enough money to make certain decisions for yourself, rather than a dependence.”59 Hellman clearly met this test. She placed the demands of women’s liberation in the context of the life she had shaped for herself and found them wanting. She never stopped admiring the spirit and gumption of the young women who acted in the name of women’s liberation, and she never stopped hoping to convince them that economic independence was their best hope for expanded personal rights and freedom—and that this in turn would lead to the better world that she had so long envisioned. “I’m with the movement in theory,” she said. “Most of its goals are excellent, although I’m uncomfortable with some of the slogans. Wearing or not wearing a bra is terribly unimportant. It’s being able to buy that bra yourself—that’s important.”60 If Hellman could not admit to being a feminist by the standards of the seventies, she was certainly one by her own.

  In 1970, disturbed by what she saw as the increasing repression of the Nixon administration, Hellman saw an opportunity to do exactly what she had hoped her friends and colleagues would do in the McCarthy period, exactly what she had been urging students to do in the 1960s: to stand up for what they believed. As early as 1968, Hellman was already worrying out loud about the re-emergence of surveillance techniques and the possibility of a new McCarthyism.

  She had good reason to worry. In April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. produced a wave of despair in the black community. Two months later, Robert Kennedy—who, as attorney general, had led his brother’s campaign to secure voting rights for Southern African-Americans—died at the hands of another assassin. Parts of a disjointed civil rights movement formed a black liberation faction to demand black power; some members of the Black Panthers, who organized breakfast programs for poor children, resorted to weapons amid a rhetoric of self-protection. Radical fringe groups like the Weather Underground splintered away from mainstream protest movements to organize a campaign of bombings and demonstrations that would lead to revolutionary change. Violence mounted on other fronts too. The war in Vietnam was going badly: national security adviser Henry Kissinger and President Nixon had formed a tight cabal to make decisions about how to run it. Even the State Department found itself excluded from policy decisions. Matters got worse when, in the fall of 1969, the air force secretly began bombing Cambodia. As opposition mounted and peace marchers challenged the power of the military industrial complex, government surveillance stepped up. National Guard efforts to defuse peace protests turned ugly.

  The administration responded to the turmoil with heightened repression. In the name of order, and to counter what it called subversion, the Justice Department and the FBI infiltrated a wide variety of political organizations thought to be threatening. Lists of those under surveillance grew. The FBI, joined by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), escalated an already massive campaign to subvert left-wing organizations by encouraging “deep cover” agents to act as provocateurs. Operation Chaos, originated by the CIA in 1967, collected 7,200 files on Americans within national borders; army intelligence spread one thousand agents among the protest groups; the FBI’s Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Operation) sent anonymous letters to left-wing groups designed to set off quarrels and foment internecine warfare. The undercover agents did their jobs well, provoking violence where none might have occurred. Twenty-eight members of the Black Panther political party were killed in 1969. The same year, Greensboro, North Carolina, undercover agents incited militants to bomb stores and ambush police, providing the weapons that enabled them to do so. Police, hearing rumors, called in the National Guard; one student died. In the meantime, opposition to the war reached a fever pitch: as many as a third of draftees were not showing up for their induction dates. As they had done before, law-enforcement agencies blamed communist infiltration and influence. But the hammer and sickle no longer frightened the young. Campus protests escalated; in May 1970, four students died when National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio.61

  Hellman had not forgotten that Nixon was a key player on Joseph McCarthy’s Government Operations subcommittee. Nor had the wounds she sustained in that period healed. In February 1970, she began to talk about how to resist what she saw as a new period of repression. Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, recalled the moment: “She felt strongly that the old rot was setting in and that there was a need for a new group of citizens—writers, artists, scientists, lawyers—who would, so to speak, be on guard—a group that would be willing to speak out in defense of constitutional rights against the dangers of bullying, devious secret government.”62 Starting with a group of trusted friends, including Blair Clark, her old pal Hannah Weinstein, and her fishing partner John Hersey, Hellman cajoled others into organizing resistance. In April, she invited Telford Taylor, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School, into a small group called the Committee for Public Justice. Convincing Taylor of the need for such a committee, wheedling a little, adding self-deprecatory comments—“It’s been a big job for me and I am not very good at it”—she persuaded him to become active.63

  From this narrow circle the group spread to include Norman Dorsen, then general counsel of the ACLU and later to become its president; Jerome Wiesner, a well-known scientist, Lillian’s neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard, and soon to become president of MIT; cartoonist Jules Feiffer; and Burke Marshall, a former assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights and then a deputy dean at Yale Law School. Recruiting members was not, apparently, a difficult job: Roger Wilkins, a former assistant U.S. attorney general, then consultant to the Ford Foundation and the committee’s first chair, recalled his own decision to join up. It emerged, he wrote, from a frightening experience in the summer of 1967, when he was surrounded by

  fellow-citizens … six of them were kneeling and pointing guns at me and some of them were calling me nigger. I thought then that to be a free man in America was perilous indeed … For myself I vowed
in that moment of terror to fight, if I survived, as hard against the spirit of repression and intimidation … as I would for equal justice for all Americans. That is why, in the atmosphere of the spring of 1970, I eagerly joined with other citizens to form the Committee for Public Justice.64

  When the group reached more than a dozen names, its members circulated their friends and relations in a letter drafted by Norman Dorsen, revised by Hellman, and sent over the signature of Burke Marshall. “What we propose to do is based on the belief that this country has entered one of its recurring periods of dangerous political repression,” the letter, written on May 25, said. “What we are setting up is a kind of early-warning system against the erosion or invasion of the basic freedoms.”65 An accompanying letter spelled out the purpose of the newly named Committee for Public Justice. Hellman’s sensibilities shine through every line. “Once again it becomes necessary for citizens to perform the high public duty of resisting the repressive efforts of the state,” it began. Then, deftly combining the interests of minority groups with those of antiwar protestors, it continued, “The nation has often endured times when the refusal of the government to recognize the right and aspirations of the weak and the poor and of political dissenters has led to periods of hate and intolerance.” The statement cited ten “grave invasions of individual liberty” that had occurred, among them official threats to the independence of mass media; repression of dissent at the 1968 Democratic convention; invasion of privacy by wiretapping and eavesdropping; bills to authorize preventive detention; malign neglect of the rights of the black minority and of poor people generally; and an official blacklist of respected and qualified scientists. Quoting Justice Louis Brandeis to the effect that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that it should be a fundamental principle of the American Government,” the statement concluded:

  We cannot now stand silent in a period of repression. We must remind the country and our elected representatives that only enduring principles of justice are fundamental to the common good and that all or any violations must be strongly resisted now and in the future with full strength and force. How can this be done? We know that the lawless activity of the government is often obscured because the public does not know the facts, or is given a distorted version of the facts by the authorities. We know that the rights of unpopular political dissenters are sometimes overridden not only in police action and in the courts but in the legislatures themselves. When such threats to constitutional rights arise, we intend to investigate them, to criticize them and to draw the attention of the public to them.”66

  Within three weeks, the group had attracted twenty more names, and these quickly expanded to provide a roster of distinguished women and men in every field of business and the arts, of law and the sciences, letters and literature. On it were people of every political persuasion from former communists and fellow travelers to anticommunist liberals. Some of these were Lillian’s friends from other political causes; many were social admirers and acquaintances. Some joined because they agreed with the call to speak out against a “lawless government” or responded to the ringing cry that “We were born free and intend to remain so.” Lillian’s strong ties to Hollywood served her well. Movie stars and directors Paul Newman, Shirley MacLaine, Donald Sutherland, Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Marlon Brando, and Mike Nichols joined at her invitation. So did others in the arts, including Leonard and Felicia Bernstein and George Kirstein. Writers, critics, editors: William Shirer, William Styron, Richard Poirier, Robert Silvers, Martin Peretz, and Robert Coles signed up. Lawyers, union leaders, academics, scientists, and philanthropists added their names. They were joined by political and policy people including the Children’s Defense Fund’s Marian Edelman, Congressman Charles Goodell, EEOC member Aileen Hernandez. And the list kept growing.67

  The group could not have been assembled without Hellman. To put it together, she traded on the personal qualities for which she was often disliked: she deployed her celebrity status, she alternately demanded and cajoled, and she attracted both vigorous opponents of the Soviet Union and casual supporters of peaceful coexistence. Leon Friedman, the group’s third executive director, described as her goal “to energize the political community, to focus on public problems and to do something about them.”68 People put their names on the letterhead because they were her friends, to be sure: “I joined largely because she asked me to,” Telford Taylor admitted when he was still unsure of the CPJ’s prospects.69 But they donated money, legal expertise, and time because they believed in the cause that the CPJ espoused. If they were not all friends of Hellman’s, they were friends of friends, acquaintances who believed in defending civil liberties, a group so diverse that only a Lillian Hellman, who had credibility in the worlds of both celebrity and the intellect, could have brought it off. It was not only that “she knew everybody,” as an early executive director, Stephen Gillers, recalled. It was that “she willingly picked up the phone to call them.”70

  In the summer the CPJ hired its first director, Luis Sanjurjo, and housed him in space donated by Lillian’s friend Sue Marquand (wife of the writer John Marquand) on West 57th Street. Lillian had so far spearheaded the fund-raising efforts of the organization. She had, in the words of an executive committee report, “exhausted herself and also her sources for these kinds of funds.”71 That summer the executive council, chaired by Roger Wilkins, took formal responsibility. But Lillian remained unrelenting in her pursuit of support and supporters. She hosted executive council meetings in the Park Avenue apartment to which she moved in the fall.72 Singlehandedly she raised the money to keep the CPJ going during its first year, soliciting her friends to provide contributions.

  By the late fall of 1970, the CPJ was ready to go public. With flair worthy of Hellman, the organization called a news conference at the Overseas Press Club on November 17, 1970, where Ramsey Clark, among others, explained the group’s origin as a consequence of the FBI’s increasingly ideological bias, accusing the bureau of “having an end before it” and of seeking “facts to fit that end.”73 The New York Times covered the event sympathetically—describing the CPJ as “an organization of prominent private citizens … concerned that the nation has entered a period of political repression.” It did not mention that uneasiness at invasions of public privacy had spread into the corners of Congress, where North Carolina’s conservative Democratic senator Sam Ervin and others had begun to raise issues of military surveillance of civilians, unauthorized wiretapping, federal blacklists of scientists, and intimidation of the national media. Hellman’s name appeared in the last paragraph of the New York Times article as one of several founding members. But the Washington Post singled her out for attention: “Playwright Lillian Hellman, the principal organizer of the group, also spoke at today’s news conference. She said she felt impelled to do something last spring because some of us thought we heard the voice of Joe McCarthy coming from the grave.”74

  The CPJ followed its opening salvo with a full-page announcement that appeared in the New York Times on December 15, 1970, and placed the Bill of Rights at the heart of its mission. “This is your Bill of Rights. It is 179 years old. It is being killed,” the advertisement announced. In small type, it reprinted the Bill of Rights along with an annotated list of the ways the current government eroded it. “These violations of the Constitution,” it concluded, “are not isolated instances. They represent a dangerous trend toward repression and neglect of rights, for which the present administration bears a major responsibility.”

  The FBI, still in its Cold War mode, reacted vigorously. In their view, Hellman’s presence in the CPJ immediately identified the organization with communism. Apparently at J. Edgar Hoover’s personal request, the bureau produced a document that identified the CPJ’s leaders and pinpointed their previous political activities. These thumbnail sketches, which tell us little about the individuals the FBI followed, reveal the bureau’s particular interest in th
eir political lives and especially in the issue of communism. Telford Taylor earned a negative review for many reasons, including his membership in the left-wing Lawyers Guild in 1942, his membership in the “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which cooperated with the Soviet Government,” and the fact that he had represented many CPJ members in court and before congressional committees. The report complained about Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, because in 1964 he “reportedly used individuals with ‘leftist tendencies’ to review books dealing with security matters and the U.S. Government.” It identified Norman Dorsen as a supporter of “the aims of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a cited organization.” Additionally, it trashed Dorsen as one of a number of law professors who attacked the department’s claim that the “Government may wiretap and bug domestic organizations considered subversive without court supervision.” Dorsen stood accused, as well, of participating in a TV debate that included notorious left-wingers like Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis. And so it went.75 Former assistant attorney general Burke Marshall got off lightly, accused only because he was “not considered a friend of the FBI” while he was in the Civil Rights Division. Of Hellman, who was cited as active in at least eighteen subversive organizations in the 1940s and identified then as a known communist, the worst that the FBI could say was that new information revealed her support of New Left and antiwar groups. “She was one of the speakers at the Second Annual Nation Conference of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, described as a New Left-type group made up of students and instructors which is against the war in Vietnam and supports the government of Communist China.”76