1970: The CPJ placed the Bill of Rights at the heart of its mission. (From advertisement in the New York Times )
While the FBI investigated, the Committee for Public Justice got to work. Its first projects reflected the eclectic base of its membership: a project on child labor, another on women’s prisons that featured an investigation of the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue. These drew little attention. But the CPJ’s greatest coup was soon to come. In the spring of 1971, egged on by Hellman, the executive council decided to tackle an overreaching FBI directly. Lillian called on her friends Milton and Elinor Gordon to provide funds for a conference scheduled for the following fall. Burke Marshall, then a member of the executive council, asked his old friend Duane Lockard, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, to host the conference on the site of the school. The two joined Norman Dorsen as co-chairs of the conference. The group issued a press release announcing that it planned to assemble a group of some fifty knowledgeable citizens to “make a scholarly and objective inquiry” into the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in American society.77 In the interest of fairness, Duane Lockard sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, inviting him or a representative to attend.78
Hoover declined the request, insisting that “no worthwhile purpose could be served by an FBI representative attending an inquiry casting him in the role of defendant before even the first fact is brought out, and condemned by the ‘judges’ before trial begins.”79 His refusal was accompanied by eight single-spaced pages explaining why the FBI, an efficient and fair organization, had no need to defend itself and suggesting that the CPJ instead invite a representative from the organization of retired FBI agents. The CPJ promptly issued the invitation.
Hellman could not have been more pleased. The CPJ, then barely a year old, acknowledged Hoover’s letter for what it was: a welcome sign of the committee’s public influence. The letter, as political journalist Tom Wicker proclaimed in the introduction to the book that followed the conference, “splendidly exemplified why its sponsors thought the conference necessary.”80 In claiming that the FBI needed no defense, Hoover provided the best justification for a “scholarly effort to improve our understanding of the functioning of an important American institution.”81 The CPJ circulated the letter to illustrate its growing presence in conversations around civil liberties.
For its part, the FBI also reprinted and distributed Hoover’s letter, seemingly unaware that with every copy it sent out, it enhanced the visibility of the CPJ. To its correspondents, it revealed the biased backgrounds of its speakers, hoping to discredit them and the conference by convicting them of guilt by association. But this strategy often got tangled in the knot of past politics. When Allan Brownfield, a small-time political activist, tried to curry favor among FBI officials by producing a forceful piece for Roll Call challenging the credibility of the conference as nothing less than an attack on the FBI, bureau officials identified him as having had unsavory communist associations in the past and reluctantly recommended ignoring the piece.82
The FBI could hardly be faulted for its opposition to the CPJ, nor for believing that the conference would not deal evenhandedly with the bureau. Still, the bureau’s extraordinarily defensive response produced precisely the effect it sought to avoid. Hoover’s letter dramatically escalated newspaper coverage of the conference and public awareness of it. Even as announcements of the call to the conference emerged, the FBI encouraged the formation of “Friends of FBI” to raise money for its defense. The group pleaded for donations on the grounds that “the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover are now being subjected to the degradation of a vicious partisan attack by self-serving politicians, their supporting media and certain radical elements that ultimately seek the destruction of all law and order in the United States.”83 It circulated a cartoon depicting itself as the victim of a hanging judge; it asked one of the invitees, William Bittman, to inform on what was happening there. The bureau also did what it could to discredit the conference by asking sympathetic newspaper columnists (including students from the Princeton University newspaper) to denounce the CPJ as a liberal, or left-leaning organization. The bureau’s trepidation led it to closely track the amount of press the conference drew, as well as the content of favorable and unfavorable articles. In the aftermath, its agents dismissed most of the conference presentations as lies, freely distributing phrases such as “wholly false,” “a collection of baseless and twisted allegations,” and “a tissue of lies” to dismiss those it did not like. It deployed words like fatuous and slanted to describe some papers and accused one presenter of “twisting facts to suit his own ends.” Other presentations appeared to agents to be “filled with errors and distortions” or “half truths, unsupported assertions and outright lies.”84
From the perspective of Hellman and the CPJ, the conference was an enormous success. They had brought together critics from a variety of political perspectives (New York City’s police commissioner, the editor of the Nation, two retired FBI agents, a distinguished Yale Law School professor) to challenge the FBI’s repressive strategies against dissenting political groups. The conference sparked national press coverage that drew attention to the FBI’s single-minded focus on national security and its lack of regard for civil liberties. It positioned the CPJ as a player in a dialogue that would continue for several years. Crucially, the conference legitimized reasonable criticism and dissent—one of Hellman’s main goals—and dramatically reduced the fear of name-calling. A day after the conference closed, the Washington Post published an extensive account of the conference that included a quote from an unnamed government official who complained that “those left-wingers are not only after a pound of flesh now, they are trying to make money for another pound later.” The piece closed with a reference to a House floor speech by Representative Richard Ichord, whom the FBI had approached early on. Ichord took the floor to disparage the provenance of the Committee for Public Justice by asserting that in 1951 Hellman had been “identified as a member of the Hollywood chapter of the Communist Party U.S.A.”85 To no avail. This time neither the public nor the “left-wingers” associated with the CPJ would bite. A second piece, set beside the first, described conferencegoers as “painting a grim picture of a police state disregarding constitutional liberties and repressing political dissent by use of informers, wiretaps, electronic surveillance and agents provocateurs.”86 But none of these pieces made as much of a splash as the spirit of the conference itself.
The CPJ used its leverage to advantage, broadening its membership to some eighty “prominent citizens.” It also turned the CPJ into a visible player against repression and encouraged an even broader representation of membership that soon came to include such political antagonists as Victor Navasky and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Hoover died in 1972, a few months after the conference closed. His successor, acting director L. Patrick Gray, quickly arranged a meeting with three representatives of the CPJ. The New York Times trumpeted the organization’s victory in a headline that declared THE FBI AGREES TO HEAR ITS CHIEF CRITIC.87 And when Congress settled down to confirm Gray as permanent director, the CPJ’s Norman Dorsen drew national attention for pointing out that there had never been a real congressional investigation of the FBI.88 Five years later, the CPJ once again received an invitation to testify in hearings to approve Gray’s successor to the post of director. Bureau records reveal its subsequent concern to fend off the kinds of inquiries that the CPJ conference had provoked and to work out some method by which the FBI could appear to be more amenable to oversight while maintaining a necessary secrecy and without actually ceding authority to Congress.
Finally, and most important, the conference signaled a turn in the politics of liberalism. No longer barricading themselves behind an anticommunist shield lest they be associated with communism, liberals promoted the civil liberties of all. The turnabout rejuvenated a languishing American Civil Liberties Union, which soon took the CPJ under its umbrella. Hellman reveled in thi
s shift of opinion, and the rapid succession of CPJ activities that followed confirmed her sense that if people would simply stand up and speak, they could maintain the freedom that was their heritage. When, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers—a top-secret history of the unfolding war in Vietman compiled by the Defense Department and made available by Daniel Ellsberg—the federal government immediately convened a grand jury in Boston to investigate their release and to consider bringing criminal charges. In the furor that followed, the CPJ turned its attention to the grand jury system, asking if it was fulfilling its historic function to “check the power of the state by filtering prosecutions … through a group of disinterested citizens,” or whether the system was simply serving as a “rubber stamp for indictments the government wants to secure.”89 At the daylong conference that followed the following May, the CPJ confirmed its reputation for pointed investigation.90
The organization’s concern with the increasingly secret operations of the federal government produced several other significant achievements. A conference on secrecy in May 1973 resulted in a book edited by Norman Dorsen and Stephen Gellers called None of Your Business. In December of that year, while the Watergate scandal was still unfolding, the CPJ sponsored a conference on the subject of “Watergate as a Symbol” and to encourage the investigations by Senator Sam Ervin into the Nixon administration’s abuse of power. Asked by a popular magazine if she identified with the witnesses who faced the Ervin committee, Hellman replied, “I envy the courtesy with which they are treated. Villains do better than any of us innocents who were called before House or Senate committees in the 1940s and 1950s.”91 The following year, the CPJ took a lead role in filing suit to release the tapes made in the Nixon Oval Office. While this was going on, during the winter and spring of 1974, the CPJ inquired into the operation of the Justice Department. In February 1974, director Stephen Gillers and his soon-to-be successor Leon Friedman issued a report on “courtroom disruption” that exposed the false premise behind a crackdown on courtroom discipline and protested “summary contempt proceedings” that permitted judges to discipline lawyers to whom they took a dislike—sometimes for defending unpopular clients. Hellman played no role in organizing this conference. But she delighted in seeing one of McCarthy’s chief ploys overturned.
Soon the Committee for Public Justice was everywhere: its name and its spokespersons routinely punctuated articles and news briefs that questioned the authority of government surveillance efforts, challenged presidential secrecy, and called for scrutiny of FBI and CIA activities. More than once the CPJ was mentioned on the floor of Congress, often in negative statements inserted by representatives who were routinely thanked by the bureau for their cooperation. More than once the CPJ testified before Congress, thriving on the publicity and taking every opportunity to insert its voice into debates about civil liberties matters. When she addressed conferences or made public statements on behalf of the CPJ, Hellman never failed to connect the event with past moments of silent acquiescence. She told a June 1975 meeting, called to explore reports that the CIA had kept track of student radicals and antiwar activists, that twenty-five years after the McCarthy period, she still felt the need to understand how individual freedom could be so easily invaded.92 In 1977, when newspapers began to note the emergence of a neoconservative movement, she turned her attention to raising money for a conference that would investigate the “swing to the right.” Recalling the public inattention that had led to an undeclared war and the fostering of “crooks and liars in high places,” Hellman urged CPJ supporters to speak up against “efforts … to reconstitute the power and legitimacy of government security and investigative agencies whose irresponsibility and violation of civil rights had been exposed as scandals.”93 The conference took place that fall. Finally, in 1977, the CPJ joined with the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies to propose a bill that would prohibit the FBI from engaging in political surveillance and curb its efforts at eavesdropping and wiretapping except in criminal cases.94 The bill was never passed though CPJ pressure did produce briefly effective guidelines.
All this activity was funded through Lillian Hellman’s efforts and her personal connections. Her verve and her spirit, her shamelessly demanding insistence, and her absolute confidence in the justice of the CPJ’s mission held sway. Bravely, the CPJ asserted its voice in the interest of transparency, and increasingly Lillian called on her celebrity friends to raise money and speak out for the organization. She tapped Ruth Field and the Field Foundation; she softened up her rich friend Max Palevsky—computer entrepreneur and venture capitalist. She lent her name to one benefit after another, shamelessly glorifying in adulation and contributions.
A March 6, 1975, “Citizen’s Town Meeting” in Los Angeles, called to disclose domestic surveillance activities of the CIA, featured film star Warren Beatty. The benefit attracted Jacqueline Onassis, Jane Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, and other stars, and proved so popular that Hellman quipped she’d run out of tickets.95 Six months later, Hellman’s old friend Hannah Weinstein, a distinguished Hollywood producer and herself a victim of McCarthyism, orchestrated a benefit for the Committee for Public Justice around Lillian Hellman’s seventieth birthday. For $150 apiece, contributors heard a dozen actors read from Hellman’s plays and memoirs and then adjourned for dinner at Gallagher’s steak house. Hellman basked in the glory of extensive coverage of both herself and the event.96 The movie Julia, released in 1977, became the occasion of a third benefit. A trip to Los Angeles persuaded Robert Redford to host yet another glamorous benefit for the CPJ.
1975: Increasingly Hellman called on her celebrity friends to raise money. Here with Warren Beatty at a tribute to Hellman. (Photofest)
Though there is little doubt that without Lillian Hellman the Committee for Public Justice could not have survived, Hellman exerted little influence over the daily workings of the committee, the projects it chose, or the books and papers it produced. The substantive issues and the strategies for addressing them were the brainchildren of the lawyers and others who sat at monthly meetings and determined the direction of the organization.97 Hellman attended most of the meetings of the executive board, hosted many of them at her Park Avenue apartment and occasionally at her Vineyard home, and lent her name to every activity that the CPJ undertook. With Hannah Weinstein and Bobbie Handman, she dominated logistical decisions about food and drink, driving the small staff crazy as she repeatedly changed her mind about benefits and entertainments. Yet, except for reasserting the purposes of the organization, she took no part in debating the issues. She could be disruptive at meetings, drawing attention away from substantive matters. She fussed over small details, making Saturday-morning phone calls to Stephen Gillers to check that nothing had been overlooked and harassing some of the later executive directors. The record suggests that, far from being passively “outmaneuvered,” “checkmated,” and “cajoled”—to use one biographer’s derogatory description—the brilliant legal and intellectual minds in the CPJ enthusiastically developed the projects that successfully drew attention to instruments of government repression.98
The CPJ lasted as long as Lillian had the energy to mobilize resources for it, petering out as she became sicker in the late seventies and as controversy mounted over her veracity. By then, its agenda had largely been subsumed into a revitalized ACLU. Still, for as long as she lasted, she supported the organization’s efforts to move questions of civil liberties to the forefront of the public agenda and to maintain public awareness of the dangers of silent acquiescence. She stuck by that agenda, leading the Committee for Public Justice to a position as an honored and effective organization that educated the public in a decade permeated with lies. The CPJ benefited, to be sure, from the changing climate of the seventies—a decade when President Nixon led a delegation to Communist China, J. Edgar Hoover’s death provided an opportunity for the FBI to alter its agenda, and Congressional Committees began to take up the issue of secrecy. Within th
at context, Hellman briefly helped to reframe the agenda and move the United States from attacks on communism to self-examination. In so doing, she and the CPJ exposed the harm done by those who insisted on exaggerating the power of Soviet Communism. Her efforts helped to heal a breach on the left by uniting people of different political and social perspectives in the interest of civil liberties. At the same time, she exposed herself to a new set of attacks that emanated from those who still believed her guilty of subversion.
Chapter 10
Liar, Liar
I don’t know what the hell the truth is, maybe just not lying.
—Harvard lecture, 1961
What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.
—from Three, 1978
Lillian Hellman, I think, is tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer. Every word she says is a lie, including “and” and “the.”
—Mary McCarthy, 1979
Lillian Hellman died in 1984, in the midst of a scandalous lawsuit, fighting for her honor and her integrity against accusations of lying. There is more than irony in this, for Hellman struggled all her life to sort out the meaning of truth and to adhere to a high standard of honesty. She had, she tells us in the story of Bethe Bowman, learned as a child the damage that could be done by lying and vowed then and there never to tell a lie, under penalty of torture and the guillotine.1 She sometimes thought of herself, as she once said, as “too honest.” Indeed, asked by Dashiell Hammett to identify her worst fault, that’s the one she recorded.2
But what was truth? Efforts to find the answer to that question permeate Hellman’s work: The Children’s Hour rotates around a lie told by a disturbed thirteen-year-old girl that destroys three lives and a cherished school for girls. Dark Angel, her first movie script, focuses on a white lie, meant to hide a marriage, that subjects the hero to a dangerous wartime mission he might otherwise have avoided—and to a lifetime of blindness. The Little Foxes turns on a lie about a theft of bonds whose discovery places Regina in a position of power and allows her to win a financial victory over her brothers. Toys in the Attic features a young wife from whom truth is withheld who then becomes the unwitting instrument of her husband’s ruin. How is it that the writer who spent so much of her energy defending truth became known as the archetype of liars? The answer to that question lies less in Hellman’s life than in the historical debates that consumed her final decade.
A Difficult Woman Page 38