There had been scores of such trials during the past five or six years of the great American Red-hunt, and none of them had taken more than an hour or two to complete. The routine was simple: the questions that the accused had declined to answer before the Committee of Congress were read; an “expert on Communism” testified that in his opinion the defendant was under “Communist discipline”; and a conviction and sentence for contempt were handed down by the judge. Some, like the Hollywood Ten—screenwriters and directors caught up ten years earlier in the virulence of the first hearings on the movie industry—had gone to jail for a year, but in more recent times a certain therapeutic boredom on the part of the public had tempered the proceedings, and the penalty was more likely to be a fine and suspended sentence, although not by any means in every case. Given the intense publicity about my case, I had reason to fear harsher rather than more lenient treatment, for the Committee would probably want to justify itself by punishing me.
Federal District Court Judge Charles McLaughlin sat behind the high tribunal looking like President Warren Gamaliel Harding, whose handsome face I had memorized so long ago in Far Rockaway when his black-draped photograph was displayed in all the store windows the week of his death. McLaughlin, with his silvery, neatly combed hair, glanced down at his fellow Democrat, my lawyer Joe Rauh, and at Prosecutor Hitz, and amiably contemplated aloud that give or take a few minutes the trial would doubtless be over by noon, about an hour and a half hence. Just as amiably Hitz assured him that the government’s case would not require much time at all, and with equal cheerfulness Joe Rauh, giving his little baritone chuckle and touching his finger to his polka-dot bow tie, announced that his case would require a minimum of four and possibly five days to present.
The shock in Hitz’s face I recall aurally rather than visually, as the kind of clicking sound made by a windup toy when it is lifted off the carpet and allowed to spin itself out. The judge was likewise absolutely astonished, having grasped, like Hitz, what Rauh’s declaration meant—for the first time a lawyer intended to win a contempt case rather than hopelessly conceding it. As for me, I was too stupid to understand any of this until Joe explained it later; all I knew was that from then on a negative electricity began flowing toward me from the bench and the government table, whereas I had hardly been noticed before the incredible announcement was made. A defendant planning actually to win such a case was evidently an unconscionable affront to all decency and venerable tradition.
One reason for Rauh’s imagining that he might if not win then make a record that would reverse the decision on appeal was the Watkins case. In that one he had established a precedent that forbade the Committee to ask questions of a witness unless the answers would serve a legislative purpose. A committee of Congress, in other words, could no longer simply reach out and pick people off the street, as HUAC had been delightedly doing for years, but had to show that their testimony was relevant to some piece of legislation the committee was actively contemplating for submission to Congress. In questioning me, the Committee had made a couple of passes at asking me about my passport in order, as was now amply demonstrated by the prosecution, to line themselves up with the requirement of Watkins. Indeed, my hearing had actually been labeled an inquiry into “the misuse of United States passports.”
Naturally, there was not the slightest connection between my refusal to name a writer at a meeting I had attended years earlier and my passport, used or misused. But to my growing amazement—and, as the days passed, my sinking despair—Mr. Hitz opened each of his orations with one or another variation of “Now, when Mr. Miller went into Czechoslovakia, he knew he was forbidden by the stamp on his passport to enter that country …” Which indeed would have been a misuse of a passport, but since I had never been in or near Czechoslovakia in my life, it was hard to fathom how they expected to prove anything by this false assertion. Yet every time he took to his feet we had a repetition of it. And when, each time, Rauh rose on a point of order to wearily repeat that I had never been in that country, the judge simply turned back to Hitz and asked him to continue.
After each hard day in court—during which I drew many fine sketches of all the personnel in order to stay awake, while agonizing, like all amateurs, at the snail’s pace of the proceedings—we normally returned to Joe’s house, where we rushed to the bar and sat drinking as I, for one, had never drunk before. On about the third such evening, our first scotches under our belts, Rauh suddenly screwed his broad face up, pointed at me, and said, “Hey!”
“Yes, sir. Hey what?”
“Hitz keeps putting you in Czechoslovakia in 1947—isn’t it ‘47?”
“Yes, ‘47.”
“But Czechoslovakia was still a democratic country in ‘47. It was Eduard Benes who was president then, wasn’t it? They weren’t Communist yet!”
“My God! I almost visited a free country and did something good! But I wasn’t there anyway.”
Next morning Rauh sat waiting for Hitz to start his daily prayer for vengeance on me for having gone to the forbidden land. And now it came. “When Mr. Miller went into Czechoslovakia knowing he was forbidden to do so by the terms of his passport…” Rauh was on his feet with his basketball shooting arm raised high in the air. “Your honor …”
Once recognized by the now wearying Warren Gamaliel Harding on high, Joe paused as before a double-thick lamb chop lying centered on his plate with a piece of parsley on either side and a baked potato with sour cream nudging it, and repeated that Mr. Miller was never in his life in Czechoslovakia, but that even if he had been, Czechoslovakia at the time was a democratic state whose President Benes” was our friend. This, he said, was a matter of history.
Well, now. A pause. Warren Harding looked down at Hitz, and Hitz looked up at Warren Harding, and Rauh sat down and straightened his bow tie with both hands and gave it an additional pat.
And now the judge spoke, saying, “I think it falls under the four corners of the indictment. Proceed, Mr. Hitz.”
I leaned urgently toward Rauh and whispered, “What does that mean, ‘four corners of the indictment’?” I had the image of a four-cornered tent under which I was suffocating.
Rauh bent to me now and beckoned my ear to his mouth. “Nothing,” he said, and laughed. His enjoyment was so infectious that I found myself laughing too, about what, however, only God knew.
Time’s fade-outs and fade-ins and cross-fades. More than a quarter-century after my hearing before the Un-American Activities Committee I was seated at a festive table with my wife, Inge Morath, and my guests, Joe Rauh and his wife, Olie, in a dining room in the Cannon office building, improvised for the occasion of the Kennedy Honors opening banquet because the State Department dining room was then under reconstruction. A hundred or more people, many of great distinction, were present, with Secretary of State George Shultz the official host. As we had entered within a mob of celebrants, I’d had no chance to look at our surroundings, but I noticed now that the walls and ceiling were newly painted in decorator colors rather than the usual federal drab. Joe Rauh suddenly turned fully around in his chair to study the room and then leaned past Olie and told me that I was being honored in the same room where my HUAC hearing had been held so many years before.
Of course the layout was all different now, with a score of banquet tables covering the floor, but even after mentally reconstructing the old layout I could not connect to the place. Irony was all I seemed able to feel, and it seemed so coldly metallic a thing when I recalled the hot gases that had poured over me in this very room. I looked around at the happy guests and the healthily smiling secretary of state and the famous faces of my fellow honorees, and again I felt on the outside looking in, and more, that it all lacked reality. I had supposed that after the kind of merciless rejection I had known it would never be easy to accept the smooth self-congratulation of such ceremonies. Still, I could enjoy this good-spirited occasion—sort of. Maybe I had the illusion of having lost my fear of power, having been close enou
gh to it to know there was nothing power had that I wanted. But a lot of my former faith in the system’s enduring beneficence had been burned out of me, too. All that was the same on both occasions was the flag, which now as then hung from a staff near a wall. It might even have been the same one that had hung behind Congressman Walter’s head so long ago, and I recalled now how it had reassured me then, although I knew that to many in the world it signified cruel wealth and arrogant blindness. But how to put all this together in a coherent sense of my life? Or maybe I ought to settle for it all having been a dream, a dream of perpetual exile and perpetual returns.
The most interesting talk I recall having in that barren week of my trial was with former senator Harry P. Cain, whom Rauh had brought up from his semi-retirement in Florida to testify as my “expert witness on Communism.” He had read my plays and did not believe I had been “under the discipline of the Communist Party.” Normally in such trials it was the government alone that produced “expert testimony,” usually from ex-Communist officials, to prove that the defendant showed all the necessary hoof-marks of the Communist Lucifer. This routine, incidentally, was an all but exact duplication of the use of clergy as experts on witchcraft in the Salem of 1692; one of them, Reverend Hale of Beverly, is a character in The Crucible. Hale in my play, like his original in history, defected from the prosecution’s side on realizing that he had been had by the “afflicted girls” and, filled with remorse, tried unsuccessfully to save the people his earlier “expertise” had helped condemn to hang. Harry Cain’s story, I now learned, was amazingly similar.
A much decorated marine who had fought in the Korean War, Cain was one of a very few Red-hunters to have turned against the whole business, in his case with a vengeance. He had ridden the anti-Communist tide out of his native state of Washington when, with no trace of any political background, he was picked up by the Republicans and run for the Senate. His sole campaign theme was the Communist menace, about which he had such powerful feelings that he would demand Chaplin’s deportation for having asked “the self-admitted Communist Picasso” to help organize French protests against American repression.
Joe McCarthy came out to help him, and even then, in the full flood of his fervor, Cain noticed something disconcerting about Joe’s paranoid vindictiveness. One night they were both on the platform in an American Legion hall when “some guy got up in the back and began heckling McCarthy. The boys threw him out in the street, but you couldn’t help noticing how really mad McCarthy was at the guy—I mean he was mad personally, he was damn near shaken. It was weird.
“Anyway, some years passed, and we were playing poker with the wives one evening, and suddenly Joe looks at me and says, ‘What’d you do about that guy?’
“I didn’t know who he was talking about. That guy in the Legion hall that night who was bugging me.’
“It took me a minute to recall, it had been so long ago. I couldn’t believe he’d even remember it, but it still really bothered him that somebody way, way back there in Tacoma hadn’t gone along with him. And I said something like, ‘I don’t know, I guess they just tossed him out of the hall. Why?’
” ‘ Why! For Chrissake, the son of a bitch was heckling me!’—and he was mad as hell all over again. I couldn’t believe it, because Joe was not all that bad a guy, you know. He could be awfully sweet and good to a person if he wanted to be. He just got onto the Communism thing and ran with it, and I think he was always scared it was going to collapse under him, so he kept looking for enemies. … Tell you the truth though, Arthur, the really vindictive ones were the wives. We’d be playing cards with some of these senatorial wives and their husbands, and more likely than not the wives’d be the ones who’d say, ‘When are you going to get this one or that one? Why do you let him get away with saying this or that? Go get the son of a bitch!’ They were the real haters.”
In court Cain testified that he had read my plays and found that politically they were so contradictory that they could not have been written under Party control. It was pleasant testimony, but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.
Cain’s transformation had grown out of his former job as head of the Subversive Activities Control Board, to which he was appointed by President Eisenhower after his defeat for a second term as senator. The board’s mandate was to see that no Reds were hired by government or held government positions. In an ordinary day he received a bushel of letters of denunciation of one citizen by another for real or imagined subversive views, plus a small but steady number of complaints by accused people claiming innocence of Communist associations or sympathies, which went into the files with little ado.
A persistent man in Baltimore, however, caught Cain’s bored attention with a semiliterate protesting letter about every third day claiming that he had been unjustly fired as a subversive from his job at the post office. A real Red, Cain imagined, had to know how to spell better than this, and he wrote agreeing to see the man to discuss the matter, figuring he would probably not dare to show up and face his interrogation.
But he did appear one morning and convinced Cain of his innocence. He had the same name as a man known to have contributed to some Party front. Cain got him his job back, but he now found himself staring at his massive files containing the hundreds of denials, partial denials, remorseful confessions, denunciations—the whole mixed detritus of thousands of Americans who had lived through the New Deal years and had been tainted with what was simplistically branded subversion. Beginning by attempting to sort out the obvious from the less obvious Reds, the far leftists from the more conservative leftists and the mere left liberals, he arrived in some worried weeks at the point where he no longer believed that the government should be in the ideological policing business at all. He got an appointment with Eisenhower, to whom he confided his deep misgivings that they were assembling a governmental structure of a totalitarian, mind-controlling bent. Eisenhower listened and Cain was promptly fired.
At the time of my trial he was doing regular political commentary on some Florida TV station. Sitting and talking with him in the Rauh living room, I saw a man with the special kind of tired, thin laugh that comes to those who have been spewed out by power and know they are not ever coming back.
When Judge McLaughlin looked down at me and asked if I had anything to say before sentencing, I thought I saw a look of embarrassment on his kindly Midwestern small-town face. I could think of nothing to add, and he sentenced me to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine and serve a month in jail, with the prison term suspended. The case was reversed by the court of appeals a few months later, with only the briefest technical comment. Spyros Skouras was quick to send a superlatively congratulatory telegram.
With the sentence delivered, McLaughlin quickly left, explaining to Rauh that he had a funeral to attend. And so Joe and I gathered up my doodles and his few documents and ambled out onto the broad steps of the courthouse into the bright Washington sunshine, where he suddenly grabbed my arm. “Wait! You can’t leave this building, you’re a convicted criminal! We’ve got to get you bailed out!”
With which we rushed down one empty marble corridor after another looking for a bail bondsman and a clerk to set me free. We were now in Kafka country, it being a few minutes after five, when no proper clerk would be found dead in a federal court. What to do? To depart might be to invite a whole new charge of flight from justice. Luckily, we happened on a wandering clerk on his way home who agreed to reopen his office and fix me up with the necessary stamps and documents.
In the early eighties, some twenty-five years later, I received a letter from a literature professor at a Midwestern university identifying himself as the nephew of Judge McLaughlin, now deceased, whom he rather feelingly described as having had an important and good influence on his development, as a man of warm human sympathies and a certain quality of intellect. Would I mind telling him how I felt about his uncle, who had confided to him that my trial had trouble
d him greatly and left him with some regrets about his part in it? Particularly, what had my impressions of him been during the actual trial?
I wrote the professor that I honestly felt no rancor toward the judge, regarding him now as simply one more deanimated cog in the gears. After all, no civil liberties organization had offered me its help then, any more than two years earlier when I had been barred from writing the screenplay on delinquency despite the World-Telegram’s suggestion that I be “allowed” to finish it but that my name not appear on the screen. To this benign outrage there was also no public reaction whatever, neither from the literary world and the civil libertarians nor from the reborn leftists and libertarian Trotskyites, who were now giving their all to fight Soviet totalitarianism and its contemptuous treatment of writers. It was simply that having once been pro-Soviet, I had failed later on to make the right exculpatory noises, the passionate anti-Soviet protestations, fearing as I still did a blind anti-Communism that could easily overflow into a primitive fascist spirit at home and fling us into war abroad; had failed, in short, to close my eyes to what was happening in my own country, something that would cost me over the years in certain influential literary quarters where such things mattered quite as much as literature—indeed, a lot more.
The hearing and trial seemed an artistically barren experience for me—I had already written The Crucible five years before, and the dynamics of the phenomenon were too repetitious to teach me much more. Yet in the long run it too served my education; a decade later, well before such concerns became the common property of Western intellectuals—if for some merely a chic exercise—I would accept the international presidency of PEN, an organization of poets, essayists, and novelists, and at the time a virtually expiring institution. Its London leadership, under David Carver, came to me in Paris while I was there on a long visit, in a last desperate hope that having a known working writer as president might help PEN to survive. No writer whose typewriter was still warm could want such a job, I thought, but after weeks of trying I finally found it impossible to turn down; my American experience had given me too clear an idea of what writers were going through in Eastern Europe and the benighted, ignorant, brutalized parts of the globe where there were few to hear and fewer to offer a helping hand once government had decided that they must be silenced. I thought by the mid-sixties that perhaps I could help hasten the time when a human principle unclouded by the Cold War, then temporarily in abeyance, might be seriously asserted. The Un-American Activities Committee had provided me with the desire to make its like impossible here anymore, and maybe on some far-off day, everywhere else in the world.
Timebends Page 60