by Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover;America in the Age of Lies
In the early 1950s, the actual threat of Soviet spying was declining due to the Venona decryptions and because American Communists were losing their faith. Party leaders had scattered to avoid being put in jail, and the Party was making impossible demands on those who were left. By 1954, Howard Fast felt that “much as the FBI was destroying the party, the party was destroying itself.” But even as the number of real Communists in America plummeted, a toxic atmosphere spread throughout the country. All of Washington feared Hoover’s files. And mini-Hoovers around the country held the same power locally. Conservatives claimed that both the United States government and United Nations were filled with unmanly pencil pushers whose only loyalty was to the global homosexual Soviet underground. Out in Hollywood, Myron Fagan claimed that a secret society sponsored by Jews was conspiring to use the UN to take over the world and that famous film stars were pawns in this dastardly plot. Suspicion became proof.
The glamorous Hollywood studios, with their he-men and curvaceous babes, were particularly vulnerable to whispers of disloyalty. Then, as now, there was a ready market for gossip about movie stars. And gossip columnists were as ready to spread suspicion, or employ blackmail, as anyone else. So there was a constant bubble of accusation and fear made all the worse because the major studios were seeing their profits decline. TV was the new sensation, and people were choosing to stay home with their families rather than go out to the movies. Hollywood simply could not tolerate bad publicity. In 1951, when HUAC decided to hold hearings about Communists in the film world, everyone knew the score. You would say or do whatever the committee wanted, or your film career was over.
Ten Hollywood writers, producers, and directors, including the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, refused to answer HUAC’s questions about their Communist pasts and were sent to prison for contempt of Congress. Afterward, they were blacklisted — unable to get work in Hollywood, at least at their old pay rates and under their real names. Trumbo moved to Mexico.
The committee already knew a great deal about who was, or had once been, a Communist. The hearings were not really meant to gather new information. Rather, committee members wanted suspects to grovel. Each witness was asked to spill the names of friends, neighbors, and lovers to demonstrate his or her own loyalty by betraying others. It didn’t even matter if everyone a person named had already been identified as a former Communist or Communist sympathizer. The goal was to force people to vomit out the past, to expel it like a disease. A witness who had once been a leftist now needed to show that he or she had no old alliance, no lingering bond of friendship, no emotion at all but obedience to the committee.
The HUAC hearings and the whole loyalty campaign were the judgment of the 1950s on the 1930s. In the 1930s, you may have thought you were being idealistic in speaking up for the Scottsboro Nine, sending money to support widows overseas, or buying a Paul Robeson record. You may have seen yourself as a patriotic American, bringing Jefferson’s ideals to the twentieth century. But twenty years later, you learned that you had been terribly wrong. Those who had disagreed with you during the Depression, or who might need to cover up their own youthful radicalism by exposing yours, were going to make you pay.
The poet Langston Hughes testifying before HUAC in 1953. Radicalized by the Scottsboro trials, he had traveled to the Soviet Union to make a movie designed to bring the Communist message to African Americans. But by the 1950s, he had abandoned those beliefs. He did his best to please the committee without having to harm anyone else.
Actor Larry Parks experienced the mood of the committee in 1951. He was ready to admit that he had once been a member of the Communist Party. But that was not enough for his examiners. “Don’t present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this committee and going to jail,” he pleaded, “or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.” But that is precisely what HUAC demanded. Parks tried to push back: “It seems to me that this is not the American way of doing things. . . . I think to do something like this is more akin to what happened under Hitler, and what is happening in Russia today. . . . It is not befitting for this committee to force me to make this kind of choice.” But the committee did want Parks to choose — betray your friends, ruin their careers for having once shared the wrong ideals, or get out of Hollywood. Parks finally did name names — and still got only two more parts for the rest of the decade.
The price of refusing to give names was even higher. J. Edward Bromberg was an actor, but when HUAC called on him, he would not cooperate. His son Conrad later recalled the weeks, months, and years that followed: “I remember a sense of silence that pervaded that apartment. . . . Very few people came to see us. . . . He would be sitting at his desk waiting for the phone to ring. . . . He would literally sit for hours and hours.” Two years after he met the committee and his phone stopped ringing, Bromberg died; he was forty-eight years old.
Theater artists cannot stand silence. Stranded on a desert island with a few tools, a painter can still paint, an author can write. But a director needs actors, and actors crave an audience. We call the most famous people in Hollywood “stars” because they blaze — they give off heat and light. Being cut off from the flow of energy — not to speak of the fame and fortune it brings — is terrifying. The biggest spirit may be in the most danger; he who has the most to give has the most to lose. Take Elia Kazan.
Kazan was a brilliant director. Even today, if you watch the Oscar-winning films he made, such as Gentleman’s Agreement or On the Waterfront, you can feel the sharp intelligence and burning intensity he brought to a project. As a young man in the 1930s, Kazan joined the distinctly left-wing Group Theater (as did my father), and for a couple of years he was a member of a secret Communist cell (my father was not tempted). As a result, on January 14, 1952, Kazan was called to face HUAC.
Kazan knew how to read a scene — he staged them all the time. He felt how much the congressmen enjoyed their power and his helplessness. And he was sure the committee already knew everything it needed to know about him and the Group Theater. Their real goal was to conduct “a degradation ceremony,” in which he had to kneel and inform on his friends. He refused to speak about anyone but himself. But Kazan had seen the Communists play the same power games. He remembered hearing writers being told how to write and his own fear of disagreeing. He had let “the Party fellows get away with what I hated most, by not being ready to question and doubt and forcefully express my contrary convictions.” And he knew for certain that he could direct films again only if he agreed to name names. To speak was to give in and hurt his friends. But the alternative was that killing silence — silence about the Communists he disliked and the silence of a career cut short.
Kazan’s side of this story is best explained by watching On the Waterfront, a film written by Budd Schulberg, who freely spoke to HUAC, starring Lee J. Cobb, who also named names, and directed by Kazan. It is about an individual who is brave enough to expose corruption and tell the truth to the police. The hero is the man who resists the group and speaks for himself.
In Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront, the heroic individual stands up by breaking ranks with the corrupt union. In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, the heroic individual resists the impulse to save himself by accusing others. In these works, the two former friends, Kazan and Miller, were both talking about HUAC, Communism, and anti-Communism — from opposite points of view.
In his own mind, Kazan made the right choice. He named eight people, all actual Communists; he was telling the truth. But the truth bears a price. Philip Loeb was starring in a TV series about a Jewish family called The Goldbergs. When Kazan and Cobb both named him as having once been a Communist, he was taken off the TV series and could not find work. In 1955, Loeb committed suicide. Like J. Edward Bromberg, he could not take the silence.
When Kazan first started working on a movie about the waterfront, his scriptwriter was the playwright Arthur Miller. Miller and Kazan were a terrific creative team; they were also fri
ends and lived near each other in Connecticut. In the early days of 1952, as Kazan was deciding what to say to HUAC, Miller stopped by his house. He was on his way to research a new play about the Salem witch trials of 1692. While Kazan was unsure what to say to the committee, Miller had no doubts. Called before HUAC, Miller insisted that “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.” His play about Salem was to be a comment on the modern witch hunt going on in America.
Miller arrived at his friend’s house, then realized something was wrong: Kazan had already broken, given the committee what it wanted. Miller was furious — at HUAC. “I was,” he later wrote, “experiencing a bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before, a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom. Who or what was safer now because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself?” You can still feel Miller’s fury when you see the play he went on to write, The Crucible.
Joe McCarthy rose to power by bullying everyone, going beyond all limits. But he was just as out of control in his personal life. By 1954, he was drinking too much, eating too much, and talking too much. He was like a guy at a party whom people enjoy at first for being rude and crude but who goes too far. There is a moment when even his fans turn away, when what was entertaining turns scary or sad. One night at the Del Charro, McCarthy was so drunk that he angrily pushed his nicely dressed new bride into a pool. Murchison got up, walked away, and sent a note to McCarthy telling him to leave the hotel.
On March 9, Edward R. Murrow, the most trusted reporter on television, devoted a full half-hour show to challenging the “situation of fear” McCarthy was spreading. Calls to the network ran 10–1 in favor of the show and against McCarthy. (The 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck recounts this story.)
Edward R. Murrow interviewing Senator McCarthy in a national broadcast
McCarthy’s boorish behavior was the least of his worries. One of his aides had tried to coerce the army into giving him special treatment. When the military balked, McCarthy accused the soldiers of hiding traitors. McCarthy was about to challenge the army — in a nation where many were proud of their service and the memories of recent wars burned bright. He did not know it, but he was going to have to do it alone.
McCarthy was so out of control, he made the one mistake Hoover could not forgive: he brought suspicion on the FBI. The senator was making it too easy for people to guess where he was getting his information, and Hoover military balked, McCarthy accused the soldiers of hiding traitors. McCarthy was about to challenge the army — in a nation where many were proud of their service and the memories of recent wars burned bright. He did not know it, but he was going to have to do it alone.
McCarthy was so out of control, he made the one mistake Hoover could not forgive: he brought suspicion on the FBI. The senator was making it too easy for people to guess where he was getting his information, and Hoover would never, ever, allow his Bureau to look bad. The director ordered his men to cut him loose — no more lists, no names, no more favors. Just when McCarthy took on the army, he lost his secret support system. All he had left was his bluster and his nearly limitless capacity for cruelty.
The Army-McCarthy hearings began on April 22, 1954, and lasted until June 17. Two television networks covered every moment of the drama. The attorney for the army was an old-time Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch. One day when Welch was questioning Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s closest aide, McCarthy broke in. He accused Welch of having an assistant who was himself a Communist. In fact, the assistant had once supported a liberal lawyers’ group — a cause of suspicion in the Age of Fear but certainly no proof of being a traitor. “Until this moment, Senator,” Welch responded, his face heavy with feeling, “I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” McCarthy was being reckless, lashing out at Welch, at the army, at anyone and everyone he could name. As film cameras rolled, Welch captured the worst of McCarthy — the bully who would rather hurt others than show weakness. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” (The 1964 documentary Point of Order tells this story very well.)
McCarthy couldn’t sleep; he drank at breakfast and at lunch and seemed on the edge of collapse. But he tried to rally support by playing on his old themes. Twenty-five thousand Communists, he warned, were spread across America, ready to support the U.S.S.R. “They know exactly where to throw a long chain or a steel cable to cut off the electric power of any city in case of war with Russia. . . . They teach goon squads how to throw hand grenades, how in effect to commit murder.” Mitchell Palmer had issued similar warnings as his popularity declined. For years after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Fox News ran alert levels on its TV crawlers, reminding everyone to be scared, to be afraid. But there is a moment when stirring up fear no longer works. It only makes the fearmonger look desperate. In January 1954, half of Americans polled said they liked McCarthy. By June, when he was shamed by Welch, only 34 percent were still on his side, while 45 percent disliked him. By December, the Senate censured McCarthy, and his days of power were over.
A draft of the Senate resolution condemning Senator McCarthy. From the moment he made his FBI connection too obvious, his days were numbered. Without Hoover’s support, his bullying lost its power.
Reporters next turned their attention to the people who had supported McCarthy, men like H. L. Hunt and Clint Murchison. Exposés spoke of Texas as a state dominated by “hate, fear, and suspicion” whipped up by “a handful of prodigiously wealthy men.” Instead of defining patriotic Americanism, Texas money seemed toxic.
Hoover was not tainted. He had used McCarthy as a front man but knew exactly when to step away. Two years after his censure, in 1956, Joe McCarthy was an obvious alcoholic, liquor dribbling out of his mouth as he downed shot after shot. He died the next year. Hoover, with his files, his secrets, and his G-men, was alive and well, but he had a problem of his own. The mood in the country was shifting, and that shift would lead him into his last battle.
FACT: While Hoover was head of the FBI, President Kennedy was assassinated, as were Dr. King, Senator Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The Internet is filled with conspiracy theories claiming that Hoover and the FBI either plotted these murders or did little to prevent them.
THE INSIDE STORY: The FBI had information about Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, that should have led it to pay more attention to him. They were inept, and Hoover did his best to cover that up. But that was not the Bureau at its worst. A recent biography of Malcolm X that makes extensive use of FBI files concludes that agents had infiltrated his inner circle but were strangely absent when he was killed. There is so much evidence that agents were involved in Hampton’s death that the FBI agreed to pay a million dollars into a fund set up in his name. It is, though, unfair to expect any agency to have provided perfect security in a period when America was in deep conflict with itself and when many groups and individuals believed in violent revolution. The FBI’s failures both deepened and reflected the intense divisions of the time.
Frames from the twenty-six-second film Abraham Zapruder recorded on November 22, 1963. He had planned to film the president’s visit to Dallas but instead captured Kennedy’s assassination.
J. Edgar Hoover grew from each of his battles. By chasing down gangsters and then broadcasting that story through the mass media, he made himself a national hero. When “subversives” threatened America, he met with the president in secret to map out a response. After FDR’s death, he turned his own recollection of the private meeting into a mandate to vastly extend the Bureau’s secret reach. From that moment on, Hoover’s career as a lawman meshed perfectly with his private fears. The FBI was built on Hoover’s passion for scientific precision, careful management, and secrecy. But starting in the mid-1950s, if he was going to follow orders and enforce the law, he was going to have to turn
against his own deepest beliefs and prejudices. The two foundations of his entire being — protecting himself and protecting his nation — were about to come into conflict. The first hint of this new threat came from the Supreme Court in 1954, when it ruled that all public schools must be integrated. This meant trouble for Hoover and the FBI.
The 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka signaled trouble for Hoover. The highest court in the land announced that the policies of separation and conformity he had devoted his life to defending were illegal. While junior and senior high schools took longer to integrate, elementary classrooms, such as the previously all-white Barnard School, in Washington, DC, shown here in 1955, were quick to implement change.
Hoover was a Washington man through and through. He fought hard each year to get more money from Congress, to gain new responsibilities for the FBI. Yet his idea was always that elite FBI agents would work with local police forces. His FBI was to be a model that police chiefs, mayors, and American Legionnaires would so admire that they would serve as its loyal friends and allies. To enforce racial integration in the South would mean having to clash with, overrule, and even arrest the very people he counted on for support. Nothing about that prospect appealed to Hoover.