Marc Aronson
Page 15
As a candidate, Barack Obama officially rejected this entire view of how to keep America strong and safe. And yet ever since he took office, members of his own administration have been deeply divided over exactly what we can and cannot do. We are fighting enemies who are not a nation but a loose network. They don’t wear uniforms. Whom do we define as a terrorist? Sites on the Internet tell unhappy young people that they need to join the global holy war against America. Unfortunately some have responded to this new “answer” and tried to spread violence and death. How much freedom of speech should these Internet terrormongers have? Should we monitor who goes to their websites? If so, aren’t we doing exactly what Hoover did in filling out his file cards showing nodes of potential Communist subversion? What is the price of security?
In April 1919, one of the acid bombs the terrorists tried to mail was intended for the Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was targeted for death, but that did not change his legal opinions. “All life,” Holmes insisted, “is an experiment.” There is no absolute certainty, as there is no perfect protection against dangerous enemies and destructive ideas. We do not silence views; rather, we let them battle for attention “in the competition of the market.” And that requires Americans to “be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.”
A democracy must allow ideas to be aired, even loathsome ones that are “fraught with death.” Those views flourish, or wither, as people hear them and weigh them against other views. This is indeed a very dangerous high-wire act requiring fine sensitivity and judgment. There is no guarantee the government will get it right. But all of life is an experiment. Otherwise, in the name of protecting democracy, we destroy it.
Justice Holmes got it exactly right: In America, we are living an experiment. That means there are no easy answers. Sometimes we will need to strike hard; sometimes we will need to pause. Fear paralyzes; democracy requires us to take a breath, to let the emotion subside, and to think. Our safety, our only safety, comes in that moment of agonizing weighing, and in our willingness to admit when we were terribly wrong. We have only imperfect safety, which is the glory of our nation: countries that demand perfect answers hide their mistakes in unmarked graves. There is an ebb and flow in the story of a nation — a time when loyalty and obedience are the highest virtues and another when dissent and doubt save us from ourselves. I hope Master of Deceit shows that we must always question both the heroes we favor and the enemies we hate. We must remain open-minded, even when the shadow of fear freezes our hearts.
Writing about the Cold War presents a unique set of challenges. In one way it is dusty and distant, especially for readers born after the fall of Soviet Communism. People, events, and issues that were of the greatest interest to older adults are invisible today — as out of sight and eclipsed as only the recent past can be. There is none of the romance and charm of the distant past, none of the current-events appeal of the latest disaster or triumph. And yet the Cold War is still controversial. The key issues it touches on — Communism, anti-Communism, government secrets, personal lies, the moral failings of our leaders, heterosexual and homosexual affairs — are still sensitive subjects. This is especially so because of the security decisions we need to make today. As I write this, Congress is holding hearings on the supposed radicalization of American Muslims that remind many of the HUAC hearings of the 1950s. So while one challenge is to bring a very obscure past to life, another is to negotiate through a charged field of political opinion. I hope this essay will help orient students and teachers who plan on doing their own research about this important period. At the end I’ve added a note about my own emotional experience in doing this research.
THE RESEARCH CHALLENGE
Books written in Hoover’s lifetime were most often massaged by his PR staff. They make for lively reading but are slanted and incomplete. Books written in the 1970s, in the shadow of the Church Committee hearings, are often quite detailed and deeply critical. In the late 1980s and early 1990s came efforts to piece together all that was then known into narrative histories. The fall of Soviet Communism, the temporary opening of Soviet files, and then the release of the Venona decrypts in the ’90s produced a new round of books that shaded old debates about, for example, Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, in new ways. In the twenty-first century, we have started to have more specialized studies of various individuals and themes that take all the previous scholarship as a given background but offer new insight into one beat of the story.
As we came out of the Cold War, the weight of scholarship was on the left, often angrily so. The rise of modern conservatism has given rise both to defenses of Hoover and McCarthy and to a new interest in the enduring legacy of anti-Communism. And even as all this work has gone on in the academy and in serious adult books, Anthony Summers and his rumors (see here) swept through popular culture and, falsely, defined Hoover in the general adult imagination. The one value of the Summers book is that it gathered all the rumors in one place so that they could be examined. That in turn has spawned a new round of (far less widely known) academic challenges and correctives to the Summers mythology.
As you can see, the field of researching and writing about Hoover and the Cold War is constantly shifting and changing. That makes for an exciting opportunity: take a small selection of books from different periods, line them up, and see how they treat similar events. That offers a quick, and powerful, lesson in the fact that who we are and the interests before us today influence what we see in the past. That does not mean the past is entirely invented and up to us to shape as we like. To be a historian, you must be fair to the evidence, willing to be proven wrong, and open to criticism. We may come to different conclusions, but we have to play by the same rules.
My own reading took place in several concentric phases. Before I even started to read about Hoover, I needed to get oriented in the story of Communism and anti-Communism. I knew, from my own childhood, that many of the key clashes of the period were still controversial. I began that phase of research with Ted Morgan’s Reds, which is readable and fair-minded and covers the full arc of the period. A more detailed, scholarly, and generally pro-left view can be found in Ellen Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes. And Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s Red Diapers, which Dr. Schrecker recommended to me, is fascinating. While other books discuss the great issues of Communism and anti-Communism as they shaped society, this book captures the family drama of living with radical beliefs. Having broadly mapped out the period, I could then enter the specific clashes. For example, for Hiss and Chambers, I used Allen Weinstein’s Perjury, Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, and Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s The Haunted Wood.
My main guides to Hoover were The Boss by Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox and Secrecy and Power by Richard Gid Powers. The Boss is more dry and close to the sources but also ventures interesting psychological interpretations; Secrecy and Power is more expansive and interested in popular culture. Broken, also by Richard Powers, is a history of the FBI, not just Hoover, but it usefully draws on many of the themes of the earlier book. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets by Curt Gentry is good to use with the others, as it adds stories and is more recent, but it is less reliable. Ovid Demaris’s collection of interviews, J. Edgar Hoover: As They Knew Him, is a real treasure trove for quotations but likely to be most useful for a student after he or she already knows the basic outline of Hoover’s life.
For Hoover in the Palmer raid phase, my guide was Kenneth D. Ackerman’s Young J. Edgar. For McCarthy, I used Schrecker’s Many Are the Crimes for context and David M. Oshinsky’s A Conspiracy So Immense for biography. The Great Fear by David Caute helped me to get a sense of the time and offered many useful anecdotes. David Garrow’s book on the FBI and Dr. King was indispensable
for making sense of the Hoover-King clash. David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare deepened my understanding of the period in crucial ways. Late in my research, I came upon J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists by Charles M. Douglas, as well as Rhodi Jeffreys-Jones’s The FBI: A History, both of which added fresh perspectives I had not previously seen.
These books oriented me; they allowed me to feel comfortable in Hoover’s life and to begin to know my way around. I offer additional comments in the source notes on the books I read most carefully. After doing this background work, I could read memoirs, go to websites, and read novels with some sense of context. I knew the world out of which they came. And that leads to the FBI files themselves.
Ever since Congress began investigating the FBI in the 1970s, a great many FBI files have been made available. Using the Freedom of Information Act, researchers have gained access to even more FBI material about specific individuals. Once I was oriented in the scholarship on Hoover and the Cold War, I began to go online to the FBI Freedom of Information site and to travel to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland, to look at its collection of FBI photos and files. I loved my hours and days at NARA and hope to return. I did see Hoover afresh when looking at thousands of images of him and reading his phone logs and notes. He came alive to me as a person, beyond the issues and controversies.
Perhaps that is ultimately the difference between primary and secondary sources: secondary sources are like looking through binoculars as you focus the lenses. You are scanning the terrain and searching for guideposts. Primary sources are like the moment when you can see clearly through the lenses — the bird or bear or tree is suddenly crisp and sharp in its own individual color and personality. I was so pleased to have that aha! experience.
FEAR
This is a book about fear, and I was scared to write it. Really, I mean that. I grew up among the children of people who lost their jobs, or had to use false names, because of the Communist or socialist ideals they admired. My parents worked closely with some of those parents. One summer, my camp counselors were brothers whose parents were the Rosenbergs, the spies whose execution by our government is described in chapter 12. Even though today’s FBI is not the organization it was under Hoover, after you read about the crimes committed by the Bureau, you can’t help feeling some anxiety in exposing its dark past. And yet that is not the main reason I felt hesitant to write this book.
I was scared because I live in a world of liberals and leftists, in which there is tacit agreement to see Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover as terrible men and to speak passionately about the victims of their witch hunts. As you’ve seen, McCarthy was a reckless bully and opportunist who used people’s fear. Hoover was the mastermind of an empire of secrets designed to terrify and silence anyone he disagreed with or disliked. Many did suffer because of them. Yet merely telling the story of their crimes and being self-righteous about their victims felt false to me. I knew that those on the left had their own secrets; their own liars, bullies, and opportunists. I felt scared to write this book because instead of joining in the chorus of the views I heard growing up, I would have to stand out and stand apart.
This book is filled with information that has never before been written about for teenagers, and that means I took risks. Some who admire Dr. King will be disturbed that I depict his moral failings. Those who believe it is important to encourage patriotism and respect for authority may think it is wrong of me to reveal the FBI’s crimes. My frank discussion of the important role that rumors of homosexuality played in Hoover’s day may bother both those who fear I am stigmatizing homosexuals as well as those who feel I am condoning activities they find morally objectionable. But this is the book I felt I needed to write; this is where the evidence I found led me. These are the truths about our past I felt teenagers deserve to know.
Have you had an experience similar to mine in writing this book, when your friends, your family, your teachers, all nod their heads about something, while you have doubts? It is hard to show that you don’t really agree, you don’t exactly fit in, especially when you see that kids who stand out get punished, especially if you have joined in on making fun of them. You know you are lying, but you don’t want your friends, people you like, classmates you admire, to see you as a jerk, an unpopular fool, so you lie some more and grow more afraid of being found out.
In researching and writing this book, I learned to trust myself, to speak out even when everyone else seems to share an opposing view. Hoover silenced dissent both within the FBI and in American society. But so too did the Communist Party. The evil was never on one side; it was in silence.
THE WRITING CHALLENGE
Having gathered all this information, I faced the real problem: what to say? At every moment I had to weigh maintaining momentum versus pausing to tell a story. Everything was potentially interesting — from John Reed in Moscow to the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and protests; Langston Hughes’s odyssey from Scottsboro through HUAC; the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain and the way in which arguments over Communism and anti-Communism turned into neighborhood clashes between Jews and Catholics in American cities; the FBI’s wartime successes and failures in Latin America; the Hollywood 10 hearings; the reactions of the children of famous reds to their parents; the Hiss-Chambers trials. But what belonged in this one book? What could give readers enough and not too much?
I wrote entries, from a few paragraphs to full chapters, on all the subjects I just listed but finally decided to leave them on the cutting-room floor. This is not meant to be a textbook; it cannot “cover” everything. I have tried to hone the story down to one that moves along but says enough to engage readers. Finding that link to readers was another challenge. I tried out innumerable first chapters — from a vivid description of 9/11 and the fear it created, based on one of my neighbor’s personal experiences in being at the towers as they were collapsing, to finally the Dr. King letter I have now. I particularly liked my 9/11 chapter but came to feel that those events themselves have become history, while the unfamiliar example of the FBI plot was a better lead into the dark story that would follow.
The truth is, I could not tell which beats in the story belonged until I tried my hand at all of them. If there is a lesson in that for students, it is that it is OK to be excessive, to do too much. Why would I do that? you may ask. Well, because when you are full of your research, you probably don’t know what is most important or what will communicate your ideas in the most effective way. Better to get it all down. Then, once you have your full story on paper, you can prune. Just remember that, as they say in fiction, you will have to “kill your darlings”— let go of bits that you like but that are getting in the way of your larger goal: sharing with readers the fascinating information you have discovered and the insights you have to offer.
NOTES
Prologue: Blackmail
“King, there is only one thing . . . bared to the nation”: quoted in Garrow, 125–126. This pathbreaking book not only reveals the FBI’s campaign against Dr. King but also carefully weighs the possible explanations for it. Garrow went on to write a Pulitzer Prize–winning book about Dr. King called Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Morrow, 1986).
King believed the note was telling him to commit suicide: U.S. Senate, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 94th Congress, 2nd sess., 1976, pp. 159–160, Mary Ferrell Foundation website, http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=1159&relPageId=165. This is the report of the Church Committee, charged with investigating the FBI’s illegal activities. Andrew Young, a close aide to King, told the committee, “I think that the disturbing thing to Martin was that he felt somebody was trying to get him to commit suicide, and because it was a tape of a meet
ing in Washington and the postmark was from Florida, we assumed nobody had the capacity to do that other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Young testified that both he and Ralph Abernathy, who also heard the tape and read the letter, interpreted it as inviting Dr. King to take his own life.
Part One: Nothing in This Book Matters Until You Care about Communism
Chapter One: John Reed and Revolution
To see how the full arc of American history would look if written from this first point of view, see the best-selling A Patriot’s History of the United States, by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (New York: Sentinel, 2004).
To see how the full arc of American history would look if written from this second point of view, see the best-selling A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn (New York: New Press, 1997).
“Nothing teaches . . . organized on a grand scale”: John Reed, “Bolshevism in America,” Revolutionary Age, December 18, 1918, Early American Marxism website, http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1918/1218-reed-bolshinamerica.pdf.
“New light seems to pour . . . at one stroke”: Crossman, 23. Published in 1950, this collection gave former Communists an opportunity to describe why they had once believed in Marxism and why their views had changed. The book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the power, and the failure, of Communism, which is a crucial theme for the entire history of the twentieth century.