Try as she might, Julia could not keep a lid on her indignation. Anger came at a boiling rush when she read in March 1954 that McCarthy’s witch hunt had reached her alma mater, Smith College. A Mrs. Aloise B. Heath of the so-called Committee for Discrimination in Giving had accused five faculty members of being associated with organizations that were “Communist fronts” in a mailing alerting alumnae to the presence of “traitors” on campus. Mrs. Heath also accused the college of “knowingly harboring” the turncoats and insinuated that there were others, as yet unnamed, who were trying to subvert the young minds at the school. She also suggested people withhold donations to the college as they were being used to fund Communists. In classic McCarthyesque style, the accusations, made by an anonymous group of alumnae without any supporting evidence, were released to the public before any attempt was made to ascertain the facts or allow Smith’s president the opportunity to reply.
Taking her cue from Bernard DeVoto, Julia took a strong, principled stand in her letter to Mrs. Heath, who happened to be the sister of William F. Buckley and sister-in-law of L. Brent Bozell, who had coauthored a defense of McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against Communism. Julia sternly chastised her fellow alumna for acting as an informer without any proof and for failing to employ “proper democratic methods” in dealing with “charges of this grave nature”:
This is the theory of the “end justifying the means.” This is the method of the totalitarian governments. It makes no difference how you do it: lie, steal, murder, bear false witness, but use any method fair or foul as long as you reach your goal…. In Russia today, as a method of getting rid of opposition, an unsubstantiated implication of treason, such as yours, is often used. But it should never be used in the United States.
She pointed out that in this fraught period of history, it was imperative that young people learn to “sift truth from half-truth, demagoguery from democracy, totalitarianism, in any form, from liberty.” To that end, she was sending Smith College a copy of the letter, along with a check doubling her annual contribution to the alumnae fund. She added, acidly, “For the colleges harbor the ‘dangerous’ people, the people who know how to think, whose minds are free.”
Smith’s president, Benjamin F. Wright, stated that he had “complete confidence” in his staff and objected to the anonymous group’s sneak attack on the college. In May, the five accused faculty members were dragged before the Massachusetts Un-American Activities Committee. By the time the hearings were over and all the testimony heard, the subcommittee charged with the investigation had found no evidence of illegal or disloyal activity, and the matter was dropped. Julia was pleased to discover that Mrs. Heath’s strategy backfired, at least to the extent that as a result of her poisonous letter more loyal alumnae poured more money into Smith’s coffers than ever before. But the damage to the reputations of teachers, and that of the college, could never be undone.
In a rare act of open defiance, Julia sent a copy of her letter to her father. She was motivated in part by pride, for it had taken considerable courage on her part to speak out, and in part by sheer pique at his continued confidence in a “desperate power-monger” she believed was destroying a country that had come out of the war the strongest, most unified nation on earth. No doubt some of her rancor stemmed from the memory of her own thoughtlessness and political naïveté and a time not so long before when she might have failed to recognize the danger inherent in McCarthy’s Red scare, with its reckless innuendo and ad hoc retribution. It pained her to think that her dear old Pop was “right in there with them [the McCarthyites].”
Not surprisingly, her father took a dim view of her exercise in moral outrage and did not mince his words, scolding his daughter for “supporting the Communist line.” In letter after letter, he pounded away at his favorite paranoid theme. “These people with red badges have to be exposed,” he insisted. “It’s a hard, dirty job that has to be done and it takes a rough-and-ready person like McCarthy to do it. In his zeal he gets out of bounds now and then but that’s our business.” He was convinced that Julia and her husband were “falling right into the plan the Reds [were] developing—that of creating dissension and distrust among their enemies.” They had fallen prey to the “socialistic element in Europe” and would do well to come home for a refresher course in real American patriotism. Paul literally felt ill at the thought and had to lie down.
In October, Paul was transferred again. He and Julia fit in a quick visit with Jane, stopping in Paris for a few hours en route to their new post in Bonn. It was a merry occasion as always, full of drinks, toasts to the future, laughter and talk. There was nothing memorable to eat, of course, but the company more than compensated for the lack of food. Paul and Julia were a bit pressed for time that afternoon and kept an eye on the clock. In their hurry to be off, grabbing up coats and bags and calling hasty adieus over their shoulder, they never dreamed of what was to come. How were they to know that disaster lay just around the corner? That what Bernard DeVoto had once called “the avalanching danger” of rumor, insinuation, slander, and malice hung over them all? The quiet men with credentials were closing in. They never heard them coming.
11
THE NIGHTMARE
It was a languid Sunday morning in mid-August and Paris was half asleep on its feet. Julia and Paul had just finished a delicious meal at Les Deux Magots and were lingering at their table, too content to move. Tired of dull, stodgy Bad Godesberg, they had decided on a brief holiday “to break loose from the rhythms of life in Germany.” They knew it was silly to go to Paris at that time of year, “the very nadir of La Morte Saison” when any Frenchman with sense flees the city, but Julia’s birthday fell on the fifteenth and they wanted to celebrate “la Naissance de Julie” in their beloved city. After brunch, Paul had left Julia sitting in the sun, toying with her beer, while he ran off to take a few quick photos of Place Furstenberg, a charming little square hidden in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. When he returned, whom should he see but George Zlatovski, talking intently to Julia, one hand furiously stabbing the air with a lit Gauloise. They both turned to look at him as he approached, and in that moment Paul detected an atmosphere of such gravity that he asked immediately why Jane was not there. With an impatient gesture, George resumed his tale, but the angry torrent of English and French was almost impossible to follow.
“I must confess to being sort of confused by what he said,” Paul wrote Jane afterward. “He didn’t want to repeat the whole story again, and gave me only a brief fill-in. Later on, Julie wasn’t clear on all the details.” Paul outlined the little he knew: that the previous fall, Jane had flown to San Francisco on a moment’s notice after being informed that her mother was dangerously ill; that exploratory surgery had happily proved this to be false; that she had been about to return to Paris when State Department authorities suddenly seized her passport; and that she had been stranded in the United States ever since. George had conveyed the extreme anguish and hardship Jane had endured for the last nine months: “that you have to live apart from your husband, your apartment, your clothes, your paintings, and your normal life.” Choosing his words with enormous care, aware that prying eyes might pick apart every line, Paul wrote, “And that the reason they won’t give your passport back is that you have been presented with a long list of accusations of subversive activities.” He continued:
What is this all about, and why? We both want to know. We really don’t know anything about your political affiliations, or about your life before OSS, or, for that matter, about your Paris life either. But we’ve always been terribly fond of you, and consider you our friend. And we are terribly sorry you are in this predicament. If you are assumed guilty and are expected to prove your innocence, then have you gotten in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union? They are, from what we have read, supposed to help out people in just such a situation.
Jane’s passport troubles had come as a complete surprise to Julia and Paul. They were genuinely heartsick at
the idea that she was going through this political torment all on her own, without even her husband by her side. Charlie Chaplin’s case had received massive publicity in Europe—McCarthy’s demagogic attacks on his patriotism had driven the actor and his family into exile in Switzerland—and they were by now all too familiar with the State Department’s efforts to restrict the travel of anyone suspected of being a Communist sympathizer or of having participated in any so-called Communist-front groups. Their friend Teddy White had also had his passport taken away the previous summer after the McCarthyites branded him a subversive, and he had been forced to hire a lawyer and battle the State Department to get it back. That Jane should now find herself the target of such suspicions was incredibly sad but, given the poisonous mood in Washington, hardly unexpected.
Julia and Paul could not believe she was guilty of more than her usual impudence and imprudence. She had always been too cavalier, and too careless—about her money, work, affairs, everything. Irreverent, irrepressible, and utterly lacking in propriety, that was Jane. It was all too easy to imagine how she might have gotten herself in a jam with “McLeod’s boys,”* or McCarthy’s, or any one of a number of official investigative bodies. Moreover, she was their friend, and they were not about to start jumping to conclusions because her name cropped up in some FBI file. They had seen too many colleagues have their names blackened by spurious charges to desert Jane because of vague suspicions about her supposed Communist connections.
Over the past year, Julia had been revolted by the sight of colleagues who would “cringe” in fear before McCarthy’s men, and she was determined never to be one of those people “who just cravenly fell down in front of them.” She would not be intimidated. She and Paul would stand by their friends—and their principles—no matter what the cost. Without making too much of a point of it, Paul attempted to express their sympathy and solidarity, and concluded his note to Jane by encouraging her to get in touch: “We would very much like to hear from you, if you feel like writing us about yourself.” He signed it, “Love from both of us, and keep your chin up.” They sent it to the New York address George had provided, but were not at all confident of its ever reaching her. In these days of secret loyalty investigations, letters were often intercepted.
What they did not tell Jane—or, for that matter, mention to George at the café—was that Jane’s situation had hit home in a very personal way. Just that past spring, their own world had been turned upside down by similarly nebulous charges. Out of the blue, Paul had been dragged back to Washington in April and forced to endure a full security inquiry, hours of interrogation at the hands of two FBI agents, and all the indignity and injury that came with being under suspicion. And throughout the entire ordeal, the one question that had haunted them was, Why? What was the investigation’s raison d’être? What did the State Department authorities have on him? Was it something from his past? Or someone? Paul did not really have any enemies, so he and Julia could not believe he was “being attacked by a revenge-seeker.” In the course of being questioned, Jane’s name had come up more than once, but then so had many others—the FBI had harped on Charles Child’s leftist leanings—and in the end Paul could not be sure what any of it meant. After weeks of trying to analyze every angle, he had taken Julia’s advice and given up trying to make sense of it all, and had just tried to put the episode behind him.
Now, with terrible certainty, Paul realized his case was inextricably linked to Jane’s. When the State Department confiscated her passport in December 1954, it must have been the culmination of an aggressive investigation. Any cursory check of her wartime service record and close colleagues would have turned up his name and set the bureau machinery in motion checking out the new lead.* The FBI had worked fast. Four months later, Paul was in the hot seat, defending his reputation and swearing for all he was worth that he was a loyal American.
Both Julia and Paul felt sick. At one level, they were furious with Jane. If not for her big mouth, messy bohemian lifestyle, and utopian beliefs, none of this would have happened. At the same time, they were enormously fond of her and genuinely feared for her future. As Julia wrote late that night, “I think she undoubtedly joined a lot of hair-brained ‘humanitarian’ causes in the ’30’s, as she would be a perfect fall guy for that sort of thing.… and a thoughtless fool in many ways. I can see her as an unwitting tool … but it is hard to picture her as an enemy agent.” They were much less certain about what they thought of George. “Wouldn’t know about him,” Julia commented, but ventured a guess that his political sympathies lay to the far left. They imagined that, being a Russian-Jewish immigrant, he might have reacted against being treated like a Jew, and could well have joined the Party. Based on what a journalist friend had told them, most of the American volunteers, like George, who were with the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War were recruited by the Communists. Apart from what Jane had told them, they had no real knowledge of George’s background or affiliations. It was all just conjecture on their part. And it was hardly fair to judge the man in his present mood. The government’s persecution of his wife had made him “as un-American as anybody can be, and deeply embittered,” Julia conceded, adding, “a frightful advertisement for us.”
One of the theories that had occurred to Paul when he was sweating it out in Washington was that it all had to do with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb, who had had his security clearance revoked in 1954 after a loyalty-security hearing revealed his Communist ties. One of the accusations made against him was that as a physics professor at Berkeley before the war, Oppenheimer had been a member of a “discussion group” that was identified as a secret underground unit of the Communist Party, along with his friend and fellow faculty member Haakon M. Chevalier, a professor of French literature. Chevalier had reportedly approached Oppenheimer about sharing nuclear secrets with the Russians. Knowing that Chevalier had since moved to Paris (in part because of his own passport troubles), and frequented the same arty, left-wing intellectual circles as Jane and George, Paul saw exactly how the FBI could have pasted together the names and facts and arrived at their incriminating conclusion. “What I suspect,” he noted, “is that the Oppenheimer investigation revealed to them the name of Haakon Chevalier; his name, and his connection, produced the Zlatovsky [sic] couple; and their name and connections produced my name as a friend.”
As Paul saw it, “the McLeod boys” would have written a report and handed it over to the FBI, which already had Haakon Chevalier marked down as an active Communist, and that was all they would have needed for the old guilt-by-association match-up. Jane and George, even though neither worked for the government, would now be fair game. The same went for himself and Julia. FBI agents have “the professional investigator’s habit of following every lead, no matter how tenuous,” Paul reasoned. “Their job (as defined by somebody) must be to try to locate every Communist, and get as much of a line on them as possible—all their connections, habits, changes of address, and modes of life, etc.—just in case. Of course: they tell you nothing. So this speculation.”*
Despite their mixed feelings, Julia and Paul mustered their courage and carefully drafted their letter of support to Jane, fully cognizant of the ramifications. If it was “intercepted by the FBI,” it could cause them real problems: Paul’s name would be flagged, his file reopened, and more questions asked. His career would never survive a second inquiry, of that they were sure. It stunk, but there it was. But no matter how they looked at it, they felt they had to hold the line against the stampede of reckless and unsubstantiated accusations that was wreaking havoc with all their lives and destroying the reputations of perfectly good and harmless people. As Paul told Julia after his FBI interview, he did not like a country where people in power could dictate “what we must and mustn’t believe, what we can say, and who we can have as friends.” Jane was innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and that was all they needed to know.
We cannot with decency turn our back on a former colleague. Besides, is it not part of our duty, as U.S. citizens, and members of a democratic system we are trying to preserve, to help people out if they have gotten on the wrong trolley … Prodigal Son, and all that? What good is our famous “way of life” otherwise…. The way things are going now, we shall probably be thrown out on our ear as being people about whom “reasonable doubts of loyalty” can be entertained. An ironic end, but we’re stuck with it. What would you have done?
Julia added a grace note: “Of course, this letter is not only a presumed comfort to Jane, but an affirmation to ourselves that we are not cowards.”
She never sent the letter. After much agonized debate back and forth, she slipped it into a drawer and hoped against hope that events would soon render it superfluous.
It was another two months before they heard from Jane: “Well, the Nightmare is over, thank God.” She was back breathing “the wonderful free air of La Belle France” and feeling better with each passing day. She thanked them profusely for their letters, particularly that first one to New York—“that was really fine”—and admonished them for taking the risk of writing someone as dangerous and disreputable as herself. “You are in no position to associate with Typhoid Mary,” she chided, noting that while she was under suspicion in America she was about as popular as someone carrying the “Black Plague.” She apologized for her long silence, and explained that she and George had intentionally not alerted them to what was happening because “knowing what good people you are, we knew you’d stand by and being a friend of mine was, at that moment, no recommendation for advancement in the State Department.”
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