Suspect Red

by L. M. Elliott

  Some historians also question Hoover’s close friendship with the FBI’s number two man, Clyde Tolson, given the fact that any hint of homosexuality became reason for dismissal as well. The lavender scare is a term many use for the persecution of gays by McCarthy-era loyalty review boards. Hoover and Tolson vacationed together, rode to work together, and dined together daily (at Harvey’s or the Mayflower Hotel). Tolson inherited Hoover’s property upon his death and is buried within a few feet of the director in Congressional Cemetery.

  Eventually, Hoover distanced himself from McCarthy when the senator recklessly attacked the army and a decorated World War II veteran general. In December 1954, McCarthy was denounced in a formal censure by the Senate for conduct “contrary to senatorial traditions.” He died three years later from cirrhosis of the liver. His belligerent right-hand man, the chief counsel on McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lawyer Roy Cohn, was disbarred for ethical violations in the 1980s. Before that, he remained a much-feared attorney, helped elect President Richard Nixon, and befriended and advised young would-be leaders such as Donald Trump.

  Hoover retained his influence and stature. When he died in 1972, his body lay in state in the Capitol building—an honor afforded to no other civil servant before or since.

  My two families—Richard’s and Vladimir’s—are fictional. They are imagined amalgamations gleaned from careful research into the time period. As such, they are symbolic of people caught up in the firestorm and pressures of the McCarthy era.

  The news items opening each chapter and framing the events of that month, however, are historical fact.

  While writing Suspect Red, I was struck by the relentless power of rumor and our human tendency to assume someone is guilty of something if his friends or family are, or if someone we like and admire says so. The inherent conflict between our desire to succeed, to be popular, and to be safe versus what we know to be ethically right is an age-old challenge. It requires courage. The novel’s themes of real dangers versus perceived ones; national security versus individual rights/privacy; racial profiling and labeling; book censoring; and fearmongering, hate-speech, hyperbole, or outright lying for political gain all seem startlingly relevant today.

  I was also reminded of what a fascinating and contradictory decade the 1950s was. World War II veterans came home, desperate for normalcy and a sense of personal success. That seemed defined in simple, homogeneous terms—a man owning his own home, preferably with a backyard, and a car; marriage to a wife who kept a neat, tranquil home and who was thrilled to see him walk through the door at night after work. According to magazine and TV ads, her greatest dream was to marry, have polished, polite children, an electric vacuum cleaner, and a refrigerator/freezer. Rarely did a woman have her own career, and if she had strong opinions on political causes, she risked the kind of ridicule about her femininity that many heaped on Eleanor Roosevelt.

  What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder was little understood in the 1950s. Dismissive terms like fright-burned, flak-happy, or psycho were applied to very real and disabling symptoms. In Chapter 2, I quote directly an article titled “They Called Him a ‘Psycho’” in the Saturday Evening Post. I thought it important to use Don to remind readers of how World War II veterans had to push themselves to function in the face of callous characterizations and misdiagnosis of their combat traumas.

  It is important to remember these men and women sincerely believed they fought the Axis to make the world safe for democracy. Confronted with Stalin’s crimes against humanity, the Iron Curtain, the possibility of nuclear holocaust, and the Korean War—all coming so fast on the heels of World War II—it makes sense they would be swept up in a patriotism and national protectiveness that allowed McCarthyism to grab hold and flourish.

  The 1950s were also a time of lingering, beneath-the-surface anti-Semitism and overt prejudice against African Americans, when those agitating for civil rights or labor reform could be dubbed subversive, and when progressive social ideas were suspected of having Red underpinnings. Sadly, offensive racial and ethnic slurs, and insensitive labels for people with disabilities were used freely. Occasionally, my characters’ dialogue reflects those harsh realities to “show rather than tell” those shocking attitudes.

  In reaction to such prejudices, many creative artists produced daring, eloquent, and groundbreaking works. Jazz and its gutsy improvisations flourished, along with bebop, Beat poetry (the original slam verse), and rhythm and blues. Rock ’n roll was born. Playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller pulled away the skin of conventionality to lay bare the bones of individual, psychological tragedies. Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille broke the rules of classical ballet to create a heartbreakingly expressive modern choreography. Composers Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland elevated American themes and the common man. Writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin unmasked racism. Ray Bradbury skewered small-minded pack mentality. Edward R. Murrow reported on McCarthy’s bullyboy tactics despite threats of reprisal.

  Here’s a quick background on historical events mentioned:

  The Hollywood Ten: Much has been written about the ten screenwriters who lost their fight against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by arguing their First Amendment rights. What happened in the entertainment business—literature, movies, radio, TV, live theater, magazines, and newspapers—reflects the ripsaw of changing politics and world circumstances that made so many vulnerable to McCarthy’s smears.

  Many of the creative artists blacklisted had indeed once been “armchair Communists”—liberals and progressives during the Depression’s financial disaster, involved with trying to unionize and improve workers’ lives, maybe passing petitions, perhaps attending political rallies or fund-raisers that had some association with the American Communist Party. At that point, in the 1930s, the American Communist Party was just another pro-labor political faction within American society. During World War II, the Soviets were allies, not trusted exactly, but admired for their stubborn fight, and certainly integral to Hitler’s defeat.

  All that changed after World War II with Stalin’s aggression in Eastern Europe. But American citizens could not erase their own pasts and political statements. (Think about your tweets and Facebook posts.) Fanatical Red-hunters, or those who exploited the nation’s fears simply in order to elevate themselves professionally or socially, used people’s past opinions and activities against them.

  Once blacklisted, entertainment professionals could not get jobs. Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had to ghostwrite, hiding his identity for years, even after anonymously winning Oscars for Roman Holiday and The Brave One.

  Anyone who spoke out in support of the Hollywood Ten might be investigated themselves. For example, when the Ten testified in front of HUAC, a group of actors formed the Committee for the First Amendment. They signed and ran a petition in newspapers, and traveled to Washington, DC, to sit in support in the audience. Many were later hauled in front of the hearings themselves.

  The Venona Project and the Korean War: In Chapter 1, Don refers to decoded Soviet transmissions and evidence against the Rosenbergs that could not be entered into their trial for security reasons. Today, because of the Freedom of Information Act and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we know the program as the Venona Project—a counterintelligence office run by the Army’s Signal Intelligence Service (SIS, the precursor to today’s NSA, the National Security Agency).

  In the chaos following the Allies’ invasion of Germany, American soldiers discovered a cipher pad left behind by Soviet troops. It allowed U.S. cryptographers to read thousands of intercepted Soviet cables—revealing large-scale attempts at spying within the American government by KGB-handled operatives. The Army and the FBI knew, for instance, that the Soviets had code names for Julius Rosenberg (Antenna), and his brother-in-law, David Greenglass (Bumblebee).

  Six weeks before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, our ability to decode Soviet messages “went dark.
” A Russian translator within Venona and a British intelligence officer posted in England’s embassy in Washington, DC, were suspected of informing the Soviets that U.S. intelligence could read their messages. The Soviets immediately changed their codes.

  This was long before surveillance satellites. Had Venona been able to decode the Soviet’s military communications regarding its supply and training of North Korean troops, many experts speculate we might have been able to use diplomacy to prevent the Korean War. Instead, the Communist invasion into South Korea was a total surprise, killing 36,574 Americans, 620,000 North and South Korean soldiers, and 600,000 Chinese soldiers, as well as millions of Korean civilians.

  Judith Coplon and the sting operation against her were as the character Abigail describes. Coplon worked in the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration division as the go-between with the FBI. When the bureau suspected her of leaking its cases to the KGB, it wiretapped her phone. Agents briefly lost her on her trip to her handler and arrested them before she had actually handed over the planted paperwork. Her conviction was overturned in appeals court because of the important civil liberties guaranteed to everyone by our constitution. The judge determined that her arrest was illegal because the FBI had failed to obtain a warrant beforehand and that the Bureau also lied about the wiretap.

  The case broke Hoover’s cardinal rule—never embarrass the bureau. Hoover was known to freeze out agents who received too much public credit for successes, and to punish agents who bungled investigations or didn’t flatter him enough. He used agents to place bets for him at the racetrack, to do repairs on his house, and even to compile his tax returns. Given all this, the pressures I put on my character, FBI Agent Don Bradley, are fictional, as is he, but plausible given reported history. So too are his interactions with Hoover and McCarthy.

  Advancing American Art: Right after World War II, the State Department tried cultural diplomacy to woo countries susceptible to Communist thought. (It was a tactic also used later by the CIA with jazz artist performances.)

  The department purchased 79 abstract, expressionist, cubist, and realist paintings. Many of the works were created by liberal intellectuals, some born in Eastern Europe. The exhibit would travel to countries like Czechoslovakia, where a homegrown Communist party was sprouting. The idea was that the paintings would display—vividly—the freedom of thought and expression allowed in the United States, thereby refuting Soviet claims that American society was repressive. Many of the paintings depicted workers with haunting sadness, as did Gwathmey’s Worksong.

  The response in Prague was overwhelmingly favorable. Unfortunately, back home, a few conservative congressmen and radio commentators condemned the frank subject matter, dark color tones, and abstract forms as being critical of American life, thereby fueling Soviet claims that our society was decadent and cruelly materialistic. The exhibit was recalled.

  Jane Bowles’s career was brief, but influential. She was friends with writer Truman Capote and playwright Tennessee Williams, who also worked with her composer/author husband Paul Bowles (the author of The Sheltering Sky). The Beat Generation—Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, among many others—became devotees. Jane Bowles’s writing was infused with wry, self-deprecating wit. I tried to replicate that in Chapter 8 by paraphrasing her quoted interviews.

  William Oatis was the Prague AP bureau chief who employed the three Czech reporters—one of whom I imagine to be Teresa’s cousin. All three were convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16, 18, and 20 years. The source of their stories, “the boy from Paris,” was convicted in absentia as their ringleader. His name was Vladimír Kazan-Komárek.

  Kazan-Komárek’s story is the stuff of Cold War intrigue. During World War II, he was sent as slave labor to Germany. He escaped and was employed as a U.S. Army translator in Nuremberg from May 1945 to 1946. After Czechoslovakia’s Communist coup, Kazan-Komárek escaped again, this time to Paris. He braved going back and forth to his native land, smuggling in radio transmitters and smuggling out people of interest to France’s foreign intelligence service. Eventually, he married an American and became a U.S. citizen. In 1966, working as a travel agent, Kazan-Komárek went to Moscow for a business conference. But on the flight home, Soviets forced the plane to land and kidnapped him. The United States negotiated his release, but six years later in Spain, Kazan-Komárek disappeared again. He was never found.

  Pick Temple, the Green Feather Movement, the FBI sneaking into the Czech Embassy in a trash truck and making off with a decoding machine, LBJ and Hoover living within a few houses of one another, and the hollow nickel are wonderful truths that are far better than anything a writer could make up. (Look for a hollow nickel in the movie Bridge of Spies about Russian spy Rudolf Abel.)

  The FAO Schwarz employee my fictional Natalia mentions when telling Richard about censored picture books was none other than Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, who would go on to create some of the world’s most imaginative and unconventional picture books.

  My description of Lolita Lebrón and three Puerto Rican nationalists shooting 29 bullets into the House floor in protest of their island’s status as a U.S. protectorate is pulled directly from news reports. Until that day, the gallery had welcomed any and all who wished to witness Congress passing the nation’s laws. The only question guards had asked spectators was if they carried cameras.

  Lebrón served 25 years in prison. She was released by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, in what many believe was a prisoner swap for CIA agents imprisoned in Cuba. Happily, the congressman shot in the chest survived. A lovely endnote to the terrible incident is the lifelong friendship of two teenage pages who helped carry congressmen out on stretchers. They became congressmen themselves, dear friends on opposite sides of the aisle: Paul Kanjorski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and Bill Emerson, a Republican from Missouri.

  I’d like to end as Vladimir left Richard, quoting Philbrick and then Edward R. Murrow, the broadcast journalist who risked so much to investigate and expose McCarthy. First Philbrick: You might not expect a man who became such a 1950s icon for fighting Reds to be an advocate for calm reason and brave tolerance, but he was. Although his book refers specifically to communism, Philbrick warned his readers to resist fearmongering and not to descend into labeling and threatening those who have opposing philosophies or backgrounds. He echoed Murrow’s plea that we not disintegrate into persecuting all because of the few.

  Philbrick urged Americans to leave the battle against those who sought to undermine the United States to trained experts like the FBI, and added that acting with hatred or prejudice toward our detractors only strengthened their propaganda: “Ambitious politicians, demagogues, and rabble-rousers are no match for [them]. The fight…will not be won by flag-waving or name calling….If we adhere to our traditional American dream of a society of freedom…of individual as well as collective intelligence…we will have disproved [our detractors’] theory….

  “[Our enemy] depends upon hatred, uncertainty, and fear….The best answer for that is reaffirmation of the faith that ours is a nation and we are a people founded upon…the sanctity of each individual. Therein lies our strength.”

  On March 9, 1954, Edward R. Murrow and CBS’ See It Now ran “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.” Murrow ended with these stirring words:

  “The line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one….We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof….

  “We will not walk in fear, of one another…into an age of unreason. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

  “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

  “[McCarthy has] caused alarm and dismay…and whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it�
�and rather successfully. Cassius [from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar] was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

  Bibliography

  Texts:

  Fried, Richard M. Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

  Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.

  Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey. Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

  Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey. Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

  Kessler, Pamela. Undercover Washington: Where Famous Spies Lived, Worked and Loved. Sterling: Capital Books, Inc., 2005.

  Miller, Douglas T. and Nowak, Marion. The Fifties: the Way We Really Were. Garden City: Doubleday, 1977.

  Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  Ranville, Michael. To Strike at a King: The Turning Point in the McCarthy Witch Hunts. Troy: Momentum Books, 1996.

  Shogan, Robert. No Sense of Decency: The Army-McCarthy Hearings. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publisher, 2009.

  Theoharis, Athan G., ed. Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

  Documentaries and Feature Film Biopics:

  Bridge of Spies. Directed by Steven Spielberg. 2015. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures, 2016, DVD.