A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

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  OUR FAMILY MOVED again, this time from Ann Arbor to Cleveland, where my father landed a job on the copydesk of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We stayed at first in a small apartment in the suburb of Parma. On February 18, 1953, my mother put a pot of pea soup on the stove and wrote a letter to her brother at the sanitarium. “We gave away most of our furniture in Detroit, and we’re stuck here with no comfortable and cozy living room furniture to sit on. Sitting at the kitchen table at least keeps us from falling asleep when we’re reading, and I’ve read more books since I’ve been here than I did all summer.” Two of us were at the table keeping her company, she wrote. “Davey is drawing a 3-year-old’s conception of a map, which includes China, Ann Arbor, Detroit, Parma, and Texas all in one picture. I guess he included Texas because that’s the cowboy state. Jeannie is reading a comic book. Jimmy is on his way out with some kid he met at the bus stop here. Jim and Jean go by bus to the Pearl Road school here in Parma from 8:30 to 3.” It was their fourth school in less than a year.

  My uncle Phil kept the letter, and it was saved with the family archives by my aunt Jean, who passed her boxes along to one of my cousins, Mary Higgins. When I visited my cousin and found the letter more than sixty years later, my rendering of a map of the world was still there. I have no idea about China, but my mother was probably right about why Texas made the map. I thought of myself as a cowboy then and did a little “cowboy dance” to please the adults, where I shifted from leg to leg and shook my hands at my side and blurted out, “Get along, little dogies.” Hopalong Cassidy was my favorite, not Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. No white hat for Hopalong; he dressed all in black.

  As soon as Mom could arrange it, we moved into a house nearby at a new 1950s-style development called Snow Village. With all the instability in our lives, she thought it was important that we have a home of our own, wherever we went from there. “Mary thought it would make the children feel more settled,” my father later wrote in a tribute to her. All the moving was taking a toll on my big brother. Jim started feigning illness to stay home from school, and it reached the point where Mom took him to a psychiatrist, who told her not to worry, that he was just a perfectionist. He had already skipped a grade and was so smart the teachers would pass him even if he had too many absences. He read the World Book Encyclopedia from Volume A to Volume W–Z and never fell behind in his schoolwork. “Teachers would admonish the other students for not doing as well as the new kid,” he recalled. “Surprisingly, this did not make me unpopular. I never felt disliked.” He won a prize at school for a poster he made to advertise a school bond issue. It was of a stork with the message “Get Ready for Us.” “Us” being the baby boom generation flooding into the public schools. Jeannie rarely if ever missed a day of school and was delighted by the move to Snow Village. “I remember looking at our new house while it was under construction. It was great to have my own room when we finally moved in. Mom did a little painting and sewing to fix the place up. I think we were planning to stay there. At least that was my impression. Jimmy and I took piano lessons in Cleveland, and we often went to a swimming hole in Berea.”

  The simple pleasures of the 1950s: The family went to the cinema to see Brigadoon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. On our black-and-white television, we watched Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen, and the crowning of Queen Elizabeth. Life seemed placid, but the world was churning. In swift succession after we arrived in Cleveland, Joseph Stalin died, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed, the Korean War ended, and the Detroit communists known as the Michigan Six were convicted on Smith Act charges. When the judge offered to send them to Russia instead of prison, they refused and were sentenced to four to five years behind bars.

  My own strongest early memories began around that time at Snow Village. Some memories were traumatic, but most were warm. I remember my asthma getting worse and a doctor sticking two rows of tiny needles in my forearm for allergy tests. I was okay during the day but often spent hours wheezing and struggling to breathe at night. I also remember the apple trees blossoming in a huge field across Snow Road, and men flying model aircraft in the field, and getting my first set of little rubbery bowlegged cowboys and Indians with horses to fit them on. At a nearby pond we collected tadpoles in jars. The father of one of our Snow Village friends took us to what we called “the cliffs,” high above a railroad track; our dad did not want us to go but came along once and twisted his ankle on the rocks.

  We made it through 1953 and much of 1954 without upheaval. We were a family of baseball lovers, and now our new team was the best around: the 1954 Indians. Mom and Jeannie went to see them play at cavernous Municipal Stadium on Ladies Day. We listened to them on the radio all summer long. Al Rosen, the hard-hitting Jewish third baseman. Larry Doby, the pathbreaking Jackie Robinson of the American League, in center field. Al Smith, another black ballplayer, usually next to Doby in left. Bobby Avila, the little second baseman from Mexico. And that world-class rotation of Bob Feller, Early Wynn, Bob Lemon, and Mike (Big Bear) Garcia. A team that won 111 games and took down the Yankees, the pinstriped establishment, the team we hated more than anything in the world. When the Indians clinched the pennant, Dad took us to the airport to greet the players returning from a road trip. I got Al Smith’s autograph. Jim got Al Rosen’s. Then we watched Willie Mays make the most famous catch in baseball history as the Giants swept four straight in the World Series.

  The good American family leading the good postwar American life. Or so it seemed. One day Jim was at the house of a friend named Tony, and Tony’s mother told them that communists were reptiles. “I said to her that my mother was a communist,” Jim said later. “Not that I was about to denounce Mom or anything, but I think I wanted to see what Tony’s mom would say. ‘Oh no she isn’t. Your mother isn’t a communist.’ ” Jim said he could take this response one of three ways. “(a) Mom didn’t look or talk like anything but an all-American girl. Peaches and cream. Very gentle and considerate in manner. Evansville, Indiana accent. Or (b) maybe Tony’s mother didn’t want to see herself as attacking the family of her son’s friend. Or (c) didn’t want Tony to see her as a venomous gossip. In any case, I could deal with it.”

  On our phonograph at home, Mom played a Paul Robeson album as part of her daily rotation of music. “There’s a Balm in Gilead.” “Ol’ Man River.” “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” We knew his songs by heart. Jim grew to love-hate him. When Jim’s teacher, Miss Baer, asked the class to name some famous Negroes, Jim said Paul Robeson. “Paul Robeson is a communist!” she replied.

  Dad worked the late shift at the Plain Dealer, going into the office at five in the afternoon and staying until two in the morning. He usually stayed up for a few hours after that and slept until almost noon. An old friend from his Michigan Daily days helped get him the job. He loved newspapering—he was a natural at it—even if he thought less of the newspaper itself. “Have you ever seen a copy of the Pee-Dee?” he wrote in a letter. “It is Cleveland’s most ‘influential’ paper—big, fat, and rich—but frankly it is awfully stuffy. Typographically it is still in the 19th century; but since it has practically no competition it doesn’t feel compelled to change.”

  The FBI continued to follow him in Cleveland. His name was on Washington’s Security Index of suspected subversives. But special agents and informants were coming up with nothing, according to their internal reports. On June 17, 1953, the Cleveland special agent in charge sent a memorandum to Hoover’s office regarding “Ace” Maraniss, marked “security matter”: “Cleveland informants have recently been contacted concerning subject’s presence with the Cleveland Division and they advised that they do not know him. Inasmuch as there is no reported activity by the subject within the Cleveland Division and the fact that informants have not reported any activity concerning subject since his arrival from the former office of origin, Detroit, this case is being placed in a closed status pending receipt of information reflecting renewed activity.”


  There was no renewed activity. Sometimes Dad looked after us children while Mom worked part-time during the day in the book department at Higbee’s department store in downtown Cleveland, where she made enough money to buy furniture for our new house and bring home a shelf of books that she could buy at a discount. But in early May 1954, after a witness at another HUAC hearing in Detroit identified Dad as having been a party member in 1947, the Cleveland office became interested again and sought permission to interview him. There was internal debate between Cleveland and Washington about what was called “the plan of approach”—how and where that should be done, and whether Mom should be interviewed also—but in the end Washington rejected the idea. The directions were to watch, but not interview. Through that summer and early fall, there were no reports of communist activity on the part of my parents.

  Then our lives were disrupted once again. On October 21, Wright Bryan, the editor of the Plain Dealer, called Dad into his office and questioned him about his appearance before the committee in 1952. According to an FBI report based on confidential informants, “in the above conversation between Bryan and the subject, Maraniss denied that he is presently active in affairs of the Communist Party. According to T-3, Maraniss advised Bryan that his past Communist Party activities were well known and that he, Maraniss, invoked the Fifth Amendment before the House Committee because he did not wish to be an informer and a source of embarrassment to others.” Bryan fired him on the spot.

  As he had in Detroit, my father hoped that the Newspaper Guild would come to his defense. It did, to an extent, according to the FBI report: “A committee of the guild called on Mr. Wright Bryan concerning the matter. According to the informant, Bryan advised the committee that he would consider re-hiring Maraniss provided the latter would make a full disclosure of his Communist Party activities to the FBI. The Newspaper Guild Committee then relayed this information to the subject who stated that he did not want to talk with the FBI for fear of embarrassing other people.” The guild committee then told my father that his only recourse was to submit to arbitration and testify under oath. He refused again, and the guild dropped its support. He was out of a job, and soon we were on the move again, back to Detroit before Christmas.

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  FOR MANY PEOPLE, Joe McCarthy is the first thing that comes to mind at any mention of anticommunism and the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s. After all, they named the era after him. And McCarthy was the looming specter in our lives. My parents read about him and talked about him and watched him on television during the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954 in the living room of our house at Snow Village in Cleveland. He had nothing to do with the House committee that had labeled my father un-American, yet he had everything to do with whipping up national hysteria. Dad and McCarthy were participants in the same larger national drama, but their paths never crossed. McCarthy played a dominant role, and my father was barely a bit player in a cast of many thousands—collateral damage.

  Charles E. Potter, one of the congressmen in Room 740 on the day my father was called to testify, went on to have a much closer look at McCarthy. Potter used his role as an earnest anticommunist on HUAC and an endorsement from McCarthy as springboards for his election to the U.S. Senate. Once there he became a member of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, a normally backwater panel that McCarthy, as chairman, transformed into a personal commie-hunting fiefdom from which he could gain maximum publicity. Potter was one of four Republicans on the subcommittee in 1953, along with McCarthy, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and Karl Mundt of South Dakota. The three Democrats were John L. McClellan of Arkansas, Henry Jackson of Washington, and Stuart Symington of Missouri. The subcommittee’s chief counsel was a twenty-seven-year-old Columbia Law School graduate named Roy M. Cohn, as brash and breathless as his boss.

  Many historians of the McCarthy era have pointed out astutely that the beginning of the end for McCarthy came when a fellow Republican was elected to the White House, and not just any Republican but a former army general and war hero. It was not that Eisenhower moved aggressively against McCarthy, at least not at first. He had refused to denounce McCarthy while campaigning in Wisconsin in 1952, and during his first year in office mostly tried to keep his distance from the senator. Nixon, his vice president, had made his reputation going after Alger Hiss and Reds in the federal workforce, taking on that role long before McCarthy, and appreciated how central the anticommunist issue was to his success and that of his party. Even more than Eisenhower, Nixon wanted to avoid clashes with McCarthy, but this was not easy. McCarthy became more and more unhinged without a Democratic bogeyman. Before Ike reached the White House, the Democrats had controlled the executive branch for two decades, which McCarthy had labeled “twenty years of treason,” and he was not ready to disembark from the treason train and stop his histrionics just because the Republicans controlled the White House and the Senate.

  That is where Potter came into the picture. Like Eisenhower, and even more like Nixon, his old pal from the Chowder and Marching Club, Potter would rather have avoided any disputes between McCarthy and the Republican establishment, but at times that proved impossible. When McCarthy hired Joseph Brown Matthews as staff director, a disillusioned leftist who had become a strident right-winger, Potter joined with Democrats on the committee in voting for his removal after it was revealed Matthews had written an article titled “Reds and Our Churches” for American Mercury magazine, calling mainstream Protestant clergy the largest group of communist sympathizers in the nation.

  McCarthy seemed intent on attacking revered American institutions—not only the churches but the military. In February 1954, after weeks of jabbing at the army, he ordered Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker, who had earned a Silver Star on Omaha Beach on D-Day, into the committee room to browbeat him for allowing the commissioning of a left-wing dentist. Here was the overreach that prompted Ralph Flanders, a moderate Republican senator from Vermont, to utter a line that came to define McCarthy’s bullying tactics: “He emits war whoops. He goes forth to battle and proudly returns with the scalp of a pink Army dentist.”

  Eisenhower, who had devoted his life to the army, was infuriated by McCarthy’s attacks, as were the military brass. This had become a war, and they soon found a vulnerable point of attack. The administration compiled a chronology that showed how Roy Cohn, abusing his status as committee counsel and McCarthy’s right-hand man, sought to obtain preferential treatment for G. David Schine, Cohn’s close friend and traveling companion, so that Schine could avoid being inducted into the army. The army gave a copy of the chronology to Potter, who shared it publicly on March 11, and things blew up from there. McCarthy responded the next day by saying that the army was trying to blackmail him because he was embarrassing the brass with his exposure of Reds in the military, but his bleating could not prevent the Senate subcommittee from taking the next step: starting hearings into the Schine affair, which became known as the Army-McCarthy hearings. “From his simple act and the selfish whim of two young men who seemed to be demonstrating a rare kind of irresponsibility, the entire country was swept into a tornado of emotional nonsense,” Potter wrote later.

  The Army-McCarthy hearings dominated daytime television from April through June, watched by millions of households, including ours. Since McCarthy and his top aide were being investigated, he stepped away from the chairman’s seat during the hearings but stayed on the committee and took on the role of his own defense attorney, allowing himself cross-examination privileges that he had denied to all other witnesses. In the end, he did himself in, showing the country his hypocrisy, belligerence, and what army lawyer Joseph Welch, during their historic confrontation, called his “reckless cruelty” and lack of decency.

  The hearings led to Cohn’s firing and McCarthy’s censure by his Senate colleagues. They also led to a transformation in the thinking of Senator Potter. Once, when he was a member of HUAC, he called his job rooting o
ut un-Americans the most important fight of his life, more significant than the world war that had rendered him paraplegic. He had enthusiastically brought citizens like my father before the committee to challenge their patriotism and took full advantage of the anticommunist hysteria blowing across America to advance his political career. But eventually he reached a point of regret and wrote a book of repentance titled Days of Shame. In it, Potter described the Red-hunting phenomenon as “like a gigantic, tumultuous hurricane” that “dominated the thoughts and actions of the American people, disrupting their emotions, distorting their judgment. Sanity seemed to go in hiding, opinions whirled to the outer edges of human thought.” He saw in McCarthy’s supporters “a lineup of disgraceful racial bigots and American fascists.” The wounded hero of World War II said he hated to admit it, but that group included many local branches of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars who were “noisy supporters of every irrational blast at Communism that McCarthy fired.” One post of the VFW “made itself ridiculous by accusing the Girl Scouts of America of being a Communist front because it supported the United Nations.”

  There were sections in Potter’s book that spoke directly to the sorts of things that happened to my father in Room 740. At one point he took issue with the role of HUAC altogether, saying that congressional committees should focus on the functioning of existing laws and whether there was a need for amendment or new legislation, and that it was “never intended that these legislative bodies should conduct quasi-trials with power of punishment.” Where once he and Chairman Wood and Counsel Tavenner had declared that a witness invoking the Fifth Amendment was acknowledging guilt, he now wrote eloquently in the amendment’s defense. “This protective shield given to a witness under the Fifth Amendment is written in the blood and lives of many people,” Potter concluded. “But by distortion and abuse, the Fifth Amendment became a pair of dirty words.”