From “The Cross and the Flag: Catholic Anticommunism in the Cold War”

Chapter 1—The Cold War and American Society

By Kenneth J Uva

“ ‘I love my little girls more than anything in the world, but I would rather see them die now, still believing in God, than to grow up under communism and some day die no longer believing in God.’”

— President Reagan addressing the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, quoting remarks made by a young father during the Cold War. [1]

“The most blatant example of hysteria, that I can recall, took place in my high school days. A friend of my mother’s explained once that the country was in extreme internal danger from the ‘Red Menace.’ The lady added that this danger was being reflected in magazine and billboard advertising. She felt that the color red was being used too much and was part of a Communist conspiracy to pave the way for the ultimate takeover.” –Letter to author[2]

“I refer here not to a conventional civic and political opposition to communism, domestic or foreign, but to a mania that mobilizes the entire society in a comprehensive Kulterkampf.

— Frank J. Donner on Cold War anticommunism. [3]

The Cold War, that period of world affairs stretching from the years following World War II to sometime in the 1960s, was a unique era in the history of the United States. Never before had international affairs had so thorough and pervasive an influence on American politics, culture and social institutions. American Catholics, involved with their own extensive institutions, were profoundly influenced by the Cold War, and, in turn, exercised a great impact on the U.S. politics of the era.

The Cold War period was marked by intensive international competition for influence and power between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union. This struggle for international power also had ideological overtones. Thus, the capitalism and democracy of the West were perceived to be threatened by the communism of the Soviet Union. The true causes of the Cold War have been a source of intense debate almost from its inception. The focus of this book will be on one aspect of the Cold War—that of an anti-communist crusade. This is not to be a history of the Cold War. It is, rather, a study of the effect of the Cold War on American Catholics. A short summary of the Cold War is necessary, however, so that a general understanding of Cold War America as a point of reference for the events and personalities that play significant roles in this book is available to the reader.

A World Turned Sour

The United States emerged from World War II as the strongest nation on Earth. Its industrial prowess had enabled it to build a war machine that pounded Germany and Japan into unconditional surrender. Its Lend-Lease program had provided its allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, with the ability to fight back against the seemingly invincible Germans. In 1945, the United States had won the war with its territory unscathed, had the largest navy and airforce in the world, and was the sole possessor of the atomic bomb. The United States, most Americans thought, was in the enviable position of being able to dictate world affairs. Events would often prove to the contrary. To many, the only explanation for U.S. setbacks in the face of the country’s seeming international invincibility was that U.S. policy was being controlled or influenced by Communists or Communist sympathizers embedded in the government and throughout society.

The Yalta Conference of 1945, which convened prior to the end of the war, dealt the first such blow to the American psyche. At this meeting of the “Big Three,” Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin discussed the postwar status of Germany and Poland. The Yalta Agreements promised free elections in Eastern Europe and established a Soviet-Polish border. In the next few years, however, the agreements were disregarded by the Soviet Union, which established Communist governments in the nations its troops controlled in Eastern Europe at the end of the war. The developments subsequent to Yalta led to a belief on the part of many Americans that Eastern Europe had been given to the Soviets by a sick, dying Roosevelt. Since several of these countries, including Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were heavily Catholic, U.S. Catholics, especially those of Eastern Europeans origin, were in the vanguard of those charging a U.S. sellout at Yalta.[4]

In a speech given in Fulton, Missouri in early 1946, Winston Churchill gave a convenient shorthand name to this de facto Soviet control of Eastern Europe:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.[5]

While Vienna and Belgrade ultimately did not become satellites of the Soviet Union, the phrase “Iron Curtain” countries was applied throughout the Cold War to those Eastern European nations controlled by the Soviets.
The year 1947 is the starting point for this book. That year, the United States implemented two major foreign policy initiatives, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, both of which spent billions of American dollars to oppose Communist and, therefore Soviet, power in Europe.

Early in 1947, Great Britain informed the U.S. that it could no longer afford to support the Greek government in a civil war against Communist rebels. President Truman asked Congress for $400 million in military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey. While Turkey was not threatened by an insurrection, Truman said that it needed the aid for the “modernization necessary for the maintenance of its national integrity,” which according to the President, was “essential to the preservation of order in the Middle East.” [6] Truman stated the reasoning for his aid request. This reasoning would essentially be the official line of every U.S. administration during the Cold War:

The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will. The Government of the United States has made frequent protests against coercion and intimidation, in violation of the Yalta agreement, in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. I must also state that in a number of other countries there have been similar developments.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. ***I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. [7]

At the Harvard commencement exercises of 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall proposed that the U.S. undertake a massive program to rebuild Europe’s economy. This program, which became known as the Marshall Plan, eventually cost about $12 billion. While the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were included in the original proposals, Stalin refused the aid. The exclusion of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe from the plan undoubtedly helped its passage by Congress. [8]

The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were implementations of the policy of containment. The concept of containment was outlined by former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George F. Kennan using the name “X” in the journal Foreign Affairs. According to Kennan, Soviet policy centered on the perpetuation of Communist expansion. U.S. policy, therefore, would have to focus on the containment of Soviet influence at its current limits.[9] This concept would guide U.S. foreign policy for a generation.

The Soviet Union, on its part, did its best to encourage Western hostility and suspicion during the late 1940s. In 1948, the Soviets instigated a coup in Czechoslovakia and installed a Communist government, while solidifying their control in Poland, Bulgaria, Rumania, and East Germany. During that same year, the Soviets blocked Western land access to Berlin, resulting in the Berlin Airlift. U.S. and British transports flying food and fuel to the isolated city became a potent Cold War image. Berlin itself was the target of Soviet intimidation and Western resolution throughout the Cold War. The Berlin Wall, erected by Russians and East Germans in the summer of 1961 in order to keep East Germans from crossing to West Berlin, was yet another image that shaped the attitudes of a generation of Americans. It was fitting, therefore, that when President Kennedy visited Berlin in 1963, he declared, to rousing cheers, that

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner.”[10]

The formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by the U.S. and its European allies and the first Soviet atomic bomb explosion in 1949, served to harden the resolve of those on each side who saw their opposites as a serious threat to security. However, for its impact on domestic politics, perhaps the greatest foreign event of 1949 was the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government in the face of Communist victories, and Chiang’s subsequent retreat to the island of Taiwan (Formosa) late that year.

Despite the investment of $2 billion of American aid in support of the Nationalists and a mediation mission by George C. Marshall, the two largest countries in the world—the Soviet Union and China—were now under Communist governments. The U.S. State Department saw fit to explain Chiang’s defeat in a White Paper issued in 1949. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a letter accompanying the document, wrote that internal Chinese forces and not a failure on the part of the U.S. caused Chiang’s downfall:

The unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result; nothing that was left undone by this country has contributed to it. It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not. A decision was arrived at within China, if only a decision by default.[11]

The issue of who “lost” China infected U.S. politics throughout the Cold War. The China Lobby, made up of the Luce magazines and other supporters of Chiang, Senator Joseph McCarthy, a large segment of the press—especially the Catholic press—and numerous others, made the search for the culprits a major issue. The consensus among them was that Communist infiltration of the State Department had put pro-Communists in charge of U.S. foreign policy. China specialists, such as Owen Lattimore and John Stewart Service, were hounded by Congressional committees for many years in a quest for scapegoats. As a result of this search for culprits, U.S. policymakers were deprived of expert advice which might have prevented future disasters for the U.S. in Asia. [12]

This line of thought on China was not the province of a lunatic fringe. Patrick Hurley, former U.S. ambassador to China, called the White Paper a “smooth alibi for the pro-Communists in the State Department who had…aided in the Communist conquest.” [13] When the Communist North Koreans invaded South Korea in 1950, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio (“Mr. Republican”) blamed the Korean War on Communist sympathizers in the State Department:

They [the North Koreans] knew that we had permitted the taking over of China by the Communists and saw no reason why we should seriously object to the taking over of Korea. The Korean War and the problems which arise from it are the final result of the continuous sympathy toward communism which inspired American policy.[14]

Asian conflicts provided another strong symbol for the anti-communists to add to the “loss” of China when President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, leader of U.S. ground forces in the Pacific during World War II, postwar ruler of Japan, and commander of U.N. forces in Korea, for publicly criticizing the Truman Administration’s Korean War policy. MacArthur returned home to ticker tape parades, a standing ovation in the Congress, and an unprecedented outpouring of support wherever he went.

Events abroad would have a great impact on U.S. politics during the entire Cold War period. Since this book does not purport to be a history of the Cold War, the reader will find it informative to consult some of the many volumes written on the subject. Several other Cold War peaks are worth mentioning, however, because they were major events with particular significance for U.S. Catholics.

The defeat of the French by the Communist Vietminh in Indochina in 1954 signaled the end of the end of the French colonial empire in Asia. Since part of that colonialism included bringing the Catholic Church to the region, the French defeat there was considered a victory for the forces of atheism. Catholics in the U.S. were strongly supportive of the Catholic Diem family who ruled South Vietnam until 1963.

In 1956, after an uprising in Catholic Hungary overthrew the Communist regime, Soviet forces attacked Budapest and brutally put down the revolution. Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, considered an anti-communist martyr for his imprisonment years earlier for opposition to the Communist regime, was freed by the revolutution. When the Soviets struck again and retook Hungary, the Cardinal was forced to seek asylum in the U.S. embassy.

The Hungarian revolution and the plight of Cardinal Mindszenty influenced the U.S. and Catholic attitudes a great deal. This author recalls a sermon given by a priest of Eastern European origin at Our Lady of the Presentation Church in Brooklyn, New York in 1959. The sermon focused on the upcoming visit of Nikita Khrushchev to the U.S. The priest told us that if any of us happened to be in the vicinity of the “Butcher of Budapest,” we were to make the sign of the cross for the benefit of newsreel cameras. The priest hoped that the films might then be shown behind the Iron Curtain and give comfort to oppressed Eastern European Catholics.

Shortly after coming to power after the overthrow of the Battista regime in Cuba, Fidel Castro declared himself to be a Marxist. Another Catholic country was now controlled by Communists, and this time the country was 90 miles away from the U.S., not on the other side of the world.

Eastern Europe, Indochina, and Cuba occupied the thoughts of many Americans during the Cold War. As we shall see, however, these places became obsessions with Catholics. The seeming Red Tide after World War II and the apparent inability of the U.S. to stop it became grist for many during the Cold War. Domestic politics became a hybrid of legitimate attempts to understand and resolve the situation and demagogic rantings and witchhunts to find scapegoats while, incidentally, feathering some political nests. It is the heavy tilt toward the latter which gave Cold War politics its flavor. Some might say stench.

The Home Front Responds

The postwar situation abroad had an immediate impact on the political climate in the United States. In the 1946 elections, the Republican National Committee Chairman said the voters were being offered a choice between “Communism and Republicanism.” Joseph W. Martin, House Republican Leader, said the choice was between “chaos, confusion, bankruptcy, state socialism or communism, and the preservation of our American life.” [15]

Among the prominent Cold War politicians elected to Congress that year were Joseph McCarthy, to the Senate from Wisconsin; John F. Kennedy, to the House from Massachusetts; and that most successful of Cold Warriors, Richard M. Nixon, to the House from California.

In his race against incumbent Jerry Voorhis, Nixon resorted to a campaign of smear tactics and innuendo that would characterize his entire political career and much of the politics of the Cold War. One of Nixon’s tactics was to tie Voorhis to the Communist-dominated CIO Political Action Committee (PAC). Although Voorhis never sought nor did he ever receive the group’s endorsement, one Nixon leaflet announced: “A vote for Nixon is a vote against the PAC, its Communist principles, and its gigantic slush fund.” Another advertisement read:

Voorhis has the endorsement of the National PAC because he voted their viewpoint 43 times out of 46 opportunities during the past four years.

While he has been carrying the Democratic colors in recent years for his political purposes, REMEMBER, Voorhis is a former registered Socialist and his record in Congress is more Socialistic and Communistic than Democratic.[16]

Nixon employed the same tactics in his 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas. The Nixon campaign distributed a pink sheet showing a comparison between Mrs. Douglas’ voting record in the House and that of Vito Marcantonio of New York (Marcantonio followed the Communist Party line). According to Nixon, Douglas and Marcantonio voted the same way on 354 occasions. Nixon won handily.[17]

As the Republican nominee for vice president in 1952, Nixon labeled Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president, “Adlai the appeaser,” a man who was a “PhD graduate of Dean Acheson’s cowardly college of Communist containment.” [18]

Such campaign tactics were by no means the exclusive province of Nixon, nor of Republicans. In the 1950 Florida Democratic Senatorial primary, George A. Smathers dubbed his opponent Claude D. Pepper the “Red Pepper.” [19] In one speech, Smathers, promised that “Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling spider web of the Red network…the people of our state will no longer tolerate advocates of treason.”[20]

This kind of red baiting, far more extensive than the few examples given here, was not limited to political campaigns. The Cold War saw the United States establish a system of loyalty boards, congressional committees, government surveillance and private enforcement to keep watch on the loyalty of American citizens and to root out the alleged subversives entrenched everywhere.

The roots of the Cold War loyalty apparatus can best be traced to the period immediately following World War I. In 1919, after bombs exploded in several U.S. cities, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer formed the General Intelligence Division, called the “Radical Division,” within the Department of Justice. In late 1919 and early 1920, “Palmer raids” resulted in hundreds of arrests and deportations of radical aliens, including Emma Goldman, the anarchist theologian. Eventually, between 5,000 and 10,000 suspected radicals were arrested. Many were arrested without warrants, held for long periods of time, and subjected to considerable brutality by federal law enforcement officials.[21] The head of the Radical Division was a 24-year-old employee of the Enemy Alien Registration Unit named J. Edgar Hoover.

The Enemy Alien Registration Unit was a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, formed in 1924. As director of the FBI for five decades, Hoover became the premier anticommunist in America. His speeches, books, and articles on the internal Communist threat to the United States were a staple for the witch-hunters of the Cold War and were incessantly cited or quoted by the anticommunists. The Catholic press of the Cold War adored Hoover even though he was, regrettably, a Protestant.

Hoover’s books include J. Edgar on Communism (Random House, 1969), A Study of Communism (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), and his best seller, Masters of Deceit (Holt, 1958). These books solid millions of copies as they reiterated Hoover’s assertion that communism was an international movement directed from Moscow and aimed at world domination. Communists, according to Hoover, were venal to the core and were constantly at work attempting to recruit idealistic, naïve people. In the gospel according to Hoover, communists were artists, actors, doctors, dentists, educators, engineers, draftsmen, lawyers, musicians, nurses, newspaper writers, office workers, salesmen, social service workers, pharmacists, clergymen, butchers, carpenters, mechanics, plumbers or laborers, from all races, nationalities, regions, and ages.[22]

Hoover’s clear message was that everyone was suspect. Lest anyone be deceived by those active in humanitarian causes, Hoover noted that people may have joined the Communist Party because they supported causes the public might consider benign. Others joined for more selfish reasons. As Hoover wrote:

The list of specific reasons for joining the Party, growing out of a desire to improve our nation, would be long. One woman was interested in social problems such as slum clearance and better housing. Communists claimed to favor the same things as she. She believed and joined. Another individual, as a young minister, saw many injustices in a Northern state. Still another, arriving home from overseas, felt that the war had not accomplished any semblance of peace; he was displeased with American policy. He walked into Party headquarters on his own initiative and signed up.

Over the years, thousands of Americans have entered the doors of Communism. The
turnover of Party membership has been great. Besides those motivated from idealistic
reasons, there have been curiosity-and adventure-seekers, opportunists, disgruntled
misfits, and power-hungry personalities. Some of these have consciously sought out
the Party; others have drifted into it. Many were youngsters, wanting to dance and sing.
Some wanted social companionship. In others, sexual appeal played a role.
[23]

To Hoover, everyone and anyone might be a Communist—those from every occupation, race, and region; the selfless and the selfish. Even those wanting to dance and since were suspect! Given such a cross-section, the only way Communists could be ferreted out of our society was to empower the FBI to employ its own agitators and informers and to provide ample funding for the battle. Frank Donner, in his book The Age of Surveillance, summed up Hoover, who both predated and epitomized the mindset that led to the witch-hunts that dominated American society during the Cold War:

Hoover was a child of his times, a countersubversive fanatic. Radicalism was something demonic and unclean—an infection that threatened not only American political institutions but civilization itself. Our way of life, the purity of our women and the innocence of our children, were being befouled by the bearded foreigners, godless and filthy, cunning and bloodthirsty, in alliance with parlor Bolsheviks and intellectual perverts. What mattered details like due process or lack of jurisdiction when the beast was poised to strike at the nation’s throat? It is this extraordinary absorption of the cause by the self that made the child of the twenties the father of the man of the forties, fifties, and sixties.[24]

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) was another institution that predated the Cold War, but would play its most visible role during that era. Organized in 1938 as the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda in the United States, the committee was first chaired by Martin Dies of Texas. Even in the years prior to World War II, when fascist countries were assaulting China, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Ethiopia, and threatening virtually the entire world, Dies complained that “hundreds of left-wingers and radicals who do not believe in our system of private enterprise” were infesting the federal government. As “purveyors of class hatred,” Dies listed Stalin, Frances Perkins, Harold Ickes, and Harry Hopkins.[25]

Dies thought nothing of linking Stalin, the Soviet dictator responsible for the deaths of millions, with three high officials of the Roosevelt administration. While ostensibly set up to combat undefined “un-American” activities, the thrust of the committee was always anticommunist and never anti-right wing. Subsequent chairmen, such as John E. Rankin (Democrat of Mississippi) and J. Parnell Thomas (Republican of New Jersey) were apparently comfortable with this situation as they held hearings on alleged Communist infiltration into everything from schools to Hollywood.

Rankin, who had been elected from a district in Mississippi with the highest poll tax in the nation, was also a noted anti-Semite. When he proposed an investigation of (heavily Jewish) Hollywood, Rankin noted that his intent was to get to the bottom of “the loathsome, filthy, insinuating, un-American undercurrents that are running through various pictures.” [26] Thomas, another guardian of the American way of life, was later convicted of taking kickbacks from his staff.

The committee not only held hearings in Washington, D.C., but also took its show on the road and, at one time or another, set up shop in most major cities. Hearings were held on espionage in government (starring Elizabeth Bentley, Whitaker Chambers, and Alger Hiss) and on Communist infiltration of various industries including defense, film, radio, and television, and various professions including longshoremen, lawyers, teachers, and social workers.[27] The committee’s methods were marked by the intimidation of unfriendly witnesses, the issuance of contempt citations, and a penchant for publicity. Some of the committee’s more celebrated witnesses will be dealt with in this chapter. For a thorough study of the committee, see Walter Goodman’s appropriately titled book, The Committee (Secker & Warburg, 1969).

In 1981, two decades after the end of the committee’s heyday and six years after it was finally abolished, Congressman Don Edwards (D-California) summed up HUAC’s role:

What the committee actually did was break up families, turn friends into enemies, and destroy reputations and lives, while demonstrating that the United States government could take on characteristics that are usually associated with our totalitarian adversaries.[28]

The Cold War saw the mania for national security legitimized through a series of federal and state laws and through executive orders issued by the President. The Smith Act, passed in 1940 but most noted for its application in the 1949 trial of eleven Communist Party leaders, was the first of these laws enacted on the federal level. The Act made it a crime to teach or advocate the violent overthrow of the government or to belong to any group that did so.[29]

The 1949 trial was so marred by hostility between the prosecution and the defense that it became known as the “Battle of Foley Square,” for the location of the U.S. District Court in New York City. The defendants were all found guilty. As a sign of the times, the defense lawyers were held in contempt of court and most were sentenced to jail terms and endured years of disbarment proceedings. It was not only a danger to be a Communist, but also a danger to ensure that Communists received a fair trial. The American Bar Association even recommended local disciplinary action for lawyers who represented Communists, including disbarment for Party members.[30]

Harry S. Truman tried to steal the thunder from the Republicans by instituting his own Loyalty Program, issued in stages beginning in 1947. The effect of the program was to purge the federal civil service while inspiring similar purges on the state and local level. The first executive order established loyalty review boards in executive departments and FBI checks of federal workers. An employee could be fired if there was “reasonable doubt” of loyalty, thus shifting the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused.[31] During Truman’s administration, 1,200 federal employees were fired and 6,000 resigned because of inquiries under the Loyalty Program. During Eisenhower’s first term, the numbers were 1,500 fired and another 6,000 resigned. This pattern was duplicated at every level of government.[32]

The Internal Security Act (McCarran Act) was so repressive that Congress had to pass it over Truman’s veto in 1950. The law, sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran (D-Nevada), a Roman Catholic, made it a crime to combine or conspire to establish a totalitarian dictatorship controlled by a foreign power. It further provided that Communist organizations had to register with the Attorney General and provide names and addresses of officers and sources of income; that members of such organizations were ineligible for federal employment or passports; that all mail and broadcasts of such organizations had to be identified as Communist propaganda; and that a five member Subversive Activities Control Board would be established to determine what organizations should be required to register.[33]

The McCarran Act and the concentration camps it set up for radicals in case of national emergency were more important as symbols of the times than for actual applications. The camps were never used and no organization actually registered. In 1965, the registration provisions were held to violated the Fifth Amendment.[34] Yet, the importance of the McCarran Act, the Loyalty Program, the 1954 law outlawing the Communist Party, the loyalty oaths, the hearings, and the firings, even as symbols, cannot be denied. Political dissent became dangerous; nonconformity was heresy; and an inquisition did sweep through the land. It was a period of fear for some and of opportunity for others. The climate allowed many to crawl out of the woodwork to accuse and denounce and forced others into silence for fear of being accused and denounced. Thousands of people did lose jobs in government and in teaching. Others were blacklisted and unable to practice a profession or display a talent. Most of these victims had once been members of the Communist Party or of groups judged to be “Communist fronts” or had some connection with such organizations. They were not convicted of treason, subversion, or sabotage. Therein lies the essence of the Cold War as a period of inquisition.

There were a few actual convictions that the anticommunists pounded incessantly as evidence of subversion and espionage in the United States. The litany of Hiss, Coplon, and the Rosenbergs emanated from the temples of the right throughout the Cold War.

Alger Hiss was the prototypical establishment man. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Harvard Law School, he was a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and then served in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; on a Senate committee; in the Solicitor General’s office; and in the State Department. In the latter capacity, he accompanied Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Yalta and was involved in the formation of the United Nations. Hiss achieved notoriety, however, when he was accused of having been a Communist during the 1930s.

Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was a confessed Communist and spy. He fingered Hiss at HUAC hearings in 1948. Hiss denied Chambers’ charges and sued him for libel. Ultimately, Chambers was able to prove what Hiss had denied—that he (Hiss) had known Chambers after 1936. The evidence was the now-famous “pumpkin papers”—microfilm hidden in a pumpkin in the garden of Chambers’ home. Hiss was later convicted of perjury for denying that he had known Chambers after 1936. The statute of limitations had run out on espionage.

This thumbnail sketch of a former government official’s conviction for perjury tells only a small part of the Hiss story. After Hiss’s conviction, Dean Acheson said, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss.”[35] Adlai Stevenson was a character witness for Hiss, and Eleanor Roosevelt expressed support for him in her newspaper column. To many people, this kind of backing for Hiss showed that the elite, East Coast establishment was nurturing and protecting Communists in government. There was a sense that these people felt that “our kind” could not be lying while rumpled, uncouth Whittaker Chambers told the truth. Those sniping from the outside picked upon this support for Hiss. Joe McCarthy would deliberately refer to “Alger, I mean Adlai” Stevenson. Richard M. Nixon first achieved national prominence on HUAC in connection with this Hiss case and pushed for the perjury indictment. During the 1952 Presidential campaign, he said of Stevenson, “If Stevenson were to be taken in by Stalin, as he was by Alger Hiss, the Yalta sellout would look like a great American diplomatic triumph by comparison.”[36]

This, then, was the real significance of the Hiss case as it would echo throughout the Cold War. Respectable people, the “striped-pants set,” had taken lightly the fact that a highly-placed person in government had been a Communist and had passed government documents. This would be another part of the litany of the “twenty years of treason” that resulted in America’s precarious position in the Cold War. [37]

Judith Coplon, a Justice Department clerk, was arrested for espionage in 1949. Her trial and conviction for stealing “top secret” Justice Department documents concerned with the FBI’s counterspy system, gave credence to those who said the government was riddled with Reds. Coplon’s conviction, however, was later reversed on procedural grounds and she was not prosecuted again.[38]

In 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born, British nuclear physicist was arrested in England on espionage charges. Nine Americans were arrested and linked to Fuchs. One of the Americans was a Philadelphia chemist named Harry Gold. He implicated one David Greenglass, who apparently confessed and, in turn, implicated his sister and brother-in-law, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Julius Rosenberg had been a member of the Young Communist League during the 1930s. At the age of 19, Ethel Rosenberg had led a strike and, as a result, had lost her job. The Rosenbergs were tenement Communists, a type quite prevalent during the 1930s. They became the center of a controversy that marked the high noon of the Cold War in the United States. The Rosenbergs were tried and found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. They were executed at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York, in June 1953.

The specific act for which the Rosenbergs were prosecuted involved “persuading” David Greenglass to supply them with a cross-section of the atomic bomb from the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The government maintained that this information enabled the Soviets to build an atomic bomb (One of the government prosecutors in the trial was Roy Cohn). The Rosenbergs were found guilty of the conspiracy charge. Judge Irving Kauffman imposed the death penalty, treating their actions as treason. Rosenberg supporters maintained that treason involved giving aid and comfort to the enemy during wartime. At the time that the Rosenbergs were alleged to have passed information to the Soviets, the USSR was an ally of the United States.

The legality of the death penalty in this case was one point of controversy. Other controversies centered on the questionable nature of the Gold and Greenglass confessions and the actual value of the information allegedly passed. Rosenberg opponents saw the trial as a vindication of their charges that the U.S. was plagued with domestic Communists bent on subversion. The evidence is still hotly debated and the Rosenbergs’ two sons have been among those calling for a new examination of the evidence.

The electrocution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg was preceded by rejected appeals to the Supreme Court and by denials of clemency by President Eisenhower. Supporters of the Rosenbergs staged an international death-watch. Opponents insisted that justice had been done. As David Caute observed, “the timing, the passions aroused, the worldwide appeals for clemency, and the ritual-purgatory nature of the act, all enshrine June 19, 1953, as the midsummer’s night of postwar anti-Communist, anti-Soviet hysteria.”[39]

The name of Owen Lattimore was often included in the litany of Hiss, Coplon, and the Rosenbergs as further evidence of the domestic subversion that could only be remedied by the creation of a strong internal security program with an accompanying curtailment of civil liberties.

After the Communist victory in China in 1949, the search for scapegoats led to Owen Lattimore and other China experts. Senators McCarthy and McCarran and the China Lobby were among those who charged that Lattimore had influenced U.S. policy that had resulted in Chiang’s defeat. Lattimore had been raised in China, had traveled and studied throughout that country, and had worked in the Office of War Information in Chungking. He had written numerous books on China and Asia. Lattimore maintained that the success of the Communists was due to good military tactics and to appeals to popular political views. Lattimore had urged the U.S. to deal with China on the basis of new Chinese nationalist sentiment.[40]

Lattimore was the focus of a series of hearings held by Senator McCarthy. In his book, Ordeal by Slander (Little, Brown & Company, 1950), Lattimore described the investigation. After being vindicated of espionage charges by a Senate committee chaired by Millard Tydings, Lattimore was then called before Senator McCarran’s new Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Tydings, meanwhile, earned the enmity of McCarthy, who campaigned against his reelection in 1950. McCarthy’s enmity was hard to overcome. Tydings lost the election.

The McCarran committee went after Lattimore and the Institute for Pacific Relations, a group with which Lattimore had been associated for many years. The hearings went on for almost a year and examined alleged subversive influences on U.S. foreign policy on the part of Lattimore and the I.P.R. Louis Budenz, a star witness and denouncer of the period, identified Lattimore as an undercover Soviet agent.[41] At McCarran’s urging, Lattimore was subsequently indicted for perjury. On June 14, 1955, five years after the beginning of Lattimore’s persecution, a judge’s dismissal of the perjury indictment was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals.[42] No new trial was held, but Lattimore and an entire generation of Asian experts had been silenced by the intimidation imposed by McCarthy, McCarran, and the China Lobby.

The Cold War and American Culture

The hunt for subversives in American society led to various attempts, some of them successful, to impose an intellectual conformity in culture, education, and communications. Efforts were made to ban performances by such left-leaning individuals as the singer Paul Robeson and the dancer Pearl Primus. The Weavers, a folk-singing group known for their songs about peace, labor, and civil rights, were blacklisted from television appearances.

Schools and colleges were subject to both external and internal investigations in order to root out teachers and administrators with leftist sympathies. These Cold War investigations had their antecedent in the 1940-41 Rapp-Coudert Committee hearings which sought out Communists in New York City’s colleges. Some 36 people were forced out of jobs by those hearings.[43]

During the Cold War, many colleges set up committees to investigate these matters. James B. Conant, the president of Harvard, was known as a liberal and, as such, was pilloried in the conservative, especially the Catholic, press. Yet even he got on in the anticommunist bandwagon when he declared that “card-holding members of the Communist Party are out of bounds as members of the teaching profession.”[44] A 1954 poll showed that 91 percent of the Rutgers University faculty agreed that Communists should not be allowed to teach in college.[45] In 1949, the National Education Association stated that Communist Party members surrendered their right to think for themselves and, therefore, the right to teach. The American Federation of Teachers resolved not to defend Communist teachers. Only the American Association of University Professors resisted the purge.

Support for the ouster of Communist teachers from both the educational and the political establishments made it difficult for those caught up in the investigations. At the University of Washington, for example, the determination of the president that communists be “smoked out” was supported by the Seattle Real Estate Board, the Chamber of Commerce, and the American Legion. [46]

The House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated many schools, including MIT. McCarthy’s committee set its sights on Harvard, representing as it did, the elite the Senator considered responsible for Communists in the U.S. When Harvard Professor Wendell Furrey invoked the Fifth Amendment, McCarthy described him as one of “(President) Pusey’s Fifth Amendment Communists.” The McCarran committee held a series of hearings in 1952 and 1953 at which more than 100 professors pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Of these, 54 were dismissed or censured; others were placed on probation.[47]

In 1949, the University of California ordered professors to sign an anticommunist loyalty oath. At Berkeley, 20 percent refused to sign. This refusal resulted in a bitter controversy and dissension that lasted for years. After innumerable investigations and many non-renewals of teaching contracts, most professors submitted. By 1951, there had been 26 dismissals and 37 resignations of nonsignatories. [48]

New York experienced massive firings and resignations as a result of investigations conducted under the state’s Feinberg Law. David Caute has estimated that 321 school teachers and 58 college teachers were fired for having been party members or for refusing to testify about themselves or others.[49]

Some teachers who were victims of the Cold War were later given a vindication of sorts. Ten New York college teachers fired for refusing to name names were awarded a monetary restitution in 1982. In 1983, the University of Vermont conferred an honorary degree on Professor Alex B. Novikoff who, thirty years earlier, had been ousted from his teaching position for refusing to name Communists among his colleagues.[50]

Similar pressure was exerted within the radio, television, and publishing industries. In 1947, three former FBI agents set up an organization called American Business Consultants. This group was a blacklisting organization that put pressure on the sponsors of programs written, directed, or acted in by persons American Business Consultants considered suspect. The group disseminated information “detailing” Communist influence in radio and television through a newsletter, Counterattack, and through a book, Red Channels. [51]

Typically, Counterattack listed the “record” of an individual, including such information as the names of people with whom he or she associated, the work in which the person was involved, and the sponsor of the work. The following excerpt from Counterattack is indicative of the material that appeared weekly for several years:

UTA HAGEN RECEIVED A FINE BUILDUP on the “Betty Crocker Star Matinee” last Saturday, Jan. 5 (ABC-TV network—12 noon).

UTA HAGEN, former wife of JOSE FERRER and star of current Broadway production, “St. Joan,” has backed CP’s May Day Parades, the Waldorf and other Communist-inspired “peace” conferences, the committee set up in defense of the 12 Politburo members after their indictment for conspiracy, the Civil Rights Congress (party’s bail fund & defense agency) and many other fronts.

Since outbreak of war in Korea, CP has plugged her as one of six people, including three key Communists, who signed telegram to Att’y Gen’l McGRATH urging him to grant bail to 16 non-citizens held on Ellis Island under Internal Security Act. She is also listed as sponsor of two fronts fighting for repeal of Internal Security Act.

Last February she was named with identified CP members CLIFFORD ODETS and MORRIS CARNOVSKY as hostess at art benefit staged by the party’s Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Affair was chaired by ROCKWELL KENT, head of Int’l Workers Order, which was ordered dissolved by N.Y. Courts several months ago. KENT has been identified as a CP member.

When CP was whipping up agitation over case of WILLIE McGEE last May, UTA HAGEN was one of 90 women (many of whom were Communists or had front records) who sent appeal to PRES. TRUMAN urging him to intervene in case.

When American Peace Crusade, CP’s major front today, was launched last January, UTA HAGEN was billed as one of its sponsors.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO COMBAT COMMUNISM? Write To: LESLIE PERRIN, Pres., General Mills Inc., 400 Second Ave, South Minneapolis, Minnesota (Gen’l Mills sponsors Betty Crocker show).
Ask him if he can’t persuade “Betty Crocker” to feature on her program people who fight the agencies of terror, war and slavery… instead of those who support them.[52]

Sportscaster Bill Stern was one person the witchhunters did not have to worry about. In a 1958 radio broadcast, Stern declared that the lack of interest in “big-time” football at New York University, the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the City College of New York was “due to the widespread acceptance of Communism at these universities.”[53]

Perhaps the most visible of the Cold War investigations was the witchhunt in Hollywood that began with HUAC hearings in 1947. During the 1930s, numerous actors, writers, and directors had been members of the Communist Party. The numbers declined dramatically by the time the Cold War began. However, the most common question asked at Congressional hearings was “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Thus, the witnesses were interrogated about their past affiliations.

During the 1947 hearings, ten witnesses were cited for contempt for refusing to state whether or not they had ever been members of the Communist Party. These witnesses, writers and directors, became known as the Hollywood Ten and were among those jailed for failure to answer HUAC’s questions.[54] Some witnesses, such as the writers Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and Dashiell Hammett, offered to talk about themselves, but would not talk about others. Hammett was eventually jailed for his refusal to name names. Many of the biggest stars of the day were hauled before the committee and forced into humiliating obsequiousness about the errors of their pasts. Lee J. Cobb, Edward G. Robinson, and John Garfield, who died of a heart attack shortly after testifying, all confessed to past indiscretions and errors in judgment. Still others, such as director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg, named names and then tried to justify their actions by insisting that they were exposing a great threat. In the 1954 film On the Waterfront, written by Schulberg and directed by Kazan, Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, is shunned and threatened by his peers after he testifies about union corruption on the docks. The film clearly depicts the informer as hero and even, in its last scenes, as a Christ-like figure.

Hollywood did not offer much resistance to the pressure. Studio executives, columnists, such as Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Walter Winchell, the Screen Actors Guild (headed by Ronald Reagan), and various technical unions all cooperated with the committee. The result was imprisonment for some uncooperative witnesses, blacklisting of hundreds, broken lives, and bad movies. The climate of fear and obeisance was such that Leila Rogers, mother of actress Ginger Rogers, would actually testify that in the 1943 film about Soviet resistance to the Nazis, Tender Comrade (written by Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo), Ginger had been forced to speak Communist propaganda. The line in question was “Share and share alike, that’s democracy.”[51a] In such an environment, it is not surprising that Hollywood turned out large numbers of musicals and other non-controversial, non-offending films, as well as such anticommunist gems as Red Menace, Red Nightmare, I Married a Communist, Big Jim McLain, and Red Planet Mars.[56]

Perhaps the most hysterical of all anticommunist films of the Cold War was a Hollywood and Catholic effort entitled My Son John.[57] Produced and directed by Leo McCarey (Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s) and written by McCarey and Myles Connolly, the film starred Helen Hayes, one of Hollywood’s most conspicuous Catholics, as the mother, Dean Jagger as the father, and Robert Walker as their son John. In 1947, McCarey was a friendly witness at a HUAC hearing and, in 1950, he joined Cecil B. DeMille in urging all members of the Screen Directors Guild to take loyalty oaths.[58] My Son John was McCarey’s attempt to redeem Hollywood for its past sins.

The film opens on a tree-lined street in a typical Hollywood-American town, clapboard houses, shutters, and Mom on the porch. The next scene shows Helen Hayes in fanatical devotion in Church and introduces us to Frank McHugh, the family priest, and Mom’s other two sons who are in uniform. At the ensuing Sunday dinner, the last before the boys leave home for Korea, the conversation settles on John’s absence from home. John sends a telegram explaining that he is otherwise engaged. Father then comments that John is always using “two-dollar words.” This is a reference to the fact that John belongs to that most suspect of classes—the intelligentsia.

John eventually does turn up at home where he displays another sign of the Communist. He is cool to his father. He tells his parents that “Even when our thinking gets shaky, there’s nothing better than good old bromides.” Like all good Commies, John then expresses his faith in “science.” Holding his father’s American Legion hat, he asks, “Still active, father?” Father responds that John prefers high-brow professors to “low brows,” slowly building a case in the event that the audience has not yet caught on that John is a Communist.

Father, however, is not a true low brow. In fact, he is a school teacher. But he does teach “fundamentals” and is the type of man who would like to sing patriotic songs to a Communist cell. Father and John do not have a good relationship.

Sharp-eyed Mom can always tell when John is ridiculing his parents. She says, “When it gets to the point when you make fun of a mother’s love…” and then babbles insanely. Mom talks a great deal about her two fine boys now off in Korea and about her other son, John, who is the bright one with “more degrees than a thermometer.”

At this point in the film, we are introduced to another major character, an FBI agent sent to investigate John. Played by Van Heflin, the agent worms his way into Mom’s affection and trust by explaining that he, also, had a wonderful mother. To show his appreciation for John’s mom, Heflin rips up a car repair bill he had come to the house to present to Father. (Earlier in the day, Father and Heflin had a minor fender bender.)

Mom, who becomes progressively incoherent as the film progresses, is not the intellectual John is, of course. She gets her strength from two “nourishing “ books, her cookbook and her Bible.

In the meantime, John makes many cryptic telephone calls, indicating that he is up to something nefarious. Ever so slowly, the plot creeps along.

There is a confrontation scene between John and his parents. John tells Father that he is thinking in the past while he, John, thinks in the future. John wants to learn to live with neighbors and to love humanity, the downtrodden and the helpless minorities. We are thus put on notice that anyone who talks in those terms is, in all likelihood, a Communist. In response to Mom’s question as to whether this kind of thinking makes him like St. Paul, John replies that he wants to struggle to bring into existence a new and better world.

The plot thickens. John swears on the Bible that he is not a member of the Communist Party, thus showing how lightly Reds regard sacred oaths and thus letting the audience known how they should regard sworn testimony by those accused of being Reds. Father then hits John on the head with the Bible and Mom experiences shortness of breath.

Father explains that intelligence (like John’s) is not enough. Character and God must be taught. The next scene depicts the recitation of the pledge of allegiance in Father’s class the next morning. A lesson to us all.

John, who has returned from whence he originally came, then calls home exhibiting great nervousness about something. Van Heflin shows up again and provides Mom with a quick justification of FBI methods. Mom finds a key in the pocket of one of John’s suits (the cause of his nervousness). Mom then goes to Washington where she is given a patriotic tour of the city by Van Heflin, who tells her that people must fight on the home front for her two brave sons in Korea. Mom, who is suffering throughout, uses the key to open the door of an apartment that belongs to a known Red. (Mom has gleaned this information from newspaper reports detailing the arrest of this Red). Now, finally, Mom knows that her son John is a Communist. Mom returns home and lies in bed with a rosary. John turns up in search of the incriminating key. Mom begs her son to “confess to the FBI,” but John, who is too bad to be believed, not only refuses to confess, but informs Mom that he could easily have her declared insane so that no one will believe her story about him. Mom then thrusts her rosary in John’s face and exclaims, “what a fight you have on your hands!”

Mom reminds John that he did not play football, thus establishing him as a wimp and, possibly, a homosexual. His brothers, her two “fighting halfbacks” in Korea, are fighting on God’s side and Mom is fighting with them. She tells John to “take the ball” and uses other football metaphors before cracking up completely and coming to the sad conclusion that John must be punished for his sins. Van Heflin arrives again and confronts John himself. “The lower you sink, the higher you rise in your party, don’t you John?” he asks. John escapes out of a window. He returns to Washington and wrestles with his conscience before finally deciding to confess to the FBI after all. While he is on his way to the FBI office, John’s cab is attacked by Communists. John staggers out and dies on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. His last words: “They got me!”

This, however, is not the end of John. It turns out that he has recorded a tape which is played by Van Heflin to students at the commencement exercise at which John had been scheduled to speak. (This odd device was necessary because Robert Walker died from a heart attack before filming was completed—no doubt another victim of Cold War hysteria). As a heavenly light bathes the podium, the voice of John explains how the Reds prey on the American sense of fair play (i.e. Communists use humanitarian rhetoric) and warns them that the eyes of Soviet agents are on some of these students as they once were on him. John concludes, “I am a traitor. I am a native American Communist spy. And may God have mercy on my soul.” Redemption. FINIS.

The significance of My Son John was its presentation of so many Cold War themes: Communism vs. basic American values (the “fundamentals”); Communism vs. the family and religion; the suspect intellectual; and the FBI agent as, in Nora Sayre’s term, the “priest for political confession.” The Communist portrayed in the film was not a political activist; he was a spy. His conversion to the Party was due to the influence of unnamed others, mostly professors, not to any political values of his own.

The heavy Catholic involvement in the film makes it a subject worth exploring. A black-and-white universe with clearly delineated borders was a world view held by many Catholics during the Cold War. A recognition of this world view is essential to an understanding of Catholic anticommunism.

The Cold War had its special impact on American society because the threats perceived were both external and internal. During World War II, the nation mobilized for a global conflict yet, with the shameful exception of the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, there was no major effort to curtail civil liberties. The Cold War, however, saw the U.S. mobilize against the villains from inside, as well as outside, its borders.

The external threat was met by military action in Korea, a world-wide system of alliances, a vast military aid program, and convert attempts to overthrow unfriendly governments. It was also met by air raid drills in U.S. cities and the building of a system of fallout shelters. Every schoolchild of the era remembers retreating to the school basement or ducking under desks in preparation for the attack for which the warning time would be too short to make it down to the basement.

Americans were bombarded by information about how bad life was in Communist countries. One frightening television commercial for Radio Free Europe depicted a group of people listening to a radio news broadcast, an ax smashing through the radio, and the image of a man in uniform. Books, magazines, and movies echoed the same theme. The implication was unmistakable—this would happen here if we were not vigilant.

On the home front, this vigilance included a sharp eye for subversives. The legislative committee and FBI investigations dug deeply for signs of “disloyalty.” In most cases, they found nothing. In others, they found “suspect” affiliations that in the climate of the times were sufficient for dismissals from jobs, blacklisting, or both. This massive witchhunt uncovered no conspiracy to deliver the United States into the hands of the Soviet Union. At the time, however, witchhunting was a popular activity that few stood against, and none did so without adverse consequences.

Schools, unions, the media, libraries, and movies—any avenue through which ideas could be transmitted was suspected of sending the wrong signals. An attempt was made to impose a bland conformity on American life, to equate dissent with disloyalty, or even treason. This attempt was the essence of the Cold War in America.

 

Footnotes

[1] The (New York) Daily News, March 9, 1983, 2.

[2] Frank McAdam to author, October 20, 1980.

[3] Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 1980), 10.

[4] Norman Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy (D. Van Nostrand Company, New York: 1977), 26.

[5] AH.L. Trefousse, Ed., The Cold War: A Book of Documents (Capricorn Books, New York: 1966), 78.

[6] Trefousse, 99.

[7] Trefousse, 100-101.

[8] John Lukacs, A New History of the Cold War (Doubleday & Co. Anchor Edition, Garden City: 1966), 69.

[9] George A. Kennan, Foreign Affairs, July 1947, 566.

[10] New York Times June 27, 1963, 12.

[11] Trefousse, 141.

[12] On the question of assigning blame for the Communist victory in China, see generally David Caute, The Great Fear (Simon & Shuster, N.Y.: 1978).

[13] Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America (Holt, Reinhart & Winston, New York: 1978), 69.

[14] Graebner, 53.

[15] Caute, 26.

[16] Jerry Voorhis, The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon (Popular Library, New York: 1973), 14-15.

[17] Caute, 37.

[18] Wittner, 108.

[19] New York Times February 24, 1983, B8.

[20] Bill Keller, “I, Claude,” The New Republic, March 7, 1983, 17.

[21] Donner, 36.

[22] J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (Henry Holt and Company, New York: 1958), 105.

[23] Hoover, 111.

[24] Donner, 41.

[25] Caute, 88-89.

[26] Caute, 90.

[27] Caute, 94.

[28] New York Times February 19, 1981, A31.

[29] Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition (Hill and Wang, New York: 1982, 152.

[30] See generally Rutler, ch. 6.

[21] Kutler, 36.

[32] Kutler, 38.

[33] 50 U.S. Code 781 et seq.

[34] Caute, 564.

[35] Caute, 37.

[36] Caute, 46.

[37] For a history of the Hiss case, see John Cabot Smith, Alger Hiss, the True Story (Holt, Reinhart & Winston, New York: 1976).

[38] Kutler, 38-40.

[39] Caute, 62.

[40] See, for example, Lattimore’s The Making of Modern China (W.W. Norton, New York: 1944); Asia in a New World Order (Foreign Policy Association, New York: 1942).

[41] Kutler, 201.

[42] Kutler, 211.

[43] Ellen Schrecker, “Academic Freedom and the Cold War,” The Antioch Review, Summer 1980, 314.

[44] Schrecker, 318.

[45] Schrecker, 326.

[46] Caute, 405-6.

[47] Caute, 409.

[48] Caute, 423.

[49] Caute, 445.

[50] New York Times April 29, 1982, B3, May 22, 1983, 22.

[51] Red Channels (Counterattack, New York: 1950).

[52] Counterattack, January 11, 1952.

[53] Victor Navasky, Naming Names (The Viking Press, New York: 1980), 335.

[54] See generally Havasky, supra.

[55] Navasky, 79.

[56] See generally Nora Sayre, Running Time, Films of the Cold War (The Dial Press, New York: 1982).

[57] Paramount Pictures, 1952.

[58] Sayre, 94.