Elizabeth Bentley walked into the room. This was her first public appearance, the first look the media would have of the Spy Queen. Calm and composed, she wore a simple, short-sleeved, black dress with large, ornate earrings and a flowered hat, the kind of outfit a woman of a certain age might wear to a ladies’ luncheon. Much to the surprise of the media in attendance, she was neither blond nor svelte. Time magazine, huffy about being mislead concerning her appearance, described her as “neither beautiful nor glamorous” but, more accurately, “plump…with a sharp nose and a receding chin.” Ferguson and his colleagues already knew what she looked like. They had questioned her in closed session several days before, treating her kindly while going over the terrain they would cover in the public hearing. In this, Ferguson was probably aided by FBI reports and documents leaked to him prior to the hearings, material that helped arm him and his colleagues with tough questions regarding Remington. Certainly they knew far more about him than could be found in his official records.
Bentley took her place at the witness table just a few feet in front of the raised dais where the senators sat. There were microphones everywhere, at least six in front of her on the small desk she shared with a stenographer and another half dozen placed strategically along the length of the dais. When she stood to take the oath, she was staring directly into the bank of klieg lights. She took a moment to fish a handkerchief from her purse and blot her brow. It must have been close to a hundred degrees under the lights.
The committee was gentle with her. “How old are you?” Senator Ferguson asked early in the proceedings, quickly adding, “If you do not want to answer that question, that is all right; that is a woman’s privilege.” He moved on without giving her the opportunity to reply and walked her briskly through her résumé, an account of the life of a privileged young woman with a high-class education and sojourns to Europe.
Led by Ferguson’s simple, methodical questioning, Bentley began talking about her conversion to communism. “How did you happen to stray so far from the fold?” one senator asked plaintively. Bentley talked about meeting socialists at Vassar and Columbia, about experiencing fascism in Italy, and about joining what she called a “fringe organization”—but which Ferguson quickly dubbed a “communist front”—the American League Against War and Fascism. As Bentley began to detail her activities as a “card-carrying member” of the party and later, as an underground operative, the senators were clearly mesmerized.
The hearing was designed to focus on Remington, but the committee seemed to forget that as Bentley’s story unfolded. This was as close as any of them had ever gotten to a real, live communist. They had so many questions. They wanted to know the intricacies of how things worked, what exactly was printed on the party membership card, who this man Golos was and what he did, how a mail courier operated, where and when and from whom she gathered intelligence, what agencies her sources came from, whether they were still working for the government. Bentley answered as fully as she could while not naming any names, a strategy agreed upon during her previous closed-door sessions with the committee. She answered confidently, with the calm assurance of a schoolteacher lecturing a classroom of eager but not terribly bright children. Her voice had that slightly nasal East Coast finishing school tone about it, a little pinched, a tad metallic, and very much in control. The afternoon wore on without a mention of William Remington. At one point, the chairman seemed to scold the committee. “It is not desired at this particular time to go into all of the ramifications,” he told his colleagues, after they had sat spellbound, listening to Bentley’s tale of intrigue. “We would like to conduct this hearing, if we can, concerning one person: William Remington.” But almost immediately, Ferguson himself turned the questioning back to Bentley’s personal story. And, a few minutes later, when she seemed to be rushing through the narrative, he reined her in, cautioning, “I do not want to go too fast now, on this.”
Bentley offered a clinical description of her relationship with Golos with no hint of the emotional and sexual intimacy they had shared. She offered, too, the version of her past that she seemed to have convinced herself she had lived, a version that cast her as passive rather than active, someone things happened to rather than someone who made things happen. She told the senators, for example, that her underground activities began when she was “turned over” to a special contact (Golos) because she had access to material at the Italian Library of Information. But the truth was that she herself had recognized the potential importance of her position at the library and had sought out, through the Party, a contact to whom she would report. She had not been spotted as a possible operative and taken underground. It had been her idea. She had launched herself into clandestine activities. Later in the afternoon, when she was questioned about what had made her come forth and denounce communism, she answered that, in part, it was because the “effect of Mr. Golos was wearing off,” as if Yasha had been a Svengali rather than a toiler in the trenches.
For more than an hour, they quizzed her on how her Washington, D.C., network operated, why she thought her sources gave her confidential information, to whom they thought it was going, who her Russian contacts were and what kind of information seemed to interest them. She answered each question carefully, articulately, often with precise details and completely from memory. She had no notes. She had no lawyer by her side. Finally, more than two hours into the afternoon session, Ferguson asked the first question about the man who was the subject of the hearing.
“Did you have a source [in the War Production Board]?” he asked Bentley.
“I had several,” she replied.
“Did you have a man by the name of Remington?” Ferguson asked.
“Yes, I did,” said Bentley. She then launched into the same story she had told both the FBI and the grand jury about Remington: how an editor at the New Masses introduced Remington to Golos, how Golos and Bentley met Remington at the Schrafft’s on Fourth Avenue, how it was arranged for her to rendezvous with him during her trips to Washington, how they met in drugstores and on park benches “ten or fifteen or twenty” times, how he gave her his Communist Party dues and accepted party literature, how he passed her confidential information on scraps of paper he took from his jacket pocket. The senators wanted to know what kind of information, and she told them: aircraft production figures, internal policies of the Board, a formula for synthetic rubber. The committee focused on Remington for perhaps twenty minutes before the questions once again turned to the Russian spy apparatus and Bentley’s Soviet contacts. The bigger story was just too good. They couldn’t stay away from it for long.
It was Bentley who finally brought the conversation back to Remington just a few minutes before the committee adjourned. She was questioned about the purity of her motives. Did she have anything against any of the people who gave her information, any ulterior motives in exposing them? No, Bentley said, adding “…and I don’t too much like having to do this to Mr. Remington, either.” But she had done it to Mr. Remington, and this hearing would be only the beginning of his troubles.
Remington appeared the next morning, a tall, slender, sandy-haired, handsome man barely out of his twenties who wore a suit well and looked exactly like what he was: a well-heeled Dartmouth man on the way up. Remington told his side of the story that morning, a Saturday, and at another session a few days later. He could have brought along an attorney, but he didn’t. He was young and smart and sure of himself. He was quick-witted and charming. He could handle this. He told the committee that just about everything Bentley had testified to was true. Yes, he was introduced to her at Schrafft’s. Yes, they met a number of times in Washington at the locales she mentioned. Yes, he gave her information that came from the War Production Board, where he was employed at the time. He gave her money. He took Communist Party literature. But in each instance, he had an alternate explanation. First of all, he had no idea, he told the committee, that either Bentley or Golos were communists. He thought Golos was a Dutch jour
nalist writing a book, he said, and that Bentley was his research assistant. True, they met under odd circumstances, but he could explain that. Bentley would always be in a hurry when she called. She’d be uptown, far from his office, and suggest they meet somewhere halfway. That’s why they met on street corners and out-of-the-way drugstores. The money she said she collected from him for party dues? Those were actually contributions to an antifascist fund, he said. The Daily Worker? Yes, he did buy it from her, as she said, but he did it not to keep in touch with the party—he was not a communist and never had been, he insisted—but because he wanted to examine the stories in the paper to evaluate their accuracy. And the information she said he passed to her? It was no more than he would have given any journalist, he said. It was all publicly available material. Nothing was secret or confidential.
Remington presented himself as a young, well-meaning naïf, but the committee was having no part of it. The senators bombarded him with questions. How could he have not known—or even suspected—that Bentley was a communist when she was introduced to him by a famous communist editor, when every time he saw her she sold him copies of the Daily Worker? If he truly believed she was a journalist, why didn’t he treat her like one? Why not insist on meeting in his office? If the information he gave her was publicly available, why not steer her to the government information service or published sources? Why scribble the information on scraps of paper? Remington, seemingly unshaken, weathered the storm, steadfastly maintaining his complete innocence, accusing himself only of “forgivably erroneous judgment.”
“Sir,” he said to Senator Ferguson, “as I look back on it, I realize I was involved in something of a very dubious nature. But at the time, it did not appear to me to be of a dubious nature.” But no one could be that naïve, least of all a bright, educated man like Remington, thought the senators. They were astonished and unbelieving, openly hostile. Ferguson called his story “preposterous.” The Washington Post, giving him the benefit of the doubt, dismissed him as a “boob.”
Throughout, Remington’s confidence remained unshaken. He called a press conference for that evening, telling reporters from Washington and New York that he had “very high regard for Miss Bentley.” He called her “very courageous” and said the nation owed her a debt of gratitude for exposing communism. But Bentley was wrong about him. She was confused. She was remembering incorrectly, he told the reporters. And he was sure he could prove his innocence when he testified again. He was confident, too, that he made a good impression with the media. He was at ease with them, staying after the questions to chat with reporters and pose for photographs.
The hearings continued on Monday with ex-communist Louis Budenz testifying explosively that the American communist party, which he called “the Russian fifth column,” had placed “perhaps thousands” of its members in government jobs. He had no particular knowledge of Remington and could only corroborate Bentley’s testimony in the most general way, but his appearance served to whip up the already stormy seas. When Remington returned to testify the next day, the committee subjected him to a grueling five-hour session. He had been confident that he would prove his innocence, but he couldn’t have been more mistaken. With every protestation of his own blamelessness, his own gullibility, Remington dug himself a deeper hole. By the end of that afternoon, the senators seemed more skeptical, more hostile, and more intent on developing a case against him than they had been when the hearings began. Toward that end, Ferguson demanded certain records on Remington, notably his military file. But the secretary of the Navy flatly refused the request, citing an executive order to keep such records confidential. That was all Ferguson had to hear, that the executive branch— the Truman administration—was standing in the way of his investigation. There was much posturing about the purity of motives on both sides, much heated oratory, much saber-rattling, but little result. The hearings closed without closure. The senate committee had no power to do what the grand jury hadn’t been able to do the year before. Remington would remain unindicted. He would keep his government job. But Elizabeth Bentley and William Remington would not be rid of each other. The Ferguson hearing was merely the opening salvo in what would be a five-and-a-half-year war of words between them. It would be messy, and it would end badly.
Chapter 16
Un-American Activities
THE FERGUSON HEARING was Bentley’s first public appearance, but it was not her most important. The senators had focused—to the extent that they focused at all—on one man. But Bentley’s story was bigger than that. There were more than a hundred men and women she had alluded to in her testimony. There were many doors yet to be opened, many avenues to be explored, many names yet to be publicly named. It fell to the single most controversial, most partisan committee in Congress, the House Committee on Un-American Activities—commonly referred to as HUAC—to aggressively mine the terrain Bentley had mapped for the senators.
The HUAC hearings began July 31, the day after Bentley’s appearance before the Ferguson committee. Like the Ferguson sessions, they were called that summer for political purposes. Conservative Republicans and equally conservative southern Democrats ran much of the committee machinery in Congress, and they were being urged by the GOP national chairman to take full advantage of this situation. “Set up spy hearings,” the GOP chairman advised the head of HUAC. “Stay in Washington, and keep the heat on Harry Truman.” Keeping the heat on Harry Truman meant focusing on—and with any luck, causing him embarrassment about—communists in the government. Public testimony that accused scores of federal employees—most of them FDR Democrats—of espionage could weaken Truman, discredit the New Deal, and give the GOP the keys to the White House. This hunt for communists in the government would be the centerpiece of the GOP’s strategy to recapture the presidency, and HUAC would lead the way.
The intent of the hearings that summer was not, as officially stated, “to investigate subversive activities”—the committee did not have the resources to mount an actual investigation—but rather to publicize information already known to the FBI, and most probably leaked to the committee. The intent was to give Elizabeth Bentley a chance to name names. A ranking member of the committee put it more succinctly. It’s about time, he said in his opening statement before the committee, to “drive these rats from the federal…payroll.” The congressmen were confident they could do it. After all, their committee had already enjoyed great success the previous fall driving “the rats” out of Hollywood.
The hearings in October had been one of the biggest media circuses in the history of Washington, D.C., with high-profile “friendly” witnesses like Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, and then-actor Ronald Reagan testifying that a communist conspiracy was taking over the motion picture industry. They were pitted against a group of screenwriters alleged to be party members or fellow-travelers who were accused of inserting un-American propaganda into their scripts, an example of which was offered by Leila Rogers, Ginger’s mother. She testified that her daughter had turned down a role in a movie because the script would have her deliver a speech that began, “Share and share alike—that’s democracy!” Humphrey Bogart, Groucho Marx, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and other luminaries picked up the screenwriters’ cause, and the hearings became a magnet for autograph hounds and every newsreel, radio, and television broadcaster who could shoehorn his equipment in the room. Meanwhile, the sessions devolved from polemic to melodrama to farce, ending with armed guards dragging the screenwriters from the committee room. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the hearings were an unqualified success for HUAC. Studio executives, who had at first opposed the House probe as an unwarranted intrusion, blacklisted the so-called Hollywood Ten. And in December, two months after the hearings, a federal grand jury handed down indictments against all of them. They stood trial, were found guilty, and, after various appeals, went to jail.
HUAC emerged from the Hollywood hearings a committee to be reckoned with. More powerful than it had ever been in its short and
contentious history, it was also, simultaneously, the least savory it had ever been, its image tarnished by the incivility and extremism of its members. Although membership on the committee ensured a high profile and held the promise of bigger things to come in one’s career, it was one of the least popular committees on which to serve. Of all the new and returning Democratic members of Congress in 1948, not one listed HUAC as a committee preference or even a second choice. But for a small group of conservatives motivated by their enthusiasm for hunting subversives, it was the place to be. They were not, however, the best and the brightest.
J. Parnell Thomas was the chairman. A charter member of the committee since 1938, he was an arch-conservative Republican from New Jersey who believed that government, education, the movie industry, and unions were all hotbeds of communist activity. Considered by his fellow congressmen to be arrogant and opinionated, Thomas had shown himself to be coarse and vindictive on the House floor. In the midst of the summer 1948 hearings, he was accused of operating a kickback racket with his own office staff, and was later convicted and sent to federal prison.
John Rankin, a Mississippi Democrat, was another powerful committee member who had served as chairman in the mid-1940s. A dedicated enemy of the New Deal, he equated FDR’s policies with “the beginnings of a communist dictatorship the likes of which America has never dreamed.” Communism, he once said in remarks on the floor of the House, “hounded and persecuted the Savior during his earthly ministry” and “inspired his crucifixion.” An ardent and unreconstructed racist, Rankin hated Jews—communism was, he said, a Jewish conspiracy—and was sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. The committee also included Karl Mundt, a six-term Republican congressman from South Dakota. A politically ambitious man—he would move up to the Senate in a few years—he found the executive branch contemptible, distrusted the State Department, hated the United Nations, and vehemently disagreed with Truman’s postwar foreign policy in general. And then there was the junior congressman from California, Richard M. Nixon, one of the ablest and cleverest on the committee, who had made it to Washington, D.C., two years before by virtue of a smear campaign against his Democratic opponent. HUAC would give him the exposure he needed to mount a national career in politics that would end in the White House.
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