A Difficult Woman

by Alice Kessler-Harris

  But Hellman was after something more. “If you survive something,” she said shortly after the book came out, “it’s hard to remember the terrible pressure on you when you believe that survival is not possible.”39 She wanted to capture the prevailing sense of confusion and fear generated by continuing investigatory commissions, the fury at their power to destroy lives without evidence, the helplessness of individuals faced with a Hobson’s choice of maintaining their capacity to earn a living by telling committees what they wanted to hear or staying silent and risking jail. Above all she wanted to express her blinding contempt for people (she labeled them liberals and cowards), under no threat themselves, who betrayed their own commitment to liberty and freedom of speech for fear of being tarred with the brush of communist sympathy. These were the American intellectuals, who “had stood watching that game, giving no aid to the weak or the troubled, resting on their own fancy reasons.”40 In a refrain that permeated Scoundrel Time, she told interviewer Nora Ephron, “I wasn’t shocked in the way so many people were. I was more shocked by the people on my side, the intellectuals and liberals and pretend radicals … I mean, I wasn’t as shocked by McCarthy as by the people who took no stand at all.”41

  For all the pithy and direct language of Scoundrel Time, Hellman’s position took the moral high ground: she had stood up for the ordinary American values of decency, honesty, and integrity while many had, like cowards, given way. For those who cooperated with the investigatory committees, she had only scorn: “Some of them … had sprinted to demean themselves, apologizing for sins they never committed, making vivid and lively for the committees and the press what had never existed.” Dismissing the committees as made up of “men who invented when necessary, maligned even when it wasn’t necessary,” she declared that from them she expected nothing. The shock and anger, the sense of betrayal came rather “against what I thought had been the people of my world.” She had believed, she wrote, that “the educated, the intellectual, lived by what they claimed to believe: freedom of thought and speech, the right of each man to his own convictions, a more than implied promise, therefore of aid to those who might be persecuted. But only a very few raised a finger when McCarthy and the boys appeared.” These, then, were the scoundrels: the American intellectuals who would not “fight for anything if doing so would injure them.”

  One after another, she skewered with forceful language those who had not lived up to her standards of honor. Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, the columnist James Wechsler, and her old friends Lionel and Diana Trilling all fell victim to her angry words and wittily venomous barbs. Their silence, she continued, allowed McCarthy to quash freedom of thought, opening the door to a continuing witch hunt. It encouraged intellectuals to sell their souls to the CIA (as had recently been revealed), which used their names to foster thinly disguised propaganda through sponsored magazines and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Appeals to the fear of communism accounted, in her view, for the disastrous war in Vietnam and the ascendance of Richard Nixon.42 Hellman gave no quarter, dismissing the rationalizations of the silent as cowardice and “pious shit.” “Lives were being ruined and few hands were raised in help,” she wrote accusingly. “In every civilized country, people have always come forward to defend those in political trouble.” Why not in the United States? She thought the answer obvious. “These men and women, too eager to secure themselves and their material possessions, were too often the children of immigrants, determined to keep what they had earned.”

  The first reactions to Scoundrel Time took Hellman’s story at face value, affirming her sense of decency and applauding the moral courage she had shown before HUAC. Repeatedly and admiringly, they echoed the line that had resonated in 1952 and turned Hellman into a heroine: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” Friendly critics described Hellman’s story as “compelling,” brave, and written with “plainspoken vigor.” Time magazine alluded to her personal code of morality: “She was brave because her private code would not allow her to be anything else.”43 Her friends Richard Poirier and Robert Coles pitched in admiringly. What one does at a moment when one is faced with earning a living or losing one’s honor, declared Coles, was a measure of character. Hellman had not flinched. She had made that difficult choice with “explicit, unhedged moral decisiveness.”44 Scoundrel Time soared to the top of the bestseller lists, where it remained for twenty-one weeks. “I found the kind of unwritten code of honor and decency, which she feels she has lived by, extremely moving and touching,” said the distinguished British critic Marina Vaizey. “It felt truthful to me.”45 Hellman had earned a right to tell her story as she remembered it, said journalist Murray Kempton, “thanks to her superb hour of resistance to banal chic.”46

  And yet there were dissenters. A few reviewers noted that the book contained false notes. Scoundrel Time accused James Wechsler, for example, of being a friendly witness before HUAC. In fact he had been called before McCarthy’s Government Operations subcommittee rather than HUAC, and he hotly contested Hellman’s attribution of friendliness. Wechsler, who had an unimpeachable record of opposition to McCarthyism both in print and before the committee, had decided for perhaps misplaced strategic reasons to give the committee some names they already had. Doing so, he believed, would enhance his credibility in the fight against McCarthyism. Hellman found this rationalization absurd but under threat of a lawsuit agreed to modify her characterization of Wechsler in subsequent editions of the book.47 Critics also noted that Hellman had incorrectly described the use of the pumpkin in which Whittaker Chambers had hidden rolls of microfilm later used to convict Alger Hiss of perjury. While Hellman had insisted that none of the microfilm was ever useful, they pointed out that two rolls of it were in fact used as evidence at the trial.

  The “scoundrels” (some of whom Hellman identified as the editors of magazines like Commentary and Partisan Review, and many of whom had once been her friends) did not remain silent for very long. In accusing them of not coming to her aid, Hellman called their morality and decency into question. But their view of history was quite different from Hellman’s, and on that basis they refused to cede the high ground. In 1976, those who had once counted themselves among the New York intellectuals and their allies still perceived communism as a very real threat. They remembered the postwar period as a difficult moment when even those who had opposed McCarthyism felt that their first obligation was to challenge Stalin, who, in their view, constituted a powerful enemy of freedom and world peace. From the anti-Stalinist perspective, those who cooperated with the committees were heroes rather than collaborators. Those who denounced the committees were the real cowards. They deserved the contempt of all right-thinking Americans, not their gratitude. As William Buckley, an old-fashioned conservative, noted, anyone who was a communist in that period was complicit in the deaths of ten million people.48

  Beyond crude politics, the economic crisis of the 1970s played a crucial role in the reception of Scoundrel Time. Stagflation—the unholy combination of high unemployment and inflation—along with the decline of the industrial Midwest left economists in a quandary over how to reduce joblessness without increasing inflation. The old liberals of the 1950s who had once battled over whether centralized planning and the socialization of the economy was a viable alternative to capitalism now wondered whether some sort of industrial planning along with a greater attention to social justice and equality might improve the economic outlook.49 They were resolutely opposed by social commentators who insisted that such a return to socialist ideas posed a danger to the American way of life. Blaming the breakdown in self-discipline and individual entrepreneurship on the 1960s cultural revolution that advocated resistance to authority and promoted a new sexual and personal freedom, conservatives gathered under the umbrella of what would become known as neoconservatism. The most vociferous among them (including Encounter editor Irving Kristol, philosopher Sidney Hook, sociologist Nathan Glazer, and Hellman’s former friend Norman Po
dhoretz) linked America’s economic woes to its failure to confront the Soviet Union. America’s prosperity and safety, they argued, lay in a vigorously aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union that would revive free-market economies at home and abroad. Supporting traditional family and gender values at home and establishing democracy and free markets everywhere would save an America that had lost its way. Allying themselves with traditional conservatives and with liberal anticommunists, neoconservatives sought to foster a more stable world order in which the United States would play a leading role. By 1976, when Scoundrel Time appeared, neoconservatives were on the cusp of acquiring a powerful ideological presence. To them the book, in Nathan Glazer’s words, was more than naïve: it trivialized the real dangers of “an awesome power that was, after the defeat of Hitler, unquestionably the enemy of freedom throughout the world.”50

  Hellman had a very different view of history. She had never believed, and did not in 1976 believe, that communism constituted a threat to American freedom. To be sure, she had once thought that social justice would be best served by following the Soviet example, and into the sixties she still hoped that the Soviet Union could reform itself. But she had long ago abandoned any commitment to Stalinist Communism. She was an American patriot, convinced that the route to a nonracist and more egalitarian America lay in defending freedom of thought, the capacity to dissent, and curbs on the power of money. For all that she had briefly been a member of the CPUSA who now recognized the sins of Stalinism, she no longer advocated utopian beliefs that had once made sense to her and to millions of others. And she could not, even symbolically, kick a man when he was down. Though Hellman acknowledged three times in Scoundrel Time that she had wrongly believed ideas that she now rejected, her sense of decency, her code of loyalty, forbade her from turning on others whose intentions had been good. “Think of what it would be like,” remarked her goddaughter Catherine Kober Zeller. “She sees through the politics, hates herself for having supported it, but can’t say anything for fear that if she says it, it will look as if she’s betraying her friends.”51 After all, as she wrote in Scoundrel Time, “Whatever our mistakes, I do not believe we did our country any harm.”52

  To skeptics, Hellman’s stance seemed like rank hypocrisy. Had she simply been blind? She had, after all, early on attacked fascism (which in the eyes of many of the liberal anticommunists was simply another version of totalitarianism). How could someone “who pictures herself as a heroine defending intellectual and cultural freedom” defend a system now known to have destroyed millions of lives at the whim of Stalin, asked Sidney Hook.53 Scoundrel Time, they argued, was simply an obfuscation of Hellman’s longtime support of the Soviet Union and of the totalitarian policies of Stalin. Her work for “world peace” in the late forties and early fifties, they charged, was ample evidence of her political naïveté and of her continuing acquiescence to the communist line. How, Sidney Hook asked, could she have portrayed the Soviet Union to be peaceful and freedom-loving at a time when “dissenting or non-conforming intellectuals were being martyred in Communist countries?”54 Her silence in 1952, and her continuing silence in the sixties, provided tacit support for what President Ronald Reagan would label an evil empire. Either she was a hypocrite and a liar or she was, in their language, an unregenerate Stalinist.

  Hellman could not apologize for something she could not see. In her view, communism posed no real threat to the United States, but attacks on freedom of thought and speech did. Her position was reinforced by a turn in historical interpretation that occurred in the 1960s. A new group of revisionist historians led by William Appleman Williams, then at the University of Wisconsin, began to seek new explanations for U.S. military and economic involvement in the world. Particularly in Latin America and South Asia, they traced American foreign policy back to a relentless search for power and influence.55 These New Left historians suggested that the United States was as single-mindedly self-interested as any nation. Driven by economic impulses, the United States had followed its own ideological bent into the world, imposing on allies a vision of freedom and democracy that ran roughshod over the wills of indigenous peoples. The new view recognized the brutality of Stalinism and the failures of the Soviet system even as it acknowledged the Soviet Union’s territorial and ideological goals. It suggested not so much an apology for the Soviet Union as an effort to understand the dynamics of national self-interest. And there was the rub. Far from being an innocent defender of freedom, the United States, revisionist historians suggested, enacted a foreign policy as much in pursuit of power and economic influence as any in the world. This view both emanated from the ongoing war in Vietnam and fuelled opposition to it.

  Furious opponents of the Soviet regime held New Left historians at least partly responsible for undermining American security by ignoring the excesses of communism while they critiqued America’s search for power. The new truth, wrote former liberal Nathan Glazer, was inspired in great part “by the unending flow of volumes of apparently serious research revising the history of World War II and its aftermath.” Referring back to the McCarthy period, he emphasized the consequences of the research. “Young scholars now believe that the congressional committees investigating Communism represented a totally unjustified attack on the freedom of thought, speech, and action of progressive-minded Americans … and that those investigations posed a greater danger to this country’s liberties than Communism itself ever did.”56 These views, for which Scoundrel Time provided juicy evidence, could not be allowed to go unrefuted. As Richard Falk perceptively noted, “the success of Scoundrel Time would, if not challenged, endow its views of the McCarthy period in the early 1950s with an authoritative status.”57

  Hellman probably never fully appreciated the dimensions of the conflict into which she landed. Yet she enthusiastically endorsed historian Garry Wills, who her publisher suggested might write the introduction to her book. And Wills fully endorsed the new view of history. His lengthy introduction quickly became part of the problem—singled out by reviewers as proposing a biased and problematic view of the Cold War. In his view, that Cold War was incited not by Russian territorial aggression, not by efforts to impose communist regimes in Greece and Turkey, but by Truman’s efforts to appease anticommunists by imposing loyalty and security oaths on government employees. Wills believed that the loyalty-security program had encouraged the climate of fear that led directly to the flaunting of civil liberties by congressional committees and other investigatory bodies. In turn, the failure of liberal intellectuals to stand firm against McCarthyite tactics led the authorities to believe that they could trample the civil liberties of opponents to the war in Vietnam, New Left dissenters, and protesters against the Democratic convention in 1968. That, in turn, had given credence to Richard Nixon’s successful run for the White House and to the culture of surveillance that his administration sustained. To this extent, Hellman and the New Left historians held common ground.

  The parallels between Hellman’s ideas and those identified with revisionist history fueled the ire of Hellman’s critics—former liberals, traditional conservatives, and neoconservatives alike. In an influential piece, New York Times cultural critic Hilton Kramer identified Scoundrel Time as just one among “a new wave of movies, books and television shows” that were “assiduously turning the terrors and controversies of the 1940s and 1950s into the entertainments and best-sellers of the 1970s.” He traced this wave back to “academic historians” who had redrawn “the history of an earlier era along … often fictional lines.” “For a decade,” he argued, they “have been laboring to persuade us that the Cold War was somehow a malevolent conspiracy of the Western democracies to undermine the benign intentions of the Soviet Union.” The point of Scoundrel Time, in his view, was “to acquit 60’s radicalism of all malevolent consequences and to do so by portraying 30’s radicalism as similarly innocent, a phenomenon wholly benign, altruistic and admirable.”58 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., historian, political adviser to presidents,
and a friend and longtime dining companion of Hellman’s, dropped Kramer a note declaring his wish that the article “could be made required reading for everyone born after 1940.”59 Hellman, who had dined with Schlesinger just the day before the article appeared, promptly wrote him a scathing note: “In my cricket book, you don’t sit next to people at dinner in apparent friendship and not tell them that you have publicly embraced their attacker.”60 Schlesinger forwarded it to their mutual friend, Joe Rauh, with a one-sentence comment: “Now I am on the enemies list too.”61

  As in so many instances, Hellman had turned herself into the center of a controversy waiting to happen. She had challenged the morality of the anticommunists who had betrayed their nation by refusing to defend freedom of speech. She had called them scoundrels, accused them of undermining the values they held dear. In reply, the neoconservatives unleashed all the fury of morally wronged victims, the personal venom of opponents bent on destruction. These attackers were not after her to tell the “truth”: what they wanted was a confession of “sin.” What right did she have to claim moral authority, this woman who could not get her facts straight, who placed herself at the center of a struggle in which she was at best a peripheral player? Why believe someone who still publicly denied her participation (and that of her longtime friend and companion Dashiell Hammett) in the Communist Party, who hypocritically overlooked the millions of murdered and destroyed lives in Stalin’s Russia even as she wept over her own lost financial security? What right did she have to claim that she had done no harm? By refusing to cooperate with the investigations, some asserted, she had reinforced the credibility of a totalitarian system and prolonged the life of McCarthyism. If this fight was to be fought on the basis of virtue and morality, then Hellman’s virtue was fair game.62