A Good American Family

by David Maraniss

  This was Elliott’s trinity of life: Mary, baseball, and writing. Politics came in fourth, though it was connected to the others in various ways and at times overwhelmed all else. He loved to write, and Mary urged him to keep a journal of his army life, but he said his letters to her would have to suffice. “I will try to make my letters to you take the place of keeping a journal, because I won’t be able to do both. I feel that my strongest inclination and talent are for reportage, essays, criticism, and historical writing. And you simply don’t knock those out in five minutes, or every time you get a couple of minutes.” Yet he started writing letters to her every day, sometimes twice a day, a practice he would maintain whenever they were apart for the next three and a half years; they were part romance, part journal, part reportage, part essay, part criticism, and part history. In them, he evinced the practiced sarcasm and wise-to-the-world attitude of a soldier, yet rarely lost his native idealism and optimism.

  “I don’t know exactly what kind of place America is going to be after the war,” he wrote in one letter that June. “But I do know, in general, that it’s going to be a healthier, happier, and more secure country, because the threat of external aggression, which now bears down so heavily, will be removed and it will be free to pursue the labors of peace. I look forward, with unmitigated delight to our reunion and our labors after the war. For two high-spirited and zestful young people like us, postwar America should provide a great many opportunities to lead constructive and joyful lives.”

  * * *

  AS A MICHIGAN man in the army, a zestful young Elliott had ambitions beyond his status as private first class. He wanted to be an officer, maybe in the Signal Corps, drawing on the semaphore skills he had acquired as a Boy Scout in Coney Island, or go to cadet school and become an aviator. By early June he had filled out his application for Officers Candidate School. The orderly room would finish off the paperwork, he told Mary, “then it will go to my squadron commander, Captain Kates, who has informed me that he will approve it. Then it goes to the base commander for his approval, then to the board who will examine it and call me in for a verbal interview when they have another session. Still a long way to go yet, as you can see, but at least they are beginning to move.”

  Elliott sensed that “something was in the wind,” and he had every reason to be optimistic. In his initial assignment at Edinburgh Field, he had achieved the highest score in the radio detachment on an aptitude test involving sending and receiving coded messages on the wireless radio, getting 77 out of 78 units correct. No sooner had he started that job than the Base Operations officer pulled him from the squadron to work with him on a sensitive assignment providing pilots with information for their flights through analytical work on “the radio, telephone, maps, charts, geographical and political documents.” Along with good efficiency reports, he bolstered his OCS and cadet school applications with letters of recommendation from former teachers and bosses. Stuart Portner, supervisor of the Michigan Historical Records Survey, where Elliott worked as a Michigan upperclassman, wrote that “his efforts merited high praise in many quarters and his writings—cogent, profound, and brilliantly phrased—were reproduced widely.” Harold M. J. George, chief copy editor at the Detroit Times, called Elliott a credit to his staff and said his old job awaited him upon his return. “Mr. Maraniss’ character is above reproach and his habits exemplary. It is a great pleasure to me to recommend him for any consideration his superior officers might give him.” And Carlton F. Wells, professor of English at Michigan, said that he knew Elliott from class and extracurricular activities and “regarded him as a young man of exceptional ability, intense purposiveness, and a steadfast devotion to his convictions.” If Elliott wanted to be an aviator, Wells added, his convictions “will make him a better combat flier for the fact that, in this war, he had long seen (long before the average American realized it) the far-reaching, inescapable conflict represented by ruthless Nazism.”

  (Yes, but with a caveat, I thought to myself as I read this last statement in the FBI files. My father had seen the threat early, supporting Bob Cummins and the other young American leftists who fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, but he rationalized the threat later, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and returned to his original position on the inevitability of conflict only after Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, attacking Soviet-held territories on the Eastern Front and drawing Russia into the war. It was then that he readied himself to volunteer as soon as the U.S. entered the war. Yet that too can lead to a misrepresentation. It was not that my father felt more strongly about the Soviet Union than his own country. In all of his previous writings, he showed a deep belief in America and the American promise. He was a patriot in his own way.)

  As it turned out, something else was also in the wind during my father’s balmy days in Trinidad. The Military Intelligence Division of the War Department had launched an investigation into his background. The documents from that investigation were later sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and I eventually acquired them through a Freedom of Information Act request in a supplementary bundle of documents that were part of his FBI file. The military intelligence investigation was launched in late July 1942 and went on through late November. Case B201-Maraniss was conducted by agents from the Sixth Service Command headquarters in Chicago. Special Agent W. F. Maranda was dispatched to Ann Arbor and Detroit, assisted occasionally by Special Agent Anthony Cuomo.

  Agent Cuomo checked records at the University of Michigan and found that Elliott had maintained a B average until the final semester of his senior year, the semester after he had married, when he received three C’s, two D’s, and an Incomplete. Cuomo also checked the National Youth Administration records at Michigan, which showed Elliott was paid forty cents an hour in 1937 for doing clerical work for the university bursar. Agent Maranda obtained Elliott’s employment records at the Detroit Times and reported that he started work there on June 25, 1941, that he belonged to the American Newspaper Guild, and that before that he had worked at the New York Post from June 1940 to June 1941 as aide to the executive editor at a salary of thirty dollars a week. Cuomo and Maranda checked with police departments and credit bureaus in both cities and found no blemishes on the records of either Elliott or Mary.

  Then Maranda began conducting interviews. He talked to Elliott’s colleagues at the Detroit Times. According to his report, copy editor S. R. McGuire said “SUBJECT’S honesty, character and integrity were above reproach. He described SUBJECT as quiet and retiring. SUBJECT was very liberal in his views and admitted being a communist to Informant. He kept company with a couple of boys from the University of Michigan who went to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. In spite of this, SUBJECT never made any remarks against this government, and tried very hard to get into active service. McGuire did not think that SUBJECT’S viewpoints were so deeply imbedded that they would sway his loyalty to this country.”

  Another copy editor, Guy M. Whipple, said he had worked with Elliott at the Michigan Daily, where they both were into radical politics, although Whipple said his own political views had “cooled off” since his university days. He told Maranda that he had helped Elliott land a job on the Detroit paper’s copydesk after he left the New York Post “in their big economy purge.” He described Elliott as “a smart fellow, well above average intelligence. He became too much interested in the Michigan Daily and let his school work ‘ride to hell’ after he became editorial director.” “In conclusion,” Maranda wrote, “Whipple stated that SUBJECT was an amiable fellow, easy to get along with and not the hot-tempered type. He was honest and above-board, and never made any derogatory remarks against this government. SUBJECT’S chief attraction was baseball.”

  George Weiswasser, another Times colleague, remembered Elliott expressing his liberal political and economic views a few times when he was handling stories. He told Maranda, “SUBJECT displayed his real loyalty to the United States on the first day of t
he war; the minute he heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist in any of the branches of the service and even took days off from work to accomplish his purpose. Although the Navy rejected him because of his eyesight, the Army accepted him.” Colleague Clyde Davis told Maranda that Elliott “possessed no communistic tendencies, never made any remarks against this government, and could be classified as a 100% American. He tried to get into the army and from the tone of several letters he had written to the boys in the office, he is trying hard for advancement.” While Whipple said Elliott’s main interest was baseball, Davis, according to Maranda’s report, remembered that “SUBJECT’S favorite pastime was playing poker.”

  Maranda concluded the newspaper interviews by talking to Elliott’s supervisor, Harold George, who had already recommended him as an OCS candidate. George repeated his previous comment, that Elliott had a job waiting for him when the war was over. He told the investigator that Elliott never discussed his political views in front of him, and he “would not say that Maraniss was a communist because the latter never said or did anything that would indicate that.”

  Pursuing the investigation in Ann Arbor, Maranda heard a different story. He interviewed Edson Sunderland, a distinguished law professor and longtime supervisor of the Michigan Daily board, who had “very distinct” recollections of Elliott—all negative. He said Elliott came to Michigan “primarily for the purpose of getting a key position on the Michigan Daily and succeeded in his purpose.” According to Sunderland, “he was thoroughly imbued with the Russian ideas and he thoroughly thought that the Russian experiment was the best thing in the world. He stood blindly for everything that was Russian.” Elliott’s tolerance of the American government, Sunderland told Maranda, was temporary, “pending our helping Russia.” He said Elliott was “always interested in radical things such as labor, strikes etc.” and that he was “kind of fanatic, controlled by emotions rather than by intellect.” He married a girl just like him, Mary Jane Cummins, and “went to pieces in his school grades after he married that girl.” He believed that Elliott “despised our government, the President, the administration, and anything that meant order and even looked upon the faculty of the school as a necessary evil.” Sunderland concluded that Elliott was not to be trusted in the U.S. Army, “even as a private.”

  At the Daily offices, Maranda interviewed the student who now held Elliott’s old position as editorial director. His name was Morton Mintz. As I leafed through the FBI file and came across the document of Mintz’s interview, it affected me in a different way from the other records. I knew Mintz from my own career in journalism. After Michigan he eventually worked as an investigative reporter at the Washington Post and was a legend by the time I arrived at the newspaper in 1977. He had done groundbreaking reporting on the dangers of several drugs, including the sedative thalidomide, which led to birth deformities when taken by pregnant women. For a few years, when I was the deputy investigative editor, Mintz was on the team of reporters I edited. He was fiery, fearless, and stubborn, and we got along well. I remember hearing from my parents during that time that they knew Mort from the old days, that he not only worked at the Daily a few years after my father but had been a classmate of my mother at Ann Arbor High. But there was more to the connection than I imagined.

  Maranda visited the Daily offices in the Publications Building on October 14, 1942. “Mintz gave the following picture of SUBJECT,” Maranda’s report began. “He was one of those who, before Russia was in the war, was a strong critic of President Roosevelt and his policies. He was very cynical about Roosevelt, the administration, and the fate of humanity but would fight like a dog for what he thought was right. He was extremely dogmatic and intolerant of any view but his own. Maraniss was very prominent in the American Student Union, dominated it, and used it to his own ends. He strongly supported the Russian invasion of Finland and never deviated one iota from the Communist Party line in his ideas and principles. His views dominated the editorial columns of the Daily for a long time, and did the paper more harm than good. Maraniss was a very skillful writer but very unsympathetic.”

  Mintz also told the agent that he had heard rumors that Elliott’s father had been killed in a strike and that he came from a very poor family, therefore he was “down on everybody.” His wife was also a “Red,” but the naïve type that was “taken in.”

  All of this led to Mintz’s conclusion that “he would not want Maraniss in any responsible position in his army.”

  This document was a lot for me to process. I understood Mintz’s dismay concerning the ideology my father expressed in his Daily editorials, positions that looked more errant from the perspective of 1942 than 1939–40. America was in the war now, “the good war” against the evil Axis powers, and my father’s old arguments that the conflict was “a clash of rival imperialisms” seemed at best stale and irrelevant. Mintz’s observation that my father seemed to change course in parallel with the Soviet line was undeniable. But in my reading of all of Dad’s editorials in the Daily, I disagreed with Mintz’s opinion that he was intolerant of any view but his own or that he was cynical about the fate of humanity. And I had no idea where he heard the rumors that my grandfather, Joe Maraniss, was killed in a strike, which was false. But most of all I wondered why Mintz, the journalist I knew to be skeptical of authority, a righteous antiestablishment maverick, decided to talk to military intelligence agents, in a sense joining the ranks of informants.

  I did not have to imagine an answer to that question. Mintz was still alive, at age ninety-five, when I first reached him by email in August 2017. I wrote that I had an uncomfortable matter to discuss with him but knew that his lifelong devotion to truth and clarity would make it easier. After providing him with Agent Maranda’s account of their conversation, I added, “I know it’s a difficult question, but I am wondering how you decided to talk to the agents about my father, whether you had a debate with yourself about doing it, and how you felt about it afterwards.”

  His reply came the next morning: “Dear David, It’s a very painful question. I can’t recall the details, but my best recollection is I was so troubled by Elliott’s views and conduct in that terrible time that I reported him to the authorities, believing, yes, that it was my duty to do so. I look back on what I did with shame.”

  That last sentence shook me again. My intention was not to shame Morton Mintz, far from it, but when I saw his response I realized that I had not fully considered how he would feel. In studying Victor Navasky’s seminal work, Naming Names, I had read many accounts of informants who felt righteous at the time but later suffered severe doubts and pangs of guilt about what they had done during the Red Scare. I had read this, but not internalized it until now. Just as I had failed to appreciate my father’s situation until I saw the imperfect S in his statement to HUAC, I had failed to put myself in his informants’ shoes. Perhaps it was presumptuous of me to try to absolve Mintz, but I felt I should let him know that I was not an aggrieved son and had no hostile intentions. “Dear Mort,” I wrote back. “Thanks for your honest answer. Please, please forgive yourself. My father came out of that trauma a better person and was very forgiving.”

  On February 21, 2018, I went to see Mintz at his apartment in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington. He was ninety-six by then, and still in good health, though his memory was uneven. He could not remember anything about his discussion with military intelligence and again expressed dismay over it. “I am ashamed that I did it,” he said, shaking his head. “Never done anything like it before or since.” He did have one memory that provided context. His mother’s sister, he said, was “a dedicated communist” who lived in Detroit and worked for Amtorg, a trading company that conducted international business for the Soviet government. Whenever that sister visited the Mintz family in Ann Arbor, Mort recalled, his father would not speak to her or even recognize her presence in the house. Mort’s parents both came from Lithuania and were “very liberal” but anticommunist.

&n
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  THE MILITARY INTELLIGENCE investigators conducted ten more interviews, two negative, the others positive or neutral. They also analyzed scores of editorials Elliott had written at the Daily, deducing that he was a liberal, a radical, and possibly a communist. In his final report, Maranda gave extra weight to the derogatory information provided by Edson Sunderland, noting that he was a highly esteemed law professor. Maranda concluded that Elliott was “communistic” and that his “toleration” of the U.S. government appeared to be temporary. The recommendation: “This Agent recommends that MARANISS should not be given employment in confidential work in the U.S. Army, but that he should be watched to determine the extent of his activities at the present time.”

  * * *

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE Christmas 1942, the commanding general of the Trinidad Base Command received a memo from the Military Intelligence Service calling for Elliott’s transfer in grade to a safe assignment in the medical detachment at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, where agents could more easily keep an eye on him. The transfer never happened. In fact the directive came far too late. Elliott’s work at Edinburgh Field had impressed his superiors enough that they had already approved him for officer training, though not for the Signal Corps or aviator school. “Soldier is no longer in this command, having been transferred to QMC, OCS,” Air Corps Capt. Howard A. W. Kates informed Washington. The initials stood for the Quartermaster Officers Candidate School at Camp Lee, Virginia. Elliott had been studying at the sprawling camp near Petersburg since October 5, long before Agent Maranda completed the military intelligence investigation. Captain Kates had paved the way for his acceptance with an endorsement that said he “demonstrated good qualifications of leadership,” scored well above the required level on the Army General Classification Test, and exhibited excellent character.