Richard Pells, Author | Contemporary Historian

Social and cultural history from a War Baby perspective

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Dalton Trumbo Story

August 18, 2015 by richardpells Leave a Comment

Trumbo is an upcoming American, biographical, dramatic film directed by Jay Roach and written by John McNamara starring Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Elle Fanning, Louis C.K., Helen Mirren and John Goodman. The film follows the life of Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo during the McCarthy era (based on the biography Dalton Trumbo by Bruce Alexander Cook).

I wrote a whole chapter in my 2nd book, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age, about Trumbo, McCarthyism, and the blacklist.  Trumbo was probably the most talented of the screenwriters who were blacklisted.  And Trumbo did “break” the blacklist in 1960 when he received credit for writing 2 films: Spartacus and Exodus.  But earlier, in 1957, he won an Oscar for best screenplay, under a false name, so he couldn’t accept the award!  It was very embarassing at the Oscar ceremonies that year.

Although Trumbo was not a war baby (born much earlier in 1905), the war babies grew up (or at least were adolescents) during the McCarthy era. In my book, War Babies: The Generation That Changed America, I describe Carl Bernstein’s experience of having FBI agents tail his family, including showing up at his Bar Mitzvah.  And I also describe being allowed to stay home from school in the afternoons in the spring of 1954 so I could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV.  Barney Frank had the same experience.  And many of us were told by our parents in the 1950s not to do anything that would leave a record, or put our name on a list, or get our pictures taken at a demonstration — lessons we all thankfully ignored in the 1960s.

If you’re interested in all this, there’s a terrific movie, released in 1976, called The Front.  It stars (but was not directed by) Woody Allen.  It’s a very accurate account of blacklisting in the television industry: most of the events in the movie actually happened, and almost all the actors and the director of the movie had in fact been blacklisted (as the final credits reveal).  You can probably get the movie on Netflix.  And it may be one of the best acting performances Woody has ever given.

Excerpt From War Babies: Carl Bernstein’s Memories of McCarthyism

August 4, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

For those war babies who were teenagers in the 1950s, the ominous images of Joseph McCarthy—in newspaper photographs and newsreels, and on television—were deeply imbedded in their consciousness and remembrances.  Judy Collins recalled that her father hated McCarthy for ruining people’s lives.  Faye Dunaway learned that many of her professors at the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts had worked in Hollywood or on television shows, but had been blacklisted for refusing to answer HUAC’s questions about whether they were members of the Communist Party.  Nor were they willing to identify
those they knew of having attended Party meetings.

My own mother allowed me in the spring of 1954 to stay home from school so I could watch the Army-McCarthy hearings on television. She believed, correctly, that I would learn more from watching Senator McCarthy’s brutal performance than from anything I might be taught in class.  Barney Frank’s parents felt the same way; he too remained home to watch the hearings.  The drama of the hearings, especially the confrontation between McCarthy and Joseph Welsh, was riveting.  Nothing matched them in intensity until the Senate Watergate hearings, broadcast on television in 1973.

Loyalties By Carl BernsteinYet no one among the war babies experienced the effects of McCarthyism more personally than Carl Bernstein.  In 1989, Bernstein published a memoir called Loyalties about his parents’ ties to the Communist Party and his own recollections of how much his entire family was hounded by the FBI in the 1950s.  His parents were not thrilled that their son was delving into their political past, and his father refused to read the book.  But they did answer his questions about what they had done and why.

Although Bernstein’s parents had withdrawn from Communist activities and meetings in the late 1940s, they did not officially leave the Party because they felt their departure would have been disloyal.  For this, they paid a heavy price.  They were purged from the labor movement to which they had given most of their time and energies during the 1930s and the war years, and were ostracized by their former friends (those who were blacklisted in Hollywood also found their friends avoiding them in the years of their exile).

Nevertheless, Bernstein’s parents continued to engage in left-wing politics, notably during the trial and imprisonment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.  Bernstein recalled that the Rosenberg case was a constant topic of dinner-table conversation, and that his parents served on committees to exonerate the couple or at least have their death sentences commuted.  On June 19, 1953, Bernstein and his parents spent the entire afternoon marching in front of the White House pleading for clemency. But nothing worked.  On the night of June 19, at 8:00 p.m., the Rosenbergs were electrocuted (I recall that it got very quiet in my house when the news came over the radio that the Rosenbergs were dead). Bernstein himself cried hysterically at the death of the Rosenbergs.  Yet he was also angry that his parents seemed to be risking their own lives; if the Rosenbergs could be jailed and executed, he feared, then so could his mother and father.

In fact, Bernstein’s parents were under persistent surveillance by the FBI throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Two agents even showed up at Bernstein’s Bar Mitzvah, though how his reading of the Torah could be regarded as dangerous was unknown both to Bernstein and the agents.  In 1954, Bernstein’s mother was summoned to testify before HUAC.  She was an “unfriendly” witness, in the parlance of the time, because she declined to name the names of her former associates in the Communist Party.  Bernstein’s father explained to his son that one took the Fifth Amendment in order to protect one’s friends, that this was the ultimate symbol of trustworthiness.

Eventually, in 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis,  Bernstein was able to read the FBI files on his parents.  He discovered that there was no information in the files that identified his parents as subversive or seditious to the United States.  Clark Clifford, President Truman’s closest adviser, later told Bernstein that Truman loathed Joseph McCarthy, and that Truman’s loyalty oath program and Attorney General’s list were just ways of neutralizing his political opponents on the right as well as justifying his anti-Communist foreign policy.

Still, Bernstein admitted in his book that he was exasperated at his parents for their commitment to a Communist movement that was dishonest, vicious, and (under Stalin) murderous.  But at the end of his memoir, Bernstein reminded his readers that he had “tried to learn what happened in our family, and to set it down.  In so doing,” he confessed, “I may or may not have committed an act of disloyalty. My mother and father never did.”

Bernstein’s memoir offered a harrowing portrait of what it was like to be the target of investigations and harassment in the Truman and Eisenhower years.  So the break-ins and enemies list during Watergate seemed to Bernstein all-too-familiar.  For Bernstein, the crimes of the Nixon Administration appeared to be a replay of the inquisitions during the McCarthy era, inquisitions that he had witnessed as an adolescent.

Yet for all the lives that HUAC and McCarthy wrecked, McCarthyism itself barely impinged on the culture of the 1940s and 1950s. Painters, architects, novelists, playwrights, and social critics felt little constraint in their work.  On the contrary, they contributed to a cultural and intellectual efflorescence that shaped the war babies’ values and view of the world.

War Babies:  The Generation That Changed America is now available online at Amazon.com

The Search For The Mole

June 16, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

Cold WarThe war babies were born during World War II.  Later, they lived through the Korean War, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  But the global conflict that dominated their lives was the Cold War.

Yet the Cold War, unlike the struggle against terrorism, had limits that offered a  bizarre sense of comfort.   Both the Americans and the Soviets knew what the limits were.  Neither were going to threaten the other’s sphere of influence (except in the one case where the Russians attempted to install missiles in Cuba in 1962).  Otherwise the Cold War was fought mainly with  proxies, particularly in Southeast Asia and Africa.

So for nearly forty years, the real conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was conducted between agents and spies.  Suspicions abounded.   Carl Bernstein‘s parents had been members of the American Communist Party.  Consequently, they were regularly followed by FBI agents, including two FBI-men who showed up at Bernstein’s Bar Mitzvah.  How reading from the Torah might be considered subversive  was unknown to Bernstein and the agents.  But the event did inspire in Bernstein a suspicion of government power that blossomed when he was reporting with Bob Woodward on Watergate.

The fundamental issue in this game of intelligence agents was who to trust, who might be a “mole”—a double or even triple agent.  And there were plenty of those: Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in America; Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby in Britain.

What sort of person would betray his country, his spouse, his friends, and his colleagues?  Usually not for money.  Mostly, the act of treachery was motivated by ideology and sometimes just the fun of the game.

No author wrote with more understanding and insight about the psychology of the mole that John leCarré.   In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley’s People (1979), and A Perfect Spy (1986), Le Carré was fascinated with the perils of deception and duplicity, and with the con-man who could fool anyone without their suspecting.  As a result, some of the novels were the most engrossing and sophisticated of the Cold War.  And many of them were made into superb movies.  Richard Burton gave one of his finest performances as Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  And after Alec Guinness inhabited George Smiley in the BBC production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People, le Carré admitted he could not write about George Smiley again because Guinness had “stolen” Smiley.

Eventually the Cold War spy novelists lost their subject when the Cold War ended.  Now the enemy was not other spies but terrorist groups that were difficult to penetrate.

Still, during the Cold War things could go awry – spies or no spies.  In that case, we might all be riding a bomb with Slim Pickens to oblivion.  So perhaps the last words should be given to Peter Sellers as the maniacal Dr. Strangelove:  Mein Fuhrer!  I can walk!

The Generation That Shaped America Over The Past 50 Years: War Babies

April 22, 2014 by richardpells Leave a Comment

World War IIIn 2009, I attended the 50th reunion of my high school class in Kansas City, Missouri, where I grew up.  All of my classmates had been born in 1940 or 1941.  And they all contributed brief biographies of their lives since graduation.  Most of them had become lawyers, doctors, teachers, or nurses.  While none of them were famous, they had led productive lives.

At the time I was writing a book about the impact of foreign cultures on the United States, called Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture—a book that was published in 2011.  Yet I was also beginning to think about my generation, the people who had been born during World War II, from 1939 to 1945—people I began to think of as “war babies.” No one had ever written about us as a distinctive generation with special contributions to make to American culture and politics.  People constantly referred to the “greatest generation” of the 1930s and postwar years, a term coined by Tom Brokaw who was in fact a war baby, born in 1940.  Plenty of books and articles had been written about Baby Boomers, but we were invisible in American history.

Except that we weren’t.

Once I began to do some research into my generation, I was astonished to discover how many major figures born during World War II became leaders in movies, music, journalism, and politics.  In film, for example, the war babies included directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and George Lucas; and actors like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Faye Dunaway, as well as a host of other actors who helped shaped movies from the 1970s to the present.  Similarly, almost all the music we associate with the 1960s was written and/or performed not by Baby Boomers but by war babies: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin.  In journalism, the war babies included the only two journalists in American history—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—who helped bring down a president.  War baby politicians include John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi (the first woman Speaker of the House), Barney Frank, Joe Biden, and Dick Cheney.  And among social activists on the issues of race and gender equality, the war babies numbered Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, Muhammad Ali, and Billie Jean King.

War Babies: The Generation That Changed AmericaSo I decided to write about this generation and their accomplishments.  The result is a book, soon to be published, called War Babies: The Generation That Changed America.  I think anyone who buys and reads the book will find it a revelation, changing their views about who was important in transforming American life over the past 50 years.

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Author Richard Pells

Author Richard PellsRichard Pells has never been a traditional historian.  He is primarily interested in 20th century American culture—movies, radio, television, art, music, literature, and the theater, all of which are reflected in his five books.  Through his work, readers are treated to a history of American cultural life from the 1930s to the present.  More

Richard Pells’ Books

War Babies: The Generation That Changed America

Modernist America: Art, Music, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture

Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II

The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s

Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years

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