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THERE
is an old Latin proverb; Veritas Magna est et pravelibit: The
Truth is Mighty and Will Prevail. Maybe so. Question is: can the truth,
irrevocably and definitively exposed after 52 years, finally prevail
and bring justice to the memory of the most unfairly maligned man in
modern history? That question arises with the publication of a fascinating
new book, Hollywood Party, by Kenneth Billingsley.
Its subject? The late Joe McCarthy, junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin
and chairman of the deeply loathed early post-WW2 House Committee on
Un-American Activities, set up to investigate Soviet penetration and
subversion in the US Government, labour unions and Hollywood before,
during and after WW2.
Working on KGB documents recovered from Soviet archives - which naturally,
McCarthy never saw - Billingsley discloses just how far powerful men
and women in Tinseltown, the people behind such hugely popular box office
hits as Spartacus, On the Waterfront, High Noon, The Philadelphia Story
and dozens more, were prepared to go in their efforts to help advance
Stalin's foreign policy objectives, up to and including undermining
their own country.
Very early on Stalin identified Hollywood as one of his top five US
targets. Quite correctly. Countless producers, writers and stars all
proved willing to combine and connive at brainwashing the world about
the marvels of the Soviet system. "Message" films such as Mission to
Moscow, Song of Russia, North Star and scores of other productions did
more to glorify the USSR than the Moscow propaganda machine had any
hope of doing.
Where did McCarthy come in? What we know now is that in January 1947
three men went to McCarthy's office with a 100-page FBI report detailing
Soviet espionage activities in the US Government. The State Department
was given that report sometime before, but ignored it. McCarthy, a former
circuit court judge with a distinguished war record, agreed to take
the report to the American people. So the House Committee on Un-American
Activities was born.
McCarthy did not succeed in exposing the full ramifications of Soviet
penetration of US society. What he did uncover was sufficient to blow
the whistle on the most successful secret war ever waged by one government
against another. We know now that the Roosevelt Administration was quite
literally crawling with Soviet agents.
Unbelievably, the Soviet apparatus seeking to subvert America included
the No 2 man in the State Department, Alger Hiss; the No 2 man in the
US Treasury; Harry Dexter White; the No 2 man in the Office of Strategic
Services (predecessor to the CIA) Darna Lee: and, most amazingly of
all, the No 2 man in the White House, Harry Hopkins.
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In
his book, KGB: The Inside Story, Oleg Gordievsky, disclosed that the
KGB considered Harry Hopkins as "the most important of all wartime agents
in the US."
Exactly as with the State Department, Hollywood was shot through with
communists, fellow travellers, dupes, idiots and agents. The HCUAA hearings
began in 1947 and continued intermittently until 1956. McCarthy stunned
the world with his charges that communists riddled the fabric of the
US government, the labour unions, Hollywood: moles guilty of treason,
sabotage and subversion on the grand scale.
It was when he moved in on Hollywood that the smear machine began cranking
up. He was depicted as a political troglodyte, a reckless fanatic who
caused untold grief and injury to innocent persons, who soiled the good
name of the US. He was accused of using the Big Lie, of Red-baiting,
of political witch hunts, of guilt by association, of disregard for
due process, of using unsubstantiated charges.
Was McCarthy wrong in his pursuit of Hollywood Reds? Absolutely not.
He was instinctively right. There was something terribly rotten in the
whole US system. The real story about McCarthy is that he was hated
and vilified, not because he attacked the innocent, but because he successfully
exposed the guilty. He went after card-carrying communists busy assisting
in the expansionist goals of Soviet foreign policy and dedicated to
overthrowing capitalism. Not to its credit, recent disclosures indicate
that the US government itself displayed great reluctance to release
information it had held for upwards of 50 years which would have vindicated
McCarthy and shown him to be the victim of an unparalleled character
assassination instigated and operated by Soviet agents.
Through all the whipped-up hatred, top politicians - right up to the
President - watched McCarthy's career incinerated, did nothing while
he was hounded to death, all the time with ample proof in their hands
that the Rosenbergs were indeed guilty, that Harry Dexter White, Laughlin
Currie, Alger Hiss and so many more were indeed active Soviet agents.
When taxed on his failure to help expose Soviet infiltration of the
US Government, Lyndon Johnson replied that he could not possibly associate
himself with such a campaign: were such information to be made public,
"the Democrats would be driven from power for generations."
A significant figure in subverting Tinseltown was one Ella Winter. In
1938 Winter married wealthy screenwriter and fellow communist, Donald
Ogden Stewart, the man who wrote The Philadelphia Story, which earned
both him and Cary Grant an Oscar. In Stewart's imperial mansion Winter
pursued her crusade for Stalin, recruiting such luminaries as Charlie
Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall and Marlon
Brando.
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