Replies

What happened after they testified? Were they arrested? Imprisoned? What?

I don't remember reading that anyone was imprisoned, though some certainly should have been. Alger Hiss for example, who was a fairly top level official at the State dept, IIRC, and Whittaker Chambers who outed him was given a pretty hard time. (BTW, if anyone here is looking for a great read, take a look at Chambers' book Witness---some of the best writing I've read.)

Richard Nixon took Chambers' side and was vilified by the left forevermore. It took over 20 years to bring Nixon down, but the left finally got him in '74. He was an enemy of the left from the time of the Hiss-Chambers affair in the early 50s.

Some of the Hollywood types who were called by McCarthy to testify were blacklisted in Hollywood, and didn't work for a number of years, like Dalton Trumbo, though I think he and other writers wrote under pseudonyms.

McCarthy might have been an unsavory and unpopular guy personally, but he was on target with this. I was amazed when I started to read about all this, after all the years of propaganda that I had ingested, and then I began to see what the real story was.

Alger Hiss for example, who was a fairly top level official at the State dept, IIRC

You are going to be embarrassed when you recall how "top-level" Alger Hiss was, and then you'll be mad about what access he had to classified information about sources and methods.

Sigh. We won anyway.

/john

Well, it sounds to me as though the Hollywood vs Communism struggle has been revamped and the new screenplay reads Hollywood vs Hateful Right Wing Conservatives. Very canny. I must say, I usually consider Hollywood denizens to be meat-with-eyes, but this was clever of them, to paint themselves victims of what amounts to no more than being "outed."

How many of them today would object if the US enacted a "Zero Tolerance for Hate" law and set up tribunals to see who belonged to the KKK or some "right wing" Christian "Homosexuality-is-a-sin" group? How many of them would proudly point fingers and say "I saw HIM going into a church!!"

I was a school kid during the Watergate scandal--but I remember our Social Studies teacher going over the unfolding events with our class. She was in clover at the news---grinning and claping her hands together.

There was a really curious kid in our class named Tommy--and he kept asking our teacher why Nixon was such a bad man.

She said: Because Nixon made a whole lot of people feel like they were not really Americans once, just because they thought differently! That's why Tommy!"