The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [56]
Others brought additional prejudices into play. John Rankin, a senior congressman from Mississippi, sagely observed: “Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.” Against such men, McCarthy looked almost moderate and fairly sane.
Such was the hysteria that it wasn’t actually necessary to have done anything wrong to get in trouble. In 1950, three former FBI agents published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 celebrities—among them Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee—of various seditious acts. Among the shocking misdeeds of which the performers stood accused were speaking out against religious intolerance, opposing fascism, and supporting world peace and the United Nations. None had any connection with the Communist Party or had ever shown any Communist sympathies. Even so, many of them couldn’t find work for years afterward unless (like Edward G. Robinson) they agreed to appear before HUAC as a friendly witness and name names.
Doing anything at all to help Communists became essentially illegal. In 1951, Dr. Ernest Chain, a naturalized Briton who had been awarded a Nobel Prize six years earlier for helping to develop penicillin, was barred from entering the United States because he had recently traveled to Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, to help start a penicillin plant there. Humanitarian aid was only permissible, it seems, so long as those being saved believed in free markets. Americans likewise found themselves barred from travel. Linus Pauling, who would eventually receive two Nobel Prizes, was stopped at Idlewild Airport in New York while boarding a plane to Britain, where he was to be honored by the Royal Society, and had his passport confiscated on the grounds that he had once or twice publicly expressed a liberal thought.
It was even harder for those who were not American by birth. After learning that a Finnish-born citizen named William Heikkilin had in his youth briefly belonged to the Communist Party, Immigration Service employees tracked him down in San Francisco, arrested him on his way home from work, and bundled him onto an airplane bound for Europe, with nothing but about a dollar in change and the clothes he was wearing. Not until his plane touched down the following day did officials inform his frantic wife that her husband had been deported. They refused to tell her where he had been sent.
In perhaps the most surreal moment of all, Arthur Miller, the playwright, while facing congressional rebuke and the possibility of prison for refusing to betray friends and theatrical associates, was told that the charges against him would be dropped if he would allow the chairman of HUAC, Francis E. Walter, to be photographed with Miller’s famous and dishy wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller declined.
In 1954, McCarthy finally undid himself. He accused General George Marshall, the man behind the Marshall Plan and a person of unquestioned rectitude, of treason, a charge quickly shown to be preposterous. Then he took on the whole of the United States Army, threatening to expose scores of subversive senior staff that he claimed the army knowingly shielded within its ranks. In a series of televised hearings lasting thirty-six days in the spring of 1954 and known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, he showed himself to be a bullying, blustering buffoon of