Before the Storm (20 page)

They had waded through a forest of pickets in order to watch what papers were calling the nation's most talked-about film.
Communist-Led Riots Against the House Committee on Un-American Activities in San Francisco, May 12—14, 1960
was better known by its informal title,
Operation Abolition.
HUAC claimed to have derived the nickname from the label “the Communist Party itself has given to its current, greatly intensified drive to have the committee abolished.” The events the film depicted were rooted back in 1959, when HUAC subpoenaed 110 Bay Area teachers for one of its road-show hearings. HUAC was a lunatic outfit; its latest project involved hunting down the officer responsible for withdrawing an Air Force Reserve training manual because it contained the claim that “Communists had infiltrated our churches” to “teach Soviet Gospel from the Pulpit.” HUAC was not popular in liberal San Francisco. When the targeted teachers' names were published in the local press, the outcry that ensued was such that the committee had to postpone its planned West Coast tour. By May of 1960, when HUAC finally rolled into town, a politically charged academic year was just winding to a close at UC Berkeley. A student began a hunger strike to protest compulsory ROTC participation. (President Clark Kerr responded by strengthening rules against students speaking on campus about “off-campus” issues.) The Congress of Racial Equality chapter picketed the local Woolworth's; students massed in a vigil outside San Quentin protesting the execution of Caryl Chessman; and when the Board of Regents prostrated themselves before J. Edgar Hoover after a university document criticized the FBI, the
Daily Californian
editorialized that
Hoover's FBI was America's own homegrown Gestapo. An anti-HUAC movement began.

On May 12 dozens of students went to San Francisco's City Hall expecting to be able to observe HUAC's public hearings. Barred entry, they lined up on an outdoor second-floor rotunda outside the hearing room and attempted a literal exercise of their First Amendment rights, delivering a document reading, “We petition this arm of the United States Congress either to move to a larger hearing room or to open its doors on a first come, first served basis.” Security officers were unmoved. The next day even more spectators were denied entrance to the proceedings. They beat on the doors and began singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After San Francisco's most open and unapologetic Communist, the wizened longshoreman Archie Brown, raised a cry from the witness table—“Open the doors! Open the doors! What are you afraid of?”—white-helmeted police closed in on him as he bleated, “Here come their goon squads!” The hearing room went up in pandemonium. A group in the back of the hall took up a rousing chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Outside, police pointed a firehose at the crowd of students, now sitting down civil rights-style. And, in a scene that looked like a visitation from some far-off world, white kids, most well-scrubbed and neatly dressed, were brutally washed down the stairs by firehoses. Slicing through fifties decorum as if through butter, they got back up and were washed right down again, the stairs now slicked by their blood.

HUAC subpoenaed news footage of the event. Representative James Roosevelt of California, FDR's son, had recently introduced a daring bill to end HUAC's congressional authorization once and for all. HUAC wanted to make a documentary demonstrating just how vital the committee's work remained—by demonstrating how the Communist Party had duped innocent students into working on its behalf.
Operation Abolition
began with a still of a document labeled “Communist-front Literature”—a speech delivered by Jimmie Roosevelt. It went on to explain that Students for Civil Liberties had issued a “directive” on the front page of the
Daily Californian
to sabotage HUAC hearings. A scene was shown of a kid defending himself against a cop's blows; but since HUAC assembled the shots out of order, it looked like he was assaulting the cop. The narration explained that the guerrilla attack on the police had been signaled by the singing of “We Shall Not Be Moved,” a song “lifted from the old Communist
People's
Song
Book.”

Operation Abolition
was little noticed until J. Edgar Hoover published his own report on “the successful Communist exploitation and manipulation of youth and student groups throughout the world today,”
Communist Target
—
Youth
(later made into a film narrated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy). In
a summer of left-wing student unrest on three continents, the idea that the Berkeley students had been duped by the Communists caught on. Private groups, first a trickle, then a flood, began screening Operation Abolition (the commercial film company that HUAC hired to produce it sold five hundred prints at $100 apiece). Soon it was being shown to entire staffs of cabinet departments. By the winter of 1960-61, its narrator, Fulton “Buddy” Lewis III, a young staffer on HUAC and the son of McCarthyite radio host Fulton Lewis Jr., and Herb Romerstein, an ex-Communist HUAC investigator, began touring it around colleges.

Thus the scene that January evening at Rutgers University.

It began when the MC, head of the county conservative club, rushed in late and announced, “I heard there were pickets from SANE here”—the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, a disarmament group—“and I wanted to see how you picketed while crawling on your belly.” (It was the same language Barry Goldwater had used before the platform committee in July.) He was answered by the first of the evening's many choruses of boos. The film was rolled, interrupted throughout by laughter, applause, jeers. Romerstein took the floor. “I hope that those students who have been brave enough to jeer in the dark would be brave enough to stand up in the light, give their names, and make their comments.” They were, and they did. Angry, passionate debate ensued: on Communism, on anticommunism, on civil liberties, civil rights, questioning authority, respecting authority—an evening of sweaty brows, flailing arms, and outbursts, ending four hours after it began when a dean ordered dormitory dwellers back in time for curfew.

Then Lewis and Romerstein packed up for the next school. The same thing happened everywhere they went—which wasn't supposed to be possible in consensus America. A history professor named John Higham had recently published an article in the liberal magazine
Commentary
called “The Cult of American Consensus: Homogenizing Our History.” In it, he complained that his colleagues were unaccountably bleaching out all the conflict in the American past—as if such conflicts weren't important to the story at all. He watched, surprised, as those colleagues proudly claimed the epithet “consensus historians” for themselves. Conflict in America, in those rare moments it occurred, was an epiphenomenon, they argued—a footnote, in the past as much as the present. The political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset published a book called
Political Man
whose final chapter, “The End of Ideology,” reported that domestic politics were now “boring” because “the fundamental political problems of the industrial revolution have been solved.”

It was a nice idea—and, since no one paid much attention to what politically active kids under the age of thirty were doing, it was catching.

The fifteen activists from Youth for Goldwater for Vice President at the Chicago convention whom Goldwater urged to make their group permanent did exactly that. They made their public debut as Young Americans for Freedom on January 2, 1961, picketing against HUAC abolitionists in front of the White House.

Their mentor had been instrumental in putting it all together. Marvin Liebman had begun a long romance with the Communist Party in high school; he joined the Army during the war, drew a dishonorable discharge for homosexuality, then settled down to what he thought would be a life of confirmed bohemianism in Greenwich Village. Desperate for cash, he took a job with a Zionist organization and found his calling. He designed a brochure, black with a jagged cutout that opened to reveal in stark white letters the words “HEBREW BLOOD.” The yield from the fund-raising campaign it announced broke the bank. Marvin Liebman began a new career. Soon he would also have a new ideology.

Liebman was taken on as an apprentice by top-drawer New York publicist Harold L. Oran. Oran asked him to help with a fund-raising campaign for a humanitarian committee led by Elinor Lipper, who had spent eleven years in a slave labor camp in Siberia. Liebman refused. “There are no slave labor camps in the USSR,” he told Oran. “The woman is obviously a fraud.” His boss asked him to meet her just once, as a favor. The two met for drinks at the Algonquin. Lipper calmly looked Liebman in the eye and related her experience in Stalin's camps. A wave of revulsion washed over him. He felt personally responsible.

The experience was a common one among former-Communist leaders of the right—Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, John Dos Passos, and Herb Romerstein, among others. A chiliastic struggle between light and darkness was unfolding, they had believed as Communists. Everyone was responsible to one side or the other. And when they realized the side they had thought was the bearer of light was really the embodiment of evil, no less convinced of the stakes, no less fervent, no less driven—Communists became anticommunist warriors.

What made this anticommumist warrior unique was that he had received the best public relations education money couldn't buy. He went into business for himself and became the right's P. T. Barnum, the publicity arm of National Review's literary revolution—maestro of the bipartisan committees, the testimonial dinners, the rallies, the full-page ads, the crowded letterheads with the preprinted signatures for committees with long names. His masterpiece was the Committee of One Million, which had supposedly collected a million signatures to keep Red China out of the United Nations.

Doug Caddy was one of Liebman's apprentices. Liebman persuaded Bill
Buckley to loan Great Elm, the family estate, as the site for an organizational meeting for their new conservative youth group on September 10. A call was posted from Liebman's Madison Avenue office to 120 conservative student activists and journalists. “Now is the time for Conservative youth to take action to make their full force and influence felt,” it declared. “By action we mean
political action!”
He sent another letter to his prime contributors' lists.

Almost one hundred students came to Sharon, Connecticut, that September weekend. For young conservatives who had discovered their idiosyncratic political faith from
National Review,
from ISI and Foundation for Economic Education pamphlets, from
Human Events,
who were ridiculed whenever they spoke up in class about the spiritual crisis of the West and against “peaceful coexistence” with a slave empire—for many of them, for the very first time they felt like they were not alone.

A disproportionate number of those who came were serious Catholics. Pope Pius XII had made fighting Communism a church priority in 1947 as Italy's first postwar general election approached—excommunicating party members, ordering propaganda films shown in village squares of Communists hurling church bells from their towers. In the United States the mandate was taken up in a thousand parish pulpits, and in church publications such as
Our Sunday Visitor,
The
Brooklyn Tablet,
and
The Tidings,
filled with dramatic tales of martyrs like Hungary's Cardinal Mindzenty and the heroes of the 1956 uprising there. Kids had the lesson reinforced on their round-screened Philcos and RCAs when they watched the heroic young rebels of Budapest burning portraits of Stalin in public squares and facing down Moscow's tanks with paving-stone barricades—and the Eisenhower Administration doing nothing, even though it was Dulles's “rollback” doctrine that had spurred them into the streets in the first place. The event was an epiphany shared by thousands of future anticommunist militants.

They read schoolboy equivalents of the Pope's encyclical
Divini Redemptoris
(“Atheistic Communism”)—James Michener's slim, stirring narrative of the struggle in Hungary,
The Bridge at Andau
(a Catholic Digest Book Club selection); Thomas Dooley's memoir of rescuing Catholics from North Vietnam,
Deliver Us from Evil;
Whittaker Chambers's
Witness.
They discovered
National Review.
They saw how John F. Kennedy was unthinkingly lionized by their parochial school peers (and New Dealer parents). They viewed the Democratic Party as a moribund establishment—especially if they lived in cities like Baltimore or Jersey City, where mobbed-up political machines choked liberty as surely as any Dixie courthouse gang. Fidel Castro, a former student at a Jesuit high school, noted that moralistic young Catholics made the best revolutionaries. Goldwater would soon discover the same thing.