The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia (54 page)

In Los Angeles, 20th Century Fox organized a reception in Khrushchev’s honor—a glittering occasion attended by Hollywood’s leading producers, directors, and movie stars. The rotund Khrushchev happily posed for cameras surrounded by scantily clad showgirls from the set of
Can-Can,
with Shirley MacLaine and Frank Sinatra lending a touch of glamor to what was essentially a public relations campaign. One week later, just hours before his plane left for Moscow, the Soviet leader broadcast a live speech on American television:
“Everybody in the Soviet Union wants our two countries to live in peace, everyone wants peaceful co-existence . . . What do we have in mind? To abolish all armed forces completely . . . Everyone in the Soviet Union enjoys real freedom . . . Good-bye, good luck, friends!”
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Three years earlier—with Khrushchev’s approval, and to lend “fraternal proletarian solidarity”—Soviet tanks had crushed the democratic uprising in Hungary. Three years later, the Soviet premier would precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction. Those who saw Khrushchev only as a rotund, smiling, red-faced peasant perhaps had second thoughts. Next to Stalin, of course, he appeared to be a saint.
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ON JULY 13, 1956, five months after Khrushchev’s revelations and a month after the “Secret Speech” was published in
The New York Times,
Paul Robeson appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee. No hint of apology was forthcoming from Robeson, who claimed forgetfulness for his long years of obeyance to Stalin, before launching into a counterattack of his own:

 
In answer to direct questions on his membership in the Communist Party, Robeson pled the Fifth Amendment more than thirty times, until the hearing was adjourned. Paul Robeson’s steadfast campaign for civil rights in America made his acquiescence to Stalinism all the more tragic. There were many American communists who recanted once they understood the nature of the crimes committed in the USSR. There remained, however, a psychological conflict among those who understood, yet whose pride or ideology could not allow them to admit their error. Robeson’s actions and speeches had justified, and therefore contributed to, the crimes of Stalinism, and for that at least, he was morally culpable.

In 1961, after his passport was restored by a Supreme Court ruling, Paul Robeson was free to travel once more to the Soviet Union, for his first visit since the death of Stalin. In a Moscow hotel room, the American singer attempted to end his life by slashing his wrists with a razor blade. His son, Paul Robeson, Jr., would later assert that his father’s mental breakdown was fashioned by a CIA agent who drugged his drink at a cocktail party earlier that night. An alternative, and perhaps more likely, explanation was that Robeson had succumbed to the same spiritual despair as Alexander Fadeyev.

After an extended convalescence in London, Robeson returned to America on December 23, 1963. According to press reports, at the airport, he looked “at least fifty pounds underweight, his face gaunt and his hair gray . . . The basso profundo that thrilled the world was silent.” When his wife, Eslanda, died of cancer in 1965, Robeson retreated still further into isolation. The rest of his life would be scarred by a series of nervous breakdowns, bouts of depression, and a complete withdrawal from society. His last decade was lived as a recluse in his sister’s house in Philadelphia, until his death on January 23, 1976. It was, according to a former friend, “a great whisper and a greater silence in black America.” The honorary catcher of the American baseball team of Gorky Park was gone.
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OF COURSE, THOSE without ideology, only cynical expedience, suffered no particular trauma at all. In the early 1950s, Joseph Davies was briefly caught up in the McCarthy era, forced to defend the movie
Mission to Moscow
from the Un-American Activities Committee attacks, while his marriage was plagued by rumors that Marjorie Davies had interests elsewhere. Ever the chameleon, Davies emerged mauled but relatively unscathed, having learned to brandish his credentials as a corporate lawyer and businessman:
“I was one of the birds who in the 1920’s put great business combinations together . . . all strictly within the law . . . and I made a fortune doing it.”
But his access to presidential power was cut off, and without this rejuvenating oxygen, Joseph Davies grew old and sick very quickly. It was as if he had nothing else to live for.
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In 1952, Marjorie Davies sued for divorce, citing “mental cruelty and incompatability,” her husband’s “whiplash temper,” and “the lack of basic straight thinking that was awfully hard to live with.” Three years later she married the nephew of Davies’ first law partner. After her fourth marriage, Marjorie moved into another Washington mansion, which she filled with her vast collection of Russian art brought back from Moscow during the Terror. And in the garden, just outside the back door of the house, she had a shelter dug to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. At the Hillwood mansion, she lived quietly until her death in 1973. In her will, Marjorie Merriweather Post instructed that the mansion be converted into a museum and opened to the public. The collection included the vast socialist-realist painting
Peasant Holiday in the Ukraine,
which Joseph Davies had given her as a fiftieth-birthday present in 1937. The painting depicted a colorful, bucolic Ukrainian peasant scene, which the museum’s curator carelessly chose to hang in the public dining room. Occasionally this cultural negation of a famine that killed five million attracts the complaint of an elderly Ukrainian American visitor, but there it remains, waiting for someone with sufficient grace to take it down.

In the years after his divorce, Ambassador Joseph Davies was left alone in Tregaron, the Washington mansion bought by Marjorie, who generously placed his name on the title deed. There was enough Russian art to fill this house, too, and the portrait of Stalin in its silver frame to remind the ambassador of his former proximity to power, if not the lives he had saved. His children from his first marriage attempted to contrive a reunion with his first wife, but by this stage Davies was already a sick man. After months of invalid care, he died on May 9, 1958, of a cerebral hemorrhage. His offer to gift Tregaron to the nation as a vice-presidential mansion was declined.
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Walter Duranty had died just six months earlier, at the age of seventy-three, in retirement in Orlando, Florida. The former “King of Reporters” had stopped writing years earlier, and was living in genteel poverty before the onset of a sunset romance with a rich Floridian widow, which ended in a marriage at his hospital deathbed. Duranty’s son and former mistress had been left behind in Russia, and were long forgotten. Many years later, Victor Hammer—the brother of the notorious American businessman Armand— told an investigative reporter that Duranty had reported regularly to the OGPU throughout his period working for
The New York Times
in Moscow. According to Victor Hammer, Duranty had a weakness for young girls, and Victor’s brother, Armand, had kept him supplied. By his death in October 1957, the name Walter Duranty meant very little to the American public.
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During the McCarthy period, while dining with a friend one night, Henry Wallace confessed that he did not want to live in America anymore. The treatment he was being subjected to, he said, was hardly what any citizen, much less a former vice president, should expect. By the outbreak of the Korean War, Wallace had taken to making lengthy public apologies for his former support of the Soviet Union. He now understood that the “Soviets wanted the Cold War to go on indefinitely, even if it led to a hot one.” His nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover, remained unimpressed: “Old bubble head has seen the light at last, but all too late.” Henry Wallace then retreated to the isolation of his farm in upstate New York to cultivate strawberries and gladioli. He died in the midsixties of Lou Gehrig’s disease; after a long illness and unable to speak, he was forced to communicate with his final visitors on a slate.
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Before his illness, Henry Wallace had given a long interview to Columbia University. As an old man, he spoke of his earliest memories, of getting lost in a cornfield in Iowa, aged three or four. The young Wallace had wandered deep into the field, where the sand burrs got into his socks and started to hurt his feet. And then he began to cry: “Where is mama’s baby? Where is mama’s baby?” until his family heard his shouts and found him. Later Wallace told his interviewer how he had genuinely loved Franklin Roosevelt for his “capacity to radiate joy and confidence to other people,” and how he often dreamed that the president could rise up from his wheelchair and walk. In the last days of his illness, perhaps Henry Wallace found comfort in his recurring dreams of walking beside Roosevelt, the man with the “golden heart.”
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HENRY FORD’S FAMOUS good health deteriorated soon after he suffered a stroke in his River Rouge cinema while watching the black-and-white newsreel taken at Majdanek concentration camp at the closing stages of the war. In the theater it appeared that Ford, the former publisher of
The International Jew,
had a sudden awareness of the consequences of his actions. The silver-haired billionaire had once given away the violent pamphlets against the Jews, saying proudly, “This came out of our factory.” The Nazi propaganda machine had turned his book into a bestseller in Germany, reprinting it throughout the Holocaust, by which time it was translated into a dozen languages and distributed throughout the occupied capitals of Europe, with a swastika on its title page. The world-famous figure of Henry Ford had lent his name and reputation to the anti-Semitic cause, paving the road to the Holocaust like a highway for one of his cars, which led its victims on the short journey to the crematoria. For Ford’s words, once written, could never be taken back.
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Two years after suffering his stroke, Henry Ford died on April 7, 1947, at his home at Fair Lane, on the banks of River Rouge. On the day of his funeral, the bells of Detroit City Hall and every church in the city tolled, and the whole state of Michigan stopped to observe a minute’s silence for America’s greatest industrialist. In all the eulogies, what was never mentioned was that Henry Ford had been one of the few American businessmen to have maintained ties with both totalitarian regimes simultaneously.

Three years before his death, Ford had sent a message to Joseph Stalin, brought to the Kremlin by Eric Johnston, the young head of the American Chamber of Commerce. From the record of the meeting, preserved in the Russian state archives, we know that on the evening of June 26, 1944, Johnston told Stalin that he had talked with Henry Ford in Detroit before his departure and that Ford had requested he pass along his personal greetings to the Soviet leader. Stalin replied that he had not expected to receive greetings from Henry Ford: “We owe Henry Ford a lot, he helped us to construct automobile plants.” At this point, Johnston conveyed Ford’s willingness to help the Soviet Union again in the future, to which Stalin answered that “the Soviet Union would repay Ford for his help,” just as they had done in the past. The Soviet stenographers then recorded that Johnston complimented Stalin: “In his opinion J. V. Stalin is in fact a real businessman.” To which Stalin replied that “if he was born in America and lived there he would probably have really become a bu sinessman.”
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The Ford Archives, almost a mile of boxed records of Ford Motor Company history, were stored at Ford’s mansion in Fair Lane, Dearborn. According to the memoirs of Charles Sorensen, Henry Ford liked to roam among them in his old age. The octogenarian industrialist would step past the records of those people he had dispatched around the world to do his bidding. Hidden in these archives lay the single slip of paper that had issued a Ford badge to Sam Herman, the defining gesture which began the Herman family’s emigration to the USSR. And there, too, were the names of the other former Ford autoworkers who had followed him on their doomed journey to Nizhni Novgorod.
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