Focus 580; The Culture of the Cold War

This is focused telephone talk program my name is David Ensor good morning and welcome back to our number two of our show in this part of focus we'll be talking about the culture of the Cold War. It is the title of a book they have is written by Stephen Whitfield who was our guest this morning in this part of focus. He's a professor of American civilization at Brandeis University and the book is about. It's really almost two books in a way. It is a in part a brief political history of the Cold War but it is also an account of the popular culture of the Cold War and the ways in which that mirrored the political concerns of the times. His book The culture of the Cold War is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. If you would be interested in taking a look at it we will be talking this morning with Professor Whitfield about some of the ideas in the book. And as you hear us talking you're certainly invited to call in if you have questions or comments. Our telephone number here locally is 3 3 3 W I L L or 9 4 5 5. Our toll free line which is good anywhere that you can hear us around Illinois or Indiana is 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. The

numbers are close but they're not exactly the same. Again the local number 3 3 3 WRAL and the toll free 800 to 2 2 W while. Professor WHITFIELD Hello. Yes hello Mr. Inge are you. Good thanks thanks very much for talking with us. Thank you. Let me begin with a question that I know is a large one and that is this is as you point out in your book in the post-war era there were certainly many countries where communists were a more potent or at least a more visible force in politics than they were in the United States. Yet it seems that nowhere else was the reaction as to the presence of communism both internal and external nowhere else was it as as strong and as strident as it was in the United States. So the question is why. Why do we react the way we did in a very tough one. I think part of the explanation has to do with certain views which were part of really the legacy of the post-war era having to do with notions

of American security notions of American omnipotence which I think it's certainly been reinforced by the military success in the second world war one totalitarian power of course the Third Reich had been defeated along with the allies. And there came to be a sense in other words a sort of natural assumption that somehow everything would turn out for the best. Only to realize that somehow yet another very powerful totalitarian nation. Which of course had been allied with us during the Second World War was now in some ways threatening us. Certainly in terms of foreign policy and its geo political aims as well and this was something that I think Americans had not really really been prepared for much of the propaganda much of the publicity concerning the Soviet Union during the Second World War had really been an effort to promote the notion that the Soviets were in some ways very similar to Americans.

And this came in some ways as a very considerable shock. There were also of course a number of post-war cases I'd grant that they in some ways have their analogues in countries like Great Britain as well which involved espionage which involved a logical conflict to his case of course the Rosenberg case all of these promoted the notion then that communism was a domestic danger as well. Even though as I pointed out in my book of course this was from endlessly overstated and exaggerated. Well I suppose that's a bit the point again worth making that for all of the time and energy that was spent in looking for Communists and the people who whose lives and careers suffer greatly because of that exercise we never really found any. We never found any domestically that were engaged in the sort of sabotage or terroristic operations which were often depicted in American popular culture such as television program

films. This is it seems to be a very very striking phenomenon that if you have a number of the Cold War films of the 1950s you have communists behaving in effect like. White gangsters gangland slayings and Rob out there was never anything like. So there what it seems to be a tremendous discrepancy between the sense of what domestic Amin is capable of doing of course of action on the part of your book. Then I really find fascinating is is the ways in which popular culture did mirror the concerns and the attitudes of the time and I don't want to don't want to minimize what I think is a very concise and scholarly account of the politics of the time because that's also a part of the book. But I find myself particularly drawn to to sort of this other facet of the book and in there there's one thing that to me that really really struck me and

it may be that I'm. I'm drawing the conclusion that you did not intend by the way you structured the book but the fact that there were two sections that are right next to one another and one is a section where you're talking about Mickey splain who was very very popular writer at the time as a matter of fact. Of the top ten fiction bestsellers in the decade of the fifties six of them were written by Mickey Spillane and that does not count. What is probably his most popular novel I the jury which was published before 1950 and I suppose everybody or a lot of people will be familiar with with Mike Hammer this detective character that Mickey Spillane created. And you have a section where you talk about sort of the the ethos of the of the hammer novel and then right next to that is a section talking about Joe McCarthy and the sort of one wonders whether you were intending to suggest that in some ways Joe McCarthy was a real life embodiment of some of the ethic of Mike Hammer.

Yeah. You've hit upon of course a tricky and possibly not very defensible. Let's say you're off story strategy here but it is an effort as you suggest to promote the notion that in fact they are of their own both the fictional character of my camera and the all too real senatorial presence of Joe McCarthy really inhabit something of the same mental and political universe and certainly in that sense are contemporaries in the sense of Billings greatest popularity more or less coincides with the period in which McCarthy was most on the rampage. But what I tried to suggest to him those in those two sections which is I think as you rightly noted was it wasn't where they were intended to be a parallel if the sense that in order to defeat domestic communism. That rules had to be broken in some of the niceties of due process which has usually been considered among the great glories of a democratic society. But these procedural rules were in fact the inhibitions on defeating the enemy that simply

could not be tolerated in a climate that seemed to be increasingly imperiled and beleaguered by that threat of domestic subversion. And I again have to reiterate the notion here that in the book that I've just published that I'm really talking about the danger of domestic subversion the threat of the coming of communism from abroad in terms of the military. Power of the Soviet Union was a very real one and I don't mean in any way to suggest that it was a creature of phantoms. What concerns me and what I've tried to write about is really the domestic fears. And both McCarthy who had no interest in foreign policy really and the fictional detective Mike Hammer created by Mickey Blaine are of course involved in domestic in defeating domestic targets and in combating domestic foes by means that are

essentially extralegal that just as McCarthy claimed to be defeating of trying to fight communism with the sleeves rolled up and created a kind of aura of brutality and violence around him at least in terms of its kind of general ambience. This is the world of course that makes billing that well and they both in a sense feel to a kind of more sinister underside of the American ability in believing that the old rules were no longer applicable in terms of. Protection of the rights of the accused. Oh there's one really wonderful quote that I wanted to read that you mention that must come out of a splay novel where he's talking about how you should deal with communists he says you don't arrest him don't treat him with the dignity of the democratic process of the courts of law. Do the same thing they do to you treat him to the inglorious taste of sudden death.

Yes pretty pretty vented sort of planes and splendid if enough or if I should reiterate perhaps an impartial defense Mr. Inge that if this is it works within a within the genre that of course would not satisfy the requirements of the American Civil Liberties Union. But if these are the sorts of works of fiction or fact. Play upon manifestly male mucky smo fantasy and of course are not intended to be legal text books but what I was trying to suggest in dealing so heavily in the book was blame was the notion that there's a politics of spoiling fiction as well that even if one grants that there is a kind of aura of Cruelty to such novels which really aim at appealing to certain male fantasy what's striking to me is that Blaine worked in the early fifties within a an anti-communist vein that I think would be far less common in this sort of genre really sub literary work later that

is. The enemies in a book like one lonely night are indeed communists whereas two decades later let's say they would have been third world terrorists perhaps two decades earlier they would have been. Ethnically oriented organized criminals. And it still aims work particularly one in the one novel published might want our works that play off the political concerns of the era that would be less intense later or sooner. Well I get to know the question the serious question the way that I keep coming back to how it is that that we at this time it manage to be such an accepted idea that to certain individuals the the Bill of Rights and those other sorts of legal stick niceties that that Mr. Hammer would like to brush aside yes I really did that there were some people to whom those things just didn't apply. That's right. This is you raise a very very good point which I really didn't

have a chance to elaborate on in the book. And that is the general respect that the majority of American citizens have toward the Bill of Rights which I think oscillates and I did not intend to suggest that somehow there was something peculiar or unique about the era of the 1950s and terms of a disdain for the Bill of Rights in dealing with the threat or the alleged threat of communist version. And but I think one would often have difficulty getting too many American citizens to acknowledge the. Notion of protections that are embodied in the Bill of Rights. I'm not in any way suggesting that in an earlier era there was significantly greater respect. I do happen to believe there has been greater tolerance of political and other forms of diversity since I'm liking it. But the fifties it seems to me was an era in which with regard to the issue of political dissidents on the left that there was far far less acknowledgement of the rights of the accused than of the rights of those who seemed to be politically different

and who were in terms of their behavior still operating within the law. But there was far less respect for their rights and there was good there than there really should have been. And that a figure like McCarthy very much played to that sort of concern which suggested that the Bill of Rights could be overridden. But I'm I'm in no way suggesting that there was anything markedly more intense about this period in terms of the respect according to the first tenement than in any other time only that it took this particular dimension in terms of the fear of domestic enemies. Our guest this morning in this part of focus is Stephen Whitfield He's a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and is the author of a book we're talking about in terms of the culture of the Cold War. It's published by the Johns Hopkins University Press if you're interested in looking at it we have a caller who's been waiting patiently here and who would welcome anyone else into our conversation if you'd like to ask question. Make a comment. Three three three W I L L is the

local number and toll free 800 to 2 2 W I L L that's the number to call and we do have somebody on that line right here. Hello. Oh well it's really a fascinating conversation. I am very much and very much interested in the old laughter but you know let's tell you I was a kid or teenager in the early 1950s and I remember a counter fire. Bron Yeah I live three lives in garbage out. Ex accidentally. But they able to have our inside they may be an American Communist Party by meeting the relatives of hell wear em up a blue or yes accidentally and by annoying her. I was able to actually meet a little bit of curly Flynn in the role of the lone fails and Xander Trachtenberg in some of the old old people. Yes and here are

some of these fascinating tales and the outcome of this it made me question just what did the bump in the line of that word spread and are some of our sun our own life or are they able to. Are untrue people prompting how the FBI have been blackmailed and caused people to lose their jobs and with employers and it was really really something and that's pretty distant now but it was just amazing the lengths that the FBI went to. To bond of these I consider harmless people. Tell you what I still like to go on. Flip flop Paul Robeson records and Martin proteome friend Peter Howard fry a Finn I really really

admire the only half hear about the Abraham Lincoln book or Rick Perry didn't have to say OK well thanks for the call you do have some reaction to that. Yes I may have some political disagreements along the line with but the caller because of my own sense of it is I think a little bit more complicated and certainly more ambivalent than the caller suggested. I certainly have a kind of residual sentimentality about many features of the old left. That is certainly the outrage against American injustice and much of the exploitation that I think has historically been true. The operations of the American economy and I certainly in no way condone or sanction the violation of the rights of all leftists. But I think the story is really a bit more complicated than that and I tried to suggest critically in the opening chapter of my book. The reason that it is more complicated than that is that the old left

I'm really here thinking here of course primarily of the Communist Party and its various satellites and members but the communists in some ways bore responsibility for what happened to them because they were themselves not champions of a of a free society and were themselves not champions of the notion of rights by which the innocent and the Guilty of course required protection. This is this is the complication really of the story which I think necessarily goes beyond romanticization and sentimentality toward the old left and that is that their view of civil liberties was itself entirely expedient. That is to say they were in favor of civil liberties in favor of the Bill of Rights when they needed protection when they were going after their own enemies at least rhetorically and program magically such as the Trotskyist movement. And during the Second World War all those who were against full championing.

Maximum war effort against the Axis powers they themselves showed virtually no respect for the rights of others. And I'm just trying to suggest that in the terribly intolerant atmosphere of the Cold War period that members of the old left themselves had no principled protections upon which to fall back because they themselves had been so implicated in in much of the disrespect for civil liberties of the earlier period and that even figures such as the gentleman mentioned such as Paul robes for all of his extraordinary talent and virtuosity for its versatility. He himself was in no way a champion of civil liberties except when it coincided with the program of the Communist Party which itself of course in this era was subservient to the Soviet Union so that when Robeson testifies in the mid-1950s before he way and he's asked about what we would now

call of course the labor camps of the Gulag Archipelago he claimed that the only prisoners who were in such camps if they even existed were fascists. And this is of extraordinary libel and slander against really the millions of helpless innocent victims of Stalinist system. And it does suggest it seems to me a morally far more complicated picture of. Of the fate of communism that I think we all are suggesting. Well let's talk with someone else we'll go here to lie number one. Hello. Hello. Yes yes. I'm interested in the change that's occurring within the Soviet Union which caused airstrikes. But one of the things that occurred to me is that contemplate this problem that he's got is the fact that one of our reactions to communism was probably racist. If you look at the way the Soviet Union was organized

it did accommodate the various races and religions and big groups and the like throughout a very diverse culture. Putting them more or less the same plane using the rationale that they're all workers in the struggle is between workers and capitalists not between workers among themselves because of race or religion or ethnic differences in our society which is capitalistic. I think we're also probably one of the most racist societies on earth and the capitalist system does lend itself very well to subjugation of different people races religions ethnic groups. Because they can simply be denied jobs and thrown into what preparedness call the

reserve army of the unemployed and of course if you've got to go to capitalists and beg for means of subsistence you're in a pretty vulnerable position. So I think our clinging to the capitalist system has a lot to do with our basically racist underlying motivation especially in the more crass way to support the capitalist system because labor unions themselves or potentially very racist. So I was wondering if you could comment on this story. Yeah I get it. It puts me in a position that suggests that I'm much more argumentative and stubborn than I really am because I would also disagree with the caller's views on this on these points as well. Both with regard to the character of the Soviet Union in terms of its own pluralism and in my opinion with regard to the American system as well that is the caller's suggestion that all the various ethnic

and national groups in the Soviet Union were put on the same plane. I think it's true but of course in my opinion highly misleading. But the plane that everybody was put on of course was one of subjugation to the power of the state and particularly the Communist Party so that not only was there very brutal suppression of the right of worship and of course the tremendous cruelty that was often shown to believers whether themselves Russian Orthodox the various Christian groups such as Baptists Jehovah's Witnesses deprive all of Jewish rights in the Soviet Union as well. All of this suggests something other than a notion of pluralism. The notion that somehow everybody is merely a worker but of course very active oppression of religious groups and similarly what we're seeing now in the case of the Soviet Union over the last couple of years amounts to efforts really to engage in the breakup of the Soviet Union on the grounds that it suppressed the national sensibilities and

instincts of groups ranging from the various Baltic states who were forcibly annexed and acquired by the Soviet Union by arrangement with Nazi Germany in 1939 in like 40. And even those groups that had been part of the Soviet Union ever since the 1920s. Such a very strikingly in the Ukraine Armenia and so on. What we're witnessing of course on television and reading in newspapers and what was even announced earlier in this program and NPR Music meant well if the notion here that distinctive national entity. After a period of over half a century do not want to be part of a system that allegedly describes them only as workers and only sees things in terms of class that their national feelings which had long been suppressed by Moscow and by the Russians themselves are now yearning for some version of autonomy and independence. Nobody of course knows for sure what direction this will go in or ultimately how healthy and

unhealthy it will be. But I simply think it's it's false to claim that somehow. That the Soviet Union has has managed to reconcile all the ancient rivalries and conflicts and feelings that can be attributed to national feelings to race nationality religion and so on. And by the same token I think the picture of the United States is much more complicated one than the caller suggests. There is of course a along in a very troubled and very bloody history of racism in the United States much of it of course can be ascribed to can be ascribed to economic conflict and economic desperation. But I think the actual pattern of ethnic and religious groups in terms of their own efforts to emerge from poverty and misery that this is in fact a much more complicated picture. Then the caller proposes that one finds particularly in the case

of certain Asian American groups of Japanese Americans Chinese Americans and certain others or in the case of Jewish Americans one finds now the much more favorable and much more encouraging picture in terms of ascent from lower classes in the sense from traditions of discrimination that existed earlier in earlier periods of American history. And I simply don't think that one can ascribe it to capitalism such that there are these tremendous variations in terms of the actual economic performances and achievements of groups that have usually been described in in racial terms. So I think in the case of the Soviet Union one has here the political imposition. A very powerfully authoritarian system that subjugated the natural feelings of various groups in what formed the view. And in the United States although one obviously has of the color quite rightly that

one has a very ugly history of. Racial hostility bigotry. The actual results as of 1991 are. Seems to me on the one hand more complex and on the other hand also in some respects more encouraging. But I think the caller's statement which we are about midway through our conversation here with Stephen Whitfield we'll talk some more with him in just a second and take some more callers. This morning our guest is Stephen Whitfield He's a professor of American civilization at Brandeis University and is the author of a book that we have been talking about this morning it's entitled The culture of the Cold War and it's published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Our phone lines are here open if you'd like to call in. Our telephone number 3 3 3 9 4 5 5. That's four champagne Urbana folks and we also have the toll free line that's 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5. Go back here to the phones and to the toll free line. Hello.

Good morning Stephen. Good morning. After World War 1 Well actually was when the war was winding down. The administration and all the advisors didn't know how they could employ all of these workers because we were in a war economy and they were the architect of the pool war with Senator Vandenberg from Minnesota. They had a big meeting. And he said what yes. Do you have to scare the hell out of the people so that they will be willing to support high taxes and to keep the the industries that produce the fuel implements of war going because it just like now most of our brains are in the defense plants. Are you acquainted with that article. Well there are a couple things I think. Sorry you probably meant to say after World War 2. I don't mean World War 2 Yes right and Senator Vandenberg was a Republican senator from Michigan right. It was Michigan. That's right. And the the context of his statement

was that he told President Truman to quote scare hell out of the American people end of quote. And that really have to do with the notion. That a bipartisan foreign policy with regard to the containment of the Soviet Union abroad required according to Senator Vandenberg the Truman if need be. Exaggerate. And you know you might say overly emphasize the immediate and urgent need to provide aid to Greece and to Turkey and to promote various other programs which included point for in the Marshall Plan which was established in 1949 as ways of ending the period. The history of American isolationism with which Senator Vandenberg himself had been associated and I believe that that was the immediate context not so much issues of unemployment or high taxes.

Then it was carried to extremes. Yes I agree with you about that. You know they found a Commie under every bed in every city for 25 or 30 years. Well I don't agree with you about that and my own sense of it is that the period of really the greatest hysteria and excessive concern with the problem of domestic communism is really within a fairly small phase which is to say from near the end of the 1940s when Senator Vandenberg made the statement that you correctly attributed. And I would say in my view the fears that we associate with domestic communism largely begin to evaporate by the early 60s. I'm very struck by the fact that when. President Kennedy was assassinated late in 1983 by someone who was widely identified as being a communist. I bet you had none of the McCarthyites rampages against

political dissent on the left that one would have had it seems to me 10 years earlier. I might add by the way that Lee Harvey Oswald growing up early in the 1950s favorite television program was the very one that I think Mr. Inge mentioned. I live three lives the Herbert for Herbert Philbrick. No television show. So it seems to me that one could look at the the relatively mild reaction and certainly very moderate response to the horror and the tragedy of President Kennedy's assassination by someone who was identified as a communist. But this strikes me as a reasonably clear evidence that the the fears that I have written about in my book that those fears had largely evaporated. But those words are swollen a pro-Communist. I'm not an authority on that. Whatever I've read on the subject suggests that he was but this is an area of such extraordinary controversy and disagreement that I'd better duck that particular question just. On the sincere

grounds of ignorance. But it was certainly the fact that he was widely believed to be so and that the Warren Commission so sad without it seems to me provoking the the notion is as you yourself said of looking for a communist under every bed. And I was out in the cold war was over when I asked another question. You know Johnson had the most to gain by the death of Kennedy and I am always believed maybe Johnson didn't himself have a hand in it. But I think some of the people that were around him from Texas might have had a hand in it. If you look back at history you'll find out after Johnson got to be president all the defense plants that are over in Texas right now his Are You think there's a connection there. Again I would have to plead ignorance but from what I have read on the subject no no trail of evidence has ever led to the Vann vice president certainly Texans gained when Johnson became president just as Texans gained

tremendously because of Johnson's own extraordinary energy and resourcefulness as a congressman and senator in the 1930s and 1940s and early 50s. Given that I really don't think that there has been ever any serious unchallenged evidence that would suggest that there was any link between those two. Do you know how he controlled the Senate. He had a little black book with a lot of skeletons in it yes. And he could he could expose just about everyone in the Senate and the Congress and yes Johnson of course is an extraordinarily complex figure who has been the subject of Robert care as recent two volume biography that makes him both extraordinarily monstrous in my view and at the same time as gifted as clever as intensely talented a politician as perhaps our country's ever produce that is if you if you read carefully the account in Carol's biography you find it almost unimaginable that

anybody could ever have successfully bamboozled or defeated it Johnson he was so. Unbelievably canny and resourceful and tenacious. But I think although Johnson may be responsible for any number of things that we would find reprehensible and extraordinary I really don't think it's there's any evidence to suggest what you just just said. I hope the caller will forgive me if I go on here to another caller who's out there waiting for a bit. Let's go here to line number one. Hello. Yeah good morning good morning. Interesting show here. And David perhaps you can help me a little bit about a book. You did an interview last year a gentleman written a book called Dangerous CA's which exposed a lot of files that the FBI and the Hoover people were compiled about artist and thinkers and poets and novelists in the United States and I wondered whether your

current guests have read that if I think about it he had an overnight gang. Yeah ok and the second one is a real simple question that is where is Brandeis and I'll get off the phone. Both of those questions are reassuringly easy to answer the first one in gangs book Dangerous dossiers as you quite rightly said is a very appalling account of the efforts by the FBI in particular to record the activities and views of American writers artists intellectuals of various kinds including Nobel laureates. The interesting thing about the book and I don't quite know what. Of course what Mr. Mead King talked about on the show last year. But what's interesting is both the incredible clumsiness and crudity of the actual accounts that the FBI put down of what American writers and intellectuals were saying. But the other

odd thing about the book is that there's no real evidence that mid-game himself present bet and that much should say that much significant damage was actually done to their careers. There were very very appalling cases and I mentioned a couple of them in my own book in which these dossiers were used to prevent American writers like Nelson or grant of course in your own state of Illinois and Arthur Miller from traveling abroad these were shocking and shameful cases in which the accusations from the raw data of FBI files were used to prevent Americans from exercising their freedom of travel. I should add by the way that both Graham and Miller noncommunist were not even if the accusation had been accurate I don't believe they should have been deprived of the right to travel in this case it wasn't even just. And gang present this in a very very

straightforward fashion it would be comic if it were in fact not so sad and so depressing. The answer the second question is that it's located in fam Massachusetts. Pretty good. We have about 10 minutes left. We're talking with Stephen Whitfield he teaches at Brandeis University teaches American civilization there and is the author of book we have touched on here this morning the culture of the Cold War is the title of the book other questions here are welcome if you'd like to give us a call. Why. Why do you think that the the entertainment industry was such a target of McCarthy and in those others in this period when i suppose one could it might be a little bit more understandable why they would go after people who are in the business of politics. We're also the business of education and I'm not saying condoning that by saying you were just saying that's understandable but but there has and maybe it's because you know because the entertainment industry has the ability to reflect on itself maybe a little bit better that we know so much about this but

why it why is it that that writers and and actors and film producers and you know the Hollywood was really such a target of interest. Yeah I think it's a way of perhaps my in answering your question suggesting something of agreement with particularly the first two callers on the program and bad if there was something essentially frivolous. And insincere of it. Related to much of the anti-communist crusade of the 1950s. But if the fears were bloated the fears were exaggerated. It seems to me for purposes that had nothing to do with a genuine and legitimate concern with national security and by going after actors by going after screen writers by going after television performers it was not only can be looked at in retrospect as something which had nothing fundamentally to do with the security interests of the United States but was done really for other purposes and I think going after those in the entertainment industry

was profitable for such crusaders for essentially two reasons. One was that the entertainment industry itself. Generated tremendous public city that if you could. Call Gary Cooper before the House Committee on Un-American Activities or Jack Warner or Lucille Ball you were in fact reaping an extraordinary Bonanza and perhaps get people who would normally not look closely at the political news in the front part of the daily newspaper to look more attentively at it. So there was tremendous advantages particularly for in some ways the worst of the committees which was the House Committee on Un-American Activities which went after Hollywood first in 1947 and again in a series of hearings in the early 1950s. But this was a an extraordinary bonanza in terms of promoting the political. Conspicuousness

really of those who are members of the committee and their associates and the second factor that I think made the entertainment industry vulnerable is that it was a way of demonstrating the effectiveness of such anti communism because entertainment as everybody knows is tremendously susceptible to the shifts and fashions of public opinion. And therefore it's easier to go after somebody who depends upon popular favor then to go after a politician who may be serving several years in office. If a judge of course even longer to go after somebody in academe who may have tenure or at least a reasonably secure base of support. But entertainers are remarkably subject to the fluctuations and oscillations of public taste. And so if you can pick a film by Charlie Chaplin even though that film has nothing to do with politics you can in effect drive a Charlie Chaplin out of the country. And this

is a way of maximizing one's own impact even when it has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual vulnerability of the United States to the very sorts of fears of espionage that the culture of the Cold War actually promoted. We're coming down to our last few minutes here I do have another caller. We'd love to include on our toll free line. So let's talk with them next. Hello hello. Yes go ahead. I wonder if your gentlemen there has an e as expressed in his book any opinions on the chamber's affair or if he has not that were that he would if they were what he believed to be the case in regard to the perjury charges and the purported guilt of Alger Hiss. Yes very good question I talk about it actually a little bit in the context of the fact that the his case as I mentioned to Mr. In earlier to his case was one of the ways by which we can understand why Americans may have overreacted in the early 1950s

to the fears of domestic subversion. Because he came from as socially secure. As a background as one could imagine that is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University of Harvard Law School protege of Professor Felix Frankfurter clerk to Justice all over Wendell Holmes assistant of the secretary of state attending the Yalta Conference of the organizing secretary of the United Nations and its founding conference in San Francisco 1945. But it's the most extraordinary resume that one can imagine. And yet when a hiss was convicted of perjury. It which means in effect he was convicted of lying about whether or not he had passed on intelligence secrets to a self acknowledged Soviet underground courier Whittaker Chambers. This case had an extraordinary ramification because it meant in effect that of Alger Hiss could

be a spy that anybody could be a spy and that that that's the main reason why I was interested in my book in talking about the his case which was not so much his guilt or innocence but its ramifications when he was convicted as to my own views although I have not engaged in I would say extensive research on the case. I am very very much persuaded by the most recent major book on the subject by a former historian at Smith College Allen Weinstein in the book called perjury. In which Professor Weinstein began his research expecting to find that he had been framed that his was in fact innocent. And as Weinstein continued his research this was a book published by Knopf I believe in one thousand seventy eight. He concluded that in fact his was guilty that his had in fact lied that his was indeed very very deeply implicated in the espionage in the

communist espionage apparatus that had been established actually early in the 1930s by one of the people who is mentioned by I believe the first or second caller by the Herald where the son of Mother Bloor of the Communist movement. So my own sense reading primarily the work by Alan Weinstein entitled perjury suggests that in fact that his was indeed guilty and that a number of people who started their own notions of the case with a view that somehow his had to have been framed that his could not have done what he did indeed reached other conclusions and that a number of people including even I.F. Stone the. Muckraking left wing journalist were very very careful not to associate themselves with the view that somehow that this had indeed been a frame up and that this was indeed.

Eerily of the hysteria which is that of a minute or two left just for that one and one for their character that I would be interested in having you comment on we're talking a little earlier about a couple of people who perhaps over the success of their careers to the Cold War Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy but there was somebody else that you mentioned in the book I think it's interesting and that is Billy Graham who you talk about the fact that he is also someone whose rise can really only be understood when you look at the time in which he emerged which was a time where there was a great return to religion and I think again there's an interesting connection. There's sort of an odd thing with Mickey splain because as you point out in the book in the early 50s McKeesport lane became a Jehovah's Witness. So even he was caught up in the act. I wonder if you could just talk for a minute about Billy Graham Graham of course this is tricky since Graham attended a religious ceremony in Illinois you have to be careful what I say but I thank you very very much. Whatever else you. It was very very much a product of the Cold War and that

his own extraordinarily popular and successful evangelical movement the entire movement of revivalism that he personified in the 50s. It seems to me can only be understood in the context in which Graham warned of the imminence of Armageddon. Of the danger of the destruction of the United States due to its own sinfulness and that the Soviet threat was very very much on Graham's mind seems to been very much on the minds of many of those who were part of his crusade. And Graham was particularly promoted by such ardent Lee. Anti-communist publisher is as William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce and by a number of other figures clearly associated with American conservatism which was intensely anti-communist of course in that era.

F somebody who in promoting a return to religion would also promote conservative anti-communist values as well. And Graham understood I think from everything I know about Graham Berry understood that that was a role that he was destined to play and that his specific evangelical message was very very much within the context that somehow America needed to redeem itself. Otherwise it would be destroyed by the forces of atheistic materialism. If you stick materialism associated with with communism. Well yeah. Well there are many other things that I wish I had the time to ask unfortunately we're here at the end which is going to have to stop. I think the book is a very interesting one and I appreciate you spending some time talking but thank you very much. I most appreciate it. Once again our guest this morning is Stephen Whitfield He's a professor of American civilization at Brandeis University and if you're interested in reading more on this topic you might take a look at

his book. It is entitled The culture of the Cold War and it is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.