For Your Eyes Only

By Ed Rampell, AlterNet. Posted January 7, 2005.

"This committee under its mandate from the House of Representatives has the responsibility of exposing and spotlighting subversive elements wherever they may exist. It is only to be expected that such elements would strive desperately to gain entry to the motion picture industry. Simply because the industry offers such a tremendous weapon for education and propaganda."

Thus did Rep. John Parnell Thomas, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), lay out the task ahead in the 1947 hearings on the Hollywood 10 – Tinseltown talents accused of being subversives, who eventually went to jail. (A mere three years later, Thomas would resign from Congress, after being convicted for salary fraud).

Over the course of the hearings, hundreds of Hollywood screenwriters, directors, actors and producers were named as Communist sympathizers. Screenwriter Bernard Gordon was among them. After screenwriter Jack Moffitt informed on Gordon, he was subpoenaed, fired by Paramount and plunged into the horror of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthy era.

Gordon has made an invaluable contribution to the reassessment of the Reds-under-the-beds Cold War hysteria with his new book "The Gordon File, A Screenwriter Recalls Twenty Years of FBI Surveillance."

Like Inspector Javert relentlessly pursuing Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency conducted surveillance on Gordon and his family, friends and associates for around a quarter century. Gordon, who was born in New York in 1918, writes: "I must hand it to the FBI agents who worked on my file: they were indefatigable." The spies who hated him created a 500-plus page dossier that Gordon refers to as a "thick file of pages from the secret police that would eventually pin me like a bug in a specimen jar ..."

There have been many memoirs of the American inquisition by Hollywood screenwriters, such as Ring Lardner's "I'd Hate Myself in the Morning," Lester Cole's "Hollywood Red" and Norma Barzman's "The Red and the Blacklist." Numerous histories and biographies exist, including Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner's "A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left." In 1971, Eric Bentley edited transcripts of the HUAC hearings, "Thirty Years of Treason." Victor Navasky's 1980 "Naming Names" included interviews with "friendly" and "unfriendly" HUAC witnesses.

"The Gordon File," however, is unique. In 1997, under the Freedom of Information Act, the feisty Gordon requested his FBI dossier; he eventually received 280 pages by 2003. "The Gordon File," published by the University of Texas Press, which previously released Gordon's 1999 memoir, "Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist," includes much of this undercover documentation.

The first published entry in the formerly clandestine folders is dated Feb. 10, 1945, and is signed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover himself, as are many others, including classified letters Hoover wrote to the infamous CIA agent James Jesus Angleton. Gordon's case wasn't closed until Nov. 25, 1970, although it is marked "subject, of course, to being reopened in the event additional pertinent information is received." The dossier covers Gordon's activism and eventual emigration.

The FBI file assiduously notes picayune details (often inaccurately, Gordon points out), such as his 1938 Chevrolet coupe's license plate number. As he moved throughout Mexico and Europe, U.S. embassies' legal attaches kept tabs on Gordon, religiously reporting his whereabouts. In his postscript, Gordon writes, "the FBI must surely have had something on me to account for all the years, time, and money spent hounding me."

True, Gordon had been a card carrying Communist – joining the legal political party in 1942, when Moscow was America's World War II ally, but leaving the Party after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 revelations of Stalin's crimes. Yet, despite 25 years of surveillance, Gordon was never charged, let alone convicted of a crime. "The Gordon File" quotes a 2002 Los Angeles Times piece by professor Christopher Pyle:

"During the Cold War, the FBI undertook more than 500,000 counterintelligence investigations against domestic political groups. Not one produced an indictment ... [T]he investigations gradually changed the character of the agency, from one chiefly concerned with law enforcement to one centered on spying."

Gordon's "crime" – and that of everyone on the blacklist – was dissent. But surely all this domestic surveillance must have produced something. In an appendix Gordon prints selections of the FBI's file on the World War II-era Hollywood Canteen, where 2 million servicemen enjoyed some R&R, perhaps dancing with a movie star, before shipping out to the frontlines. J. Edgar's G-men caught the Canteen redhanded; were actors like John Garfield and Canteen staffers like Gordon's future wife Jean Lewin collaborating with Hitler or Hirohito? No – "The matter of white girls dancing with Negro soldiers and Negro girls dancing with white soldiers" had the Bureau in a tizzy. The FBI also noted that "The question of Negro equality is one of the basic planks in the Communist Party's platform." The state police were investigating desegregation, not crimes against the people.

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