Haynes Johnson Interview (2005): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 1 of 8
Haynes, welcome back to Berkeley.
Well, thanks, Harry. I love being here with you.
Let's talk a little about the origins of this book. When did you conceive this book? Because we're meeting today on the day on which the special prosecutor is announcing indictments [of Lewis "Scooter" Libby], and here you have this book to give us background to an earlier period when we went through [a national] trauma.
The genesis of this was actually 9/11, because a climate of terror and fear again enveloped the country -- legitimate fear. We were attacked, and I watched it begin to unfold: great unity in the country and suddenly the echoes of the Cold War kept creeping in, and the manipulation of the press, and the disunity, and charges or smears on people who were not loyal, and so forth. That took me back to the McCarthy period, the Cold War, when I was a young student and a young officer in the army during the Korean War. I always thought I'd go back to that some day, but the genesis was the playing up of fear and how fear can be exploited for political purposes. That seems to me the enduring lesson linking past and present to this very moment that we're speaking.
Was it a difficult book to research? A lot had been written but you indicate that a lot of the McCarthy files are still sealed.
Well, I'm frustrated, anybody would be, scholars would be. At the archives of Marquette University his widow, Jean, left the McCarthy Papers, all twenty-five huge installments of the paper. Half of those are sealed, and she said they could not be used or opened in her lifetime and in the lifetime of a child they had adopted three weeks before he died. [That child] is still alive; the widow is long dead. We can't get to them, and the sealed part is what I would love to see, the financial records, the medical records, the private correspondence, the office logs, all of these things in there.
However, there was enough material in those files, and also in the Wisconsin Historical Society where I did research as a graduate student of American history, a wonderful treasure. And there's a great archive in Washington that not many people use too much: it's the United States Senate Historical Office. They have oral histories, and they are fascinating, because they have gone back and interviewed not just the senators and so forth, but the people in the staff who worked and saw, and [who were interviewed] after the fact -- very candid. I used those. Also, I was around as a young reporter, and so I remembered all these things, too.
It was a long process, a four-year project.
Next page: Remembering the McCarthy Era
© Copyright 2005, Regents of the University of California