Haynes Johnson Interview (2005): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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You work at the intersection of history and journalism, and this book very much reminds me of the work of Frederick Lewis Allen, contemporary history. Tell us about the particular problems that arise when you're trying to relate to current events and still going back into history.
Frederick Lewis Allen is one of my mentors, heroes, or models, whatever you want to say. I love what he did, Only Yesterday, on the 1920s and 1930s, and I've tried to do those in social histories of the eighties and the nineties. There's a problem is that you can research the whole problem and then all of a sudden it changes before you finish your story, and you could work for years and all of a sudden you have an out and maybe it doesn't seem to be as pertinent, or some new information comes and changes it around. So, you don't have the leisure of stepping back forty, fifty years with all the documentation.
In this story, it's a narrative history of American life fifty years [ago], so the actual soundings on the Cold War -- the bomb, McCarthyism, the wars that we were led into -- all that really is history, so the question is of trying to recreate that with documentation and bring it up to the present. The present is more difficult because it's happening even as we speak.
But I have to say, I never would've anticipated this. It seems more pertinent now than when I [began]. So, in that sense, it's a sad commentary. In the end of the book I do talk a great deal about the links and the parallels between now and then. But as you said, right at this moment it couldn't be more pertinent.
There's also a family connection here, because your family experienced McCarthyism. Your father was a journalist and he also won the Pulitzer Prize (so we have a father/son Pulitzer Prize-winning family here), but he was affected and your father's family was affected.
Yes, very much. I was in high school in New York City in 1948 when he was writing the "Crime on the Waterfront," article series exposing the reign of terror and murder on the waterfront by a corrupt union. [Under] mob control, they were murdering people. And he named Albert Anastasia and Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello, and it led later on to the Kefauver hearings. So, we got a lot of calls threatening us at home by the mobsters. That was one thing.
But also, the day the articles began, the union president, Joseph Ryan, who later went to jail because of the revelations of my father's article, started attacking my father as a communist, [saying] the articles were pro-communist, it was pro-communist propaganda to defame and destroy good working people, when in fact the whole idea was an exposé to help the working people free themselves of murder and exploitation on the docks.
But he sold the rights to Hollywood, and then for five years ...
That is, your father sold the rights ...
... which became the movie "On the Waterfront." And so, for five years there was this incredible attack on my father, this was a "communist inspired" document.
We hired Bud Schulberg, the writer, who had been a young communist in the thirties. He had long since left the Party by the time the movie came out in 1955. But it was based on a screenwriter, a commie, and my father was a commie, so that was it, and they tried to get my father fired.
That was when Joe McCarthy was reigning supreme. So, I remember McCarthyism.
By then, I had finished undergraduate work and I was in the United States Army. I remember vividly what it was like to be in the army during the Korean War, when the Army-McCarthy televised hearings took place, and I remember how morale sank inside the uniformed services, the idea that we were supposedly infested by communist traitors and led by communism. People who had medalled and led the United States in three wars were nothing but subversives. It was terrible. So I remember that.
You mentioned a letter that your father wrote to your mother which you discovered after his death, describing a family dinner -- and this would be in the late forties when Truman had announced the Truman Doctrine. McCarthy fits into a historical context where we were worried about the communists, but you made a crack -- you had a remarkable insight for a 16-year-old. Tell us what that was at the dinner table.
It was a breakfast the morning after Truman's speech [announcing] the Truman Doctrine -- "we will fight communism wherever it appears in the world, and stop it" -- that began the Cold War period. My father wrote my mother and said, "Haynesy ... " -- he called me Haynesy. He said, "He can be pretty smart, as you know, and he put his finger on it at breakfast this morning. He said about Truman's speech. 'That means we'll have to have a standing army all over the world, and that means we'll have to go to places like the Middle East. I don't see the future in going to the Middle East for me.'" I said in the footnote, I was fifteen, about to be sixteen at the time, and it makes me seem wise. The fact is, in the same letter he said, "I wish our Haynes wasn't such a blunderbuss, he's broken another pair of glasses." But I didn't even know about that letter until I found it long after they had died, in this research.
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