Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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(The Senate rejected Carswell’s nomination.) Most of the questioning of KPFK witnesses was conducted by the subcommittee counsel, a Nevada hack with the wonderful name Jay Sourwine.
The day started with Trevor Thomas, acting president of the Pacifica Foundation, telling the committee in a prepared statement that “avowed members of the Communist Party have been heard” on KPFK and the other stations, but that was “in keeping with the foundation’s policy affording a public platform for all.” He emphasized that “seventy to eighty percent of our broadcast day is music, drama, literature, poetry, and children’s programs.” KPFK, he said, was not a left-wing station; instead (as the first Folio, the station’s official publication, had declared), “All shades of the political spectrum are represented.” Dorothy Healey was one of the ten commentators who had “different perspectives”; the list also included William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk. Thomas emphasized that Healey was on the air for only fifteen minutes twice a month with her “political views.”8
Senator Hruska interrupted. “I do not believe the Communist Party has any political views,” he said. “They have views that are calculated to overthrow this country. That is not political views.”9
Sourwine then said he was concerned about Dorothy Healey getting airtime because “the Communists always seek to infiltrate mass communications as early as they can in every country” which is “a prelude to the Communist takeover in country after country.” First Dorothy, then … revolution! He asked whether KPFK or the other Pacifica stations “broadcast any programs from Radio Moscow.” (The answer was “no.”)10
Next came Peter Odegard, a director of the Pacifica Foundation and a professor in the UC Berkeley political science department. When he was asked about Healey and other Communists, he told the committee: “I do not like to be associated with these people. I loathe them.” You might call that “pandering,” or “opportunism”; but it’s also possible he was sincere. He continued: “But I believe that our listeners have a right to hear this, just as they have a right to hear people like Gerald L. K. Smith, who we also interviewed.” Gerald L. K. Smith was a neo-Nazi and white supremacist so far to the right he was shunned by segregationists like Strom Thurmond—you might say he was not exactly “balance” for Dorothy Healey. But Odegard concluded that KPFK put both Gerald L. K. Smith and Healey on the air “so that the people may judge what these, what I call ‘enemies of freedom’ are saying.”
Hruska protested: “You created them.”
Odegard: “No, we did not create them … They exist. These are facts of life.”11
He was right about that.
Next the subcommittee called Pauline Schindler, widow of the LA architect Rudolph Schindler. She was seventy years old; in the 1930s she had run a salon of left-wing intellectuals and artists at the famous Schindler House on Kings Road in Los Angeles.
Sourwine asked the inevitable question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
She answered “Not the party, but I was once a member of the Communist Political Association—ages and ages ago, briefly. In 1946 … they threw me out. They did not approve of me.”
That was the end of her testimony. The hearing was reaching its climax: Dorothy was next. They started by asking her, “What is your business or profession?”
She declined to answer, responding: “I believe the greatest danger that this country faces today is the possibility of concentration camps of the mind, the dictatorship of big business, of control exercised and expressed through agencies of government determining what people can or cannot think. It is my opinion that all areas of expression are protected by the First Amendment.” She also pled the Fifth.
Sourwine then asked: “You are a fairly well-known commentator on radio. Do you want to decline to admit this?”
“The question of what or who is well known is, of course, a matter of opinion, but as I have already stated, I do not believe that this committee has any right to inquire into any questions regarding … press or radio.” And she again pled the Fifth.
“You have a program on radio station KPFK regularly, do you not?”
“The same answer … for the same reasons.”
Sourwine then showed her a document that had the fascinating title Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States, v. Dorothy Healey. It said Bobby Kennedy had petitioned the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1962 to require that Dorothy register with the attorney general—himself—as “a member of a Communist-action organization.” It then cited evidence from five witnesses that she was a Communist—two former party members turned snitches, and three reporters who had interviewed her and to whom she had said she was a Communist. One of the snitches said she had given the keynote address to the Southern California district convention of the CP in 1960, and that she had said, “Now is the ideal time to set about popularizing socialism in American terms: its rational productive relations, its elimination of material want … its devotion to humanism and faith in the perfectibility of man,” and “its respect for and encouragement of true culture as against mere amusement.” That sounded suspiciously like KPFK.12
Sourwine continued, “Will you admit that you are the Dorothy Healey referred to as the respondent in this case?”
Dorothy’s reply: “I am struck by the fact that the only dissenting opinions which the subcommittee wishes to defend are opinions which defend entrenched wealth.” She was referring to a previous witness at a previous hearing—she mentioned “Katanga mining interests”—but it’s hard to tell from this transcript exactly what had transpired. Whatever it was, her remark made Senator Hruska mad: “I move, Mr. Chairman,” he submitted, “that all these comments of this witness … be stricken from the record as … self-serving statements and very unbecoming in the premises, and, besides referring unjustly and improperly to a member of this committee.”
Senator Dodd, apparently the target of Dorothy’s remark, stayed cool. “I am not offended,” he told Sourwine. “I do not mind.”
Sourwine then read a list of names of people who had testified in the Smith Act trial in 1952, a decade earlier, that Dorothy was a Communist. Dorothy replied, “After a six-month trial and after a decision of the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice came into the trial court in 1957 to admit that there was no evidence against me adequate for a conviction that I had at any time conspired to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” She once again pled the Fifth.
“Mrs. Healey,” Sourwine said, “You cannot have it both ways. If you are trying to tell the committee these people testified falsely, you cannot do it in the same breath in which you refuse to answer the question as to whether you know that they testified against you.” He did have a point. “I am willing to leave the record there,” he concluded. “I have no more questions, Mr. Chairman.” Dorothy was dismissed. They never brought up any of the twelve transcripts of her KPFK shows produced by the FBI for the Senate subcommittee.13 Apparently they weren’t interested in what Dorothy actually said on KPFK—or maybe what she said wasn’t criminal.
The next attack on KPFK came ten months later, in October 1963. This time it was the FCC, conducting its license renewal hearings, which asked all Pacifica board members, officers of the foundation, and the general manager of KPFK and the other two stations whether they were or had been members of the party. Like many other liberal-left groups, Pacifica had two factions with opposing strategies for responding to McCarthyism. One group of directors proposed a policy declaring that Pacifica would refuse to hire anyone “who is a member of the Communist Party.” Members of the opposing group pointed out that that meant Pacifica would create its own internal McCarthyism—an endorsement of the repression of the Left that was being proposed “at a time when the political climate seems to be shifting away from such practices.” The battle focused on Jerry Shore, executive vice president of the foundation and a former CIO organizer, who had been expected to become Pacifica’s president, but apparently was, or had been, a party