MediaWatch: June 1997
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: Ode to a Communist's Lawyer
America may have won the Cold War. The Soviet archives may have proven that the Communist Party USA was an espionage tool of a foreign power, taking Soviet commands and Soviet money. The expansion of Soviet communism may have exported a system of mass murder and abject slavery to millions. But to the media, none of that packs the moral punch of a group of communist script writers and directors who couldn't get a job in Hollywood.
CBS keeps coming back to these blacklisted "Hollywood Ten." On June 15, 1994, CBS aired a one-hour CBS Reports special on McCarthyism as a tribute to the anti-anti-communist "integrity and honor" of CBS legend Edward R. Murrow. One of CBS's featured victims was Hollywood Ten lawyer Bartley Crum, whose daughter, Patricia Bosworth, blamed his 1959 suicide on anti-communism: "I don't think he ever got over that, the shock of what happened, the evils that were perpetrated by McCarthy."
Columnist William F. Buckley took exception: "Bartley Crum was a prominent fellow traveler who ardently defended the communists, in print and in court...His suicide, two years after McCarthy's death, was unrelated to McCarthy, but might have been related to Crum's past." Buckley noted one of the Ten, Edward Dmytryk (Crum's primary client), admitted in 1951 he was a member of the Communist Party, adding: "The idea that there were Americans around who defended, indeed applauded and in some cases spied for Josef Stalin and his gulag was thought treacherous and morally disgraceful."
Buckley's viewpoint was nowhere to be found on May 25, when CBS Sunday Morning reprised the accusations of Patricia Bosworth, who has now written a book on her father's life. For returning to that one-sided attack on anti-communism, CBS reporter Martha Teichner earned the Janet Cooke Award.
Host Charles Osgood introduced the segment: "In May of 1947, just a half a century ago, a congressional committee reported that hearings in Hollywood had yielded hundreds of names of communists who had infiltrated the movie business 98 percent of whom were writers. That was the start of what became known as the Hollywood witch hunts. Reputations were burned at the stake. Black lists were drawn up. Those accused, unless they themselves became accusers, were unemployable. And did no one defend these defamed people? Oh, yes. Some did, and found themselves defamed and in need of defense. 'A Man of Honor' is reported now by Martha Teichner."
Osgood's editorializing left an obvious question unanswered: how can we know if the Hollywood Ten were "defamed" if we don't know whether they were communists? How could Dmytryk be "defamed" as a communist when the charge was true? Imagine substituting the word "Nazi" for "communist" in Osgood's sermon. If the Nazis had agents or sympathizers writing movies in Hollywood, would CBS use this poor-tyrant-lover tone?
Teichner began: "Patricia Bosworth is reading from the book she has written about her father, Bartley Cavanaugh Crum. You might have heard of him. Bartley Crum was one of the lawyers for the 'Hollywood Ten,' directors and screenwriters who went to jail for refusing, exactly fifty years ago, to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether they were communists."
Bosworth exulted: "Men invariably surrounded him when he spoke. 'It was almost a sexual thing,' my mother said, 'because he exuded a real power in his prime.' He had an access to power: the White House, the media..." Teichner added to the legend: "Bartley Crum was a player in some of the major events of this century. His dazzling rise to prominence, matched only by his terrible fall....The picture looked so promising, so perfect then. Bartley Crum, the young corporate lawyer, an Irish Catholic Republican, who soon knew everybody in California politics...He became the confidant of a would-be President, Wendell Willkie. And the adviser to an elected one, Harry Truman."
Bosworth told of the wonderful dinner parties her parents threw, with guest lists studded with famous names William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and so on. Teichner added: "The names in the party book were often names in the headlines: those of labor leaders, leftists. Their causes: the Spanish Civil War, the fate of concentration camp survivors stuck in displaced persons camps." CBS did not explain these partisans backed the communists in the Spanish civil war, and only cared for the survivors of Nazi camps, not Soviet ones.
Bosworth added more tributes: "Well, I think that he was certainly a crusader, a fighter for all sorts of causes. A lot of people said he was a fighter for lost causes. But he was very serious about it, and maybe more serious than he was about, sometimes about, taking care of us. But that's the way he was."
Teichner declared: "His adoring daughter saved all the clippings, all the photographs, all the clues to what was to come...And that was the 'Red Scare.' The hunt for communists began almost as soon as World War II ended, with the onset of the Cold War. It was led by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover." CBS aired a clip of Hoover testifying: "Communists have been, still are, and always will be a menace to freedom." These words represented the menace to CBS.
From there, Teichner again developed the thesis that anti- communists were responsible for the death of Bartley Crum: "When the House Un-American Activities Committee took on the film industry, Bartley Crum had no idea that representing the Hollywood Ten would destroy his career.... Bartley Crum was already under FBI surveillance, but from then on, surveillance became harassment." She asked Bosworth: "Then, these documents say that your father was a communist? But he wasn't." Bosworth replied: "No, he was never a communist. A Republican and a Catholic...I think he believed totally in the Constitution and the First Amendment. He thought he would be protected, he thought what he was doing would be constitutionally right, and so he was fearless. He felt the Constitution would protect him. It didn't, unfortunately."
Teichner then asked: "Even though he was personally ambitious and liked politics and liked power, he always went for the dangerous if he thought it was right." Boswell replied: "Yes he did." Teichner added: "Was it the right decision, knowing what it cost?"
Teichner did not return MediaWatch phone calls. CBS never attempted to explore the thorny paradox at the heart of its story: would America be weakened by granting every freedom to those who served lawless tyrannies who sought to crush that freedom? Aside from the total avoidance of objectivity, a better question for our times is this: How morally obtuse is a network that has long ignored the starvation of the Ukraine, the victims of the Gulag Archipelago, and the historic truths tumbling out of the Soviet archives, only to focus its sympathies on the suicide of a communist's lawyer?
