I Married a Communist (2 page)

"Near the end of my five minutes, in the face of my refusal to cooperate, the chairman said that he was disappointed that a man of my education and understanding should be unwilling to help the security of this country by telling the committee what it wanted to know. I took that silently. The only hostile remark I made was when one of those bastards closed off by telling me, 'Sir, I question your loyalty.' I told him, 'And I question yours.' And the chairman told me that if I continued to 'slur' any member of the committee, he would have me ejected. 'We don't have to sit here,' he told me, 'and take your bunk and listen to your slurs.' 'Neither do I,' I said, 'have to sit here and listen to
your
slurs, Mr. Chairman.' That was as bad as it got. My lawyer whispered to me to cut it out, and that was the end of my appearance. I was excused.

"But as I got up to leave my chair, one of the congressmen called after me, I suppose to provoke me into contempt—'How can you be paid by the taxpayers' money when you are obligated by your damnable Communist oath to teach the Soviet line? How in God's name can you be a free agent and teach what the Communists dictate? Why don't you get out of the party and reverse your tracks? I plead with you—return to the American way of life!'

"But I didn't take the bait, didn't tell him that what I taught had nothing to do with the dictates of anything other than composition and literature, though, in the end, it didn't seem to matter what I said or didn't say: that evening, in the Sports Final edition, there was my kisser on the front page of the
Newark News,
over the caption 'Red Probe Witness Balky' and the line '"Won't take your bunk," HUAC tells Newark teacher.'

"Now, one of the committee members was a congressman from New York State, Bryden Grant. You remember the Grants, Bryden and Katrina. Americans everywhere remember the Grants. Well, the Ringolds were the Rosenbergs to the Grants. This society pretty boy, this vicious nothing, all but destroyed our family. And did you ever know why? Because one night Grant and his wife were at a party that Ira and Eve were giving on West Eleventh Street and Ira went after Grant the way only Ira could go after somebody. Grant was a pal of Wernher von Braun's, or Ira thought so, and Ira laid into him but good. Grant was—to the naked eye, that is—an effete upper-class guy of the sort who set Ira's teeth on edge. The wife wrote those popular romances that the ladies devoured and Grant was then still a columnist for the
Journal-American.
To Ira, Grant was the incarnation of pampered privilege. He couldn't stand him. Grant's every gesture made him sick and his politics he abhorred.

"Well, there was a big, loud scene, Ira shouting and calling Grant names, and for the rest of his life Ira maintained that a Grant vendetta against us began that night. Ira had a way of presenting himself without camouflage. Comes just as he is, holding nothing back, without a single plea. That was his magnetism for you, but it's also what made him repellent to his enemies. And Grant was one of his enemies. The whole squabble took three minutes, but according to Ira, three minutes that sealed his fate and mine. He'd humiliated a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant and a graduate of Harvard and an employee of William Randolph Hearst's, not to mention the husband of the author of
Eloise and Abelard,
the biggest bestseller of 1938, and
The Passion of Galileo,
the biggest bestseller of 1942—and that was it for us. We were finished: by publicly insulting Bryden Grant, Ira had challenged not only the husband's impeccable credentials but the wife's inextinguishable need to be right.

"Now, I'm not sure that explains everything—though not because Grant was any less reckless in the use of power than the rest of Nixon's gang. Before he went to Congress, he wrote that column for the
Journal-American,
a gossip column three times a week about Broadway and Hollywood, with a dollop of Eleanor Roosevelt-defiling thrown in. That's how Grant's public service career began. That's what qualified him so highly for a seat on the Un-American Activities Committee. He was a gossip columnist before it became the big business it is today. He was in there at the start, in the heyday of the great pioneers. There was Cholly Knickerbocker and Winchell and Ed Sullivan and Earl Wilson. There was Damon Runyon, there was Bob Considine, there was Hedda Hopper—and Bryden Grant was the
snob
of the mob, not the street fighter, not the lowlife, not the fast-talking insider who hung out at Sardi's or the Brown Derby or Stillman's Gym, but the blueblood to the rabble who hung out at the Racquet Club.

"Grant began with a column called 'Grant's Grapevine,' and, if you remember, he nearly ended as Nixon's White House chief of staff. Congressman Grant was a great favorite of Nixon's. Sat as Nixon did on the Un-American Activities Committee. Did a lot of President Nixon's arm-twisting in the House. I remember when the new Nixon administration floated Grant's name back in '68 for chief of staff. Too bad they let it drop. The worst decision Nixon ever made. If only Nixon had found the political advantage in appointing, instead of Haldeman, this Brahmin hack to head the Watergate cover-up operation, Grant's career might have ended behind bars. Bryden Grant in jail, in a cell between Mitchell's and Ehrlichman's. Grant's Tomb. But it was never to be.

"You can hear Nixon singing Grant's praises on the White House tapes. It's there in the transcripts. 'Bryden's heart is in the right place,' the president tells Haldeman. And he's tough. He'll do anything. I mean anything.' He tells Haldeman Grant's motto for how to handle the administration's enemies: 'Destroy them in the press.' And then, admiringly—an epicurean of the perfect smear, of the vilification that burns with a hard, gemlike flame—the president adds: 'Bryden's got the killer instinct. Nobody does a more beautiful job.'

"Congressman Grant died in his sleep, a rich and powerful old statesman, still greatly esteemed in Staatsburg, New York, where they named the high school football field after him.

"During the hearing I watched Bryden Grant, trying to believe that there was more to him than a politician with a personal vendetta finding in the national obsession the means to settle a score. In the name of reason, you search for some higher motive, you look for some deeper meaning—it was still my wont in those days to try to be reasonable about the unreasonable and to look for complexity in simple things. I would make demands upon my intelligence where none were really necessary. I would think, He
cannot
be as petty and vapid as he seems. That can't be more than one-tenth of the story. There must be more to him than that.

"But why? Pettiness and vapidity can come on the grand scale too. What could be more
unwavering
than pettiness and vapidity? Do pettiness and vapidity get in the way of being cunning and tough? Do pettiness and vapidity vitiate the aim of being an important personage? You don't need a developed view of life to be fond of power. You don't need a developed view of life to
rise
to power. A developed view of life may, in fact, be the worst impediment, while
not
having a developed view the most splendid advantage. You didn't have to summon up misfortunes from his patrician childhood to make sense of Congressman Grant. This is the guy, after all, who took over the congressional seat of Hamilton Fish, the original Roosevelt hater. A Hudson River aristocrat like FDR. Fish went to Harvard just after FDR. Envied him, hated him, and, because Fish's district included Hyde Park, wound up FDR's congressman. A terrific isolationist and stupid as they come. Fish, back in the thirties, was the first upper-crust ignoramus to serve as chairman of the precursor of that pernicious committee. The prototypical self-righteous, flag-waving, narrow-minded patrician son of a bitch—that was Hamilton Fish. And when they redistricted the old fool's district in '52, Bryden Grant was his boy.

"After the hearing, Grant left the dais where the three committee members and their lawyer were seated and made a beeline for my chair. He was the one who'd said to me, 'I question your loyalty.' But now he smiled graciously—as only Bryden Grant could, as though he had invented the gracious smile—and he put out his hand and so, loathsome as it was to me, I shook it. The hand of unreason, and reasonably, civilly, the way fighters touch gloves before a fight, I shook it, and my daughter, Lorraine, was appalled with me for days afterward.

"Grant said, 'Mr. Ringold, I traveled up here today to help you clear your name. I wish you could have been more cooperative. You don't make it easy, even for those of us who are sympathetic. I want you to know that I wasn't scheduled to represent the committee in Newark. But I knew you were to be a witness and so I asked to come because I didn't think it would be much help to you if my friend and colleague Donald Jackson were to show up instead.'

"Jackson was the guy who had taken Nixon's seat on the committee. Donald L. Jackson of California. A dazzling thinker, given to public statements like, 'It seems to me that the time has come to be an American or not an American.' It was Jackson and Velde who led the manhunt to root out Communist subversives in the Protestant clergy. That was a pressing national issue for these guys. After Nixon's departure from the committee, Grant was considered the committee's intellectual spearhead who drew their profound conclusions for them—and, sad to say, more than likely he was.

"He said to me, 'I thought that perhaps I could help you more than the honorable gentleman from California. Despite your performance here today, I still think I can. I want you to know that if, after a good night's sleep, you decide you want to clear your name—'

"That was when Lorraine erupted. She was all of fourteen. She and Doris had been sitting behind me, and throughout the session Lorraine had been fuming even more audibly than her mother. Fuming and squirming, barely able to contain the agitation in her fourteen-year-old frame. 'Clear his name of
what?
Lorraine said to Congressman Grant. 'What did my father
do?
Grant smiled at her benignly. He was very good-looking, with all that silver hair, and he was fit, and his suits were the most expensive Tripler's made, and his manners couldn't have affronted anyone's mother. He had that nicely blended voice, respectful, at once soft and manly, and he said to Lorraine, 'You're a loyal daughter.' But Lorraine wouldn't quit. And neither Doris nor I tried to stop her right off. 'Clear his name?
He
doesn't have to clear his name—it's not dirty,' she told Grant. 'You're the one who's dirtying his name.' 'Miss Ringold, you are off the issue. Your father has a history,' Grant said. 'History?' Lorraine said. 'What history? What's his history?' Again he smiled. 'Miss Ringold,' he said, 'you're a very nice young lady—' 'Whether I'm nice has nothing to do with it. What is his history? What did he do? What is it that he has to clear? Tell me what my father did.' 'Your father will have to tell us what he did.' 'My father has already spoken,' she said, 'and you are twisting everything he says into a pack of lies just to make him look bad. His name
is
clean. He can go to bed at night. I don't know how you can, sir. My father served his country as well as the rest of them. He knows about loyalty and fighting and what's American. This is how you treat people who've served their country? Is that what he fought for—so you could sit here and try to blacken his name? Try to sling mud all over him? That's what America is? That's what you call loyalty? What have
you
done for America? Gossip columns? That's so American? My father has principles, and they're decent American principles, and you have no business trying to destroy him. He goes to school, he teaches children, he works as hard as he can. You should have a
million
teachers like him. Is that the problem? He's too good? Is that why you have to tell lies about him?
Leave my father alone!
'

"When Grant still wouldn't reply, Lorraine cried, 'What's the matter? You had so much to say when you were up there on the stand—and now you're Mr. Dumbmouth? Your little lips sealed shut—' Right there I put my hand on hers and I said, 'That's enough.' And then she got angry with me. 'No, it's
not
enough. It's not going to be enough until they stop treating you like this. Aren't you going to say
anything,
Mr. Grant? Is this what America is—nobody says anything in front of fourteen-year-olds? Just because I don't vote—is that the problem? Well, I'd certainly never vote for you or any of your lousy friends!' And she burst into tears, and that was when Grant said to me, 'You know where to reach me,' and he smiled at the three of us and left for Washington.

"That's the way it goes. They fuck you and then they tell you, 'You were lucky you got fucked by me and not by the honorable gentleman from California.'

"I never did get in touch with him. The fact was that my political beliefs were pretty localized. They were never inflated like Ira's. I was never interested like he was in the fate of the world. I was more interested, from a professional point of view, in the fate of the community. My concern was not even so much political as economic and I would say sociological, in terms of working conditions, in terms of the status of teachers in the city of Newark. The next day the mayor, Mayor Carlin, told the press that people like me should not be teaching our children, and the Board of Education put me on trial for conduct unbecoming a teacher. The superintendent saw this was his warrant for getting rid of me. I didn't answer the questions of a responsible government agency, so ipso facto I was unfit. I told the Board of Education that my political beliefs were not relevant to my being an English teacher in the Newark school system. There were only three grounds for dismissal: insubordination, incompetence, and moral turpitude. I argued that none of these applied. Former students came down to the board hearing to testify that I had never tried to indoctrinate anybody, in class or anywhere else. Nobody in the school system had ever heard me attempt to indoctrinate anyone into anything other than respect for the English language—none of the parents, none of the students, none of my colleagues. My former army captain, he testified for me. Came up from Fort Bragg. That was impressive.