Clay Risen
speaker
88 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Clay Risen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There was an immediately obvious need to reinforce Europe, to commit billions of dollars to shoring up their economies and societies so that the Soviet Union couldn't continue its press westward and take over more countries than it had. And there was a pivotal meeting with Russia.
key State Department officials, key Senate leaders, in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously told Truman that, hey, I'll do what I can, I'm gonna help you out, but you have to scare the hell out of them, right? And essentially make communism out to be the biggest baddie. And, you know, there was obviously a strong case for that.
And so Truman gave a speech to a joint session of Congress where he explained what was ahead and made out a very strong case for a maximalist assertion of U.S.,
effort abroad but part of that was also talking about the limitless threat of communism and so then it became incumbent on him to do something about communists domestically and here he was sort of in a trap because he didn't really believe there was much of a threat but there were uh
particularly Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress who did say there was a domestic threat and J. Edgar Hoover said there was a threat. And truth be told, there was very good evidence that there had been espionage in the U.S. government. It turned out to be true that the Soviets were funneling money through the Communist Party. So Roosevelt versus Truman, I think,
implemented the loyalty oath largely because he thought it would be a sop to these folks and wouldn't do anything. It wasn't a big deal. He was wrong on that.
Well, there were a couple. First of all is that when you hire the exterminator to come in, you really expect there to be rodents, right? And there's something here, too, where once you set up these loyalty boards in all these government agencies, it's sort of incumbent on them to find something. And, you know, look, I mean, there's always something to be found in someone's background.
And the FBI would investigate any rumors. And there was really no way for someone to fight back. You know, if it came up from an anonymous, there were a lot of anonymous sources in these investigations, you couldn't really challenge somebody. This wasn't a court proceeding. So people who found themselves targeted under these loyalty programs had very little recourse to clear their names.
The other thing that was a real problem was that One of the sets of criteria for judging somebody suspect was a list of organizations that the attorney general drew up at Truman's directive that were deemed subversive. And it started off with a few dozen. It ended up being a couple of hundred. And some of them were anodyne.
Some of them were by no stretch of the imagination a threat to national security. But if you had any connection, even secondhand, to one of these, your career was in jeopardy. And the list was not long. The list got out. And so it then became something for the private sector, for state and local governments to start to use. It became viral in that sense.
And the list became this test against which millions of Americans were judged.
Yeah, and look, I mean, some of them were fronts, but also some of the fronts were fairly anodyne. You know, if the Communist Party set up a club for writers and a writer joined it with no real interest in the Communist Party and maybe was in it for a year and then left and ended up in a government job somewhere, well, they would probably get fired years later for that.
Had they expressed any connection to communism by doing so? No. No. They had simply done this during that fluid period of the 1930s when this was de rigueur for the left.
No, no. You know, there were people identified and found out to have been spies for the Soviet Union, but not through this program. And, you know, the other thing that I think is important, and it's very—you can't prove a negative, but—
This was a real deterrent for anybody who might have something in their background or just someone who didn't want to be investigated that way to ever join the government. And this at a time when the government really needed smart, capable, motivated people to come in and commit to public service.
He did. Oh, no, he did in his memoirs. He said that it was a mistake.
There are a couple of reasons. The first is Hollywood, like today, was super sexy. And it was a target for anybody who wanted to raise their own profile. And so the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee at the time, his name was J. Parnell Thomas from New Jersey. he thought this would be a great way to raise the profile of the committee.
But he also had come to believe that Hollywood was this den of radical, subversive leftists. And it wasn't. There were a lot of left-leaning people in Hollywood, but it was hardly a subversive hotspot. But You know, there was an active Communist Party in Hollywood. And it did – it also saw Hollywood as a great place to be to raise money and to raise its own profile.
It was never very successful because if you're living in Hollywood and you're a star, who wants to – You go to a five hour meeting where you talk about Marx all night when you could go hang out at a club or who wants to have to hand out communist newspapers on the street corner if you're a star. So it never really got far.
But that didn't keep Parnell Thomas and his committee from making that target number one.
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