Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in Self-Deconstruction

Prologue

Prologue My Life under Surveillance For seven years during the McCarthy era, from 1949 to 1956, I was a member of the Communist Party—roughly, from the time its leaders were indicted under the Smith Act, through the period when it was semi-legal and eventually outlawed, until it began to fall apart in the aftermath of the Khrushchev “revelations.” It was not a propitious time to be a Communist, and we were well aware that the Federal Bureau of Investigation might at any moment be watching or listening. We took for granted that certain phones might be tapped, and our comings and goings observed. My in-laws’ summer house at Sandwich on Cape Cod, which was often visited by party friends and sympathizers, was at times obviously “staked out,” and when we drove away, we were sometimes aware of being followed. At one point, the neighboring summer house of another radical family was broken into in a search for “incriminating” documents; all the time, of course, the FBI was adding entries into its own bureaucratic hoard of incriminating records. In 1989, when I was entering the age of reminiscence, I took advantage of the Freedom of Information Act to request my FBI file, along with that of my father. This, in the hope that these might supplement and jog my memory—which even in the best of times functioned like a sieve, with passing experience leaving residues that might expand if given appropriate stimulation—visual, conversational, or more often, from a methodological point of view, textual. After a lapse of over a year, I received a package of photocopies four inches thick. My father’s file was a series of security checks for government jobs, starting in the fall of 1940, when he joined the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense. It included numerous 3 4 Prologue testimonials from citizens of Clarendon, Texas, where my grandfather had set up medical practice in 1885. Although there were occasional comments on the Stocking family’s anti-Trinitarian religious views and their preference for the life of the mind rather than the business world, all of them affirmed the family’s patriotic Americanism. In 1947, the only blot on my father’s record was his membership in the University of Texas chapter of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, chaired nationally by Franz Boas but cited by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1942 as a Communist front organization. In 1951 and later, however, it was my own affiliations and activities that caused him problems. However, despite the fact that my membership in the party had by then been on several occasions a painful issue between the two of us, he did not mention it to the FBI, nor did he mention to me the fact that that they had interviewed him.1 Given the numerous countervailing attestations by his friends and colleagues of my father’s hatred of Communist totalitarianism and his support of the “free enterprise system,” it is unlikely that he lost any appointment on my account. However, much of the material in his file relating to me was blacked out, and that was even truer of my own file, from which whole pages were “withheld entirely,” for various coded reasons (most frequently, b7d: “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source”). The same code categories accounted for other blacked-out passage of less than a page—on many of which there were only a few words left legible. Following up the first stage of the slow appeal procedure, I later obtained another half inch or so of photocopies—at which point I gave up pursuing the matter. Despite all that black marking, my file did provide a kind of grid for memory, beginning just after the disappointment of Henry Wallace’s performance in the presidential election of 1948. Several items summarized from the Harvard Crimson (“Unknown Assailants Attack HYD [Harvard Youth for Democracy] Pamphlet Distributor”) evoked the traumatic recollection of a rainy night when I was roughed up and 1. Several years ago, my brother Myron told me that the FBI had also questioned him about my activities when he was beginning his service as a doctor in the U.S. Navy in the mid-1950s. 5 My Life under Surveillance knocked to the ground by three Harvard students in an entry to Wigglesworth Hall, where I...