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CHAPTER SIX Dark Clouds over the Newsroom
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CHAPTER SIX Dark Clouds over the Newsroom B Y 1955 THE RIVALRY among congressional investigative committees had grown so intense that they agreed to avoid overlapping investigations. The House Un-American Activities Committee focused on labor issues at hearings held in Seattle, Milwaukee, San Diego, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee turned its attention toward the press.1 An FBI memorandum in November 1955 showed that the previous January, Ralph Roach, the FBI’s White House liaison, had told Alan Belmont, the agency’s assistant director, that Julien G.“Jay” Sourwine, the subcommittee’s counsel, had requested “a list of individuals”who were“reportedly connected with the NewYork Times.”2 Although the document bears a stamp that says “Do Not File,” the document apparently slipped through Hoover’s cleverly devised and elaborate screening procedure, which was designed to hide potentially embarrassing information, such as court order or congressional subpoena, from the public .3 The memo also noted that the FBI had furnished Sourwine with“brief succinct resumes of information in Bureau files” about eight individuals, including five who had been subpoenaed to testify in public. The names that Sourwine received were only a small part of the FBI’s arsenal. An earlier report from the NewYork field office to FBI headquarters listed seventy suspected employees at the New York Times.4 At the same time rumors of an investigation of the press began to circulate through city newsrooms. Fearing the possibility of being called before a committee, Charles Kraft, a writer in the Times’s radio-television DARK CLOUDS OVER THE NEWSROOM 81 department, walked into the office of Jack Gould, a well-known writer who acted as head of the newspaper’s radio-television department, and volunteered that he had belonged to the party between 1936 and 1939. Moreover , Kraft said, he had helped organize a Communist cell at the Times in 1932. Kraft said that the idea for a cell came from a mechanic who tended to the Associated Press teletype machines at the Times, the Herald Tribune, and theWorld-Telegram. According to Kraft, the leader of the Times group was a discontented copyboy who was attracted to the Communist Party’s campaign for higher wages. Kraft described the cell as a“haphazard operation ” with no indication that it was supported by any party masterminds.5 It was hardly a secret that Communists worked at the Times in the 1930s. By 1936 party members were a familiar sight at the newspaper’s doors, where they would hand out circulars signed “Communist party Nucleus at The NewYork Times.”6 Eugene Lyons,a leading anti-Communist writer, wrote an exposé of the party in 1941 in which he noted that Communists published “shop papers” at the Times and Time magazine that “made life miserable not only for the bosses . . . but for anti-Stalinist radicals on the staff.”7 Although the papers were openly distributed, the journalists who edited them carefully concealed their identities by using pseudonyms . Cells had also formed at the Brooklyn Eagle, Long Island Press, and Herald Tribune, where members worked for the right of journalists to unionize and for better wages. Given the large number of immigrants who had settled in New York City after the turn of the century, it was not surprising that Communists were active in nearly every substantial enterprise in the city. In the mid-1930s New York served as the intellectual and political center of the American Communist movement.8 Kraft told his superiors that the most prominent members of the Times cell were political reporter James Kieran and copy editor James Glaser. Kieran had been an organizer of the guild unit at the Times and had worked closely with the national guild’s founder, Heywood Broun. After joining the Times in 1923, Kieran had worked on the night rewrite desk before becoming a political reporter and transferring to the Albany bureau to cover then-governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the 1932 presidential campaign Kieran coined the phrase “brain trust” to describe Roosevelt’s informal cabinet of professional advisers. Kieran left the newspaper in 1937 to become press secretary to New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia and died in January 1952.9 Glaser joined the Times in 1929 and, at the same time, secretly wrote for the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, under a pseudonym.10 He left the Times in 1934 to work full time as theWorker’s managing editor. [3.236.247.213] Project MUSE...