In the 1950s, the American senator Joseph McCarthy fed the public’s suspicion that there are powerful enemies within the country, rotting out its core values. My father, mother, and uncle had good cause to fear that they would be fingered as among these enemies. They had become Communists in the depths of the Great Depression, my mother organizing garment workers, my uncle and father joining the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which fought against Fascism in Spain. After the Second World War people like them appeared as corruptors of American trade unions or as spies for the Soviet Union.
McCarthy and President Donald Trump are both charismatic performers with a base of fervent believers. And there is a more personal bridge between the two: Roy Cohn, a lawyer and political fixer. Cohn served as McCarthy’s chief counsel and later as a business adviser to the young Trump. Cohn was an expert in techniques of deception; he once had McCarthy wave in front of a gullible press a sheaf of papers supposedly listing hundreds of communist spies—the sheets, of course, proved to be blank paper. A generation later, he coached Trump in how to bluff or intimidate New York politicians when the young property mogul encountered rough weather in the city.
It was the minions of Cohn who persecuted my family. They fed our names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), suggesting that my mother, father, and uncle be indicted for sedition, a crime which entailed long prison sentences. Thankfully, nothing came of the sedition charge, but FBI surveillance and harassment by HUAC did not go away, and reached into my own childhood. Because McCarthyism enlisted schools as well as employers in sniffing out suspected Communists, men occasionally sat in a car next to my school playground, watching me play, observing whom I played with—clues, possibly, to parents who might also be disloyal.
This harassment transformed families like ours. The less children knew about their parents’ politics, the safer those parents; silence at home meant that a kid would not accidentally betray parents to teachers. The silence worked, but families paid a price for it. However, “red diaper babies,” as the children of communists were known, could intuit, as children seem always to do, that their parents were holding something back—and inside the family, adult secrecy eroded trust. At ten years old, while I was too young to make sense of communism, I knew there was something which I should not be told about; I nagged my mother in particular, and she withdrew inside herself rather than slap me down, as a less anxiety-driven parent would have done.
