NY Review of Books, Feb. 21, 2021
What the FBI Had on Grandpa
J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my
family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.
by Molly Jong-Fast
I never considered my grandfather to be a danger to the republic, but J.
Edgar Hoover disagreed. When I knew my grandfather, he was in his late
sixties, lived on Fifth Avenue, and did not seem very interested in
world revolution or overthrowing the US government. But Hoover never
ordered the tap removed from my grandfather’s phone, because, as his
biographer summarized the FBI view, Grandpa never stopped being “a
dangerous radical out to destabilize race relations in the United States.”
To me, Howard Fast simply looked like a million other cranky old Jewish
guys from the tristate area. He could have been an aging allergist from
Westchester or a retired bus driver from Queens. He wore a shearling
coat in the winter months and a wool cap on his bald head. He enjoyed
taking the Madison Avenue bus and eating in diners. He did the
crossword. Sometimes, he took me to his club, which occupied an old
McKim, Mead, & White Renaissance revival building on West 43rd. It was
filled with other elderly men.
A scene from Spartacus
My grandpa didn’t seem like much of a radical to me. Sure, he had
opinions. Enormous opinions about almost everything. He hated Kirk
Douglas, for instance, really hated him—even though Douglas had starred
in the movie adaptation of Grandpa’s novel that made him famous,
Spartacus. But to be outshone by a mere actor…that was unforgivable.
The only clue to my grandfather’s former affiliation as a Communist was
that he was convinced that The New York Times was somehow against him
because it was dominated by Trotskyists (it wasn’t). So what was
Grandpa’s dangerous subversive activity? As he later told the
Times—notwithstanding his suspicion of its infiltration by
Trotskyists—in 2000:
I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months [in 1950]
for contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a request of a
congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities
Committee. After the Spanish Civil War against Franco, a group of us got
together a [second] group of well-to-do people who were sympathetic to
the lost cause of a Republican state. We bought a convent in Toulouse
and converted it into a hospital run by the Unitarians. It took care of
the Spanish refugees who fled to Toulouse. There were many thousands of
them and their families. We were asked to give the donors’ names and
refused. All twelve of us were sent to jail.
His crime was silence, an unwillingness to play ball with the House
allies of Joseph McCarthy, the anti-Communist, witch-hunting senator.
Grandfather plead the Fifth, vehemently, and was held in contempt of
Congress. But Grandpa hadn’t always been an enemy of the state. In fact,
just a few years before he was jailed by the US government, he had been
loyally working for it, writing propaganda for the Office of War
Information at the American news service the Voice of America—in effect,
selling World War II to the American people. Of course, for someone like
my grandfather, a Jew of that generation, World War II was very
different from any war before or since—serving in this one, against the
Nazis, they very much considered their patriotic duty.
Howard Fast in his library, 1943
But what I knew, growing up, of my grandfather was neither his
patriotism nor his radicalism, but the ways he profoundly disappointed
those around him. My grandfather was a bad father to my father, mean and
punitive. A serial adulterer, he was also a bad husband to my
grandmother. His philandering wasn’t one of those family secrets locked
away, as it might have been in a normal family; no, it appears brazenly,
in the very first chapter of his autobiography, Being Red. One thing I
will say for the writers in my family: they always wanted to give the
reader the dirt. Unfortunately, the dirt was always us.
And what of the dirt J. Edgar Hoover had on my grandfather? I was eleven
when I stumbled on Grandpa’s FBI file, among the cardboard boxes full of
papers that lined the sideboard in my grandparents’ dining room. There
were papers everywhere. I picked up one of the pages. It was just black
lines, lots of black lines; almost all the words were blacked out.
Someone had sat in a room in Virginia with a marker pen because
knowledge of those words supposedly still represented a threat to
national security—long after Hoover’s G-men had filed their original
reports.
Grandpa has now been dead almost eighteen years, so his silence is a
given. But somewhere on the FBI’s computer servers in Virginia, there’s
an unredacted version of the file that defined him as an “enemy of the
state.” His Times obituary put it this way: “Mr. Fast joined the
[Communist] party in 1943, a decision he often said was made at least in
part because of the poverty he experienced as a child growing up in
Upper Manhattan.” All very virtuous, or at least well-intentioned. But I
wasn’t so sure—I’d read other accounts, heard different stories. I
called my dad to ask him about how Grandpa got involved in communism.
“Any explanation of your grandfather usually involves a woman who isn’t
your grandmother, you know. And he had this affair with the woman who
married that pumpkin microfilm Richard Nixon guy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just Google: pumpkin, Richard Nixon, microfilm.”
I did, and the results I got were all about Alger Hiss. I got back on
the phone with my dad.
“Grandpa had an affair with the woman who would marry Alger Hiss?”
“Sure,” my dad said. Hiss, an alarmingly charming WASP, was a senior
State Department official who was accused, in 1948, of spying for the
USSR. (He always proclaimed his innocence but was subsequently convicted
on a related perjury charge. He later retired to the Hamptons, wrote his
memoirs, and became a dedicated birder.)
Grandpa’s dalliance was not something I’d learned reading between the
black lines in his FBI file. Had Hoover’s men fallen down on the job?
Arguably so, because the character who appears in the feds’ account is
almost unrecognizable—as my grandfather himself acknowledged in his
autobiography:
The eleven hundred pages detailed every—or almost every—decent act
I had performed in my life. If I were to seek some testament to leave to
my grandchildren, proving that I had not lived a worthless existence but
had done my best to help and nourish the poor and oppressed, I could not
do better than to leave them this FBI report. In those pages, there is
no crime, no breaking of the law, no report of an evil act, an
un-American act, an indecent act—and I was no paragon of virtue, and I
did enough that I regret—but the lousy bits and pieces of my life are
nowhere in those pages, only the decent and positive acts: speaking at
meetings for housing, for trade unionism, for better government, for
libertarianism, for a free press, for the right to assemble, for higher
minimum wages, for equal justice for black and white, against lynching,
against the creation of an underclass, against injustice wherever
injustice was found, and for peace, and walking picket lines, and
collecting signatures. These are what make up that brainless report.
In the years since my grandfather died, I have become more involved in
politics myself, and gotten to know some First Amendment and civil
rights lawyers. One of them helped me use the Freedom of Information Act
to get a copy of “that brainless report.” When it came, it was via
email—the report’s reams of pages in PDF format. It seemed much less
scored-through with black marker than I’d remembered from my girlhood.
As I was looking over it all, I got a message from a former FBI official
I’d met through my work. “When looking through your grandpa’s FBI file,”
he wrote me in a message, “check the margins; sometimes Hoover would
write on them directly.” Hoover, of course, had a notorious nose for
vice: after failing to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist
stooge, he set about snooping on King’s philandering. Had he noted down
my grandfather’s dirty secrets, too?
There were scribbles in the margins, but they were impossible to read,
the ink faded and smudged by time. And I wondered whether, just maybe, I
had been letting my grandfather’s vice obscure his virtue.
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