Chapter 9

The Most Dangerous Hours

I see a road in this lovely land, crowded with people I liked and respected being pushed aside as the gay and very mischievous face of Joe McCarthy moves steadily faster than they do and so may catch up with us once again.

—Lillian Hellman, 1970

You have grown up in a country that has possibly come closest to its most dangerous hours if you believe that the corruption of liberty, the invasion of personal freedom is the sin of sins, the final sin.

—commencement address, Mount Holyoke College, 1976

How does one make a free womanhood, or a liberated womanhood, unless there are jobs and opportunities for women to have?

—American Scholar Forum, 1972

The lessons of the McCarthy period remained with Hellman for the rest of her life even as the hysteria of the Red Scare subsided. The 1950s witnessed the emergence of a solid middle-income class in the midst of unprecedented prosperity; at the same time, under Dwight Eisenhower’s leadership a positive national consensus grew around some of the most contentious innovations of the New Deal years, including old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, and welfare support for the poor. But fear of war and subversion faded more slowly. After the Communist Control Act of 1954 declared the Communist Party “an agency of a hostile foreign power” and “a clear and present and continuing danger to the security of the United States,” the party itself shrank into a tiny hard core of perhaps five thousand members, of whom one third might have been undercover FBI agents. The following December, the U.S. Senate censured Joseph McCarthy for impairing the dignity of the chamber. Yet HUAC continued to investigate the influence of communist thought in academia, education, and the entertainment industry. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI did not cease its search for communists, and it labeled “pink” or “red” those who supported liberal causes such as trade unionism and the burgeoning civil rights movement. Nor did the Subversive Activities Control Board stop investigating federal employees accused of affiliation with communist front organizations. Loyalty oaths became commonplace in states and educational institutions.

Hellman remained blacklisted by the movie industry throughout the decade, as did actors, directors, and screenwriters of all kinds. She survived the ordeal by working in the theater, where, bolstered by her fame, she continued to attract an audience. Slowly, she reemerged as the celebrity she had once been. Her adaptation of The Lark drew wide acclaim and played for more than six months. The 1956 musical version of Candide added to her luster even as it failed at the box office. Though she vowed after the disappointment to leave the theater scene behind her, she wrote one more great play, Toys in the Attic, which opened in February 1960. Some say it was her greatest play.¹

Feeling more economically secure, she bought a house on Martha’s Vineyard in 1955. There she befriended a distinguished group of literary neighbors who included novelist John Hersey and his wife Barbara, Sue and John P. Marquand, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and, later, William and Rose Styron. Putting politics behind her, she socialized with an eclectic group of celebrities and intellectuals and met and grew to like some of the leading liberals of the moment. She made friends with Senator John Kennedy’s speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who shared her love of fishing; she came to know McGeorge Bundy, then dean of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., an advocate of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential aspirations. Both Bundy and Schlesinger were noted for their liberal anticommunism. In the same period from the late fifties to the early sixties, she established intimate friendships with conservative columnist Joseph Alsop, Philadelphia lawyer Arthur Cowan, and CBS news executive Blair Clark. She might have disagreed politically with each of these individuals, but all of them remained lifetime friends.

With the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the shift from a political climate of fear to one of hope, the honors and the work poured in. Bundy paved the way to a teaching job at Harvard, where she took her first crack at teaching a seminar of undergraduate students. She did not want, she said, to teach them how to write plays but to teach them how to write. “Are there students,” she asked Bundy, “who are interested as I am, in the relation of drama writing to all other writing?”² In 1963, she won election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an honorary degree from Douglass College, and another from Wheaton College. The film version of Toys in the Attic appeared that summer. As the blacklist lifted, Hellman accepted an offer from Twentieth Century Fox to write the movie script for The Chase, a play written by Horton Foote that would be directed by Arthur Penn and feature Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, and Robert Redford. She didn’t like the way the film turned out, but still, she was back in the swing again. This was only part of it. More honorary degrees came from Brandeis in 1965 and Mount Holyoke in 1966. Visits abroad to attend openings of her plays spiced her days: Moscow in the fall of 1966, London and Paris in the spring of 1967, Paris and Moscow the following fall. At home, Mike Nichols mounted a first-class revival of The Little Foxes in 1967. Lillian Hellman was in full celebrity mode once more.

But in the sixties, the political debate took on a new shape, and Hellman once again found herself a target of criticism. President Kennedy’s electoral victory and his desire to return to the domestic visions of FDR, the emerging civil rights and antiwar movements, and, later, the claims of feminism all seemed to Hellman to signal a newly energized population. At Harvard in the spring of 1961, she met with a small group of students whose critical minds she admired. She welcomed their incipient turmoil as an indication that students, among others, were emerging from the apathy of the fifties. At Harvard, and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Yale and in the commencement addresses and lectures she gave at prestigious colleges and universities around the country, she invariably told her audiences to remember the lessons of the fifties: to be courageous, not to give in to bullies. Not to stand up for what you believe, she repeated to a generation of students, was the greatest dereliction of civic duty.³ Hellman vigorously applauded the emergence of what came to be called a New Left, especially when, as at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, young people turned their attention to political protest. She loved it when young people demonstrated “spunk” or courage.

Others on the left as well as on the right mistrusted students and despised the New Left. The young, they argued, lacked a sense of history, knew nothing of the perils of Marxism, and romanticized nonconformist and aesthetic lifestyles.⁴ Around her, especially among the New York intellectuals and in the anticommunist left, Hellman heard only criticism of students. Cultural leaders such as Irving Howe thought them guilty of undermining a necessary vigilance against the Soviets. The controversy severed old political alliances and realigned partnerships. Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol opted to seek shelter by moving increasingly toward a right-wing stance. Socialism, they thought, would inevitably lead to totalitarianism of either the communist or fascist variety. To avoid that fate, they opted for programs that would suppress socialist impulses or socialist ideas. In the name of preserving democracy, oblivious to the cost to freedom of expression and civil liberties, an increasingly conservative minority targeted anything that did not look like free-market individualism. In their view, government intervention on behalf of the disadvantaged (African-Americans, migrant workers, women, the poor) constituted a slippery slope that would end, they thought, in totalitarianism. Focused around magazines like Encounter and The New Leader, most of this group, as historian Alan Wald puts it, “not only denuded themselves of past radicalism but developed sophisticated rationalizations for tolerating the essence if not the precise McCarthyite form of the witch-hunt.”⁵

All through the sixties and into the early seventies, majority opinion deviated from this view. Men such as Philip Rahv, editor of Partisan Review, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, and Dissent editor Irving Howe sought a distinctively American path toward the social-justice goals of the old left. Convinced that the future of American transformation lay in distancing themselves from communism in any form, they sought to recreate an audience for liberal or socialist programmatic change. Partisan Review and Dissentbecame the voices of transformative, noncommunist change.

Hellman did not participate in, and perhaps was even oblivious to, the sectarian arguments. Her politics remained a moral politics vested in the belief that too much attention was being paid to the Soviets, too little to civil liberties in America. For her the legacy of the McCarthy period rested in defending decency and loyalty and, most of all, in the courage to defend one’s beliefs. So she hovered on the fringes of all these groups, continuing to value social change while for the most part ignoring unfounded sporadic accusations that she remained faithful to communist ideas. Her celebrity as a survivor of HUAC shielded her from explicit attack; her refusal, even in the sixties, to denounce Stalinism or to turn away from friends who clung to their own principles, rendered her politically untrustworthy to the continuing idealists. She was not, by their standards, an intellectual: she lacked what Irving Kristol called critical intelligence. When in the early 1960s some of the younger generation of the New York intellectuals (Jason Epstein, Robert Silvers, Barbara Epstein) founded the New York Review of Books—a magazine explicitly designed to foster conversation on the left outside the realm of the old Communist Party debates—Hellman was simply irrelevant. Friends and acquaintances including Robert Lowell, John Hersey, and John Marquand wrote for the NYRB; Hellman remained marginal.

In the politics of the sixties, the largely nonideological choices of activist students (and the New Left into which they merged) appealed to Hellman. She liked the fact that young people were standing up for something: they had what she called “spine.” At a 1968 political rally, she declared with pleasure, “Our children black and white have caught up with our hypocrisies, and whatever our doubts about their actions or their methods, they have a right to sneer at us.”⁶ She would later describe their protests “as a mixed bag of the good and the foolish.” The good part, she thought, was “the insistence upon examination of what they had been told, taught, and read.” The bad consisted of “the taking over of college offices, damaging of files, bullying of teachers, and so on.” But she did not condone the sending in of police to quell the protests of “good-natured young men and women with much to complain about that needed complaint.”⁷ Nor, on the other side, did she have much patience for the youth movement that questioned parental, political, and corporate authority, promoted sexual liberation, and suspected that anyone over thirty was already part of an unredeemable establishment. She considered this emerging counterculture (dropping out, turning on, communal living, flower power) mere foolishness. She later applied the same label to the cultural expressions of the women’s movement.

The rise of grassroots efforts by southern blacks to stand up for themselves stirred Hellman deeply. The civil rights movement, she noted in her journal, was “the first deeply felt movement since the Spanish Civil War,” an indication that people could not “live long on non-something” without belief. Recalling her own political epiphany, she scrawled notes in her own hand: “suddenly something like 1930s has appeared again and man is once more angry that other men don’t eat very well, get snubbed and insulted, haven’t proper rights.”⁸ Hellman never participated in the ongoing strategy sessions and debate as she had with efforts to eliminate Jim Crow from the army in the forties. This time around, she found a way to support the cause of civil rights by doing what she did best: raising money and writing.

In the summer of 1963 Hellman persuaded Ladies’ Home Journal to send her as a journalist to report on the August 28, 1963, March on Washington organized by Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a coalition of labor union and civil rights groups. To prepare the article, she did her usual job of research, clipping pieces from several newspapers and familiarizing herself with the Civil Rights Act then before Congress. She interviewed protest organizer Bayard Rustin along with a range of young southerners, many of them marchers in previous demonstrations. Among her contacts were two virulent southern opponents of civil rights, Louisana’s senator Allen Ellender and Alabama’s John Sparkman. She scrawled notes from her informants in a three-by-five notebook—to which she also included references to hair appointments, lists of expenses, and instructions she wanted to convey to her secretary at home. The notes reflect something of her feelings. Of a jail in Alabama, she noted “toilet facilities—toilet in room they slept” and “food was 2 times 5AM & 6PM. Grits & gravy & bread & no sugar for coffee.” On another occasion, she recorded: “Treated girls as bad as boys. Electric prodders used on private parts … Police came in during night and used electric prodders. 24 girls to a cell—3 beds or 4 beds … Struck some of girls on breast.”⁹

The piece that finally emerged, called “Sophronia’s Grandson goes to Washington,” used the device of her beloved nurse Sophronia (whose viewpoint was that of the old paternal order) to imagine what it would have been like for a young black man to be speaking up for himself. In it she mocked the positions of traditional racist southerners and told stories about the way protesting blacks faced beatings, dogs, and electric cow prodders. Graphic descriptions of Sheriff Dewey Colvard of Etowah County, Alabama, “putting a cow prodder to the breast of a girl” and later to the testicles of a boy provoked a denial and demand for retraction, to which the Ladies’ Home Journal acceded.¹⁰ Though Hellman did not deny having falsely named the sheriff, she insisted that she had accurately depicted the spirit of the events. “My article in all important matters tells the truth,” she wrote brashly. “What is true should not be obscured by the fear of lawsuits.”¹¹ Years later she would reject this logic when she was the victim of a similar rationale. But at the time, she hid behind her heritage “as a white woman born in the South” to insist on the veracity of her interpretation.¹¹ Some of her southern readers respectfully disagreed. They dismissed her efforts to excuse what one called her “slanderous defamation of Mr. Colvard’s character” and insisted that “Lillian Hellman’s birth was a geographical accident; she is not a Southerner.”¹² And yet many saw this small confrontation as a courageous intercession in a much larger struggle. “I know that your experience will not keep you from speaking out against injustice wherever you see it,” wrote her lawyer when, somewhat apologetically, he sent her his bill at the conclusion of the case, “and that your stand will ultimately be vindicated and approved.”¹³

For all of her sympathy with the purposes of the march and her anger at the methods of those who resisted black protest, for all of her insistence that “the argument for States’ rights was now reduced to the argument for the right of each police department to act as they saw fit,” she could not restrain her impatience with the slow pace of change.¹⁴ White people shared the blame for this, she thought. “What is interesting now,” she reminded herself, recalling her frequent injunctions against silence, is “where the white man had been all those years—very few of us will protest unless the victim makes us.”¹⁵ She gave no quarter even to her friends. Folk singer Pete Seeger remembered her dismissing the words of “We Shall Overcome,” the song that became the anthem of the movement. “She didn’t like the song,” he recalled. “She said, ‘someday, someday … That’s been said for too long.’ “¹⁶

The same mixture of sympathy, relief, and impatience pervaded Hellman’s attitude toward antiwar movements of the sixties. Between 1961 and his death in 1963, President Kennedy slowly escalated American military commitments to Vietnam. Hellman remained uninvolved during this period. She was, after all, a friend of McGeorge Bundy, now a Kennedy adviser, and she still enjoyed fishing with Richard Goodwin. But in 1964 and 1965, as President Lyndon Baines Johnson stepped up American troop presence, Hellman’s anger mounted; her old desire for peace rose. She could not bear an acquiescent silence in the face of policies that she abhorred. But what could she do? In 1965, her former Harvard student and now good friend Fred Gardner came up with an idea to establish coffeehouses outside army bases where GIs uncomfortable with the war could talk with like-minded souls. Hellman loved the idea. She offered Gardner $5,000 and the use of her Peugeot for a year to get the project off the ground. The idea worked, and Gardner, along with his partner, Donna Mickelson, established a GI coffeehouse network that provided neutral territory for conversation. After they were taken over by more ideological antiwar activists, the role of the coffeehouses diminished.¹⁷

Later, Hellman translated her opposition to the war into support for Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential candidacy. The campaign, headed up by her good friend Blair Clark, included old friends and new ones, all of them opponents of the war. She joined them and McCarthy on countless platforms and at rallies to articulate the moral stance that was her trademark. There she chose to remind audiences of the importance of articulate leadership in the service of just causes. At a huge Madison Square Garden event organized by Hannah Weinstein, she noted how easily Joseph McCarthy prevailed “often unopposed by those who had not been so frightened of liars and bullies when Roosevelt was there to give them the courage evidently lost on the day he died.” Not to protest in the face of a war cloaked in democratic words, she told that audience, was to share the sin of hypocrisy. “We have allowed our government to kill an innocent people, as they explained that their death was for their own good.”¹⁸ When she received the 1969 National Book Award for An Unfinished Woman, she asked her audience why they were not disturbed “by the death of young men they have in majority, silently agreed to send across the world against a people who never harmed them, into a war they do not understand.”¹⁹

In light of the war in Vietnam, politics took on a new dimension. Hellman’s resonant moral pleas suggest that she closely identified her own Cold War experiences with those of the young people who challenged a war they opposed. They too risked castigation and exclusion for their opinions. Her messages begged audiences to overcome the fears she still shared with them and to get out and do something. “So many of us climbed into that bed of pain in those years,” she reminded her own generation, “and have stayed there ever since.”²⁰ Her stance brought her closer to elements of the left and New Deal coalitions—who now defined their politics as liberal and social democratic—and especially to the New York intellectuals. Their shared opposition to the war in Vietnam, their common desire to expose America’s malfeasances around the globe in the name of democracy and freedom, temporarily obscured deeply rooted disagreements over the Soviet Union. To this group, Hellman brought her luster as a “moral beacon,” her reputation as a brave opponent of McCarthyism.²¹

Hellman’s moral credibility increased when she began to speak out with respect to the intellectual dissent that boiled up in the Soviet Union in the late fifties. Censorship remained rigid behind the iron curtain, but underground (samizdat) publication of stories and novels enabled writers to circulate their work privately and to smuggle it out of the Soviet Union for publication abroad, often under false names. Writers and printers caught circulating work in this way, rather than subjecting it to official censored channels, risked long jail sentences and confiscation of their possessions. In the winter of 1965–66, the Soviet authorities tried two writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, for criticizing the regime in articles smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the foreign press. After a well-publicized show trial, the court found them guilty and leveled sentences of hard labor—seven years for Daniel and five for Sinyavksy. But in contrast to earlier years, when Russian intellectuals remained silent and communists abroad supported the regime, in 1966 the dissidents attracted vocal support inside and outside the Soviet Union. Hellman joined the public outcry against the regime’s intolerance. In 1938 she had done exactly the opposite, signing a statement in support of the Moscow trials that condemned several writers to death. She had not spoken up when actor and director Solomon Mikhoels was executed in 1948. Nor did she utter a word when the poet Itzik Feffer, whom she met during a 1943 visit to the United States, died in a Soviet prison in 1952. Her voice now signaled misgivings about her previous rationalizations of Soviet repression. Catherine Kober Zeller, her goddaughter, remembers her around this time “as standing up, or pacing, furious at herself, with all the intensity of her fury, for not having seen through what was going on in Russia.” Kober Zeller adds, “I felt, at that moment, that she hated herself for it.”²²

Hellman visited the Soviet Union the following spring to attend a theater festival. She was warmly received by a regime that still recalled her wartime expedition. Her old friend and interpreter Raisa Orlova, now married to Lev Kopelev, one of the country’s leading dissenters, took her under her wing. This put her in an awkward position when she received an invitation to address the fourth national congress of the Union of Russian Writers in the spring of 1967. She accepted reluctantly, not wanting to offend the regime. Still, she had to decide whether to support the regime’s refusal to tolerate dissent or cast her lot with the dissenters. She chose to do the latter, offering the group a sharply worded message urging them to remain true to their values regardless of state pressure to follow a particular line. “Intellectuals—and by intellectuals I mean men who believe in the power of reason—can continue in the hopes they once had only if they come together to speak honestly of past mistakes and present problems.” Intellectuals, she insisted, “almost never wish to imprison men for speaking words they do not like … all intellectuals believe in freedom and many of them have an honorable record of fighting for it. No medals need be given for that fight: freedom is the essence of thought, the blood on the paper. Without freedom the intellectual will choke to death and his country will gasp for air. Thus the demand for it is the measure of true patriotism.”²³ She might have been speaking of the United States just fifteen years earlier. Back in the United States, she found herself publicly proclaimed as a champion of Soviet dissent. Not yet comfortable as an opponent of the regime, Hellman hedged. She had not meant to imply that writers opposed the Soviet system; she said only that they wanted to be able to express themselves freely within it.²⁴

She clung more persuasively to that argument when she lashed out at novelist Anatoly Kuznetsov, who fled the Soviet Union for England in the spring of 1969. Unlike Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who preferred to suppress his work rather than see it censored, Kuznetsov published censored editions that conformed to bureaucratic demands. His compliant behavior (which included denouncing novelists Andrei Sakharov and Yevgeny Yevtushenko for failing to cooperate with the Soviet authorities) earned him a trip to Britain, where he immediately sought asylum. Once safely out of Soviet reach, the forty-year-old Kuznetsov published an incendiary attack on what he remembered of the Soviet Union in his youth. The Western press and literati welcomed Kuznetsov as a friend and ally. Lillian refused the consensus. She knew, she wrote in a New York Times piece, that intellectuals in the Soviet Union were in turmoil; and she knew as well the disgusting pressure exerted by “the semi-literate bureaucrats, who suppress and alter manuscripts, who dictate who can and cannot be published.” But Kuznetsov, she argued, protested only when it was safe to do so. Palpably bitter, she concluded her piece: “I’d like to bet that he’ll soon pay us a visit and the dinner party lists are already being drawn up. After dinner in a chair by the fireside—the favorite position of Whittaker Chambers once upon a time—he will speak to the guests of freedom but somebody should tell Kuznetsov that freedom earned by betraying innocent friends is a contradiction of terms.”²⁵

Hellman surely relived the experiences of the early fifties when she watched her friends choose how to behave under pressure of investigation. But the Kuznetsov episode reminded others more of 1938, when she had rationalized her support for what she should have seen as an evil regime. In attacking Kuznetsov for cowardice, she seemed to expose her own hypocrisy. Commentaries in the New Yorker and Time magazine noted that Hellman was “scarcely in a position to demand that a Soviet writer risk his liberty and perhaps his life, by making open protests on Soviet soil.”²⁶ Hellman angrily accused William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, of “misinterpretation presented under the covering banner of ‘fact.’ “²⁷ Her agent, Robby Lantz, objected that Time had returned to “the old pastime of witch-hunting and red-baiting.”²⁸ And yet Hellman resisted the notion that her piece in any way defended the Soviet Union. “I didn’t mean to ‘champion the USSR’ or anything else,” she wrote to a sympathetic correspondent. “I meant only that I didn’t like what Mr. Kuznetsov had to say about his friends.”²⁹

For all of the renewed attention, Hellman remained in the late sixties unsure of how to situate herself. Her friend Anne Peretz and Catherine Kober Zeller both remember her as mildly depressed, though she continued to teach regularly and to lecture widely.³⁰ Her plays and the film versions of The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour received renewed attention. But she was a playwright whose time had passed. She knew, she would say later, that she didn’t want to write any more plays, but she also knew that she “wanted to go on being a writer … I had to find some other form to write in.”³¹ That form turned out to be the memoir.

In 1966, she persuaded Bennett Cerf (Hammett’s old editor at Random House) to publish a collection of Hammett’s fiction for which she would write an introduction. The effort proved transformative. Hellman refused the temptation to write biographically about her “closest … most beloved friend,” trying instead to capture some of the feeling of the man she had both loved and fought with for “thirty-one on and off years.”³² Moving from memory to memory, she produced a remarkable essay infused with love and affection, with pride in Hammett’s idiosyncrasies, and with pleasure at her own capacity to cope with them. But it was an essay that, critics argued, placed her too centrally in Hammett’s life and claimed too much for the importance of their relationship. It revealed more about her than about him. The piece proved to be a model for the memoirs to which she would soon turn.

Hellman came reluctantly, and with great insecurity, to the idea of writing a memoir. She didn’t like the idea of writing about herself; she feared writing about others. Besides, she didn’t know who might publish it. Relationships had soured with Random House, which had put most of her plays into print, and she wasn’t getting along with Alfred Knopf over the Hammett stories. Stanley Hart, an editor at Little, Brown, was at the time actively pursuing her. But she was uncomfortable. That company had, in 1951, parted with Angus Cameron, then a young editor of left-wing proclivities. It had also, unforgivably, apologized for publishing politically “dangerous” authors and named Lillian Hellman among them. Cameron recalled that Hellman came to him before she signed with Little, Brown and the two agreed that “it was many years ago and people are all different there.”³³ After she overcame her doubts and signed the book up, Hellman worried that she “wouldn’t like it when I finished it,” and insisted on a clause that allowed her to return the advance without penalty if she didn’t like the final product.³⁴ Even after she sent the manuscript in, she lingered over the details. William Abrahams, who served as her editor and became her friend, was in near despair at the end. “Lillian telephoned to say that she was uncertain about one passage,” he wrote to his boss. She wanted lawyers to check whether the words in a particular film had been spoken by actors or written as subtitles. Abrahams thought she had “a case of jitters brought on by giving up the manuscript to the printer.”³⁵

The final product, An Unfinished Woman, proved to be an intriguing mix of incisive commentary on herself and others punctuated by reflective and emotive anecdotes. About one third of it is a roughly chronological account of her growing-up years. Another chunk replicates heavily edited diary entries of her trips to Spain in 1937 and to Moscow in 1944–45. The rest consists of three character sketches. “Hammett” reproduces much of her introduction to The Big Knockover. “Dorothy Parker” depicts the “tangled fishnet of contradictions” that represented her own sense of herself. The final story, of her longtime housekeeper Helen, is, in the words of one critic, “a subtle study in race relations and the liberal conscience, shaped like a story.”³⁶ Hellman’s parents, relatives, and friends emerge from behind curtains of memory, each starring in a story of love or disappointment or hope. As a memoir must, An Unfinished Woman reveals less of the lives it puts forward than of an inner Hellman.

But the book worked. Admiring reviewers described it as “a record of personal discovery” that captures “the deepest of feelings, coming plain, and meant to be that, enlarged nonetheless by its clarity and infectious in its precision.”³⁷ A British reviewer suggested that Hellman had taken “the very personal fragments” of her life and merged them to reveal a “personality of real beauty.”³⁸ Another complimented the writing as “lucid, flinty, vulnerable,” and averred that “the compressed prose is diamond hard and sometimes brilliant and the dialogue is like one pithy speech after another out of a Hellman play.”³⁹ If reviewers complained about the silences—“the omission of any discussion about her political passions, her life in the theater, her sexual appetites”—they interpreted them generously, seeing in them confessions of vulnerability, measures of her continuing effort to find herself. They appreciated her modesty, her search for integrity, her need for solitary moments. “She has given us a detailed portrait of a person who doesn’t want to be portrayed,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times.⁴⁰ Critics almost universally complimented An Unfinished Woman for its “rare imagination and literary skill,” at least one noting that it revealed “with an almost sad reluctance” the unexpected personal story of a great American playwright. Hellman, one concluded, had drawn a portrait of a complex woman, at once shrewd and difficult. The self of An Unfinished Woman was simultaneously shy and frightened and “an adventurous rebel.” This was a book in which everyone could find “a mirror, and an image,” concluded Life magazine.⁴¹

Released at the end of June 1969, An Unfinished Woman climbed to eighth on the New York Times bestseller list within a month. It stayed on top for three full months, winning the National Book Award for 1969 and launching Hellman on her new career as memoirist. She was excited and delighted. She signed a new contract with Little, Brown, with the proviso that she continue to work with her editor, William Abrahams, who had now relocated to California. Again the honors poured in: visiting professorships at MIT and Berkeley in the spring of 1971, and then a distinguished professorship at Hunter College for the spring of 1973. Hellman, by all accounts, loved to teach and took students seriously. She thought carefully about what she wanted to convey to them and commented copiously on her students’ work. They, in turn, often wrote to tell her how meaningful her classes were. Elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1973, she won a woman-of-the-year award from New York University’s alumnae club the same year.

The book could not have been better timed, appearing just as a new young generation of women’s movement activists cohered into a political force. The women’s liberation movement had built rapidly in the sixties, emerging from women’s growing discontent with limited roles in the home and rampant discrimination in the workplace. It was fueled as well by a powerful civil rights movement that involved black and white women in the struggle for freedom, and nurtured by a search to end the war in Vietnam that encouraged women as well as men to challenge the twin gods of manliness and wartime bravado. An Unfinished Woman caught the crest of the moment. It followed on a year of rapid and almost invisible organizing that included the emergence of radical women’s groups like Red Stockings and the increasing success of a three-year-old National Organization of Women. It paralleled the spread of small consciousness-raising groups designed to allow women to “speak bitterness” and to confront a growing sense that private life was lived in the context of public decisions as well as shaped by them. The year 1969 followed on a widely publicized August 1968 protest action against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, which demanded an end to the fetishizing of women’s bodies. It was the year that young women began to understand and to repeat the mantra “The personal is political.” And it preceded an August 1970 mass march by women who celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage with banners that read WOMEN STRIKE FOR PEACE AND EQUALITY.

Nineteen sixty-nine was also the year that tensions emerged between the political and cultural strands of the women’s movement. Radical feminists urged women to focus on changing the organization of personal life and familial relationships. If women eliminated the demeaning attributes of language and lifestyle, thought radical feminists, if they controlled their own reproductive choices, if they resisted limited gender roles, they could win equality between the sexes. These changes would require overturning a patriarchal power structure whose insidious effects materialized in the everyday actions of men and women. To radical feminists, questions of chivalry—who opened car doors or held coats or walked nearest the sidewalk—mattered as symbols of the larger patriarchy. Liberal feminists, to whose ideas Hellman’s came close, believed, in contrast, that economic opportunity held the key to gender equality. The first step, they thought, should be to drop the barriers to women’s education, occupational choices, and career aims by fighting for legislative and policy changes that would provide access to job training and professional education, make available credit and financial resources, and ensure fair treatment in the workplace for women regardless of their family status.

Hellman was already in her mid-sixties when women’s liberation became a movement, and she was approaching her seventies by the time the conflict between liberal and radical feminists became apparent. Ironically, perhaps, her own remarkable successes as a playwright drew attention at the time because she had achieved them as a woman. Hellman, who had never wanted to be identified as a “woman playwright,” now found herself a heroine to women who admired her achievements because of her identity, not her politics. Her readers focused as well on the unorthodox lifestyle she celebrated in An Unfinished Woman. The long-term relationship with Dashiell Hammett, the several abortions of which she made no secret, the sexual liaisons in which she continued to indulge even as she grew older: all these turned her into a model for the new women’s movement.

Yet the Lillian Hellman dramatized in her memoir bore little resemblance to the Hellman her friends and lovers knew. The strident and outspoken persona that Hellman memorialized presented another side in private. She could, says Feibleman, “walk into a room very quietly and sit down, and the room would turn to her, and people wanted to get to know her or wanted to be in her good graces. She was very electric, electrifying, magnetic.” Nor was she, in real life, sexually adventurous or aggressive. Peter Feibleman describes her as shy sexually, a description that affirms the femininity that others noticed in private moments. She was, says Feibleman, “very passive, very unaggressive, very feminine—one of the most feminine women I’ve ever known. The bark and the bite were political or emotional. Never sexual, never sexual.”⁴²

This second Lillian, this woman who, to paraphrase Feibleman once again, both lived her life and performed it, made no secret of her contempt for issues of cultural change. She believed she had become successful as a result of her own talents and efforts, not as the result of her sexually liberated lifestyle. She had earned her way to the top, and her success had given her access to political culture that promised to shape the world. She had deployed her fame to espouse political causes that could address issues of racial and gender equality. She had used her visibility to help organize screenwriters in the 1930s; she had relied on her talent to raise her voice in the fight against fascism and on her celebrity to raise funds for causes she cared about in the forties. Hellman had done all this without particularly focusing on women’s issues, though always with an eye to the collective strengths of politically mobilized women.

To Hellman, women’s equality was never a goal in itself. Rather, she believed in equality as a vehicle for achieving national and worldwide political progress and the good society she imagined. From early on, women’s failures to help each other had systematically disappointed her. While political emancipation had led to advances for individual women, in her early forties she wrote, “it has nowhere gone in quite the most desirable direction.” She expected that since women had always been underdogs, they “would become the most advanced, the most liberal.” She hoped that because women “suffered from the deprivation of certain basic human rights” she would be “in the forefront of the fight for others’ human rights,” and she anticipated that “because she is the giver of human life, she would be also the most zealous guardian of it—instead she is often the most bloodthirsty.”⁴³ These lessons stuck with her. At a Women for Wallace luncheon during Henry Wallace’s 1948 presidential campaign, she accused her female audience of being “remarkably indifferent to the problems of our time … Another generation gave us the vote and either we have not used it at all or we have too often used it for the wrong issues and the wrong men … another generation worked hard to establish us as equal people, capable of doing more than giggling at dinner tables, or scrubbing floors for those who did. We responded with little enough gratitude, little true interest, in the affairs of our country or the state of the world.”⁴⁴

To Hellman, “career” women, as the postwar world defined them and as the new women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies proposed to empower them, did not automatically harbor the kinds of values necessary to political progress. Career women who adopted the aggressive strategies and power-grabbing mentality of successful men would only emulate their politics. And while she understood that wealth ruled the world, she believed that most real wealth was inherited from husbands and fathers rather than earned, so it was folly to assume that women with careers would exercise significant amounts of power. In her view only a broad education, one not oriented toward a particular career, could lead women and men to decide how to live their lives and to define their own values. “Pick yourself a few decent standards and stick by them,” she advised one audience.”⁴⁵

Despite her skepticism, An Unfinished Woman spoke directly to the lives of the young women then marching. Its depiction of a sexually free, politically engaged, and economically successful life, a life filled with love and friendship, with courage and determination, resonated with a generation of young women in search of models. In direct and clipped prose, less reminiscence than an evocation of self, Hellman recalled a life lived not by the standards of her mother’s generation or those of the postwar young, but by those whom she so frequently called “my generation.” These standards, as she remembered them, were rooted in integrity and honesty, in a lack of pretense and an absence of sentimentality. “My generation,” she would say repeatedly, “didn’t emulate the standards of their mothers; they chose to go their own ways.” Rejecting conventional modes of being, Hellman painted herself, as one reviewer noted, as “impatient with ‘lady stuff’ … attracted towards dangerous places and brave intelligent men.”⁴⁶

Lillian shrugged off the adulation. She did not believe that women’s liberation could or should be a matter only or primarily of sexual freedom. In the series of tours and interviews and invitations that followed the publication of An Unfinished Woman and then, four years later, Pentimento, Lillian expressed her impatience with what she thought of as the diversionary tactics of the current women’s liberation movement. They had taken their eyes off “the problems implicit in our capitalist society.”⁴⁷ Middle-class white mothers had failed to teach their daughters values like courage, loyalty and integrity, warning them that these were “unfeminine, unfashionable qualities,” inconsistent with “the qualities that will get you a husband.”⁴⁸ The result, she argued, was a generation of women without real values. From these generalizations she exempted black women and poor women, who, since they had always needed to work, had developed more substantial characters. The educated white woman, in her eyes, bore responsibility for women’s bad name.

These views undermined Hellman’s position in the women’s movement. In 1972, in the heady moments of women’s liberation, Hellman moderated a panel on the “condition of women today.” Panel members—seven distinguished women writers, novelists, and critics—had been invited by Hiram Haydn, editor of the American Scholar, to record a conversation that he later published in the pages of the journal. The exchange began with a question originally suggested by Hannah Arendt: “What will we lose if we win?”⁴⁹The debate, which took place in mid-May, was sometimes heated and often acerbic. In it, Hellman revealed her sense of what being a woman meant to her. Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with her life, she argued that the most significant issue for women was economic independence. Nothing mattered, she repeatedly asserted to panelists who generally disagreed with her, as much as good jobs for women. “Equal wages, equal opportunities” seemed to her the crucial issues. When another panelist sought to override these concerns, telling her, “That goes without saying,” Hellman replied sharply, “I’m afraid it doesn’t go without saying. I think one of the troubles with women’s liberation is that it has not touched women of the so-called lower classes, deprived classes. It’s really been a movement of intellectuals and well-heeled middle-class ladies. It’s too bad.” Challenged by African-American novelist Alice Walker to explain why black women, who had historically earned their own livings, nevertheless remained sweet and compliant to their men, Hellman replied that such behavior “pays better.” Nor did she credit cultural issues with paving the way to change. Dismissing impatiently the significance of “who takes out the garbage and who takes care of the children,” deriding the debate over whether women should or should not burn their brassieres, she returned insistently to the idea that “the liberation of people comes about through economic equality. Men could not put women down if women were truly equal.”⁵⁰

Hellman repeated this theme endlessly, offering herself as the archetype of the successful woman who had achieved renown and a substantial fortune on her own merits. “It seems to me a question of what dignity is about,” she told that 1972 audience, and dignity in her mind involved “economic equality, spiritual equality,” the capacity to meld a satisfying personal life with fulfilling wage work. Dignity manifested itself in a refusal to idealize marriage and motherhood. That made her insufficiently womanly to some, and decidedly masculine to others. Perhaps she was something of a throwback, for even as she drew on the models of the twenties to flout the gender assumptions of the seventies, she insisted that she was merely following the conventions of the most interesting people of her generation. “Enlarging the norms is good for everybody,” said Elizabeth Janeway, who hoped for a broader conception of what a woman could be.⁵¹ Lillian Hellman agreed. She had, she thought, done her bit to do just that.

In some respects, Lillian was repeating what she had always said: she hoped women might acquire what she variously called self-respect or dignity. She believed women could achieve these only if they had the possibility of earning their own livings. Lack of economic independence produced ugly emotions and despicable acts, as she had written in two of her best plays. Regina of The Little Foxes challenged her brothers, took the life of her husband, and risked the love of her daughter to acquire control of family resources. The two aging sisters in Toys in the Attic remained so invested in the love of their younger brother that when his newfound success threatened to reduce his dependence on them, they sabotaged him rather than allow him to reverse roles. Nobody was better at drawing the portraits of women who, like those in her mother’s family led frustrated lives that revolved around the desire to have, to keep, and to construct something of their own; nobody was better at articulating the sense that women’s traditional economic dependence undermined their capacity to be unselfishly loving; nobody better captured the ambivalence of women whose emotional dependence was forged in their inability to control their own money.

To the goal of a women’s movement that could produce self-respecting women and free them from the internal pressures and tensions of pretense and self-abnegation, Hellman remained faithful even as her own fame and wealth grew. Despite her consistent vanity—she carefully cut and dyed her hair, dressed modishly, and wore perfume daily—she ridiculed the attention paid to issues of language, insisting on being addressed as Miss Hellman rather than the clumsy Ms. She preferred to be published by general literary publishing houses and magazines rather than those dedicated to “militant feminist publications,” but she would settle for publication by such houses over no publication at all.⁵² She turned a deaf ear to pleas to lend her name or her funds to feminist causes. Nor did she particularly identify, as a writer, with women’s issues. Rather, as she told a series of graduating college students, she hoped that young women would “speak out for the benefit of others” and wished for them that they “have something to do with making the country what it must and ought to be.”⁵³

For Hellman, the important symbiosis, the tension that called young women to act, was between work and politics rather than between money and love. In the spring of 1975, she gave a commencement address at Barnard, which she later published in the editorial pages of the New York Times and then republished in the college issue of Mademoiselle magazine. In the various drafts of this address she connected the threads of her concern with what women would become. The world ahead of them, she told the graduates, was a troubled one, and America was filled with people who misused power to make it worse. But these graduating women had a responsibility to connect their book learning with what was happening in the world. America would grow better only if they undertook the responsibility of examining their lives and their goals. To do that, they first needed to make a living. “How can there ever be liberation of women,” she asked, “unless they can earn a living?” Ibsen’s Nora, she noted, “having slammed the door and opened it for women’s liberation,” was embraced by students but not really recognized for what she did or couldn’t do. What happened to Nora after she slammed the door? she asked. And then answered her own question: “The talk of brassieres or no brassieres, who washes the dinner pots, whether you are a sex object … has very little meaning unless the woman who slams the door can buy herself dinner and get out of a winter wind.”⁵⁴

To Hellman, who had managed to do far more than get out of a winter wind, the lessons of women’s freedom were clear. Hellman hoped that a women’s movement would be a means to an end—the end being a more engaged and politically informed community of citizens. She wanted to eliminate boundaries imposed by class and wealth in order to assure the personal and cultural freedom that could lead women to make a better world. And she made no secret of her contempt for women who used wealth conspicuously or wastefully. My Mother, My Father and Me, her last attempt at writing for the theater, mocked the aridity of a 1950s family whose life focused on the meaningless consumption of a vapid mother and the empty goals of her purposeless teenage son. The lesson of these shortcomings was hard to miss: if she was going to argue for real values, she would have to put her own on the line. And her own commitments were laid out in the books that brought her a second chance at celebrity. All her life she fought for decency, self-respect, and dignity that could be achieved only by self-support and political engagement in the struggle for a better world.

Small wonder, then, that for all that she was idolized by the young feminists of the 1970s, Hellman could not fully identify with the modern version of women’s liberation. In that 1972 panel, Elizabeth Janeway and Carolyn Heilbrun among others tried to tell her that questions of life’s meaning and purpose, of socialization and self-confidence, could not be disentangled from those of economic opportunity and freedom to choose jobs. Hellman thought otherwise. By herself, through hard work and talent, she had achieved money, status, and fame in her lifetime and by her own hand. She was a self-made woman. Her capacity to live freely—her sexual liberation, her personal freedom—rested on the economic foundation she built for herself. Young women, she thought, could choose to emulate her unorthodox lifestyle—to emulate her capacity “to walk out if somebody insults me”—only if they were economically independent. But the younger generation of women reserved their adulation for her style. They admired her brash and outspoken stance, her ability to smoke and to swear and above all her courage in living by her own rules of personal conduct. “I was so bored. I got so nasty,” she told an interviewer about that famous panel. “Nobody seemed to be talking about economics.”⁵⁵

Even as she became popular among young women of the 1970s, she did not call herself a feminist. When, in 1976, interviewer Barbara Walters asked her how, in the face of her skepticism about women’s liberation, she accounted for her status as something of a “cult figure,” Lillian replied, only half tongue in cheek, “It is probably due to the fact that I lived with a man so very long without marrying him.” “Do you think they say she really did it when nobody else dared to?” Walters asked. Lillian replied, “Well, you know the younger generation always thinks that nobody did anything before they did it … I wish it were something more solid.” Walters pursued the issue, asking Hellman how she felt about “women’s lib.” Lillian replied, “I think it is an excellent theory,” and continued, “It certainly should be fought for, probably on any ground one can fight it.” But she punctuated each assent with a qualifier: “I wish they’d get more on economic equality than who wears what brassiere,” she added. And again, “I don’t think it can be fought for in the foolish ground.”⁵⁶ Still, Walters would not let go. How was it, she asked, that she didn’t identify with women’s liberation, “even though you would be perhaps one of the heroines of it”? Hellman responded: “I stayed out of it because I realized I would get into arguments over it; I once conducted a forum on it with very intelligent and educated ladies and I was so in disagreement with most of them I thought I’d better not do this again.”⁵⁷

She did not, after that 1972 debate, get into any more fights with adherents of women’s liberation, but she did stick to her guns and in so doing earned the veneration of a generation with whom she had declared herself at odds. For years after that 1972 forum, she told whoever would listen that she had been misunderstood then and that she continued to be misunderstood. “I don’t have to tell you how deeply I believe in women’s liberation,” she told interviewer Bill Moyers.⁵⁸ But in the same breath, she repeated her assertion that “it all comes down to whether or not you can support yourself as well as a man can support himself—whether there’s enough money to make certain decisions for yourself, rather than a dependence.”⁵⁹ Hellman clearly met this test. She placed the demands of women’s liberation in the context of the life she had shaped for herself and found them wanting. She never stopped admiring the spirit and gumption of the young women who acted in the name of women’s liberation, and she never stopped hoping to convince them that economic independence was their best hope for expanded personal rights and freedom—and that this in turn would lead to the better world that she had so long envisioned. “I’m with the movement in theory,” she said. “Most of its goals are excellent, although I’m uncomfortable with some of the slogans. Wearing or not wearing a bra is terribly unimportant. It’s being able to buy that bra yourself—that’s important.”⁶⁰ If Hellman could not admit to being a feminist by the standards of the seventies, she was certainly one by her own.

In 1970, disturbed by what she saw as the increasing repression of the Nixon administration, Hellman saw an opportunity to do exactly what she had hoped her friends and colleagues would do in the McCarthy period, exactly what she had been urging students to do in the 1960s: to stand up for what they believed. As early as 1968, Hellman was already worrying out loud about the re-emergence of surveillance techniques and the possibility of a new McCarthyism.

She had good reason to worry. In April 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. produced a wave of despair in the black community. Two months later, Robert Kennedy—who, as attorney general, had led his brother’s campaign to secure voting rights for Southern African-Americans—died at the hands of another assassin. Parts of a disjointed civil rights movement formed a black liberation faction to demand black power; some members of the Black Panthers, who organized breakfast programs for poor children, resorted to weapons amid a rhetoric of self-protection. Radical fringe groups like the Weather Underground splintered away from mainstream protest movements to organize a campaign of bombings and demonstrations that would lead to revolutionary change. Violence mounted on other fronts too. The war in Vietnam was going badly: national security adviser Henry Kissinger and President Nixon had formed a tight cabal to make decisions about how to run it. Even the State Department found itself excluded from policy decisions. Matters got worse when, in the fall of 1969, the air force secretly began bombing Cambodia. As opposition mounted and peace marchers challenged the power of the military industrial complex, government surveillance stepped up. National Guard efforts to defuse peace protests turned ugly.

The administration responded to the turmoil with heightened repression. In the name of order, and to counter what it called subversion, the Justice Department and the FBI infiltrated a wide variety of political organizations thought to be threatening. Lists of those under surveillance grew. The FBI, joined by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), escalated an already massive campaign to subvert left-wing organizations by encouraging “deep cover” agents to act as provocateurs. Operation Chaos, originated by the CIA in 1967, collected 7,200 files on Americans within national borders; army intelligence spread one thousand agents among the protest groups; the FBI’s Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Operation) sent anonymous letters to left-wing groups designed to set off quarrels and foment internecine warfare. The undercover agents did their jobs well, provoking violence where none might have occurred. Twenty-eight members of the Black Panther political party were killed in 1969. The same year, Greensboro, North Carolina, undercover agents incited militants to bomb stores and ambush police, providing the weapons that enabled them to do so. Police, hearing rumors, called in the National Guard; one student died. In the meantime, opposition to the war reached a fever pitch: as many as a third of draftees were not showing up for their induction dates. As they had done before, law-enforcement agencies blamed communist infiltration and influence. But the hammer and sickle no longer frightened the young. Campus protests escalated; in May 1970, four students died when National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful demonstration at Kent State University in Ohio.⁶¹

Hellman had not forgotten that Nixon was a key player on Joseph McCarthy’s Government Operations subcommittee. Nor had the wounds she sustained in that period healed. In February 1970, she began to talk about how to resist what she saw as a new period of repression. Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, recalled the moment: “She felt strongly that the old rot was setting in and that there was a need for a new group of citizens—writers, artists, scientists, lawyers—who would, so to speak, be on guard—a group that would be willing to speak out in defense of constitutional rights against the dangers of bullying, devious secret government.”⁶² Starting with a group of trusted friends, including Blair Clark, her old pal Hannah Weinstein, and her fishing partner John Hersey, Hellman cajoled others into organizing resistance. In April, she invited Telford Taylor, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and now a professor at Columbia Law School, into a small group called the Committee for Public Justice. Convincing Taylor of the need for such a committee, wheedling a little, adding self-deprecatory comments—“It’s been a big job for me and I am not very good at it”—she persuaded him to become active.⁶³

From this narrow circle the group spread to include Norman Dorsen, then general counsel of the ACLU and later to become its president; Jerome Wiesner, a well-known scientist, Lillian’s neighbor on Martha’s Vineyard, and soon to become president of MIT; cartoonist Jules Feiffer; and Burke Marshall, a former assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights and then a deputy dean at Yale Law School. Recruiting members was not, apparently, a difficult job: Roger Wilkins, a former assistant U.S. attorney general, then consultant to the Ford Foundation and the committee’s first chair, recalled his own decision to join up. It emerged, he wrote, from a frightening experience in the summer of 1967, when he was surrounded by

fellow-citizens … six of them were kneeling and pointing guns at me and some of them were calling me nigger. I thought then that to be a free man in America was perilous indeed … For myself I vowed in that moment of terror to fight, if I survived, as hard against the spirit of repression and intimidation … as I would for equal justice for all Americans. That is why, in the atmosphere of the spring of 1970, I eagerly joined with other citizens to form the Committee for Public Justice.⁶⁴

When the group reached more than a dozen names, its members circulated their friends and relations in a letter drafted by Norman Dorsen, revised by Hellman, and sent over the signature of Burke Marshall. “What we propose to do is based on the belief that this country has entered one of its recurring periods of dangerous political repression,” the letter, written on May 25, said. “What we are setting up is a kind of early-warning system against the erosion or invasion of the basic freedoms.”⁶⁵ An accompanying letter spelled out the purpose of the newly named Committee for Public Justice. Hellman’s sensibilities shine through every line. “Once again it becomes necessary for citizens to perform the high public duty of resisting the repressive efforts of the state,” it began. Then, deftly combining the interests of minority groups with those of antiwar protestors, it continued, “The nation has often endured times when the refusal of the government to recognize the right and aspirations of the weak and the poor and of political dissenters has led to periods of hate and intolerance.” The statement cited ten “grave invasions of individual liberty” that had occurred, among them official threats to the independence of mass media; repression of dissent at the 1968 Democratic convention; invasion of privacy by wiretapping and eavesdropping; bills to authorize preventive detention; malign neglect of the rights of the black minority and of poor people generally; and an official blacklist of respected and qualified scientists. Quoting Justice Louis Brandeis to the effect that “the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that it should be a fundamental principle of the American Government,” the statement concluded:

We cannot now stand silent in a period of repression. We must remind the country and our elected representatives that only enduring principles of justice are fundamental to the common good and that all or any violations must be strongly resisted now and in the future with full strength and force. How can this be done? We know that the lawless activity of the government is often obscured because the public does not know the facts, or is given a distorted version of the facts by the authorities. We know that the rights of unpopular political dissenters are sometimes overridden not only in police action and in the courts but in the legislatures themselves. When such threats to constitutional rights arise, we intend to investigate them, to criticize them and to draw the attention of the public to them.”⁶⁶

Within three weeks, the group had attracted twenty more names, and these quickly expanded to provide a roster of distinguished women and men in every field of business and the arts, of law and the sciences, letters and literature. On it were people of every political persuasion from former communists and fellow travelers to anticommunist liberals. Some of these were Lillian’s friends from other political causes; many were social admirers and acquaintances. Some joined because they agreed with the call to speak out against a “lawless government” or responded to the ringing cry that “We were born free and intend to remain so.” Lillian’s strong ties to Hollywood served her well. Movie stars and directors Paul Newman, Shirley MacLaine, Donald Sutherland, Warren Beatty, Candice Bergen, Marlon Brando, and Mike Nichols joined at her invitation. So did others in the arts, including Leonard and Felicia Bernstein and George Kirstein. Writers, critics, editors: William Shirer, William Styron, Richard Poirier, Robert Silvers, Martin Peretz, and Robert Coles signed up. Lawyers, union leaders, academics, scientists, and philanthropists added their names. They were joined by political and policy people including the Children’s Defense Fund’s Marian Edelman, Congressman Charles Goodell, EEOC member Aileen Hernandez. And the list kept growing.⁶⁷

The group could not have been assembled without Hellman. To put it together, she traded on the personal qualities for which she was often disliked: she deployed her celebrity status, she alternately demanded and cajoled, and she attracted both vigorous opponents of the Soviet Union and casual supporters of peaceful coexistence. Leon Friedman, the group’s third executive director, described as her goal “to energize the political community, to focus on public problems and to do something about them.”⁶⁸ People put their names on the letterhead because they were her friends, to be sure: “I joined largely because she asked me to,” Telford Taylor admitted when he was still unsure of the CPJ’s prospects.⁶⁹ But they donated money, legal expertise, and time because they believed in the cause that the CPJ espoused. If they were not all friends of Hellman’s, they were friends of friends, acquaintances who believed in defending civil liberties, a group so diverse that only a Lillian Hellman, who had credibility in the worlds of both celebrity and the intellect, could have brought it off. It was not only that “she knew everybody,” as an early executive director, Stephen Gillers, recalled. It was that “she willingly picked up the phone to call them.”⁷⁰

In the summer the CPJ hired its first director, Luis Sanjurjo, and housed him in space donated by Lillian’s friend Sue Marquand (wife of the writer John Marquand) on West 57th Street. Lillian had so far spearheaded the fund-raising efforts of the organization. She had, in the words of an executive committee report, “exhausted herself and also her sources for these kinds of funds.”⁷¹ That summer the executive council, chaired by Roger Wilkins, took formal responsibility. But Lillian remained unrelenting in her pursuit of support and supporters. She hosted executive council meetings in the Park Avenue apartment to which she moved in the fall.⁷² Singlehandedly she raised the money to keep the CPJ going during its first year, soliciting her friends to provide contributions.

By the late fall of 1970, the CPJ was ready to go public. With flair worthy of Hellman, the organization called a news conference at the Overseas Press Club on November 17, 1970, where Ramsey Clark, among others, explained the group’s origin as a consequence of the FBI’s increasingly ideological bias, accusing the bureau of “having an end before it” and of seeking “facts to fit that end.”⁷³ The New York Times covered the event sympathetically—describing the CPJ as “an organization of prominent private citizens … concerned that the nation has entered a period of political repression.” It did not mention that uneasiness at invasions of public privacy had spread into the corners of Congress, where North Carolina’s conservative Democratic senator Sam Ervin and others had begun to raise issues of military surveillance of civilians, unauthorized wiretapping, federal blacklists of scientists, and intimidation of the national media. Hellman’s name appeared in the last paragraph of the New York Times article as one of several founding members. But the Washington Post singled her out for attention: “Playwright Lillian Hellman, the principal organizer of the group, also spoke at today’s news conference. She said she felt impelled to do something last spring because some of us thought we heard the voice of Joe McCarthy coming from the grave.”⁷⁴

The CPJ followed its opening salvo with a full-page announcement that appeared in the New York Times on December 15, 1970, and placed the Bill of Rights at the heart of its mission. “This is your Bill of Rights. It is 179 years old. It is being killed,” the advertisement announced. In small type, it reprinted the Bill of Rights along with an annotated list of the ways the current government eroded it. “These violations of the Constitution,” it concluded, “are not isolated instances. They represent a dangerous trend toward repression and neglect of rights, for which the present administration bears a major responsibility.”

The FBI, still in its Cold War mode, reacted vigorously. In their view, Hellman’s presence in the CPJ immediately identified the organization with communism. Apparently at J. Edgar Hoover’s personal request, the bureau produced a document that identified the CPJ’s leaders and pinpointed their previous political activities. These thumbnail sketches, which tell us little about the individuals the FBI followed, reveal the bureau’s particular interest in their political lives and especially in the issue of communism. Telford Taylor earned a negative review for many reasons, including his membership in the left-wing Lawyers Guild in 1942, his membership in the “Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which cooperated with the Soviet Government,” and the fact that he had represented many CPJ members in court and before congressional committees. The report complained about Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, because in 1964 he “reportedly used individuals with ‘leftist tendencies’ to review books dealing with security matters and the U.S. Government.” It identified Norman Dorsen as a supporter of “the aims of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, a cited organization.” Additionally, it trashed Dorsen as one of a number of law professors who attacked the department’s claim that the “Government may wiretap and bug domestic organizations considered subversive without court supervision.” Dorsen stood accused, as well, of participating in a TV debate that included notorious left-wingers like Abbie Hoffman and Rennie Davis. And so it went.⁷⁵ Former assistant attorney general Burke Marshall got off lightly, accused only because he was “not considered a friend of the FBI” while he was in the Civil Rights Division. Of Hellman, who was cited as active in at least eighteen subversive organizations in the 1940s and identified then as a known communist, the worst that the FBI could say was that new information revealed her support of New Left and antiwar groups. “She was one of the speakers at the Second Annual Nation Conference of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, described as a New Left-type group made up of students and instructors which is against the war in Vietnam and supports the government of Communist China.”⁷⁶

1970: The CPJ placed the Bill of Rights at the heart of its mission. (From advertisement in the New York Times )

While the FBI investigated, the Committee for Public Justice got to work. Its first projects reflected the eclectic base of its membership: a project on child labor, another on women’s prisons that featured an investigation of the Women’s House of Detention on Greenwich Avenue. These drew little attention. But the CPJ’s greatest coup was soon to come. In the spring of 1971, egged on by Hellman, the executive council decided to tackle an overreaching FBI directly. Lillian called on her friends Milton and Elinor Gordon to provide funds for a conference scheduled for the following fall. Burke Marshall, then a member of the executive council, asked his old friend Duane Lockard, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, to host the conference on the site of the school. The two joined Norman Dorsen as co-chairs of the conference. The group issued a press release announcing that it planned to assemble a group of some fifty knowledgeable citizens to “make a scholarly and objective inquiry” into the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in American society.⁷⁷ In the interest of fairness, Duane Lockard sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, inviting him or a representative to attend.⁷⁸

Hoover declined the request, insisting that “no worthwhile purpose could be served by an FBI representative attending an inquiry casting him in the role of defendant before even the first fact is brought out, and condemned by the ‘judges’ before trial begins.”⁷⁹His refusal was accompanied by eight single-spaced pages explaining why the FBI, an efficient and fair organization, had no need to defend itself and suggesting that the CPJ instead invite a representative from the organization of retired FBI agents. The CPJ promptly issued the invitation.

Hellman could not have been more pleased. The CPJ, then barely a year old, acknowledged Hoover’s letter for what it was: a welcome sign of the committee’s public influence. The letter, as political journalist Tom Wicker proclaimed in the introduction to the book that followed the conference, “splendidly exemplified why its sponsors thought the conference necessary.”⁸⁰ In claiming that the FBI needed no defense, Hoover provided the best justification for a “scholarly effort to improve our understanding of the functioning of an important American institution.”⁸¹ The CPJ circulated the letter to illustrate its growing presence in conversations around civil liberties.

For its part, the FBI also reprinted and distributed Hoover’s letter, seemingly unaware that with every copy it sent out, it enhanced the visibility of the CPJ. To its correspondents, it revealed the biased backgrounds of its speakers, hoping to discredit them and the conference by convicting them of guilt by association. But this strategy often got tangled in the knot of past politics. When Allan Brownfield, a small-time political activist, tried to curry favor among FBI officials by producing a forceful piece for Roll Callchallenging the credibility of the conference as nothing less than an attack on the FBI, bureau officials identified him as having had unsavory communist associations in the past and reluctantly recommended ignoring the piece.⁸²

The FBI could hardly be faulted for its opposition to the CPJ, nor for believing that the conference would not deal evenhandedly with the bureau. Still, the bureau’s extraordinarily defensive response produced precisely the effect it sought to avoid. Hoover’s letter dramatically escalated newspaper coverage of the conference and public awareness of it. Even as announcements of the call to the conference emerged, the FBI encouraged the formation of “Friends of FBI” to raise money for its defense. The group pleaded for donations on the grounds that “the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover are now being subjected to the degradation of a vicious partisan attack by self-serving politicians, their supporting media and certain radical elements that ultimately seek the destruction of all law and order in the United States.”⁸³ It circulated a cartoon depicting itself as the victim of a hanging judge; it asked one of the invitees, William Bittman, to inform on what was happening there. The bureau also did what it could to discredit the conference by asking sympathetic newspaper columnists (including students from the Princeton University newspaper) to denounce the CPJ as a liberal, or left-leaning organization. The bureau’s trepidation led it to closely track the amount of press the conference drew, as well as the content of favorable and unfavorable articles. In the aftermath, its agents dismissed most of the conference presentations as lies, freely distributing phrases such as “wholly false,” “a collection of baseless and twisted allegations,” and “a tissue of lies” to dismiss those it did not like. It deployed words like fatuous and slanted to describe some papers and accused one presenter of “twisting facts to suit his own ends.” Other presentations appeared to agents to be “filled with errors and distortions” or “half truths, unsupported assertions and outright lies.”⁸⁴

From the perspective of Hellman and the CPJ, the conference was an enormous success. They had brought together critics from a variety of political perspectives (New York City’s police commissioner, the editor of the Nation, two retired FBI agents, a distinguished Yale Law School professor) to challenge the FBI’s repressive strategies against dissenting political groups. The conference sparked national press coverage that drew attention to the FBI’s single-minded focus on national security and its lack of regard for civil liberties. It positioned the CPJ as a player in a dialogue that would continue for several years. Crucially, the conference legitimized reasonable criticism and dissent—one of Hellman’s main goals—and dramatically reduced the fear of name-calling. A day after the conference closed, the Washington Post published an extensive account of the conference that included a quote from an unnamed government official who complained that “those left-wingers are not only after a pound of flesh now, they are trying to make money for another pound later.” The piece closed with a reference to a House floor speech by Representative Richard Ichord, whom the FBI had approached early on. Ichord took the floor to disparage the provenance of the Committee for Public Justice by asserting that in 1951 Hellman had been “identified as a member of the Hollywood chapter of the Communist Party U.S.A.”⁸⁵ To no avail. This time neither the public nor the “left-wingers” associated with the CPJ would bite. A second piece, set beside the first, described conferencegoers as “painting a grim picture of a police state disregarding constitutional liberties and repressing political dissent by use of informers, wiretaps, electronic surveillance and agents provocateurs.”⁸⁶ But none of these pieces made as much of a splash as the spirit of the conference itself.

The CPJ used its leverage to advantage, broadening its membership to some eighty “prominent citizens.” It also turned the CPJ into a visible player against repression and encouraged an even broader representation of membership that soon came to include such political antagonists as Victor Navasky and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Hoover died in 1972, a few months after the conference closed. His successor, acting director L. Patrick Gray, quickly arranged a meeting with three representatives of the CPJ. The New York Times trumpeted the organization’s victory in a headline that declared THE FBI AGREES TO HEAR ITS CHIEF CRITIC.⁸⁷ And when Congress settled down to confirm Gray as permanent director, the CPJ’s Norman Dorsen drew national attention for pointing out that there had never been a real congressional investigation of the FBI.⁸⁸ Five years later, the CPJ once again received an invitation to testify in hearings to approve Gray’s successor to the post of director. Bureau records reveal its subsequent concern to fend off the kinds of inquiries that the CPJ conference had provoked and to work out some method by which the FBI could appear to be more amenable to oversight while maintaining a necessary secrecy and without actually ceding authority to Congress.

Finally, and most important, the conference signaled a turn in the politics of liberalism. No longer barricading themselves behind an anticommunist shield lest they be associated with communism, liberals promoted the civil liberties of all. The turnabout rejuvenated a languishing American Civil Liberties Union, which soon took the CPJ under its umbrella. Hellman reveled in this shift of opinion, and the rapid succession of CPJ activities that followed confirmed her sense that if people would simply stand up and speak, they could maintain the freedom that was their heritage. When, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers—a top-secret history of the unfolding war in Vietman compiled by the Defense Department and made available by Daniel Ellsberg—the federal government immediately convened a grand jury in Boston to investigate their release and to consider bringing criminal charges. In the furor that followed, the CPJ turned its attention to the grand jury system, asking if it was fulfilling its historic function to “check the power of the state by filtering prosecutions … through a group of disinterested citizens,” or whether the system was simply serving as a “rubber stamp for indictments the government wants to secure.”⁸⁹ At the daylong conference that followed the following May, the CPJ confirmed its reputation for pointed investigation.⁹⁰

The organization’s concern with the increasingly secret operations of the federal government produced several other significant achievements. A conference on secrecy in May 1973 resulted in a book edited by Norman Dorsen and Stephen Gellers called None of Your Business. In December of that year, while the Watergate scandal was still unfolding, the CPJ sponsored a conference on the subject of “Watergate as a Symbol” and to encourage the investigations by Senator Sam Ervin into the Nixon administration’s abuse of power. Asked by a popular magazine if she identified with the witnesses who faced the Ervin committee, Hellman replied, “I envy the courtesy with which they are treated. Villains do better than any of us innocents who were called before House or Senate committees in the 1940s and 1950s.”⁹¹ The following year, the CPJ took a lead role in filing suit to release the tapes made in the Nixon Oval Office. While this was going on, during the winter and spring of 1974, the CPJ inquired into the operation of the Justice Department. In February 1974, director Stephen Gillers and his soon-to-be successor Leon Friedman issued a report on “courtroom disruption” that exposed the false premise behind a crackdown on courtroom discipline and protested “summary contempt proceedings” that permitted judges to discipline lawyers to whom they took a dislike—sometimes for defending unpopular clients. Hellman played no role in organizing this conference. But she delighted in seeing one of McCarthy’s chief ploys overturned.

Soon the Committee for Public Justice was everywhere: its name and its spokespersons routinely punctuated articles and news briefs that questioned the authority of government surveillance efforts, challenged presidential secrecy, and called for scrutiny of FBI and CIA activities. More than once the CPJ was mentioned on the floor of Congress, often in negative statements inserted by representatives who were routinely thanked by the bureau for their cooperation. More than once the CPJ testified before Congress, thriving on the publicity and taking every opportunity to insert its voice into debates about civil liberties matters. When she addressed conferences or made public statements on behalf of the CPJ, Hellman never failed to connect the event with past moments of silent acquiescence. She told a June 1975 meeting, called to explore reports that the CIA had kept track of student radicals and antiwar activists, that twenty-five years after the McCarthy period, she still felt the need to understand how individual freedom could be so easily invaded.⁹² In 1977, when newspapers began to note the emergence of a neoconservative movement, she turned her attention to raising money for a conference that would investigate the “swing to the right.” Recalling the public inattention that had led to an undeclared war and the fostering of “crooks and liars in high places,” Hellman urged CPJ supporters to speak up against “efforts … to reconstitute the power and legitimacy of government security and investigative agencies whose irresponsibility and violation of civil rights had been exposed as scandals.”⁹³ The conference took place that fall. Finally, in 1977, the CPJ joined with the ACLU and the Center for National Security Studies to propose a bill that would prohibit the FBI from engaging in political surveillance and curb its efforts at eavesdropping and wiretapping except in criminal cases.⁹⁴ The bill was never passed though CPJ pressure did produce briefly effective guidelines.

All this activity was funded through Lillian Hellman’s efforts and her personal connections. Her verve and her spirit, her shamelessly demanding insistence, and her absolute confidence in the justice of the CPJ’s mission held sway. Bravely, the CPJ asserted its voice in the interest of transparency, and increasingly Lillian called on her celebrity friends to raise money and speak out for the organization. She tapped Ruth Field and the Field Foundation; she softened up her rich friend Max Palevsky—computer entrepreneur and venture capitalist. She lent her name to one benefit after another, shamelessly glorifying in adulation and contributions.

A March 6, 1975, “Citizen’s Town Meeting” in Los Angeles, called to disclose domestic surveillance activities of the CIA, featured film star Warren Beatty. The benefit attracted Jacqueline Onassis, Jane Fonda, Ryan O’Neal, and other stars, and proved so popular that Hellman quipped she’d run out of tickets.⁹⁵ Six months later, Hellman’s old friend Hannah Weinstein, a distinguished Hollywood producer and herself a victim of McCarthyism, orchestrated a benefit for the Committee for Public Justice around Lillian Hellman’s seventieth birthday. For $150 apiece, contributors heard a dozen actors read from Hellman’s plays and memoirs and then adjourned for dinner at Gallagher’s steak house. Hellman basked in the glory of extensive coverage of both herself and the event.⁹⁶ The movie Julia, released in 1977, became the occasion of a third benefit. A trip to Los Angeles persuaded Robert Redford to host yet another glamorous benefit for the CPJ.

1975: Increasingly Hellman called on her celebrity friends to raise money. Here with Warren Beatty at a tribute to Hellman. (Photofest)

Though there is little doubt that without Lillian Hellman the Committee for Public Justice could not have survived, Hellman exerted little influence over the daily workings of the committee, the projects it chose, or the books and papers it produced. The substantive issues and the strategies for addressing them were the brainchildren of the lawyers and others who sat at monthly meetings and determined the direction of the organization.⁹⁷ Hellman attended most of the meetings of the executive board, hosted many of them at her Park Avenue apartment and occasionally at her Vineyard home, and lent her name to every activity that the CPJ undertook. With Hannah Weinstein and Bobbie Handman, she dominated logistical decisions about food and drink, driving the small staff crazy as she repeatedly changed her mind about benefits and entertainments. Yet, except for reasserting the purposes of the organization, she took no part in debating the issues. She could be disruptive at meetings, drawing attention away from substantive matters. She fussed over small details, making Saturday-morning phone calls to Stephen Gillers to check that nothing had been overlooked and harassing some of the later executive directors. The record suggests that, far from being passively “outmaneuvered,” “checkmated,” and “cajoled”—to use one biographer’s derogatory description—the brilliant legal and intellectual minds in the CPJ enthusiastically developed the projects that successfully drew attention to instruments of government repression.⁹⁸

The CPJ lasted as long as Lillian had the energy to mobilize resources for it, petering out as she became sicker in the late seventies and as controversy mounted over her veracity. By then, its agenda had largely been subsumed into a revitalized ACLU. Still, for as long as she lasted, she supported the organization’s efforts to move questions of civil liberties to the forefront of the public agenda and to maintain public awareness of the dangers of silent acquiescence. She stuck by that agenda, leading the Committee for Public Justice to a position as an honored and effective organization that educated the public in a decade permeated with lies. The CPJ benefited, to be sure, from the changing climate of the seventies—a decade when President Nixon led a delegation to Communist China, J. Edgar Hoover’s death provided an opportunity for the FBI to alter its agenda, and Congressional Committees began to take up the issue of secrecy. Within that context, Hellman briefly helped to reframe the agenda and move the United States from attacks on communism to self-examination. In so doing, she and the CPJ exposed the harm done by those who insisted on exaggerating the power of Soviet Communism. Her efforts helped to heal a breach on the left by uniting people of different political and social perspectives in the interest of civil liberties. At the same time, she exposed herself to a new set of attacks that emanated from those who still believed her guilty of subversion.