Red Scare

Starred review from January 30, 1995
This oral history of the anticommunist hysteria of the 1940s and '50s reminds us that the ``red scare'' launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI attacked not only communists but also progressives, civil rights activists, labor organizers, New Dealers and ordinary citizens for dissent or ``nonconformity.'' Fariello, a freelance writer, interviewed, among others, screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., one of the Hollywood Ten, who spent a year in prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee; ex-Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who in 1954 gave Hoover carte blanche to bug whomever he chose; Nobel chemist Linus Pauling, denied a passport and hauled before a Senate committee for his peace activism and protests against nuclear proliferation; along with Alger Hiss, Arthur Miller, Kay Boyle, Pete Seeger and Robert Meeropol, son of convicted atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Also interviewed are FBI agents, professional informers and security officers empowered to police the thoughts and personal behavior of federal employees. A chilling and powerful indictment of the witch-hunt mentality.