(Page 75 excerpt)
Making my discomfort worse
was my inability to simply
refuse to answer the HUAC's
questions or assert that my
membership, in either the
Communist Party or the Screen
Writers Guild, was none of their
business. But the lawyers of
the ten of us, in an exercise
of logic that seemed persuasive
at the time, had insisted that
such a stance could leave us
vulnerable in court at a later
date. We were instead supposed
to maintain that we were making
an attempt, in our own way, to
answer the questions we felt the
HUAC had no right to ask.
In recent decades, feelings in
Hollywood, among other domains
of American Culture, have turned
sharply in our favor. As the
sole survivor of the "TEN" I have
been in a position lately to
receive many expressions of respect
and admiration from actors,
actresses, and other denizens
of the New Hollywood who sometimes
have only a sketchy idea of what
really happened to us. Since I
enjoy a little adulation as much
as the next man, I don't always
make a point of filling in the
gaps in their knowledge or
correcting the points of confusion.
But from time to time I try to
suggest that we weren't as heroic
as people make us out to be. It
would be more analytically precises,
it seems to me, to say that
we did the only things we could
do under the circumstances,
short of behaving like complete
sh*ts. .
Like the other 9 who testified
with me, I couldn't yet know just
how much life and property and
comfort I was going to lose and
for how long. . .
