It has often been noted that both the Senate and House investigating committees during this period blackened reputations with a reckless disregard for the truth, besmirching many who had never been Communists. This is certainly true. But it strikes me as much too narrow a criticism, implicitly conceding the right of those committees to investigate the private beliefs of American citizens and to penalize them if those beliefs were deemed erroneous. It accepts the basic mission, in other words, but assails the sloppiness of the execution. Harry Truman was more on the mark when he described the Un-American Activities Committee as "the most un-American thing in America." Nobody, after all, was being accused of treason, or of terrorism. People were being investigated and punished solely for what they thought.

Within a day of his testimony, my father was dropped by his agency, fired from his job (he was a staff writer on the then-popular situation comedy I Married Joan), and declared persona non grata in the only profession he had ever pursued. An account of what followed can wait for another time; for now, it's enough to say that he managed to scrape by, the situation slowly improved, and the first script to bear his name after his blacklisting, produced some 11 years later, won him an Academy Award.

Now, let's flash forward to some time in the mid-'90s. Frank was invited to appear on an LA radio show to talk about his experiences of the blacklist. By then, Joseph McCarthy, the movement he led, and the blacklist that resulted were all in total disrepute, and my father agreed to the interview with the reasonable expectation that he would be treated as a victim of a deplorable aberration in American history.

That isn't quite what happened. The interviewer began the dialogue by asking if my father would feel equal outrage had the blacklist targeted Nazis rather than Communists. Wrong-footed, Frank fumfered some sort of response. After the interview, both my parents emerged from the studio in high dudgeon. "How dare he?" was the gravamen of their scandalized indignation. And when they told me about the interview later that day, I made matters worse by suggesting the interviewer had posed a legitimate question. There was a distinct chill in the parental household for some time thereafter.

But it is a legitimate question. Unless one is prepared to defend Communism on its merits, or, alternatively, is merely defending one's comrades out of a kind of tribal loyalty2, then one is, I think, obliged to consider whether punishing people for their political beliefs is always wrong, or wrong only when it's one's own side that is being persecuted3.

Now, I concede there's one important distinction to be made here. Americans of my parents' generation joined the Communist Party out of genuine idealism, no matter how misplaced. With 25 percent unemployment, Jim Crow laws in operation in the South and de facto segregation common elsewhere, and fascism on the rise in Europe and effectively unopposed by the continent's democracies, Communism might have looked like a reasonable political recourse. Whereas it's hard to imagine anyone becoming a Nazi out of anything anyone would recognize as idealism.