Stalin is a man of genius.
{an8}He is a great politician, patriot, and leader.
One notable thing about Russia
is the failure to really come to terms in a full way
with the crimes and horrors of its totalitarian past.
Stalin is still venerated in Russia
as the builder of a strong empire, the Soviet Union,
and as the victor of World War II.
He died but did not leave us.
His great deeds and creations,
his glorious victories have lived and will live through ages.
His crimes are not nearly as comprehensively known and understood.
All he did was for the good of the people.
That's why I have good feelings towards him.
We see a strong revival of Stalinism.
It's the imperialistic dream that has never died in Russia.
We are not merely close neighbors.
And Putin has very openly talked about his imperialistic dreams.
We are actually, as I have pointed out many times, one nation.
Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities.
What are you shy about?
Do I want Stalinist repressions? Yes, I do.
I think what we're watching today, in a way,
{an8}is the last workings of probably the most evil person Russian history.
The weaponization of Soviet history is not about history.
It's about the future.
What made the Cold War terrifying was not just nuclear weapons.
But the great powers had deep
and irresolvable ideological conflicts between them.
We were literally out to destroy each other's way of life
and whole idea of government for 50 years.
The world order of the Cold War
was about this existential struggle between the capitalist world
and the communist one.
Two systems that were not reconcilable and did not try to reconcile.
Industrialization in the 19th century
was a period of child labor in capitalist societies.
Huge disparities of wealth.
And also disparities in life expectancy.
There was a global effort to regulate capitalism.
The sense is that greed is not good.
Two Germans, Marx and Engels,
came up with a utopian vision of a world where workers were in control.
An idea that is supposed to bring together people of any language,
any ethnic background, any race.
They are linked because they are workers.
This was communism.
This was a very seductive approach.
It takes root in one of the most authoritarian
and unequal countries in the world, Imperial Russia.
Vladimir Lenin was a visionary.
He was inspired by Marx and Engels,
and thinking about a bright new world,
a future with no exploitation, where everyone is equal.
Lenin also was a very good politician
who found the moment in 1917,
took advantage of the disarray of World War I,
and took power...
and proclaimed Russia as this new state of workers and peasants.
To the surprise of not only the world, but the Russian radicals themselves,
the Bolsheviks, they take power.
And their sense from the get-go is that they are besieged.
DEATH TO BOURGEOISIE AND THEIR HENCHMEN.
LONG LIVE THE RED TERROR.
That was the period of the Red Terror.
In order to usher a new world,
Lenin ordered whole classes exterminated.
The nobility, the clergy, landowners.
{an8}This led to the Civil War in Russia, a very bloody war.
It was a time of turmoil in Russia that continued for several years.
{an8}And Lenin presided over it.
The leaders of the Bolshevik party were divided roughly in two groups.
One group were people like Vladimir Lenin,
who were quite well-educated,
were engaged in debates and discussions.
And then there were people like Joseph Stalin.
His understanding of the outside world was very limited.
{an8}Stalin was basically a gangster.
{an8}That's why Lenin liked him so much.
He's born in Georgia, brought up in a poor family.
A violent family. His father drinks.
He had a lot of traumatic experiences from early on.
{an8}He does all this underground, crazy, revolutionary stuff.
He organized this huge bank robbery and sent this money to Lenin,
whom he hadn't even met.
It was very, very audacious.
My grandfather was a communist.
He told me about his revolutionary activity.
Stalin, who was his colleague in the Communist Party,
had a bank job.
He killed guards and stole gold and money.
My grandfather received that money
and tried to sell them on the black market.
Soviet Union is established in 1922.
Stalin is made secretary general of the party,
which at that time is just a technical office.
Lenin dies.
{an8}Secret battle for control of the Kremlin is cold and swift,
{an8}but Joseph Stalin is unmistakably the number-one man in the USSR.
{an8}As a result of backstabbing and real stabbing,
Stalin had taken a position that had been a nothing position,
general secretary, and turned that job into the key job.
COMMUNISM
Communism started as a utopia,
the promise people will be equal.
WITHOUT WOMEN, SUFFRAGE IS NOT UNIVERSAL.
There will be no exploitation of man by man,
something that was an antithesis of the capitalist world.
And promised, actually, happiness to people.
But this did not evolve as promised.
1929 was the year Stalin started the collectivization.
{an8}Collectivization was the process by which, basically,
{an8}the entire class of Russian peasants
{an8}got eliminated, or liquidated, as they called it.
Stalin is expropriating, basically,
all privately owned land from peasants.
So-called kulaks.
Kulaks were small farmers who were more successful than others.
{an8}Small landowners, basically.
{an8}DOWN WITH KULAKS
{an8}My grandparents were considered kulaks
{an8}because they had a small farm.
{an8}People who had too much property.
So everything was taken from people to have collective farms.
My mother was only a six-month-old baby
when my grandparents were deported to Siberia.
{an8}They were young, they had choices, they had possibilities.
{an8}The world was open to them.
And everything was taken.
At that time, the Soviet Union didn't export oil or gas,
but they had grain.
The problem was that they were trying to deal with
an extremely inefficient agricultural sector,
and they couldn't produce grain enough.
Collectivization couldn't feed the country.
This crazy economic experiment created, basically, a famine.
Mass starvation, shortage of goods,
a shortage of food on a grandiose scale.
As a result of collectivization,
there was general starvation and general food shortages
all across the Soviet Union.
In the winter of 1932 and '33,
Stalin decided to take advantage of that famine and to make it harsher,
and make it even more lethal in Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union.
Stalin, from the very beginning of his rule,
{an8}particularly feared the Ukrainians.
{an8}The Ukrainians had tried to organize their own state
at the time of the Russian Revolution.
They fought bitterly against the Bolsheviks.
A special program of food collection was instigated in Ukraine.
People went house to house taking away the food from peasants.
Sometimes police forces in Ukraine would go into somebody's house
and take food out of the oven so people would have nothing to eat.
In the winter of 1932, the borders of Ukraine were sealed.
People were unable to leave the Republic.
And they were unable to travel and get food anywhere else.
The result of it was that people ate rats, and they ate mice,
and they tried to boil leaves and grass.
There were incidents of cannibalism as well.
The result of that policy over the next several months
was that some nearly four million people died in Ukraine.
It's what's now known as the Holodomor.
And that's all Stalin.
In the late '30s,
the Soviet Union becomes truly totalitarian.
The Kremlin runs all elections, and the outcome is always the same.
All dissent is stamped out.
Leonid Konstantinovich Ramzin,
according to Articles 58-3, 58-4, 58-6, and 58-11 of the RSFSR Criminal Code,
is sentences to the highest degree of social protection
by shooting execution with confiscation of all property.
The verdict is final and cannot be appealed.
1937 and '38 was the time of the so-called Great Terror.
Stalin was paranoid.
{an8}Concerned those around him were actually his secret enemies and wanted to kill him.
{an8}Those Bolsheviks with whom Stalin began his struggle against Imperial Russia,
nearly all of them were exterminated.
{an8}The country plunged into an orgy of self-extermination.
{an8}EXPOSE THE ENEMY UNDER ANY MASK.
The Soviet Union constructs a huge system of concentration camps,
known as the gulag.
To which millions and millions of people are sent.
The gulag was a vast system of labor camps that, at its height,
stretched all the way across the Soviet Union
in almost every part of the country.
Stalin is trying to remove danger.
People that can challenge him potentially,
that have intellectual capacity of organizing some sort of resistance.
Engineers, teachers, academics.
It was designed both to punish people and to frighten people.
But it was also created in order to use slave labor,
in essence, to build the Soviet economy.
These names represent the victims of communist crimes.
People who were deported to Siberia or killed during the occupation regimes.
So, there you can see thousands and thousands of them.
Something like between 15 and 20 million people
went through the camps at some point.
And several million people died there.
{an8}The Nazi crimes were widely condemned across the world.
But the Soviet crimes never were.
The mechanism Stalin created from the late 1920s,
and the number of people he killed,
had an impact that turned out to be so much more lasting
than anybody could imagine.
If you imagine the Earth,
Stalin didn't just kill the leaves,
or the flowers, or the trees,
or the first layer of Earth.
He went really deep down.
He ripped out the roots.
A lot of them.
I don't think that any Russian ruler
was as genocidal towards his own people as Stalin had been.
He really went into the soil.
And then poured incredibly poisonous stuff,
really toxic material, into the soil
to make sure that whatever he produced
would be different from what it was before.
{an8}After World War II, President Truman wanted to know,
"What does Stalin want?"
The Americans looked across the internal borders of Berlin.
They looked east.
What they saw was Joseph Stalin's army,
intending to take what they could
as spoils from Germany,
and perhaps intending to keep marching west.
The Soviet army stole everything they could from Eastern Germany,
up to and including trains, coal, wheat.
Anything that could ensure the survival of a nation.
Just took it.
The West is trying to re-establish local governments,
re-establish a national government, introduce a currency,
re-establish democracy.
Stalin says, you know, I didn't just lose 20 million or so of my citizens
to give up control.
There's all kinds of other issues.
Soviet soldiers tragically had carried out massive numbers of rapes,
and you had health consequences and pregnancies,
and Stalin was just denying that happened.
In 1945, after the war,
you have Soviet troops in the Baltic states.
You have Soviet troops in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary,
in Romania, Bulgaria.
All these countries that never chose to be communist are made, forcibly,
to be communist.
In the Western mainstream discourse, 1945 is the end of the war.
But over here, in this part of the world, 1945 is not the end of anything.
And it's not replacement of war with peace and normality.
It's the replacement of one occupation with another,
and one totalitarian system with another.
So, what does Stalin want?
Does he aim to take all of Eastern Europe?
Will he stop there?
There was one person in the government of the United States,
and really only one, who could tell President Truman that.
That was a man named George Kennan.
{an8}In early 1946, George Kennan was the Chargé D'affaires
in the American Embassy in Moscow.
What that means is he was the number-two guy,
and he was running the show.
George Kennan, in the winter of 1946,
begins to write what is known as "the long telegram."
The thrust of the long telegram is that Stalin wants more.
He wants more of Europe. He wants more power.
{an8}Our victory signifies, first of all,
{an8}that our Soviet social system was victorious.
{an8}That the Soviet social system successfully passed the test of fire in the war
and proved that it is fully viable.
And he will oppose America's already strong attempts
to instill American democratic values in Europe
and stand up against the imposition
of communist and totalitarian societies
throughout the world.
I was actually George Kennan's last research assistant.
George Kennan defined the Soviet Union as an adversary,
and provided some sort of clues as how to handle it.
This is just six months after the end of World War II.
He's laying out exactly what the Soviets are going to do,
saying the only thing that Soviets understand is force
or the threat of force.
This idea that somehow the wartime alliance with the Soviets
is gonna continue on, that what's happening in Eastern Europe
is interim, provisional communist governments,
that somehow that's going to go by the wayside
and democracy's gonna bloom.
Kennan says that's a crock. It's not gonna happen.
What Kennan espoused was this idea
that you have to fight fire with fire, essentially.
George Kennan is telling the president
that there will be another force that will oppose America.
And that these two forces
will someday fight for dominion of the world.
That was the beginning of that kind of Cold War narrative
that the Soviet Union is an adversary,
and therefore it needs to be treated as such.
The beginning of the Cold War.
The sense is that we're going to need a new apparatus
and a new national security state
to protect the country and to protect freedom
and to protect the West.
{an8}That leads, eventually, to the National Security Act of 1947,
{an8}one of the most significant pieces of legislation
{an8}and government restructuring in American history.
You see, in very quick succession,
the creation of this unified Pentagon
{an8}with an Air Force, with a Navy, with an Army,
all operating under a new Secretary of Defense.
{an8}Then all of these other tools and agencies
come into creation in that same act.
The National Security Council at the White House.
The Central Intelligence Agency.
You know, it begins to transition the United States
from a minor peacetime military and national security state
into the vast military and intelligence apparatus that we are now used to today.
{an8}From Szczecin in the Baltic,
{an8}to Trieste in the Adriatic,
{an8}an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
{an8}Behind that line lie all the capitals
of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe.
As we move into the Cold War,
the confrontation between East and West
becomes more and more intense.
And it plays out in Berlin.
At the end of the Second World War,
the Allies come to Berlin,
and it's divided into a Soviet, American, French and British sector.
And it's just one city.
But then as the Cold War freezes,
gradually the line between the Soviet sector and the Western sectors
becomes the line between not just East Germany,
but actually the entire Soviet Bloc and the entire Western Bloc.
It's the front line.
The world was literally divided into two blocs.
And Germany was the divided center of that world.
And Berlin was the divided center of the divided center.
Then the Soviets try to take over the entirety of West Berlin
in something called the Berlin Blockade.
Access to Berlin from the main Western zones
was guaranteed by means of road, rail and air routes.
But the Russians cut this road and this railway,
and West Berlin faced starvation.
We call out to the world
that Muscovite communism
is guilty of crimes against humanity.
We Berliners will give everything for our freedom.
Western allies do something absolutely brilliant.
The airbridge.
The United States, Great Britain, and France
were embarked upon the biggest air transport operation
history has ever seen.
The vital necessities,
food, raw materials, even coal,
were brought in by air.
We fly in plane after plane after plane after plane.
And actually relieve the siege.
And then the Soviets have to give in.
It was a very difficult time,
and one of the children of that moment
was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.
NATO was established in 1949
to prevent the Soviet Union from moving further west.
{an8}The main idea of NATO is that, as long as we stand together,
{an8}we are all safe.
After the Western countries
put together the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, in 1949,
Moscow decided that it wanted an alliance of its own.
The Warsaw Pact.
NATO was a voluntary alliance, and the Warsaw Pact was not.
And that was the Cold War standoff
between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
And the dividing line between those two alliances
ran right through the middle of divided Germany.
And then the communist government in China takes control.
{an8}Mao Zedong, once a lowly party worker,
{an8}now assumes the stature of a dominant figure
{an8}in all of Eastern Asia.
Right after Chinese communism took over,
Mao Zedong went to Moscow in December of 1949.
Long live the friendship and cooperation of China and the Soviet Union!
Mao stayed in Moscow for nearly three months,
talking with Stalin about world revolution,
about division of labor,
and who would be responsible to do what.
The rise of the communist government in China
becomes one of the major turning points of the 1940s.
And the sense was that communism was on the march,
that communism was expanding around the globe.
In many ways, that loss of China kicks off the Red hysteria
that we see poison our politics
in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
There was a real sense that we are already losing the Cold War to communism.
And then in 1949,
a U.S. weather plane over Alaska
picked up the first signs that a nuclear weapon
had been tested over the Soviet Union.
A test that came much sooner than Americans had anticipated
that the Soviet Union would be able to develop it.
We think that Stalin
first learned about the possibility of an atomic bomb in September 1942.
And he signs a decree setting up a small project
to investigate whether a uranium bomb is possible.
Use of the bomb in the war in 1945
was interpreted in Moscow by Stalin
as a way of intimidating the Soviet Union.
"See? We have this powerful bomb. What do you make of that?"
And that was why it was important to build a Soviet bomb
as quickly as possible.
This turned into a massive enterprise
within a few years.
There were 600,000 people working on it.
Two hundred thousand in Eastern Europe mining uranium.
A hundred thousand looking for uranium in the Soviet Union.
Two hundred thousand involved in construction.
And then 100,000 working as scientists or engineers or technicians
in the different plants,
because what the Soviet Union did was copy the Manhattan Project.
{an8}You may be sure that in the future as well,
{an8}I shall spare no effort to serve the socialist homeland
{an8}to carry out the assignments of Comrade Stalin.
During the war, the Soviet Union had infiltrated
almost every government agency in the United States,
including Los Alamos.
They had several spies there. In particular, there was Klaus Fuchs.
{an8}Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee who had become a member
{an8}of the British delegation in the Manhattan Project,
{an8}was an immensely important physicist at Los Alamos, and was at the heart
{an8}of many of the hardest weapons design problems for the implosion bomb.
The scientists thought he was the most trustworthy guy.
He was their babysitter when they had parties.
They literally gave him their children. This is how much they trusted the guy.
{an8}The motives that inspired him to go to the Soviet Embassy in 1941 were,
well, we're allies, we're fighting Nazi Germany.
He knew what an awful regime the Nazi regime was and therefore,
you know, why not help an ally?
Fuchs was able to move top secret documents
out of Los Alamos with impunity.
{an8}Including detailed blueprints of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
{an8}The first Soviet test was successful.
Right after the button was pressed,
the brightest light illuminated everything.
The door was already shut by then.
It was evident that the explosion had been quite powerful.
The idea that the Soviet Union has broken
the American nuclear monopoly
comes not necessarily as a surprise,
but definitely a shock to the American people
and to the American government.
This is what they had feared all along.
{an8}We must conclude that ten years from now,
Russia will be way ahead of us.
{an8}It was discovered from an analysis of communications
{an8}between the Soviet Embassy in the U.S.
and the Soviet Union that somebody was passing information
to the Soviet Union about the atomic bomb.
{an8}Fuchs was approached and he confessed,
{an8}and then he was arrested in early 1950
and sentenced to prison.
This just changed everything.
This shook the entire secrecy and nuclear establishment to the core.
A manhunt started.
By February of 1950,
the United States arrested a man named Harry Gold,
who was a spy courier.
{an8}And he traveled regularly to Los Alamos to get information,
{an8}primarily from Klaus Fuchs.
Then in June of 1950,
{an8}the FBI arrested David Greenglass
{an8}and claimed that on one occasion, Harry Gold met David Greenglass,
{an8}who was a machinist working at Los Alamos
{an8}and also my uncle, my mother's younger brother.
My name is Robert Meeropol, but I was born Robert Rosenberg.
{an8}I am the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
{an8}My father was arrested a month after my third birthday
{an8}and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage.
A month after my father's arrest,
my mother went to testify before the grand jury.
And she, too, was arrested.
My parents grew up in the heart of the Depression
on the Lower East Side of Manhattan,
which was a very poor neighborhood filled with relatively recent immigrants.
Chaos at the New York Stock Exchange.
On October 29, Black Tuesday, the bottom dropped out.
After the stock market crash of 1929,
you had a significant percentage of the people in the country out of work.
You had people lining up for soup lines.
Those who have, share with those who do not
in the soup kitchens that spring up across America in 1932.
By the time the Depression had hit full force,
people saw capitalism, essentially, as failing the people.
So both my parents were members of the American Communist Party.
What's a red diaper baby?
Red diaper baby is somebody whose parents were communists.
That's me. I'm a red diaper baby.
And proud of it.
In the '30s, during Depression times,
the party was its most powerful in America.
Mostly what they were fighting for were unions,
to have some real representation of workers in the system.
And to also stop the kind of brutal capitalism that was running amok.
In Europe, even more people became communist,
because the sense was only Stalin's Soviet Union works.
The image of the Soviet Union that was being projected
was that it was a system where people had jobs,
where people had a good wage, where the standards of living were rising.
There was a misunderstanding
about what was going on in the Soviet Union.
This was before the crimes of Stalin
were really fully understood.
So it wasn't the least bit shocking that people were members of the party.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were certainly true believers.
{an8}Also, they were both Jewish.
So I think the allure of the Communist Party
was there was a voice that was speaking out against anti-Semitism.
And as they saw the rise of fascism in Europe,
and especially the targeting of Jews...
WATCH OUT JEWS
...they looked to the Communist Party
and said, "These are the people standing up to this."
{an8}It's very unpleasant, I think,
{an8}for Americans to look back on the 1930s and realize the level of anti-Semitism
that was prevalent in the United States.
This Los Angeles bookshop of the Silver Shirts,
dispensing anti-Jewish propaganda,
is one of many that have recently opened all over the country.
You've got beaches that had signs that say no Jews or dogs allowed.
And this is the world that they were living in as a young Jewish family.
It's hard to imagine the Rosenbergs
getting a fair trial in 1951.
This is the Cold War.
The idea that, at any point,
we could be in a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union,
and everyone wants to know who handed the bomb to the Soviets.
The government said David Greenglass
handed the secret of the atomic bomb to Julius Rosenberg.
And Julius Rosenberg wrapped it up and handed it to the Soviet Union.
From the American people's perspective,
Julius was an atomic spy who gave the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
{an8}I would have said to you,
"Both my parents are totally and completely innocent."
But, years later, some of the material that ultimately came out,
showed me that Julius Rosenberg was probably involved in something.
What's called military industrial espionage.
This had to do more with military technology,
particular pieces of military information.
The atomic information that he's able to pass on is,
by all accounts, negligible,
because that's not the information he has access to.
My father didn't know anything about the atomic bomb.
When they first arrest David Greenglass,
they asked him about Ethel's role.
He says, "No, my sister wasn't involved."
"This was Julius's spy ring."
We get to the trial, and that changes.
We now know that within a week before the trial,
agents go to David Greenglass and say,
"We need more on Ethel or we're going to arrest your wife, Ruth."
In the trial, Ruth gets on the stand
and says David Greenglass's handwriting was bad,
and so Ethel had to type those reports.
David Greenglass corroborated that story.
Years later, we get the release in the grand jury testimony
that says nothing about anybody typing anything.
The grand jury testimony indicated that there was no evidence against Ethel.
{an8}Irving Saypol was the chief prosecutor in my parents' case.
One of his assistant federal prosecutors,
who was very young, in his 20s at that point,
{an8}was Roy Cohn.
{an8}The Communist party's most important work is that of espionage
{an8}on behalf of the Soviet Union,
which means that it infiltrates our government, defense plans,
every important place possible in order to steal information from us
and give it to the Soviet Union.
{an8}The trial is less than three weeks.
{an8}The jury takes eight or nine hours to come to a decision,
but they do ultimately say that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
are guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage.
The judge sentenced them to death to try to get them to talk.
They kept bringing the sons to visit their parents
to pull at their heartstrings and say,
"These are the children you are going to leave behind
if you do not name names, because you will be killed."
I think they really thought, "Oh, these folks will crack."
And they still don't talk.
It's very hard to look at that case
and not think, "This is an appalling lack of justice."
{an8}Even Klaus Fuchs, who passed along crucial atomic bomb information,
got 14 years in Great Britain.
How do they not to say, "Okay, we need to temper this
because this is looking extreme"?
The executions were set for Friday, June 19th.
Their 14th wedding anniversary.
Julius and Ethel have a simple meal.
They sit with each other with wire between them.
They talk to each other as long as they can.
And then by about 7:30 or so, they're sent back to their separate rooms.
They decide to execute Julius first.
And the rabbi says, "Do you have any names to give?"
And he apparently said virtually nothing.
Went in, was strapped in,
and was, uh, executed.
A few minutes later, Ethel is brought in.
And the rabbi says,
"Julius is gone."
"Do you have any names to give to save yourself for your children?"
And she says, "I have no names to give. I'm innocent. I'm prepared to die."
They strap her in
in what is now referred to as a botched execution.
{an8}She died a lot harder.
{an8}When it appeared that she had received enough electricity
to kill an ordinary person,
believing she was dead, the attendants had taken off
the ghastly strappings,
and electrodes, and black belts, and so forth.
And these had to be readjusted again, and...
And she was given more electricity.
And then after sunset on Friday, June 19th, 1953,
they were both dead.
I didn't really understand life and death at that point.
You know, as a six-year-old,
I think I still had a bit of that magical thinking.
If you really, really, really want something to happen,
you can make it happen because you want it so badly.
{an8}My brother reports that
{an8}even though he had told me within 24 or 48 hours
{an8}that my parents were killed
and I was never gonna see them again,
that I would occasionally say to him, "When are we gonna see Mommy and Daddy?"
By the end of the year,
when we were introduced to Able and Anne Meeropol,
who became our adoptive parents,
I knew that my parents were dead and I would never see them again.
It's easy to have a moral center when times are calm.
It's difficult as people and as a country to have a moral center
when things are so fearful.
The assumption was, any communist was a potential spy.
And anyone could be a communist.
You have this Invasion of the Body Snatcher worry
that people who look like me and sound like me and work with me...
could be a secret communist.
This committee,
under mandate from the House of Representatives,
{an8}has the responsibility of exposing,
{an8}and spotlighting subversive elements wherever they may exist.
The House of Un-American Activities Committee
was founded to ferret out subversives in the United States.
In the late '40s, early '50s,
HUAC became far more focused on,
are there Reds in the entertainment industry?
Is the great medium of cinema being used to subvert our youth
and subvert our country?
So HUAC subpoenaed actors, writers, Hollywood filmmakers,
in an attempt to get them to testify about their communist past
or their communist present.
If you were subpoenaed, you had two alternatives.
You could cooperate.
{an8}Have you ever observed any communistic information in any scripts?
{an8}Well, I have turned down quite a few scripts
because I thought they were tinged with communistic ideas.
If you answered those questions, you were a friendly witness.
If you either refuse to show up, or didn't answer questions,
or took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination,
then you were an unfriendly witness.
{an8}Your purpose is to use this
{an8}to disrupt the motion picture industry, to invade the rights not only of me,
but of the producers, to their thoughts, their opinions.
And this I will not permit.
I was just, you know, a New York theater girl.
But you didn't need to do much to get blacklisted.
{an8}I was sent up for Detective Story.
I did the movie of it.
I don't want to inconvenience you. I'll come back tomorrow.
Come on.
I was nominated for an Oscar.
{an8}The nominees for Best Supporting Actress are
{an8}Lee Grant in Detective Story, Paramount.
{an8}After Detective Story, I went to this new play.
{an8}And J. Edward Bromberg,
{an8}who was a famous character actor in Hollywood,
was in the play.
And as we were standing in the wings, he said to me,
{an8}"The Un-American Activities Committee is calling me and they won't let me off."
{an8}"I don't know what to do. And I have a bad heart."
It hits me.
This great actor who I love
is threatened by this Un-American Activities Committee.
And he left the show to go to London.
And he died.
He died. It was too much. His heart gave out.
And so they had a memorial for him.
It was a mob.
There were thousands of people there.
And they asked me as a representative of young actors
to say something about him.
And I said he was afraid that he was going to have a heart attack
if he went in front of the Un-American Activities Committee.
And it happened.
And the next day, I was blacklisted.
I went to an Actor's Equity meeting, and somebody turned around and said,
"Hey, you know, you made the list."
No work in television. No work in film.
The effect of giving names as well as not giving names,
the effect on yourself.
You know, for people who had morality...
it was a horror.
Couldn't live with themselves.
Why didn't we avoid all this?
{an8}Why didn't we answer yes or no, as the committee demanded?
{an8}Because we wanted to challenge the right of the committee to ask such questions.
Enter Joe McCarthy.
{an8}He's a demagogue and he has a lust for power.
He decides to make a name for himself.
Even if there were only one communist in the State Department,
even if there were only one communist in the State Department,
that would still be one communist too many.
{an8}Senator McCarthy's committee was operating at the same time,
{an8}but became eventually more famous
{an8}than the House of Un-American Activities Committee,
{an8}and eventually his name just stuck to any anti-communist investigation.
{an8}McCarthy was looking for spies in the government.
{an8}If he couldn't find spies,
{an8}he was looking for communists in the government.
{an8}I do have in my hand,
{an8}the names of 57 individuals who are either communists
{an8}or are certainly loyal to the Communist Party.
So if you had ever been a communist, you came under suspicion.
McCarthy went beyond that.
If you had been a member of a popular front organization,
progressives who sided with communists in the 1930s or the 1940s,
you could also be charged.
{an8}Then, if you knew a communist, you could come under suspicion.
People who were called to testify and whose names appeared in the newspaper,
there were anti-communist slogans spray-painted on their houses.
People were dismissed from their jobs without any kind of evidence.
It was devastating for people.
Fellow Americans,
if our civilization is to live,
this groveling and indecision on the part of this great nation must stop.
This groveling and indecision will stop.
And just about the time the Red Scare begins,
you have the beginning of a demographic change in the United States.
World War II had brought immigrants into the country.
Women were working.
Some people will react to that by fearing
that the world they grew up in is disappearing.
That all these new people and all these new ideas
are upsetting the world that they're comfortable with.
Joe McCarthy understood
that you want to position yourself as a populist.
You want to take on all the people who weren't us,
weren't real Americans from the heartland.
{an8}Let's put some man with grassroots common sense in charge
{an8}and then watch America go, my friends!
In times of distress, people are looking for easy people to blame.
Their scapegoat of the moment.
There was another underlying fear that I think he was also tapping into.
Fear of a whole world of advanced technology,
represented by everything from computers to atomic bombs.
People sensed that their life was being upended,
and Joe McCarthy was saying, "Enough."
"We're gonna fight back against all those forces you hate,
and we're gonna embody that in a fight against communism."
If we are to win this fight, we must use all of the intelligence,
all the courage, all of the skill,
every effort of mind and body.
And if, as is obviously the case,
a rough fight.
A rough fight is the only fight the communists can understand,
then the Republican Party will give them a rough fight.
And when Joseph McCarthy needs a lawyer to work with him,
Roy Cohn is the obvious answer.
Nothing could be stronger than the guy who says,
"I helped put away the Rosenbergs."
We believe that the free world is gonna win the Cold War
and win this fight by one thing, the truth.
{an8}At the beginning of 1954,
{an8}the Red Scare is at one of its most fevered pitches.
And Joe McCarthy goes after the ultimate enemy.
Alleged Reds in our own U.S. Army.
At that time, the so-called Army McCarthy Hearings
were the most watched hearings in the history of Congress.
Television, in a sense, helped to make McCarthy
because he was on it regularly.
But in the end, television helped to break McCarthy.
He overplayed his hand
because it's hard to look at the U.S. Army as a communist-supporting organization.
In the glare of the TV cameras, his bald head was sweating profusely.
He went from looking like the all-American hero
to looking like a schoolyard bully.
While our friend Sanctimonious Stu,
was advising...
Senator McCarthy, I resent that reference to my first name.
You better go to a psychiatrist
because I won't take psychological bribes from you.
Let me tell you something...
The chair believes that the American people
have had a look at you for six weeks.
You're not fooling anyone either.
By the end of the hearings, McCarthy's numbers were plummeting
{an8}and Joe Welch, the Army's chief lawyer,
asks what may have been the most famous question
ever uttered in those hearings,
and maybe ever in any congressional investigation.
Have you no sense of decency, sir?
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
If there is a God in heaven,
it will do neither you nor your cause any good.
And there's applause throughout the chamber.
It really shocked the public opinion of McCarthy.
Really never bounced back.
By December,
the Senate had voted to censure McCarthy.
And he essentially drank himself to death.
Died in 1957 while he was still in his 40s.
McCarthy created a great amount of scare, but rarely ever finished an investigation.
Rarely ever proved a point. Never found a spy.
- Never found a spy? - Right.
One demagogue's lust for power
got translated into a national moment of intolerance
and disrespect for constitutional liberties.
He was able to stoke America's worst fears of communism
at a moment that becomes incredibly important,
and shapes the remainder of the Cold War.
What happens to Roy Cohn?
Half a century later,
when a young Donald Trump is trying to make it big
in the New York real estate business,
his father, Fred Trump,
realizes that Donald needs some schooling in hardball politics,
and he goes out and gets the ultimate schoolteacher.
Joe McCarthy's protégé, Roy Cohn.
American political culture
has a traditional vulnerability to demagogues.
There is something about the demagogue that can stir the pot in dangerous ways.
And in terms of nuclear weapons, that could be potentially catastrophic.
When the U.S. learned that a nuclear weapon
had been tested over the Soviet Union,
it was an immediate earthquake in U.S. national security policy.
This sense that the Soviet Union would be able to now build up
its own atomic weapons.
But then even more importantly,
the U.S. begins to realize that the Soviet Union
will surely move ahead and build a thermonuclear device,
the sort of next level of nuclear weapons.
The weapons kept getting bigger as the technology evolved.
These were the kind of weapons that were so destructive
that presidents realized that if we ever got involved in a nuclear war,
it will be the end of civilization.
There would be nothing left.
I copied the papers on nuclear war plans.
I was one of a handful of civilians
who did see these plans.
And they were strange
and horrible.
They seemed like the worst plans that had ever existed.
This is institutional insanity.