Maybe I missed it, but I didn't hear Leffingwell lie, and yet he tells the president he did lie. He never said the witness against him was wrong. He never said he didn't attend the meetings. Where's the lie? He acted as if he was wrongly accused, but that's not a lie, as misleading as it is.
shareHis lie was that he did for a short time in his youth actually attend Communist cell meetings where Gelman was also an attendee. He never joined the Communist Party, but he did attend the meetings. He lied in saying he didn't. Hope this helps.
shareIf he said that, I'm wrong and I apologize. I just don't recall those words before the subcommittee. When he tells the president he lied he's referring to his testimony before the committee. Is that where he said that?
shareThe fact that he made Gelman out to be a liar by cross examining him in front of the subcommittee, and Gelman was a little shady on the truth in some parts of his testimony probably due to his shaky mental state, still he made him recant. So yes, Leffingwell did lie to the subcommittee by excoriating Gelman and making him recant, even though the substance of his testimony was the truth.
shareI knew it was a mistake to approach this like a lawyer. I'm justified because the Supreme Court has interpreted the federal perjury statute to not penalize misleading testimony. In other words, it's not perjury unless you say something you know to be false. Misleading is not a crime under that statute. You can say who cares, but I wanted to check my memory of the movie, which was that he didn't lie before the subcommittee, misleading though he might be. In this sense I think lying means the same as perjury under the law. Of course there are other considerations here besides the law of perjury and I get that.
shareAfter recounting how Gelman had been fired from the Federal Power Commission he headed, then given a job at the Treasury Department, Leffingwell said to the Committee, "This, then, is the sum total of my knowledge about Herbert Gelman." That in itself was a direct lie, as he of course had known Gelman at those Communist cell meetings back in Chicago. So in that one particular, at least, Leffingwell did commit perjury.
Otherwise, by carefully using Gelman's own errors and misstatements against him, Leffingwell discredited him as a witness. In doing so he was indeed able to dodge directly answering whether he had attended such meetings or any of the substance of Gelman's accusations. That may be more evasion than perjury as such, but in terms of a Senate hearing it makes little difference whether Leffingwell committed perjury in the strict sense (although in fact he did, as pointed out above) or was simply creating a false narrative without technically lying. His misleading the Committee, whether technically perjury or not, whether prosecutable or not, would nonetheless have gotten him in serious trouble with the Senate, since his testimony on this matter was in effect a lie, and would have forced him to either withdraw or face defeat. He would also have been subject to a likely separate Senate investigation, one of the fears he expressed to Hardiman Fletcher when he saw him in his apartment after Gelman's testimony.
Thanks. I had overlooked "this, then is the sum total of my knowledge..." Certainly a lie and definitely perjury.
shareYou're welcome. Leffingwell himself told the President he had lied to the Committee, but he was clearly referring to more than just that one statement. He meant the totality of his testimony regarding his involvement with the Communist cell, which was deliberately evasive and misleading and so was tantamount to a lie. That seems to have been what everyone was focused on, not merely his "sum total" line, which was a direct lie (arguably his only one, but regardless...).
Besides a separate Senate investigation Leffingwell would also almost certainly have been cited for contempt of Congress because of what he'd said, in addition to a charge of perjury.
Author Allen Drury broadly based the Leffingwell/Gelman encounter on the 1948 HUAC hearings that featured a showdown between Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, at which Chambers testified that he and Hiss had known one another in the 1930s and that both had been Communist agents. Chambers was fat, sloppy and disheveled and made such a poor contrast to Hiss, Harvard-educated and elegant, that at first the Committee didn't believe Chambers and not only accepted Hiss's denials that he had been a Soviet spy and had ever known Chambers, but even apologized to him. But Committee member Richard Nixon, whose investigators had found Chambers, persisted and Chambers subsequently came up with tangible proof of his claims -- after which Hiss's veneer of calm denial disintegrated as he gradually gave ground as he admitted to having known Chambers and began trapping himself in one lie after another. Hiss eventually went to prison, not for espionage (the statute of limitations prevented that) but for perjury.
The parallels between this real-life incident and Drury's incident in Advise & Consent are obvious. He drew other incidents in his book from actual people or events in the Washington of the late 40s and 50s.
The last years of Hiss's life he became a bit of a rock star as he toured gullible college campuses, adored by idealistic but ignorant students who bought into his recycled claim of innocence. And I remember a Richard Nixon but don't know whatever happened to him.
shareHiss became a hero to the ignorant, gullible and willfully stupid mainly because they hated Nixon so much. Nevertheless, though I'm a liberal who intensely disliked Nixon and HUAC, I refuse to put my mind on hold and ignore or wish away the truth simply because of how it affects someone's reputation. Nixon was quite right about Hiss, and there certainly were Communist spies in the government during the 30s and 40s, besides Hiss and Chambers. No knowledgeable, rational person could ever have believed otherwise.
Yes, what ever did happen to that Nixon fellow?
Many liberals also still refuse to face the blunt fact that during HUAC's headline-hunting "investigations" into Communism in Hollywood, most of the people accused of having been Communists had in fact been party members or sympathizers. Most joined during the Depression when they were looking for a cause, and most of those -- but not all -- quit after a short time and had long since put their flirtation with Stalin to rest by the time HUAC caught up with them. But the right-wingers in the House competing with Joe McCarthy (often erroneously lumped in among those investigating Hollywood) in the Senate made sure to grab attention by ruining the careers of a lot of people who were guilty of little more than political stupidity. Of course, there were some hard-core Stalinists in Hollywood too, people who never gave up on their dangerously naive faith in Communism, but even so, being a Communist was not illegal and they committed no crime. But the popular belief today is that these were all sweet innocents falsely victimized by vile men. Most of HUAC's members were bigots and idiots, but their accusations in this case usually had merit, even if they pursued this issue strictly for political gain, since unlike Hiss et al, no wrong-doing was involved.
Remember when the genius Elia Kazan got a lifetime achievement award from the Academy (1999) and that lightweight Tim Robbins was shown angrily sitting on his hands? I agree with you that there were communists in hollywood and I would add they were trying to sell their product to the public. Incidentally, a week or so ago a great segment on the Rosenberg children on 20/20, I think it was. You should catch it if you didn't see it.
shareYes, Tim Robbins, Nick Nolte and several other holier-than-thou, self-satisfied Hollywood liberals. The irony is that it was other, true liberals, like Martin Scorsese ad many others, who pushed to get Kazan the award. I'm wary of celebrities who pass moral judgment on the actions of others in the profession 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, when these people have never faced similar moral dilemmas. It's easy for a Robbins to look smugly down on a Kazan, but I really wonder how well he would have coped had he been around in 1952 and was faced with the loss of his livelihood. This was not an easy call or black-and-white situation.
Edward Dmytryk, one of the Hollywood Ten in HUAC's first rampage into Hollywood in 1948, went along with the "strategy" devised by John Howard Lawson, a genuine hard-line Stalinist, who followed the party line and told the Ten to defy the Committee and refuse to answer anything directly. All this got them was contempt charges, prison terms, and being blacklisted. But they were eager enough to see non-Communist Hollywood liberals go to Washington to defend them (Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye and many others), until those honest citizens realized they were being duped into defending people with other agendas.
After prison and a couple years' "exile", in 1952 Dmytryk became the only one of the Ten to offer "purging" testimony before HUAC, after which he was "allowed" to work again. In later years Dmytryk (who had quit the Party in 1945) said that he realized how stupid Lawson and the rest were in their obstructionist tactics: all they did was make themselves look bad, as though they were guilty of something. He said they should simply have answered the Committee's questions, fully and truthfully, thereby giving them no place to go. No doubt they would all have been blacklisted, but that happened anyway, and they would have avoided prison and maybe even gotten some credit for their courage in admitting their unpopular views.
I can't exactly say I admire people like Kazan, Dmytryk, Sterling Hayden, Lloyd Bridges and the others who did name names of friends and former "comrades"; after all, they did so in large part for self-serving reasons. But nether can I condemn them for this. What did any of them owe these others? Dmytryk, for one, said that he owed no loyalty or any other allegiance to people who he realized were hiding behind others, being dishonest and harming other people's careers. I think he was right. But no one, on any side, came out of this mess clean or uninjured. That's why I so resent the ignorance and even vindictiveness of most modern Hollywood types about a cruel, difficult and morally ambiguous period of American life, about which they clearly know nothing. And that goes for the Right too.
Nice brief essay, thanks. Are you professionally involved in writing about this period? My sense is that most Americans know nothing about it (ahistorical) and another couple of decades and only specialists will be aware of the history. I've had interactions with milliennials and many never heard of Norman Mailer or Philip Roth. I'm too scared to ask about the Marx Brothers.
share