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CBS's Don Hollenbeck: An Honest Reporter in the Age of McCarthyism
Loren Ghiglione recounts the fascinating life and tragic suicide of Don Hollenbeck, the controversial newscaster who became a primary target of McCarthyism's smear tactics Drawing on unsealed FBI records, private family correspondence, and interviews with Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Charles Collingwood, Douglas Edwards, and more than one hundred other journalists, Ghiglione writes a balanced biography that cuts close to the bone of this complicated newsman and chronicles the stark consequences of the anti-Communist frenzy that seized America in the late 1940s and 1950s. Hollenbeck began his career at the Lincoln, Nebraska Journal (marrying the boss's daughter) before becoming an editor at William Randolph Hearst's rip-roaring Omaha Bee-News. He participated in the emerging field of photojournalism at the Associated Press; assisted in creating the innovative, ad-free PM newspaper in New York City; reported from the European theater for NBC radio during World War II; and anchored television newscasts at CBS during the era of Edward R. Murrow. Hollenbeck's pioneering, prize-winning radio program, CBS Views the Press (1947-1950), was a declaration of independence from a print medium that had dominated American newsmaking for close to 250 years. The program candidly criticized the prestigious New York Times, the Daily News (then the paper with the largest circulation in America), and Hearst's flagship Journal-American and popular morning tabloid Daily Mirror. For this honest work, Hollenbeck was attacked by conservative anti-Communists, especially Hearst columnist Jack O'Brian, and in 1954, plagued by depression, alcoholism, three failed marriages, and two network firings (and worried about a third), Hollenbeck took his own life. In his investigation of this amazing American character, Ghiglione reveals the workings of an industry that continues to fall victim to censorship and political manipulation. Separating myth from fact, CBS's Don Hollenbeck is the definitive portrait of a polarizing figure who became a symbol of America's tortured conscience. .
Price: $18.00
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The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism
In The Age of Anxiety, now updated with a new afterword, Johnson tells this monumental story through the lens of its relevance to our own time, when the current administration has created a culture of fear that again affects American behavior and attitudes. He believes now, as then, that our civil liberties, our Constitution, and our nation are at stake as we confront the ever more difficult task of balancing the need for national security with that of personal liberty. .
Price: $0.98
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Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run
Throughout his childhood, Mike O’Connor’s family pretended to be normal. But Mike and his two younger sisters knew that their parents were hiding something–a secret they didn’t dare talk about. The family appeared to be no different from any of their small-town Texas neighbors–that is, until suddenly, the O’Connor’s would flee, leaving with only a few hours’ notice, abandoning houses and pets and possessions and running across the border to Mexico. For all of Mike’s adolescence, O’Connor family life alternated between relative comfort and abject poverty–sometimes within a matter of days. From living in a Texas ranch house to living in two rented rooms in an impoverished Mexican village, the O’Connors never knew what lay ahead–only that they must not draw attention to themselves. Though their parents steadfastly denied it, the children knew that something was chasing them–a past that hovered like an invisible enemy, always waiting to strike, always in pursuit. But it was not until much later, after his parents’ deaths, that Mike O’Connor, now an investigative reporter, was able to uncover the truth about his family’s past. As the secrets were unlocked one by one and the long trail of deception unfurled, Mike faced the heart-wrenching ramifications of his parents’ actions–and made a discovery that shook his family loyalty to its core. Full of incredible details of a life lived on both sides of the border, in near-poverty and near-wealth, Mike O’Connor’s account is a real-life suspense story of childhood mysteries and strange circumstances that will enthrall readers to its very end. Kirkus Reviews
Journalist O’Connor’s riveting debut traces a childhood shaped by his mother’s and father’s lies and his adult quest to uncover the truths they hid. The author grew up knowing virtually nothing of his parents’ pasts or extended families, though his mother’s accent did reveal that she was English. The absence of cousins and grandparents was just one oddity. The O’Connors were also constantly moving, establishing tentative, tenuous households and then fleeing town in the middle of the night. They had a particular fear of government officials, and any encounter with cops left Mrs. O’Connor shaken for days. Given all this moving, the O’Connors were unable to make much money, and they slipped from a precarious perch in the middle class to shocking poverty. In late adolescence, the author finally recognized that life at home was poisonous, his parents unstable and deceptive. He moved out and had only sporadic contact with them in the ensuing decades, when he worked as a reporter for CBS News, the New York Times and NPR. Only after both his parents died did O’Connor’s two younger sisters beg him to tackle the mystery of their lives as though it were a political scandal he was assigned to expose. He began to dig, grudgingly at first but then increasingly determined to discover the secrets that had shaped his childhood. His research took him to Boston, where he connected with his father’s large family; to Burnley, England, where an elderly union organizer told him stories about his mother and uncle; and into the offices of the CIA, FBI and INS, following a sketchy paper trail that shed light on the government’s interest in his parents. O’Connor is a sympathetic narrator, never bitter, who reveals the complexities of every last character. By the end of this suspenseful memoir, readers will be just as eager as the author to discover what kept his family on the run."This is a lot more than just a memoir. Mike O'Connor brings the pacing of a thriller, the eye of a great reporter and the intrigue of a life on the run to create a fascinating portrait of his own Boston Irish family and the secrets it held in McCarthy-era America. It is a page turner that takes you on a journey out of the confines of the Irish enclaves of New England through the big sky country of Texas and south of the border to Mexico. All along the way, O'Connor writes with a unique voice that manages to both enlighten the past and inform the present. This is a finely crafted work of non-fiction and one hell of a good read." -- Charles M. Sennott, author and staff writer for The Boston Globe
"This book is a mystery and a memoir. But more than anything it is an unforgettable romance about two people who willingly sacrifice everything - their finances, their future, and their families - to stay together. Mike O’Connor is an extraordinary writer and in retracing his parents’ footsteps he asks big questions. What is a family? Does the truth matter? And most importantly, what is love?" -- Ruth Reichl, Editor-in-Chief, Gourmet "Mike O'Connor, the young son of a Boston Irish father and a British mother, spent his childhood on the lam in Texas, Mexico and California, never knowing what his parents were up to. Years later, after distinguished work as a foreign correspondent in war zones from El Salvador to the Middle East, O'Connor probes his bizarre past and gets to the bottom of what his parents feared most, what they were running from. The O'Connor family story is a story of post-war America. It is riveting, and it is unforgettable." --David Gelber, Producer, CBS News
"O'Connor's book is a gripping yarn of inscrutable dangers, broken dreams and the power of grit. It is also a searing story of his efforts--first as a boy and later as a savvy journalist--to understand and unravel the mystery of why his family has to keep moving from Massachusetts to Texas to Mexico, back to Texas, back to Mexico, then to California and back to Mexico. The scenes of border crossings are so haunting you feel as if you are there. In a voice that is at times youthful and at times world weary, he masterfully tells a tale that evolves from McCarthy era paranoia but goes well beyond that troubled time in our history." --Henry Weinstein, Legal Affairs Writer, Los Angeles Times
"Mike O'Connor is a masterful writer. A brave and relentless war correspondent, he now turns his investigative skills to his own mysterious family and the secrets behind a childhood filled with danger and constantly on the run. It's a poignant American saga that has its roots in a time when the country was intoxicated by fear, obsessed with enemies within as well as without. Powerful, elegant, compelling." --Sylvia Poggioli, Senior European Correspondent, National Public Radio.
Price: $5.00
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Senator Sam Ervin, Last of the Founding Fathers (Caravan Book)
Many Americans remember Senator Sam Ervin (1896-1985) as the affable, Bible-quoting, old country lawyer who chaired the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. Yet for most of his 20 years in the Senate, Ervin was Jim Crow's most talented legal defender as the South's constitutional expert during the congressional debates on civil rights. The paradox of the senator's opposition to civil rights and defense of civil liberties lies at the heart of this biography of Sam Ervin. Karl Campbell illuminates the character of the man and the historical forces that shaped him. The senator's distrust of centralized power, Campbell argues, helps explain his ironic reputation as a foe of civil rights and a champion of civil liberties..
Price: $22.76
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Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBIs Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
A vital reminder of the importance of academic freedom, Threatening Anthropology offers a meticulously detailed account of how U.S. Cold War surveillance damaged the field of anthropology. David H. Price reveals how dozens of activist anthropologists were publicly and privately persecuted during the Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s. He shows that it was not Communist Party membership or Marxist beliefs that attracted the most intense scrutiny from the fbi and congressional committees but rather social activism, particularly for racial justice. Demonstrating that the fbi’s focus on anthropologists lessened as activist work and Marxist analysis in the field tapered off, Price argues that the impact of McCarthyism on anthropology extended far beyond the lives of those who lost their jobs. Its messages of fear and censorship had a pervasive chilling effect on anthropological investigation. As critiques that might attract government attention were abandoned, scholarship was curtailed. Price draws on extensive archival research including correspondence, oral histories, published sources, court hearings, and more than 30,000 pages of fbi and government memorandums released to him under the Freedom of Information Act. He describes government monitoring of activism and leftist thought on college campuses, the surveillance of specific anthropologists, and the disturbing failure of the academic community—including the American Anthropological Association—to challenge the witch hunts. Today the “war on terror” is invoked to license the government’s renewed monitoring of academic work, and it is increasingly difficult for researchers to access government documents, as Price reveals in the appendix describing his wrangling with Freedom of Information Act requests. A disquieting chronicle of censorship and its consequences in the past, Threatening Anthropology is an impassioned cautionary tale for the present..
Price: $14.00
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Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (Film and Culture)
Though conventional wisdom claims that television is a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, Doherty argues that during the Cold War, through television, America actually became a more tolerant place. He examines television programming and contemporary commentary of the late 1940s to the mid-1950s -- everything from See It Now to I Love Lucy, from Red Channels to the writings of Walter Winchell and Hedda Hopper. By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Doherty paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black and white cliches. .
Price: $20.44
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Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents
Incorporating important recent scholarship, this popular supplement combines a comprehensive essay on the history of McCarthyism with compelling documents that trace the course of anti-Communist furor in the U.S. The volume’s 95-page essay follows the campaign against domestic subversion from its origins in the 1930s through its escalation in the 1940s to its decline in the 1950s. The second part includes over 47 original documents (including 6 new sources) — congressional transcripts, FBI reports, speeches, and letters — that chronicle the anti-Communist crusade. The essay and documents have been thoroughly updated to reflect new scholarship and recently revealed archival evidence of Soviet spying in the U.S. Also included are headnotes to the documents, 15 black-and-white photographs, a glossary, a chronology of McCarthyism, a revised bibliographical essay, and an index. .
Price: $7.62
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Chasing Spies: How the FBI Failed in Counter-Intelligence But Promoted the Politics of McCarthyism in the Cold War Years
Based on meticulous research in FBI files, Chasing Spies uncovers the FBI's role in the most important espionage cases of the cold war years. The book shows how secrecy immunized FBI operations from critical scrutiny and enabled FBI officials to mask their counterintelligence failures while promoting a politics of McCarthyism. Athan Theoharis calmly explores a major paradox of the Cold War: that J. Edgar Hoover, for all his fulminations against communism and his collaboration with McCarthyism, failed to apprehend and convict Soviet spies busily at work in the United States. Chasing Spies greatly illuminates this notable FBI counterintelligence failure. --Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Price: $7.90
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Hollywood on Trial: McCarthyism's War Against the Movies
This is the true story of how J. Parnell Thomas, chairman of the UnAmerican Activities Committee made a national name for himself by ruining the lives of hundreds of people in the movie industry. Two years later, Thomas would be jailed for embezzling government money, but in August 1953 he was riding high. Hollywood on Trial relates the story of the victims of this witchhunt. Through the Committee many of Hollywood's leading lights were denied the right to work. Stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson were denied the passports that would have allowed them to leave America, Oscar-winning writers were forced to give their scripts to others to offer in their own names and then share the proceeds. Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, and John Huston went to Washington in defense of the "Hollywood Ten", the first writers to be blacklisted, yet when Bogart and Bacall were questioned, they too buckled. The humiliations continued until the end of the 1950s. The scars, however, have remained to this day. .
Price: $8.85
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