Salon Right On! | Betty Friedan's secret Communist past

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Surely no one seriously believes that people who reveal their Communist pasts these days have anything to fear from the American government. Angela Davis, for example, was once the Communist Party's candidate for vice president and served the Soviet empire until its very last gasp. Her punishment for this is to have been appointed one of only seven "President's Professors" at the state-run University of California, and to be officially invited at exorbitant fees by college administrations all across the country to give ceremonial speeches on public occasions.

Folk singer Pete Seeger, who has been a party puppet his entire life, is a celebrated entertainer and was honored recently at the Kennedy Center with a Freedom Medal by the president himself. In the midst of the Vietnam War, Jane Fonda incited American troops to defect in a broadcast she made from the enemy's capital over Radio Hanoi. She then returned to the United States to win an Academy Award and eventually become the wife of one of America's most powerful media moguls, where she oversaw a 24-episode CNN special purporting to be a history of the Cold War. Bernadine Dohrn, leader of America's first political terrorist cult, who once officially declared war on "Amerika," and who has never conceded even minimal regret for her crimes nor hinted at the slightest revision of her views, has just been appointed to a Justice Department commission on children. The idea that America punishes those who betray her is laughable, as is the idea that leftists have anything to fear from their government if they tell the truth.

So why the continuing lies? The reason is this: The truth is too embarrassing. Imagine what it would be like for Betty Friedan (the name actually is Friedman) to admit that as a Jew she opposed America's entry into the war against Hitler because Stalin told her that it was just an inter-imperialist fracas? Imagine what it would be like for America's premier feminist to acknowledge that well into her 30s she thought Stalin was the Father of the Peoples, and that the United States was an evil empire, and that her interest in women's liberation was just a subtext of her real desire to create a Soviet America. No, those kinds of revelations don't help a person who is concerned about her public image.

Which is why it probably has seemed better just to lie about this all these years. The problem, however, is that lying can't be contained. It begets other lies, and eventually becomes a whole way of life, as President Clinton could tell you. One of the lies that the denial of one's Communist past begets is an exaggerated view of McCarthyism. Fear of McCarthyism becomes an excuse that explains everything. That McCarthyism was some gigantic "reign of terror" (to use Carl Bernstein's sappy analogy), as though thousands lost their freedom and hundreds their lives while the country itself remained paralyzed with fear for a decade is simply not true. McCarthy's personal reign lasted but a year a half, until Democrats took control of his committee. Being an accused Communist on an American college campus in the '50s, moreover, was only marginally more damaging to one's career opportunities than the accusation of being a member of the Christian Right would be on today's politically correct campus, dominated as it now is by the tenured left. Bad enough, but reign of terror, no.

The example of Betty Friedan should be a wake-up call to the rest of us to insist that people be candid about their politics and about calling things by their right names. Otherwise, we are going to continue being inundated with books from the academy with ludicrous claims like this: "In response to McCarthyism and to the impact of mass media, suburbs, and prosperity, a wave of conformity swept across much of the nation. Containment referred not only to American policy toward the U.S.S.R. but also to what happened to aspirations at home. The results for women were especially unfortunate. Even though increasing numbers of them entered the work force, the Cold War linked anti-communism and the dampening of women's ambitions." If you believe that, there is a bridge I have to sell you. On the other hand, at least according to Friedan's biographer, that's exactly what Friedan has sold American feminists: "With 'The Feminine Mystique,' Friedan began a long tradition among American feminists of seeing compulsory domesticity as the main consequence of 1950s McCarthyism." Well, perhaps it's not American feminists Friedan has sold this bizarre version of reality to, so much as American Communists posing as feminists and unsuspecting young women whose only understanding of this past will come from their tenured leftist professors.
SALON | Jan. 18, 1999