About ten years after producing "The Day the Cold War Came Home," I  had the opportunity to tell my family's story of the Hollywood Blacklist as a national public radio drama. I received public funding to cover the expense of writing the script, casting it, and producing it in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. By then I had learned a good deal more from the public record and from my family's papers that I thought worth adding to the story. But I soon learned that, in other ways, the passage of time had changed nothing at all.  

Halfway through the project, the federally funded agency that had awarded me the grant stopped payment on their checks. It was a breach of contract. For two weeks my request for a clarification of what was going on was met with silence. I realized that, some fifty years after my father's blacklisting, I was being blacklisted, too. I was being "fired" and left totally in the dark, without the right to know the charges against me or to argue my case. I felt frightened and isolated, as powerless and small as a goldfish in a tank full of sharks. When I wasn't battling the fear in my belly, I was wrestling with the sinking feeling in my heart that there was something terribly wrong with me, that whatever was happening was my fault.  

After two weeks of official silence the funding agency renewed payment on their check. I never received an apology or a word of explanation. To this day what happened remains a mystery. But, if I had to guess, I'd say it was nothing more than "politics as usual." A week before my funding was stopped, the agency and public broadcasting in general came under attack by a powerful new Speaker of the House of Representatives, who was making headlines by identifying public radio and public television as too left-wing (the word used was "liberal") for the nation's good. I think my funder, quite simply, was afraid of being identified with my project. In my bones, I know that what happened then was what had happened to my father and what, someday, may befall my children and grandchildren, too. Good people became afraid of losing their jobs and, once again, the loss of public standing proved a far more frightening prospect than the loss of conscience.

Listen to the six-part series, “Blacklisted”

Transcript coming