search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend. .. >> and then i'm going to read something of the book so that you can get a sense of who she was.

and i start by the, with the why bother question for the following reason. there have been several biographies of lillian hellman. she was, after all, the most famous 20th century female playwright for many years until the 1970s when female playwrights began coming out of the wood work. and as such she was a figure to be reckoned with. she was a celebrity in her own right. in addition to being a playwright, she became a screenwriter, and she was responsible for films like "dead end kids" of the 1930s, "the chase" of the 1950s, films you might have heard about. but she's still most famous of those plays of little foxes, the

children's hour which are repeatedly played as films, not as plays on late night television. tune in almost any week, and you can find one or another of them. so the question is, if there have been other biographies of this playwright, why do another one? and my answer is, this isn't really a biography at all. i approach lillian hellman not as somebody who is interested in exploring the inferiority of her life, but in somebody interested in what she tells us about 20th century america:s that is, how can you look through lillian hellman and learn something about 20th century life.

i think that's an important thing to do for several reasons, and it's particularly important to do with lillian hellman because she is, as i say in the book, i describe her as a very juicy character. and i mean that she's a juicy character because she touches so many aspects of 20th century history. and it's those aspects that got me interesting in worked -- interested in working on her. for example, she's a woman who manages to make it in the theater world at a moment in time when women aren't playwrights at all, or if they are, they are playwrights of what are called domestic dramas, that is dramas in which women enact, only enact, the roles of women. hellman's not interested in that at all. she's interested in being a serious playwright.

she's a serious dramatist. she wants to engage the big subjects. the main one that she deals with and deals with often is money and the corruption that money brings. but she's interested, she calls herself a moral playwright, not a political playwright although some people think of her as a political playwright, but as a moral playwright. she's interested in things like truth and honesty and the meaning of the big lie and exploring the corruption of human life and the way in which people get corrupted by the family sometimes, but by the life that they live around them. because she's a serious playwright people don't take her very seriously until she

produced at the age of 29 her first great play, "the children's hour." and suddenly "the children's hour" which runs on broadway for about a year and a half, "the chirp's -- children's hour" makes her reputation, makes her reputation and places her immediately in the ranks of top american playwrights. so for many years, you know, when you see those lists of the top ten playwrights in america, she's in there. and then suddenly she stops being in there by the 1950s. her day is pretty much done. she writes one more great play at the end of the 1950s, and then she pretty much stops writing plays. so here she is, a woman who makes it. she's what i call a self-made

woman, that is a woman who manages against all the odds to become rich on her own, out of her own pen or out of her own talent, if you like. so she doesn't marry wealth. she marries once but then divorces and doesn't marry again. she comes from, her mother's family had a good deal of money, but for a variety of reasons it took lillian until she was about 70 years old to inherit her share of that money. and even then it wasn't enormously significant. the father's family is relatively not poor, but certainly, you know, very middle ing kind of family. so lillian's left to make it on

her own, and she does. that's a rather unusual circumstance for a woman who was born, as she was n1905. in so she comes to maturity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. it's a moment in time when most womenthey manage to make it at all make -- if they manage to make it at all, make it by inheriting money or marrying into money. not lillian. she is a self-made woman. she's also a political woman. following her own heart in the 1930s organizing the screenwriters' guild, the dramatists' guild, so she's a labor organizer, joining the communist party along with multiple members of the entertainment industry and her friends, quitting the communist party after a couple of years

and then following her own political path. some people called her a naive political person, but still to find a woman who can both manage to make it and who is political, that's already sort of two balls that she's juggling in the air. and finally she is a, um, what can we call her but a celebrity? i mean, she becomes partly through her talent as a play wright or a screenwriter, she becomes a celebrity. she hangs out in the 1960s with jackie kennedy and arthur schlesinger jr., with the getter ratty -- glitterati.

you name it, she's part of a community of celebrity people. she's famous for her dinner parties and her other parties. she's an entertain -- she entertains. edmund wilson calls her the queen of the cocktail belt in the 1960s. so she, she has a kind of presence and person in and of herself. so here's a woman then who touches a variety of strands of american history, and yet she's a woman who goes down, if you like, in the late 1970s. she's labeled a liar, she's labeled a stalinist, she's dismissed as a minor mello dramatist. her plays are dismissed. and after that rapid rise and success, she ends her life

notorious rather than famous. so one of the questions i'm interested in as a historian is how do we understand this? how do we understand what happened to her not as a product of her personality which if you know anything about her or, you know was not very pleasant to say the least. she was, had a reputation for being nasty and mean-spirited and vie tube ritive. she swore, she smoke bed, she was -- smoked, she was often angry, she was sort of in the -- in your face aggressive, aggrandizing person. it wasn't her hearsalty that made her famous, although i think her personality was part

of what brought her down in the end. but in the end i think the way to understand lillian hellman is not by understanding her persona so much as by understanding that persona in the context of the shifting politics and realities of the 20th century. and that's what this book tries to do. so what i'm going to do then is just read you some paragraphs from here and there to see if i can't give you a sense of who she was. and what i've done here is to pick some of the pieces that illustrate both her -- that give you both a sense of her as an individual and at the same time tried to provide a sense of sort of how she fits into these various worlds that she's in. and i can stop there so if you

want to ask questions in between, we can do that or ask questions at the end, whatever works is fine. so lillian hellman is a playwright. lillian hellman is a playwright, she worked hard at her plays. she imagined herself and to the end of her life when you asked her who she was, she was a writer. she identified as a writer. she identified not as -- although she was born in new orleans, so she identified all her life though she lived most of it in new york and hollywood, but she always identified herself as a southerner. she was a southern err, she was a jew, he was a political person. but if you asked her who she was, she understood herself as a writer. that's how she managed to make it. be and -- and yet she sometimes

wrote plays of, you know, it was not unusual for her to tell us that she had written nine drafts, for example, of "the little foxes" before it came into production. and each draft was read and criticized by her friend and companion, daschle ham et who some of you might want to ask questions about later. not only did she write carefully, she understood every word that she wrote as belonging to her. she didn't want anybody ever to change her words or her language. so she was, as the title of the book indicates, a rather difficult person to work with because if you know anything about neater the, you know that directors and actors often speak lines that they then want to move or shift a little bit. lillian, however, would have none of it.

she was involved not only in the writing, but in the casting of her plays. she didn't often have the final word, but she sat in on the selection of directors and actors in her plays. and she very often would sit during rehearsals off makes noises that were -- often making noises that were not welcome to the actors. so here's a, here's a piece that i'm going to read for you. as her play came closer to opening night, she became increasingly nervous, pacing through rehearsals, drinking and unable to sit still. i've never felt anything but fear and resentment that what was private is now to become public, what was mine is no

longer mine alone. she told a harvard audience. more than anything else the commitment takes place on that day, and final commitments, a final having to stand up, stand beside, take responsibility for, open yourself to is, for me, an act of such proportion that i have never on all the many first days that came ceased to be my kind of sick. austin pendleton, a director who directed the 981 production -- 1981 production of "the little foxes" that starred elizabeth taylor as regina provides a vivid picture of her behavior on such occasions. there wasn't one scene, says austin pendleton, that could make it to opening night without her saying she hated it, he affirmed. towards the end of the new york previews, hellman, still unhappy

with how things were going, stormed out of the theater in the second intermission, and in full view of the audience pounded her cane on the ground to emphasize how much she hated the performance. pendleton says of himself, i just lost it. be and i started yelling. the lobby's jammed, people are ordering drinks in line, and i started yelling. this is the worst fucking night of my life. sorry about the expletive, but it's a literal quote. to which hellman yelled back, every night i see this fucking production is the worst fucking night of my life. [laughter] this incident so upset pendleton that he left the theater unable to watch act iii of the opening night of his own play. he walked around the block several times, threatening to quit the show until the curtain came down, and then he retreated

with some close friends to an obscure bar where he thought nobody could find him. just a few minutes into their first drinks, hellman -- who had tracked him down -- called on the telephone. you still angry? he said to him -- she said to him. and he then replied, and he describes himself as finding her question enchanting. we laughed for a few minutes about our blowup, he remembers, and i had a wonderful hour or so of drinking with my friends. the relationship mended, the revival turned out to be a critical success. so that gives you a sense not only of what she was like as a playwrighter and someone involved in her plays, but it also gives you a sense of lillian hellman as a person, that is as a person who could

lose it, who could scream and yell in public at the director of her own play which was a about to open, and yet ten minutes later or a half hour later she was smiling and charming, she'd forgotten it. she was someone who could explode and then make friends again. she would become angry and violent, sometimes violently, swearingly angry, and sometimes that anger would last a lifetime. but often it would be an anger that could be calmed as soon as she was brought to her senses as it were. that's lillian the playwright. and then there's lillian the political person, and here's another kind of lillian that we need to take a look at, a lillian who has quite a

different sense of what the world is about and where she fits into be it. she is, by all accounts, a bit player, if you like. if the communism -- in the communism and in the political conflict of the late 1930s and '40s. and if you know something about these conflicts, you know that they are roiled with factions and sectarianism on the left as well as between the left and the center, if you like. so there's the cpusa, the communist party which is antagonistic to the trot skyists, which is antagonistic to the socialists, and you could go on down the line. hellman from about 1937 on identified with -- although she was not yet a member of the

communist party. it's likely that her partner, daschle, was. but like many people in the entertainment world of that period, people who had been stung by the great depression and who really wanted to bring some sense of economic security to the country to curb the appetites of rampant, the interests of money, hellman fell into almost naturally a group of people who felt like that. so her best friend, dorothy parker, for example, was a member of the party. numbers of screenwriters whose names you'll know, john howard lawson is the one i'll mention and who we're later going to be

blacklisted as hellman herself would be were party members. as for a while was her, the director of the first four of her plays, herman shumlan. so it shouldn't surprise us that hellman sort of rotated into that politics, and she joined the party in 1939, she quit the party in 1941 by all, everything that we can learn. and, but she remained what we sometimes call a fellow traveler. that is, she did not repudiate either the soviet union, but more important for her, she would not repudiate her commitment to what she saw as social justice. she was no longer a party member, she just liked and would not even when she was in the

party be disciplined by the party or follow party dictates in any sense either ideologically or in terms of what she did. but still she believed in the idealism, the utopianism that the left wing represented. the result of that was that all that was fine as long as the u.s. was allied with the soviet union this world war ii. when world war ii ended, we know the beginning of the troubles gap. began. the beginning of the attack on the left. and hellman, who didn't want to repudiate her former associations, got caught in this. hellman then returns -- sorry, hellman at the end of the war makes a trip to the soviet union. she's invited, they're doing a production of "the little

foxes," and she's invited as a cultural figure to come to the soviet union. she makes the trip in the winter of 1944 and 1945 and comes back from the soviet union, and this short section describes what happens then. hellman returned from the soviet union in march of 1945 convinced that the destruction there had been so intense that the soviets would never want war again. as she'd been moved by the suffering of the spanish in the spanish civil war, so she was touched by that of the russian people who had lost as many as 20 million lives and whose destroyed cities she had seen with her own eyes. she had stopped in london on the way back to help with a film, and she wrote to muriel rookheiser, found herself in a bomb barrage. i heard the bomb land and then nothing happened until the

screams. by the time i got to the bomb hole, a man was sitting in the hole, one of his arms lying across from him. two children were lying across the street, a rubber ball between them. an old man was being carried into a house, and a woman was holding her skirt against his face. had he seen these -- she seen these things? did she imagine them? it didn't matter. lillian had had enough of war. in the early postwar days she lent her name to several groups that focused on how to construct an enduring peace. there's a great deal of war talk now, she wrote to heri

>> the warm response to it which came from the soviet women's anti-fascist committee found its way into hellman's fbi file.

yet the other signatories on the message included such notables as mrs. dwight eisenhower, mrs. franklin delano roosevelt, and mrs. mary mccloud mcleod bee among hundreds of others. even as the soviets spread their territorial umbrella over much of central and eastern europe, hellman remained a staunch believer in peaceful coexistence. quarrels start and quarrels end, she told one audience. it is not right to weigh large things on small scales. it no longer matters whose fault it is, it matters that this game be stopped and that our arms and legs and heads and faces not be used to find out who was right and who was wrong and who said what on what day. to stop the game required

talking to the enemy. though she knew that communists played a substantial and often dominant role -- excuse me -- in many -- excuse me. though she knew that communists played a substantial and off dominant role in many of the organizations she joined, i did not really care, she writes. i felt as they did, that the russians really did not want war and that this was what counted most. i was guided by a feeling that russia would never again seek war as a means of settling into national controversy, she wrote later. right or wrong, that's the hellman who's a fellow traveler as she was committed to peace

and to peaceful coexistence. one of the results of that was in 1949 she organized a conference at the waldorf-astoria hotel. this waldorf conference, officially called the cultural and scientific conference for world peace, was a product of the national council of artists and professionals of which she was a member and which itself had communist members. there were many groups of that period that had communists and non-communist mens -- members, and that was one of them. she was committed to working with anybody who was interested in peace. among the original signatories to that call for that conference were paul robison, a known communist on the one hand, louie --

[inaudible] linus pauling, scientists and others who had no such connections. eventually about 600 people signed the invitation. and that invitation led to the construction of a conference which included eventually 3,000 people meeting at the waldorf-astoria along with a counterconference organized by anti-communists who believed that hellman was the mastermind of the conference. now, hellman, to be sure, had participated in organizing the conference, but she was by no means its mastermind and was only one of 600 members of the organizing committee. but hellman, nevertheless, gets the blame for the conference. the conference then, when it

took place, was picketed and here in a short paragraph let me give you a sense of what that was like. the american legion, the catholic war veterans rounded up hundreds of members to protest outside the waldorf-astoria. among them were a line of nuns through which delegates had to pass. but the most effective critique of the conference and the one with the most long-lasting effect, excuse me, the one with the most long-lasting effects would come from a range of individuals on the left who fundamentally disagreed with fellow travelers over the causes of the cold war. to their mind, russia bore responsibility be for the escalation and tensions. the most effect bive guarantee of -- effective guarantee of peace, they argued, was a strong military defense.

peace merely allowed the soviets more room for aggression. the conference with delegates selected by the soviet union, and there were a handful of such delegates, could expect only to serve the cause of propaganda. devastateing the the opponents accused conference organizers wittingly or not playing into the hands of the soviets. a handful of the 600 sponsors encouraged the organizers to make space for critics of the soviet union, but the organizers were committed to a conference that would knost -- not castigate either side. its intent was to bring together people who would discuss the possibilities of peaceful coexistence that had a clear international flavor to fit. that's the line that hellman took and the line that thereafter condemned her as a stalinist.

it was out of that conference that anti-intellectual, anti-communism large ri grew. largely grew. so i'm going to read you just one more short piece, although there could be many more. and this comes towards the end of her life, an incident that some of you may know about. hellman after she stops writing plays starts to write memoirs, publishes one in '69, publishes one in 1973, and then in 1976 she publishes a small memoir called sound rell time which is her memoir of her own appearance at the house committee on un-american activities. that memoir creates a, let me just say a negative reaction, a vociferous negative reaction because hellman in that book takes for granted that joseph

mccarthy and his minions, she calls them, would have been evil people. but, she says, the real blame should be laid at the feet of these liberals, the intellectuals who didn't stand up for those who were called before the committees. she argues that freedom of speech, the right to dissent was integral to american democracy and that in that period it was the liberals who became anti-communist and who, therefore, tacitly allowed mccarthy to do what he was doing. that they were the real criminals, if you like, of this period. that produces a resurgence of all the conflicts of the 950s -- 1950, and hellman is

caught right in the middle of it. she's accused by people on the left as well as by people who have now moved to the right of being a hypocrite for failing ever to denounce the soviet union, of being a hidden communist all of her life. the word stalinist is thrown at her repeatedly and endlessly. among the by-products of that is for a variety of political reasons the author, mary mccarthy, who was in a different political faction than hellman was, she'd been a trotskyist in her younger days and anti, an anti-stalinist certainly, had a long history of enmity with lillian hellman.

becomes -- well, let me read you the piece, and you'll see. hellman has just published or is about to publish, she's just sent to press a fourth memoir which is much less well known than the others. as it should be. but here's the incident as it occurs. maybe the fourth volume was already in press when early in 1980 novelist and literary critic mary mccarthy let a match to the firestorm that would serve as a metaphor for the 20th century. the moment provided a ready supply of fuel. everywhere one looked, small conflagrations were already erupting. there was confusion and concern about the changing roles of women, debate over the legitimacy of sexual preferences and the value of the traditional nuclear namely, de-- family,

declining opposition to left-wing ideologies including communist and a resulting escalation in the politics and language of anti-communism. this, you'll remember, is the beginning of the reagan period. the rise of identity politics is a factor in domestic and world politics, the vanishing influence of the intellectual and is the simultaneous rise of a popular, seemingly mindless celebrity culture. all these created a timider box of -- tinderbox of politics and emotion, and the aging lillian hellman seemed to have provided a spark to each of them. in the conflagration lay questions petty and mean, twinges of common jealousy and sparks of rage. when the fire died down, lillian hellman's reputation was reduced to ashes.

on october 18, 1979, mary mccarthy arrived at the studios at the educational broadcasting corporation to tape an interview with talk show host dick cabot. she had a new novel to publicize, her first in eight years. she hoped for the kind of success that would bring her back into the limelight. cabot looked forward to the interview. she was lively, witty, opinionated and striking on camera, he recalled later. the interview was going smoothly when in response to a question about overrated writers, she mentioned among ores lillian hellman -- others, lillian hellman who, i think finish this is a quote from mary mccarthy, is tremendously overrated, a bad writer and a dishonest writer. but she really, and then she dismissed her, she really belongs to the past. cabot followed up.

what was dishonest about lillian hellman, he asked? cabot knew hellman reasonably well. he had occasionally had dinner with her, he had previously interviewed her on his show and claimed to like her a lot. mccarthy answered, everything. i said once in some interview that every word she writes is a lie including "and" and "the." the audience laughed, the moment passed, and cabot went on to other arenas. the network lawyer complemented him afterwards on a nice show, and the tape was stashed away in preparation for be its scheduled air time on january 24th, 980. 1980. two months later, alone in her bedroom, lillian watched the show on a cold saturday night.

ill with emphysema and almost blind, she listened to mary mccarthy accuse her of being a liar. worn down by the axises of stalin -- the ax sayings of stalinism, tired of the never ending negativity about her personal life andsensitive about her rumored greed and self-aggrandizing nature, she was unprepared for this new assault. the following morning she picked up the phone and called her old friend and lawyer, ephraim london, one of the two people she had dedicated "maybe", her new memoir. she wanted to know if there were grounds for a lawsuit. london agreed there might be. still in a fury, she called dick cabot demanding to know why he

hadn't defended her. she would be suing the whole damn bunch of you, cabot recalled her telling him. mary mccarthy, at home in her paris lawsuit, heard rumors of a pending lawsuit and at first laughed them off. on february 18th a process server knocked on her door and handed her the formal notice. she claimed disbelief. cabot's question had caught her unaware, she protested, and lillian's name came to the forefront accidentally. surely her opinion was not actionable. notes from cabot's assistant that today suggest that mary mccarthy was lying. several days before the interview the assistant noted she had offered mccarthy a range of questions including the one about overrated writers. when i asked if she'd like to discuss which writers are overrated and which underrated

and suggested that it could be like a game, she was delighted, the assistant alerted cabot. after ward mccarthy continued to deny that lillian had been on her mind, but that seems highly unlikely. for more than 40 years, the two had shared a climate of hostility, their trajectories running along parallel paths, their opinions conflicting and confronting as they avoided personal encounters. seven years younger than lillian and an acknowledged beauty with a winning smile, mary mccarthy had a quick wit, a bad temper, strong political opinions and famous for her malice. both women had married young and divorced fairly quickly. both had lived sexually adventurous lives, abused

alcohol and achieved success in worlds generally reserved for men. each had a passion for good food and drink and generous hospitality. but there the similarities ended. mccarthy, graduating from vassar in 1933 as a self-declared socialist, had soon chosen trotskyism rather than the communist party as her ideological home. there the beginning -- from the beginning she despised what she called the brutality of stalinism and vigorously opposed the soviet union. she became the only female to participate in reviving the partisan review, a champion of the nonstalinnist left. in the late 1930s, she served as a drama critic and served this that role for many years after. i'm going to have to stop because our time is running out. i could read you more of the incidents of lying.

there are several wonderful examples of how mccarthy, because she's being sued by lillian hellman for claiming that hellman is a liar, the only way that she can defend herself is by proving that lillian hellman is a liar. and so she sends her friends, writes to everybody she knows to try to ascertain stories of hellman having lied. and she puts these stories together in a huge variety of ways around hellman's sexual exploits, around what she did on which trip where, around whether bombs fell at a particular kind of place or didn't fall. the result is that by the end of the process lillian hellman is

labeled in public as the quintessential liar. it's that reputation that has haunted hellman for all of her life. it's a reputation that comes partly, indeed, out of hellman's pen adapt as a dramatist -- penchant as a dramatist to exaggerate, partly out of the 20th century penchant to emphasize the individual over the collective, but more than anything else out of the long history of conflict, of political conflict that roiled the american left in the 20th century. i'm going to stop there. thank you. [applause] now, if anybody would like to ask questions? >> i'm wondering if you found in

your research anything about hellman around 1934? a at that time daschle hammet writes to her in st. louis and in albuquerque, and hammet's wife had been a nurse in new mexico, and there was work on rubber production possibly leading toward new materials development, possibly leading towards some of the wartime technologies. do you know whether hellman was in any of those kind of scientific works earlier on that the post-war scientific conflict? >> the question is what do we know about hellman in 1934, particularly in terms of her relationship to new mexico and to, and and hahmet's wife's relationship to new mexico and

particularly to new mexico rubber production in that period. and i think the answer there is hellman certainly had no relationship, at least as far as i know. in 1934 she was busy first finishing up "the children's hour" and then producing "the children's hour" which hit the stage late that year. she and hammet had lived together that summer on an island off the coast of connecticut. hahmet, when hellman met him, was married and remained married for another decade to the mother of his two children. that, the wife who hammet did not live with in that period, lived sometimes in california and sometimes in new mexico. so she may well have been there, but as far as i know, hellman

never had any connection with her, never met her, certainly never had any connection with the rubber industry. she was beginning then to organize for the drama, the drama was then called the drama writers' guild, later to be known as the dramatists' guild. but i think that's the best i can do with that. question. alex? >> it's fascinating, and there's so many questions to ask. but i think you must have left in the '30s, there are two things i'm particularly interested. one is what is the relationship with the kind of playwrighting left and that crew? there must be one, but she doesn't quite fit that mold. she's doing something slightly different, although there's one woman who wrote this great play called "morning star" about immigrant labor.

but a more specific question. she joins the -- she's in the party in rather a peculiar moment, right? is because, obviously, going to spain draws her to the party, and that makes someceps. but to join this -- in '39 right as the -- [inaudible] and then to quit in '41 right as the u.s. and soviet union were becoming allies and the anti-fascist moment is reborn, given that spain fired her political imagination, she joins the party and stays in at a very odd moment. so how do you deal -- what are the reasons she joins the party, what are the reasons she quits in terms of the timing? because it's odd timing. >> it is odd timing. the question has two parts. the first is what's her relationship to other left-wing playwrighters in this period including mark leftsteven, and

the second, why does she join the party this 1939 and quit in '41? both the joining and quitting, timing. she knowed clifford and likes him, and she knows mark and likes him much better, and later after the war she allies with mark blitz steven who turned "the little foxes" into an operetta which is sometimes still performed. i actually saw a performance a couple of years ago at bard college. but she does not want to be like them. she sees them as political playwrights, and she sees them as encompassing a rather narrow audience. and she wants a big audience. she thinks she has important things to say, and she wants the large broadway audience. so she is always writing with that audience in mind. so though she is friendly with,

let me put it that way, the playwrights we call the playwrights of the left, she is never part of that group or of either -- >> [inaudible] >> she's not part of the group theater, although she made allies with some people who were originally part of that theater. and she's not part of the province town players or any of the other left-wing groups. the second question, why does she join the party in 1939 is, i find, completely fascinating. she describes herself as having been, as having made the decision, basically, having become attached to communism as opposed to various otherrisms. after she comes back from spain,

she visits spain for several weeks while it's in the midst of civil war. she is, she writes about it, she is quite moved by the suffering there. and rather angry that america, that the u.s. won't pitch in to save the duly-elected government from fascists or from the generals who, led by franco, who are trying to take it over. she is so angry with them that she -- and she's been an anti-fascist for a while. that the anti-fascism shifts into i want to support the only country that is going to support the legally-elected government of spain, and that country the soviet union which is already bringing weapons and so on.

now, anybody who knows the history of that civil war knows that the soviet union probably did more bad than good because it brought weapons, but it also brought an ideological rigidity that eliminated, literally eliminated many others on the left who weren't sympathetic anarchists, for example, socialists who weren't sympathetic to the soviet union. but hellman was blind at that point. she did not want to see that. what she wanted to see was how anti-fascism could be played out. and my own guess is that, um, just as she in this period, she signs off on the moscow trials, you know, signs a letter saying, you know, she's part of a hundred or so other people, stars and celebrities and writers all saying that the moscow trials are probably, you know, legitimate, and it's

necessary for the soviet union to, you know, make sure that its boundaries and borders are secure. she is in this moment in 1937, 1938,1939 so, i think, embedded in this anti-fascist vision that she forgives the soviet union everything because of it anti-far stance. now, the curious thing is that in june of 1939 when the soviets sign the peace pact with nazi germany, hitler's germany, and many other people quit the party at that point, hellman doesn't quit. hellman stays in. and hellman stays in, my own guess is daschle hammet probably was an influence here. hammet is much more committed to

the party than she is. but the other piece of me thinks that one of the reasons she stays in is because she doesn't quit, um, you know, when, when a country is down or when a friend is down. she argues the argument that many made, that the soviet union signs this pact as a tactical maneuver, a tactical ha mover in order -- maneuver in order to enable the soviet union to build up strength before it goes to war with hitler. and she's willing to allow the soviet union that leeway. while she is staying in the party, she is writing "watch on the rind." so at the same time that the soviet union has adopted this line of let's make peace with the fascists, she is not obeying

the party line, right? she is writing a play which is the major american play that condemned the fascists. so, you know, she's got both balls juggling in the air. and she pulls out of the party before hitler attacks the soviet union. so she doesn't wait until hitler attacks. she's out of there as soon as she thinks that it's, it won't draw any attention in some way to pull out. so, you know, the soviet union has already risen, her commitment is clearly not to the soviet group onthen, it's to the anti-fascist cause once the u.s. is geared towards going to war even before the russians are attacked. she's ready to pull out of

there. so what can i say, but it's a mystery. there are explanations, we don't know what the explanations are, we can only guess at them, and that's what seems to make sense. okay. >> you suggest that she was pals with arthur schlesinger in the '60s. >> yes, yes. >> in the celebrity world of celebrity intellectuals. >> yes. >> but presumably in '49 he was one of the people specifically denouncing the waldorf-astoria meeting. >> yes. >> americans for democratic action. >> yes. >> so how did they mend fences 15 years later? >> well, american -- ada comes out after this, or is developed in this period. so he's not one of the chief denunciators, people who denounce.

but he certainly is one of them. and that's one of the curious things about hellman in the '60s. so she's gone smooth this tremendous, tremendous anti-communist period in the 1950s, by the 960s -- 1960s she's willing to let bygones be bygones. that politics is over as far as she's concerned. it's not in any sense the sort of moving piece of her life. so she makes friends not only with arthur schlesinger, but by the '60s she's a buddy of norman -- she's a good friend of marty parrot's. in other words, there are lots of political liberals tending to the right, if i can put it that way, who she becomes close to in this period, and close enough to so that when sound rell times

come -- scoundrel times comes out, you know, 14 or 15 years later, she breaks off her relationship with arthur schlesinger again. so, and she does that because he has personally attacked her. you know, he basically supports people who are attacking her, and she says, no, no, you don't have dinner with a friend one night and then, you know, put a knife in his back the next night. and i want nothing more to do with you. and schlesinger, you know, writes a letter to their common lawyer, joe rowe, who had defended her and whose buddy she remains and says, okay, now i'm back on the enemy list. so, you know, i think in this period of the '60s the best way to look at it is she gets a kind of new lease on life. she's a support beer of the new

left -- supporter of the new left which is, you know, as you know for an old lefty to support the new left was a rather unusual position to take. but she gives money to, you know, she support it is eugene mccarthy campaign. she is one of the original funders of the g.i. coffee house movement, the anti-war movement. she's working backwards through the '60s here, but she's one of the advocates of, um, of the march on, for jobs and freedom, the 1963 martin luther king march on washington. writes a very nice, big piece in the "ladies home journal" on this march for which she then is later sued because she attacks the southern sheriffs who are brutalizing the young people who are involved in the civil rights

movement. so, you know, in the '60s she's got a different politics. sheath got really -- she's got really a new left politics in the '60s, and that's revivifying for her politically. it's one of the reasons that makes it so surprising that by the '70s she can, once again, be accused of a stalinism which there's no evidence of anywhere, you know? if she'd once been a member of the party, there's a long history thereafter of a kind of independent politic. ..

roi so that we can get together and talk about one issues that i think are very important. there seems to be some confusion in the united states. a lot of people don't realize that america failed. they think it's still going on. just as i entered here, some guy said to me i didn't know america field. i said stick around. i also wanted to just locate

this particular talk in terms of stuff i've been writing. why america field is a third in the trilogy on the american empire. the first one was the voice of american culture published in the year 2000. the second was called dark ages in america, and this came out about a month ago, why america failed. there was, however, a collection of essays that i published about a year ago that came between the two and book three. about half of the essays are about the united states coming and i kind of want to encourage you to have a look at the book. it's called the question of values coming and the reason it's important is there's material in their that deals with the kind of unconscious programming that americans have that leads them to do the things

they do with the person in the street or the president, and the sort of completes the picture, so i just want to encourage you to have a look at the book. the title of the talk is the way we live today. despite great pressure to conform in the united states to celebrate the united states as the best system in the world the nation doesn't lack for critics. the last two decades have seen numerous works criticizing the u.s. foreign policy coming u.s. domestic policy and particular economic policy. the court system, the military, corporate influence over american life and so on. most of this is very astute and i've learned much from reading these studies. but two things in particular are lacking in my opinion. and we have a hard time making it into the public eye partly because americans are not trained to think of a holistic

or synthetic fashion, and partly because it's the sort of analysis i have in mind is too close to the bone. it's very difficult for americans to hear, and somebody would say i didn't know. the first thing is the integration of the various factors that have done the country in. these studies tend to be institution specific as though the institution under examination existed in a kind of document could really be understood, apart from other institutions. the second thing is the relationships with the culture at large. for the values and beavers americans manifest on a daily basis. as a result, these critiques are superficial. they don't really go to the root of the problem, and this avoidance enables them to be optimistic which places them in the american mainstream. the authors often conclude these studies with practical

recommendations as to how the particular institutional dysfunctions they've identified can be rectified. they are, as a result, not much of a threat. it's usually a chemical analysis of the mechanical solution. if the authors were to realize these problems do not exist in a vacuum but are related to all the other problems and are familiar to the nature of american culture itself and its dna so to speak the prognosis wouldn't be so rosy. for it would become clear that there simply is no way out. that turning things around isn't really an option at this point. to take just two examples, michael moore and noam chomsky they've done a lot to raise awareness in the united states to show that both foreign and domestic policy is currently pursued the dead ends are worse. yet both of these men assume that the problem is coming from the top, from the pentagon and the corporations, which is partly true of course.

the problem is that this rests on the theory of false consciousness that is the belief that these institutions have pulled the war of the eyes of the average american citizen who is rational and well intentioned. i would say to them get out and talk to some people and find out how accurate that is. so, for them the solution is one of education. pull it away from the eyes and the citizen will spontaneously awaken and commit itself to some sort of populist or democratic social vision. is that happening now with occupy will st.? nexium important question and i think we should talk about it afterwards. my point is what if it turns out that it is the guy is? the so-called average citizen really does want as janis joplin put it in a mercedes benz. and not much else that he or she is grateful to the corporations for supplying us with the oceans

of consumer goods and to the pentagon for protecting us from those awful arabs lurking in the middle east. then is that so the possibilities for fundamental change appear to be quite small. for what would be called -- would be called for is a set of different institutions and a different type of culture. personally, i doubt there's much chance of that. america is, after all, what it is. what are you reading this summer? book tv wants to know. >> i am wrapping up "citizens of london," which came out a couple of years ago. a marvelous history of basically london during the war and three very prominent people, edwin r. murrow, reporting back to the united states with rather strongly held views the we should get into the war on their

side. harriman who is sent over there by president roosevelt to deal with the program, which was basically our kind of foreign aid program for england. and the investor, a fellow named why men who had replaced president kennedy's father and of course was crucial to the germans and suspect that's the reason roosevelt brought him home. so, it's a marvelous book about the three of them and their interaction with churchill and other advocacy, they're impressive advocacy and the united states breaking out of this isolationist mood and getting on to gain glyn's behalf. the author previously written a wonderful book which i highly recommend on the troublesome young men, and it's about the members of parliament that rallied behind winston churchill who opposed during the 30's and orchestrated his rise to the

prime minister and neville chamberlain. so these two books it's interesting reading them back to back looking at the early stages of world war ii and i highly recommend them. what i sound again and again and again while i was researching this book was that not only was garfield's life and nomination and reef presidency full of incredible stories, but the people who surrounded him will also unbelievable. you just couldn't make them up. of course garfield's would-be assassin. he was a dangerously delusional man but he was very intelligence and highly matriculate.

if you read any other account of garfield's assassination, guiteau is described as a office seeker but that isn't covering the smallest part of it. she was a uniquely american character who is the product of this country at that time. the time there was a lot of play and there was no one to really understand what he was up to and told them to account. guiteau was a self-made madman. he was smart and scrubby, he was a clever opportunist and he would probably have been very successful had he not been insane. guiteau tried everything and he had failed everything. he tried the wall coming evangelism, even free love commune in the 1800's and he failed even at that. the women in the coming nicknamed him charles "get out"

[laughter] what he called all over the country by train and never bought a ticket. he took pride moving from boarding house to boarding house, slipping out when the rent was two. and even when he occasionally worked as a bill collector, he would as gave whatever he managed to collect. after the republican convention, guiteau became obsessed with garfield and immediately after the election, he began to stock the president yet he went to the white house nearly every day. at one point he even walked into the president's office while the president was in it. he even attended a reception and introduced himself to garfield's life. he shook her hand and gave his card and slow the pronounced his name so she wouldn't forget him. it's like a hitchcock movie, it's incredibly creepy and

absolutely terrifying. finally guiteau had what he believed was a divine inspiration. god wanted him to kill the president. nothing personal, he would later say, simply got's will. as strange and fascinating and nearly as dangerous was senator roscoe conkling and chester arthur ashe to -- that is just the picture. he was a vain brutally powerful machine politician who appointed himself garfield's enemy. he wore the canary yellow coat and lavender in ink. he had this curl in the middle of his forehead and recoiled at the slightest touch. in fact his vanity was so outside that he was famously

ridiculed by another congressman on the floor of congress. but conkling was no joke. he was dangerously powerful. as a senior senator from new york he controlled the new york custom which was the largest federal office in the united states and controlled 70% of the country's customs revenue. the controlled patronage in the state and had an unquestioning loyalty. in fact his apartment in new york was known as the morgue. conkling was enraged when his candidate former president grant didn't get the nomination. but she was apoplectic when he realized he couldn't control garfield. to conkling the attempt on garfield's life was his ticket back into power.