1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 10, 1972

GARDNER

To begin the interview, Mrs. Healey, we'll do it the standard way, with something about the circumstances of your birth, when you were born, the name you were born with, and so on, and then perhaps something about your ancestry.

HEALEY

Well, I was born in Denver, Colorado, on September 22, 1914, in St. Joseph's Hospital. My mother and father, both of whom had been born in Hungary, had come to the United States. My mother was two to three years old when she arrived; my father was ten or eleven. I'm not sure what cities my father had lived in before he came to Denver, Colorado. My mother had lived in St. Louis, Missouri, then Denver, then her family came to California during the 1890s. They stayed here about a year, almost starving--Mama describes going from house to house selling strawberries (she was a child trying to find a way to live)--then moved back to Colorado. My grandparents, my father's father and mother, they were from totally different cultures than my father's and mother's. In the first place, my father's family were far more consciously Hungarian than my mother's, spoke only Hungarian. I'm not even sure they knew Yiddish, but they" were very proud and very conscious of the Hungarian influence. My paternal grandfather, the main memory I have of him as a child (I was not terribly close to that side of the family for reasons which will become a little clearer later) was that he considered himself an artistic figure, although why, I'm not sure, because there's no evidence of his ever having done anything artistically, but a kind of--just a very self-defined artistic temperament which seemed to be expressed in that he didn't work. His children all worked at a very young age. My father started working immediately upon coming to the United States when he was eleven years old, had no formal education to speak of at all.

GARDNER

What were the family names?

HEALEY

My father's name was Joe Rosenblum; my mother's family name was Herman. My paternal grandmother, who I have most vague memories of, was a tiny, tiny woman and rather feckless. I really can't tell you exactly why [I have this] memory of both of them as being this kind of aloof--not emotionally aloof (they were very warm people) but as just not being very responsible people. One didn't turn to them for any sense of responsibility or anything else. My maternal grandfather--his name was Kiva Herman-- was a schochet (my pronunciation is very bad; my accent is very bad).

GARDNER

The transcriber will laugh anyway. [laughter]

HEALEY

I understand he was the man in the ceremony, doing the rituals and killing the food, the chickens and whatnot, and making certain that they were koshered, that the food was kosher. He was very orthodox, which my paternal grandparents were not. He was a very orthodox Jew. The dominant atmosphere on that side of the family, of my mother, the aunts and the uncles of that side of the family, was of a great resentment and rebellion against their childhood because they had been raised in this totally orthodox atmosphere, in addition to which they were terribly poor. My grandfather was very much respected in the Jewish community; people would come to him to settle arguments, and he'd play that kind of role, but he never made a living. The children, therefore, had to go to work, and particularly my mother, who was the oldest of the family, had to go to work at a very, very young age. Her greatest bitterness, and one that I listened to all the years of my childhood, was the fact that she had to drop out of school when she was in the fourth or fifth grade. She adored school; she loved school. Reading was the greatest passion of her life; it still is, as a matter of fact. The fact that she had to leave school in order to get a job to help support the family, to take care of the other children who were younger than she, I don't think she ever, ever, ever forgave my grandmother and grandfather for that, that she had to do it.

GARDNER

Was this in Denver?

HEALEY

This was all in Denver.

GARDNER

Was there much of a Jewish community there?

HEALEY

Yes, there was a significant Jewish community there. They lived on Tenth Street. All I can remember of it is that it was across the street from a synagogue. I guess the only reason I remember that, really, is that my only memory of it is having gone into it once with some trepidation; I remember asking my grandfather how they would know I was Jewish and whether there would be any restriction on my going in, and his smiling and saying, "It's on your forehead. They'll know." My memory is that it was 1214 Tenth Street. I don't know any reason why those numbers seem to be so; I don't know if that's accurate. My grandmother was a very simple woman. One of the big memories I have of her is that she wore the wig in Orthodox style. It was always a very awkward one, and I used to watch it with fascination. As a matter of fact, my first memory of my baby days, my young infancy, is of my grandfather's death. I suppose one reason why I remember is that I have been told that he and I were very close, that I looked very much like him, and that of all the grandchildren he was the closest to me. The day he died, an aunt of mine, my Aunt Lilly [Rosenblum], my father's sister-in-law, came over to wake me up out of a nap at the house where my family lived (maybe it was the being awakened out of the nap; I really have no idea of why my memories start with that) to tell me that Grandpa was dying and to hurry up and go with her. I think I was about two or three, and all I remember is going into--his bed was in the kitchen, the kitchen was a very large kitchen. . . . And suddenly this man whom I felt very close to became an object of great terror to me. I was terrified to go near that bed where he was lying, because--I don't know why death meant anything to me at that age, but obviously there was some significance to me. I had to go to the bathroom, and I had to pass by his bed to go. All I can remember is skirting around it as far from him as I could get to go into the other room: sheer terror, whatever this thing was, of a human being dying. The only other memory I really have of that period when they were still alive, when my grandfather was still alive (my grandmother died many years later when I was already grown), was the number of breakfasts I'd eat with the different members of the family as they'd get up. Each one went by me, and I'd have another breakfast. My Uncle Paul [Herman], I remember particularly. Of my other relatives of that period in Denver, I remember my father's sisters very clearly, Josie Kline and Regina [Sarvas], I think primarily because they were constantly having babies. Each of them had about ten children.

GARDNER

So you were at no loss for cousins.

HEALEY

Yes, although I don't remember playing with the children. I really have no memory of any great closeness until we came to California. The younger cousin that I was very close to, my father's brother's daughter, Evelyn Rosenblum, was the same age I was. Again, the biggest memory I have of that is the fact that she was an only daughter. My Uncle Isador [Rosenblum] made a good living compared to us, and I can remember the fact that I used to wonder why at birthday time she'd get books which she hated (she never read), and I'd get things like handkerchiefs, panties, and socks. It seemed to be very unjust. I didn't mind; I can't remember ever caring about the difference in lifestyle in anything else. But it just seemed so unjust that she would get books, because I loved reading and she didn't. I can only remember living in two different homes in Denver. One, if I remember the address, one on Montcrief--that was the last one before we left. I vaguely remember the first one, on Marian Street. I don't know why I remember it. Again, all I remember are neighbors. That's the only association that the house has for me, going into various neighbors' homes. I don't remember children, but I remember the parents of the children with whom I had long conversations. I guess I was probably the neighborhood crier, carrying the news from one house to the other. But before we lived in either of those two houses in 1916-1917, we lived in a Socialist colony outside the city of Denver with two other families. One family was the Dietrichs, Will and Helen Dietrich, who became charter members of the Communist party (at that time there was no Communist party; they were in the Socialist party), and another family--Frank Hannan was the man's name. The Hannans had three children, the Dietrichs had none, and in our family there was my brother, Bernard, my sister Frances, and myself.

GARDNER

What were their ages?

HEALEY

My brother is the eldest of the family. He's five years older than I am; my sister Frances is three years older than I am. Again, my only memory of that Socialist colony is the fact that on Sundays we'd go to Socialist Sunday school. There obviously must have been other families living in this area, a farm area, as I can remember vaguely walking down farm paths, across railroad tracks on Sunday mornings to go to what was called the Socialist Sunday school. I have absolutely no memory of what was discussed there.

GARDNER

Was it religious at all? Was it Jewish Socialist?

HEALEY

Oh, no! Because as a matter of fact, these other families, the Hannans were non-Jewish. . . .

GARDNER

No, they'd be Irish.

HEALEY

Probably, and the Dietrichs were also Hungarians. Well, now, I don't think Will Dietrich was. I don't remember him very much. Helen Dietrich died only this last Sunday. She was Hungarian, probably Hungarian Jewish, although I'm not even positive of that. But my mother had so rebelled. Gee, this is very scattered. I'm going back and forth.

GARDNER

Not at all.

HEALEY

My mother had totally rebelled against orthodoxy, in not only the Jewish religion but the Christian as well. I say that because when she was twelve, in her rebellion against Jewish orthodoxy, she decided to become a Christian, She read the Bible and the New Testament and decided that maybe this was to be better. But after about two years she decided that it was as filled with mythology and irrelevance to anyone's life as the Old Testament. I would say that one of the dominating passions of her life, far more so than any of her children's, became atheism, her absolute hatred of what she considered the role of religion in deceiving people as to the reality of their life. She would have long terrible arguments with my grandfather which left the man absolutely bewildered as to what to do with her. Her challenges to--"How can you say this is a good God, a kind God, this God who creates an Adam and Eve, knows what they're going to do, knows it ahead of time, and yet deliberately has them tempted in order to cast them out of Paradise?" She would go on and on and on. I mention this because all through my earliest years, these stories became a very important part of my background, listening to her recite these stories of her rebellion. She heard her first Socialist speaker, J. Stitt Wilson, who became the first Socialist mayor of Berkeley, when she was around sixteen years of age, and decided that that was the answer, that obviously neither the kindly Jesus nor the Jehovah of the Jews had any answer for these things, but that socialism was the answer. Having decided that, there was never a day thenceforth in her life when she ever wavered. She was a woman of great passion, great vehemence in her beliefs, and there's no question that in our immediate family she was the most important, both intellectual and emotional, influence--I would say primarily because of her beliefs. The question of ideas, of books, became to her the thing to which all other aspects of family life were secondary. As long as one had books, one didn't need nice clothes; one didn't need to live in a particularly good neighborhood. We all grew up very much influenced by that, all of us in the family, although the later impact is very different as far as all of her children. But I think in listening to my mother's and father's stories, the thing that stood out with me was the hardship, the poverty. My father, an unskilled worker, first became a railroad worker when he started working, later a waiter, and finally, in the last years of his life, a traveling salesman. The question of poverty, without any question, was always omnipresent. I remember my mother walking to the store and my accompanying her to get a loaf of bread; some way or another, she misplaced the bread, which had cost a nickel, and she sat down on the curb and cried, "Where will another loaf of bread come from to feed the family?" My father always desperately tried to provide. He was a man of enormous family feeling, just the opposite, as I say, of his rather feckless father--enormous responsibility, but never quite able to do things. Because of the pressures on this unskilled man of earning a living, he never really found a way to engage in activities that were too fulfilling. For instance, he loved music. He played a mandolin. Again, my greatest memories of him would be that when he was home we would all gather around the piano. Of course, all the family, both my sister and I, we both took piano lessons, as good Jewish girls should do. My brother played the cornet. But Papa's mandolin, whenever he was home, was the music that would be present there--and it was only when he was [there] because my mother was totally without any feeling about music. But he was a very unfulfilled man, a tragically unfulfilled man. I don't think that my feelings about him or memories of him are necessarily the same as my brother's and sister's. because as I look back, my dominant reaction to him was kind of compassion but also not too much respect. My mother was by far the dominating influence between the two of them, as I have indicated. I can remember thinking, "Well, he's a good man," because he was. He was the most truthful and good and kind man--I don't remember one time he ever raised his voice to any of us--but not a very intelligent man. I don't know if that's true; he might have been.

GARDNER

But in any event, it was your mother who influenced your family into socialism much more than he.

HEALEY

Oh, yes! Papa was always sympathetic, but he really did not like the fact that either his wife and later his daughter became so enormously involved. But he never did anything about it. He'd never say, "You can't do these things." And because he was such a good man, he--well, first of all, he enjoyed himself with whatever people he was with. He became very--I mean with all the relatives--everywhere he'd go when he was a traveling salesman he always took his mandolin with him, and he became well known on the trains on which he traveled his regular route all the time. The mandolin became the outlet for everything. But Mama was the dominating influence. As I say, I would single out as the single most important question, the question of books. It really didn't matter if you didn't have other things, but you had to have books in the house. You had to respond to the significance of ideas, the discussion. I have only one other memory of Denver in regard to the question of radical activities. In those days, no one ever heard of baby-sitters, and Mama used to take us to Socialist meetings and, I suppose later, to the Communist party meetings; all I remember are radical meetings. Here all I can remember is standing up on a table singing "The Red Flag." I was probably four or five years of age. One other memory is that there was a streetcar strike in Denver in 1918 and 1919. My Uncle Paul [Herman], my mother's brother, was one of the strikers. I can remember we used to follow around the streetcars which the scabs were operating and shake our fists and scream names at them, call them names as being dirty strike breakers and dirty scabs. As I say, I don't remember much more about it other than that.

GARDNER

What sort of schooling did you have in Denver aside from the Sunday school?

HEALEY

Well, I remember going to two different elementary schools. All together in my lifetime, I went to a total of nineteen schools. It must have been an enormous number, particularly of elementary schools, that I went to (because of my father's traveling), because I only went to one high school and two junior highs, and all the rest were elementary schools. I remember only the two elementary schools, but I don't remember anything about either one of them except that I was going to school.

GARDNER

Do you remember anything about what you learned?

HEALEY

Not a thing.

GARDNER

Your reading habits?

HEALEY

Not a thing. I can remember the fact that at the last place we lived on Montcrief, just before we came out to California, when I was about five and six (it was for two summers), I had gone in the summertime to the daily vacation Bible school. And the only things, again, that I can remember about that were the songs that we'd sing. Only one stays out in my mind, "Brighten the Corner Where You Are." That's the only one I remember, probably because I think I performed it at one ceremony.

GARDNER

What was the name of the Socialist colony? Do you recall?

HEALEY

There wasn't any name. It was just called the Socialist colony, the colony, and that was it. It only lasted about a year, and it broke up because of the frictions between the children, the older children of the Hannans and my brother and sister, and the family differences that then became expressed between them. That at least is the only memory I have of why it broke up. That, I remember hearing talked about. I don't have any memory of it: I only have the memory of hearing it discussed in later years that entered into it, hearing my brother speak with anger about the son of the Hannans, whom I don't remember at all. Other memories of Denver: I remember I got my first spanking. The only time I was spanked in my life, as a matter of fact, was in Denver. We lived some distance away. Because of our moving so often at this point, I think we were back home living with Grandma and Grandpa Herman. I had been told that I was to come directly home after school because I had to cross streets that Mama worried about, and I went off to play with a Chinese girl, I went over to her home and came home two or three hours late. My mother was beside herself with worry, and on the front step of the house she spanked me. This was the only time in my life that she did such a thing, and it bothered her far more than it bothered me. She was in tears all the rest of the day, and that night she did what became a pattern as we were growing up whenever any dispute would happen: she would come into our bedrooms very late at night and cry, and we'd all kiss and make up because you never went to sleep being angry. That's all I remember about Denver. Then we came to California, because of me, as a matter of fact. I had a mastoid infection the year before we left, and also I was very subject to chilblain and whatnot from the snow. My mother says I was a sickly child, which I don't have any memory of at all, and Mama says the doctor insisted we move here. So we came to California in 1921. We lived first in Long Beach, two different apartments, then to Los Angeles, then to Oakland, back to Los Angeles, back to Oakland, Berkeley, and it was in Berkeley finally where I spent the longest time in school.

GARDNER

For whom did your father work?

HEALEY

The only company I remember was in the later years. He worked for the J.S. Hoffman Company selling cheese and smoked meats. I don't remember any other, but that was probably the last five years of his life.

GARDNER

Before that, was it a succession of jobs?

HEALEY

A succession of jobs, right. I think he was the kind of man who lugged his family with him, the kind of traveling salesman who wanted his family with him, and that's why we moved so often: because if his headquarters for his having to go out as a traveling salesman would be in different parts of the country, we would move to be where he would be the longest. It had probably a worse effect on my brother and sister, who were older, than it had on me; although, as I say, the very fact that some of my earliest childhood memories are so fleeting I think is because of the fact that we never stayed long enough to establish roots in any one place.

GARDNER

Where were you living at the time that you came to Los Angeles?

HEALEY

Well, I remember once we lived on Arlington [Avenue]; I think it's near Washington [Boulevard], where the great loop in the street comes. The only reason I remember that is using roller skates going down the hills. I don't really remember the other places in L.A. I remember one place in Long Beach where we lived, and that I remember because we lived on top of a garage, in a little apartment over a garage. I don't have any other memory of it than that and the fact that we had a balcony. The houses in Oakland, I remember much clearer for different reasons. One place we lived on Jackson Street was in a very grimy area near Lake Merritt, but we were on the wrong side. We lived in two places there. The first place was a kind of transient hotel sort of thing, where I went to one elementary school. My mother was pregnant. It was obviously because of the transient character of the neighborhood--which was kind of a business district and was so alien to anything I'd known-- that it stands out in my mind. All I remember about this school is that it was in that elementary school that they discovered that I not only read a great deal but that evidently they felt I had a very large vocabulary for that age. They took me to some citywide school thing; it was a citywide assembly of teachers, where for ten minutes I was to talk on, just at random, any words that came to my mind. All I remember is coming home and telling my mother about it. It seemed to me such a silly thing to do, to care how many words anyone knew. Then we moved over to this place, Jackson Street, which was also a slum area. Those were the two worst homes we ever lived in because even though we were so poor we generally did not live in slum areas. But that other house on Jackson, I remember as being the same thing. All I remember is the great distaste I had for it. The surrounding area of dirt, and everything was unkempt, and again of a transient character. I remember the train ride out here to California, but again only because I was already seven. Mama, of course, didn't want to pay the train ticket for me, and I was always very small for my age. So I remember being warned by my mother that I mustn't tell anyone that I was really seven. But I was always very sociable. I always visited everywhere. Whether it was in the neighborhoods where we lived or with people on the train, I'd immediately make friends with everybody and start visiting. And I remember walking up the aisle talking to whomever, some stranger, and saying that I was really seven years old but that Mama didn't have the money for the extra train ticket. In back of me was the conductor, at the same moment, and Mama was sitting across the aisle and saw this. She says she almost perished. She says all the conductor did was smile and pat me on the head as he walked by.

GARDNER

Apparently your mother was mostly responsible for your early education and preparing you so that when you got to that elementary school you were so literate at such a young age. Do you recall any of the background that she gave you, any of the things that she gave you to read?

HEALEY

She never gave us anything to read, but she always had books around the house. Again the train ride, I remember the significance because I was already reading and already a fairly advanced reader. But my first big memory of the books and the significance of books to me was in one house we lived in on Santa Rita Street [in Oakland]. The first moving into the new neighborhood was always difficult because you didn't know any of the children yet. We always took our books with us wherever we moved. The packing crates of books were still out on the front porch, had not yet been unpacked, and I remember digging into the packing crate, pulling out books to read, and just being absolutely carried away by this world of books, being totally enchanted. I have no idea of what I was reading--I don't remember that at all--but they couldn't have been children's books because we really didn't have very many children's books. But there was always discussion, if not of the books, as I say, of what was going on in newspapers, socialism. The house was always filled with people coming and going and with this a kind of a settled feeling that socialism, of course-- "Didn't everybody believe that?"

GARDNER

The period that you grew up was the period at which Russia was consolidating after the Revolution. What sort of things went on around the house about that?

HEALEY

Well, strangely enough, until 1928, the question of the Russian Revolution was obviously not to my mother the all-decisive thing that it was to others. While it was very important and exciting and, of course, the thing that everybody supported, I don't remember any great big discussions about it. I remember far more clearly her hatred of war than I do her feeling about the Russian Revolution. The hatred of war, I remember. One of the other memories of Denver is standing with Mama when I was probably, well, I was three years old, and a parade going by, preparedness, and Mama just screaming out, "You murderers, you murderers." The song I remember the most of growing up was "I Didn't Raise My Son To Be a Soldier" ("I brought him up to be my pride and joy"). So that was far more important. I don't remember really hearing much about the Russian Revolution until I heard Lincoln Steffens speak when he came back from the Soviet Union and spoke in Berkeley at the Unitarian church, as I remember. That's my first conscious memory.

GARDNER

That's later on.

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, during the period from 1921 to 1928, Mama was not directly involved in organized activities with the radical movement because we moved around too much and she couldn't find it. It was pretty much an underground party at that point, still, and we never stayed long enough in any place for her to make connections. Another thing about this moving around. I have these memories of the elementary schools of never having friends, of never staying long enough to get to know other children. It was not true in the neighborhood; I'd get to know the kids in the neighborhood, but I don't remember ever having very many friends in school. So I remember lunches eaten alone day after day after day. But that was just elementary school, because by junior high that was no longer true. The impermanence of it must have had more of a significance than even I can possibly define. I have no idea of it, except for its transient character.

GARDNER

At what point then did you more or less settle down in Berkeley?

HEALEY

I was going to [James] Garfield Junior High [School]. I don't remember the name of the junior high in Oakland that I was transferring from. I was in the high seventh grade. We lived on Josephine Street just a block away from Garfield Junior High, and I stayed in that school all the way through. I graduated from that junior high.

GARDNER

What was Berkeley like in those days?

HEALEY

Well, it was very placid. My memory of it is as a very placid place, small-town atmosphere; at a later point exciting because of the college. My brother started to go to college, and my sister. The people they would bring home--as a matter of fact, that's when we renewed our contact with an organized radical movement; it was that 1927-28 period. By the time I was twelve years old, there was absolutely no question in my mind what I was going to be when I grew up. In today's sophisticated world, we call it a "professional revolutionary." I didn't use such language, but I knew by the time I was twelve that when I grew up my life was going to be devoted to the revolution. And I would say more important--well, equally important, along with my mother's discussions--was the question of the books I read. Upton Sinclair and Jack London were the two greatest influences of my life. Sinclair's novels, King Coal, Oil!, Jimmy Higgins, descriptions of exploitation, of what that represented, repression. I would be passionately involved in Jack London's writings, his socialist writings. I would throb and respond to each one of them. As I say, there was never any question. So when I was in junior high, as a matter of course, I would discuss these questions in school, in classrooms. For the first time, I started having friends in school, as distinct again from the neighborhood. I don't want to--on the neighborhood friends, I should make more of a point, because it's not really an accurate estimate of my childhood otherwise. I don't think there was ever time when there was a circle of friends in the elementary schools, but in the neighborhoods there were always friends. I was very much a tomboy and an instigator. . We'd have club houses, and we'd put on plays, and [we had] gangs and whatnot. I don't have any memory of any time, except in these two places in Oakland of a transient nature (where we didn't stay long, anyway), where there were no friends. But every other place there were. In junior high was the first time I started having school friends. I remember being terribly self-conscious and indignant, without ever expressing it to my mother, about ray clothes. It had more impact probably than even my indignation at that time. My mother not only had a contempt for appearance, but she thought that people should ignore such nonsensical bourgeois things as how you looked and what you wore. The importance was what was in your mind; it didn't make any difference what you wore. So she used to make our clothes, and she was a terrible seamstress. I particularly remember two dresses that she made. Somebody must have given her the cloth. One was pink linen trimmed in brown, and the other was brown linen trimmed in pink. I wore those all through my junior high school days and hated them both. Probably somewhat intimidated by Mama's moral fervor, I never really said to her how much I detested them, because she was sensitive to our needs. If I had said to her, "I hate those dresses, and I won't wear them," she would never have even insisted. She would have done anything, always anything for her children. But I think I was probably ashamed to say that it was terrible. The other handicap of having my kind of mother was like the things that other girls knew about growing up: you know, how to fix your hair, having any taste in clothes. I never acquired it, still have absolutely no judgment, no taste. I never overcame that childhood thing even while recognizing it was important as I grew up. I never acquired the knack of doing things. As a matter of fact, it later became a great jest among my friends, because I'd say to them, "It takes so long for you to get ready to go out. What is there to do that takes more than five minutes?" And they'd say to me, "You only take five minutes?" And I'd say, "Yes." The answer came, "Well, you look it, too." But it was part of the unknown. You knew there was something else, but you didn't really either care enough or know enough to do anything about it. Obviously I must have cared enough that it stayed in my mind later.

GARDNER

How about your sister?

HEALEY

My sister Frances was a far more feminine type than I was, I think probably because I was the baby between the three of us and because I was, as my mother said, sickly. Both my brother and sister insist that I always got out of doing all the chores, that they had to do the housework. My sister Frances would take over mine. She was very protective and maternal toward me. She bought me my first doll out of her baby-sitting money when we were little children. My brother was the intellectual of the family as we were growing up, very much a central figure of our childhood. He and I fought like cats and dogs. He and my sister got along very well, and my sister and I got along very well. Frances had very much of a softer nature than both of us. Bernard and I had just terrible fights. In the absence of my father, he tried to exert a paternal influence, and I wouldn't stand for it. We had terrible battles over it all the time we were growing up.

GARDNER

What sort of things did he fight about, or was it just everything?

HEALEY

Everything, everything. At a later point, when I was in Young Communist League, I remember two particular incidents. My mother and my baby sister, Carol Jean--I'm ten years and ten months older than she, eleven years older than Carol Jean--Mama and Carol Jean had come down here to Los Angeles to be with my grandmother and my Aunt Esther [Herman]. Bernard and Frances and I were in Berkeley. Papa was on the road traveling, and, of course, Bernard was in charge of me because he was five years older. I wanted to hitchhike down here to Los Angeles with a boyfriend of mine. I guess I was fifteen. Bernard sent a wire to my mother. Oh! What he did was to lock me up in my room so that I couldn't go. He told me that I couldn't go under any conditions. So what I did--I had an elevated bedroom, it was called; it was on the second story, but the second-story part was that bedroom--I remember tying a sheet to the bedspread and sliding down the window and going off to meet this friend of mine to hitchhike to L.A., and Bernard sending a wire, which is still in the family possession, saying, "Without my knowledge nor consent, Dorothy is hitchhiking to Los Angeles."

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 10, 1972

GARDNER

I'm not sure whether the end of the last tape picked up the entire telegram, so if you would just pick up the text of that.

HEALEY

Bernard sent a wire to my mother saying, "Without my knowledge and against my permission, Dorothy is hitchhiking to Los Angeles with Emy." That was Emile Rabin, my first boyfriend, who was ten years older than I was. [laughter]

GARDNER

That's one we'll pick up later. Go ahead.

HEALEY

"Am sure she will be all right." I arrived before the wire did. Then the second time that the same thing happened with my brother, I wanted to go to a meeting in San Francisco, and he said, "No, you cannot go." I was fourteen or fifteen, He not only locked me up in the room this time, he tied me to the bed so that I couldn't get out! And again, I managed to get out. But this time, as I was going up to get the train to cross the bay, he ran after me and got me and brought me back home. As I say, it was pretty characteristic. But again, it was a strange thing, because while I bitterly resented his authoritarian manners with me--the big brother, the bossy big brother--nevertheless, I also had a great respect for him. With my sister Frances, it was a very placid relationship, a sister relationship. She was always very loving, very maternal. I remember one time being very worried when we lived on Santa Rita Street, one of the first times we moved to Oakland. I won a contest in the Oakland Tribune, a children's page thing where you write in something to Aunt Somebody-or-Other. I sent in a story, and it got accepted; at the same time she had [applied], and hers wasn't and mine was. I have this very clear memory, because I was eight years old, of feeling very worried as to how her feelings would be hurt. I don't remember, as I say, any other untoward incident with Frances in all the years we grew up together. We shared a bedroom together, and it was always a very close. . .

GARDNER

While I was turning the tape, you mentioned other children, or another child, who came into the family, and also several. . .

HEALEY

Well, my older sister, who would have been the oldest child of the family, Helen (who was about a year and a half older than my brother, Bernard), died when she was six years old. My mother was really almost overwhelmed emotionally in grief, so that my memories until I was. . . I think that this aspect of our childhood went on until I was about thirteen or fourteen; I have the constant memories of the fact of this great grief of my mother's to the point that Mama would break into sobs as she'd be standing doing the dishes at night. I remember that while Bernard, Frances, and I would be studying in the living room, we all would study with one ear open for what Mama was doing. If a door would slam, we'd know that Mama was going out for a walk by herself, and one of us would always go out immediately to follow her to watch her. She'd lock herself in the bathroom and sob and cry--just the most incredible grief, and self-reproach. You know, she had a "stupid doctor," and it was "because of a stupid doctor" that her daughter had died. I think maybe that enormous outpouring of grief was always the worry (What was Mama gonna do about it? Was Mama gonna commit suicide?) which was in the back of our minds, that she'd do something terrible to herself because of her grief. We were all very protective about her, about Mama, concerned, always concerned. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I did not readily discuss feelings of hurt or anything else with her or anybody else. I'm not sure; all I know is that I remember so clearly this terrible, terrible, really, burden she placed upon us of this emotional grief that we shared. I mean, you can imagine, if a sister who died before I was born was as real to me as any living thing, the stories about it and so forth with which I grew up. The other thing that had a great effect upon our childhood was that my mother's sister had a curvature of the spine, again for which my mother felt responsible for no real scientific reason. She had been rocking Esther when Esther was a baby and Mama was a little girl, and as usual she was reading as she was doing it, this great passion of hers for books; and somehow Esther fell out of the cradle, and the family always blamed my mother for the fact that--they claimed that she got a curvature of the spine as a result of this, which is totally nonsense scientifically, but they didn't know any better in those days. It was genuinely believed. She was quite deformed. So that the other memory that I have was, one, you never use the word cripple; you never allowed that word to be used when you were growing up--it was a forbidden word--because Mama would be just frantic over it if it was used. And secondly, this terrible emotional responsibility again. This was a human being that everything else--you had to be subordinated to her needs because our mother was responsible for this thing that had occurred. Funny things, irrational, unscientific, emotional pressures, and the burden. . . . At any rate. . .

GARDNER

Well, then there were two other children, or one that lived?

HEALEY

Oh, no! There were more.

GARDNER

Oh, really?

HEALEY

The baby when Mama was pregnant, when we lived in this transient hotel in Oakland, was born when we moved to a house on Wellington Street, which was our one very fancy house that we lived in. To this day I don't know how we got it. It was a very beautiful home, lots of room, lots of bedrooms. My biggest memory is that it had a huge closet that was a playroom for me. At any rate, when we moved there, this baby was born, and it was born dead. The cord had twisted around his neck, and he was strangled. But Mama was pregnant over and beyond these births that I've mentioned, was pregnant an additional thirteen times, and most of the times self-aborted herself with a catheter. Again, a memory I have from Denver is that I was out playing one day in Denver, when we lived on Montcrief Street, and I could hear the ambulance coming toward our street, and I raced off. It was at our house; Mama was being taken out in the ambulance. She had blood poisoning and was being taken to the hospital, where she almost died. But this business of the pregnancies and Mama's self-abortions was also part of the childhood knowledge. You grew up knowing it.

GARDNER

Well, we'll return back to where we were, to Berkeley. You were in Garfield Junior High when we left off. What sort of things were you studying there? Do you recall?

HEALEY

English, history: I remember those two, because I was very good in both of them. I remember algebra because I was very bad at it. I had skipped a grade in Denver, I think between the second and third grade. I always blamed that for the fact that I never understood arithmetic. I never caught up; I never understood what it was about. I not only didn't understand arithmetic, I'd gotten such a hatred that when I got to subjects like algebra, it was a total mystery. It's funny; the only teacher's name I remember in junior high was a man by the name of Mr. Zimmerman, who was my algebra teacher. I guess I remember him because even though I didn't know a thing of what I was doing, he always gave me a passing grade. I have no idea why; I don't have any memory of it. I remember him, and I remember that I didn't understand anything that I was doing. I was always bluffing and making believe I understood. The other subjects came very easily to me. There was never any difficulty with them. I guess the thing that stands out most about Garfield is the fact that for the first time I had a defined circle of friends in school, my insecurities about that, because it was what today's children would call the "sosh" [social] crowd. It was the top students, the very well-off kids, all of whom lived up in the Berkeley hills. I lived down in the lowlands, one block away from junior high. That's when I first became aware of the fact that I didn't know how to dress, because I remember just being frenzied. I had been invited to my first party, the first time I had been invited to any party. I knew my dress wasn't right. I was just developing at that point and was very embarrassed and unhappy about my breasts, and wanted. ... I remember having this dress, it must have been a party dress of sorts, and putting a scarf on over it that didn't match in order to hide the fact that--but that's again part of my mother, who very clearly didn't like sex.

GARDNER

Perhaps as a result of the many pregnancies.

HEALEY

Yes, the pregnancies. And she and my father were not too happily married. I remember it was very clear when we discussed the question of reproduction, she really was embarrassed by it, terribly embarrassed. It was so obvious that this was true that, you know, one learned not to ever ask her questions about it. I'm sure that had something to do with my feeling then about--well, for years I wouldn't go to a beach because I'd have to wear a bathing suit, and if I wore a bathing suit then it would be apparent how big I was, buxom. That group in junior high clearly had a significance to me because what amazes me is that I remember the group, my two best girlfriends, Andrea Quayle and Camilla Blackledge, and the boys whom I had crushes on. There was one boy in particular whom I knew much later in the Communist party, Kenneth May, who was the son of Professor Samuel May. Kenneth was the social and intellectual giant of Garfield Junior High. It was he who insisted that I be invited to these parties because he and I had become friends. But I remember his saying to me when we rediscovered ourselves many years later, ten years later, in the Communist movement, "Why didn't you tell me about communism then?" because he knew I already was.

GARDNER

At this point your brother would have been probably starting college.

HEALEY

Yes, he was.

GARDNER

Was he involved in Socialist, leftist activities at all?

HEALEY

What he was involved in was a group called the Social Problems Club at the University of California in Berkeley, and--he brought home the people who then became the first Communists that we had met since we moved to California. This was in the 1928 election. It was all very, very exciting to all of us. Our house was always filled with these college students, all of whom were radicals and some of whom were Communists. I remember one name in particular, Meyer Baylin, who was a Young Communist League member there. I'm not sure whether he was in the Communist party; it must have been in the Young Communist League because he was in his early twenties. Oh, that was, as I say, the most exciting thing because for the first time all these vague ideas started to take human form, because I didn't have any great memory of the Denver Socialist. ... My mother was a charter member of the Communist party in 1919 from Denver, but, as I say, the difference between the Socialists and the Communists never was clear to me. It was just a blur of radical songs. I remember the songs more than I remember anything else. Well, it was that year that I joined the Young Communist League. I was fourteen.

GARDNER

You were probably one of the youngest Communists in the league.

HEALEY

I don't think so, because at that time there was an organization known as the Young Pioneers. That was our children's group. I had never known of it; it was mainly in Los Angeles and we had already moved up north. I'm sure there were lots of other fourteen-year-olders. It was not at all unusual. My biggest memory of that, strangely, is how little I understood anything of what they were talking about. The Communist party--and the Young Communist League, therefore-- was involved in one of its famous factional fights. This one was between [William Z.] Foster and [Jay] Lovestone. They were the two nominal leaders and actual leaders of the different groups within the party. I had absolutely no idea of what they were talking about. At every meeting of the Young Communist League there would be somebody present from one position and somebody present from the other, debating, and then you'd vote, and your votes were counted, and that became the national vote (the Young Communist League votes were counted with the Communist party). Well, I remember that I joined, as I say, in December. In order to vote in that December meeting you were supposed to have been paid up in dues for a whole year. What stands out in my mind, two things: number one, that they marked my card, "Paid in full for the whole year," so I'd vote--I'd vote the way they were voting. They were all for Foster, so I voted that way, too. And that is my first memory. But totally uncomprehending of the debates--I don't think anybody even older would have understood them, as I go back and read them now, absolutely ridiculous, abstractions in a language that had nothing to do with the reality of problems. As a matter of fact, there were real problems, but the language disguised the problems more than illuminated them.

GARDNER

But what sort of activities did you participate in?

HEALEY

Well, that really was the turning point of having joined, because there was a great discipline in the Communist movement at that point. From that point on-- well, for instance, I used to walk from my house on Josephine Street down to West Berkeley to sell the Young Communist League newspaper, house to house, three times a week. It was a three-mile walk each way, and I'd do that at nighttime. There was never any physical worry about it--at least I didn't have any. Mama had some, but I didn't. But I disliked it intensely. I never did like going house to house selling the material, although I did it for fifteen, twenty years of ray life. But you knew you had to do it, so we would distribute leaflets. We'd sell the newspaper house to house. We would distribute leaflets in front of factory gates. I have a vague memory of a strike that was going on in a Studebaker [automobile] plant in East Oakland, and we'd go up there every week to distribute leaflets, getting support for the strikers. But those are the clearest memories. Oh! I remember going to an Army-Navy game in 1929 with a man by the name of John Little--he was the organizer of the Young Communist League for California^-so that we could distribute antimilitary leaflets during the half (obviously people coming to an Army-Navy game were supposed to be Army-Navy [accomplices]), denouncing imperialist war.

GARDNER

Did you have a warm reception?

HEALEY

Funny, I have no memory of the reception. I have a memory of later years, three years later here in Los Angeles, of distributing antimilitarist leaflets at the National Guard Armory when the navy would come in to Long Beach, and of the great fear that we'd have because we would get set upon and beaten up and whatnot at times when that would happen. But I don't remember anything of the crowd at the Army-Navy game. I would imagine there was more good-humored contempt than anything else. The other big things that I remember of that period: the Soviet fliers had flown a plane, "The Land of the Soviets," the first flight across the Antarctic, first time that it had ever been done; it landed somewhere here in L.A., and there was a meeting in San Francisco to celebrate. I remember a meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union that I went to and which I joined that night. I remember that only because of the fact that I kept a scrapbook of my junior high and high school days, and the leaflet advertising that meeting and my application are both in my scrapbook. But it was total excitement. It was the most wonderful exciting thing in the world, to actually meet Soviet--of course, I didn't meet them, but to see them, to see Soviet people in the flesh.

GARDNER

Do you recall your reaction when you finally saw them?

HEALEY

Oh! I was transported. They were ten feet tall, literally, to me. Oh! I was--it was the greatest day. I have no memory of the mass meeting I attended about it except that they were there and introduced, and they spoke in Russian, somebody translated, and one was seeing the reality of this great Russian Revolution. As I say also, a year before that I had heard Lincoln Steffens speak about the Soviet Union.

GARDNER

What do you recall about Steffens? You had mentioned that sort of in passing.

HEALEY

All I remember is what seemed to me a very old man.

GARDNER

He must have been by that time.

HEALEY

Yes. But very, very elegant. An old man. I remember the little church in Berkeley, the Unitarian church, and his excitement that the Soviet Union proved the reality of socialism. That's all. I have no other memory. Of course, I took that for granted,

GARDNER

I guess we'll get back to the YCL involvement. At this time you were also ostensibly a student at Berkeley High. Can you describe your experience there? You had gotten in with the crowd apparently in junior high. Did that maintain itself?

HEALEY

No, it did not maintain itself. In the first place, Kenneth May, who as I say was the main person, the pivot of the group, went to University High. The rest of us all went to Berkeley High. By this time I was also in the Young Communist League, which made a big difference because as far as most of the kids were concerned, I wasn't really terribly interested in them anyway; it was simply the fact of belonging to a group that was important to me. The parties that I had gone to with them, including one that I remember held at my home, were fun because they were supposed to be fun. In other words, I knew these parties were important, but I never really enjoyed them. I never really relaxed at them; I never really felt a part of them. I think a lot of that was due to the fact that they were all upper-middle-class kids, very well off. I can't remember one who didn't live up in the hills of Berkeley. There was one family I was fairly friendly with, Betty Stripp, who was the sister of Fred Stripp, who is the Unitarian minister up there now, who became very left-liberal later, I guess much later, after I knew him. But they were the only ones that I can remember going to the home and feeling fairly comfortable with. The other, outside of Camilla and Andrea--as I say, the two closest girlfriends I had--all I can really remember is the feeling of distance, that there was an unknown world there and I really didn't know what made it tick, and much worse, I really didn't care terribly because none of them talked about anything that I found very interesting or exciting. So that when I started high school--first of all, I was already in the Young Communist League, and that made a difference. But I don't even know if the group itself kept together then. I have a vague feeling, a vague memory, of noticing that in turn new groups started which they became parts of. I never became part of any group at Berkeley. I would have good enough friends who I'd walk to school with, but never the intimacy of what junior high had meant--or seeming intimacy.

GARDNER

What sort of things were you studying? I don't mean necessarily subjects, but in the sense that at Berkeley there would be one level of education and through the YCL probably another.

HEALEY

Here's where I'd say being a member of the YCL probably did not have the best effect, not only on me, but I think I was pretty typical. First, we were very sure of the fact that we really knew the answers of what made society tick. Secondly, we were sure that we were being given a quote, "bourgeois," unquote, education, an education toward which one always had to maintain a suspicious attitude. I mean, obviously, you were being corrupted, you could be corrupted by this bourgeois education. So that my biggest memory is a feeling of contempt for it, of being aloof from what was going on in the classroom. I knew what was important, and the other stuff wasn't important anyway, and if it was important they weren't going to tell the truth about it. But equally important to that attitude-- which, as I say, I was not at all unique in having--was that I was terribly, terribly active already in the Young Communist League. That was my real life; that was the real world; that was all that mattered. Going to the meetings, distributing leaflets, selling the papers, and being in demonstrations--that was reality. The school was a kind of a shadow existence that I had to go through, but it had no particular meaning. I have very few memories. I remember one time. . . . The first time I was arrested in a demonstration was in the May Day demonstrations of 1930 in Oakland. I'll come back to that in a little while because it is in some respects significant in my life. But I remember after I got out of the juvenile detention home, I was in a class--"shelter" was the title of the class. It was a compulsory class for all girls, in which one studied a mixture of domestic science, supposedly, of civics, I have a vague memory of architecture (but why, I don't know)--it was a kind of hodgepodge course. When I got out of the juvenile detention home, they were studying something about penology. I remember without any self-consciousness at all standing up to give my own first-hand experiences, and the reaction was totally casual about it. They were as casual as I was. I could add to what they were studying, and it was therefore first-hand and interesting, but not terribly--I certainly felt absolutely no discomfort about it. I maybe didn't understand their reactions because I wasn't terribly close to anybody, so that if they were disapproving, I wouldn't have known anyway. But certainly, as far as the teachers were concerned, there was never any attitude of disapproval or sharpness. The only other thing that used to drive my teachers frantic, particularly my advisor, was that I'd get bad grades. [knock at door; tape recorder turned off] Margaret Webb was the Latin teacher at Berkeley High, but she was also my advisor, and twice she asked my mother to come to school to talk about me, in great distress, because she said that, while I was getting good grades, I was not doing the work that I could do, that it was very obvious to her that I was just skimming through everything that I was doing at school, totally disinterested in it. She saw me as being college-bound, and she was genuinely distressed by it. My mother was, too. But again, it was to me just one of those incidental things that one had to tolerate because one was still in school, and of absolute unimportance in one's life because school was to me totally, totally irrelevant. I argue today with young people: I fight vehemently against dropouts, and I argue about the need of intellectually equipped Marxists. We've got enough semiskilled intellectuals. You can't be a revolutionary, an adequate revolutionary, without intellectual training. As I say, I think I was more of a product of a mood of the party and the YCL of my period. I was not at all unique in any of my reactions, in this feeling of total contempt and suspicion of what school was.

GARDNER

This would have been about when, 1929?

HEALEY

This was 1929, 1930, 1931. I don't remember attending a single extracurricular school activity. They may have been taking place; I wouldn't have known, because immediately after school I'd leave to go to a Young Communist League meeting, or to read, or do anything else that I thought was in the real world. All during that period, as well as in my earlier years, I was always an omnivorous reader. I think Sinclair Lewis---I read everything he wrote. I remember being terribly moved by Jakob Wassermann. Nobody ever reads him anymore, but I was very, very moved by him, very influenced by him. Dorothy Parker, for some reason, her poetry, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Again, in this scrapbook of mine I find copied-out- poems of both of theirs, the kind of poems which, when I look back, I'm a little shocked by them now. I have one in particular which probably illustrates the romantic cravings I had with a certain pseudosophistication, because I see I quoted down, "Yes, I loved you Tuesday/ What is that to me?/ I do not love you Wednesday/ So much is true/ And why you come bewailing/ Is more than I can see/ Yes, I loved you Tuesday/ But what is that to me?" I was, what, fifteen. [laughter] The only high school subject I remember--actually I remember French. I don't know why I remember it. I took a year of French. But I remember, in what would have been my final year, a class of economics which I enjoyed. I don't remember other subjects. For instance, I always have been a history buff, and an enormous amount of my reading when I was young was history. And I did extracurricular work; again, it was nothing to do with school assignments. But I don't remember a single history class in high school. That may be the fact that more particularly here in 1929 and '30 would have been present what I was so contemptuous of, a history either of America or the world, which was doctored, tendentious, you know, one-sided history, and therefore it would have only stood out to me as something that proved that I was correct in being contemptuous. Now, I remember that probably because that was when I was first introduced to Charles Beard. What I now define as his "vulgarized economic determinism" to me at that point was great Marxism because he talked about the things that high school history never talked about--the economic motive of American history, what was present in the Revolution. I remember reading everything he wrote, he and his wife [Mary Ritter Beard], totally in love with what he was doing. Remain Rolland. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, strangely enough, was another part of that romanticism. It's a family joke between my son and myself that Dorothy Canfield Fisher actually destroyed my personal life because her books which, again, I was reading when I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, described the perfect marriage of a human being, a man and a woman, totally empathetic, candid, communicative, and that to me was what marriage should be. So, as my son says, "You went through life looking for that, for total communication, and never found what you were looking for." Of course, he read the books when he was around fifteen or sixteen because I told him how much I had been influenced by them, and he admits now that they had a little influence on him, too. I don't think anybody reads Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It was a curious mixture, the things I'd read, because simultaneously, of course, I was reading Marxist books. I think that Walt Whitman and, to a lesser extent, much less for my life than it is for today's generation, [Henry David] Thoreau, had more effect on me than Marx or Lenin or anybody else. What I was responding to really were the questions of emotion, the hatred of brutality, the hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. It wasn't just the specific mean things that one person did to another, but the impersonality, the destruction of human life, both spiritually and physically by the system, and that stayed with me. I mention it now because, as it did with my mother, this became the dominant question. One is not always so sure of what the future will hold, but you sure as hell know what you hate, and what you want no part of, and what you can't compromise with. But the Young Communist League was the most real thing of my high school days.

GARDNER

What were some of the important issues, some of the demonstrations and so forth, that the YCL was involved in in those days?

HEALEY

Well, there were a number of things that were happening just almost simultaneously. In the first place, the party and the YCL were just coming out of this big factional fight between Foster and Lovestone. The bulk of the party, but not of course of the YCL, was European-born, totally isolated from any significant relationship to American life. Well, in 1929 the Depression takes place Before the Depression, however, we were already going out to factories, as I say, distributing leaflets in factories, why workers should organize unions. I personally was a member of the YCL branch that was concentrating in West Berkeley, which is where the Black community lived, the ghetto. There we were fighting on the questions of discrimination. The biggest overall fight, of course, was around unemployment relief. There was no organized unemployment relief at that period, no organized significant welfare for people. There were either private charities or there was county welfare, but it was so minuscule that it didn't do anything. But against it-- [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] The mood of Americans who were unemployed was the feeling that it was all their own fault, that they had done it, that they had been shiftless, that they hadn't done the right things. Of course, you saw the expression of this in the organized labor movement where the AF of L vigorously opposed our fight for unemployment insurance, or our slogan, "Worker Wages," which was the main slogan of the period. What was important to me, and again, of some significance to the rest of my life--although [I was] at that time unaware of the fact that it was significant"--were the impressions that were accumulating, to see this shift of consciousness. When we started in 1930 organizing demonstrations of the unemployed, they were centered in Oakland at Tenth and Broadway, which is the Skid Row, and in Berkeley at University and San Pablo, but the Berkeley ones were very secondary to the Oakland ones. When we started in preparation for what became the huge demonstrations of March 6, 1930, the first really massive appearance of unemployed, we would hold street meetings to agitate or talk about why this was not the individual fault of the unemployed but the fault of the system, the capitalist system. Every Young Communist League member had to take a turn speaking on street corners. It didn't make any difference whether you were prepared or unprepared, a speaker or not. This relates back to my father's reaction. He came down at one point when I was speaking on a street corner some time in February before the big demonstrations took place because we were just building up, getting people to attend, and he was just heartbroken that his little daughter was down there speaking to all these bums (as far as he was concerned). What in the world? Sure, he felt sorry for the unemployed, but what was his little girl doing down there with all these terrible people? But the big thing, as I say, though, was watching the change of consciousness, watching unemployed men, almost entirely--disembodied individuals, in effect, fragmented individuals, atomized individuals--start to come together as a group, start to feel a consciousness that it was not an individual thing, that it was social, that they did have rights which were being neglected. Of course, the unemployed demonstrations occurred all over the country. The estimate is that a million people demonstrated. That became the first visible sign of protest as far as the unemployed were concerned in the Depression. Here should be noted a number of things that were important as far as the training and disciplining of young Communists, things which have, I think, some enduring significance. First was this question of this assignment to speak at street meetings, which meant that willy-nilly, you acquired the ability of standing up and talking off the top of your head. You couldn't read a speech at a street meeting. We didn't have loudspeakers in those days, so you had to learn to speak loudly. You had to learn to withstand heckling, because there was a lot of heckling. And you had to learn the need of preparatory actions before demonstrations. I mention that because nowadays people call a demonstration five days before they want it to take place, and they think distributing a leaflet will produce a demonstration. We acquired, starting with the 1930 demonstrations, the knowledge, the understanding, that you had to have a daily plan of building a demonstration including small demonstrations in little, tiny communities that would then feed to a big demonstration, so that you'd build up, beyond your own dedicated aktivs, a mass following that would participate. The third significant lesson, as I say, was the fact that the consciousness of human beings is not a static thing, and to watch the development, the process of growth of the individuals participating, the fact that organization gave them this power that they hadn't ever had before. So there were the unemployed demonstrations; there were hunger marches that we were organizing; there was what became later, a couple of years later, the League of Homeless Youth. There were tens of thousands of transients, particularly boys, but some girls, who would just tramp the country riding the roads, hitchhiking, anything, because they couldn't stay home; there was no way to live. So we organized a group, a movement, known as the League of Homeless Youth. Everybody would chip in money, and we'd rent one big home that everybody would live in, what today would be called a commune. We didn't use those terms. During the unemployed activities, we would organize the neighbors to put back the furniture of homes where the family and individual family was evicted, teach them how to turn on electricity when it was cut off. Here again, a significant thing is that we didn't use language that was used in the sixties about civil disobedience and passive, nonviolent resistance, or anything like that. We never, never philosophized. If we had philosophized we would have disdained any idea of being pacifist or of nonviolence as a method. I mean, it would never have even occurred to us. But what we did do was to recognize two things: number one, that you were nonviolent because you were always outnumbered by the police; but secondly, when the police did attack, the people fought back. We never passively accepted the police brutality. And there was an enormous police brutality. For instance, every unemployed demonstration in Oakland was broken up. There was no right to demonstrate, no right to picket, no right to petition, and there wasn't a single demonstration that wasn't broken up. Well, as I said, I was arrested on May Day, 1930. I had taken time off from high school. May Day you didn't go to school when I was young. "Down Tools on May Day" was the slogan, and that meant down everything else. You just didn't do routine things. I had gone down to Tenth and Broadway, where the demonstration was to take place. The police occupied the corner and refused to allow us to hold a street meeting, a demonstration. To hold a demonstration, you've got to have a soap box and be able to speak, and they wouldn't let us. Our party headquarters was about one block away; I think it was Franklin Street. I walked over to the headquarters, and there was a big pile of Daily Workers that had arrived there, still bound together. I picked them up and went back to Tenth and Broadway, and under the guise of selling the papers was making a speech. In other words, I'd shout out a headline, and then I'd speak about it, and then I'd say, "Buy a Daily Worker!" And then I'd keep doing it. The cops watched me for a few minutes. People were on all four corners of Tenth and Broadway; police were preventing them from coming together. The police watched me for a few minutes, and then one of them gave a signal to the patrolman, and they just picked me up in their arms and very ignominiously carried me off to a police wagon, [laughter] They started to take me to the city jail and en route discovered how old I was and took me down to the juvenile hall. That's when I first had the name Dorothy Ray. Because of my father's job and his great unhappiness, afraid of his being jeopardized, when they booked me I had to think, "What will I call myself?" And so I used the name. I don't know where it came from, why "Ray," but that became my name. As a matter of fact, until 1943, that was the only name I ever used either in my personal or political life, the name Dorothy Ray. I stayed in the juvenile detention home about two weeks. I was the absolute despair of the custodians. They kept me in isolation for a few days. Actually, now I know they did it for my protection because they figured I'd be preyed upon by the older girls who were there. There was a great deal of lesbianism among the children. They figured I was a nice little girl in spite of my radical politics. They didn't want me to be contaminated, But of course I resented it.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 10, 1972

GARDNER

When we left off, you were in juvenile hall.

HEALEY

I was agitating as soon as I got into the common room with the rest of the girls. Of course, I started agitating. Every time I was taken downstairs for an interview with the probation officers, I'd start agitating all over again. Finally they called my mother. Oh, no! There was a hearing with my attorney. As a matter of fact, I don't know how I ever got an attorney, because juveniles didn't get one, but Austin Lewis, at that point a very famous man, represented me. All I remember of it is the probation officer standing up and saying, "Your Honor, we'd just as soon be rid of her. All she does is agitate, agitate, agitate, day and night." At any rate, they released me and put me on probation, supposedly until I was twenty-one. Actually I think I reported twice, and I only reported those two times because I was curious. I wanted to see what it was like. My curiosity has always been my problem. What the hell was this business, reporting to a probation officer? I went down twice, and it was clear they were as disinterested as I was. Finally I never went back, and they never did anything about it. The Young Communist League, to backtrack just a minute on other activities, was, as I have indicated, not only terribly disciplined, but there was no such thing as a division between your personal and your political life. Again, we didn't use terms like lifestyle, but it was quite understood, and made explicit if it wasn't understood, that in your personal life you were supposed to be as selfless and dedicated and whatnot to the Revolution as you were in your political life. I remember having a great fight with Archie Brown, who is today one of the Communist leaders in the [International] Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union in San Francisco, who was sixteen to my fourteen when we first met. Archie was a newsboy when he was recruited to the Young Communist League, a rough, tough, street kid. I remember riding on a streetcar with him from Berkeley to Oakland to go to a meeting. I had just read [N.K.] Krupskaya's Memories of Lenin, and the thing that impressed me was on the question of sex, how Lenin had decried promiscuity, using the example of the glass of water--that just as you wouldn't want your lips to be on a glass that was muddied by other people's lips, the same was true in a sexual relationship. Well, Archie was having a whole lot of interesting sexual relationships, and I told him this story very self-righteously. After all, Lenin said, and anything Lenin said was supposed to be--and still is supposed to be--the final word on any question you want to prove. I remember being absolutely appalled because Archie turned to me and said, "Look, I will follow up anything that Lenin says on politics, but," he said, "I understand that in Lenin's apartment that there were two very narrow beds at the opposite ends of the apartment, one for Krupskaya and one for Lenin, and they didn't even sleep together. That guy knew nottin' about sex! That's for sure! And I'm not taking my leadership from him!" [laughter] I was very shocked at this. But it was really a total involvement of six and a half days a week. Whatever assignments you had you had to report on. Every meeting started with a checkup of what the last week's assignments had been. And you had sure as hell better had carried out your assignment or you'd be the object of terrible wrath. This continued all through my youth. I'd have to say that for those of us who survived it, it was an invaluable lesson. But an awful lot of people obviously didn't survive it. There was a very high fluctuation rate in membership, and it was quite understandable why. As an example, I was brought up on charges the time that I hitchhiked down to Los Angeles with this first boyfriend of mine, Emy Rabin, because I hadn't gotten permission from the YCL to come down for one weekend--to be away from Friday until Monday. You didn't leave the city without permission. Of course, all they did was warn me that I must never do it again, but it made a big impression on me that it was a formal question that you didn't do such things. But above all, the biggest thing was that you learned to continue to do things that you really didn't like to do--as I say, going house to house selling newspapers, ringing doorbells, later doing the same thing as far as organizing the unemployed, walking miles to ever get anyplace (nobody ever rode anywhere in those days), not liking it, yet knowing that you had to do it, that it was obligatory, learning to always come to meetings on time. I listened to lectures from the Communist leaders, that if you were five minutes late to a meeting it might cost your comrade his life. It's a habit that stayed with me all my life. I have wasted more hours going to meetings on time, waiting for people, [laughter] But I am just frantic if I think I'm going to be five minutes late to an appointment; I just can't stand it!

GARDNER

And this all occasioned, in the long run, your dropping out of school as well.

HEALEY

Yes. In 1931, the Young Communist League made a decision--with my full agreement, you must understand-that I would leave high school in order to go to work in San Jose. I had been working in the summers in a cannery in Emeryville, which is right near Oakland. That was just summer jobs, and this time I was to leave and go to work in a cannery. We were great believers in "Organize the working class." That was always the most important theme in our lives, and still is. I was to get a job in order to help organize the union there. My mother was just frantic, furious. She wanted me to go on to college. Both my brother and sister had gone on. My sister didn't stay--she got married--but my brother, of course, did. Frances got married and dropped out of college and went to work. So, Mama, in spite of her Communist loyalties, was furious, furious at the Young Communist League, considered it the worst influence on me.

GARDNER

What sort of work did you do in the cannery?

HEALEY

I was in a peach cannery.

GARDNER

What company?

HEALEY

The California Packing Corporation--CPC. I was pitting peaches. You'd take the corer, put in that with one motion over the top of the pit, then to the right, then to the left, scoop it out, with three boxes in front of you, depending on the kind of fruit it was. One box I remember was the pie box. The pie box was made up of the fruit that was rotten and dirty and had fallen on the ground, the most decayed. I never ate fruit pies; I've never eaten them since.

GARDNER

What were the working conditions like there?

HEALEY

Well, the very fact that I could get a job was one thing; because I was underage, I had no labor permit, and it was in the middle of the school season. They didn't care. When the inspectors would come by, somebody would pass the word that the Deputy State Labor Commissioner was coming by. So those of us who were underage were supposed to go to the bathroom at that point. The inspectors knew we were there--everybody knew we were there. It didn't make any difference. I don't remember what the wages were anymore. The minimum at that time I think was twenty-five cents an hour for women. There was, of course, no organization in the cannery at all. When I came down to San Jose, I had a room across the street from St. James's Park. The other organizers didn't have any places to stay; they were sleeping in the union headquarters. Ultimately I had to do the same thing when we had no more money. When the strike started, there was no more money, of course; I wasn't being paid. The strike was not a very long-lived one. It took place about six weeks after I came down to work. It was a strike of the Trade Union Unity League, the Cannery and the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. (At that time I think the name of it was just Cannery Workers Industrial Union, while in agricultural fields it was simply the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. One year later it became both.) The people that were involved in the strike were of some significance in the rest of my life too. One was a woman by the name of Minnie Carson. She's ten years older than I am, and she was one of the party leaders. She was my closest friend. I just adored her. I used to cross the bay (she lived in San Francisco on Twin Peaks) to spend every weekend I could with them, again to my mother's fury. Here the only relevant thing about that was that even though I adored her and her husband, Al Bock, and they were the height of sophistication to me, political and personal, at the same time I was very critical without ever allowing myself to define my criticism. I found that what happened was that they were already top party leaders--or she was (he wasn't). There was the kind of attitude with her and with people they went around with that the things I did, like distributing leaflets and going house to house, you know, this was Jimmy Higgins stuff and not worthy of one. I was always much too moral for comfort. As I say, in spite of my friendship, I wanted to get away from my closeness to them because I disapproved of it, for me. I mean, their attitude was all right for them because they were leaders, but I wasn't, and it wasn't right, and anyway, people shouldn1t--to me it was a differentiation, a splitting of the political and the personal life, which I don't think I ever really defined in my mind but which I know moved me. At any rate, Minnie was a great speaker, a great agitator. In the beginning of the strike, we could not rent a single hall in San Jose. It was very much like the unemployed demonstrations. There was nothing which was legal, where people could gather together. The police brutality was of a far greater level than anything that the people have seen in later years, because there was no consciousness on the part of anybody else in the public that there was anything wrong in what they were doing. [laughter] So we would hold these street meetings--I mean, these park meetings, strike meetings--at St. James's Park, and police would break them up. One of the final episodes, I remember, is that they threw tear gas bombs at us and one of the canisters cut Minnie’ s cheek open. I still remember the same feeling I had had the year before when the police attacked. I don't know how to quite describe this. When you look around and you see people lying on the ground-- that expression "their heads broken open" is a literal expression as far as your feeling. You're looking at pulp and gray matter coming out, and blood dripping all over. You know, it's a strange thing. I would become absolutely hysterical with anger and fury--not with fear, for some reason, as I would a bit later, but fury at them daring to do this. Even now when I go to a demonstration and see anything like that, the police starting to attack, I lose all sense of caution or restraint and simply start screaming epithets at them at the top of my lungs. You know, that's one reason why when the kids started the expression about the "pigs" and the older people were so offended by it, I never really was. We yelled other names, mostly "Cossack." But you learn to--I mean we did have, I think, a better sense of, [self-] protection than young people have today. It's one of the first things you learn. For instance, there were a lot of mounted police around in those days. We always had marbles with us to throw in front of the horses. Or you'd have a hatpin to jab at the horses with. I must confess that one of the first things I learned was how to knee a cop at a demonstration. I must go back to one other thing, before I was arrested at that unemployed demonstration. The only reason that it's important is that it's one of the first clippings that my mother kept of my life. I had gone back to the headquarters, which had a balcony, and there two other women--Julia Wilde, who was I think later deported to Latvia (which in the thirties was still a semi-Fascist country), and Sonia Baltrom, who became the leader of the Textile Workers Union--the three of us stood up in the balcony and spoke from the balcony to a mass crowd down below. A crowd gathered there finally. When they threw the tear gas up there was when I left to go back to Tenth and Broadway, which was where I was arrested. At any rate, the same thing happened in San Jose---the dispersion, the fact that you could never have a meeting of strikers, you could never--and finally they busted the strike. Present also in that strike as party leaders were a man by the name of Alex Noral, who became the state leader of the Workers' Alliance later, and a very unique old man by the name of "Pop" [Elmer] Hanoff, who is today in the Ukraine, or Georgia, in the Soviet Union. Crazy old man.

GARDNER

Doing what? What does he do today?

HEALEY

He was supposed to be the brains; the Gray Eminence, he considered himself. None of us had very much respect or regard for him. But he was the official party representative. A man by the name of Morris Rapaport, who is living now in Petaluma, who later became the leader of the party in Washington [State] during its greatest strength--the Washington Commonwealth Federation. I think that was the introduction into labor law of George Anderson, who I think is retired now from practice but who was, throughout the thirties and the forties and the fifties, one of the major lawyers of Northern California. At any rate, the strike was busted up, and Minnie still has the scar on the cheek to this day, the stitches that were taken from the tear-gas-bomb canister,

GARDNER

What would the membership figures be for the party in those days in the different areas?

HEALEY

Well, the entire party nationally at that point had around 5,000 or 6,000 members going into the decade nationally. I would say in Northern California we probably had five hundred at the most, and of that number, between the YCL and the party, well, the YCL in all of Northern California, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, and Mountain View, and a little tiny party in San Jose--maybe 100 members at the most, maximum. But that's when we started recruiting. By 1934 we had more than doubled our membership. By 1936 we had 25,000 to 35-40,000 members. The YCL was never as large as the party, although theoretically the youth organization is supposed to be larger because it's nonparty. You don't have to be Communist to join the Young Communist League. Oh! Other activities in 1931 that I carried on: I became in charge of the Young Pioneer work for the Young Communist League. The Young Communist League were the buddies, the teachers, of the Young Pioneers. It was our responsibility. . . . [tape undecipherable] . . . every Saturday, again, entirely black youth in the Young Pioneer Club. The main activities were games, story telling, always story telling with a political moral. About that time the Scottsboro case started; that became an all-concerning thing. Simultaneously with this were the demonstrations that were being held in regard to "Hands Off Nicaragua." Who was it there? [Augusto Cesar] Sandino was their revolutionary leader. I have one memory, a very vague memory of going to Stanford [University] to participate in a demonstration against Herbert Hoover, who was coming back for some ceremony. The YCL, a number of us, about fifty of us, drove down to Stanford to demonstrate.

GARDNER

Can you describe some of the circumstances about the Nicaragua thing and about the Scottsboro case?

HEALEY

Well, the Scottsboro case--of course, you know the facts. Nine young boys, literally boys, from fourteen to seventeen, were taken off freight trains in Alabama and charged with raping two white women, two women who, as a matter of fact, were prostitutes. They were given the death penalty. This became a major national campaign of the Communists. Huge mass meetings were being held on it. My memory is that--in fact, the best speaker I ever heard in my life, the best Communist speaker I ever heard in my life, is a Black man by the name of Richard Moore from New York, from the International Labor Defense, speaking outside Peralta Hall in West Oakland. There must have been 5,000 people gathered out there on it. The activities were--again, you went house to house, knocking on doors with a little tin can collecting money for their defense, selling the Labor Defender, which told the story of the frame-up of their case, just creating, again, consciousness. That was always the main thing one was trying to do. What were the facts? Why was it a frame-up? What did it mean as far as being Black? What did it mean as far as--at that time we had already arrived at our positions that Black people were an oppressed nation within the United States. The fight against--we didn't call it "racism"--the fight against "white chauvinism." The Nicaragua thing: we were always very conscious-- it was a very explicit education in the Young Communist League and the party--of our responsibility as being "internationalists," and that meant that we lived in the heartland of the imperialism that was oppressing other people. So particularly as far as Latin America was concerned we would carry on, again, leaflet distributions, street meetings'--we always had street meetings five times a week on various corners in Berkeley and Oakland--on what U.S. aggression in Nicaragua meant, what sending the Marines meant. Demanding, "Hands off!"--that was the slogan: "Hands off Nicaragua!" Other activities in that period, 1930-31--I mean, you must realize that our activities were very widespread. In other words, we were doing lots of things all the time. I remember, for instance, going down to Pittsburg California, in 1931, on what were called Red Sundays, where you'd go to an industrial town to sell the Daily Worker, or the Western Worker at that point, or leaflets, to leaflet a company town. It was always very scary, that part, because you were in a company town in Pittsburg California, the little town all around the steel mill there. The company police and the state police were indistinguishable. Of course, any Communist they'd get hold of was immediately beaten, and everybody was aware of it. You'd always have a kind of system of how you were to avoid calling attention to yourself and what you were doing. Well, I must say, one of my big memories illustrates how sectarian we were. One leaflet we distributed was written by the man who was at that point the party organizer of Oakland, a Greek Communist who was later deported to Greece; his name was Nick Daniels. The leaflet had a big headline, "WAR, REVOLUTION, DEMONSTRATION," and then, "Come to a movie about the Soviet Russia to learn"--(it was a Soviet movie)--"to learn how to really live." You know, I think of it now, distributing that leaflet house to house in Pittsburg and what it must have meant to the workers. It reminds me of some of the leaflets I see today put out by the October League or the Spartacists or PL [Progressive Labor] or something, with comparable slogans: "Smash Racism!" [laughter] The headquarters at 1020 Broadway--I haven't thought of those numbers for a long time, 1020 Broadway--on Monday night the Friends of the Soviet Union would meet there. On Tuesday night the Unemployed Council would meet there. On Wednesday night the International Labor Defense would meet there. On Thursday night the Young Communist League and the Communist party would meet in adjacent rooms there. On Friday night the Workers International Relief, which was a group that collected funds for the strikers like Gastonia [North California] and the big strikes that were going on, would meet. People would come in depending on what night; as far as they were concerned, they were all Communists. So if you came in on Monday you joined one organization, if you came in on Tuesday you joined another, and so forth. It really didn't make any difference, because everybody considered all of it Communist party, anyway, and there was never any effort on our part, of course, to hide that. The other part that became the subject of great jokes later on, and had truth, was that every speech and every demonstration always included either the slogan "Defend the Soviet Union," or the other one was always "Free Tom Mooney," or "Free the Scottsboro Boys," or whatever. But always, "Free Tom Mooney" and "Free the Scottsboro Boys" were the constant ones because they were in the longest. Of course, there were always enormous jokes told about it. As I say, they were not apocryphal. I remember my mother, just before she was arrested as well at one of these unemployed demonstrations in 1930, the cop saying to her, "Gee, I can understand trying to get unemployment relief, but what have I got to do with defending the Soviet Union?" [laughter] But that didn't make any matter to us. Any slogan was of equal importance, and we fought on them all.

GARDNER

Was the Tom Mooney case that early?

HEALEY

Oh, yes! It started early.

GARDNER

Yeah, but the main demonstrations and the retrial were later, weren't they?

HEALEY

Well, they never stopped. I think probably it lasted longer than the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and it was far more oriented in the labor movement than the Sacco-Vanzetti case ever was.

GARDNER

You might say a little bit about it.

HEALEY

The Tom Mooney case?

GARDNER

For our tape recorder.

HEALEY

Yeah, well, Tom Mooney and Warren Billings had been arrested in 1917 [actually 1916] at a Preparedness Day parade. They were on a rooftop when a bomb went off and killed I don't remember how many. They were arrested and charged with murder. It was probably one of the most overtly framed-up cases of any of the great cases, even more obvious than that of Sacco and Vanzetti, because witnesses were produced, pictures were produced, that showed them on this rooftop miles away, with a clock in the picture, when the bomb went off. The perjured testimony against them was more quickly exploded. Nevertheless, I think probably the only things that saved their lives was the fact that these worldwide demonstrations did take place, including even in Czarist Russia, and then, of cdurse, the young Soviet Republic. Their sentences were finally commuted to life imprisonment. In the defense committee activities, as was true of all labor defense cases in those days, there was far more material printed for mass education, to build a mass campaign on these cases, than has been true, for instance, around Angela Davis. The young people who were in that campaign think that was a great big campaign, but the older people look at it and say, "Teh, tch, tch," and are very critical. We would have a leaflet out every week on a case; maybe two leaflets. Two pamphlets came out altogether on Angela. We were very reliant in terms of material, had a great belief in the emancipatory power of the printed word over the mind. If people would only read the truth they would immediately become revolutionaries, anticapitalists. Therefore, an enormous amount of our activities relied on selling and distributing pamphlets and leaflets. And this was true in the Tom Mooney case.

GARDNER

What finally happened with them?

HEALEY

The Tom Mooney Defense Committee was centered in his union, the molders1 union [International Holders and Allied Workers], and was bitterly anti-labor-leadership because they double-crossed Tom all the time. But the case became part of the greatest public agitation, to the point where in 1938, when Culbert Olson was running for governor, one of the strongest things that helped mobilize people for Culbert Olson's election was his promise to pardon Tom Mooney, and that was the first act he did immediately upon taking office--"to pardon Mooney. The next day Mooney led a demonstration up Market Street of about 50,000 people, a victory demonstration, and, as a matter of fact, I have in my files in there the proclamation that Governor Olson signed. I think one hundred of them were sent out to people. At that point I was already with Labor's Non-Partisan League, and that's why I got one. But probably because it lasted so long, the case became the most important labor case, labor political-prisoner case of the period. My memories also of Oakland in 1930-1931 (those two years are indistinguishable in my mind; they're blurred together) are that you'd stay up all night running mimeograph machines for these leaflets, our precious leaflets. I don't imagine any of them are much too different from the one I described earlier, but, as I say, we had great belief in them. This was still before I dropped out of high school. It only emphasizes, as I say, my feeling that this was where life was, this was where reality was, and school was some shadowy existence, totally unimportant, meaningless. I had no compunction about leaving high school. I never have had any remorse about it, either, I might add! I got married in 1931 to Lou Sherman, who was the brother of Will[iam] Schneiderman, who later became the chairman of the Communist party of California. I think probably there were two factors in my wanting to get married: one was to be married for the sake of being married (you didn't feel that you had made it if you didn't either have a boyfriend, a steady boyfriend, or were married) ; the other thing was to get away from home. I really don't know why the great feverish desire, because my mother didn't really interfere very much in my life. Not that she didn't try occasionally, about not going to so many meetings, not going house to house, such long distances to walk, and not going across the bay so often by myself. She'd worry about me. She says I was a very hard person to--I usually ended up doing what I wanted to do. At any rate, Lou and I got married and moved to East Oakland and then moved down to Los Angeles in the fall of '31.

GARDNER

Was he also a YCL member?

HEALEY

Yes, he was a Young Communist. He was one of those who served a sentence in jail for having run around the 1932 Olympics with "Free Tom Mooney" during the Olympics. The four of them got in the stadium and raced around the track.

GARDNER

Who were the others?

HEALEY

I really don't remember the names of the others any longer.

GARDNER

Did they dress in track suits for the occasion?

HEALEY

Yeah!

GARDNER

So you came to Los Angeles.

HEALEY

Yeah.

GARDNER

In what capacity?

HEALEY

Well, the Young Communist League told us to come; I don't remember why. Oh! I remember what I did immediately, and that was to start organizing, in East Los Angeles, block committees of the Unemployed Council, going house to house in the east area. At that point, organizing the unemployed was much easier than it is today, primarily because it was extensive. In other words, now you have pockets of unemployment; you'd have to find various areas. Then you could go anywhere and knock on doors and you were going to find the unemployed. Every week we would take a new delegation of unemployed down to the Metropolitan Welfare to demand higher relief, to demand jobs and so forth. And every week, "Red" [William F.] Hynes and the Red Squad would be there and people would be beaten up, but every week we'd go back again. So again, the big thing one learned was the importance of organization. We didn't just agitate. People joined an organization, and those people, those unemployed, would lead the next demonstration, and you'd go on and set up a new block committee a block away that would meet every week and take its delegation down. You'd keep doing that so that you were constantly developing new leaders. People belonged to that organization, and they grew with it, they developed with it, they emerged with new talents that were latent before but then became explicit.

GARDNER

Where were you living when you were down in East Los Angeles?

HEALEY

We lived on Soto Street, across the street from-- I think it's the Hollenbeck Park. There was a park right across the street, a little court. Both of us were unemployed the whole time, most of the whole time. At a later point I got a job in Fullerton at Sears Roebuck. Lou and I moved down there, and I think I lasted a month. He didn't work; he was unemployed.

GARDNER

How old was your husband?

HEALEY

He was three years older than I was.

GARDNER

So he was fairly young, too, when you got married.

HEALEY

It was a very--both of us--I mean, even though he was older than I was, both of us were totally inexperienced in any physical relationship. Both of us were virgins and totally ignorant. I mean not only that we were virgins, which wasn't so unusual, but we were unusually ignorant as to what the hell you did once you got married. The first night of marriage was a very difficult one. As I remember we kept the light on all night in order to know what to do because neither one of us were sure. But then my friend Minnie Carson comes back in my life again. She and her husband and another couple, Emy Rabin and his wife Jean (Emy had been my first boyfriend and we had stayed friends, but we were never serious). Minnie had discovered a new birth control device. All it was was one of these foam things that you used, and all three of us got pregnant at the same time, Al went to see this Inez Williams, who became to be famous as the abortion queen of Northern California, to negotiate abortions for the three of us. First he asked for the price of one; the price of one was fifty dollars at that point. And Al said, "Well, what if I bring in a second woman?" Inez said, "Well, then the price would go down five dollars, forty-five dollars for two." And he says, "Well, what if I bring in a third?" She says, "My God, I'll put you on the payroll!" [laughter] But actually, my memory of that first abortion--I had two others later--was that of all of them, it was the most scientifically done. Inez had a very good establishment. It was a big building in San Francisco, Al took all three of the women there, delivered us there, and all three of us had it done at the same time. There were doctors and nurses. As I say, my only memory of it was how efficient it was. Then all of us went home, and my mother took care of me. I think it was like a day that I stayed in bed, and that was it. But it was just taken for granted that we would have the abortions. There was never any debate about it. I mean, who could think of a revolutionary having a child! Sex--take time off--and that's an important revelation in our attitude in regard to the question of equality because it was just taken for granted that as revolutionaries we were the equal of any man. And taking time off would be as bad for us as it would be for a man. You just wouldnft do it.

GARDNER

What was the East Los Angeles neighborhood like then? Had it begun to be a Chicano neighborhood?

HEALEY

The portions where I went were. The areas that I was assigned to concentrate on were the areas that were called The Flats, near the bridge on Ninth Street and the Seventh Street bridge. The people I worked with were predominantly, at that point, called Mexican-American, not Chicano. Now, I tell you that the big lessons were the gratification (but, mind you, I was never conscious of it at that point; it was again the impressions that go to make up your life, which were later demonstrated anew in the Imperial Valley and every other strike I was ever in), the impact upon people of organization (they'd become transformed in the course of the organization of the struggle, of the collective activity), the emerging of great human beings, just great human beings, from inarticulate people. It was always to me the most exciting thing--people, people, people. Nothing was so rewarding or so challenging. Well, I became the YCL organizer in the east side of town. The only memory I have of that is strictly silly. There was a young man by the name of Morrie Weiss, who was in the YCL there, and we became very good friends. We used to walk to the meetings together. We lived near one another. I still have a book he gave me, written by [Nikolai] Bukharin. At one point he disclosed to me that he was secretly engaged in Trotskyist activities. Of course--I say, "of course" because it was "of course" for me to immediately report him to the Young Communist League that he was a secret Trotskyist. He was immediately expelled. He became one of the national leaders of the SWP [Socialist Workers Party]. I don't really remember much else of the YCL activity. There were always these endless YCL discussions, which never really ever terribly interested me, very esoteric questions that I could never see the sense of. But at any rate, in addition to the Unemployed Council, I was participating in some kind of a cooperative, unemployed cooperative. The Trotskyite thing is important there because there was a man there by the name of Charles Curtis, who is today one of the leaders of the Socialist party--although the whole Los Angeles local four or five months ago left the Socialist party in protest against their reactionary right-wing tendencies. They stopped being right-wing social democrats and just became reactionaries. The in-fighting on politics, the line, who was going to have leadership and whatnot. So that even there the fights were going on. From 1932 to 1934 these were the activities that mainly engrossed me. There had been a strike in 1933 in El Monte, a berry strike. But my only connection with it as I remember now was going out twice to speak in the colony there, the Mexican colony. Nothing else remains vivid or clear about it. In December of 1933, some Mexican-American workers came up from the Imperial Valley. They were on strike. The name of the union was the CUCOM. I can't remember any letter; all I remember are the initials. [Confederacion de Uniones de Campesinos y Obreros Mexicanos] They had just been defeated in a fall lettuce strike, I remember, and were asking for assistance. I was called in to the YCL office, told about it, asked to leave, to go down to the Imperial Valley to help. I protested because I was pregnant again. They said--well, you know, that I still had time; I think I was two months pregnant. So they said that before the third month I could come back to L.A. and have an abortion, but right now you've got to go right away. All I remember about leaving was that that night, New Year's Eve, was the worst flood that Los Angeles has ever known. The L.A. River flowed over; that's how bad it was. Anyway, we went down to the Imperial Valley. There were two of us who were sent down. One was Stanley Hancock, from San Diego, who was twenty-three, and I, who was at that point nineteen.

GARDNER

Where was your husband at this time?

HEALEY

He was here in L.A., but that, you know, was taken for granted--that I had one assignment, he had another. By this time, I knew I didn't want to be married to him. He was a very nice man, a very good human being, very kind human being, but he just bored me to tears. He didn't know it yet, but I already knew that I wanted to end the marriage.

GARDNER

This was after about three years.

HEALEY

I didn't know how to do it because he was so good. I ought to say that when he and I came down here to L.A. we infected his whole family with scabies. We were living in Oakland just before we came down. We were living in a terrible, dirty, filthy place--just beggars description, it was so bad. We got scabies either from the place or from the headquarters where everybody lived, the unemployed. We didn't know what we had. We couldn't diagnose it in Oakland, and we didn't diagnose it until sometime after we got here to L.A. It's a very contagious and horrible disease, a terrible one, a disgusting one. We, as I say, infected everybody with it. They never forgave us; his family never forgave us. Oh! Before I came down, I went down to East Oakland as a YCL organizer. Again, that's kind of vague in my memory, except that it was primarily Portuguese people and that I was organizing something called the league-- what the hell was it? It was an athletic league, a sports league of some kind for the YCL. But all I really remember is that at the weddings and the parties that I'd go to, there was a lot of drinking wine. The people would get terribly drunk. It was the first time I had seen anybody drunk in my life. All I can remember is my horror at the fights that would break out, the inevitability of the fights. Each evening would progress toward the same things--just terrible, terrible scenes. I don't remember anything else about the whole experience--what I did, what the activities were--just my reaction against the drunkenness. It seemed so tragic and appalling, and needless, meaningless. Oooh! I guess that left me with a lifelong abhorrence of alcohol--not that it served me too much good in my two later marriages. Both my husbands drank a lot. But I've always had a great hatred of it.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 10, 1972

HEALEY

At some point in 1933, I moved to the south side of Los Angeles. I lived somewhere around Slauson and Main. We were still doing a lot of organizing of unemployed and simultaneously of factories that were unorganized; they always went together. But again, the significant thing of the atmosphere, what was dominant in the culture of the period, was the invasions of meetings by the police, whether one was meeting in a home of [a member of] an Unemployed Council, or whether we were trying to hold a mass meeting in the hall down on Spring Street, I think it was, downtown Los Angeles (there used to be a hall there that we'd rent a couple of times, another place on Grand where we used to hold mass meetings). It didn't make any difference where we were meeting, in a home or hall, and how quiet and disciplined it was (because they were all very disciplined meetings, never had any untoward action inside the meetings); the police would raid the meetings, start beating everybody up and arresting people. I must say, the American Civil Liberties Union of that period was a far more militant organization than it is today, far more aggressive. I'm not putting it down today, because I think it plays an important role today, too, but it was much more identified in a positive sense with those whom it was defending then than it is today. Now it is more objective, and it will defend anyone. Then they would organize mass protest meetings and they would themselves be the sponsors. Of course, their meetings were raided just as much as ours; it didn't make any difference who did it. In the unemployed meetings, I remember one family in particular that was shot at during that time, the Dells; Basil Dell was the name of the man who was shot in the leg. Another case was at Pershing Square, where demonstrations were held. That was, of course, before Pershing Square was built up as it is now to prevent demonstrations. Then it was just a park. We used to hold demonstrations there. It was supposed to be a free speech zone; that and the Plaza were the two main free speech zones of downtown L.A. At no time could you go to a street corner, but in these places you were supposed to be able to speak. Of course, one big memory I have was a demonstration at Pershing Square where so much tear gas was thrown that the Biltmore had to be practically evacuated because it all seeped into that luxurious hotel. People were climbing trees to get away from the police, who were charging; there was just no restriction on them. In the 1932 presidential campaign, [William Z.] Foster was the candidate and came to speak at the Plaza at a campaign mass meeting. He was arrested and deported out of Los Angeles, put on a train and sent to Arizona, They wouldn't let him stop here long enough to speak. A convention was held, an attempt to hold a party convention in Long Beach, along about that time, and it was raided, nineteen people arrested. Ultimately, I think, the charges were dismissed but, again, it was typical. We'd lots of times get the charges dismissed, but it was after our rights to do any of these things were impaired.

GARDNER

What sort of charges did they bring?

HEALEY

Unlawful assembly, disturbing the peace, inciting to riot, vagrancy; all these charges were imposed, and criminal syndicalism for some. As a matter of fact, you want me to go back a few years to a famous case, the Yetta Stromberg red flag case?

GARDNER

Sure!

HEALEY

All right. Because that was one of the first cases that I remember getting involved in. In 1928, a young woman by the name of Yetta Stromberg--it might have been 1927 that she was actually arrested at one of these Young Pioneer camps in San Bernardino--was arrested. It became known as the red flag case because the camp would roll up a red flag every day at the camp. It became a very famous case in legal history because she was convicted in all the lower courts, the conviction was upheld at the appellate court, but [she was] finally freed by the [U.S.] Supreme Court. But in the process of it, again like in every other case of that time, the International Labor Defense and therefore everybody else in this periphery of Left organizations, all of which were very interrelated and interconnected, organized great [demonstrations]. You know, she'd go on a speaking tour, people would raise money to pay for attorneys and the legal cases and distribute leaflets, and everything of course was an expose of capitalist injustice. Yetta was very important. Over and above anything else, she stayed at our home in Berkeley, and this is when we were just finding contact again after the years of absence from the movement. As a matter of fact, my mother was very fond of her. When I dropped out of high school, my mother kept saying, "You know, Yetta went on to college!" But its main significance, of course, was this history of repression in California, which is hard to believe nowadays, which meant that any assembly of any kind was broken up. This was also a period, however, of some sectarianism in the movement. A number of Young Communist League members were expelled from high school, from Roosevelt High, I remember particularly, that year in 1932, because they refused to salute the flag. In later years, much later years, my son's elementary school teacher, a Miss Emery, told me how she had been a teacher at Roosevelt High during this period when our kids wouldn't salute the flag. She said the way she solved it, because she didn't want to report them (she knew they'd be expelled if she reported them), is that she had them stand and hold the flag so they wouldn't have to salute it.

GARDNER

Maybe you could say a few words about the Red Squad. I think the atmosphere in Los Angeles was made doubly interesting by the existence of Hynes and so forth. Was he actually police chief?

HEALEY

No, no, he was head of the Red Squad.

GARDNER

How does that work?

HEALEY

It's now called the Metropolitan Squad. It has the same function, but they had to change the name by the forties.

GARDNER

But it was actually called the Red Squad?

HEALEY

Yeah, that was the name of it, the Red Squad.

GARDNER

Who was police chief in those days, do you remember?

HEALEY

No, I don't. You know, I don't think anybody really paid any attention.

GARDNER

It doesn't really matter.

HEALEY

Hynes was the important man. Hynes was the famous man. Hynes was the one that had all the publicity. He operated pretty much independently. The Red Squad was used indiscriminately because everything was Communist as far as Hynes was concerned: the AF of L, the CIO, the unemployed, students. It didn't matter what; as far as he was concerned everything was Communist, and anything that was Communist was illegal and to be busted up.

GARDNER

Who was he?

HEALEY

For a while he had been an agent provocateur in the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] in the 1920s. When he was exposed in San Pedro, I think, in 1923, he then came out openly as a cop and became promoted, rose to either the heights or the depths as the head of the squad. He was a power in himself in the city, untouchable. While Los Angeles was bad, it was not unique. I remember in 1931--I'd forgotten this--I went down to San Diego for the Young Communist League to help organize what was to be a statewide demonstration down there of what we called National Youth Day. I'll be damned if I remember when National Youth Day was, or what it was supposed to be about, but it was National Youth Day. It was a nationwide day. And when I went down to San Diego there was--of course, we never had any money; nobody heard of getting paid wages. The same thing was true later with the Trade Union Unity League--you'd try to get around five dollars a week for spending money. Even that you'd get by people giving donations. But you'd stay at different people's homes and they'd feed you. But in San Diego the few people who were Communist there were terribly scared of us coming in from the outside. They lived there year-round. San Diego has always been a place of concentration of naval intelligence, and people were always intimidated. I remember we slept in the headquarters on the benches. Anyway, we organized a demonstration, and before three minutes had gone by, it was attacked by the police and dispersed. Nobody was allowed to do it. Hynes and the Red Squad were more consolidated in their activities. In other words, there was a broadside against any aspect of either labor, or unemployed, or student activity. It was more extensive in the police brutality. But it was not totally unique by any means. During this period as well, in the period from 1930 to '33, there were very large hunger marches, where we'd go from either Los Angeles, whatever the city might be-- all the hunger marches ended up in Sacramento. But again, as distinct from caravans and parades of this day, the purpose of those was to stop in small towns on the way up. Each place you accumulated more supporters who'd join with you, and then you'd go on to the next town. I have one memory of that again in Berkeley in 1931. Just before a state hunger march to San Francisco or Sacramento, I don't remember which, my little sister, Carol Jean, who was about five or six, stood up on a soap box to make a speech for the children of the unemployed on what it meant to be a little child growing up with unemployment around, the life of a child from unemployed families.

GARDNER

Your father had died by that time, hadn't he?

HEALEY

My father died on September 20 of 1931.

GARDNER

What was your mother doing then?

HEALEY

Well, Mama was really desperate because--my father had left $10,000 in insurance, and Mama had no trade. She hadn't worked for years ... In all the years we were growing up, she hadn't worked. Some man who worked for the ILGWU [International Ladies' Garment Workers Union] as a research director came over to see her, told her he was a stock-market expert (he was one of our friends), and advised her to invest in the stock market. She did under his direction. As a matter of fact, he handled the account. She promptly lost every cent she had except for $950. Well, all the rest of us were already taken care of--I was sixteen, married--but Carol Jean was just a child. By this time, my mother had moved down here to Pasadena. I don't know where she got the nerve--probably it was sheer desperation; she didn't know what to do--she took $750 out of the $950 and invested it in Douglas Aircraft when it was fourteen and sold it when it was seventy-two, and she's lived on that the rest of her life. [laughter] She was always shamefaced about it because she didn't think radicals should do such things, thought it was terrible for a radical to be in the stock market, and she'd never admit it to anybody outside of the family. We always used to howl over it. I used to quote her, you know, Marx or Engels saying that the stock market was dead labor, and therefore wasn't an exploitation of living labor, that she shouldn't worry about it. But she was always very uncomfortable and embarrassed by it; she was profiting by the capitalist system. But she was remarkably lucky.

GARDNER

Which brings us now down to about December 1933. In reading about the things in the Imperial Valley, the troubles there--they actually started around 1930, didn't they, with melon growers?

HEALEY

They started in '30, the current wave of strikes, I mean what became "modern." There had been earlier strikes in the early 1919, during the war or just after the war, quickly broken up. But the next big strike came in 1930, and that's when Gene Dennis was down there, under the name he was then known by here in California before he went away, Frank Waldren, which is his own name. That was his family name, Francis Xavier Waldren. Frank Spector was another one of the defendants. They were all arrested and charged with criminal syndicalism. Gene wasn't. Gene had already been arrested in the earlier strike in San Bernardino, and under party instruction had left the state, lost his bail bond. As a matter of fact, he went on with Peggy, his wife, to Moscow. The others were arrested on the charge and spent about two years in San Quentin until they were freed by the Supreme Court, by the appeals.

GARDNER

Just to intersperse a question here: Who were some of the party leadership at that time in the state, and did you know them?

HEALEY

Sure, sure. Let's see. Well, the first D.O., District Organizer, I remember was a man by the name of Manuel Levin. He's now dead. Following Manny came Sam Darcy, who was expelled in 1945. Darcy was one of the most brilliant Communists I ever met. Totally obnoxious as a human being. Absolutely the most arrogant man in the world, with a wife (Emily Black was her name) who considered it her God-given privilege to serve her husband as secretary, mother, wife, everything. But he was brilliant. He was a man who could stand up on a public platform and take a stock market page, the financial page, out of his pocket, speak on what was the news of the financial page that day, and leave the audience absolutely engrossed and aware of the meaning of capitalist economics, what was going on. He remained the district organizer until 1935, through the general strike, in other words, then went to Moscow to the Congress of the Seventh World Conference and did not come back to California. I think he was actually out of the country for a few years. After him came Bill Schneiderman, my ex-brother-in-law. Bill Schneiderman stayed the chairman of the party until the Northern and Southern California districts split in 1955 or 1956. The Young Communist League organizers who I remember, the state leaders, were--the first one was a man by the name of John Little (he's the one I distributed leaflets with at this Army-Navy game). After him came--I'm not sure of the sequence of this, but there was Jack Olsen, who was the husband of Tillie Olsen, the novelist and short story writer, always a woman of great promise even as a novelist in those days, who never really fulfilled all the talent she had, a really significant talent. Archie Brown was for a while a YCL organizer; Dick Criley, who came to us from Stanford and who's now in Chicago; Frank Carlsen, who left the party in 1957, with whom I had terrible fights in order to get the right to go back to organizing the CIO in 1937. A guy by the name of Max--what in the hell was his last name? Can't remember anymore. He left the party in the late forties, a very wealthy man. Another guy who is wealthy now is Max Olsen, Jack's brother. He's a millionaire in Orange County. Here in Los Angeles there was a guy by the name of John Leech, who turned out to be a stool pigeon. There was another guy, by the name of Lawrence Ross, who became a witness against Harry Bridges twenty years later. A woman by the name of Ida Rothstein, who actually signed my application--the day I was eighteen I joined the party, which was the earliest constitutionally you could join in--she signed my recruiting card for the party. She's the one who, when Red Hynes searched her purse during a demonstration, the charge was dismissed against her because of the unlawful search. I think she got a small twenty-five dollar thing that he had to pay her for damages. Max Silver left the party, and his wife testified in the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] hearings as a friendly witness. His wife was Louise Light. Paul Cline was the head of the party for most of the time here in L.A. from 1935 to 1940. He's left the party. He became a contractor in Oakland, and I gather that he's very well-to-do. Pettis Perry was just coming into the party leadership at that point through the ILD [International Labor Defense]. The head of the ILD was a woman by the name of Mandy [Mrs. LaRue] McCormick, who's not in the party any longer, left twenty-five years ago, but who still is what I would call a tribune of the people, just a tremendous human being, subject of another funny story about one of my abortions later on in Bakersfield in 1938.

GARDNER

Well, I think that covers it.

HEALEY

Yeah, and Ben Dobbs and I both met in 1931 and have remained close friends and comrades since then. He's still in the party leadership.

GARDNER

Well, then, here we are in December 1933 again, on the way to the Imperial Valley, where the strike is in progress,

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, I drove down with Stanley Hancock, who was a former newspaperman, and Frank Nieto. Frank Nieto was one of the Chicanes who was a great man, whose name Chicanes know nothing about, and yet who was one of the most beautiful, dedicated people I've ever known. He had lost his left hand, I don't remember how; his left hand was always covered with a glove. He would travel up and down the state, organizing. An extremely intelligent and extraordinarily knowledgeable man, but again, the word I'd use most descriptive of him was "selfless." He helped lead the delegation up here to get us to come down. I notice that the history books on the agricultural organization always say that we dominated and controlled the Mexican workers there, which is not true at all. In the first place, we never went there without their inviting us in, and there was never a strike in which they did not play the most important role, more than anybody else. The Imperial Valley strike came after the San Joaquin cotton strike, which had been the long strike, had lasted the longest, had been broken up with the greatest brutality, and as a result had evoked a lot of governmental attention, especially at Corcoran, where people had been killed. That had been in the summer of 1933. It was the first big introduction of the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union to the scene. Ours was the second, came right along behind it. But the Imperial Valley, as distinct from any other place, was a self-enclosed, feudally run barony. It was really a self-contained area. One had the feeling of being totally insulated from the rest of society. You were there; nobody knew anything about what was going on--and the most horrendous things would go on, and later became known to at least the liberal people who read Nation magazine. There weren't very many. Some of the churches would get upset about what was going on. The first thing that was done was to call a meeting of all those who were interested in the union, a mass meeting at Azteca Hall in Brawley, which became the center of the strike, which was all over the Imperial Valley, in all the little towns--Holtville, Calexico, El Centro, everything. I should tell you that unknown to us, because we didn't have enough sense to pay any attention to such things, California had just initiated, with a starting date of January 1, a kind of a marketing control of lettuce to diminish the amount of lettuce being shipped out. Therefore, the shippers actually welcomed our strike, but we didn't know that. We didn't know it until years later. We had just no knowledge. The wages were ten cents an hour. The workers were working in the heat--there was heat year-around, in the summertime going up to 125°, and even in January, 85°-90°. No drinking water except for the irrigation ditches that would go through the field, and the irrigation ditches were used for everything, for toilets, for washing. The people who lived in the valley--not the migratory workers but the people who lived there-lived in a colony, little shanties built over little dirt floors. My own estimate now is that of the 7,000, 8,000 strikers, probably 40 percent were either Mexican or Chicano, probably 15 percent were Filipino--(a very high percentage of Filipino workers), and then a scattering between the rest of the Anglos who were just coming in from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas (the first dust bowl refugees were starting to arrive), and Blacks, not a terribly large number of Blacks working. At the first meeting that was held, attended by several thousand--I say "several thousand," I'm not sure of that figure--the first thing that was done in almost every strike was to set up rank-and-file committees of workers to run the strike, because for us a strike was always an education for revolution, and obviously you couldn't educate for revolution if people didn't run their own affairs. They had to learn how to handle everything. You'd set up a strike committee for scrounging relief because you'd open up a food kitchen right away. So then there'd be a committee that would go out to the little stores which the workers patronized in the community to get donations, go into the city to get donations. When donations wouldn't come to them they'd go to tour union meetings outside of San Diego for donations, civic meetings for them. There would be a negotiating committee, an educational committee, a picketing committee to take charge of the--as a matter of fact the best description of an agricultural strike that we led, the Communists led, that I've ever read is John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, which I think is a far better book than Grapes of Wrath as far as a picture of the momentum of a struggle, of what it represented. The Imperial Valley strike [hinged] more on this question of Chicanes than later strikes ever had, because of its adjacence to the border. But starting in 1935 the big repatriation things were going on, and they were just shipping Mexican-Americans and Mexicans by the hundreds back to Mexico; the Anglos took over the fields. From 1936 until the war, I would say the bulk of the workers in the agricultural fields were Anglo workers. At any rate, the first meeting that was held, we would always elect these committees; we would always describe the role of the union, discuss the demands, work out the contract with the workers. Everybody would participate, shouting out what was needed and so forth. We would always say we were Communists at the first meeting. Workers should know it. During the course of the next few days we would hold meetings with those who were interested in the Communist party. One meeting in particular stands out in my mind, probably the next one after I arrived. I drove out to one of the workers* homes in the desert: a flickering lamp, there was no electricity, sitting in this little tiny room with the light flickering because of the lamp going on and off, my speaking in English and then being translated, everything being translated as you went along, talking about the Communist party. The response of the Mexican workers was, "Of course, we're for the revolution. When the barricades are ready, we'll be on the barricades, but don't bother us with meetings all the time. We know what to do, we know who the enemy is!" This was the generation who had come over from the Mexican Revolution: anticlerical, very sophisticated politically and very anarchosyndicalist, and unbothered by organization. "Just tell us when the revolution is ready. We'll be there." There was a great deal of male-female equality among the workers. I can't remember then or in any other activity in the CIO that I was engaged in with those workers (I remember it with other CIO leaders, but not with those workers) any attitudes of male supremacy, any challenging because I was either young or a woman--just a total unconcern with it. If you seemed to know what you were doing, if you had something to say, then there was respect. It wasn't until actually later, as I say, both from particular people like Harry Bridges, who was one of the world's great male supremacists, and later even in the party itself, when I came into full-time party work, that I found any real significant male supremacist attitudes. The activities were mainly picketing to get out to the farms (you could not go on the farm; that was trespassing), to let the workers know who didn't know there was a strike going on, because communication was always the most difficult problem. The farms were all spread all over God's green acre. Just to know what was going on was enormous, so that the picketing committee and the educational committee always had the hardest jobs. It was always rotated. Everybody took their turn at it. The committee was in charge of organizing it, but then that meant that everybody else had to participate in activities. Of course, you slept in the headquarters on the floor. That was taken for granted. I remember one thing about the Filipino workers. After the strike headquarters, the Azteca Hall, was attacked by the police and the vigilantes, every night we were taken to sleep in a different home so that the police couldn't find us. There was a warrant out for our arrest and a $10,000 reward for us. I remember one time being taken to a little room and stretching out on the floor to go to sleep, and about twenty minutes after I was down, the door opens, and in come two or three Filipino men. I say hello, and they say hello; and they lie down, and about a half hour later another few more come in. This kept on for a while, until there were probably about twenty men there. There was just absolutely no self-consciousness on anybody's part about the fact that I was the only woman with them. Everybody stretched out, everybody slept, and it was, in the morning, "How are you, comrades, fellow workers?" You know, nothing! I would say the Filipino workers in some respects were the best organized of any group in the strike, partly because they lived the most together life among themselves. There were no Filipino women allowed to come into the United States. They lived totally an existence of men traveling everywhere together, living everywhere together. It was a horrible, terrible existence. The attitudes between the Filipinos, the Chicanos, and later the Anglos was again a remarkable thing to watch: all of them, each in their own way, afflicted with degrees of racial feeling, and yet within a few days the suspicions, the hatred, the prejudices, just evaporating under the impact of the comradeship engendered by the strike, by the sharing of mutual experiences, including the police attacks, trying to maintain the strike and extend it. The first two weeks of the strike, my vague memory is of strike meetings going on day and night. Pat Chambers from the San Joaquin strike came in town, but he was kind of underground, as was again Pop Hanoff--Elmer Hanoff came down for the party. Both of them stayed in El Centro, and Stanley and I used to go in two or three times a week to have party meetings with them. Where do you go from here? What do you see? The biggest waste of time! It was a waste of time mainly because we were not masters of the situation in the sense that when you are in a situation like that, the initiative is out of your hands; it's in the hands of the dominant culture, the dominant society. This was really where the vigilante activities got a great start. There was set up the Associated Farmers. Very few of them were ever farmers. Most of them were bankers, chamber of commerce types, who were later exposed by the La Follette Committee hearings. What they would do! It happened not only in the Imperial Valley, nor did it happen only in agricultural strikes; it became the characteristics of all strikes including the longshoremen's strikes, the strikes in the cities themselves, that there was a mobilization of what they'd call the citizens': committees to break the strike. It was very cleverly done, and tremendously significant and important. Our need to counter that was equally important. In each case a strike was pictured as the prelude to Bolshevik revolution. It endangered every bank teller and clerk in the Woolworth stores equally. The issue was never that the agricultural farms were owned and controlled by huge big businesses; always what was pictured to the public were these starving little individual farmers, this little farmer who could not pay one cent more. Nothing changes. The more things change, the more they stay the same! [laughter] These vigilante committees would be organized through all the interlocking organizations--the American Legions, the Kiwanis, and all these groups--of armed men to go out and beat up the strikers and the strike leaders. They would go into the community and carry on, the same as Ku Klux Klan activities. This is what happened in the Imperial Valley. The idea, for instance, of trying to hold a peaceful march just to show that there was a strike and to appeal for support--you couldn't move two minutes before you were beaten up. As a matter of fact, I remember a baby was killed the first week of the strike from tear gas. The baby suffocated to death. By the end of the second week, however, they attacked. The police came into the Azteca Hall in plain clothes; we didn't even know who they were. When they came in, I thought the man who came was one of the vigilantes. He asked for Dorothy Ray. I said, "What do you want her for?" He said, "I have a warrant for her arrest." Well, I was down in the office off-stage; I immediately ran up onto the stage--there were hundreds of people in the hall (it was where the food kitchen stuff was prepared, the meetings were held and everything; we held two mass meetings a day to explain what was going on, people would speak and give reports)--to shout that the police were there or whoever they were. He ran out, and they barricaded the doors, the cops did, both the state highway and the city police, and these vigilante gangs. There were no windows in the lower portion of tjfee hall, but there were little tiny windows all around the wall. It was a huge hall-still standing, I think. They lobbed tear gas through those little tiny windows. Again, here's an example of this initiative of workers. We hadn't prepared for this, but a guy by the name of Murietta, who of course immediately got the nickname of "Joaquin," a huge man, picked me up and later came back and got Stanley, took me way to the back of the hall, and put us over the skylight windows, or whatever they were, some kind of windows there at the back. Other workers were already there in the back to catch us as we were thrown over, to take us back to their homes. They were prepared for an attack; we weren't. We were the experienced organizers who went down to show them. Well, they took us together at that point--Stanley and I were both together still for a while--and they dug places out underneath the beds (as I say, these were just dirt floors), and they put us underneath the beds. We'd stay either there or in one or another home--home?--like that for some time. I say "home?" because these places are simply little one-room abodes--no toilets, no running water, no electricity, just nothing. We decided there had to be some physical presence of the strike so that workers would not become demoralized and think that the strike was over. It was agreed that I should be the one to speak because Stanley was more important to keep out for planning things. If I got arrested, it wasn't as important. So Stanley went to El Centro, and we distributed leaflets that there would be a strike meeting at six o'clock across the street from the Azteca Hall. We weren't going to get trapped inside a hall again. At ten to six, I just left the house where I was staying and walked probably three-quarters of a mile, a mile, to this empty lot. When I got there there were just hundreds--I would have said thousands; my later memory tells me that it was probably just hundreds--of workers there. I just stood on the shoulders of two of the men and started speaking. While I was speaking, the state highway patrol came, and they flashed their lights on us, then opened the doors of the car and let two dogs out. One group of workers--again, believe me, I didn't think of it; we didn't plan nothing, but the workers did this--made a semicircle and started to run like hell across the fields. Just boom! And the police and the dogs set out in pursuit of them. Simultaneously, one of the guys tapped me on the shoulder. I didn't speak any Spanish because I'm a backward, stupid, provincial Anglo. He just tapped me on the shoulder and puts out his hands, "Come." And we went hand in hand down some dry irrigation ditches, inside. He took me to another home to stay. Later Stanley found where I was and came to have a meeting to discuss what to do. There was still this warrant out for our arrest and a $10,000 reward. We decided we just had to break through for publicity. People and the rest of the country had to know what was going on. It was the only thing that could save the strike, the publicity. We got word that there was an American newspaper reporter, an Anglo newspaper reporter, by the name of Burke--no, that wasn't his name. [Gene] Burke was another man who figured in this; Burke was the man who made the arrangements. Burke was an importer from Mexico; he dealt across the line. He knew an American reporter who wanted to interview us so that we'd make the press and people would know the story of what was going on. We agreed to meet him in a bar, and we did. He was very obliging and said it was a great story. He was a stool pigeon and we didn't know it, a police agent. If he wasn't a police agent, he's the one who turned us in for the reward, because we found out later that he followed us back to the place where we stayed. The next morning the young boy at the home where we were staying came racing in and, in Spanish, shouted to his mother the police were coming, the police were coming. We looked out, and we could see the state highway patrol, about ten or fifteen men with submachine guns going from house to house in the colony searching everyplace. We didn't want to be found in this house because the family would be arrested and thrown across the border immediately. Nobody cared whether they were citizens or not. That's when the term Mexican-American, or the term Mexican, didn't mean anything; there was just no differentiation made. So we ran out. Stanley having longer legs, [being] tall, could run faster, and he ran down to a tent at the end of the lane, I got only as far as the privy, and I got in there. After about two minutes, I decided, "I don't care whether I get arrested," I wasn't going to stay there, the smell was so horrible. I just couldn't stand it; I was getting ill. So I made a dash; I got out, and I got to the tent where he was. There was a little hole in the tent, and we could watch them coming closer and closer from these little groups of homes. So we crawled under the tent on the opposite side. We would have gotten away except there was a fence. We couldn't climb the fence; it was very high and barbed wire. So we stretched out, and we were prone. Again, they wouldn't have found us except that the sun was casting our shadow into the tent. The next thing we know we hear a trembling voice saying, "Stand up, stand up, or I'll shoot. Stand up, stand up, or I'll shoot!" We stood up, and there was the state highway patrolman going like this, just shaking all over with this submachine gun. They were terrified. We were the terrible Bolsheviks that they had heard about. They were far more scared than we were. We were scared of their Goddamn shaky hands!

GARDNER

The guns in them.

HEALEY

Yeah! We were taken first to the Brawley jail, booked, and then taken to the El Centro jail and booked on four charges: unlawful assemblage, inciting to riot, vagrancy, and a lovely law known as "rout." Rout was a law that was passed about 1877 that says that if two or more people get together to discuss an act, which, if consummated, in the opinion of the police could result in a riot, that getting together constitutes an act of rout. We were put in the Imperial Valley jail in El Centro, the county jail.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 24, 1972

GARDNER

When we left off last time, Mrs. Healey, you were in the Imperial Valley, and undergoing all the difficulties that people were undergoing during the strike in the early thirties, and, as I recall, about to get arrested.

HEALEY

Just before we get to the arrest thing, there is one other incident that I think rather exemplified the kind of lessons and impressions that I was accumulating--not always with consciousness of what I was learning, but this particular episode was one of the few where I understood and was impressed by what I was seeing. I think I already have mentioned the initiative and creativity that I watched flowering in the course of the strike in the union organization, the fact that there was a channel through which the latent talents of human beings could be expressed. One of the other things was watching the suspicion between national groups disappear. There was a combination of that which this one anecdote typifies. The union leaders and the organizers were driving out to meet the strikers from Calipatria, the pea strike, in the month of February. This was after our arrest, actually, but was coincidental to what was going on. In the car were Stanley Hancock, Sterling Alexander (from San Diego), and myself. One of us, I think it xvas Sterling, said, "My, isn't it absolutely extraordinary watching the Mexican worker, the Mexican-American worker, his enormous capacities, the enormous qualities that are being demonstrated?" And one of the others said, "Yes, but I'm just so impressed by seeing the Filipino workers and their solidarity and their unity." And the third one of us, "But these Anglos coming in from the Midwest! To see what happens to these people: how all the suspicions and their hatreds and their bigotries are broken down. How just incredibly courageous and thoughtful they are!" And we all started laughing, realizing what we had said, and how we finally agreed, "Isn't it wonderful how wonderful the workers of the world are, regardless of the national origin, this common capacity that is present!" At any rate, coming back to the arrest, the state highway patrol with their guns all drawn surrounded us at the back of the tent where Stanley Hancock and I were lying, with their voices quavering, "Get up or we'll shoot! Get up or we'll shoot!" They were absolutely terrified. It was clear that they were totally convinced by all the newspaper bulletins they'd heard about these wild Bolsheviks Here was Stanley, who was twenty-three or twenty-four, and myself, whatever I was at that time--nineteen, I guess. They took us to the Brawley jail. The only other thought that I had in my mind at that point is that in my jeans pocket I had the address of Pat Chambers. He and Elmer Hanoff and two or three other party and union leaders were in El Centro, but in a semiunder-ground capacity--in other words, they were not there publicly. And here I had this address, and all I thought was, "Oh! My goodness, when they search they're going to find it, and my comrade will have been betrayed to them!" I kept thinking, "How am I going to dispose of this before we get to the jail?" They had us handcuffed while they were taking us in, but when they took us into the jail, they didn't have a woman on duty to search me, and the men are not allowed to search a woman prisoner, the cops. When they put me in a cell, the first thing I did was to chew up and swallow this address. At any rate, they transferred us from Brawley to the El Centro jail. In the course of the next few days, they arrested probably another forty or fifty people from the strike.

GARDNER

What were the charges?

HEALEY

There were four charges against us: one was inciting to riot, the second was unlawful assemblage, the third was vagrancy, and the fourth was rout. That's a law that only last year was used again for the first time in all the years intervening. It was passed in the 1870s. It said something about that if two or more people gathered together to discuss an action which if consummated could result in a riot, that assemblage in itself of two or three people gathered together is an illegal act.

GARDNER

Parenthetically, who was it used against last year?

HEALEY

I'm not sure who it was used against. I just remember that it ...

GARDNER

Not specifically. Was it the farm workers?

HEALEY

No, no. It had something to do with the peace demonstrations. I just remember being amused when I saw that it was used. The big question then, of course, became the question of raising bail for us to get out. We had a strict rule that the first ones to be bailed out were the workers from the areas, that the union organizers were to be the last. But I think I mentioned last time I had a problem: I was pregnant and about to have an abortion. I knew that time was running out, that it had to be done. So after much consultation with . . . [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] . . . all the strikers, it was agreed that we would go out of order, and I would be one of the first bailed out so that I could come back up to Los Angeles immediately and have the abortion. There was one other young person, a young woman from Los Angeles who was in jail with me. Her name was Janet Elfman. She was a member of the Young Communist League. She had been arrested. There had been a big drive throughout the Southern California area to drive carloads, truck- loads of food down to help the strikers, to help the relief. She had driven down with one of the truckloads. While she was there, she started helping to put out the leaflets, to mimeograph them and so forth. The main thing that we were trying to keep demonstrating was that the strike was alive, that the union was there, that the union hadn't disappeared. Again, her story I remember because it was a humorous story. She was arrested in the little office room that had been rented to house the mimeograph machine. The mimeograph machine was always the major weapon we had; the biggest thing we had was a mimeograph machine to get out our material. She had been charged with prostitution because she was the only woman in the room full of men, most of them at that point Filipino men. It was only after they took her to jail and gave her a physical examination that they found out that she was a virgin. So they released her! We always giggled over that. At any rate I got out on bail about a week or so after the arrest and came back to Los Angeles. The bail was forthcoming almost immediately for all the others as well. We came up and had very intensive joint meetings of the Young Communist League and Communist party leaders to discuss the lessons of the strike. Always our main concern after any action was, "What did we do wrong?" What was inadequate? What was weak? What had not been commensurate with what the needs were? I would emphasize this because it was another one of those pressures which, if one could survive it, toughened one and developed greater capacities and abilities as far as meeting a situation. I can't remember any situation, including this one, where after any major action people were complimented. We always looked for what was weak, what was inadequate. My memory of those discussions was that in this lettuce strike we had not made adequate provisions for what would happen after a police attack as to how to maintain and guarantee the strike would go on. This was a very serious thing because we should have obviously anticipated the action that was taking place. We knew the area we were going into and what would happen. While we were up here in Los Angeles, the other comrades and workers had been arrested, but this story is mainly about some of the Communists that had been arrested, including Pat Chambers. They had found Pat and arrested him. He was still in El Centro when we came up here--Stanley, Alexander, and myself. The district attorney, Elmer Heald, offered to make a deal for all of us. It was to encompass all the people who had been arrested who didn't live in Imperial Valley, that if we would plead guilty to the charges against us, they would give us a suspended sentence. We wouldn't have to spend any time in jail if we would agree to take what was called a floater, that is, to leave the area and not come back for the period of the jail time. Pat accepted the offer, and when we came back to the valley we were absolutely indignant over it, outraged, because this was to us a violation of what we called a class approach. We never plead guilty. We would not agree to make deals with the prosecution. Pat had already left the valley. We had a discussion and decided that he had violated party principles, and he had to come back, and he had to violate the agreement in order to show that we did not give in to these kind of things. We would not make deals; we would not compromise. We never plead guilty. As I look back at it now, it was probably an example of the kind of rigid approaches, because clearly we were not serving any purpose by being in the jail, and we were not going to come back to the Imperial Valley, anyway. So it was a defiance that may not have had too much significance; I'm not sure. But it was expressive of our refusal to compromise in any way. As I say, one could be critical of that now. I could be critical of that, looking back, because as my later life's experience taught me, there are times when a compromise, as long as it doesn't violate basic principles, may be a necessary thing. It is not in itself a betrayal; it does not automatically constitute a betrayal. At any rate, we told the district attorney that we'd make no such deal, and we came back to the Imperial Valley in February. That's when this new strike started. It was centered in Calipatria, and the crop was peas. This was entirely a strike of Anglos, which is very unusual, that it only involved them.

GARDNER

These Anglos would have been the migrant workers who came out of Oklahoma.

HEALEY

Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas. Just the people who Steinbeck christened "the Okies," and it stayed forevermore, that definition--the Okies and the Arkies. They immediately made contact with us. As I said, we used to drive out every night about midnight, way out into the desert, to meet with them. Historians say that it was a strike organized by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Union; they are inaccurate. It was a spontaneous strike. They immediately made contact with us, and we, of course, met with them every night. They had devised some new techniques as far as reaching the workers, new and differentiated from the January strike, and that was a roving picket line entirely in auto caravans with bullhorns, where they would shout to the workers still working who didn't know there was a strike. They also all congregated together in one camp. They had a very well organized strike, until again both the police and vigilante attacks on them started. You never could differentiate between what was legal and what was not legal as far as these attacks. In other words, the vigilantes who had been mobilized and organized by the Associated Farmers became an extralegal arm of the sheriff and the state highway patrol. There was no way, as I say, to differentiate between them and the "legal," in quotes, police--I say "in quotes" because they were just as illegal in their actions as the others. The big attack that came on them was that they burned down their camp, drove them out of the camp, and there was no way, no place they could find a way to live. They broke the strike in that way. Did I mention Al Wirin in that time?

GARDNER

I don't think so. No, not yet.

HEALEY

Well, I'm not entirely sure of the chronological sequence, but I think it was in the month of January during the lettuce strike when, as I say, the big major attacks were taking place to break up the strike, the American Civil Liberties Union sent Al Wirin down as an attorney. I think it was Wirin's first major case. While he was staying in the hotel in the Imperial Valley, he was kidnapped by the vigilantes, taken out into the desert, miles out, and abandoned there. They told him that if he ever came back they'd kill him. The ACLU tried to organize another meeting. In my opinion the ACLU generally was remarkably courageous and militant, played a far more active role than it played in later years as far as protecting the rights of people. As I say, one of the things I remember they did was organize this mass meeting, first having gotten a federal injunction against the police breaking it up, to test the right of people to gather together. Of course, what happened as soon as the meeting was over and people left, particularly the Mexican workers were attacked and beaten up and the deportations would start. Other lawyers were arrested when they came down to defend us. I remember one, Wilbur Breeden from Arizona, who was thrown into jail with us in January, while we were still in on the charge of vagrancy, even though he was an attorney. This was pretty much the atmosphere.

GARDNER

How did the strike turn out eventually? That may be a naive question.

HEALEY

Well, both strikes in the sense of a formal ending never formally ended. Both kind of just drifted out. They were broken and defeated, and yet even in the process of the defeat, certain gains were made. Outside of the intangible gain--intangible in that you don't have exact measurements for it--of the consciousness of workers, the development of new leaders of the workers, there was also the fact that in terms of the demands of the strikers, if nothing else it stopped the wage cuts that were there, and in many cases it did drive up the wage standards by a few cents. Our trials started in March . . .

GARDNER

Was this 1934?

HEALEY

... of 1934 in Brawley, in the Brawley court- house. We decided to defend ourselves because of these arrests and the harassing of all the attorneys. Grover Johnson--I don't know whether I mentioned what happened to him. He was there as an attorney for the ILD. He's a very interesting man. He had been a law partner of Senator Burton Wheeler of Montana at one time, and he had also been the district attorney in Butte; he had been rather conservative in the twenties. He came down to San Bernardino in the late twenties. Simply out of the principle of justice of what he had been trained as a lawyer, he decided to take these cases of workers being attacked for organizing, and himself became radicalized in the process of it. He had gone into the superior court arguing on a writ of habeas corpus for Pat Chambers, who had been arrested as soon as he violated this floater when he came back into town. As he was coming down the courthouse steps, he was accosted by a group of vigilantes with guns who started to beat him. His wife, Gladys, who was with him, ran down to their car--they kept a gun in the car to protect themselves--and as soon as she came out of the car she was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace and was put in jail for defending her husband. We decided that because of all these arrests of the lawyers, and because it really didn't make any difference in that atmosphere--I mean, the people who had lawyers were having the same convictions, one, two, three, immediately as anyone else--so Stanley and I decided to defend ourselves without having a lawyer. The trial was, again, very typical of a period. The justice of the peace was not a lawyer, knew absolutely nothing about procedure. This was true throughout the state; that was still legal. I don't think it is any longer. Now, I think that in the fifties, finally, they got around to changing it so that the justices who were either elected or appointed had to have passed the bar. So when any question would come up, the judge would simply turn to the district attorney and say, "Mr. Heald, what do I do?" And Mr. Heald would tell him. And sometimes when the judge would say or do something without having asked, the district attorney would say, "No, no, Your Honor, that's not proper. You've got to do it this way." And he would immediately rule it. Within the courtroom, they only allowed a handful of the people, of the workers, to come in. They just wouldn't let them in, and most of the courtroom was reserved for the Anglos, supporters of the Associated Farmers. But because there was such an enormous interest in the trial, they put a loudspeaker outside, and all day long--and the trial would sometimes go into the night--there would be hundreds of people outside listening to what was taking place inside the courtroom. It was like a fair, a county fair. There's not much to do in Brawley, so it had all the atmosphere of a fair--people gathering and staying there/ great excitement going on, particularly the great curiosity about these two people, Hancock and Ray, Dorothy Ray, these wild outside agitators, these Bolsheviks. During the trial--I remember only a few episodes of it actually. I remember one. I was on the witness stand, and Stanley was acting as the lawyer, asking me questions. Of course, we were mainly concerned with demonstrating the life conditions--how people lived and worked, the people of the valley, and particularly (because they were the majority in the lettuce strike who had been arrested) the Mexican and Mexican-American workers. I remember at one point Stanley was asking me about the food condition, how people ate, what kind of food they had because of the horrible wages. I was saying how they mostly lived on beans, that there was no way that they could afford to get meat, and so forth, the irony that in this vegetable center of the United States, they couldn't afford to have lettuce, to have salads. The foreman of the grand jury stood up, and he said, "Your Honor, do we really have to listen to any more of this Red agitation? I was in World War I, and the soldiers had to eat that kind of food, and if it was good enough for American soldiers, it's good enough for these dirty Mexicans living here!" The district attorney says, "No, no, no! Now sit down, you're not supposed to do that!" At another point, Stanley was in the witness chair, and I was examining him, asking him questions. Again, another person on the jury stood up, and he said, "Your Honor, do we have to listen to any more of this Red propaganda? Everybody knows they're guilty. What do we have to listen to them for?" Again, the district attorney said, "Your Honor, you must admonish the jury not to do that." [laughter] At any rate, at the conclusion (I think it was about a four- or five-day trial), the jury left the jury box and went out to the hall. We could see through the glass doors [that] they were standing there in the hall talking together. They were out ten minutes and came back in, and, of course, they found us guilty. I think the charge they finally settled on was disturbing the peace. We were sentenced to six months in jail. We appealed that, but because it was a misdemeanor and because in a justice court there is no record kept of a trial, no court stenographer, we could not appeal it outside of the county. So it went only to the Imperial Valley superior court. The appeal, of course, was rejected. On May 14, 1934, we came back down to the Imperial Valley. (We left between March and May, came back up here to Los Angeles.) We started to serve our sentences. It was a curious thing about the jail: the food was simply horrible, and they would allow all the other prisoners to have food brought in from the outside, but they would not allow me to have food brought in from the outside. But what they would let me do, which no other jail nowadays would ever do, was to allow me to have all the books brought in that I wanted. I had crate-loads of books. I remember--here is another one of these sidelights on life inside a jail--among the books I had were just a whole number on psychology. I became very interested in Andre Tridon. I never thought or heard of the man since, Tridon. And then there were [William] MacDougall, [John] Watson, [Sigmund] Freud. While I was reading them, the matron of the jail, a woman by the name of Mildred Cox, used to come up to talk to me about her life, because quite frequently I'd be the only woman prisoner left in the jail. Most of the prisoners were Mexican women who were being deported. They were just in there long enough to be held to be sent back, or they were prostitutes who were in for a couple of days and then given these floaters out of the town and told not to come back. So there were never any long periods that they were in.

GARDNER

How long was your sentence originally?

HEALEY

Six months. So Mildred Cox used to come. She'd come on duty and come up to talk to me because she was a nymphomaniac. She had nobody to tell about these enormous sexual experiences of hers. They were incredible.

GARDNER

How old a woman was she?

HEALEY

She was probably in her thirties. So every morning she'd come in to tell me the previous night's exploits because she had to have somebody to talk to about it. She figured I was safe enough. I didn't know anybody in the valley, and I sure as hell didn't care! But I was keeping a diary, and so what I started doing was to put down what she had described and then analyze it from these various schools of psychology I was reading. What would the behaviorists say? And the Freudians say? I would use the names that she--you know, I would write down literally everything that she would say and then try to analyze it from all these different various schools. Now I have to jump ahead to what happened on the last day I was in jail in order to tie the story together. On the day I was to get out, one of the women with whom I had become friendly~-she was in on charges of prostitution (she would come in and out; she was always being brought in on either drunkenness or prostitution), a woman by the name of Lola, who I had been warned was a stool pigeon and who was being brought in mainly to get me to talk to her (I had been warned that by other prisoners, but I really didn't care because there was nothing I had to hide)--she came up to me on the morning I was to go out and said, "Look, you better hide that diary of yours. If you think you're going to get it out, you're not, because I've heard them talking, and they're going to take it away from you." I said--still, after all those experiences, still very naively--"Oh, they can't do this to me. They can't take it away." Mildred Cox came in to look through my packinghouse crate of books to see what I was taking out with me, and she asked me for the diary. I said, "Well, that's my property. I won't give it to you." She said, "You're not leaving here with it. If you want to stay in jail, you can stay in jail." Well, my brother and sister were outside. They had come down to take me out, of which more later. I waited an hour, and then I thought, "Oh well, the hell with it. What do I care?" So I said, "All right, you can have it." Well, she put it in her desk, and I heard later the next year what had happened, because one of my comrades, Emma Cutler, who had been in with me for a few months (she had then also gotten out on a writ of habeas corpus, but later she was denied and had to come in and serve another three months by herself)--she told me that Mrs. Cox had put the diary in her desk drawer and had forgotten all about it. They were moving the desk around, and the deputy sheriffs picked up the diary as they were moving the desk and they said to her, "What's this?" She said, "Oh, that's the diary of that little Red bitch we had upstairs." So they opened it and started to read it. And there were all these stories about her! [laughter] Emma Cutler said to me, "You'd better never go back to the Imperial Valley, because if Mildred Cox ever gets hold of you she will literally burn you for what happened!" I always enjoyed that. At any rate, the jail experience itself was much worse for the men than it was for me. They had been in the cell, a whole number of strikers that had been arrested, the only outsider being Stanley Hancock. They were taken out to a work camp. While they were out at the work camp, there was a vigilante attack on them. A grave was dug, a cross was burned, and there was a cat-o1-nine-tails left beside the grave with a note saying, "If you Reds come back, this is what you are going to get." Oh, I forgot one part of the story about what happened during the Calipatria strike. Once when we went out--as I said, we were staying in a hotel in Brawley--a note was left at the hotel threatening us with what would happen if we stayed in the Imperial Valley. I remember the note left for me; it said that they were going to get me and they would mutilate my body, and this was the kind of warning that was present. Either because we were too young to know any different or whatever the reason, we just ignored these kinds of things. But the whole time we were in jail, there was great agitation going on in the newspapers: letters being written to the letters column which would be printed, saying, "How come we taxpayers have to pay to support and feed these people?" Threats that they were going to raid the jail and get us, threats of what they would do the day we would get out of jail. There was a constant agitation taking place over rising sentiment to justify the break into the jail. There was a great deal of worry among the few liberals in the Imperial Valley that this was a real danger, concern as to how to get support, how to stop it from taking place. But the main experience in the jail was that--well, neither that time nor during subsequent jailings, times that I spent in jail, did I really terribly mind it. In the first place, I loved to read, so that I did a lot of reading in every jail I've been in. Secondly, I loved to talk to the women prisoners. You know, it was an aspect of life that I had no direct contact with. As I say, most of them were prostitutes. You could always describe what's going on in a society by the kind of inmates that come in. In the later years that I was in jail, in the late forties and fifties, the main charges started to become narcotics. In the thirties, in all the jails during all the times I was arrested, I don't think I met one woman who was in on a narcotics charge at that point. So I was fascinated by their lives, and they were of course fascinated by mine. What the hell is this kid doing in there? What had she done?

GARDNER

You were about eighteen or nineteen?

HEALEY

Nineteen then. I remember one scene when I was trying to explain to a group of them why I was in jail. I was describing a strike and then what happened when the strikebreakers came in. They couldn't quite get the idea of strikebreakers, of how serious we regarded it. Finally, one of the prostitutes spoke up, "Oh, don't you understand what she's talking about? It's the same thing as chippies." I don't know, you may not be old enough to remember what a chippy is. It was a woman who had sexual relations without being paid, without having any charge on it. As a matter of fact, that became another amusing incident that happened in the jail. A whorehouse madam from Santa Barbara had been arrested. She came down and tried to set up a whorehouse in the Imperial Valley and hadn't paid the protection money, so Helen was in jail. Every Sunday, a group of society ladies would come through the jail to look at us and examine us, as if they were doing their good duty. We hated them. Condescending and lofty, we just--every woman in the jail resented it because it was always as if you were on inspection for them. One day Helen had been locked up in her cell most of the time. ... We were only in the cells at night; in the day, we were all in a common room together. But Helen was locked up because she would yell out the window at the trustees who were emptying the garbage and doing work outside our cells. We were on the second story. She had been yelling out dirty words or something, and so they put her in her cell. When the women came through, one of them came over to Helen, who was in the cell, and she said, "Oh, my good woman, what are you in here for?" And Helen says, "Why, you dirty bitch, I'm in here for selling what you give away." After that, we were never bothered with any more of these society ladies coming through to see us and to look at us. We would play a lot of cards together--I'm talking about the times when there were other women in the jail. There was always a lot of talk, talk, talk, talk, about what their lives were like. It was an enormous experience for me in terms of a familiarity, as I say, with an aspect of society that I had only read about, but of which I had never had any firsthand experience. I lost my good time, because in a tank right opposite us, connected only by the toilet pipes, the juveniles were kept, male juveniles. They were left there without anything to read, one or two at a time, just day and night totally alone. They were the ones who were not allowed to have any reading material--the reason I don't know. So we would talk outside of the windows--our windows both looked out the same way. They would tell me how they had nothing to do and whatnot; and so, through the toilet pipes, I would push through cigarettes and matches to them, so that they could at least have something to smoke. I sent them a note through the pipes saying that if they wanted cigarettes they should use some code word, and if they wanted matches, they should use another. Well, when the kids left, they left my note behind them. Mildred Cox then came up to say to me, "You have violated the jail rules. You've lost your good time." So when the men prisoners got out after five months (they got a month off for good behavior), I was still left behind because I had lost my good time. When the time for departure came up, there was, as I said, great worry about vigilante attacks, and letters were sent out asking for people to come down and be part of the caravan. I really thought it was unnecessary because I just didn't believe they were going to do a physical attack. But at any rate, my brother and sister came down, Bernard and Frances. When I gave up my diary, I finally was let out with a police escort, a motorcycle escort. We went first to San Diego, then the police escort left us at the county line, and then we drove off the rest of the way. It was really quite brave on their part because, as I say, the threats were certainly ominous enough. But nothing happened. I came back up to Los Angeles.

GARDNER

Before you go on to Los Angeles, how do you assess the strike, looking back on it now with a distance of nearly forty years, in terms of the effect that it had, the methods, in terms of what the YCL and the party did?

HEALEY

Well, I would say that one major thing it did, finally, ultimately, was to focus nationwide attention on the conditions of farm workers and migratory farm workers. General [Pelham D.] Glassford had been sent in by President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt to conduct a hearing on the conditions there, what was happening, the violations of free speech, of assemblage, and so forth. This I should have mentioned anyway because it was an important thing, both in exemplifying our sectarian approach as well as the limitation of what could be done by the federal government, limitation not because of the lack of power but their unwillingness to use their power on behalf of the workers--wanting to do something, that was clear, and yet unable to do anything. General Glassford, who lived at that point in Arizona, when he arrived in the valley, decided to try to cut through the grower-motivated hysteria. He tried to socialize with the growers and the bankers to cut through the--as I say, mainly to get away from the conclusion that anybody would be sent in by the government and be an outside aid to the union. It didn't do him any good because the growers and the newspapers denounced him in almost as rigorous and vigorous terms as they denounced us. We, in turn, had nothing to do with him because we denounced him as himself a grower, as an agent of the growers. Anybody who represented the government to us was automatically suspect; we never differentiated in that period of our politics. It was part of our whole anti-New Deal, anti-FDR period. But he conducted hearings on the violations of free speech and assemblage that documented, first of all, the horrible, outrageous living conditions of the workers; and secondly, the capacity of the growers to mobilize the entire agency of the state to prevent the workers from organizing into unions, to violate any law they wanted to with the help of the law to violate it. So, as far as a thin section of liberals throughout the United States who cared about such things, this did bring some focus of attention on the living conditions and on the violations of law on the part of the sheriff, the district attorney, the judges, the whole total environment. Also, there's no question in my mind that the workers participating learned the meaning of organization, and as a result hundreds, if not thousands, acquired a capacity to examine their society, not from the viewpoint of an individual failure, and [to see that] the poverty, the despair of the workers, was not any individual's fault but was society's fault. They therefore acquired a social vision that produced knowledgeable men and women. Third, as far as the conditions are concerned, as I say, there were slight, momentary breakthroughs that made for improved living conditions, but I would not say of any significant or substantial kind. We never did solve, any more than Ce"sar Chavez has solved, the question of how you maintain a union of migratory workers, how you keep a union alive that is dependent upon workers moving from area to area. The very nature of such a union is a very complex thing. I would say that we made a number of mistakes that were part and parcel of a political viewpoint at that point, namely, that we saw the strikes as the. . . .

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 24, 1972

GARDNER

Now, you were talking about the mistakes that you recognized coming out of the strike.

HEALEY

Of course, probably the overall mistake stemmed both from the youthfulness of the Communist movement in the country--the party, and the Young Communist League as an organization, what? only twelve years old at that time--and our definition of the society and therefore of the role of the revolutionary movement. We saw the state apparatus--the government, in other words--as one undif-ferentiated reactionary instrument of the ruling class. For instance, during the Glassford hearings, we refused to appear to testify before them, even though it would have been an enormously effective platform; we wouldn't do it because that meant cooperating with the government if you appeared to testify--that was an agency of the government. I remember another investigation that had come down headed by Simon J. Lubin, and another one called the Leonard Report--all these officially appointed to come down and investigate violations of the law. We wouldn't have anything to do with any of these bodies, even though later their reports were very favorable to our position, because if you in any way dealt with the state body, you were contaminating your purity; these were all, as I say, agencies of the ruling class. Secondly, even as far as the strike is concerned--we didn't use that language that was used in the sixties during the student strikes, but in a sense we had our position of no compromise, the ultimate, the maximum. What did they call them in the student strike at San Francisco State? I've forgotten the terms they've used . . . "nonnegotiable demand," that was it. Well, we were in somewhat the same respect in that we had our program. It was not that our program wasn't modest, because as far as the strike was concerned they were modest demands. Instead of twelve and a half or ten cents an hour, we were asking twenty and twenty-five cents an hour. We were asking for clean water to be given to the workers so that they didn't have to drink out of the same irrigation ditches that were used for toilets and everything else. The demands were not extreme demands, although we were, of course, always asking for recognition of the union. But we "knew," and I put the knew in quotation marks, that the Associated Farmers were not going to allow any real negotiations, and simultaneously we considered every strike a training ground for revolutionary action. The strikers then acquired a knowledge that there are two classes in society and that the ruling class controls the police, the newspapers, and everything. So what we did was to take a certain thing that had a limited validity. Generally speaking, the apparatus of the state will represent the interests of the dominant economic class, but we ignored entirely the ebb and flow that goes on within that institution, the fact that it is possible, for instance, to win a legal victory in a courtroom. We would have denied that; we would have just laughed at the idea that you could--every trial, as far as we were concerned, was simply not a question of law (we knew that we'd be convicted) and so it was a platform to talk about the class struggle, to expose the nature of the state. As I say, there was always a validity to what we had to say, but it was a limited validity, and we didn't recognize the limitation on it. We did not understand how to use the contradictions that were present even within the society for the benefit of what we were fighting for. But above all, we did not understand this question of compromise, compromise in the sense that within the class struggle, there was a need to consolidate a strike, to win a victory, to consolidate to go on to another level, that the working class could not stay in a state of eternal revolt and rebellion, that there had to be a breathing period in which you consolidated and went ahead to new demands. In the name of revolutionary purity, convinced that revolution was around the corner, we saw only the maximum and did not see the minimums of how to compromise and when to compromise, and that meant winning limited victories, and not just what we were concerned with. But from what was happening simultaneously, we did learn a little bit. Nineteen thirty-four was the year of the enormous strikes throughout the country; there were more strikes in 1934 than in any past year. Most of them were spontaneous strikes, but some of them were strikes that were within the AF of L--a whole number within the AF of L. Some of them were within the formally constituted company unions set up by the employers, and yet the conditions were so outrageous that workers were fighting. One of the things that was interesting is that we had condemned the NIRA, the National Industrial Recovery Act, enacted by Roosevelt in 1933. Now, we were right, in that what he was trying to do was in effect to provide for stabilization of the big corporations. They were agreeing not to use the antitrust laws to prosecute them if they agreed upon common prices, and so forth. But within the NIRA was Section 7A, which allowed for the testimony and participation of workers, to a limited degree, in arguing before the boards as to what the conditions of the wages and the working conditions should be. We simply said it was a slave labor act; that's how we defined it. But the workers were using it to organize unions, to present their grievances, and it was a little foot in the door as far as the right of workers to bargain. Of course, you've got to understand that only a small number of workers were organized in the American Federation of Labor; out of a total work force of around 30 million in 1930, there were about 2 1/4 million in the AF of L, almost entirely the craft workers. The resistance to union organization in the big trustified industries--auto, rubber, steel (and, of course, agriculture, but I'm talking now of those that were more easily organized)--was simply enormous. This was the first time that any administration had even tacitly recognized the right of workers to collectively bargain. We didn't see the significance of this until late 1934 and 1935, starting with '34, when workers were organizing unions, were starting to bargain. This was not being done by the Trade Union Unity League alone; it was being done generally. Taking place in that year, for instance, was the general strike in San Francisco. I was in jail throughout the entire period of the general strike, but I could read about it. Here was a combination in which the Marine Workers Industrial Union, which was a Trade Union Unity League organization, was working with a rank-and-file group of the International Longshoremen's Association, which Harry Bridges headed, working together hand in hand, jointly organizing and leading what was also a successful strike, in the sense that it was a foot in the door, forcing through recognition of the right of collective bargaining, forcing through the right of the workers through the union to define some of the conditions of their work. We learned from that a big lesson, that you couldn't just reject the AF of L, as we had done, as being an outmoded, reactionary body that was incapable of being reformed, incapable of being utilized as an instrument to organize unions. It could be done if there was organization toward it, if it was not ignored. We also learned a lesson in 1934 from the Upton Sinclair campaign. Upton Sinclair was running for governor here in California as part of the EPIC campaign, End Poverty in California. The slogan of the Upton Sinclair campaign under this End Poverty in California was, '"Production for use, not profit." The EPIC movement had swept the Democratic party, but we were rejecting it. We denounced it as social facism; what we meant by social fascism was that the outward form was progressive but the content was reactionary and fascist, which was nonsense, of course. But we--and not only we; the Socialist party had the same approach to the EPIC campaign--we refused to have anything to do with this tremendous movement because it was taking place in the Democratic party. The Democratic party was part of the two-party system, the two-party system was capitalist-controlled. We said, "You cannot operate nor reform nor change a capitalist party." Therefore, under our eyes this enormous movement based on slogans of "Production for use, not profit" was taking place, and we were condemning it and rejecting it and refusing to have anything to do with it. Well, while this was our formal attitude, nevertheless, because we were always in contact with them and observing these mass movements and relating to them, we saw that there was a change taking place, and not in the way that we had defined it would take place. It didn't fit in to our definitions as to what was possible or not possible to happen. Literally, a Democratic party struggle was taking place that had social content which was progressive. On a world scale, there were also thought-conclusions being drawn on the triumph of Hitler in Germany. We had condemned the Socialists in Germany also as social fascists. This was part of the Communist International analysis, in which, in effect, the Socialists became almost the main danger; the reason for that was that they operated within the ranks of the working class just as we did. It was a question of who was going to have the leadership of the working class; we said they're even more dangerous than the fascists because within the working class they deceive the workers as to what has to be done to fight. While on one hand, we were sending letters and arguing for a united front with them against fascism, we were simultaneously saying we wanted to do that in order to expose them as betrayers. Obviously, under those conditions there couldn't be unity. Well, it became clear with Hitler's triumph that there was a difference between a fascist regime and a regime of classical bourgeois democracy such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the big difference being that a fascist regime made its biggest thrust the destruction of the independent organizations of the people, that the classical bourgeois regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while it was still a capitalist regime, gave elbow room, allowed for the organization of workers; even though both of them were capitalist, both of them were based on a capitalist economic system, there was a vast difference between the superstructures, the political government of a fascist regime and a regular capitalist regime. So very gradually, very slowly, we were recognizing that our theory, our analysis, our line, was wrong on these overall questions, that it was wrong both in the particulars, as it was expressed through the labor movement by our condemnation and rejection of the AF of L, and wrong as far as our attitude toward the capitalist structures; that it was oversimplified and therefore distorted as to what had to be fought for. The main question was really to stop fascism from getting in power, because the time to stop it was before it had the power. After it had gotten power, because of its brutality, the opportunity for getting rid of it was very much diminished.

GARDNER

This seems to be the beginning of the greatest period of factionalism in the movement on the entire left, worldwide and especially in America--although, of course, that's something that dates back really to the split-off of the Communists and the Socialists.

HEALEY

That's right, 1919.

GARDNER

But at the same time, this is the time in which there could have been the most unity if there wasn't . . .

HEALEY

Exactly.

GARDNER

Were there people in the party who were arguing for a sort of united front approach as early as 1934, who were arguing in favor of staying together?

HEALEY

Yes, well, what was taking place in the United States was that the Young Communist League had pioneered on a question of a united front with Socialists and with other youth, nonparty but within the Left, and that was of enormous significance. There were two things of significance about it. I'll describe it a little bit, but let me first define the significance. There is the worldwide theory, of those who talk about the Communist movement, that everything happened out of Moscow, how nothing happened until Moscow said it could happen, so that the change in our political estimates is usually dated after the Seventh World Congress that took place in Moscow in 1935 where [Georgi] Dimitrov had made the report defining the fascism as the main danger, changing the attitudes of the parties towards the Socialists, for instance, discarding and rejecting the idea of social fascism as being valid. But actually, both in the United States and France, in 1934, there were movements that went in a different direction from this [condemnation of] social fascists. They predated what was later changed in Moscow at the Communist International Conference of the Seventh World Congress. This shows that the developments took place before the world Communist movement and the Soviet party had changed its position. The American Youth Congress had been started by a woman by the name of Viola Ilman, who had started it as a fascist movement to call together youth with the idea of organizing and mobilizing the vague, vast discontent among young people as a result of the Depression into a reactionary channel. The Young Communist League and the Young Socialists discussed together their joint actions to change this direction, went into this American Youth Congress, and mobilized the church youth, the Democratic party youth, all the youth who were generally moving in this direction, and took it away from Viola Ilman. It became a very powerful instrument in the thirties that united the YMCA, the YVJCA, the Epworth League, the Young Workers in Industry, the Socialist Youth, the Young Communist League, everybody, on an antifascist program. It therefore proved to us, in life, that it was possible for unity to take place. The French were doing the same thing to stop fascism in France; they had united with the Socialists. And this was one year before the World Congress. As I say, therefore, we were learning from experience. The importance of the Communist party and the Young Communist League was that because we were organized, because we were, as I say, always so self-critical of everything we did (the starting point of every discussion was what we had done wrong), as these events were taking place, we learned and drew conclusions from them. I would say that that is the big difference from what happened with the New Left in the sixties, that because there was no organized movement that could learn from experience, the same mistakes kept being repeated over and over again. Lessons were not drawn from it in order to consolidate a movement that could march on to another level of political development.

GARDNER

Well, this all brings us back then. In 1934 Upton Sinclair is running his campaign. You were in jail, I guess, for virtually that whole campaign.

HEALEY

Yes, I was in jail the entire time. I was in jail from May 14 to November 14.

GARDNER

So you even missed the election.

HEALEY

Well, I missed the physical participation in the election. Because I was allowed all the reading material I wanted, I could watch and see and understand what was taking place. Everybody else was watching and seeing and understanding as well what was taking place. Our big conclusion after the election--it took us a while to arrive at the conclusion after the election--was that we had been wrong in our estimate of this movement. We started to work with the EPIC movement after that,

GARDNER

After that, more or less a united front did form in the wake of EPIC.

HEALEY

Yes, it did form. Of course, what was also present, even in 1934, is that the mass movements that were organized, particularly of the unemployed but of some of the progressive groups then within the labor movement as well, were uniting together anyway on the issues--not with Sinclair but on the issues. Of course, one of the big lessons we learned was that the people we were uniting on the issues that we were fighting about--antifascism, the right of workers to organize, the fight for unemployment insurance-- that these were the same people who were in the EPIC movement. Here we had been condemning them, and yet we found that they were the ones who were immediately joining with us on the issues that we were organizing. In other words, this was independent, organized, united activity that was outside of the Democratic party and yet involved the same people within the Democratic party who were in the EPIC movement.

GARDNER

The whole problem of factionalizing is one that we'll have to go into in detail later when we cover the whole historical sweep.

HEALEY

It always is.

GARDNER

Because it seems that at the moment of its greatest strength, the Left always ends up factionalizing into weak fragments.

HEALEY

But I would say even more seriously that from the period from 1935 on, this factionalizing was a minor question, for one main reason. First of all, the Communist party had learned enormous lessons during this period of 1930 to 1935, the danger of fascism and the unity that was needed to destroy it, and we were the dominant voice of the Left. The Socialist party was very, very weak. The Trotskyites had gone into the Socialist party with the aim of capturing it; when they couldn't capture it, they left, but they had destroyed it in the process. As a matter of fact, James Cannon, in his book on the history of the SWP [The History of American Trotskyism], quotes Trotsky as saying that just the act of destroying the Socialist party was a great victory because the object was to destroy any possible competitor on the left. But we weren't bothered so much by that because we were already the largest organization. In the period between 1932 and 1934 we almost doubled our membership; starting with 1935 and 1936 and going on, we went from about 15,000 members to first 25,000 and then 50,000; by '37, '38, we were a party of some 75,000. Because we were an organized party that could move as one, our strength, our mass influence, was even more than that, on people who, while not in the party, were influenced by it. There was one other lesson of significance that emerged from that period. Because of the enormous strike wave that was going on, the huge battles that were fought, the militancy of the workers taking place, this influenced all other sectors of the society--the intellectuals, the cultural workers, the students. One saw an example of what happens when the organized workers start to move, of its impact on non-working-class sectors of a society. For instance, if you read the literature, the novels of the thirties, the dramas of the thirties, all of them reflected this huge working-class thrust. So that when we talked about the role of the working class leading all the other classes, the sectors of society leading society, one started to see what that really represented. It wasn't just some abstract theory but was really true, because the workers, when they then struck, when they moved, did influence everything else of the society.

GARDNER

We'll try to assess this as this goes on, what happened to that.

HEALEY

That was particularly true as far as the CIO, of course, one year, two years later. Do you have a match? [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

You mentioned that you thought of another anecdote having to do with your time in jail.

HEALEY

I think it's kind of illustrative of our naivete. Archie Brown, who I have already told you about back in 1929 when he joined the Young Communist League, had been arrested here in Los Angeles as a result of a demonstration. He was in the Lincoln Heights jail at the same time that I was in the Imperial Valley jail. One day Mildred Cox came walking into my cell and said to me, "You know a fellow by the name of Archie Brown, Dorothy?" I said, "Sure." She said, "He's not very bright, is he?" I said, "Well, what do you mean?" very indignantly. "Well," she says, "here's a letter that he sent you that he had smuggled out. He obviously didn't realize that while he could smuggle the letter out, you couldn't smuggle the letter in!" She hands me the letter and I read it. It's a letter saying that he is a trusty in a Lincoln Heights jail, that he is organizing the prisoners so that they would all join together in a strike protesting the conditions in the Lincoln Heights jail. I read it. As I say, the letter is describing this organization. I finish reading it, and Mildred Cox says to me, "So you see, he thought he was organizing a strike, but he's no longer a trusty. He's now in solitary for the rest of his jail term!"

GARDNER

There's a lesson in that.

HEALEY

Okay! Back to 1935.

GARDNER

You got out in the middle of November ...

HEALEY

November 14.

GARDNER

. . . and came back up to Los Angeles. What had your husband been up to during that time? Did he stay in Los Angeles?

HEALEY

Yes, he was still organizing for the Young Communist League. As I said, we always had a very amicable relationship--I always had an amicable relationship with all my husbands--[laughter] so when I got out of jail we agreed to get a divorce. He agreed to go ahead and do it because he had both the time and whatever it cost him. It wasn't very much, but he would go ahead and get it. And he did. But we remained very good friends. I went almost immediately to San Pedro to organize for the Young Communist League down there. Again, what was typical of organizing for the Young Communist League, particularly as differentiated from the way in which the young radicals organize today, is that as Young Communist League organizers, our main activity was mass activity, mass organization, because we always recognized the fact that you could not organize a revolutionary cadre without being surrounded by an organized mass movement. The big difference between that and today is that these young radical groups think of themselves as cadre organizations and don't realize that you cannot be a cadre in a revolutionary sense if you're not surrounded by an organized mass movement. Because how do you measure who's revolutionary and who isn't if it's not by influencing masses of people? That was always to us the starting point. So the first thing I started working with as the Young Communist League organizer was to help organize the unemployed seamen who were on the beach in San Pedro. They couldn't get on ships; there was no work for them and there was no relief. We organized huge demonstrations (huge in the comparative sense) of the unemployed, marching on relief headquarters demanding that there be--they didn't have residence and therefore were deprived of any kind of the relief that was already coming through the New Deal operation--demanding that they get relief. The second thing we started working on was meeting with the rank^and-file longshoremen who were in--it was still the AF of L, International Longshoremen's Association. That's when I first met a young man who later became leader of what was later the ILWU, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, a man by the name of L.B. Thomas. This was significant only in the sense that L.B. was considered by the radicals as a right-winger, and nobody trusted him. Even at that point, I always rejected these kinds of definitions of people. The definition never really was precise because of the contradictions that were present in human beings. We'd always had the tendency, and continued it lots of times, that people who weren't with us 100 percent on anything we believed, we always defined them as phonies. That was the favorite word. Sometimes they were, but sometimes they were people who had different approaches and ideas, didn't agree with Communists, but who were nevertheless honest. L.B. and I became very good friends. We were editing together a rank-and-file bulletin that we put out on the conditions of the longshoremen, on the struggles of the union, how to get rid of the bad leadership of the union. The Marine Workers' Industrial Union was still alive; it was the last year of its life. It was the last year, actually, of the Trade Union Unity League because within that year, all the Trade Union Unity League unions were merging either with established AF of L unions, or else dissolving where they could not get merger agreements and joining as individuals within the AF of L or later CIO unions. At that point, it was still all AF of L. I used to work with the Marine Workers Industrial Union and actually became the only woman honorary member in San Pedro. I was given a book saying "honorary member of the Marine Workers Industrial Union" because of my activity with them. I was just enchanted with them, these sailors who had the most extraordinary militancy, courage, very sophisticated, as distinct from the agricultural workers, who were just new on the scene. These were already veterans of great labor struggles and battles. I can remember sitting in the headquarters being enchanted by the yarns they would spin of life aboard ship and their world experiences. Then the Young Communist League started trying to organize the fish cannery on Terminal Island and succeeded in organizing it. By that time our whole emphasis was now within the AF of L, and we got an industrial union charter from the AF of L--a federal charter, it was called--which allowed us to take all the workers of all the different crafts within the cannery into the union. I don't even know if the union knows now that it was directly organized by Communists. The main person who did that organizing was a young man by the name of Jack Moore, a brilliant young man, a very individualistic man who left the party in the forties. I understand he became involved in real estate in Sacramento. But he was really extraordinarily talented. As I say, the Communist party and Young Communist League organized that union and won a contract, because by this time we had learned the significance of signing that contract. There was a great deal of interunion violence going on at that point as well. I remember one episode. There was a strike of the oil tankers. The Sailors Union of the Pacific--the top leadership was pretty phony; Harry Lundberg was the head of the union, either then or a little later, whether at that time I'm not sure, but there was a pretty reactionary leadership. When I use the terms now, I look back and I'm not so positive. But I generally think their emphasis was, again, against unity, against solidarity between the striking workers. I'm not exactly sure any longer of the details of that story, although I recall there were great physical clashes between the maritime workers--fistfights. At one point during that strike, I remember a whole number of us shared a house together, what would today be called a commune. We didn't think in those terms in those days. It was just a question of there being no money. As the YCL organizer I was supposed to get five dollars a week, but to get that five dollars a week, I had to go out to get it myself from sympathetic merchants and sympathetic people who had jobs. Every night I'd go eat with a different family because that was the only way you could live. I remember, as a matter of fact, that it was the first time I started to gain weight (I was always a very thin person when I was young) because I always ate a lot of bread so that I wouldn't have to eat the meat, which was more expensive, when I was eating with other people. You didn't want to take their food any more than you had to, so you'd eat a lot of bread so that you'd get filled up. So we were all together in this home. A man [was there] by the name of Britt Webster, who was a merchant-marine seaman, fascinating human being. He was the son of very wealthy people from Boston and described how he had become radicalized as a college student. He had gone to New York and wandered in the slums in New York and was so horrified by the brutality of the life, by the poverty of the life, that he would have nothing to do with his family, with the wealth of his family, and he had gone to sea. Another man--now I don't really remember any of the other names. At any rate, all I remember is that at one point, I had gone with one of the seamen to where they got paid (he was working as an extra longshoreman), and when we got back, we discovered that the house where we were living had been attacked by these goons, the goon squads that were used to break up the radical formation. These were within-the-union battles. This is different from the vigilantes. People had been beaten up. A fist-fight had taken place, and one of the goons who had come in had hit his head on the sidewalk and died. Some years later, two years later, Britt Webster and some others were arrested on the charge of murder, tried before a Judge [Thomas] Ambrose (this was when District Attorney Buron Fitts was prosecuting them). It was a frame-up. They had been the ones attacked. Britt was later released. But because of the pressures and the tensions of that trial, that murder charge against him, he lost his sanity, he went insane. He finally went into the sailors' hospital, a seamen's hospital in San Francisco and committed suicide. He was part of our family by that time. He had married my sister Frances. She had organized the defense committee for his freedom. In addition to a political tragedy, it's an enormous personal tragedy in the family as well.

GARDNER

Where was the rest of your family living at this time?

HEALEY

My mother was here in Los Angeles. She and my baby sister, Carol Jean, had moved down here, first to Pasadena, then to Sixty-fifth Street here. Frances was also here in Los Angeles; she was working for Sears, Roebuck.

GARDNER

But also participating in...

HEALEY

Yeah, she was participating, but in a peripheral way--never directly involved, but peripherally, mostly in the International Labor Defense. My brother was going to medical school at that point--USC, I think, by that time. He got his degree from Berkeley, and he went to medical school at USC.

GARDNER

How long did you remain with the . . . ?

HEALEY

I stayed in San Pedro for one year, and then the Young Communist League leaders asked me to move to San Francisco to be an organizer of the YCL there. There were no objections to doing it, but there was an enormous difference in my life when I got up to San Francisco. In San Pedro, there was no problem for me to do this mass kind of organizing. The Young Communist League grew in San Pedro from about five people to about fifty people through the course of the year when I was there. But I was doing the thing that I knew best, which was taking the Young Communist League members into the mass activity of the seamen and longshoremen and the cannery workers, When I got up to San Francisco I found myself totally unable to do that.

GARDNER

Before you get up there, we mentioned in the beginning the problems that UCLA had had. Since I'm at UCLA, I'll toss it in. Dr. [Ernest Carroll] Moore, who was chancellor [actually provost] of the university at that time, always saw Communist plots all over, and there were, of course, students thrown out at one time. Do you have any knowledge of that?

HEALEY

I have no direct knowledge of it, but I was aware of the fact that the students were as much involved in radical organization and activity among the working class and the unemployed as I was. But there was--it's really-- I'm amazed now when I think of it, that it was something very remote from my life. I had no direct knowledge of it. For instance, I would be in meetings of the Young Communist League with Celeste Strack or Serril Gerber, the two primary leaders [at UCLA], both of them brilliant young people, both of them winners of intercollegiate debating things in the United States--both of them, as I say, extraordinarily well qualified academically, intellectually. But while I would be in meetings of the Young Communist League where reports were given on these questions, generally it was something very remote from my own direct activities, and it was as if something was happening far away. It's hard to describe how separate the struggles could be, one from the other, all within the same orbit, yet separated not only physically but in a great sense politically. I think that was a lot my own weakness, however. I don't think that was as common for everybody in the Young Communist League, because the Young Communist League meetings did discuss all of the varied activities, at least a large number of them. A significant number of Young Communist League leaders had a far more general knowledge of all of the facets of social struggle. I was far more concentrated on anything I was doing; whatever I was into, that was what I was doing. I was totally consumed by it; everything else was kind of abstract from my own awareness and general political considerations. But, too, I think I was typical--maybe not typical in that respect (others were better equipped to grasp the interconnectedness of the struggle) but I was very typical in another respect that had some bearing on problems of the party. That was our really incredibly naive impression that the party leadership, the national leadership of the party, was made up of human beings of extraordinary capacity and abilities, and that, whatever they had to say, they obviously knew what they were talking about. They were always right. I can't remember ever critically reading any party document that outlined the policies of the period, reading them and asking, "Now, is this right? Does it reflect what I know is taking place? Is it accurate in its analysis?" I can only remember reading those things with the idea that of course it was right, and that one immediately tried to apply what everyone was reading as being the correct light. In other words, the lack of any challenge as far as policies were concerned on the part of the membership. Now, in the leadership, undoubtedly, that kind of debate was taking place. But what would happen is that in the name of democratic centralism--and that is not an accurate description of what democratic centralism, in my judgment now, should be, but was the prevalent idea then--once a debate took place among themselves, the leaders closed ranks and, in the name of unity, presented just the one majority agreed-upon position. You didn't ever hear of the minority position after 1930. Before 1930, one did because of the factional fights within the party; they were organized fights, and you would hear the minority position, and then the members could decide. But that was all stopped in the thirties. It was all part of what I would now define as the Stalinism of the world movement, in which this kind of thing was considered totally improper. So all you ever heard was the one position which the majority had agreed upon. If you don't hear minority positions, you have no idea of the different viewpoint that exists within the same Communist leadership. You therefore did what I think I did, as I say, very typically: simply a vast acceptance that, of course, it's right. There are no other alternatives necessarily present, There was very little grasp of the nuances, of the factors that go up to make what is a correct policy, because there was no debate internally down below in the party, only in the top leadership. At any rate, when I moved to San Francisco, I got a job working for the Alaska Cannery Workers Union, working in their office. Oh, I should mention that while I was in San Pedro, off and on, I worked as a waitress on the waterfront and on Terminal Island. That again was typical of the period where one felt you could not let your full identity be known. I remember joining the waitress union under another name--the name of Shirley Mason--because if I had done it under the name of Dorothy Ray, I was sure that this reactionary union would expel me, throw me out. But you had to be a member of the union to work. Of course, I would have joined any union. Mainly what stands out in my mind, what made me think of it, is that I later also became a waitress part-time while I was in San Francisco. I got my great enjoyment out of it because, again, I could talk to these people. I was a very unsatisfactory waitress. When there weren't meals to be served, I'd sit there talking over the counter to all the workers who came in.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 24, 1972

HEALEY

When I came out of the Imperial Valley in 1934--either in December of '34 or January of 1935, I don't remember which--the Young Communist League had what was called a national plenum. A plenum is an enlarged meeting of the National Committee of the Young Communist League. The organizers of the Young Communist League in California, Jack 01sen and Archie Brown, who were the two main people, did not want to attend this plenum, and insisted that I should go to it because I had been the big strike leader of the '34 period and would be able to report on the big strikes and agricultural strikes. That was the reason they gave. The actual fact is that there was, evidently, quite a dispute going on between them and the national office, so they just didn't want to go to this meeting. It was very wrong that I was sent, because the big thing of 1934 was the general strike in San Francisco with which I had' absolutely no contact because I was in jail during the general strike. At any rate, they made a decision that I was to go to it. .I remember that I took a bus, and the most we could get together after paying the bus ticket was fourteen dollars to live on across country. It was a wild bus trip because I almost ran out of money halfway across (eating, paying for meals in restaurants), and then when we got to Pennsylvania, there was a snowstorm and the heating system of the buses collapsed. We rode into New York just all wet and all freezing in the bus. We got to New York, terrified of this big city. I knew I had to get to the headquarters of the Young Communist League. I was standing on the corner asking people how to get there, and a cab driver came up to me and said, "You're all alone in the city. You just arrived?" I said yes. He said, "Do you have any friends or family here?" And I said no. He says, "Well, get in and I'll take you." "Well," I said, "I haven't any money." I didn't even have five cents left by this time. He says, "That's all right. I'll take you. Get in the cab." He turns to me and says, "Now, let me tell you the first lesson you better learn. You never tell anybody you don't know anybody in New York City, that you don't have a family, and that you don't have friends here, and that you don't know where you're going, and that you're lost. Don't you understand what can happen to a young girl, to a child in New York?" My usual blitheness about anything of that kind, mainly based on the fact that I had absolutely no imagination--any more than the threats of the vigilantes in the Imperial Valley stopped me, not because they weren't real and not because I'm brave; I simply never had the capability of projecting ahead to anything, or imagining what terrible things could happen to me, as if nothing like that could ever happen. So I was never bothered by things that a person with more imagination would have been bothered with. Totally, that lack of imagination motivated me quite often. At any rate, this nice cab driver drove me to the head quarters of the Young Communist League. There, for the first time, I met all these national leaders of the Young Communist League. Vie went to this meeting. Well, the first thing about the meeting was that I remember Gil Green and others were giving reports- Mac Weiss--but I didn't understand a word about what they were saying, literally not a word. It seemed to me very eloquent and very high-flung. I didn't know what they were talking about. I didn't understand their language, which was all very inner-Communist language. That's because I had spent so little time in the inner life of the Communist movement because all my activity had been outside. I was probably tired as hell from that seven-day trip, day and night without stopping at all-- it was a very slow trip in those days, nothing like it is now--that, coupled with the fact that it was very high-flowing oratory. At any rate, at one point I had to get up and speak to give a report on California. And I'm very uncomfort able and unhappy. How the hell am I going to talk to these big shots who talk this language that I don't even know what they're saying anyway? I don't even know what they want. I've never attended a meeting of this kind. I just don't have any idea of what to say. I get up, and I'm stammering around trying to present a report of California, of all the struggles and activities that have taken place. Some guy in the back of the room keeps interrupting me: What about this? What about that? What about something else? Every two minutes he interrupts me, and I'm getting angrier and angrier with him--and unhappy as well, along with my anger. But I'm angry because how can I possibly think about what to say when I'm being interrupted all the time--and heckled, which is what it was. At the same time, I'm happy because I really don't know what the hell they do want. What are you supposed to say? I don't know, don't have any idea. But I can't understand who this rude man is who keeps up this constant interruption. When I'm all done, when I go sit down, I'm just miserable. I'm just sitting there in absolute agony, [tape recorder turned off] He calls me over to come sit by him. He introduces himself, and he says his name is Boris. Didn't look Boris! And I say to him, "I don't want to talk to you. You're a rude person. You made it impossible for me. Even if I had known what to say--and I admit I don't know what to say- even if I had known, you would have made it impossible for me to even think." I turn around and walk away. One of the other Young Communist League members comes over and he says, "Hey, don't you know who that is?" I said, "No, who is it?" He said, "That's the representative of the Young Communist International." Well, a representative of the Young Communist International is like God. Anybody who came from the Soviet Union is like God incarnate, all full of all the wisdom of the world rolled up into one. I just kind of stood there looking petrified, ashamed of how here I had insulted the representative of Mecca. He finally came over to me, patted me on the shoulder, and said, "That's all right, don't feel bad. It's your com rades who are at fault for letting you come without having any discussions with you about what is needed to report on." I later met him then again in California. He came out to teach classes. There were about five of us in the class. The only other person I remember very clearly was Bob Thompson, who later became a national leader of the party and a very dear friend of mine just before his death. There, when I again met Boris, the two or three things that are significant stand out in my memory. There was going to be a meeting of the party, one of the important meetings, to summarize all the questions. It was being held in Ontario in a farmhouse. He was there, and I was to give a report for the Young Communist League. He got hold of me before I was to give the report and said, "I will work with you in preparing reports, so this time you'll know what kind of report to give." What "working with me" meant from his viewpoint was that he just dictated a whole speech for me to give. I was even more uncomfort able than with the first speech that I had given in New York because this one was a very eloquent political speech, but none of it was me. I remember that's really the first time I met Celeste Strack. She was at that meeting, and a woman by the name of Louise Todd, who was one of the state leaders, was there. I remember their coming up to congratu late me on the speech afterward. I said to them, "Well, that's not my speech. I had nothing to do with it." (The guy's name that he was known by in the United States was Max.) I said, "Max wrote the speech." It would have been abhorrent for anyone to think that this very advanced political speech had come from me when I knew that they should know that I wasn't capable of--that I certainly hadn't done it. Some of these classes that he was teaching took place at my mother's house. I remember the big fights she had with him. My brother read a great deal of Trotsky's literature. He was never with the Trotskyites, but he was always very impressed by Trotsky's intellectual capacities. This was during a period--it still continues, but it was a high point there--of considering Trotsky a counterrevolutionary, an imperialist agent. This guy Max heard about this, and he said to my mother, "Do you mean you allow your son to come into this house when he reads Trotsky?" My mother said, "Of course, I allow my son--what are you talking about, 'allow'? I'm delighted when he comes!" Max said, "Well, comrade, you must choose between your son and me. I will not come into a house where a person who is impressed by Trotsky is allowed to come." And typical of my mother, who was not typical of the other Communists--any other Communist would have said, "You're absolutely right"; families were broken up, didn't talk to one another as a result of things of this kind--my mother said, "My dear comrade, while I have great esteem for you as a representative of the Soviet Union and of the Young Communist International, if it comes to choosing between my son and you, there is no problem in my mind. You don't ever have to come back again." That really did epitomize my mother. As I say, it was very unusual and remains unusual even today, her independent thinking. While a devoted and dedicated Communist, she was never bothered by these kinds of pressures. As far as she was concerned, she knew her son was an honest man, and she wasn't in the least bothered. I'm sure she had no sympathy, any more than anybody else did, with Trotskyism, but she had no problem in knowing that her family was not going to be broken up on this question. It was also typical of the very sharp political debates we'd have in the family. My brother was influenced by these critiques. We'd have wild shouting screams, but it never interfered with our family relationship. It was a big lesson for me of the fact that you disagreed but didn't break over these questions. At any rate, in San Francisco, we set up the Union Recreation Center on the waterfront--the Young Communist League did--where, particularly for the young longshoremen and the young seamen, there would be a place of recreation for them, because in our mind, once people got together on any viewpoint, you started off being able to politicize them. That was what we were concerned with. Sport and recreation was one way of doing that. For the young sea men it was important because in those days, still, seamen who would come on the beach had absolutely no place to go except the gin mills. There was nothing else for them. By the end of the year and the very beginning of '37, it was clear that--first of all the CIO started to organize The CIO was starting, the Committee for Industrial Organization. By '36 it was already on the move.

GARDNER

Who were some of the people involved in that original organization?

HEALEY

The ones I knew were Donald Henderson, who became the International President of United Cannery and Agricultural Packing Allied Workers of America, afterwards known as UCAPAWA for shorthand's sake (and that's how I'll refer to it); Walter Donnelly, who was the first regional director of the CIO; Slim Connelly, who was first the organizer of the Newspaper Guild, and the first secretary of the Los Angeles CIO Council, and the first state chair man of the CIO Council; Chester Jordan, who was the CIO Council secretary at that point; Mervin Rathburn, who became the executive state secretary of the state CIO; Lou Goldblatt from the ILWU; Harry Bridges--I could go on and on naming names of people involved--Lew Michener. . .

GARDNER

You can quit at any time.

HEALEY

I'll quit now, then. At any rate, there was a meeting held to organize the Cannery and Agricultural workers union of the CIO, UCAPAWA, in Denver, Colorado. Present there were most of the locals of the Cannery Union and Agricultural Workers Union, both of the AF of L. Some organizing had been done of the independent unions, mainly around the Mexican-Americans (I use the language of the period, of course), the Filipino Workers' Union, and others, and an international union was to be set up. I was asked to come back down to Los Angeles as an organizer for it. I went to the Young Communist League--the state chair man then was Frank Carlsen--and asked to be released as the San Francisco organizer, gave as the two- fold argument \ that I was an absolute flop as the Young Communist League organizer and that I had done a great job in San Pedro. This was a promotion to have been asked to go to San Francisco, but I was a total failure in San Francisco, and absolutely miserable. The other thing was that the one thing that I did feel I was effective in was as a union organizer. This is what I did best. And certainly this was the most decisive thing that was before us anyway, participating in that. He was not the most kindly of human beings, and he absolutely refused that I should go. He said, "It's true. You should no longer be in charge of the YCL. You are a failure. But you've got to be disci plined and learn how to do it, and therefore you should simply become the organizer for one little club in North Beach instead of the city organizer, and then learn how to do it." I was absolutely in tears. I was sitting there crying in the Young Communist League office when the chairman of the Communist party, Bill Schneiderman (who was the brother of the man I earlier married) came walking in. "What's the matter, Dorothy? What are you crying about?" There was nobody there to see me cry. In my tears I told him that Frank refused to let me go to become a CIO organizer, that I was miser able as a YCL organizer, and this is what I wanted to do. He said, "Well, that's preposterous. Of course, you should do it. There is no comparison of the importance of it. That is where your experience is. We don't have so many people that are as experienced that we should just throw them away." So he called a meeting of the party leadership in which Frank Carlsen, as the YCL organizer, was a member. They passed the decision, with only Frank voting no, that said I was directed to be released from the YCL job. I moved back to Los Angeles--this was the beginning of 1937. I was assigned as an international representative for UCAPAWA. The activities that I then engaged in, and not necessarily in this sequence, involved the period from 1937 till 1939, two years--well, actually three years, all of '37, '38, and "39. I organized the union at the California Sanitary Canning Company that was then on Long Beach Boulevard. It was the first strike in a cannery in some years in California. It was a bitter strike. It was owned by a man by the name of [Lou] Shapiro. What stands out in my mind is that he absolutely refused to recognize the union; under no conditions would he bargain with us. We organized picket lines in front of his home where he lived in Beverly Hills. He was also a big poobah in the Jewish organizations, so we got all kinds of Jewish organizations to adopt resolutions condemning him for his refusal to bargain with the union. The students had helped us organize that cannery; it was during the summer time and a lot of students would get jobs, and they would tell us who were the key workers in the departments the key departments within the plant. If you organized those, then you could organize everything else. It was my first experience in utilizing the state agencies. The state conciliation service was very helpful to us. We had signed up workers on pledge cards to join the union. Shapiro had insisted that we didn't represent a majority. This state conciliator, whose name I no longer remember, showed us how to build up the number of cards in order to match them off against the payroll to show that we did have it. It didn't do us any good, because even after we did that Shapiro still wouldn't bargain with us. We called a strike. It lasted about two weeks. Finally, at a midnight bargaining session at his home, Shapiro finally agreed to recognize the union, and it became the first CIO contract that was ever signed for a cannery. We didn't win a hell of a lot in that strike except for the question of union recognition. But having opened the door for recog nizing unions and collective bargaining, in subsequent years the contracts got better and better because once the principle was established, then one could actually very, very dramatically change the working conditions of the employees. The next thing I organized (I say "next thing," but I'm not sure of the sequence) was the walnut workers, the California,Walnut Growers Association here in Los Angeles. This was an organizational activity where Sam Yorty was very helpful to me. He was at that time the assemblyman in the state legislature. He was considered one of the two Red assemblymen--one being Jack Tenney; the other, Sam Yorty.

GARDNER

Of all people.

HEALEY

Right. Exactly. Sam came to two union meetings to speak on why the workers should join the union. And he was a great orator. He had a love for purple prose and particularly for alliterative phrases. I remember over and over again he'd repeat the phrase, "We must fight the masters of monopoly and the princes of plenty." But par ticularly the women employees just adored him because he was just a very fiery speaker. Did a good job. But here we ran into enormous employer resistance. They were part of the Associated Farmers hookup. This was the first case I ever had with the National Labor Relations Board. And here was an important thing, too, because the attorneys on the National Labor Relations Board and the trial examiners were all very sympathetic to the union; everything that could be done to advance the union's role in bargaining, they did. Again, this was a big lesson to me, that this picture we had of the state apparatus as always representing the ruling class wasn't true. Here were these very radical attorneys and trial examiners doing everything in order to help the union. Of course, it was because there were people like that throughout the country in the National Labor Relations Board at that time that the big attack started against the NLRB. I don't think people can really visualize today how at that point these public attacks would pick up steam. You'd have the [Martin] Dies [House] Committee [to Investigate Un-American Activities] coming into an area and holding hearings only for the purpose of attacking the Left and the liberals (to them they were identical and interchangeable), and the biggest attacks were on the National Labor Relations Board. At the same time the AF of L was vigorously attacking the NLRB as too pro-CIO. The newspapers, particularly the Hearst news papers, carried on a constant campaign, so that in the minds of the large section of the public and, of course, the congressmen and so forth, to destroy and clip the powers of the NLRB became a major thing. It was success fully done in the late forties. It wasn't done until then. Before then we managed ("we," meaning the general labor movement) to hold off. What finally happened with the Walnut Growers, though, is that we filed charges of unfair bargaining practices against the company: one, that they had fired workers who were the union organizers; secondly, that they set up a company union in violation of the Wagner Labor Relations Act. Some three years later, we finally won; UCAPAWA finally got the bargaining rights there, but it took that long. It was a very tedious process because the big change that the employers had been able to win was that every decision could be judicially reviewed. Therefore, by the time you wound through the courts, years could go by on something like this. But when there wasn't the strength to hold out to win it by a strike, then it became the only way in which one could win. As I say, some three years later we did. The difference between the two strikes was only in terms of composition of the workers. The cannery had a mix of 50-50, men and women. The walnut packing was over whelmingly women. It was the only place I ever organized that was in the bulk women workers. I'm often asked now by the women in the women's liberation movement the question on the role of women and the attitudes of male supremacy in that period. I might say that first, as far as workers were concerned, the attitude toward me as a woman leader within the working class, I never in my life found any significant expres sions of male supremacy, what is now called male chauvinism. (We would not say that's a correct term, because chauvinism to us means national superiority, not sexual superiority. The term was used at that time, but we always said it wasn't right.) The exceptions I found to that, as I say, were never from the workers, although many places that I organized were predominantly male. The only exceptions I found at that point were in the top union leadership. Harry Bridges was always very much of a male supremacist; other union leaders were, but I never found it among the rank and file, among the male workers. As far as they were concerned, again, the questions were, "Did you seem competent? Did you know what you were talking about? Did you answer the questions?" That was the only thing. The role of women generally--for instance, in any strike I was in, in any union activity I was in, where there were women working they were always part of the leader ship of the union, always participating. Some women's memory of that period sees them only in the auxiliaries of the union. But I never had anything to do--I saw women in the mainstream of it.

GARDNER

Yet at the same time, their relationships must have been very different in their personal lives. Or were they? I don't know.

HEALEY

I don't think there was any appreciable difference.

GARDNER

The classic images of, say, the woman working all day and then going home and fixing dinner and taking care of the kids. Well, now that role . . .

HEALEY

... is challenged, but it was challenged then, too. Same thing. We challenged it then, too. There were big sharp struggles around that question all the time in the radical movement. The only thing is, we never wanted to limit ourselves as women to that as the answer, because really the thing to us was not who was doing the dishes and sharing the work, but equality in the bigger questions, making decisions, freedom to participate equally, freely in political life. The other two major strikes that I remember of that period, the first was a strike in Orange County in the orchards of orange pickers. It was centered in Anaheim, or Santa Ana, actually. Here I lived in the Mexican colony again. The thing that is set out in mind of this is that starting with 1935, there were huge deportations of Mexican field workers, and the bulk of the field workers from "36 on were Anglos, not Mexican or Mexican-American. But this strike was predominantly Mexican. I lived in a colony there. The growers were Japanese, and the small growers wanted to settle with us, but they were not independent operators, because the banks financed them. The big growers could control them by virtue of the ship ments and whatnot.

GARDNER

Were these big growers Japanese as well?

HEALEY

No. The big growers were never that; the Japanese were always the small little individual ones. They wouldn't let the individual growers settle with us. We did sign two contracts with individual growers, but the big ones, the overwhelming ones, we couldn't get. I was arrested at some point; I don't remember. Those big newspaper headlines again: "Dorothy Ray, Outside Agitator, Stirring up Trouble," and whatnot. But again, what stands out in my memory is, first of all, the fact that Mexican women were playing leading roles. You were still dealing, as far as Mexican workers were concerned, just as I said earlier--which later was not true--with that generation that had come from Mexico after the struggles of revolutionaries in Mexico, who were anti clerical (which became almost nonexistent in later Mexican-American communities) and very revolutionary-minded. They all knew me as a Communist. I mean, anyplace I went I was known as a Communist; I was always a publicly known Communist. It never bothered anybody that I was. That strike became a partial victory only in that we-did win some concessions and advancement. But again, we couldn't answer the problem of the migratory character of the industry, so that concessions could be won, but by the time the next crop would come around you had to start all over again. We could never stabilize the conditions.I was also very active in the CIO Council in that period. Huge internal struggles were taking place at that time between the Left and the Right of the CIO Council. Again, I rebelled against the kind of definitions of that, because whereas, while on the floor of the Council, I always identified with and supported the positions of the Left and became known as "the fiery spokesman of the party," simul taneously I always maintained very good personal relations with those who were known as the right. For instance, the longshore delegation--the longshore local in San Pedro was considered under right-wing leadership. The leaders were Bill Lawrence, Don Cox, and my old friend, L.B. Thomas. While I would fight them on the floor of the Council on policy, personally I had very warm, friendly relations. We would leave the meeting, and we would be very good friends. During every strike I was in, I could call the longshoremen, call these people who were the leaders of the union, and they would send pickets down, they would send food trucks down with relief, they would do every thing to help in the course of the strike. That was to me the important question. That was the class question, that when you were on strike, you had solidarity; and they helped. In addition, the fact that I was a publicly known Communist helped me a great deal with all these people who were considered the anticommunists, the phonies. They had no suspicions of me. They didn't think that I was up to something secret because I made no bones of who and what I was; they liked that, could relax with it. A very complicated problem of politics, of radical organization in the labor movement, was involved in this period. We were going through great internal debate in the party. The party would have meetings, for instance, of Communists within the unions; the people, who were honest people with whom we had worked, were very unhappy about that and suspicious of it. They would say, "You people meet privately to arrive at your conclusions as to what should be done, and then you come in as a body, and that becomes what you fight for. You've already made up your mind before the debate takes place." Partly to answer that problem, we were exploring questions. Partly [we did it] also for a more opportunist reason, because for the first time nationally the party was in top labor relations with John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman and these people; and to answer their objections to us, the party went through a period there in 1937-38 where it stopped doing some things it had formerly done--issuing shop papers in the name of the party, having separate organization of the Communists, and so forth. Part of it is a legitimate problem that is still present and which radicals are not yet ready to deal with in the United States, the young revolutionaries of today, [a problem] of the sus picion that comes from honest workers when they see you separately organized. Part of it is the legitimate problem of how radicals who are concerned, not just with the today's struggle but with the long range struggle, find a way to do more than just simply struggle in economic demands--to bring in political questions that will deepen the workers' understanding of why socialism is needed, why capitalism and the reform struggles are not sufficient. The problem remains today without a satisfactory answer because obviously unions have to go beyond anything; unions have to take in workers of all politics. The next strike was a cotton strike in Kern County. By this time, the [John] Steinbeck Committee to aid agricultural organization had developed. It was initiated by Helen Gahagan Douglas, who was the prime mover of it, with Steinbeck's assistance. What they did was to mobilize broad support, particularly among Hollywood people, but in the city and the state as a whole, to provide, first of all, general materials, propaganda materials, to answer the Hearst and Chandler papers. (You want to remember the L.A. Times owned about 80,000 acres in the Imperial Valley. They were not a disinterested objective observer of what took place in agricultural strikes; between the Southern Pacific and the Chandler interests, it was enormously dominated.) It was really an enormous movement of support. It coincided with other general movements of support that were organized at that time by middle-class groups to help the CIO organize. I can remember that in the cotton strike in Kern County, they held a statewide conference of experts in the field, academic experts in the field, union organ izers and workers and these Hollywood personalities, to mobilize public support for the cotton strike. I was again pregnant. [laughter] There was one amusing sideline on that in terms of my own life. Before I left Los Angeles, I had gone to a chiropractor whom I was told had the latest development on a new technique learned in Germany of how to perform an abortion. What she had doner although I didn't know it at the time, was simply to paint my uterus with iodine. When the iodine started coining out, I thought I had aborted. When I got down to Kern County--and the life during a strike, as you can gather, is a very physically intensive and an emotion ally exhaustive one. You're going on picket lines that covered the entire Kern County--Delano, Buttonwillow, Shafter, Bakersfield, Arvin--from six in the morning till two o'clock the next morning: constant movement, going around, speaking everywhere you're going, meetings con stantly, stablizing the strike, extending the rank-and-file activity. Well, while this was going on, I had gone to this Steinbeck Committee function, and I was sitting on the floor talking to the administrator of the Farm Security Admini stration camp (which was a separate thing of the New Deal that I want to comment on later, a great assistance in organizing workers), and all of a sudden I start feeling very uncomfortable. Stuff is happening, and I don't know what it is. I get up and run into the bathroom; I barely close the door, and the embryo comes out. It must have been already about four and a half months. I hadn't dreamt I was still pregnant. Well, I hastily flushed it down the toilet without any compunction. You know, there's a lot of talk nowadays about all the traumas women are supposed to suffer in an abortion. I can't remember ever thinking of anything except relief that the problem was solved. I think I was very typical of most women. Then I came back out, started talking again, and thought everything was all right, until I started having enormous pains, obviously labor pains of one kind or an other. I had to go over to Pat Callahan, my fellow organizer for UCAPAWA who was there, and said, "My God, you've got to get me back to the hotel. I'm sick." So he leaves the party, and he drives me back to this flop house where La Rue McCormick, from the International Labor Defense, and I are staying together, sharing the room. She was asleep when I got into the room. I knew she was exhausted from this routine of ours, and I didn't want to wake her up, so I crawled into bed. These pains are just becoming enormous. I finally crawl out--I want to get to the toilet because I can feel that I'm starting to vomit, and I'm hemorrhaging at the same time. The toilet was way, way at the end of the long dirty hall. I crawl on my hands and knees down to this toilet, and I'm simul taneously both hemorrhaging and vomiting. I get into the bathroom, and I get over to the toilet bowl, and I pass out. La Rue wakes up in the meantime, and she has the vague feeling that I've been there in the bedroom. She's not sure, and she turns on the light and sees this trail of vomit and blood. She follows it down and discovers I'm passed out in the toilet. She immediately goes to call in an emergency for an ambulance, and a Catholic hospital sends an ambulance out to pick me up. She has me booked under a false name because she's afraid if my own name is used, with all the attacks on the strike that are going on, they'll link it up together, and that'll be another attack against the union. The ambulance attendant who was there tells her that I'm almost dead by this time from the loss of blood. He says that in another fifteen, twenty minutes, I would have been out. So she is just distraught; she tells him my "name" and they take me in. The next day she can't remember what name she's got me booked under. She doesn't know how to find me. She doesn't know how to tell even the union or my family where I am. She's terrified: "What's happening?" She's really a great woman, this La Rue McCormick, and is still an object of great respect for me today. A real tribune of the people sort of person, a people's organizer. So she comes over to the hospital and can't figure out how to find me. She goes to a ten-cent store around there and buys about a dollar's worth of trinkets, comes up to the sisters in charge of the hospital, and says that she wants to give away free toys to the children. She simply goes from room to room until she discovers me! [laughter] At which point, she called to my mother long distance, and my mother gets hold of my brother, who's a doctor. The question is what they should do, because the doctors there have told her that I must have a curettement. My brother doesn't want anybody else to take care of me. He wants to bring me back to L.A. doctors, his friends. So he and my sister drive down, pick me up, and take me back here to Los Angeles. I really can't tell you how that strike finally ended because I became very, very sick; there was an infection and great problems. At any rate, I started to talk about this Farm Security Administration and what it represented, again the difference it meant to have the New Deal administration in, in terms of these things. The FSA had been set up to start to improve the housing conditions because they were still miserable. (They still are, by the way, just miser able.) What they did was to build camps where a consider able number of migratory workers could live en route to the next jobs. They were self-governed. The workers would elect their own governing councils. It meant that for the first time we could come in and talk to workers who were not already organized about joining a union. It just made all the difference in the world in the ability to strengthen the union at that point. It was also a big lesson for us, again, on this question that you cannot make this one undifferentiated thing that everything that comes from the government is part of the ruling-class plot against you. This was, like the National Labor Relations Board, the utilization of facilities of the government that helped the union to organize. A year earlier than that, or around that period, the beginning of "38, somewhere around that time, the UCAPAWA held a convention, and I was elected as one of the inter national vice-presidents. I guess I was the first and only woman international vice-president of any of the unions at that point. I remember being very unhappy and angry because the nominating speech for me stressed the fact that I was a woman, that because I was a woman I should be elected. Now, that would be very understandable today. I remember being very resentful and thinking, "What the hell difference does it make that I'm a woman? Am I qualified or am I not?" In other words, I was not very advanced on my thinking on the woman question because, I mean, it was a legitimate question. To me it was very insulting because it was patronizing that they were making room for me, not because I was competent and did a good job organizing, but to have a woman on the International Executive Board. It also is a sign of how much more ad vanced the left-influenced unions were than anybody else, that that was a legitimate question for them, that a woman had to formally be placed as part of the leadership, that you didn't leave it to chance whether or not women were included.

GARDNER

Well, now we're up to about 1938. This is a point at which a lot of different coalitions and fronts were being formed. Were you involved in any of the organizations around Los Angeles, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and so forth?

HEALEY

Well, not the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, although I was very familiar with their activities by this time because of the coalitions. In other words, a number of them developed at that point. There was, in the first place, the American League Against War and Fascism, which at its height probably represented 7 million people, maybe more. I think Earl Browder gives the figure of 30 million people, and I wouldn't even argue. It was based on two kinds of membership: organization affiliations, organi zations affiliating as organizations; and individual membership, in which people joined chapters of the American League, It was really a very important and influential movement, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was one seg ment of it. It was primarily, again, around this whole question of the recognition of fascism as the main danger, and the fight against war. I remember huge picket lines in San Pedro on the docks against the shipment of scrap iron to Japan, thousands upon thousands of people who would go down from Los Angeles to the docks. I think one picket line had 20,000 people picketing against the shipment. There was a boycott against the buying of German or Japanese goods. You didn't wear silk stockings because they came from Japan; you wore cotton stockings. Huge antiwar marches! Of course, the whole anti-Japanese thing was not only the question of--the main thing was their invasion of China, so that these were pro-Chinese, the support of the Chinese people, the anti-Japanese demonstrations. At that point it was not so much a consideration that it would ever be used against the United States, although I remember propaganda slogans that said, "This scrap iron will come back against us." But I don't think anybody really seriously thought that. At that time also, the main thing was the anti-Nazi movement. This anti-Nazi movement, without any question, first of all not only generated an enormous sup port, but it coincided as well with domestic questions against the people Roosevelt called the Liberty Leaguers, the America First crowd, who were the ultrareactionaries of the period. Coincidental with that was the Spanish Civil War. There was probably no issue then or since that had the sweep and command on our loyalties, our passions, and our feelings, that Spain did. Not only that thousands of young Americans, mostly Young Communist League members, had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight this thing, but that Spain itself represented the advanced battle ground of the fight against fascism, both as far as Germany and Italy were concerned. On all these political questions, you must understand that we brought all these questions into the union move ment. In other words, they weren't separate categories. They weren't things that people only in the antiwar move ment fought for. You in the union were as much antiwar and anti-Nazi and pro-Spain as the people who were organizing separate detachments around that.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 7, 1972

GARDNER

Now, at the end of the last taping session we brought you up to about 1938. You mentioned that next came a sort of crisis in your union job.

HEALEY

The early-1939 picture was interesting in terms of the combination of effective significant political actions that united a very large section of the labor movement with general people's movements, and then its impact back again on organizing. One example rather exemplifies the spirit of the time and the reality of what was taking place. I mention this one because it took place in the Imperial Valley, and in as much as Imperial Valley represented for California what Harlan County, Kentucky, represented for the East--that is, the bastion of reaction, of untrammeled attacks on individual rights--it had its unique significance. The Shed Workers Union, which had affiliated to the United Cannery and Agricultural Packing and Allied Workers of of America, UCAPAWA, my union, in about 1937 or '39 (I'm not sure which), decided to organize a public mass meeting at the fairgrounds at Imperial in Imperial Valley. The fairgrounds are under a joint state and county juris diction, just as our [Los Angeles] Coliseum is under a joint governmental body of state and county officials. When the application was made for permission to hold the mass meeting, no one really thought it would go through. But in 1938, Culbert Olson had been elected governor of California, with his running mate, Ellis Patterson. The election really represented, as far as overall state politics were concerned, a kind of culmination, a coming together of all the diverse strands of the vast people's movements that were in motion in the 1930s--the anti fascist movement, the student movement, the political action movement, the labor movement, the Negro organi zations, the National Negro Congress, the Congress of Latin Speaking Peoples (started here in Los Angeles). All of the political action around getting permission, forcing through permission, to get the meeting held in the fairgrounds, was coordinated through Labor's Non-Partisan League. Labor's Non-Partisan League is probably as close as the labor movement has come, or did come in the thirties, to playing a united independent labor political role. LNPL had been set up originally by the national CIO, but in most of the states, and this was particularly true of California (although not exclusively so), AF of L local unions joined Labor's Non-Partisan League. LNPL, like the American League [against War and Fascism], which I described previously, was based on organizational affiliations on an overall scale and on individual chapters made up of the members of the constituent organizations operating in assembly Erratum: There is no page number 189 in the original transcript. and congressional districts. Well, when the pressure started, when originally the fairground commissioners refused to give permission to UCAPAWA, the Shed Workers Local 78, to hold the mass meeting in the valley, LNPL started a statewide campaign of pressure. And because of the enormous prestige they had accumulated in the election of Culbert Olson, the governor's office was then used to place pressure on the fairgrounds to allow the mass meeting to be held. Ultimately, that pressure was successful. Hundreds of us drove down to Imperial Valley from Los Angeles. It was my first return to the valley since 1934, since I had gotten out of jail. It was the most triumphal return that one can imagine. To cap it all off, on the fairgrounds, with every seat taken--it was just jammed with workers living in the valley, as well as with people, as I say, coming from Los Angeles and San Diego--the lieutenant governor of the state [Ellis Patterson] flew down to address the meeting, landed a plane on the fairground to come speak. The emotion that went through that crowd when for the first time in the history of the valley, something of this kind was taking place, when the union became a legal thing and not an illegal organization! As I say, it was kind of a cap ping, a triumph, a climax, to a decade of the most enormous mass and class struggles, political struggles all rolled into one. As an international vice-president and international representative of UCAPAWA, I had done a lot of work with the Shed Workers. I had gone to Salinas in early 1938 to help in negotiations there. I had been in the small towns of the valley where their main headquarters were, helping. Then in between that time--as I look back, I never can understand how so many strikes and so many activities could all be taking place concurrently, but somehow they all did-- I can remember that we organized the egg candlers at Runnymede Egg Farm in Reseda. I don't know if it is still alive. This was one of the things that, as I look back now (I didn't think about it then), but the question you asked me before about the attitudes towards women. . . . These were all men working there, and yet it was again an example where if there were attitudes of male supremacy I was totally unaware of them. There seemed to be nothing of that kind operating. By the beginning of 1939, UCAPAWA was running into great financial problems. No union based on migratory workers has found the way to be financially independent. Cesar Chavez has the problem today, and we had it even worse, of course, in the thirties. Because of the already developing fights in the CIO between the Left and the Right, UCAPAWA (which had been subsidized by the national CIO, as a number of smaller unions were)--its subsidies started to be cut, and UCAPAWA was faced with the problem that it would have to cut personnel. There was quite a struggle about it in UCAPAWA here in California as to who was going to be cut. I remember there was a regional director who had come in, by the name of Ted Resmussen, from Washington. I never heard what happened to him. All I remember---it's a very vague memory--is that those of us who considered ourselves the old-timers in the field did not view him with kindly eyes, felt he was more repre sentative of the conservative trends within the CIO than anything that UCAPAWA had been familiar with. At any rate, I was one of those who was ultimately cut. There were two economy waves that hit us. The first one, about three or four people were cut, and then, as I said, at the beginning of 1939, I was. Strangely, the fact that I was an international vice-president of the union never once came into operation. So loosely did the union function as a union with a formality of union activities that the only international executive board meeting that I could ever remember attending was the one that took place at the convention where I was elected. I think it was mainly a financial reason. We just didn't have the money to allow for people to travel around to attend national conventions.

GARDNER

Is it getting ahead of the story too far to ask what became of UCAPAWA in the days after you left?

HEALEY

No, it isn't. It did some very fine organizing in the South, in Winston-Salem when there was a tobacco strike which they organized and won, led by a woman named Miranda Smith, a Black woman who died in the late forties and who was also a Communist, who did quite incredible organizing activities. In the Southwest and in California, there were very significant victories in canneries; here there was a Guatemalan woman, Luisa Moreno--who was also a state vice-president of the CIO in 1943 at the CIO con vention--who played an incredibly important role. But the war took its toll of UCAPAWA, too. I think, though, primarily, the fact is that it could not answer the problem that to this day has not been answered: "How do you stablize a union where you have a transient work force?" The Shed Workers were able to do that in the thirties--and probably still even today. In fact, I know still today. They're now a part of the [United] Packinghouse Workers' Union [of America], all the more because they were highly skilled. They were the aristocrats of the agricultural fields. Therefore, traveling, they traveled all together everywhere, but their high skill allowed them also to organize. It is an ironic thing that they were better organized than the very poorly paid field workers, comparatively. I know that for instance in the melon fields when "the snow was on the melon"--which means when the melons had to be taken care of, processed, immediately, because they had reached that stage of ripeness--even in the thirties a shed worker could make thirty-five, forty, fifty, sixty dollars a day. Of course, those were just incredible wages. It wasn't year-round, but it was still very high pay. The union [UCAPAWA] ultimately (I think around 1945 or "46) merged with the independent unions that had been organized around the tobacco and other things and became known as the Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers of America, FTA. (Interesting, I hadn't thought of that in comparison with Jane Fonda's troupe, which is also FTA, with different meaning ["Fuck the Army"].) When the expulsions of the Left from the national CIO took place, FTA was, of course, one of those expelled, but it did not have the independent strength to be able to sustain itself. A lot of its locals merged, as I remember, some with the [International Union of] Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, others with whatever groups would take them in, but it lost any independent identity in the fifties. In 1939 I went to work for the Labor's Non-Partisan League as the county organizer. The man whom I married a year or so later, Don R. Healey, was the executive secre tary of Labor's Non-Partisan League. Most of our activities were actually spent in local fights mostly around the attempts to cut back the unemployed. This was at a time when nationally Roosevelt had very much yielded to the right wing and was cutting relief appropriations right and left. There were great struggles taking place, led by the Workers' Alliance. At least as far as my activities were concerned (I don't think it was true necessarily of the rest of LNPL), it was mainly around that that I was functioning, mobilizing and speaking at meetings to stop the cuts. Also at that time we were very active in the recall of Mayor [Frank L.] Shaw, who had what is really a typically corrupt municipal administration. I know the [John] Birch Society and the right-wing talk about the honesty of local government ("The government closest to the people is always the most honest"), but actually the myth of the folksy-wolksy of local government is really a myth. Usually it is the most remote from the people, strangely, and usually, as I say, the most corrupt. This was corruption to beat all corruption. In the movement led and initiated by Clifford Clifton, who owned restaurants here, cafeterias, here in Los Angeles, a citizens' committee movement joined with an overall movement that LNPL and others were part of, to conduct the first recall of any mayor. I'm really con densing; I know you have other interviews in much more detail. It is a very dramatic story again of the coin cidence of the church people and the good-government people with the labor-movement people (who had other more general interests) in doing a very successful thing in the fight against corruption in the police force and the city government. This also marked the break of Sam Yorty with the Left. In the citizens' committee meetings, there was a voting taking place as to whom this coalition would support for mayor; Sam Yorty wanted his name advanced and wanted to become the coalition candidate. We were quite in agree ment with that and would have supported it, because Sam was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the so-called Red assemblymen. However, the good-government people wouldn't touch him because he was too Red, too far to the left. Sam, however, blamed us for it, blamed the Left and the party in particular for it. As I said, it was very un justifiable because we would have been quite willing to have him. But our allies wouldn't. He thought we should have broken with them in order to advance him. We wouldn't break. We decided unity to defeat Shaw was more important than the particular character of anyone else. The man who had been chosen to succeed--the coalition wanted Fletcher Bowron--had a fairly decent reputation, certainly nothing as advanced as Sam Yorty's was for that period.

GARDNER

What were some of the ways in which Yorty developed his reputation on the issues?

HEALEY

Well, Yorty was one of the first to speak out on the war in Spain, to petition the state assembly to call on Roosevelt to stop the Neutrality Act (which prevented Loyalist Spain from defending its legally elected government by buying the arms and munitions necessary to defend itself while Italy and Germany were supplying the Franco revolt). He was a member of the American League against War and Fascism. He participated in the Conference for Political Unity which was held in Fresno and was another one of the overall statewide coalitions that the Left initiated and participated in, in which the Communist party was always a legal and identifiable part, an accepted part. I think I mentioned he helped me organize the California Walnut Workers Association. He was a fiery, demagogic speaker. At any rate, he was breaking with us, and Jack Tenney was breaking at the same time. Tenney originally started to break because of the inner-union fight within the musicians' union [American Federation of Musicians], where the Left was opposing his arbitrary power. He was president of the union. Whereas they [had] supported him, the inner-union, democratic forces were fighting against his arbitrariness and total control. He broke because of that challenge and that fight. I remember before that had happened how I could go to Jack Tenney on any strike and always get financial assistance and public assistance and whatnot. He and Yorty were really the two outstanding "Red" assembly men.

GARDNER

Who were some of the other members of the govern ment coalition and so forth, some of the other people around town who worked with you? Tell a little bit of that story.

HEALEY

One of the more important persons was Rube Borough. Rube had been the editor of the EPIC News, had been in the whole EPIC campaign. Before that he had been a reporter of the old [Los Angeles] Record; he had quit his job when they endorsed one or another particular reactionary that offended his sense of integrity. Integrity was the word for Rube Borough. There was never a man who so symbolized it. I have vague memories of the names of the other people. Paul Cline represented the Communist party, and Eleanor Boghegian was very active in it from the EPIC movement. A Mrs. [Lloyd M.] Smith, whose first name I don't remember, [was] representing the church forces.

GARDNER

What were some of the churches that involved themselves? I imagine the Unitarian.

HEALEY

Yeah, but no. The Unitarians weren't very signifi cant or important. I don't remember. I don't think anybody ever paid much attention to them; until Steve Fritchman came in the forties, the Unitarian Church was not a major rally ing point. The congregations were Methodists. Methodists were very important. I really don't remember all the names. My ex-husband, Don Healey, would rattle them off and des cribe them in enormous detail. He has total recall.

GARDNER

Were you down here with him then?

HEALEY

Yes. In fact, that's when we met actually, during that period. The recall worked. The election of Bowron was, again, considered a significant victory. Actually, up until about 1945, Bowron was not a bad mayor. At first, for the first time at least, there was a reasonably progres sive cast to him. Of course, the most significant thing was the fact that one of the things he did was to demolish the Red Squad, Red Hynes's department. This was also when Culbert Olson pardoned Tom Mooney in 1938. It's hard, again, to recapture the elation and triumph, the sense of victories, just increasing victories in the strength of the People's Coalition, and again the significance of the fight for Tom which had gone on since 1917. There was a huge march up Market Street that everybody either drove up to or flew to--actually nobody flew in those days, practically--but everybody drove up.

GARDNER

Took the train. . . .

HEALEY

Yeah, took the train; that's right. The old Lark; used to take it all the time. Also at that time, very, very active and very impor tant was the International Labor Defense; Vito Marcantonio that year, 1939, was the national president--Congressman Marcantonio. The ILD, which had started about 1923-24, something of that kind, had in the thirties really done an enormous job of two kinds--first, just on the general defense of prisoners, political prisoners, prisoners who were being victimized by capitalism. The most outstanding case, the biggest case I ever remember, was Angelo Herndon, a young Black guy who had gone to Atlanta, George, in 1931 to organize unemployed workers, Black and white together, and was arrested on a charge of insurrection, simply be cause it included Black and white. The Georgia law spe cifically prohibited organizations of Black and white workers to join together. He was found guilty. Either at the trial or, I think, at the appeal, Ben Davis, Jr., (who later became one of the outstanding national leaders of the Communist party, was then a young Black lawyer, the son of the GOP national committeeman from Georgia) became Angelo's lawyer. This was Ben Davis's first contact with communism, Again, it's significant in the sense of the party's influence because of its fight, because of the all-front war that was carried; for every issue there was a movement, an organization, and a struggle going on. After enormous national campaigns for Angelo Herndon-- characterized by some things that the young Left today could learn a great deal from, most importantly, the art of pamphleteering, to read the pamphlets about Angelo Herndon, and then around other cases, just dozens that would come out on every aspect of the case, very inexpen sive, one-penny, two-penny pamphlets, all very well done, most very well done. The selling of these pamphlets, the selling of literature generally, was one of the high points of the thirties, the recognition of the importance of material that went beyond what the speaker, the agitator could do. There was always a difference to us between the agitator with a spoken word and the propagandist who could educate and therefore consolidate a mass under standing that would lead to crystallization of organization. So therefore on appeal to the Supreme Court, without any question as a result of the national publicity and the campaign, the conviction was reversed. Angelo was already in jail serving the federal sentence, but was released. The next big case, of course, was the Scottsboro case. This, too, was a major thing, even bigger as a matter of fact because it was worldwide. Even now when you read the novels, either of the period or people writing about the thirties, all of them discuss all the parties and fund raising, the speeches and the demonstra tions, that went on under the slogan, "Free the Scottsboro Boys." That was one-half, one aspect, of why the ILD was important, but simultaneously was the struggle that all Communists (and the ILD was influenced mainly by the Communist party, led mainly by it) carried on internally, what we called the fight against white chauvinism. This had started in the party at its high point around the trial of a Finnish janitor in New York at the Finnish Hall, which was a left-wing fraternal organization hall. There was a dance of the Young Communist League where the Finnish janitor had acted in what we considered a chauvinist (today the word would be "racist") manner toward a young Black man who came to the dance. He was brought up on charges. . . .

GARDNER

What did he do?

HEALEY

He had insulted the young Black man and indicated he was not welcome to come. He was brought up on charges within the Communist party. The prosecutor against him was Clarence Hathaway, a white man. The defense attorney for him (a defense attorney, obviously, not literally but figuratively) was James Ford, an outstanding Black leader of the party at that time. There was a huge trial, called a "mass trial," to which hundreds of people came every day to listen. At the conclusion he was found guilty of white chauvinism, the whole significant thing being that chauvin ism (or, to use today's expression, racism) is not simply to be fought in terms of an obvious, explicit action, but equally to be fought in the implicit acceptance of chauvin ist ideology and thinking that enters into the Left movement itself. There's no wall that seals out the individual revolutionary from the ideology of white supremacy, and therefore this internal struggle was in many respects as important as the external one. [August] Yokiner was expelled and then was reinstated six months later when he had shown by his activity that he had become a fighter, a conscious fighter, in the fight against both the actions and the ideas of white supremacy. This also coincided with the party's main programmatic approach at that time, what we called "self-determination in the Black Belt," starting in 1928 at the Communist International and coming to its head really at the con vention here in the United States. The party came to the conclusion that the Black people in the United States, in the South, constituted an oppressed nation, and in the North constituted an oppressed national minority. But in the South and those areas where they were the over whelming majority, in the area called the Black Belt (the Black Belt does not come from the color of the skin, but it's called the Black Belt because of the agricultural characteristics of the area), where the Black people were the overwhelming majority, they had the right, if they wanted to (that was their decision), to secede and form an independent Black nation then and there. I mention this because it became a source of enormous agitation in the party then until 1959, great struggles, because it was a very difficult thing to ever explain, even as far as Black people were concerned. They felt as if we were segregating them. Of course, that was the farthest thing from our mind. This was the example of the greatest expression of independence, that while we would not necessarily recommend secession, if that was their decision, then we would abide by it in the North, and we'd fight for it. But I would say that here the impor tance was really never so much its theoretical accuracy or validity, or even our ability to explain it very coherently, but the extra pressure, the extra sensitivity, that the party and the party membership felt around the question of Black oppression, so that, again, in every mass organization and union that we were a part of, this struggle for Negro rights, for Negro equality, was carried by Communists everywhere. You had huge campaigns against discrimination, but also within the organizations, against insensitivity or against racist practices and so forth, which were very, very important. There was built up in the country a general feeling in the Black community. Although I don't think probably that at any time the Black membership of the party was ever over 15 percent, nevertheless, within the community itself, even when people didn't join the party, there was a sympathy and an understanding for the Communist party as being the fighters on the question of equality. I think that pretty much lasted until the fifties, when in the period of McCarthyism, first fear set in, and then, of course, the young population, the young Blacks, got as much brainwashed by the I Led Three Lives syndrome as the whites did. Well, I shouldn't say "as much," because I don't think it was ever as much, but certainly there was an inroad made into it.

GARDNER

What was the role of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] in those days?

HEALEY

Well, the nickname for the NAACP on the part of the Left (I'll explain what we thought the role was)--we called it the National Association for the Advancement of Some Colored People. We looked upon it as primarily a vehicle through which the Black bourgeoisie would protect its rights with no concern for the masses, because it saw itself solely as operating through the courts. It built very little as far as mass struggle. I think we were probably much too hard on them in that period; they probably did more significant things than we were aware of. At least up until about 1936-37, they were very critical and hostile toward the Left, and we were critical and hostile toward them.

GARDNER

Who were some of the Black leaders of the day? [William E.B.] Du Bois, for example, didn't become a Communist until later in life.

HEALEY

No, Du Bois didn't become a Communist until the 1950s--no, the 1960s, 1961. John Davis, who was the head of the National Negro Congress, Max Yergan, Paul Robeson.

GARDNER

How about among the non-Communists as well?

HEALEY

John Davis was not--at least I don't think he was--a Communist. Du Bois, of course, was already the most important figure. A. Philip Randolph.

GARDNER

What was his role?

HEALEY

Well, Philip Randolph was a member of the Socialist party, and of that portion of the Socialist party which was the most vehement against any unity with the Communists in any mass movement, whether in the American League against War and Fascism, or as it later became (in 1937, I think), the American League for Peace and Democracy; or in the student movements, where there was great unity. I would say there was greater organic unity between Socialists and Communists in the student movement than any other field. But A. Philip Randolph, as I remember, was a member of that portion of the Socialist party that fought against any kind of organic--anything that was organically united if it included the Communist party. The curious thing is that he was important but not terribly well known or sig nificant until World War II, when he became very important and significant, when he organized, or threatened to organize, the march on Washington to fight for government legislation that would prohibit discrimination in govern ment employment, shipyards, defense, and so forth. The National Negro Congress was organized, I think, in 1935 or '36, and when it was organized it was an enormously strong influential body, again, a united front body. Of course, the Communists who were organized played a legal, accepted, and influential part, but by no means the dominant one until much later. And it did unite. There was Mary [McLeod] Bethune, who was an important figure at that point, very important. I really don't remember all the names.

GARDNER

Oh, that's okay.

HEALEY

What stands out most in my memory of that period, though, was this twofold struggle, the internal and the external: the fact that externally, as I say, there was no organization where we didn't raise the fight for equality, (and that meant within the unions, where for the first time a big struggle was carried on); and internally then as far as attitudes and approaches.

GARDNER

You mentioned Paul Robeson. Was he out here much during that period?

HEALEY

I don't remember him during that period at all. I think he was in the Soviet Union during that period. I think that's when he was living there. I don't really remember when--I think it was the late thirties when he became so nationally important and influential as he did.

GARDNER

Pettis Perry is one more or less local Black. You showed me the letter that he sent out in your support in the Imperial Valley.

HEALEY

Pettis Perry became the head of the ILD, the International Labor Defense, in 1933. He again was an example of the party's effect on the lives of individuals. Pettis was the son of totally impoverished Black people. He was born in Mississippi--I'm not sure whether it was Mississippi or Alabama. All I remember was that when Pettis came to California he was illiterate (he could not read nor write), and that as part of his joining the party, the party assigned people to him to help him acquire literacy. He was not unique in that, although again he became an outstanding example of what happens when human abilities are freed. He became a very, very literate man, a teacher. For instance, I know the classes he taught that people were most excited about were the classes on imperi alism. He became an author. He was really a good example of this liberation of talent. Then there was locally as well a man by the name of Hursel Alexander, who is still active, Hursel, I think, is the president of a local union of the people employed on the neighborhood projects [The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Local 1108]. Hursel and I worked together in UCAPAWA. He organized the cotton compress workers of Kern County. Very, very eloquent, one of the best speakers I've ever heard--still is. A man by the name of Lou Rosser played a very impor tant role in the thirties, although we later discovered he was a stool pigeon. Our best information is that he was not a stool pigeon in the thirties, that the police trapped him in his home (my suspicion is that it was homosexuality) and forced him to become a stool pigeon, an informer, in order to avoid public scandal. At that time that would have been public scandal. Today it would be considered, "Who cares?"

GARDNER

There was a woman who ran a newspaper here, too....

HEALEY

Charlotta Bass was the editor of the California Eagle. She became much more prominent in the forties. There were two Black newspaperwomen in L.A. who were important. One was Charlotta, who had the Eagle, which was just an incredibly progressive, consistent, thoughtful newspaper fighting on the left. The other was Almena Lomax, who edited the L.A. Tribune, which her husband Lucius Lomax, her ex-husband now, owned. Very, very talented woman, very clever, but without any real under standing of a society, so that today I gather she's ended up as pretty much of a right-winger in Northern California. Then she just would float back and forth, very vacillating, Loren Miller was a very important name in the Black community. I first heard of him when he went on a tour of Europe [on behalf of] the Scottsboro boys. But he played a very, very important role in the 1930s here. Considered very radical. As a matter of fact, it was his closeness to us in the thirties that prevented Pat Brown from appointing him as a judge in the sixties when everybody took it for granted Loren Miller would be made a judge. If anyone made the law in the United States as far as the fight against discrimination, it was Loren, who both initiated the cases and the research and the pleading before the courts, as well as participated in the mass movement for some forty years here. But it was simply the fact that in his youth he probably had joined the Communist party--but I know he left the party--that they were afraid to appoint him, even though he had become very far away from us by the time of the fifties and sixties.

GARDNER

Was Frank Whitley out here in those days?

HEALEY

Frank Whitley was here. He was one of the leaders of the party in the later thirties. I didn't know him very well. He was very much older, and I didn't have much con nection with him actually until the late forties, when we became very good friends. I knew him very well then. Among the Chicano people--it's always a question of whether you use the words of the thirties or the words of today--my memory. . . . As I indicated, around the Imperial Valley there were very many names of the very great Mexican-American and Mexican leaders.

GARDNER

Was there much party membership in the barrio?

HEALEY

Yes, oh, yes, considerable. I would say that probably at one point in the late thirties and early forties the party had 3- to 400 members there. At that point, most of them were in Spanish-speaking groups--of course, no objection to that. It was around that period that this Congress of Spanish-Speaking Peoples was started. My memory is that a Ramon Welch was one of the first leaders of it. While it was predominantly Chicano, it was not exclusively so. All the Latin American countries' people living here participated. It was a very strong movement of this period. As a matter of fact, when you read the cases on the International Labor Defense from 1933 on, the yearly reports every year, there were just dozens and dozens of cases that they were defending of Chicano workers, either because of unemployed fights or discrimi nation-immigration cases, et cetera. I guess the ILD keeps coming back to my mind, partly out of egotism, because when I was in jail in the Imperial Valley they named one of their branches after me; it was the Dorothy Ray Branch. So I'm very proud of that. Actually, I don't really think I paid much attention to it: I am prouder of it in retro spect than I was at the time when it was taken for--you know, it didn't mean anything. It was the branch in Huntington Park. (Huntington Park and those areas in the southeast were not then what they are now, the areas of John Birch [Society] and American Independent Party strength. Then, they were working-class areas that struggled along with everyone else, really very strongly organized.) But in the late forties actually came the biggest cases around Chicanos with the Sleepy Lagoon case.

GARDNER

That was during the war, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Yeah, and the so-called zoot-suit riots.

GARDNER

Anyway, to pick up the thread, I guess, were you working with the ILD then, during that time?

HEALEY

Well, that's part of the interesting thing of the thirties, and that is that you participated with all these movements. You spoke on their behalf. You considered yourself a part of it. You reacted to their mobilizations, That was true in that organization, as well as in the Friends of the Soviet Union or the Workers1 Alliance (which was the merger of the Unemployed Council and the Workers' Alliance, which was Socialist-organized). I think a whole number of people were like I was, and that was that, whatever was the important thing at the moment, you simply participated and helped, pitched in together. I stayed with Labor's Non-Partisan League until I was appointed as the state deputy labor commissioner in 1940. In 1939 I took an examination for it, the prerequisites for taking the examination being either [that you had been] a practicing attorney for two years or else had experience in labor relations for four years. I took it more as a lark than anything else because everybody derided the idea that I, who was a publicly known Communist ever since I joined, could ever be appointed to what was a Civil Service job. I passed the exams. One was the written exam; the other was the oral exam. The oral exam had some amusing aspects to it. I remember one of the people on the panel who questioned me was [Justin W.] Gillette, who was the Civil Service commissioner of Los Angeles and also a member of the musicians' union. Another was the personnel director for either Union Oil or Standard Oil, I don't remember which. I remember their asking me the question of whether I thought I could be fair to employers with my radical background, and my saying that I'd probably be much better than if the reverse was true than anybody usually was fair to workers. At any rate, I came in about eighth or ninth on the finished list. Actually the only ones who came in ahead of me were those that got the veterans' preference, 10 percent increase on their score. In August of 1940 I received the wire from Herbert C. Carrasco, the State Labor Commissioner, that I had been appointed as a deputy state labor commissioner and I was to report to San Francisco. So, therefore, in August of 1940, I moved to San Francisco.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 7, 1972

HEALEY

There's a great mythology that the 1930s, which has become known as "the Red decade," was a period when the country was on the verge of revolution, when revolutionary consciousness was agitating the masses of people, and when as a result, the theory goes, if only the Communist party had said, "To the barricades!" there could have been a revolution. The best illustration that I can give that denies this as being the characteristic of the period was the enormous difficulty that any organizer had in organizing workers into unions. Joining a union is clearly not the most advanced social act in a society. It represents really the most elementary function of the working class, because unions are not explicitly revolutionary vehicles. They are organizations to bargain around labor power, how much the worker will be paid. And yet, I don't remember [its being easy] in any field I was in, although with the agricultural workers you had a far greater political consciousness, I think, than with the others, at least in the early period when it was predominantly Mexican-American and Filipino (it was not quite the same when the Anglos became the dominant labor force in the post-1935 period). You had to organize first of all very secretly because of the threat of workers losing their jobs, the threat of police violence. Far more clearly than even today, there was a united relationship between the employer, the police department, the district attorney's office, and the judges. They never had any difficulty in knowing their role. (As a matter of fact, just parenthetically on that, whenever I've been teaching Marxist classes, I've always given the example of [this period] as proof that workers learn more through struggle than they learn in classes; when you came to the question of trying to give a Marxist definition of the state, of the fact that the police, the courts, the army, and so forth, represent the real power of the state, the coercive power, you really didn't ever have to explain that portion to the workers who had been through strikes. They saw it operating. They saw it happening.) But in organizing the union, as I say, the fact that in so many unions the most persuasive piece of propaganda that was put out was the leaflet that would say, "FOR wants you to join a union!" was indicative of the level. The fact that you had organized and you'd gone into a place like the walnut factory, the walnut plant, or anything else (and this was true of General Motors; it was true of anything else that was mass production), that you would organize to visit workers in their homes at night and secretly sign people up, is an indication of the level, And, of course, the overwhelming fact also that what was present during the thirties, during strikes, securing all of this enormous thing, was the relative ability of the employers to mobilize what we would call the petty bourgeoisie, the clerks, the small-bank tellers, and so forth, [to make them] become parts of citizens' committees to crush the strike. A good deal of strikes that took place in that period were really public relations battles to see who could most effectively influence the nonparticipant to side with them. This was an enormous [weapon] on the part of the employers; it became a great weapon to break up strikes, eating into the union through either the wives' pressure on husbands, or many times through the Red scare pressures, and so forth. Also as part of the period was the great success of the [Martin] Dies Committee [House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities] that was just really taking, carrying on its first anti-Communist, anti-New Deal hearings. I put them together because it was impossible in that period to have separated out what the Dies Committee was trying to do. Of course, the famous story is that Shirley Temple was considered, by them--four years old then, I guess--as a Communist. But the Dies Committee would hold hearings with the big objective, first of all, of attempting to destroy the National Labor Relations Board and all the federal apparatus which had really been important in helping the labor movement organize, and then, secondly, the unions themselves, the direct frontal attack on the unions. However, the other side of this picture of what was present during that Red decade was the fact that because of all the coalitions, the United Front, all of what became known as "the People's Front" activities, trying to find the common denominator for all those who opposed fascism, all those who recognized it as the danger to the world both internationally and domestically (of course, especially internationally in the presence of Hitler and Mussolini)--that this stirred in motion whole sectors of society that responded, in the first place, to what the workers were doing (the enormous activity of workers in organizing these strikes and huge struggles), but as well represented their own interests. That was true all around; you saw it expressed in literature. There was a whole outpouring of plays and novels and so forth that expressed the social currents of the time. You saw it as well in movements of women's organizations that became enormously powerful-- the League of Women Shoppers, and all kinds of women's groups, groups that were formed to support strikes. There were two women here in L.A. who I remember were particularly important in organizing support from the middle class to support strikes: Ann Pollack, who became one of the chief fund raisers later for Israel, bonds for Israel; and a woman by the name of Alice Orans, who was one of the main social workers in the state relief administration. But to come back to the point, however, the idea that workers were ready to revolt if only the revolutionary movements had said, "To the barricades!" was really nonsense. The influence of Roosevelt, the prestige of Roosevelt, would be considered by today's standards a really incredible thing. It really becomes an interesting question of defining how much of it was valid in the sense that the workers recognized that for the first time a president was at least taking some steps (through the appointments to these legislative bodies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Farm Security Administration, things that affected their daily life) to support them toward their goals and not act against them. Or the difference it made when New Deal governors like Frank Murphy in Michigan or Floyd Benson in Minnesota, when during those strikes the National Guard was used for the strikers rather than against them, as in Illinois when the workers were shot down in the Memorial Day massacre, or here in California when Merriam was governor of the state up until 1938, or in other states. Workers did make the differentiation. So there was that much validity in their perception: there was a difference. But the fact remained that the Left never really had the kind of influence that either I or others felt we had. We had the influence on the immediate needs of the people, but when it came to an issue like Spain, where we came into a head-on conflict with the Catholic Church, or in other big social issues, then even in the unions and organizations that the Left had organized and influenced and dominated, there was always a very great limitation as to how far that influence extended. It was not a real ideological influence as much as an immediate and daily influence on practical questions which workers could test and see for themselves. This is important again only in terms of its relevancy, that while great gains were made in the thirties in terms of mass consciousness, mass radicalization--there was an enormous gain clearly expressed by the growth of the Communist party if nothing else, because by the end of the decade, the party and the Young Communist League together had around 100,000 members, and that's the largest any radical movement ever had in the United States (it sounds small, but that's the nature of our country)--nevertheless, that influence, great as it was, represented, in the first place, a momentary conquest of consciousness that then became inundated in the period of World War II, where a lot of that disappeared; and secondly, it did not extend itself to a challenge of the real structure of society. There is no better example of that than what happened to John L. Lewis when he challenged Roosevelt in 1940. John L. was the most beloved labor leader that I think the country has ever known. But when he refused to support Franklin Roosevelt for the third term, when he said that if Roosevelt got elected he would resign as president of the CIO because he, too, thought [FDR's] influence was too great, the very miners, the very steel workers who adored him voted for Roosevelt. They did not follow John L. Lewis. There's a big lesson to learn in that in regard to what degree of political consciousness, of going beyond the immediate daily things, workers recognize as far as any significant effect on long-range objectives. [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

In terms of that, I'd like to toss in a question. It's possible, isn't it, to draw some sort of relevance from that towards what is going on with the Left these days, especially with regard to the relation of the Left to the Vietnam War and to one another?

HEALEY

I think so. I think that first of all there is the fact that you cannot--you have the first portion of the thirties, where we attempted to advance primarily through revolutionary agitation, through slogans, through rhetoric--but you cannot substitute the experiences and consciousness of masses of people for what you have. You can't substitute your advanced knowledge for the mass knowledge. Secondly, a revolutionary movement [fails when it] does not reckon with the history of the consciousness of the people, how it evolved, not starting with whether it is actually all valid or real, but the belief of people that it is real--that belief becomes a very potent factor. When the Left ignores it and rejects it--for instance, one of the things that allowed the party to make the enormous strides forward in the late thirties which it did is that for the first time we started to reckon with the American heritage. We went overboard quite often in regard to it, because this is also the nature of the problem of being revolutionary, of keeping a balance and not ignoring the fact that that which is valid can become absurd if it's stretched out too far, if it's exaggerated. Nevertheless, our recognition of this was a valid thing that the young Left has yet to really reckon with in terms of American history, the mass feeling that there is a democratic road open in this country, the identification with what sometimes is a mythical path. It doesn't fully exist, but some of it does--enough of it does that people feel that there is a heritage in this country. When that's ignored and condemned, it becomes part of the ultra-Right. The ultra-Right captures it for its purposes instead of it going in a left direction.

GARDNER

The breakdown of the United Front came really in 1939, just about the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. From that point on, the Left, which had been so strong and so united, began to splinter.

HEALEY

Yes. Not as much as one would have thought; but, nevertheless, it was a significant lesson that again is relevant for today. What actually happened: the biggest strength of the Left in the thirties had come from this combination of the organizing of the unorganized [workers] in the trustified industries with the overall focus of the society as a whole being around the antifascist, anti-Nazi struggle. The anti-Nazi thing, as I say, was a dominant note of that period. In the beginning of 1938, when Hitler started to move and you had the whole business around Munich as far as [Neville] Chamberlain was concerned, the appeasement, Britain sent negotiators to the Soviet Union. Now, the British archives, recently opened up, prove that what the Left said at the time was true, namely that they had gone there with explicit instructions that they were not to make any agreements with the Soviet Union in regard to the collective security, the protection, of Czechoslovakia and Poland. The Soviet Union refused to unilaterally guarantee that. First of all they couldn't, because they couldn't have marched across other countries to have done it. Therefore, in 1939, the Soviet Union signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler. It caused, of course, an immediate and terrible repercussion in this country, particularly because it was shortly thereafter followed by the Soviet-Finnish War, which had an even greater impact than the Nazi-Soviet pact. But the Nazi-Soviet pact--and here, I think, there's a big lesson for the Left, the young Left, of today to learn from it. It is not whether or not the Soviet Union had the right to sign that pact, because in my opinion, even now looking back, I would say in the first place, every country is going to take diplomatic actions that will both protect it and extend its base. What becomes a disastrous thing is if a radical movement in another country takes what is fundamentally a diplomatic act for a separate foreign country and makes it its own political banner. Because while, as I say, I think the Soviet Union was probably justified, had no alternative, in signing this pact--there was no question that the main powers were trying to turn Nazi Germany solely toward attacking the Soviet Union--what became unjustifiable and ridiculous was that we then in our country, and all the other Communist parties in their countries, adopted that as our political banner and came to the conclusion there was no essential difference between Nazi Germany and British imperialism. So from a movement which had made as its main question the fight against fascism, we then--well, it's best symbolized in that whereas before 1939 we were calling for collective security, after the signing of the pact in 1939, our main slogan was, "The Yanks are not coming," that we would have nothing to do with foreign entanglements. And that was solely the defense of the Soviet-Nazi pact. Now, as I say, interestingly enough, however, while we lost a number of people--I think this was the first big departure of intellectuals from the party (a significant number broke with the party then; even those who were not in the party but close to us broke with us)--there was no big defection from the ranks of the Communist party at that point. That is rather surprising because of the way in which we applied that Soviet-Nazi pact to our own country. I want to repeat the relevancy when I see young people who consider themselves Maoists doing that around Bangladesh, you know, opposing the right of Bangladesh for self-determination because China opposes it because of their fight against India. With young American Maoists doing the same thing, the lesson is still as relevant today as it was for my youth. But the impact on our United Front relationship was enormous, catastrophic, in 1939. The American League for Peace and Democracy almost immediately went out of existence, The American Youth Congress, which was the largest, as I said, organized united front of anything in this country, but most particularly of youth--the Communists within it then carried on a sharp fight to make an attack upon Roosevelt, who only a year before*--he and Eleanor had been the heroes of American youth. They had been the heroes of the American Youth Congress, but in 1939 they became major targets for attack. The American Youth Congress split and then disappeared. Within the labor movement, oh Lord! What stood out there was the fact that workers couldn't understand how the fight over foreign policy, which to them was not the first and more important thing, why that should become the splitting issue in every union in which we were, and it did. And then, as I say, came the Soviet-Finnish war. the hullabaloo about the defense of poor little Finland. I would say that probably most Americans even today don't realize that Finland became an ally of Hitler's Germany in World War II and fought at the side of the Nazis. That whole "39-40 period of the war so colored American perception that I would bet anything that if a poll were taken of Americans who lived through World War II, they would never remember that Finland was not an ally of the United States but actually an ally of Nazi Germany.

GARDNER

How did that work then in the light of the pact between Hitler and Stalin? Weren't the Finns already more or less lined up on the side of the Germans at that point, or did it precede?

HEALEY

No, the Soviet-Finnish war took place after the pact, but Finland was not already an organic part of the Axis. What had happened actually was that the Soviet Union had offered to negotiate the area, the immediate area around Leningrad, where the border was just a few miles away. Again, while there's some question whether they had to go to war over it, nevertheless, the fact is that in World War II when Leningrad went through that siege, that horrible siege (eighteen months of starvation as an encircled and besieged city), if the Finnish border had been as close to Leningrad as it was in '39 and '40, there's a big question whether Leningrad could have possibly survived at all, in spite of the heroism of the people. I would say that there are legitimate questions to ask, whether there wasn't an alternative to the war. I wouldn't try to answer it. I understand that when Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was in Moscow, in a private session for the Communist party delegations that were there, [Nikita] Khrushchev spoke of the fact that he thought there was a question, whether it was absolutely necessary to have gone to war, whether the territory couldn't have been gotten elsewise. But the effect on the American political scene was enormous as far as the Left. Interestingly, however, we had enough independent strength in the Communist party and the Young Communist League that even though our already organized alliances were disappearing (the American Youth Congress, the American League for Peace and Democracy, and others) because of the split, new ones were coming into being. Partly we were making alliances just on the general antiwar basis--all this, of course, until the Soviet Union was invaded on June 22, 1941. At any rate, to go back then to the start of the decade, I did get appointed as a deputy labor commissioner with authority to enforce the state labor code. I was given a huge police badge, just huge, with authority only to arrest employers; that was the only thing it enabled me to do. My job in San Francisco in the labor commissioner's office had two major functions. I understand, by the way, I was the first woman ever appointed as a result of the Civil Service exam as a deputy labor commissioner. There had been one other woman deputy who had, however, been upgraded from a clerk, had been internally appointed and had not passed a Civil Service exam, this before Civil Service exams were mandatory for the job. We held hearings in our office based on complaints that people would file on violations of the state labor code. I would say we acted in a quasijudicial capacity. Theoretically we were prohibited from determining truth of fact or evidence--we had the authority to swear people in, to take an oath, but we were not supposed to be able to differentiate as to who is lying or who is telling the truth, because that's a judicial capacity. Of course, that was nonsense. The minute you'd swear them in under oath you made up your mind on the basis of what they said, who was or was not telling the truth. Even though you did not have a jury, you were the judge and the jury at the same time. As I remember, most of the cases that came into the office were violations of wage agreements, violations of unwritten contracts. The state labor code at that time--it's no longer true--was one of the most advanced in the country. It had been initiated by the Hiram Johnson progressive movement in 1916-17, and it really represented quite an advanced labor code. My own experience was that only the AF of L understood and knew how to use it, because half the time we acted as their business agent, enforcing contracts or safety provisions. The CIO never really did understand how valuable it was to the labor movement, how many things could be adjudicated without having strikes simply by virtue of having it written in the law. We enforced the eight-hour law for women which was under the Division of Industrial Welfare, the women's division. The other part of the job meant going out to make inspections on state labor law regulations covering any establishment where there were workers. I remember one of the favorites that we used to take was to go into nightclubs to see whether the law [was being obeyed] that says that if tips are not kept by the employee, there has to be a sign posted informing people that that is true. We always used to enjoy that. We went into burlesque houses to see whether or not health provisions and sanitary provisions were enforced.

GARDNER

That they didn't catch cold.

HEALEY

Yeah. We were supposed to make--I think there was a quota of ten inspections a day, and when you got experienced you knew how to go through them very quickly, very fast, because you knew what to look for. You knew whether people were lying or not. We'd make joint inspections with the Wage and Hour Administration in Chinatown. This was the most awful part because it was such fakery. The conditions were simply horrible, the violations of every state and federal law. They'd be cited. All we could do because of the federal legislation was cite the employer to appear for violation; they'd get a "Tut, tut" warning, and nothing would happen. The other investigations, where we did them on our own, were far more effective It depended upon the individual deputy, how much you wanted to do.

GARDNER

How many deputies were there?

HEALEY

Gee, I don't know.

GARDNER

I mean lots, or just a couple?

HEALEY

Well, not lots, probably eight, nine, ten, something like that. That's just in San Francisco. I don't mean statewide.

GARDNER

Yeah.

HEALEY

At any rate, in 1941, four days before Pearl Harbor, I was called before the Tenney Committee, the Assembly Interim Committee on Un-American Activities, in San Francisco.

GARDNER

You might put in here something about Mr. Tenney and his change between the time when we talked about him and last and now, the last two or three years.

HEALEY

Yes. In 1939, Tenney and Yorty--together, by that time, although they later split over it--started the first "Little Dies Committee," as it was called, in California. Their investigations focused on the State Relief Administration offices, in which a whole number of left-wingers had been appointed by virtue of Olson's election. Olson was appointing based on who had supported him, where the organized strength had come from. Tenney, as I said earlier, had broken with the Left over the fight within his own union, the musicians' union, with the Communist and left progressive forces in that union. Up until 1938, he was the chairman of Labor's Non-Partisan League in Southern California. He resigned from that and immediately started investigating his former associates, using the power of this Un-American Activity Committee to do it. Again, remember the picture of the state at that time: this was the first Democratic administration in California for God knows how long, certainly the first liberal one ever, liberal-left. The newspapers were going crazy, every major newspaper. The Los Angeles Times, of course, was one of the most reactionary papers of its period; the Hearst papers. . . . The constant, constant attacks on the administration and the State Relief Administration were going on, so that the investigations coincided with this build-up, first of the newspapers, calling them terrible. It's like the so-called "welfare abuses" today, only more so because it was linked with communism then. As I say, it was a never-ending pressure of the papers that started the campaigns. When I appeared in 1941--no one ever took the Fifth Amendment in those days. (As a matter of fact, at a later point, I'll describe how the Fifth Amendment was first pioneered by us in 1949 at the grand jury hearings.) But at that point, one answered the questions and didn't even think about it. The big thing that Tenney was after was how I got appointed, how I got the job, in view of my Communist background. He read into the record the material of the State Personnel Commission which had appointed me. Here's an editorial from the Oakland Tribune of November 7, 1941, commenting on it; again, since it is expressive of that period, I might read it to you. It's headlined, "COULD IT BE GLAMOUR?" "How to get a job with the Olson Administration is a question which has bothered a lot of regular Democrats in California. But for Dorothy Ray it was easy. She is now deputy labor commissioner for the State of California. Dorothy, by the way, is the former wife of Lou Schneiderman, brother of William Schneiderman, who is the secretary of the Communist party in this state, and the present wife of Don Healey, Communist State Central Committee member, according to records in Sacramento. She is something of a Communist in her own right, having given, she says, ten years of active service to the party as a member of the Young Communist League. When she applied for the position of deputy labor commissioner, it was revealed that she has been several of those ten years in strike leadership of agricultural unions in the San Joaquin Valley, in Ventura, in Orange County, and climaxed that career by spending six months in the county jail in the Imperial Valley. Something of a handicap, you might think, for a person who sought a key spot in the state government. But not for Dorothy. The only barrier between Dorothy and the job was an oral examination to be given by Herbert C. Carrasco ..." (That, of course, is parenthetically not true; I first passed a written examination.) "... Herbert Carrasco, a labor commissioner appointed by Governor Olson, E.W. Chapson, J.W. Gillette, W.K. Hopkins." (Parentheses again. They don't mention the fact that, as I say, one of these was the personnel director of either Union Oil or Standard Oil Company; the other was the personnel director of the City of Los Angeles.) Then, again, to the Tribune; "They listened to her story." (I haven't read this in so many years I looked ahead to see what it says.) "Here are their comments immediately after the interview, recorded by a shorthand reporter and filed with the legislative committee probing into subversive activities into the state government. Gillette . . ." Well, there's some flowery language which I think I'll skip, and then he says, "'I wouldn't be afraid to trust that woman. I wouldn't be afraid to trust that girl in any place. I think this woman has something I never saw in a woman in my life, something there, I don't know what it is.' Hopkins: 'She has the courage of her convictions.' Gillette ..." Again, very flowery language which isn't important. "Carrasco: 'Her answers are one of the best we have.' Gillette: 'Absolutely the best.' Carrasco: 'Very keen thinker.' Gillette:" (This quote I love the best.) "'The most forceful woman I have seen of that type. It is certainly not force of good looks!' Hopkins: 'Force of personality. I'm giving her 85 percent.' Chapson: 'I'm going to give her 88 percent.' That, girls, appears to be the way to get a good job with Governor Olson's administration." And, of course, what that whole examination had been about was this question, first of all, of my knowledge of economics, and secondly, my knowledge of labor law. Well, I had studied that state labor code backwards and forwards before I took the exam. There was really no problem in answering the questions. What really astounded them was the fact that I had gotten it. It didn't only astound them, but it astounded all of us, too, the Communists as well. I remember the discussion in the party when I got the grade back in the mail. They sent you back an announcement of how far you placed. As I said, I had been either eighth or ninth. I remember talking to my fellow comrades in the party office about it. I remember the comment, "Well, water would have to flow upstream, Dorothy, before you could get that appointment." When I actually got the appointment I immediately sent wires to the comrades saying, "Water has just flowed upstream." At any rate, I worked on the job for some three years and became increasingly bored with it, [even though] it was very pleasant as far as working conditions. First of all, for the first time I was getting a very good salary. I don't remember what it was anymore, but it was three times as much as I had ever gotten in my life. Secondly, there was really no supervision over us. We were our own bosses as to how long we wanted to work, when we wanted to work, how we wanted to work. So it was very un-pressure-ridden, the only time in nay life that had been true. It certainly was the only prestigious job I'd had. Yet it was also really boring. The complaints were very petty. While they were important to the individual, you weren't really changing much of society. Of course, I always sided with the worker. There was never any problem with that because usually the worker was right. There were very few times when that wasn't true. But whether you're doing inspections or whether you're hearing cases in the office, it was very petty and very unsatisfying as far as effectively challenging the system.

GARDNER

Were you participating in activities with the Communist party as well?

HEALEY

No, as a matter of fact, I was on leave at that time, primarily because of this job. I was doing some things. Oh, I know what I was mainly doing! I don't know why I had forgotten; it's good you asked me. I had helped to form--I was one of the initiators of--what was first known as the Tom Mooney Labor School and later became known as the California Labor School. I was not only one of the ones who went out to organize, to get a great deal of support for it, finance it, and get it set up, but also one of the first teachers of it; [I taught] labor history. That took up a great deal of my time.

GARDNER

Where was this school located?

HEALEY

In San Francisco.

GARDNER

Where in San Francisco, do you know?

HEALEY

On Turk Street. I won't swear to that, but that's my memory.

GARDNER

Who were some of the others?

HEALEY

One of the main organizers had been Frank Carlsen, who had been the Young Communist League organizer in the early thirties that I mentioned, a very bright and talented man. Dave Jenkins of the ILWU was very important in its organizing. Gosh! I haven't thought about it in so many years, I don't remember. But it was very broadly supported by the labor movement, by the Central Labor Council. After the war, as a matter of fact, it was accredited as one of the places where the GI Bill could be used for credits. Hundreds and hundreds of students. It covered the gamut from politics to culture, and so forth. [Phone rings; tape recorder turned off] After I had appeared before the Tenney Committee, the state labor commissioner's main assistant, a man by the name of Albert Shanks, who had been one of the early organizers of the Tom Mooney Defense Committee, called me into his office and said that the governor demanded my resignation, that it was clear I was a Communist, and that they wanted me to resign. I said that I would not resign, for as far as state law was concerned, I had a perfect right to be anything I wanted to be, and that I wouldn't resign. I actually stayed on the job longer than I would have otherwise simply because of the pressure to get me to resign. I just wouldn't give in. I stayed longer because, as I say, I was really bored with it and wanted to leave. But I stayed with them until I became pregnant with my son, Richard. I then took a leave of absence.

GARDNER

What would be the chronology of this?

HEALEY

I married Don Healey in 1941. In 1943 I got pregnant. By the way, I got permission of the party to get pregnant. I know that's no longer operative, but as I was growing up, one did not act as an individual in one's life. One did whatever one did in discussion with the party. I can remember having a meeting with Oleta O'Connor Yates and Louise Todd. Louise was the state secretary. Schneiderman was actually the state chairman of the party, Louise was the state secretary, and Oleta was the county organizer in San Francisco. I told them I was getting on in years--I was twenty-nine--and I thought it was time I had a child. They said, "Sure, of course." So I got pregnant. When I was about seven months, eight months pregnant, I left San Francisco--Don had been drafted in the army already--and I moved back to Los Angeles. My son was born here, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. About six months after he was born--I had only, as I said, taken a leave of absence from the job; I wasn't sure what I would do--Maurice Travis, from the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers union, came to see me and implored me to come help them as a union organizer, that because of the war, the organizers had been drafted and they were in very great difficulty. So I went down to the labor commissioner's office here in Los Angeles and discussed it with them. I handed in my resignation. They were so relieved, delighted, and so glad. They had to reappoint me if I wanted to do it, and yet it would have been just a terrible blow to them.

GARDNER

What had Don been doing during the time that you were up in San Francisco? He was up there as well?

HEALEY

No, not in the beginning. He was still down here in Los Angeles with Labor's Non-Partisan League. He moved up there about '41 or '42. He went to work for the CIO, in charge of their--first he went to work either as a pile driver or as a painter; I'm not sure which. He had been a house painter. He'd been the business agent of the AF of L here in Los Angeles, was expelled from the AF of L on the charge of "dual unionism" in the mid-thirties. Don was a very, very eloquent speaker, an extraordinarily handsome man at that point when we were young, and then, as he is now, a very good, fine, sweet human being. He became a full-timer for the CIO in about 1941 or '42. No, it wasn't for the CIO; it was for something set up by the CIO and the AF of L both. It had to do with the raising of funds for what was called the United War Relief. That was the raising of individual amounts of money for the allocation of funds to Yugoslav war relief, Russian war relief, the Red Cross, and assorted groups. He did that until he was drafted. He went into the army in 1943, was stationed mainly at Fort Selma, Alabama, in the training cadre, teaching the army whatever they teach. He was supposed to be sent to DCS, Officer Candidates' School, but each time his own commanding officers would fight for him to go because of his abilities, it would be countermanded higher up because of his politics. He liked the army. He enjoyed the regularity of it, the structure of it, the discipline of it. He enjoyed himself a great deal. As it was true with a whole number of Communists, he was not allowed to be at any front rank in fighting. He was kept here. That wasn't uniformly true. Some Communists--like Bob Thompson, Herman Bottcher, and others--did get through; but others didn't. At any rate, my son was born June 18, 1943. Six months later I became an international representative for the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, here in Los Angeles.

GARDNER

Where were you living when you came down to Los Angeles?

HEALEY

I lived with my mother at 1933 West Sixty-fifth Street. My mother had lived there from about 1933 on. My husband, on leave from the Army when the baby was born, built an extra room to make room for all of us there. We lived there until 1946 when we moved here to Eighty-fourth Street. My main job with the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers was organizing unorganized workers into the union and then servicing the contracts of those already organized. The two plants that stand out in my memory were Bohn Aluminum, which is now Harvey Aluminum, and Alcoa Aluminum. They were right across the street from one another in Torrance. They stand out in my mind, first of all, because of the sharp fights we used to have on every aspect of the contracts in making them live up to it. I was mainly in charge of the departments that had Black workers, in the foundry and the extrusion plant at Bohn.

GARDNER

Isn't Harvey related to one of the leading Democrats?

HEALEY

Yes, as a matter of fact, the founder of the plant, Leo Harvey, was an old-time sympathizer of the Russian Revolution and of the Left generally. The Bohn Aluminum plant, which was built with taxpayers' funds, was practically given by the United States government to Harvey. After the war those plants were given away to private industry. Before that, there was a Harvey plant which Mine-Mill had organized. What used to amuse me was that the old man, who still considered himself a radical, had been superseded in operational authority by his son Lawrence. My friends, who were close friends of theirs (I have some friends, Jules and Elsa Kievits, from Labor's Non-Partisan League days), Don and I used to go out with them to the Harvey home, the beach home at Malibu, which they weren't using on weekends. We played poker there every weekend, which always tickled my silly sense of humor. [laughter] That's when I first also met Wyndham Mortimer, who was working with Mine-Mill at that time. I also got re-involved then in the internal battles going on in the CIO Council. Slim [Philip] Connelly, who ultimately became my third and last husband, was the secretary of the CIO Council. The battles between the Left and the Right were just enormous. The Right was mainly led by John Despol, who was named representative of the [United] Steelworkers [of America] union. We were very contemptuous of the Steelworkers because very few of their organizers had ever worked in a steel plant in their life, and Johnny Despol was very typical of that--probably never worked a day at anything in his life. We used to laugh that the Steelworkers union was the only union that never fired an organizer, unless you were Red. Once you got a job with the Steelworkers, you could do no wrong. There was absolutely nothing. You never had to do a bit of work. Once you were in with them, you were in for life--as long as you went along with their politics.

GARDNER

Were there any other activities at this time, during the last few years of the war, in which you were involved?

HEALEY

There were two. One was the War Labor Board. The CIO appointed me as its alternate representative on the regional War Labor Board (one of the few, if not only, women appointed on the regional board). What that meant was that I would sit in on the tripartite hearings that were held which regulated the question primarily of wages and hours during the war. Because there were to be no strikes: the CIO had pledged no strikes; the Communist party was all gung-ho for no strikes. The other activity that I entered into was that I was appointed by the CIO to represent it at a new school that was being formed here called the People's Educational Center. There, the only thing that really stands out in my mind is that Dean McHenry, who is now chancellor or something at [the University of California] Santa Cruz, was on that board with me and got in a lot of trouble later because of it.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 7, 1972

GARDNER

We're coming to the period in the latter part of the war, and I was wondering if you would talk about what your involvement was with the Communist party at that time, and what your activities were in the party.

HEALEY

Before I went to work with the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, when Richard was about three months old, I went down to the party office--Carl Winter was then the chairman of the party in Los Angeles--and I offered my services as volunteer to do anything they needed. It just wasn't enough being home. As a matter of fact, the only assignment they could figure out for me then was to clip papers for them. I remember five papers a day I used to clip for them. It got me in a very good habit. I've done it ever since for myself. Then I went to work for Mine-Mill, and I became a part of what in the post-Browder period was derisively called the Gods' Committee. That was the Communists who were in the top leadership of the CIO, who had a group together; it was mainly a class, as a matter of fact, taught by a woman by the name of Eva Shafran who died in '45. Really a wonderful woman, the only woman I've ever known who could take a current question and relate it back to Marxist classics. At any rate, in that group, as I remember, were Slim Connelly and his then-wife Dorothy Connelly; Bill Gately, whom I know. Lord! I really don't remember the names. At any rate, I started for the first time reading Communist material more seriously than I had before, the monthly magazine The Communist, the newspapers and pamphlets, I was just horrified at what was becoming the line of the party. It is described in party texts as the "Teheran Line," and it's all blamed on Earl Browder. Teheran was a city in Iran where Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill had met and agreed on the postwar perspective of unity, the fact that they would stay united, that there would be no war, that they would be the three strong powers that could stop wars from starting anywhere. Very similar to what we did in 1939 with the Nazi-Soviet pact, the party started to interpret this as representing what domestic lines should be, that there would be this long period of peace, class peace, not only peace as far as the absence of war between imperialists, interimperialists, or between imperialist and socialist countries, but peace at home. There already were difficulties starting with the party's line because of our total emphasis on the "win the war at all cost" approach, on the no-strike pledge, all questions being secondary to the emphasis of winning the war. This was true as far as no striking, this was true as far as conditions. The UE [United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers Union of America], for instance, which considered itself the most left of all the unions, the most revolutionary, had actually come up with proposals on how to accelerate production; they were really speed-up proposals, incentive pay plans, things of this kind that depended on individual speed-up of workers. As far as, for instance, the struggles for Negro rights, we should have been the most gung-ho while we still maintained our struggle for equality, [except that we] kept saying that first you had to win the war because otherwise fascism would place Negroes in even worse conditions. Everything became subordinated to it. It's another instance of what I was referring to earlier, that you can take what is perfectly valid, and by just a little extension of that which is valid make it an absurdity. The party's line was already becoming such, in my opinion. I was, as I say, working then as a Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers representative. Both the approaches on the question of the no-strike pledge, the extent to which we [the workers] were carrying it, as well as the need for [higher] production and so forth--I was finding them absolutely outrageous, as a worker, as an organizer in the union. The bosses were getting away with murder because they weren't going to subordinate anything to winning the war. Therefore, the whole burden, all the sacrifices, were being placed on the backs of the workers. The party was losing its own identity as an independent revolutionary movement, totally submerged around the whole question of Roosevelt as commander-in-chief and the "don1t-rock-the-boat" approach. Well, then came this approach toward Teheran as representing a whole new epoch which had opened up in world history, its being translated by the Communist party leadership as representing not only the question of what is now defined as peaceful coexistence in the world, but, in some respects even more seriously, as a question of extended class peace within the United States. As Browder placed it in the reports to the party, the capitalists would realize it was to their own benefit to raise wages by themselves without class struggle having to force them to do it, [and] to make sure that they were not making an undue profit out of the exploitation of workers; that they would realize the same thing as far as the colonial world was concerned, as far as imperialist interests--that it was in their own interest not to pursue imperialist policies but rather to have a Good Neighbor policy with the oppressed colonial countries

GARDNER

Sort of benevolent capitalism.

HEALEY

I started getting just outraged by what I was seeing. I mention this because of the fact that with my usual unconcern for party conventionality, with what people thought, I was already speaking out against these questions. That is important only because I was doing it before the [Jacques] Duclos article was written. It later became important and was why I was forced into becoming a party representative, a spokesman for the party, rather than continuing in the CIO. Everywhere, in these meetings, for instance, of what was known as God's Committee and in larger meetings of Communists gathered to discuss party policy in the labor movement, I was constantly speaking out, attacking these approaches as being--I don't think I ever used the word revisionist, but as being reformist, as being inaccurate, as being wrong; that they were totally out of kilter with what was needed to pursue the interests of the working class in the first place, and the whole social struggle secondly. The Communist party called a convention in 1944 where the party was officially, legally, dissolved on one day, then an hour or half an hour later reconvened as a Communist Political Association. The whole thing was that we were not going to be running candidates, we were not going to be doing things that characterized an independent political force before, that we would now be working through the established parties and organizations of the people.

GARDNER

Doesn't this--this is, of course, a devil's advocate question--doesn't this coincide at some point with the dissolution of the Comintern?

HEALEY

No, the Comintern was dissolved a year earlier in 1943. At that time those of us who were just ordinary people (I don't know what the leadership thought of it, but ordinary Communists who were not the leadership), we all thought it was simply--we believed what was said, that it was no longer a necessary instrument, that all the parties had become so independent and mature by this time that there was no longer needed a center that would coordinate and so forth. Actually, of course, what was undoubtedly true in retrospect was that the Soviet Union's interests no longer wanted it because of its wartime alliances. It was an embarrassment. Therefore, it was dissolved. But as I say, the Communists never shifted, simply considered it as a move [beyond] a thing that was outgrown. It was no longer needed. The Communists would coordinate common struggles against imperialism and fascism in the world in other ways. Well, when I read the news (this was before I had gone back to work for Mine-Mill), when I read the news that the Communist party had been dissolved--I read it in the newspaper--I was totally unprepared for it. Although those who were functioning in the party knew that in the pre-convention this had been proposed, I hadn't read it, heard about it, nor known about it. I remember calling a friend of mine, Audrey F., and crying, literally crying, "They've taken the party away from us! What right do they have to take the party away from us?" Just brokenhearted at it. Then, when I was functioning in Mine-Mill, the absurdity of the line was so clear to me, so patent, that I started making speeches and needling remarks on it everywhere I could, in private conversations, to party representatives and so forth. What kind of nonsense was this? Well, then came the publication of the Duclos article, first I think in the New York Herald Tribune and then in the Daily Worker.

GARDNER

Why don't you describe who Duclos was.

HEALEY

Jacques Duclos was one of the leaders of the French Communist party who was still, I think, underground at the time; the war was still going on. Germany was still occupying France. He wrote an article for a French Communist magazine examining the policy of the American Communist party. The party's policy had become very influential for other parties. Some had rejected it. The British party just rejected it out of hand. But Latin American parties whom we influenced a great deal accepted it; the Canadian party accepted it and followed the same kind of nonsense. The Australians, as I remember, rejected it. But there were enough parties that were accepting it and being influenced by it that the French felt impelled to speak out. I know that even the first of the national leaders of the party had not known about it until they heard that this article was going to run in translation in the Herald Tribune. They hadn't known of the existence of the article in its original French. Well, it was as if a bolt of lightning struck the Communist party. The discussions and the reaction in the party were extraordinary. In the first place, lots of Communists had felt exactly what I was verbalizing but hadn't done it because of party discipline, what they considered democratic centralism to mean, that you subordinated any questions you had to what the majority had ruled at a convention.

GARDNER

Had you spoken out at this point?

HEALEY

I had spoken out before the Duclos article in party circles.

GARDNER

In publications?

HEALEY

No, not in writing, in large party meetings and small meetings.

GARDNER

Locally?

HEALEY

Yeah. But I never called it the Browder policy. I still resent calling it that because it was a policy that the whole party had adopted and the National Committee had adopted. As I will indicate, I think there are big lessons for revolutionaries in regard to that as to how vulgarized the concept of democratic centralism had become, how Stalinized, and, of course, some thirty years after, how in my opinion it should have been interpreted. But I remember huge meetings used to take place of the Communists in the CIO (they were taking place between Communists everywhere, but those were the ones I knew), debating what this represented, because almost immediately the party was plunged into the most enormous ideological battle of its history, either before or since. There's really been nothing ever since that is commensurate with it. The Twentieth Congress was the only other thing of comparable impact. But I think this was even more, because this was something that related directly to what we had been doing ourselves in the Communist party. The party was swept by a wave of antileadership approaches. The membership wanted everybody out that had anything to do with this. Partly it was the feeling that they had been hornswoggled by the leadership, but partly it was a feeling that they wouldn't admit that they had participated and accepted it themselves. They themselves had gone along with it, and nobody wanted to accept that responsibility. Instead, they wanted to put it all on the leaders: "You leaders betrayed us, you leaders did this, and therefore you leaders should go!" The leadership everywhere in the country was rushed into the greatest kind of crisis. Well, we had then what is always true in the party--a convention was ordered, a special emergency convention. Before every convention there's at least a two- to three-month period of what is called preconvention discussion. This is the only time when really free debate is supposed to operate. Anything anybody wants to say or write, anything anybody wants to write, must be printed. That's not true at any other period. But during pre-convention, anything must be printed. The pages of the preconvention bulletins were just filled with articles, as I say, I think probably two-thirds violently [opposed to] what became known as the Browder policy, one-third very supportive of him. There was no question how the bulk of the party felt, but immediately. Now it's true, I think, that the feeling that I was expressing was already starting to be expressed in national circles before the Duclos article, but again in a very cautious, veiled way. People like Gene Dennis and Gil Green were already raising questions that there had to be, as soon as the war was over, a reexamination of this policy, what it represented--but very tentatively placed, very tentatively placed, because the general secretary of the party, this and every other Communist party, is a person of enormous authority, far more than any one person should ever have. It becomes a very difficult thing to ever challenge a policy that has the stamp of the general secretary. In Los Angeles a body was set up which was totally unique to the area. It was called an Internal Leadership Commission. It was supposed to act before the convention in examining the old leadership and interviewing new people for new leadership. I only knew about it really kind of remotely, not directly; I wasn't involved. But I knew about it because I started hearing stories of the whole intention that this leadership must go. I came to the convention. By then it was pretty well known that I had opposed it ahead of time.

GARDNER

Which convention?

HEALEY

This was the Los Angeles convention. It was really the most dramatic convention, that and the national convention that followed it in 1945, that I've ever seen in the Communist party. This combination of the feeling that you have betrayed and hornswoggled us, and also, really in large part, in my opinion, this unwillingness of individual Communists to face up to the fact that they'd let themselves be so taken in. There was no gun at anybody's back. There could have been the fight earlier. There could have been the demand for examining what was happening in all of our various fields of works, in the struggle for Negro rights, Chicano, all the way down the line.

GARDNER

What was the party situation as far as membership and size at that point? Had it fallen off?

HEALEY

No, no. As a matter of fact, it hadn't. Of course, the men who went in the army took a leave of absence from the party. We didn't try to organize within the army itself, which is also a part of what now would be considered reformism, not to have done that. The only thing that had fallen off in 1941, maybe '42, was the Young Communist League [which had failed] to fulfill an effort that had started in the mid-thirties to make the Young Communist League what technically the youth part of any revolutionary movement is always supposed to be, [in other words,] much larger than the Communist party, more influential, on the ground that to join the Communist party you already have to accept the program of the Communist party. But to join the Young Communist League, that is not supposed to be true: all you have to do is want to study, learn, and participate in activities, but you did not have to accept the program. But nowhere in the world was the Young Communist League bigger than the party. All the Young Communist Leagues throughout the world had been going through great efforts trying to figure out new forms that could broaden out their appeal, make them more youthful and less junior Communist parties, which is what we were, in fact, if anything more disciplined, more demanding, than the Communist party. The first thing that it had done was to dissolve the Young Communist League and set up the American Youth for Democracy, the AYD. I don't really know an awful lot about that except that it really lost a good deal of its character, became mainly student, lost most of its working youth, in my memory. It did have a very broad appeal. I remember one dinner that appeared in the Tenney Committee later, which I have pictures of still. I think my young sister [Carol Jean] spoke at that banquet as an AYDer, and Evans Carlson, the Marine colonel [who coined] the term "Gung-Ho Raiders," was the guest of honor. Frank Sinatra was there; John Garfield was there; Paul Robeson was there. They had great public appeal, even though it was a radical youth organization. But they had lost in membership. Nevertheless, the real size of the party had not appreciably altered with the change over to this CPA, Communist Political Association. That's what it became.

GARDNER

Back to the convention.

HEALEY

Yeah, back to the convention. The Duclos article had also called attention to something that none of us had known, and that was that William Z. Foster had been one of two votes against this policy of liquidating the party, had voted against that--that's what became known as the Teheran policy--Foster and Sam Darcy, who was the head of the party in Philadelphia. But nobody in the party membership knew that there were these disagreements in the top leadership, or that Foster had opposed it. The Duclos article pointed out Foster and printed from a letter that Foster wanted to send out to the National Committee members (some of whom got it) which explained his opposition to this policy. That made Foster the instantaneous hero of the National Convention. He had been "right" all along. You should know that this had significance because Browder was confirmed as the general secretary in 1934, but actually in 1930 had been selected by Stalin to be the in-between man who was to take over the leadership because of the factional fights with Foster on one side and Lovestone on the other.

GARDNER

Which we'll get to later on.

HEALEY

Yeah, at another period. Foster and Browder developed the most horrible kind of relationship, Foster always opposing Browder and Browder always opposing Foster. Foster had been sick after the 1932 Presidential campaign-- he had had a heart attack--so he was out of full activity, but he nevertheless kept his oar in. Mostly all that anybody of us saw him doing in the late thirties was writing articles, and in some places in the Midwest he used to go to help on the union organizing of party members who were doing any organizing work. His role was very much diminished. There were a lot of stories going around that he was semisenile, and what not, obviously old Browder-motivated stories. I was elected as a delegate to it even though I had not played any real role in the Los Angeles party. Almost everybody knew me from as a child on, but I had not been involved in the inner party life at all.

GARDNER

Who were some of the other delegates, do you recall?

HEALEY

Well, there was a man by the name of David Buchanan from San Diego, who was a painter. "Nemmy" [Ned] Sparks was then the chairman of the party. He's still here in L.A. Morgan Hull. Pettis Perry. I don't remember any others.

GARDNER

That's okay.

HEALEY

I was elected as a delegate to go to it, the main reason being that I was a labor spokesman, well known in the labor movement, also the fact that--this was not generally known, but it was known among all the labor people--that I had opposed the position before. Well, the local people at Mine, Mill, and Smelter denied me permission to go back to the convention. I was determined to go because I really was so genuinely outraged by what I felt was the betrayal of my patrimony, my heritage, my birthright in this party. This was my love, my life, my family, and what had happened to it! I was absolutely determined to go. (By the way, I should mention this parenthetically, again out of order. I had taken the name Healey when my son was born in 1943. It was the only time I ever changed my name. Always before, I was Dorothy Ray, so after that it was Dorothy Ray Healey. It has relevance only in that they tried to say that I could go under a different name, just use Dorothy Ray, not use Dorothy Ray Healey, because Mine-Mill only knew me as Dorothy Ray Healey. I refused. That was a compromise I wouldn't think of doing.) At any rate, I was fired when I came back from the convention. I knew that was going to happen, so I really didn't care. There were so many union places I could work with and for. Well, it was the first national convention I attended with the party. I had been in since 1928. The only other things I attended of an inner-party character--I attended a party convention in San Francisco in 1938. But I didn't feel terribly directly involved in all the discussions and debates going on, partly, as I say, because of the unjustified and arrogant feeling that we who were the leading people in labor were really the ones leading the masses, and these other people were mainly talking. That convention, I was astonished by it. First of all, as I say, I was kind of exasperated by this anti-leadership thing, although if I knew then what I know now, I would have joined it very enthusiastically. But I was equally furious at what the national leaders were doing in terms of protecting themselves. They were banking on an article written by Celeste Strack in preconvention discussion.

GARDNER

A familiar name.

HEALEY

Yes. Celeste had provided the rationale. It's a rationale that I have particular hatred for even though there's a certain validity to it. The rationale was that we Communists living in the capitalist environment had been penetrated by capitalist ideology, had been absorbed by bourgeois ideology, and that was why we had gone off the track and allowed this.

GARDNER

A confession of sin.

HEALEY

Well, what just outraged me was this: as I said, at the National Convention I got up and made a very strong speech, which caused a lot of problems later, attacking this business on the ground that--what a convenient justification! These pure little puny Communists, unable to withstand the capitalist pressures. How fragile could Marxist theory and Marxist ideology be if capitalist ideology and bourgeois ideology and bourgeois pressures could so easily penetrate? Now, I said there is some validity in that rationale in that obviously you don't live in a society without absorbing some of its pressures. But to rely solely upon that, to make that the primary reason why this really enormous betrayal of Marxism-Leninism could take place---which is what that position represented--as I say, just seemed to me a giant cop out. I was furious. But I was also disturbed by this whole, as I say, antileadership thing because already, even at that point, I was just exasperated and disgusted with rank-and-file Communists who had faith but nothing else: faith in the leadership, faith in the party, faith in the inevitability of the revolution, faith in the Soviet Union, faith in everything---because it was religiosity. One can say one has confidence in something or, to be more exact or precise in Marxist language, one has confidence in the potential of something as it matures, as it develops. But to have faith-- that meant that you were laying aside your own responsibilities and simply taking something else. You know, "Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my being; Thy will, not mine, be done." This is really--I'm orating about it now because both historically and currently, this is the most serious problem of any revolutionary movement, and not just of the Communist party. I see the same thing operating now in all the young radical movements, the so-called Maoist movements and the independent radicals that developed, but most particularly in the Maoist youth movements. At any rate, at this very stormy convention, that was when really more than ever I became convinced that no matter what other assignment I was ever going to have--I had had no intention, no thought of working within the internal structure of the party because, as I've indicated, I've always, ever since 1935, felt this was not for me; I didn't find it very exciting, and it seemed kind of pedestrian. But I was now determined that never again would I lose such intimate contact with the internal life as I had in those past years of being in the labor movement, where I just looked at it kind of bemusedly more than anything else. It was all right; I had no conflicting questions on the line until the 1944 events, until the Browder- Teheran line. At that time I still had no real significant question as to the leaders as individuals within the party. This was also not unimportant in terms of later years because a member of the party never really knew what role particular national leaders played one way or the other. Differences were never aired, so you never knew what positions people had. There was never any report on people's activities back to the party, so that you didn't know what they actually didn't like. You'd see them when they'd come to your area, to Los Angeles, and would judge them then, but obviously you saw them in a very superficial way, not really a three-dimensional way. But I had absolutely no thought that I can remember in 1945 that individual members of the party leadership might be better or worse than others. They were all pretty much [the same]. I remember speaking there. Browder was sitting almost in front of me as I spoke. I had never known him, had never seen him before--which is kind of unusual because he traveled around a great deal, but I'd always either been in jail when he came or way out of the city. I remember making my big speech just describing the daily effect on me as a union organizer; I used Bohn Aluminum and Alcoa as the example of what this line of the party represented in the lives of workers, what a betrayal of workers that had been. I can remember as I was speaking looking at him and thinking, "Gee, I'm doing what I really don't like," that it's the thing which happens in the chickenyard when the hen goes down and all the chickens start pecking. I never have liked it. Everybody was using and singling out Browder mainly because he wouldn't do a mea culpa and say it's him. I remember feeling inside of me kind of distressed that I was doing the same thing and going along. As I say, when the nominations for leadership had come up, I had already gotten up and spoken against this idea that it was all Browder, that that was nonsense. Or that it was all capitalist influence--I thought that was nonsense. At any rate, I came back to Los Angeles, and the second session of the Southern California Convention was called. We'd had one session before the National [Convention], and then the second was to elect our own leadership. A county committee was elected, and I was elected to it. We were part of one state organization of the party, north and south, at that time. Bill Schneiderman was still the state chairman; Nemmy Sparks was still just the county chairman. And the pressure started coming. They were looking for an org [organizational] secretary. The pressure started coming that I should become an org secretary, and I just laughed at them. Now, they made no bones about why they wanted me. Number one, I opposed the policy ahead of time; therefore they wanted me as a fig leaf; I was a token. They wanted me for that reason. Secondly, I was a worker and a trade unionist; therefore, they wanted me for that reason. Third, I was a woman, and they wanted me for that reason--not because they had any idea of anything I could do or not do, but simply it was to be a token thing, symbolic. And I fought like hell. For two days and two nights, that county committee meeting was held up. (The county committee elects the officers of the party.) I refused to do it. I should mention that Morgan Hull, who is since dead but who was one of the original organizers of the Newspaper Guild and who had been the trade-union director of the party, had really cooked my goose on this, because when he had nominated me to either go to the National Convention or be elected to the county committee--I don't remember which one now--he had made this very flamboyant speech about how I had opposed the Browder policy before the Duclos article, and that this was supposed--of course, this only fitted what they needed, this fig leaf sort of thing. Well, I battled and battled. Number one, I didn't know anything about what an org secretary was or what they did. Number two, I was the main known Communist in the CIO Council and what nonsense to take me out of the CIO Council and out of the CIO work generally when I was the best-known Communist there and practically the only one who was known as a member of the party. And number three, if I had to do anything, let me be the labor secretary, the trade union director; I mean, that at least I knew something about. This other stuff, I didn't even know what the job was; I didn't know what the person did. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Now that I look back, I think it was probably again an expression of male supremacy, that it was all right for me to be org secretary--that was a woman's job--but not trade union director; whoever heard of a woman trade union director? Then I didn't even realize that this had something to do with it.

GARDNER

Who was named trade union director, do you recall?

HEALEY

I think Ben Dobbs, a few months later. Not at that time, but a few months later, Ben Dobbs, who was then in San Jose, came down here and was made it.

GARDNER

And Foster then became national secretary.

HEALEY

No, Gene Dennis was elected at the National Convention as the general secretary with Foster's recommendation, which was ironic because Foster later came to have an extraordinarily critical approach towards Dennis. Foster became the chairman. He was really too old and knew he was too old or too sick to do more than that. But he became the veto power, nationally, he and Ben Davis and Bob Thompson. At any rate, in October 1945, I walked into the party office. Max Silver was then the org secretary. His wife, Louise Light, later became a friendly witness before the HUAC.

GARDNER

Oh, yeah, she was a doctor, wasn't she?

HEALEY

Yeah, Dr. Louise Light. You have a good memory. I said, "Max, what does an org secretary do?" And Max was simply outraged. You know, this young punk was coming in to take his job that he'd had for twenty years or twenty-five years, this was the second largest area of the party in the United States, and here's this punk kid who doesn't even know what it's about and she's been elected to take his responsible post. I remember his answer, his saying to me, "Well, Dorothy, it all depends who you are as to what the job is. If you know what you're doing, it's one kind of job, and if you don't know what you're doing, as you don't, then it is a very technical kind of job." I remember standing there--I had planned to spend several hours with him; he was to turn over all this information to me--but I remember standing up and saying, "Oh, go to hell, you pompous ass," and walking out, [laughter] deciding I'd learn on the job.

GARDNER

Was this in New York, by the way?

HEALEY

No, this was in Los Angeles.

GARDNER

So how did it work then? Were the party's headquarters split off, or were you just . . . ?

HEALEY

No, every party organization in the area elects its own leadership. All you elect when you go back east is the National Committee, which then elects individual national leaders. The convention doesn't name its leaders. The convention elects a committee--that's in order to impress the collective aspect of it. The individual officers are supposed to be responsible back to the committee.

GARDNER

But didn't you hold a national office as well, or was that later?

HEALEY

No, not at that point.

GARDNER

That was later on.

HEALEY

Much later.

GARDNER

The convention was held in New York, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Yes.

GARDNER

How did you all get back there?

HEALEY

On the train. It was about four days and five nights or five nights and four days. My main memory is playing poker all the way across the country with the Pullman porters. [laughter] I have very little memory [of it]. And soldiers who were on leave, I remember they used to join our game and play day and night. Buchanan liked poker; that's why I remembered him first.

GARDNER

Do you have much recollection of the atmosphere of New York at that convention time? At that point there would have been sort of a fairly involved communist community, with the Stanley Theater and so forth on Fourteenth Street.

HEALEY

No, I don't remember any of that.

GARDNER

You don't recall the trip at all?

HEALEY

I don't remember anything about that. I remember the convention, but . . .

GARDNER

Where was it held?

HEALEY

I couldn't tell you that--oh, yes, it was a Greek hall, some Greek name, but I don't remember it. A Greek fraternal organization. I couldn't tell you anything about it. I don't even remember where I stayed. Oh! [laughter] It was personal. My husband, Don, had a leave at that point from the army and came into New York, and I remember I was staying in a hotel. When he came to join me at the hotel, I remember, a great explanation had to be made to the desk clerk as to how come this man was staying there at the same time I was. We didn't want to pay; we wanted to save money. It's a very vague thing in my mind; I don't remember it much.

GARDNER

So then you became the organizational secretary for Southern California.

HEALEY

Well, no, just Los Angeles County.

GARDNER

How many different organizations are there, then, or were there at that point?

HEALEY

There was a state--well, I'll do it from the bottom up. First came the club of the party, which could be either a shop-industrial or community club. Mostly at that point they were all community clubs, because as part of this policy, the shop-industrial clubs had mostly been dissolved. Then, if there were a number of clubs in one area, you had what was known as a section of the party. In other words, all the clubs on the East Side would come together as a section, and they would elect a section committee. Then there was the county committee, which was elected by the convention. The county committee elected a county executive board, which is what I became a member of, and within that the org secretary. Then there was a state committee, which I became a member of, I was elected to, and a state executive board.

GARDNER

At the same time?

HEALEY

At the same time, and which I was a member of.

GARDNER

And how many states would have had boards? I imagine some states probably had multiarea . . . ?

HEALEY

Not very many. Before that, in the thirties, there had been some. For instance, California in the thirties was what's known as District 13, which included California, Arizona, and I think Idaho. No, I'm not sure. California and Arizona I remember. But by the late thirties the party in most states had become large enough so that was no longer true and you had one party organization for each state. I think that was true in most all states. You might have had, for instance, like in the Northwest, where the Seattle district would have the responsibility for Oregon.

GARDNER

And Idaho. [laughter]

HEALEY

And Idaho, right; that's where Idaho would come in. But by the late forties that was not as much true. Each organization was big enough to have its own leadership.

GARDNER

Where were the offices of the local party?

HEALEY

At that time they were at 126 West Sixth Street. We stayed there until the building was torn down. No, we stayed there till we were forced out as a result of the Smith Act trials in 1952.

GARDNER

Who were the other . . .

HEALEY

. . . officers?

GARDNER

Yes. Do you recall?

HEALEY

Well, let's see. Pettis Perry. Jim Forrest for a while was educational director. Elizabeth Spector at different times--then she was Elizabeth Glenn--was educational director. Frank Spector--he wasn't on the board; he was in charge of the Morgan Hull division (Morgan Hull died; we named our industrial division after him). Ben Dobbs, Guillermo, a young girl representing the AYD who is now a professor at UCLA--I don't know whether she'd want me to mention her name or not; of course, I suppose it's known, sure it is--Vicki, Vicki. No, it's not true anyway. Phil Bock was the representative of the youth movement. He's now a millionaire manufacturer.

GARDNER

Oh, is that so? Manufacturing what?

HEALEY

Electronics. He invented something. Or somebody else invented it and he marketed it. I don't know if he's really a millionaire. By my standards he's a millionaire. Probably has half a million; that's the same thing.

GARDNER

Well, when did you begin? When did these duties officially begin?

HEALEY

October 1945 is when I started. The first thing I did was to go into the party library and get out a magazine known as the Party Organizer, which described the internal functioning of the party all through the thirties and up to that time (maybe only the thirties; it may have ended before that). I simply locked myself up for two weeks and did nothing but read, just to get an understanding of the language, because party language is a very different language from anybody else's language (for instance, "org secretary "--who else ever heard of an org secretary?), trying to understand enough to get a rhythm of this internal life, what made it tick. Then I started just going around to meetings to see who the people were sitting in meetings. Clubs. I'd go to meetings of what we'd call commissions-- those are bodies appointed by the board to handle specific things like a Mexican commission, a Negro commission, a women's commission, cultural commissions, et cetera. I really have only the greatest compassion and sympathy for Nemmy Sparks, who was the chairman, who had to tolerate me, because there is nothing so bad as the persons who don't realize how little they know. Every organization does build up its own internal mores through which people operate, the standards, the language. And I just never had any understanding of it because I hadn't done so, and I had never really cared. Quite often I was like a bull in a china shop, really offending people with the things I'd blurt out and the fights I'd make. He was a very hot-tempered man himself, and we used to have terrible battles, But he was also very patient and understanding, because he needed me. He was very patient in a lot of the training period that I had to go through, the on-the-job training. At the same time, I still was in the CIO representing Local 700 of the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. I stayed in that CIO Council until 1949, when because of grand jury attacks I went underground. But I was then still playing a very public role in that council. At the same time, I was in charge of working with [the United] Auto [Workers] for the party, the trade-union work there. I maintained very cordial relations with union leadership, which went through quite enormous struggles at the time when Walter Reuther captured the CIO, won the nomination in 1946. This has its own particular importance because without Walter Reuther taking over the UAW, the later purge of the CIO could never have happened.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 21, 1972

GARDNER

When we left off at the last session, we were at the point where you had taken over as secretary of the party locally. I suppose the postwar era and your experience as a party functionary are the next important phases.

HEALEY

The exact title, by the way, was organizational secretary, popularly known as org secretary. I mention it because it was always one of those titles that exasperated me. An "org" secretary never sounded as if it had anything that remotely resembled anything else in American political life. The big surprise I found coming into the party leadership, and into the internal party leadership as distinct from the former, was that much to my great amazement, I found it extremely exciting--and in many respects more exciting than what I'd been doing before. The main reason was that in the labor movement, while we who were Communists-and progressives as well as Communists--brought a whole number of political questions into the labor movement to fight on, never simply satisfied ourselves with the narrow internal economic questions, nevertheless, there was, of course, a limit because of the character of the labor movement as to what and how much we did; whereas in the party, in the internal and overall party leadership, one could, if one had that temperament, be concerned with every aspect of the social life, of political life, of economic life. One went from big debates on cultural questions in Hollywood, to questions of strikes in a dozen different kinds of industries, to the question of how to organize youth, women, or the fight as far as the Chicanos were concerned and black liberation. There was just no aspect, no facet of society, that did not come within the ken of the leadership of the party. So I found myself, first of all, having to learn things that other Communists who had functioned in the internal life of the party knew far better than I, namely, how the party itself was organized and its method of functioning. Secondly, I was simultaneously continuing to be active in the mass questions outside of the party, the things that I had always preoccupied myself with. I should mention that starting in the thirties and ensuing really all the way up to now, for those of us who were working in the labor movement particularly--although this was by no means limited to the labor movement--there was a kind of definition that went to the heart of what kind of a Communist you were. We said there were two kinds: there was the trade-union Communist and the Communist trade unionist. The trade-union Communist was the person who became a member of the party as a result of the party struggle on the economic questions, on the narrow trade-union questions; these were quite often very honest people who reacted to the party's struggle and initiative and leadership on these questions. Then there were the Communist trade unionists, who were in the first place Communists, who regarded the labor movement as an indispensable area of struggle because of our [belief in] the role of the working class as indispensable for social progress, and who therefore looked upon the question of bringing political consciousness into that labor movement as our primary concern.

GARDNER

Into which category did you fall?

HEALEY

I was always a Communist trade unionist. As I say, from the time I was twelve years old, I had known this was what I wanted to do with my life. I didn't use the word professional revolutionary when I was a child, but that was the lifetime I saw for myself. There was never any question in my mind at any time as to where I saw the emphasis and the importance. But nevertheless, because I had not been working in the internal life of the party, I was then (and still am) very conscious of the fact that in some sense it's like two parties. There are those who function only within the internal life of the party, and then there are those who either function on the outside or who combine the mass work with the internal life of the party. This is important and remains important because those of us who functioned in the general life of the community or the society or the labor movement knew from experience that we had to be able to defend the policies of the party, not only to the initiate, to those who already accepted it, to whom you were speaking in the name of the party--in other words, not just to the membership--you had to be able to answer the questions and defend the politics of the party to the non-Communist and you had to debate the anti-Communist. My own opinion is that there were far too many of the kind of people whom I call the "hothouse Communists," the people who had never had to defend the policies of the party, who'd never had to debate anti-Communists, who were simply used to the acceptance of what they had to say by virtue of their party title. Unfortunately, all too often within the party, as is true of any organization, the leadership acquires a special respect and reputation, and what they have to say is accepted far too uncritically. (I say "they." The same thing was true when I was in the leadership; I could just as easily say "we.") Well, this makes a big difference on how one approaches what happened to me in terms of my life from '46 on, because the habit that I acquired in the labor movement and in the general class struggles of thinking through why we had a particular policy--because I had to be able to defend that policy to hostile people or to neutralists--I then transferred the same approach within the party. I would say almost from the beginning, my life as an officer of the party was a stormy one, because I was simply not equipped to accept policies passively simply because somebody else on a higher level of the party felt that they were the correct policies. Furthermore, I had never acquired the definition of democratic centralism (an erroneous one in my opinion, I would add) that became common and accepted in the party: namely, that no matter what the experiences showed after a policy was decided, the fact that the policy had been decided meant that you never again reopened or questioned or challenged it. This was totally foreign to my method of work as well as to my temperament, I suppose. I've always had a great deal of compassion for the comrade who was the chairman of the party when I became org secretary, Nemmy Sparks, first because in my ignorance of the protocol and the nuances of interparty relationships and functioning, I was usually like a bull in a china shop. I'd charge in with little regard for the history of how those things were done. Secondly, I was totally ignorant of the internal functioning of the party. I would say that Nemmy Sparks represented one of those Communists who's unfortunately not too common, a man of great culture and knowledge, who had a breadth of knowledge that was uncommon, I would say, from a lot of the people I've met in the leadership. He also, however, had some very bad personal characteristics that we could define as bureaucratic methods

GARDNER

Could you give some examples of this?

HEALEY

All too often within the party, he was far too accustomed to simply pounding the table and saying, "This is the decision and this must be done." There were only a few times that I can remember, most notably around the later debates that took place on the third party, the Progressive party, that he welcomed challenge or argument. So I would say I learned enormously from him, and he was in many cases very patient with me. But at the same time, we had very sharp collisions, very, very vehement battles, because he's as vehement a person as I am. The org secretary of the party traditionally is a person who is primarily responsible for what are called the housekeeping chores of the party. The org secretary is responsible for taking care of such questions as dues, membership activities, literature, education, the People's World, the question of relationships with the clubs and the commissions of the party. Perhaps I should explain the structure of the party. Based on the bottom going up, we had and have clubs that are called community clubs, mostly based on the political subdivisions where people live. The most important clubs are those we term the shop clubs; those are made up of Communists in one particular factory. Then there are also industrial clubs, where there aren't enough people in a factory, or they work in an industry such as the building trades, where you don't work in any one factory; the industrial club covers an industry, a general number of unions. Those are the three basic organizations. If there are a number of clubs in one geographical area or in a political subdivision, such as industry, then we would have the next level up; the next structure of organization is called a section, and that grouped together those groups. They elected their own section committee, which combined coordinating leadership and a section organizer, who was the pivotal person in the club. But the emphasis was always on the clubs because traditionally--and not necessarily accurately as far as life is concerned--we defined the club as the most important body because the club membership were supposed to be the ones who made the policies of the party come to life among masses of people. Sometimes that's true, and sometimes it's not true. Above the section depended upon the size of the party. By late 1948, the party in Los Angeles, which had 3,200 members when I became the org secretary, had a little over 5,000 members; this was the high point for membership in our entire history. It was then too big to go from the section to the next ordinary level, which was the county, so we instituted something known as divisions. The division simply combined together many sections into a new subdivision of the party. After that, in 1949 still (all the way through to 1956), came the county committee. The county committee was elected at the conventions of the party, where all the clubs had delegates, and it represented the overall political leadership for Los Angeles. Until 1956, we were still part of the state of California as the party. In 1956, after enormous political battles, we separated into two districts, Northern California and Southern California, and then elected separate bodies. But until 1956 we had what was known as the State Executive Board, which was also elected at a state convention and provided the same level of leadership statewide. I should add here on this question of the great political battles that ensued about this, that the state headquarters were always in San Francisco, but the bulk of the party was always in Los Angeles. Because of the definition of democratic centralism--namely, that the highest body is always the most authoritative body--the decisions were made (we always felt it was the tail wagging the dog) by the people in Northern California. Even though some of us would be on that state board, obviously the operative leadership was in San Francisco. This led to great internal political battles. I understand they started back in the twenties. I know that in the forties and fifties there were the sharpest kind of political fights between us, north and south. Finally, after 1956, we achieved our goal of being a separate district, and that meant that we then had direct relationships, did not have to go through Northern California, with New York, where the next highest body was the National Committee of the party, which was elected at a national convention. You must understand that in the party, democratic centralism also means delegated elections. In other words, the membership does not elect the National Committee, but the membership elects delegates to a local convention, that convention elects delegates to a state convention, and the state convention elects delegates to a national convention, and the national convention elects the National Committee. Furthermore, the officers of the party are generally elected not at a convention but by the elected committee. In other words, a county committee, a state committee, or a national committee elects the general secretary, the chairman, the other officers, on the premise that that produces a far greater collectivity--in other words, that you are responsible collectively back to this higher body, and you are not individuals who function by yourselves responsible only to the convention.

GARDNER

Who were some of the leadership at that time? For example, who were the state leaders?

HEALEY

Bill Schneiderman was the state chairman of the party. Louise Todd was the state org secretary; Oleta Yates was at one time the San Francisco county chairman; Celeste Strack was the state educational secretary.

GARDNER

And the national leadership at that time?

HEALEY

Eugene Dennis had become the general secretary of the party in 1946. Bill Foster was the chairman; Johnny Williamson was the trade union director; Henry Winston was the org secretary. I think Betty Gannett was the educational director, although I'm not certain of that. Ben Davis, Jr., was one of the national leaders. Pettis Perry became a national leader after 1949, went back East, but not until then.

GARDNER

You mentioned that the membership here reached its peak in the late forties. Historically, most of the books say that the Communist party's peak was in the 1930s.

HEALEY

I think this is probably true nationally. I assume that's true nationally.

GARDNER

Well, that's what my question was going to be. Do you know if the national figures correspond?

HEALEY

No, I'm sure they didn't correspond. Our greatest figure did come, as I say, in 1949. But overall that would not be true for the party; in 1949 I don't think the party had more than 50,000 members.

GARDNER

Of whom 10 percent were here?

HEALEY

Were here in Los Angeles.

GARDNER

What would the corresponding figures be, say, in the middle thirties? Do you have any idea?

HEALEY

Yes. About 2,500 was the height of the Los Angeles But nationally, with the Young Communist League included, the party came close to 100,000 members by 1939.

GARDNER

How do you explain this? Is there an explanation?

HEALEY

I've never heard it debated or discussed. It could well be that we did not have any significant losses during the Browder war years when other parties may have. I'm not sure. As I say, I've never heard the question debated by anyone nor even explored. And it is an incongruous thing. But nevertheless it is a fact, and I'll try to find out before I see you again next time. I'll call some of the people in New York and ask them why. [laughter]

GARDNER

Ask them why everyone left in New York but not California.

HEALEY

Well, it may be that we just recruited to a far greater degree. This is what I think it was. We recruited very fast after 1945. I think that may have accounted for it more than anything else, that other places didn't recruit as much as we did.

GARDNER

What were some of the major functions that you fell into as organizing secretary?

HEALEY

Well, the first thing I had to learn was this internal functioning. I had to find out how the clubs functioned and who the people were. I simply made it a practice of every week going to one or two club meetings and just sitting through them, listening to the people, making little notes as to which people impressed me the most in initiative, political education, understanding and ties with masses of people, and which ones really knew anything outside of the inner life of the party. I had to work with what was known as an org commission. That was made up of the people on a county level who were responsible for membership dues, People's World, education, and so forth. I had to become familiar both with their specific fields as well as how it affected the county overall. In addition, I was still a delegate to the CIO Council from Local 700 of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union, so that I had considerable activity still in the CIO. I attended all the council meetings and participated in activities with both the Communists and the non-Communists within the council. I was given a special responsibility of working with the UAW people, and I'll describe that later in a little more detail because that became a very significant part of labor history and what subsequently happened to the party. I was also--and here I want to pay tribute to Nemmy Sparks about this, because he made it a point of seeing that I could attend all kinds of meetings that I wanted to; he didn't insist that I should just take care of "woman's work" (nobody would have thought of it in that way then, anyway)--but I remember sitting in on what was called the Political Commission. Those were the people, Communists and some non-Communists who worked with us, who were active in the Democratic party, the NAACP, the labor movement (AF of L and CIO), and the Hollywood cultural activities, something that was known as HICCASP [Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions] (I think it was formed about that time but it might have been later)--in other words, a political organization of people primarily from the cultural field. By "cultural field" we usually meant Hollywood in this city. The youth activities I spent a lot of time with at that time--the American Youth for Democracy was the only youth organization that the party influenced, and in 1947 we started the preparations for the recruitment of that [organization] with others into the Labor Youth League, which became far more explicitly Marxist-Leninist than the AYD had been. Veterans' activities. As I say, there were big struggles that we organized at that point and that I participated in, first of all, around civil rights struggles. Mother [Mrs. Rosa] Ingram, a Black woman in Georgia, had been arrested along with her sons on a charge of murder because the plantation owner had tried to rape her, and they resisted, and I think he was shot in the course of their resisting--they were charged with murder and went into a big case on that. [There were also] the Martinsville Seven, the Trenton Six from New Jersey, as well as local struggles, primarily around the question of employment of Blacks.

GARDNER

What were those Martinsville and Trenton cases?

HEALEY

The Martinsville, I don't remember. The Trenton Six were six Black youths who had been arrested, I think, on charges of rape. Again, I'd have to look up the materials on those cases. Each case at this point, so many years later, starts to blur together. All I remember are the activities that went on around it.

GARDNER

Well, that's okay. Go on to the local ones.

HEALEY

The local struggles were job struggles mainly, to break down the discrimination in hiring. It's hard to believe, but in those years there were practically no Blacks in any of the service industries, particularly in the retail stores and in banks, even in those located in overwhelmingly Black communities. They were staffed all by whites. We would organize community groups who would put up picket lines in front of those stores, demanding the employment of Negroes, and we'd keep them there until there was a victory. Well, coming back now to some of the specific activities. The first thing, of course, was what was happening in the country as a whole. Forty-six marked Churchill's speech at Fulton, Missouri, on the "Iron Curtain countries." "Iron Curtain countries" is an expression coming from [Joseph] Goebbels in Nazi Germany which Churchill picked up again in '46 in Fulton, Missouri, thereby starting in a formal sense--well, of course, it had already started before that--the cold war, the attempt to use the monopoly of the A-bomb as a blackmail pressure on the Soviet Union in terms of Eastern Europe mainly, as well as the attempt to see that Chiang Kai-shek would win in China, to prevent the developments there which culminated in 1949 with the success of the Chinese revolution. But with the start of the cold war, expressed through such things as the Truman Doctrine, the most immediate effect of which was the U.S. taking military and political responsibility for the defeat of the Greek Civil War, the actions in Turkey (those are the two I remember most clearly), you had the accompanying pressure within the liberal community of the indecent, cowardly capitulation to the pressures of the period, cowardly in the obvious sense of what they did as far as running away from all of their great purported devotion to the cause of civil liberties, the liberal doctrine, and their establishment of organizations that really tried to compete with the right wing, with what became known as McCarthyism (although that's far too oversimplified a term for what was present--communist baiting, communist exclusionary measures, aggressive policies for foreign policy). I guess probably the organization that became best known at that point as being the focal point of these activities was the Americans for Democratic Action. As far as the expression of what that all represented, people should read Collier's magazine, I think it came out in 1951, with articles by such people as Walter Reuther and others like him on the United States' defeat of the Soviet Union in a military war, what that would mean. There was an enormous amount of hysteria. This was the time when, as [Dean] Acheson points out, the Democrats started the loyalty oaths campaign, which then consumed them later with the Nixon charge of "twenty years of treason" and "the cowardly college of communist containment," the attack against Truman and Acheson and others, the charges that the Democrats had lost China--as if China was ever the United States' to lose. All of that started in the postwar years in the late forties.

GARDNER

In what way did the Democrats initiate the loyalty oath?

HEALEY

It was under the Truman administration that the first loyalty-oath measures were passed, and it started the first hysteria of looking under the bed for the Red. Acheson later wrote a book, very self-critical, about how the Democrats had unwittingly contributed to what later then became defined as McCarthyism in the fifties. There was the Mundt-Nixon Bill, legislation to try to outlaw the Communist party. There were all the hearings that were taking place, HUAC--the House Un-American Activities Committee--the Senate Internal Security Committee, et cetera, Everyplace these committees would go at that point, they were front-page stories.

GARDNER

We might note that [Martin] Dies has just died the other day.

HEALEY

Yes, I saw he just died. Unsung, unhonored, unmourned. [laughter]

GARDNER

Exactly. Did the committee make any appearances out here in that era, '46 through '48-'49?

HEALEY

Yes, indeed. Of course, what happened, however, is that the committee called the Los Angelenos to Washington, D.C., and the hearings were held in Washington. Of course, the most important hearings were the hearings of what later became known as the Hollywood Ten, who then went to jail.

GARDNER

Was that '49?

HEALEY

It was '47 that that started. It started in '47, and in '48 were the actual trials that took place as far as the contempt citations against them. Hollywood was a very important thing that they started on. Again [there is a] big lesson here for people to understand because doctrinaire Marxists would not understand why they would start with people who would not be considered the decisive area of struggle--the cultural, the Hollywood scene--not recognizing the enormous significance that the cultural scene has in terms of influencing all of America. Of course, the charge against them, that they were trying to get Communist propaganda into the movies, was simply poppycock. The kind of examples that were used were so fantastic and silly. Ginger Rogers, for instance, testified that in a war movie she appeared in, made during World War II--I think the name of it was Tender Comrade--a movie describing what happened to the wives left at home while their husbands were fighting in the war, she had to say the phrase "Share and share alike, that's America to me," meaning everybody shared in that period, the scarcities of World War II. But the hearings against the Hollywood people were not only important in terms of what it did within the industry. Originally the response to it was simply enormous, the attack against the committee hearings. Hundreds and hundreds of very brave people signed their names--I think it was called the Committee of 1,000--resisting what they saw, what they recognized as a threat to the entire industry, because what was under attack, whether it was within the labor movement or in Hollywood or anyplace else, was of course not only the Communist party but anything that was left of center, that did not get into the cold war hysteria.

GARDNER

Were you well acquainted with--I'm sure you were--some of the Ten?

HEALEY

With a number of them, although I got to know the problems and the individuals better in the early 1950s, about 1953, when I was part of the very intensive innerparty debates on Marxist theory and the role of movies in capitalist America, the questions of content. But I'll discuss that at a later point because it's really a very separate question that coincided with what I think was a very sectarian period of the party, because of the attacks against us in the fifties, our reactions being, as I say, very narrow to those attacks.

GARDNER

I'd like to hear your recollection of some of them. Dalton Trumbo's probably the best known because he's done the most since the blacklist, after fighting it. Albert Maltz was a fairly well-known novelist in addition to his screenplays.

HEALEY

Well, Albert, of course, was the victim of what became known as the Maltz Controversy. Albert had written an article in the New Masses (this was about 1946-47), in which he advanced what was considered the heretical thought that we should not judge the content of a book--most particularly books, but also any artistic endeavor--by the politics of the author or the creative person, that under the slogan "Art is a weapon," which was the party's definition of art, we made political judgments but not aesthetic judgments. For instance, the example that was used was James Farrell's Studs Lonigan. [We had dismissed the book], not because Studs Lonigan was or was not good literature, but because James Farrell was close to the Trotskyites, if not a Trotskyite, and therefore was beyond the pale as far as our literary judgment was concerned. Albert challenged this, in my opinion quite correctly, as being sheer nonsense and a distortion of what a Marxist aesthetic approach should be, which, while certainly including a political approach, must not base itself [exclusively] on the question of the author's [personal politics]. Probably the most notable example of the opposite of that kind of approach was the fact that Balzac was Marx's favorite author; Balzac was a monarchist but his books described the whole growth and the decadence of the bourgeois society. Well, poor Maltz just got really trampled on. They came pouring in here from New York. Sam Silien was one who came in, along with V.J. Jerome, who all during that period was "the Commissar of Culture" (both enemies and friends called him that). There were lots of other people, including John Howard Lawson, who was the local heavy, as far as the Left was concerned, in dealing with questions of theoretical and ideological purity. Weeks and weeks and weeks of discussions took place, with the Hollywood people participating, fighting about this question. Finally Albert was convinced to say that he had been wrong. A mass meeting was called, held at the Embassy Auditorium. Everybody was intensely interested in this debate; the whole party was excited and interested in it, and people of course outside the party. So a mass meeting was held at the Embassy Auditorium where Albert delivered his mea culpa speech that he had been wrong. Just as a footnote to that, after the Twentieth Congress, Albert came up from Mexico, where he'd been living in, practically, exile because of the blacklist, and I remember his saying to me that his great fear was that he would go down in history and all that would be known of him was a little asterisk at the bottom of some page describing his recanting when he didn't even really believe in the recantation.

GARDNER

And curiously, his place in history will probably be more marked by the blacklist.

HEALEY

Of course, of course.

GARDNER

What was he like? What sort of person?

HEALEY

Well, he was--this is a rather hard thing to discuss, because these are, you know, subjective reactions to individuals and I don't necessarily have any overall accuracy or objectivity.

GARDNER

That's perfectly all right.

HEALEY

Well, the most important thing about Albert to me was his wife, his first wife, Margaret Larkin, who was an extraordinarily intelligent and talented woman in her own right but who considered her primary responsibility, as did Albert, the care and feeding and nurturing of Albert, that his needs as the great writer came first, and the whole household just revolved around this. I can remember being very exasperated by watching it in the forties. A very talented man, no question of his talent. I would say that as regards genuine literary ability he and Dalton, Phil Stevenson (who was not as well known), Michael Wilson--a number of them had more talent than others.

GARDNER

Who were some of the others of the Ten that you knew? Did you know Dalton Trumbo?

HEALEY

Yes, Dalton I knew. I got to know Dalton much better in the fifties than I did in the forties, but I knew Dalton. Dalton Trumbo had a home in Beverly Hills in the postwar forties, a block-long colonial style house, and I remember William Z. Foster went to some meetings there when he'd come to town. Mostly what I remember is that Foster was very disappointed because there weren't any stars there--they were only the writers--and Foster was an enormous movie buff, particularly a Western movie buff. Foster could walk into a Western movie and without seeing anything of the credits or beginning could tell you exactly who'd written it, everything about the actors who were in it, and all the details of it. I guess that came from the period when he was very ill and, because of his heart attack, was not able to do a lot of other work, so he frequented so many movies.

GARDNER

I don't suppose he ever met John Wayne.

HEALEY

No, I don't think he ever did, no. [laughter] As I say, my memory of those particular meetings is that they were usually predominantly the writers. By the way, the writers were the dominant political leadership of our cultural section. They were enormously articulate people, and it used to be very funny. One of the reasons all the meetings took so long--no matter what the debate was, any debate that started in Hollywood went on five times as long as it went on in any other part of the party because everybody wrote papers of 10,000 words and they were then read at every meeting. Of course, that didn't happen anywhere else. But that's why the writers dominated--because they could both verbalize and write these lengthy opuses.

GARDNER

Do you think this literary group might have been one of the reasons too for the growth of the party out here? The fact that the membership did comprise--well, intellectuals is the wrong word, but such an obviously intelligent group.

HEALEY

Well, that might have--no, because they were really never part of the party leadership. That's the other thing you have to understand about the party, is that outside of Jack Lawson, none of them were ever really in the county leadership. They had their own setup--and by the way it was very much like the party organizational setup, which was made up of what we called cultural clubs--[and it] had the same built-in weakness in terms of being able to withstand either the penetration of the FBI or HUAC or anyone else that our shop and industrial clubs had. In other words, when you have all people together who come from exactly the same field, everybody knows everyone else, and if there's one agent in one of those clubs, the entire club becomes identified, whereas if they'd been mixed up and spread all over the city in other clubs, it would have been much more difficult for HUAC to do it. When their hearings started in Washington, D.C., you should know that the taking of the Fifth Amendment wasn't even considered at that point. These were the first trials of this kind; I should say they were the first major hearings of this kind because the hearings preceded the trials. Before that, when the question would come up, when we had been subpoenaed--for instance, I'd appeared and other Communist officials had appeared here in Los Angeles before the Tenney Committee--the government was not trying to get contempt citations in those days, so that all of us when we'd appear would answer all the questions about ourselves or about the party, and we were never asked questions that tried to turn us into stool pigeons. But of course that's what happened in the later hearings, starting with the big HUAC hearings with the Hollywood people and then going on from one area of life to another, all of them designed to try to force the individual appearing. The reason for that--and why later the Fifth Amendment had to be used-- was that when the First Amendment was used (as the Hollywood people did on their refusal to answer), and the Supreme Court refused to recognize that as being a valid defense, then came the development of the use of the Fifth Amendment. There you can answer any questions that the man on the street could answer, but if you started answering any [single] question that took specialized knowledge, you would then waive the right to use the Fifth Amendment [on all subsequent questions]. However, the Hollywood people--and this came really as. ... It was a great debate, because there were a number of them, as there were of later people who appeared before the committee, who wanted to say, "Yes, I'm a Communist, and so what? I'll tell you about myself, but I'm not going to tell you about another person, and go to hell."

GARDNER

Well, some people did.

HEALEY

Finally some five people did, but not as a general thing. The only ones who got away with it were very prestigious people like Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and people like that. No one else really got away with it. But the debate as to when not to do it-- the main reason why people took the First Amendment and then later the Fifth Amendment was that if you didn't do that, if you answered their questions, no matter how little we had to hide--and actually there was never anything secret about the party--no matter how little we had to hide, once you answered those questions you were admitting the committee's right to invade the privacy of people, and unwittingly you became their collaborator. You could dress it up with great big left rhetoric as to why you do it, and lots of people later did. The fact is, if you answered the questions, you became a collaborator, and that was the main reason, the dominant reason, why people refused to do it. But those hearings were coinciding, as I say, with great changes taking place in the country, with the polarizing effect of the cold war both internationally and domestically within the country. Now, going back a little bit on how the things developed chronologically, I would single out as the most important thing in 1946-- over and beyond the huge strikes, the first postwar strikes that took place in General Motors, the electrical industry (those I remember most particularly; there may have been others, but those I remember), and here in Los Angeles, the Hollywood studio strikes--but the other thing in 1946 that I think was the most important as far as long-range significance was the election of Walter Reuther as president of the UAW-CIO. The UAW was really the balance of power in the national CIO. From the start of the CIO on, there had always been a very uneasy alliance between what were called the center and the left forces, the center forces pretty much defined around [Sidney] Hillman, [Philip] Murray, and John L. Lewis, of course, in the first place until he resigned in 1941. The left forces: Harry Bridges from the ILWU; the UE leadership of [James] Matles and [Julius] Emspak; the fur workers [International Fur and Leather Workers] of Ben Gold, who was a very prominently-known Communist; the public workers union [State, County, and Municipal Workers Union of America]; UCAPAWA, led by Don Henderson. There were eleven of what were called the left-led unions.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO NOVEMBER 21, 1972

HEALEY

The UAW had, from its inception, a very progressive, a left-progressive character. (When we Communists use the term "left-progressive," what we're usually talking about are Communists and those who work closely with Communists, or, if they don't work closely with them, at least follow a political line that Communists can support.) The organizers of the early UAW had been Communists, mostly notably Wyndham Mortimer and Bob Travis, leaders of the sit-down strike at GM at Flint; and in the factories themselves, in the automobile plants themselves, the party had a great deal of organized strength because of its history of having led the early struggles and the early strikes. Furthermore, the UAW probably was the most democratic union of any union in the CIO because of this history. Caucuses were quite legal, and everybody had them. At any rate, when Walter Reuther ran for president of the UAW in 1946, as I said, I had been working here in Los Angeles with the UAW on behalf of the party. In the UAW we had the policy of Communists and non-Communists meeting together to discuss jointly what our policy and tactics should be; this was unusual and should have been done far more by everybody else. But it had become a tradition in the UAW in L.A. that the Communists did not meet by themselves to discuss and define what their priorities would be, but as a matter of course met with the non-Communists. So when the campaign started, when Reuther started his campaign for president, we had discussions here and agreed that the decisive question was to stop Reuther from becoming president, because Reuther had, from 1937-38 on, played one of the most opportunist of roles within the UAW, going wherever the pressure and the strength seemed to be, but always the cutting edge being not only his own ambitions but, at that point, [a drift] toward the right. So I can remember the sessions we had here with the non-Communists who led the UAW—John Allard and Bill Goldman, who were very important leaders of the UAW but were never Communists--those are the most notable names that occur to me. We agreed that our policy would be to try to get the maximum anti-Reuther delegation elected to that convention; in order to do that, we had to agree that we would support Cy O'Halloran, who was the regional director for the UAW here in Los Angeles, for reelection. He was just a nonentity, no more of a leader than a child would be, not very bright, very much a drunkard and not very capable. But that would not be too high a price to pay because on his staff would be people who were good leaders, who were energetic and capable and dedicated. They would become dominant, and the price of having Cy reelected was minor in terms of carrying through the anti-Reuther campaign. Therefore, from California, Southern California particularly, came a 100 percent delegation elected in the plants, pledged to vote against Walter Reuther. And this was one of the few areas in the country where this was done. I mention it because I was critical of the party policies in Detroit, for instance, where Carl Winter was the head of the party, which was of course the most important section of all. L.A. was really the peripheral part of the UAW compared to what Detroit represented, where I thought the policies were far more sectarian. The question of an independent stand of the party by itself, without those who had been its former allies, became, I thought, pronounced. At any rate, what finally happened is that Walter was elected president of the UAW in 1946. His election cast a long shadow. He promptly moved the UAW--throughout the country he fired all the staff people who had been anti-Reuther. He promptly started to institute the most high-handed, tight, arbitrary procedures in terms of the internal life of the UAW, as far as he could go within the framework of this union that had been historically so democratic. Within two years he consolidated his strength; the international executive board was almost totally controlled by him. In national CIO politics [he supported] the historical right wing of the CIO, which fought all left politics, all left political leaders, union leaders, and he pretty much placed the UAW in support of this cold war hysteria that was starting to develop in the country with such serious consequences. If this had not happened, if Walter Reuther had not been elected president of the CIO and had not taken the union in this direction, then the 1949 expulsions of the left unions, the eleven international left-led unions, could not have occurred. It is important to note that none of the labor historians even mention this, and none of the historians about what happened to the Communist party after the forties mention it; they either don't mention it at all or don't give it any significance if they do mention it. And yet I would single it out as the single most crucial thing that took place which made it possible for those expulsions to take place; and with those expulsions there was then no longer the capacity for an enormous united resistance to what is known as McCarthyism, to the right-wing hysteria that swept the country in the early fifties. They themselves unwittingly became a part of it. I say "unwittingly" because they tried to draw a line themselves; they didn't want to go as far as McCarthy went--obviously McCarthy was attacking the Democratic party and them. He didn't make any distinction; as far as he was concerned, all of them were Reds. If the party and those who had worked with it had not been really decimated with the expulsions, then the events of the fifties, and particularly the isolation of the Left and of the deterioration of the labor movement, would not have taken place. This deterioration of the labor movement was, of course, of great social importance. The historic role that the CIO had played really diminished. It is one of the ironies of history that Walter Reuther then again became one of the most prominent left-liberal figures in the late fifties and in the sixties, most particularly in trying to play a role in the sixties in the fight against the war in Vietnam. But I think there has been a general recognition--I shouldn't say "general," that's too sweeping--there has been a limited recognition on the part of many of those who participated in the witch hunt against the party in the labor movement in the CIO, of the enormous seriousness of the real crime that was committed against the labor movement and against the Left of the country as a whole. Paul Jacobs is probably the most notable example of that. Paul had been one of the great hatchet men of the national CIO here in L.A., but later, in his dialogue at the Center for [the Study of] Democratic [Institutions], he discussed how wrong he had been, how much he regretted what he had done, and what serious consequences came from what he had done.

GARDNER

Eason Monroe mentioned [John] Despol.

HEALEY

Well, Despol, of course, never regretted it, though. Despol was one of the most politically despicable of all these right-wing CIO leaders in California. He was on the steelworker [United Steelworkers of America] staff, although he'd never been a steelworker. He was always used as their political trimmings. The Steelworkers had always been the main right-wing thrust in CIO politics. Here in Los Angeles, the main attack from the right wing came against Slim Connelly, who was the secretary of the Los Angeles CIO Council. Connelly had come from the Newspaper Guild. For years he had been the top rewrite man of the old Herald-Express--now the Herald-Examiner-- one of the first organizers of the Newspaper Guild, the first state chairman of the CIO, and later the secretary of the Los Angeles CIO Council. He was always a very controversial character, on the one hand because of his politics--because he was a Communist--and on the other because of personal eccentricities, which came more from his occupation than anything else. [laughter]

GARDNER

The old stereotyped newspaper man.

HEALEY

Right, exactly. Despol was one of the primary leaders of the right wing here in Los Angeles against the Left and against Slim in the first place.

GARDNER

What was your involvement in this?

HEALEY

I was very much involved, with Johnny particularly. It was very funny. I was very much involved first because I was still in the CIO Council, where, of course, I had always been among the Communists. My personal relationships with Johnny and with others like him, the so-called right wing, were still good relationships because, first of all, I rarely personalized my political antagonisms or oppositions. The fact that somebody follows a political line that I think can be suicidal for the movement that I'm concerned with has nothing to do with the fact that I can also see these are human beings who follow a line I think is wrong; it doesn't mean that as individuals they're necessarily totally bankrupt. Well, Johnny came as close to it as anyone, Johnny and his wife Jerry, who later became one of the state inheritance tax assessors. At the council meetings there were fiery debates every Friday night. The CIO Council was the best show in town; everybody came flocking to it to sit and watch because of the sharp fights that would always be taking place. Up until 1948, till the time of the Progressive party, I think we managed very well to maintain an alliance with the nonparty forces. For instance, the president of the CIO Council was Bob Clarke from the steelworkers' union. There were a whole number of non-Communists who were in the leadership, and we had generally very good relations up until, as I say, the time of the Progressive party. Well, what happened there is probably the most important. Henry Wallace as [former] vice-president of the United States was one of the few national political figures, one of the few still in office, who opposed this course at the start of the cold war. First of all, he derided the idea that the Soviet Union, after having suffered over 20 million dead in World War II and with almost all of its industrial base destroyed, having to pick itself up by its own bootstraps'--there was no aid for them--was in any way going to endanger the United States. Of course, part of the whole thing of the propaganda and the attacks back and forth that were being used was what was happening in Eastern Europe--Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, what later became the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia--the events of 1948.

GARDNER

Describe them.

HEALEY

Well, it's really such a separate story.

GARDNER

If you'd like to wait we'll do it when we get there in more detail.

HEALEY

Well, it's part of the world picture at that time and I guess it should be dealt with.

GARDNER

Especially in terms of Wallace.

HEALEY

Yeah. Germany probably stands out as a good example of everything else that was happening. The Potsdam Agreement had stated that there would be resistance by the joint four powers to any attempt at the re-Nazification of Germany; this was the agreed thing, that past Nazis would not serve. Secondly, all agreements governing Germany had to be made by the four powers. Well, what of course started to take place is that almost immediately after the war, thanks primarily to the United States military government of Germany, the old cartels of Krupp and Thyssen merrily resumed their dominance. I think [Alfred] Krupp had to serve a short prison sentence as a prominent Nazi who had been the main one utilizing slave labor in the industry. After really what amounted to a tap on the wrist, he was placed back in his former economic power. And the entire administration, as far as the U.S. military government could help it, along with England and France, was going in the direction of re-Nazification, the old Nazis coming back into power again. Then, in 1947 I think it was, or '48, the United States, in the West German zone that it controlled, started to issue for the first time without agreement a separate currency for that area. This really became the start of what was known as the Berlin Airlift and the huge struggles that took place about that time. Actually, the main thing that the United States was concerned with at that point was the role that West Germany would play as the kingpin, the underpinning, of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty [Organization], which was the physical expression of this aggressive approach as far as the cold war was concerned. Therefore, any approach to trying to soften it down, to try to negotiate, to try to compromise, was laughed at and dismissed. I still have copies of the Wall Street Journal, for instance, describing why the United States and particularly Dulles was rejecting and refusing any approach, they'd say, on the part of Stalin to compromise on the question of West Germany, because any approach would have meant then that they could not make West Germany this significant underpinning of NATO. Then in 1948 in Czechoslovakia came the February events. The Czechoslovak Communist party was probably the largest party in Czechoslovakia in 1946, and in the elections, during which all the powers were there, it had gotten the majority vote as far as any one party was concerned. It had the greatest prestige from the past of any party. But again, under the encouragement of what was going on, what was known as the Marshall Plan--the American utilizing of the desperate conditions of the European countries, providing huge U.S. subsidies on condition that they follow the politics of the U.S.-- the right wing and/or the conservative groups of Czechoslovakia, who were in the government alongside the Communists, organized a walkout, thinking this would bring the government down, that the Communists would be driven out and they would have control. But what happened is that over a million people gathered. The people still had their arms from World War II. And rather than it becoming a right-wing coup, the Communist party took power. This became one of the heated, huge hysterical campaigns in the United States, although I think most historians now would recognize that it did represent in a great sense the democratic desires of the people of Czechoslovakia, that the Czechoslovak Communist party then was at that point still accepted by the majority of people. But in our country, that and Berlin, and then what became the Berlin Airlift (when obviously the Soviet Union felt that it could prevent West Berlin from being taken care of but couldn't, the Soviet Union couldn't, prevent it; the airlift of the United States Air Force was, of course, totally effective)--but all of these things added to the note of hysteria in this country that the Soviet Union was going to invade. It's very much like the Vietnamese sampans that were going to come over here and land in Long Beach. And Henry Wallace was, as I say, the only major political figure nationally (he was still in office) who was constantly exposing all these campaigns and all this hysteria as representing organized propaganda approaches that were not reflected in the reality of the world relations.

GARDNER

Was he still in office at that point?

HEALEY

He was still the vice-president, yes, he was still vice-president under Truman. No, no, he wasn't vice-president, he was secretary, yes, because then Truman had been the vice-president [after Wallace] and became president with Roosevelt's death.

GARDNER

He was secretary of commerce, I think.

HEALEY

I think you're right, he must have been. But he used every occasion, both internationally and nationally, to speak out and expose what he considered this enormous destructive drive, what it represented both internationally and nationally. The most famous example was a speech he made at Madison Square Garden, the speech that was supposedly approved by President Truman, in which he challenged the foreign policy and was promptly thereafter removed from office. It was also a speech which the Communists in the audience booed because he equally attacked and criticized the Soviet Union for what he considered their mistakes, and he was probably correct in his criticism. Well, already in 1946 consideration of third-party actions had started within the labor movement. In 1946 there had been a miners' strike, and the Truman administration had tried to seize the mines; ultimately it levied enormous fines--the Supreme Court, I guess, did it--against the mine workers. The same thing happened in the railroad strike, where Truman had seized the railroads to break the strike. It took a court order to release them. The Taft-Hartley Act was just being passed at that time. Although Truman vetoed it, he didn't really fight to uphold the veto. There was enormous recognition in all parts of the labor movement that the Taft-Hartley Act was an anti-labor act; nevertheless it was all part of what was in the legislative hopper. You had people like [A.F.] Whitney from the Brotherhood of Railroad [Trainmen] calling for a third party. You had a considerable significant body. Of course, historically the Communist party had always felt that the breakup of the two-party system, the emergence of an independent party which would represent the labor movement, the Black movement, the Chicanos and so forth, was historically overdue, that it was the decisive next step. Just as "organizing the unorganized" had been the central slogan of the thirties, we felt that for the forties the organizing of independent political action as an independent party was it. Starting in '46, we joined with others in debating, discussing, organizing in time for the '48 election. There were two schools of thought, both within and out of the party. One was that Wallace should fight within the Democratic party, and this was most notably expressed by Bob Kenny here in Southern California. Bob had just been defeated as attorney general in the "46 elections. He had run for governor against Earl Warren and because of cross-filing Warren had won both the Democratic and the Republican primaries. Bob was vehemently opposed to the idea of organizing an independent party, but he was just as passionate an organizer nationally, but within the Democratic party, to challenge the Truman administration through Wallace. (I use him as the exemplar; it was true of the whole trend within the Democratic party.) Our position, while encouraging that-- because we didn't think there was any real chance that it could happen-*-was also to encourage, if it was possible, if it was going to get significant support, the emergence of a third party. In the CIO conventions the biggest fights were taking place around such questions as foreign policy. The Truman Doctrine was the starting point and after that the Marshall Plan in '48, the Truman Doctrine starting in "46. We had always historically said--I use the work historically again because it was a long-standing policy--we had always recognized that you could not have a third party unless you had a significant body of the labor movement that was going to support it, that otherwise it could not rest on any firm base. Therefore, for much of "46 and the beginning of "47 we kept pressing within the labor movement for this policy, still being very careful not to break any alliances at that point, to accumulate as many forces for independence as possible but really relating to both aspects of the struggle, within the Democratic party and independent of it, outside the Democratic party. Now, this question on the timing of how the Progressive party developed, again, has significance as to how histories of the Communist party have been written. Most notably I'm thinking of the last one that just came out, Joseph Starobin's book on the crisis of the Communist party [American Communism in Crisis, 1944-1957] where he and others write--and I see it's picked up now by young historians who don't do any independent research but take other books as representing the primary research, and usually inac-curately--they place the formation, the actual formation of the third party as far as the Communist party is concerned, as coming only after the Cominform conference had, in their opinion, given the go-ahead signal in September, 1947. (The Cominform was a setup in which the socialist countries of Eastern Europe plus the French and the Italian Communist parties had a method of leading together and supposedly coordinating and directing their work. We were not part of it. The Chinese were not part of it.) But this meeting in September 1947 is supposed to have given the go-ahead by the use of--and this is what all these histories quote--the use of the phrase, "You must never over- estimate the ruling class nor underestimate the working class." That's the example that's given of why we went ahead. Well, this is sheer poppycock, because here in California, in August of 1947, about six weeks before this famous meeting is supposed to have taken place, a conference took place, the founding conference of the provisional committee to organize a Progressive party in California. We had already worked this way all through "47. To qualify the party on the ballot you had to have over a half a million valid signatures, which meant you had to get a million signatures in order to have 600,000 valid. And this was a huge organizing job. We felt that this was the time for the emergence of a new party. The conference was held, as I say, in August, led by Hugh Bryson from the Marine Cooks and Stewards [Association of the Pacific Coast], which became the organizing center, [and there we agreed] to go ahead, to qualify a new party, to do all the work that was necessary. So that by the time that famous [Cominform] meeting took place, everything was already being done here, and we weren't paying any attention to any directives from anybody else. The activity around the formation of the Progressive party was the most exciting thing that was happening, because within every organization in which there were any significant number of people, enormous political debates were taking place on the combination of both the foreign policy and also the domestic antilabor policy, as well as the failure to carry through anything as far as integration or equality on any front, all the combined international and local questions. Huge mass meetings were taking place. Here in California they really did an enormous job of qualifying that new party; thousands of people participated day in, day out, day in, day out, getting the signatures. It was a far more difficult thing. There were no professional--we didn't use any professionals to qualify those signatures. We raised all the money to do it. (Again, when I'm saying "we" now, I'm talking not in terms of the party alone, although the party certainly was a central factor, but of all the forces who were ready to break. That included at that point a significant number of workers from the labor movement, particularly within the CIO but even including the AF of L.) There were already, however, problems that I think came from the sectarian approaches of the party, most notably at the first national convention of the Progressive party after Wallace finally agreed to go ahead with the formation of the third party as a separate and independent movement, over something called the Vermont Resolution. It was a resolution that criticized both the Soviet Union and the United States' foreign policy. Evidently some of the people back there--not only Communists but others, but most notably the Communists-violently and vehemently opposed this resolution as equating the responsibility between the Soviet Union and the United States instead of seeing the United States as the aggressor and the initiator. My own opinion then and later was that it was just nonsense to have done that. Not that Communists could not and should not have spoken up independently in arguing about the validity of this, but to make this the very big question it became was to really defeat the prospect of any significant breadth around the Progressive party. To assume that masses of people were ready to see the United States as the sole aggressor, to think that only the United States was responsible, was to fail to judge the character of the country and of the labor movement accurately.

GARDNER

Did you attend the convention?

HEALEY

No, I listened to it on the earliest television returns I can ever remember seeing. And then radio, of course. But television was just coming in then.

GARDNER

Were you involved in any. . . ?

HEALEY

I was involved here in L.A. in all the preparatory activities.

GARDNER

In any official way?

HEALEY

No, as a--well, as who I was. And in big fights in the CIO. However--and here I give great credit to Neitimy Sparks in the Executive Board of the party--it was already clear a few months into the campaign that this was going to split the CIO, that we were not getting enormous support within the labor movement. We were getting it everywhere else, but not within the labor movement. [At meetings of the Communist party Executive Board] I kept arguing and raising the question that we were violating what was really one of our great premises, that you do not move without the working class. Other groups may be there, and it's good, but they're not decisive. The working class is decisive. And, as I say, Nemmy's credit is that he bent over backwards in these discussions on the board to make room for my opposition and my disagreements. I think the reason for this is that he himself, although he wouldn't admit it, felt some disquiet over the fact that it was not proceeding with the extent of the labor movement's backing that we thought it would have, that it was getting narrowed down.

GARDNER

To intersperse a question here, do you think that this was the beginning of what has turned into a sort of widening chasm between the great bulk of American labor and the American Left? Do you think this started around here?

HEALEY

Well, I think that brought it to its height, yes, no question of it, because that laid the basis for the expulsion of the CIO unions on the ground that they were violating national CIO policy. While the expulsions were the things that widened the gap of the Left and the labor movement, the origin came with the Progressive party. In retrospect, I think most people recognize--I shouldn't say "most people," I think some people would recognize--that what should have been done is that rather than a separate party as a party nationally (in California it had to be a separate party to get on the ballot, but in other places it didn't) we should have had it simply as a national ticket, and then you go on from there if you have sufficient strength to organize a separate party. But at least you don't put everything into it; you still maintain your relationships elsewhere. But everything we had was to go into this one aspect of our political line, a Progressive party. Now, what happened however at the CIO Councils, generally throughout the country in the major centers but most particularly in New York and Los Angeles where we were the leadership of the CIO Councils, the councils themselves did not take a formal position. But what they did do, which later cost them their charter and gave the right wing a chance to reorganize them under their domination when the Left was simply ousted, they refused to endorse the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine as the criteria for the endorsement of candidates. Their position became that although they would not endorse them. they would not take the opposite position either of affirmative opposition; they would, quote, "simply be neutral." While still campaigning against the concepts of [the Right candidates]. But the national CIO declared that the councils were simply the property of the national CIO and had to follow out its policy. Of course, it's identical with what Meany has done now with the Colorado AFL-CIO and others, trying to take their charters away on the same ground as they took them away in 1948-49.

GARDNER

Who were some of the other people around Los Angeles who were active in the organization of the Progressive party here?

HEALEY

Jack Herman, Art Takei, Horace Alexander (who later ran as a black candidate for secretary of state), Charlotta Bass, Ray Cox, and very, very large support in the brown community, the Chicano community. There was an organization formed called the Amigos de Wallace which had a meeting at Lincoln Park where 10,000 Chicanos turned out. It was a very strong and influential part of the movement. There were big meetings in Gilmore Stadium where Katharine Hepburn and other Hollywood personalities spoke in support of Wallace. Of course, what misled everybody was that every meeting he had was just a huge triumphal meeting. Gilmore Stadium, which I don't think exists any longer (it held 32,000 people) was always jammed, just packed with people, whenever he'd come. And this was true everywhere. There's no question of the fact that he made a mistake. . . . Well, you asked me about people. Among the national people, C.B. Baldwin was probably the most important, who'd been Wallace's assistant in the Department of Agriculture in the thirties. I don't remember the national names.

GARDNER

Well, that's okay. What were you going to say?

HEALEY

Well, one of the mistakes--before the mistakes, one of the great contributions of the campaign was on this struggle for equality. Wallace really singled this out. When he went South, where he was, by the way, treated just incredibly--meetings broken up, brutalization, violence, and whatnot to prevent him speaking to Black and white together--but there was at that point in the South (and this also was destroyed immediately afterward) a very significant section of white Southern liberals, who fought on this question and who joined together with Black leaders of the area. But, as I say, this was true everywhere in the country. It's more significant that it was even true still in the South. I think the mistakes, as I look back on them now-- and I'm talking now just of the campaign itself. . . . As you know, at that point California had what was called cross-filing. That meant that in the primaries, instead of there being partisan primaries according to the parties, any candidate could cross-file into the other party primaries, and if he won his own nomination and the other party nomination, the primary then became the final election--no more general election necessary. The big question in Los Angeles became what to do with people like Helen Gahagan Douglas and Chet Holifield, who was still one of the gung-ho left people--those two I remember most particularly. Helen Gahagan Douglas was the congress-woman from what was then the Fourteenth Congressional District, which is the Black community, Central Avenue then. She had a notable record. But she refused to cross-file in the Progressive party. So did Chet Holifield, although enormous negotiations went on. In order to protect the primary--because anybody who registered IPP (Independent Progressive Party) could file--to prevent phonies from doing it, the IPP finally decided to file candidates ostensibly running against Helen Gahagan Douglas--Sidney Moore, a leader of the public workers union of the CIO, was the candidate that filed in that district--and against Chet Holifield. And this became a very terrible thing, actually, because then instead of the IPP being seen primarily as a weapon against the right wing in the country, the left-liberals said, "But look, you're running against the pride of the left-liberal movement." As I say, Helen Douglas most notably. It's always easier to have 20-20 vision looking back than it is at any one point. It would have been much better to have taken the chance of any phony coming in and not filed against her. It is true that Sidney Moore announced that he was doing it not to oppose Helen but in the event that her Republican opponent won the cross-filing primary, so that then in the final election there would be an alternative available for those who wanted to vote against the Republicans. That might have been true in a different kind of district, but in those districts there was no question of the fact that there was not going to be a Republican who would win in the cross-filed campaign. Well, in most places of the country except Los Angeles, the party placed all its emphasis totally and exclusively within the Progressive party as far as political action was concerned. Here in L.A. we did not do that, for a number of reasons; we still maintained both people and influence within the Democratic party, so much so that in 1949, when NATO was formally organized, there was a caucus of fifty people in the Democratic County Central Committee, led as I remember by Richard Richards, who later became a senator, based on opposition to the North Atlantic pact. Again, things like the North Atlantic pact, the Truman Doctrine, these things became the rallying cry for all the international and domestic questions in which like-minded people gathered together.

GARDNER

You mentioned Moore. Were there any other major candidates who ran on the Progressive party ticket? Or was most of the thrust, especially here, placed on the presidential campaign?

HEALEY

Most of the thrust everywhere was the presidential campaign. Here, too, however, we did have a few candidates, at that time just for congressional offices. In 1950, during the gubernatorial campaign when Jimmy Roosevelt was running against Earl Warren and Helen Gahagan Douglas was running for U.S. senator against Richard Nixon, the Korean War broke out just before the primary. We had been supporting them before that, but we then refused to support them because they supported the Korean War, and ran IPP candidates against them. There were, of course, great fights within the Communist party as far as the top leadership was concerned. Our membership unfortunately was never told of the fight--again because of these wrong distortions of democratic centralism, that the battles within the leadership do not become the property of the membership. (You were bound to fight for whatever the majority decides in the higher bodies, and therefore you don't express your separate position.) We here in L.A. in the 1950 election were violently opposed to the position of opposing Helen Gahagan Douglas. We felt that [most important was] the question of defeating Nixon, who had already emerged as the prominent right-winger with his prosecution of Alger Hiss, his role in HUAC, and his introduction of legislation, the Mundt-Nixon Bill, to outlaw the party. But the state office of the party's position--and it was reflected in our paper, People's World--the attitude toward Helen Gahagan Douglas was that she was only the lesser of two evils, that there was no difference between them. At that point we still had considerable political influence. There's no question in my mind that, maybe even only to a little bit, we helped defeat Helen and elect Richard Nixon.

GARDNER

So ultimately you're responsible for the present administration.

HEALEY

Yeah, although I may be overstating how much influence we had by 1950. I think we had enough; at least it would have cut down any vote he got.

GARDNER

What was the size of the [1948] Wallace vote in California finally?

HEALEY

Oh, it was not very large. I think it was 100,000 votes--I'm not sure--because he got a million nationally. I think that's what it was. And 100,000 is really not a hell of a lot of votes.

GARDNER

To what do you attribute the fact that he got so few votes?

HEALEY

Well, I think two things happened. One, Truman started to pick up on Wallace's campaigning, particularly on the domestic questions of equality. Just at that time he enacted the executive order in regard to discrimination in the navy and the armed forces and started making great campaign speeches about equality. But I think the overwhelming thing, the reason for it, is that even the people who'd planned to vote for Wallace, when they got to the ballot box, they were so worried about Dewey winning that they felt that they'd be throwing away their vote for Wallace, and they didn't want their vote wasted. I think that's a very important psychological political question of what masses of people feel, that they don't want to "waste their vote," and therefore they did not vote for Wallace. However, let me also add here on this question of "the lesser of two evils," that the use of that phrase has been historically much misunderstood. It arose in Nazi Germany in 1932.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE NOVEMBER 22, 1972

HEALEY

The concept of "the lesser evil" has been probably the most distorted concept in the United States. Its origin was in Nazi Germany in 1932 when the Socialists rejected any idea of a united campaign with the Communist party of Germany, of running a joint candidate against [Paul] von Hindenburg, their argument being that von Hindenburg was the lesser evil and therefore that's where their vote would go. Now, the reason we made fun of it and made the term a famous term of derision was the fact that there did exist in Germany a mass alternative. The Socialists and Communists were the two largest parties. If they had united, there's no question of what would have been their success. There was, in other words, an alternative. And in fact, von Hindenburg was not a lesser of two evils, because all he did was pave the way for the appointment of Hitler as chancellor. So the term arose in derision. Obviously, if there was such a thing, as there is in life, as a lesser and a greater evil, only a fool is going to dismiss the lesser. Who is going to reject a lesser evil in the face of a greater evil? And we used the term originally simply as a term of contempt for those who did not see that the lesser evil is identical with the other evil; there was no difference. There was no greater or lesser evil. But the way the term has come to have its own meaning in the United States, particularly in the last twenty years, is to indicate that even when there is no mass alternative, as there was in Germany, if you vote for the liberal candidate against the reactionary candidate, you are in effect simply saying that you are asking for the greater evil because the lesser evil is as great an evil as that greater one. And this is sheer nonsense, as I say. However, the other side of that coin is that all too often the party and the Left have screamed "Wolf!" about the danger of reaction. And while Tom Dewey without any question did represent the most conservative forces in 1948, it would not have meant the end of the world. Each time something like this came up, the way we talked you would have thought it was the beginning of fascism in the United States. I mean, there are the two approaches toward this problem. But what stands out above all is the fact that in the United States, you're dealing with a far more complicated political picture than in any other industrial country. You have two parties who subsume within themselves the coalitions that ordinarily in other countries would be separate political parties, separate entities. Secondly, there is an enormous difference between the role the parties play nationally and the particular role that any party can play within the state. To say, for instance, that in California there's no difference between the Democratic and Republican party is sheer nonsense. One only has to look at the votes on any kind of social legislation, any kind, to see the difference--and that's even true as far as congressmen are concerned. However, it is also true that to say that both parties are capitalist parties is to recognize the fact that nationally both of them are parties that defend the questions of property rights nationally. Nevertheless, having said that, one has not exhausted the political realities of America. And it is this complex question that historically has always vexed the Left in being able, first of all, to define the reality of where they are alike and where they differ, and secondly, what alternatives they have, what they can do about them. Partly the problem is that--the left wing in the '48 election showed this very clearly, and all other elections have shown it just as well. For instance, the Trotskyites, who have always said that their position is "class against class," that you can never in any way support anyone who runs as a Democrat or Republican, they vehemently attacked the Progressive party and would have nothing to do with it, on the ground that Henry Wallace represented capitalist thinking. Now, clearly, if they were consistent, they would not have had that position, because the Progressive party was at least the first major attempt since 1924, since La Toilette's campaign, to break from that two-party vise. But because they weren't leading it, because it wasn't their baby--their principle positions are never principled; they're simply questions of opportunism for them to kick around. Interestingly enough, Norman Thomas vehemently opposed the Progressive party on the ground of the Communist party's having influence in it. As a matter of fact, he and other Socialists and people who considered themselves left took the same position as the right wing in regard to it, and their similar responsibility for the hysteria of the later McCarthy period has never been defined and pointed out. There's a kind of a mythology that Norman Thomas and those around him always took positions that were positions of integrity, positions that responded to the needs of masses of people, and that is just not true. As a matter of fact, Norman Thomas later came out with a book in about 1952 which justified the existence of concentration camps for Communists under the McCarran Act, emergency measures enabling the president to put people in concentration camps. I say this, again, because the political report card as written up in history books is usually so tendentious and untrue, all designed to prove how wrong and perfidious and conspiratorial the Communist party has always been, and meanwhile how good and real and honest the Socialists or other opponents of capitalism have been. It's just not a truthful statement. And I'm not saying that in any way to gild over the mistakes we Communists have made, because, as you know by now, I think we've made plenty. But the fact is that when we make mistakes, it's considered part of a terrible conspiracy; and when others do, it's just a momentary lapse of judgment.

GARDNER

I'd like to talk more about the responsibility of the--I don't want to use the word "Left" necessarily, because I think that's too narrow a spectrum in a sense-- but the Democrats and the liberals and so forth, for what happened in the 1950s. The tendency now is really to see things in black and white and to blame it all very easily on the hysteria that followed the war and McCarthyism and so forth. But I think the things that you mentioned before, what Dean Acheson said, for example, and now Norman Thomas--I'd like to pursue that a little more.

HEALEY

Well, as an example, Eleanor Roosevelt. I think Eleanor Roosevelt was, without any question, a remarkable human being, one of the most remarkable of the last forty years. Nevertheless, her role in the postwar period, which is dressed up and prettified in Joe Lash's biography of her [Eleanor; The Years Alone], was pretty typical of of what was happening to those who considered themselves the outstanding liberals, because she participated and joined in this anti-Soviet hysteria. And it was a hysteria. Let me just parenthetically again restate a little more strongly what I indicated earlier: this defeated country (the USSR), defeated in the sense of the enormous toll World War II had taken on it, where they had borne the greatest burden of the war of any single country, was in no position to threaten militarily or in any other way anything of capitalism or imperialism throughout the world. It was a deliberately built-up propaganda campaign, in which she (Eleanor Roosevelt) went along, not as the worst but certainly not standing up to fight against it. Her attacks in 1948 on Henry Wallace were also part of the ammunition that helped to stoke up this whole fire that really consumed the liberals to a great extent in the fifties. The American Veterans Committee, the AVC, was formed. Originally there was recognition on the part of this overall Left, this rather ephemeral thing which nevertheless existed after the war, that the American Legion and the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars] obviously had to be challenged as representing veterans coming back from an antifascist war because historically, particularly the American Legion had played a prime role as strikebreakers, as vigilantes, as the worst kind of mobilizers, the centers of mobilization for the most reactionary attacks. So the AVC was started. Well, as part of this whole, what is called "the ADA syndrome," the split from anything that could be defined as having anything to do with the Communists, the AVC was split to drive out the Left. There was absolutely no aspect of life. . . . The NAACP passed an anti-Communist provision for the first time; they may have had it before, but they'd never enforced it before. There was nothing really that in the beginning stood up against it, and as a matter of fact, there was a great responsibility which the Left, the "liberals," had in helping to project it. You saw the examples of it even more so in 1954--and I use this again as illustrative without exhausting the problem--when it was a Hubert Humphrey under whose name comes the 1954 legislation to prohibit Communists from running for office anywhere in the country, the Communist Control Act of 1954, which goes beyond anything in the McCarran Act, done by the right wing in 1950. Of course, what the liberals never recognized--there were two things that they didn't recognize when they participated in these crusades. Number one, that there's no dividing line, that once you open the door for these kind of attacks against one segment of society, you've opened it for all. Of course, as far as the reactionaries are concerned, there never was any division in their mind. Back in the thirties and the forties Roosevelt was as much a Communist to them as Earl Browder. Of course, the second part of the fallacy that permeated the Democrats was their belief that they could win elections by competing with the ultra-Right and the anti-Communist hysteria. But the fact was that when people went to vote, if they were going to be influenced by the anti-Communist hysteria, they were going to take the original article of the anti-Communist organizers, and they were not going to take the liberal facade for it. So they opened the door for their own defeats, as exemplified in 1952 when the main charges that Nixon and others made were, as I've indicated, "the cowardly college of communist containment," and "twenty years of treason," and all the other things.

GARDNER

Now, I guess at this point we can flash back to your own experience and the point at which the investigators came knocking at your door.

HEALEY

Well, in 1949--in 1948, actually, but continuing on until 1949, we got word from a friend of ours who was on the grand jury, the federal grand jury, that the Department of Justice had sent a special prosecutor out here and that there were going to be a whole mass of subpoenas issued for Communists: the recognition being that we would not testify about other people, that we would only testify about ourselves; and the purpose being the attempt then to force us either to be stool pigeons against others or to cite us for contempt.

GARDNER

Was the Smith Act passed yet?

HEALEY

The Smith Act was already passed, and as a matter of fact the Smith Act trials had already taken place in New York. The Foley Square trials had taken place in 1949, and those trials--well, let me deal with those trials, and then I'll come back to the grand jury, because that first trial was significant also in terms of deepening both the outward hysteria and the reaction of the party to it, which I think most people would now agree was an exaggerated reaction in terms of what we did about it.

GARDNER

Could you explain the Smith Act?

HEALEY

The Smith Act was passed in 1939 as a rider to a bill in regard to naturalization and immigration. It was a rider that added the [provision] that it was illegal to conspire to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. It's interesting, the legislative history, that when this was passed, no one in the country was really aware that it was even up for legislative debate. It was, as I say, a rider by Congressman [Howard] Smith of Georgia, and nobody paid much attention to it. It was first used against the Trotskyites in Minnesota in 1943 during the war on the ground that they had conspired to defeat the war effort. We Communists, very stupidly--first because of our historic hatred of the Trotskyites, and secondly because of our position on the war of active support of the war as a war against fascism--not only ignored the civil liberties rights of the Trotskyites in the Smith Act, but more than that, actively organized to prevent other people from supporting them. It was really an outrageous position on our part, one that we were not unique in following, but nevertheless it was very wrong. Because, again, the same thing as I said about the liberals: once you open that door you have made it possible--as long as capitalism endures, it's always going to be Reaction that will utilize the further power of the government to march in on ideas. It will not be the Ku Klux Klan that will suffer; it will be the Left. In 1948, on the eve of the election, the Department of Justice indicted the leaders of the Communist party, of the national party. It was a deliberate election-eve thing. But, really, nobody took it too seriously in the beginning. It seemed so ridiculous that anybody could be convicted on this, partly because of our historical position. We'd always had one position on it: we advocated peaceful change, a peaceful revolution; but we always predicted that no ruling class left the scene of history quietly, that they would use violence against the majority of the people, and therefore the people would have to organize and use their violence against the first violence of the ruling class. Well, that trial became a hysterical merry-go-round under Judge [Harold R.] Medina (whose article appeared in yesterday's Los Angeles Times), first of all because it was part of the period of great hysteria, what today would seem incredible hysteria. The attacks upon the lawyers defending the Communists became--I mean, Medina used his courtroom for the most frivolous and provocative kinds of attacks. Secondly, in the jury selection, every challenge that was made was rejected, and yet on the jury you had people who had publicly made proclamations of their positions in writing--there was one writer who had written an article a year before ab out how all Communists should be deported or put in jail for the rest of their lives. There was already a firm conviction of guilt that was there.

GARDNER

Gene Dennis was the number one?

HEALEY

Yes, Eugene Dennis was the general secretary of the party then and also defended himself, which is called pro per.

GARDNER

Who were the other defendants?

HEALEY

The other defendants were Bob Thompson, who was the most highly decorated war veteran member of the Communist party, Carl Winter, Henry Winston, Ben Davis, John William-son, Irving Potash, Gil Green, Gus Hall, John Gates, and Jack Stachel. At any rate, the trial was predicated on what all the latter Smith Act trials were predicated upon, and that's reading from the books of Marx, Engles, and Lenin every passage that seems to contain any violence in it. I remember particularly then, but later again in my own trail, that the most favorite one was the declaration about "Smash the bourgeois state." Of course, all the prosecution and the judge and the jury could see from that is blood in the streets, "smashing" meaning literally killing people, rather than meaning eliminating the power of the Pentagon and the Department of Justice and so forth by the workers taking over those positions instead of the former office holders. The second thing that happened in those trials was the use of the stool pigeons, the professional stable of stool pigeons who were trotted around the country to testify on the most ludicrous things. You must understand that on a conspiracy charge, they don't have to charge that you have ever done anything, only that people who you have been associated with have made statements that could be utilized against you. So these stool pigeons would stand up and would talk about how in private secret sessions somebody would teach a class that would say, "And when the revolution comes, blood will run in the streets." You may never even have known the person who was teaching that class, but if they proved that person was a member of the party, automatically that was part of the conspiracy. It's very important to understand that most people didn't realize that a conspiracy doesn't mean that you have the intent of overthrowing, but simply that people, unnamed conspirators, have that. Third was the use of the term "Aesopian language" to justify that wherever our party outline spoke about peaceful change of society, what we were advocating [was violence], the claim of the prosecution that this was not really what we meant, that this was double-talk. I think Louis Budenz was the one who initiated that. At any rate, they were not only found guilty, but they were also found guilty of contempt of court, as were the lawyers found guilty of contempt of court. Contempt of court citations came every time they contested against mistreatment either of particular witnesses on the defense side or of individual defendants. When they were found guilty on the trial court level, there was just no question in anybody's mind, every civil libertarian, every expert on constitutional law, that on appeal we would win, that there was just no evidence adequate for conviction, that it would fly in the face of every constitutional precedent and all the legal precedents of past cases of this kind that the Supreme Court had ruled on. Well, the first blow came when the circuit court under Judge Learned Hand, a great civil libertarian, upheld the convictions. And then in 1951, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions. Well, when the appellate court upheld them, the party started to feel the convictions were going to stand. By this time also, the Korean War had started, and therefore there was the feeling that in order to prosecute the Korean War, there would have to be mass repression at home; the party would be the first one under attack with everybody arrested, but from that would go on the attacks against the unions and people's organizations and leaders. So in 1950 we initiated policies to try to secure the party, which meant that a good portion of the party, some of the party leadership, would go underground, that is, not be available in ordinary places. They would be in different cities or different occupations or in people's homes or out of the country, where they would not be available for arrest. Our belief, which we adopted from the French Communist party, was that the most we could hold together of our own party in the coming period of what we saw as real fascism would be 10 percent of the members. The first big losses of the party took place then in 1950, primarily as a result of our own decisions that we should only keep in the party those people who were thoroughly steeled and prepared to fight to the bitter end. Everybody else should become simply sympathizers.But before the final decision of the Supreme Court was reached on this, the grand jury attacks started both here and in Colorado--the technique, as I say, being to subpoena Communists before the grand jury to ask them questions not about themselves but about other people; to try to secure the membership books of the party, and when that was not forthcoming to cite us with contempt of court for refusing to answer questions. Well, we had, as I say, received advance notice that the roundup was going to take place on a particular Monday, I think in October. Therefore, we decided that certain people would not be available. Most notably that meant myself here in Los Angeles, that I would go underground. Well, that first Monday morning when the arrests took place, the first arrests were of eleven people. They were promptly taken before the grand jury, asked these particular questions about other people, and when they refused to answer, taken to the federal court, the trial court, to be directed to answer by a judge, and when they refused, that's when the contempt citation came. (That's when we pioneered with the use of the Fifth Amendment, because before that the Fifth Amendment hadn't been tested out or tried. We didn't know when we used it whether the Fifth would hold up.) Most of the people who were arrested at that point and cited for contempt received sentences of six months. But the hunt on the part of the marshals for those of us not caught right away went on.

GARDNER

How many were there convicted?

HEALEY

The first group was eleven people, but the grand jury continued in office, and so it ultimately came to twenty-one.

GARDNER

How many went underground?

HEALEY

Only the top leaders of the party. Some of them were made available, but some of us went underground, and I remember along with me was a guy by the name of Alvin Averbuck, who was our East Side organizer. I really don't remember the others. At any rate, this was for me personally a very short period of tension because of my son. My son was then--he was born in '43--six years old; and I was then and remain one of the most typically fatuous mothers you've ever seen. As far as I was concerned, everything revolved around my son Richard. I was determined that my boy would not be a party orphan, as I'd seen in my generation many kids of party leaders become. Their parents were so occupied with the party and with their activities that the kids just felt absolutely alienated from the party and grew up to hate it. So I spent a great deal of time, always made a lot of time for Richard. We had a standing arrangement that if I was going to have a meeting on a Sunday, then all day Saturday was his time, and nothing could interfere with that. When I'd pick him up from nursery school in the afternoon--and I always picked him up very early, about three-thirty, because he was very young and I didn't believe in leaving him there too long--I didn't care who was in town, whether Foster or John Williamson or who, I would leave the office to go pick him up. There was always the agreement that I didn't even answer the phone between five and seven; that was solely his time to read and play and so forth. Well, here I am then underground, separated from my son. My mother was taking care of him. But I am living in other people's homes, which is a rather distasteful thing, too. I never liked it. It's an imposition on other people, and it's difficult for you, too, for the person doing it, because you're always having to be concerned with their needs and the rhythm of their households, that you don't disrupt them too much. But there was no question that the marshal's office was spending a great deal of time looking for me, the federal marshal. While this was going on, the national office of the party had taken Nemmy Sparks, who was the chairman of the party in Los Angeles, and asked him to come to New York to set up the beginning of an underground apparatus for the national party, to be responsible for organizing it. And he was sworn to secrecy. Obviously this is not something that could be discussed, because then the FBI would follow him from the beginning. We were told not to tell a single person about it. Only Ben Dobbs and I knew about it. Nobody was to know about it in San Francisco, which is very unusual, because they were the state leadership (as I say, you must always remember this level of leadership operating in the party where the higher body is always the most authoritative body). Well, when he left--this was in February of 1949--the question came then of replacing him. Ben Dobbs and I had been coworkers for many years together. We had first known one another when we were youngsters in the Young Communist League in Los Angeles. He was at that point the trade union director of the party. The question was which one of us would become chairman, which one of us, secretary. We simply flipped a coin, because we were pretty much interchangeable in our experiences and work. I became the acting chairman; he became org secretary. This had sharp repercussions later because I was a woman. The state leaders admitted that they could understand a woman being org secretary but not being the chairman, that that was not right. And then the coworkers here in Los Angeles and section organizers and others raised great resistance to it, because, again, they decided it's all right for a woman to be org secretary, but chairman--that's unheard of. But I was still operating then underground, and what that meant is that the only meetings I'd have, either people would come by very indirect circuitous routes at nighttime to the house where I was staying, or I would be taken out by a dozen devious methods to the place where the people were. In other words, I would be taken out by car--I'd be lying on the floor of the car--and then switched to another car and switched to still a third car and then finally taken to the place where the meeting was.

GARDNER

Had the FBI infiltrated by this point?

HEALEY

Well, you always take for granted that the FBI-- I mean, in any people's organization, you take the FBI for granted.

GARDNER

So at that point, even though you were underground, then, at some of these meetings there might have been FBI people?

HEALEY

There might have been, although I still don't have any knowledge of that, because from none of those meetings did anybody ever emerge later as a witness against me. But I was suffering, as I say, a great deal from separation from my son. Slim Connelly and I had already gotten married in 1947, and it was a very difficult marriage. He had been a very, very important leader in the CIO, very well known throughout the state, very well known in all the political circles. When the charter was yanked by the CIO, he became the local editor of People’s World, the Los Angeles editor. But obviously that was not as important as he'd been. He was going through great psychological problems because of that. Secondly, being married to a woman like me is not an easy thing. Things like people coming over to talk politics with me; he'd be sitting here in the room, and they'd just address themselves to me and ignore him. We'd go out to some big affairs in the ACLU or something, and people would come up and address him as Mr. Healey--just a dozen things that were terrible. And I was--well, I was enormously preoccupied with being a mother; I was very, very resentful of the additional pressures of now being a wife in the sense of the great subjective feelings he felt about my being away or going to meetings all the time, as I was. While I made great arrangements about taking care of my son, when I'd have to go out to a meeting at night, I'd also have to think of a way to explain it to him; or if I had to go back to New York to meetings, I'd have to placate him so he wouldn't get so upset. I was very conscious at the same time of the great psychological problems he was going through, plus the fact that it was a new marriage, both of us--I was thirty-two, I guess; he was forty-three but he'd been married before for twenty-five years, also to a Dorothy. There were very difficult problems of adjustment. But while I was underground, the most difficult problem of adjustment was not seeing my son. This was absolutely the most terrible pressure I have ever known, the desire to just physically be in contact, to touch him. And he was going through great problems, too, because how do you explain about a grand jury to a child? It doesn't have any entity; it has no body. And where is the mother? How do you explain that? Even though he was surrounded by love--my mother and my stepfather, and his own father and his stepmother, who lived in Willowbrook and who were very, very good and wonderful as far as relationship with him--that's still no substitute for a mother who is very close. So he was suffering, and I was suffering, the tortures of the day. Finally what happened is that he got mumps; I called up somebody else who called up the house who told me when he called back that he had the mumps. I got together with Ben Dobbs--this was some four or five months later, probably June or July, somewhere in there; I'm not sure of the exact time--and I said, "This is sheer nonsense. The grand jury will never end till they get me. It's clear that I'm the person they want." (Other arrests had been made in the meantime, the next group of about five people.) I said, "With my kid sick, I'm coming home. That's all there is to it. This has got to end. It's going on interminably, and there's no end to it. It's stupid. It's stupid politically, and it's killing me personally because of Richard." So he and I had a session together, and it was agreed it was silly and I should come home. Well, I came in on a Saturday night. I had agreed that I'd stay in the house, I wouldn't go outside, but we knew that the minute I'd come home that they'd know about it. So I was with Richard all day Sunday, and then Monday the marshal came, a man by the name of [Jack] Sears. He was very friendly with us. This was during the Smith Act trials. They arrested me, and arrested with me were Matt Pellman, E.G. Greenfield, and Buck Averbuck. Well, I shouldn't say "arrested"; we were given the grand jury subpoena. We appeared before the grand jury; the questions were as anticipated. First, they'd served a subpoena duces tecum, which meant we had to produce the books of the party, and I claimed I didn't have any knowledge of where the books were. Then they proceeded to ask all the questions, and I refused to answer them, about other people--who was here and who was that person and so forth. I was ordered to appear before Judge Pierson Hall, refused to answer the questions, and was cited for contempt, and appeared before him for a trial. The others got six-month sentences, but I was given a year-and-a-half sentence for contempt of court on the ground that I was a central culprit. I was put in jail, but I was only in jail one day and night; they refused me bail, but my attorney Ben Margolis immediately went to the appellate court and got a bail order directing them to let us go on bail. At the same time, as I say, the Denver people were going through the same thing. They, too, were pioneering the use of the Fifth, and ultimately, when the cases reached the Supreme Court, the use of the Fifth was validated, and from then on other people used the Fifth, knowing that if they did not answer questions that opened the door to waiving it, then no matter what the other consequences, you would not go to jail for refusing to answer. As I say, it was rather incongruous because I'd appeared before the Tenney Committee twice, and they didn't ask any such questions in those days, the old investigating committees. They simply asked you about the activities of the party, and for that I was always-- every Communist answered those questions; we had nothing to hide. And here was the first time we weren't talking, I can remember coming out of the grand jury room and telling the newspaper men, "I'll answer any of your questions that you want to know about myself or about the party. But I will not answer any of their questions." Well, then came the real underground of the party. This was really just a very few people in Los Angeles, not the rest of the country. The party made an analysis, first of all, of the [Frederick M.] Vinson decision around the Dennis case, deciding in a shorthand way that it was five minutes to midnight--midnight being fascism--that that's what the decision represented. As I say, particularly because the Korean War had started, we absolutely expected that there would follow the immediate attempt to safeguard, to quiet the home fronts so as to prosecute the war. Sometime in June we were arrested on the charge of violating the Smith Act. Three weeks before we were arrested, the FBI started to follow me and Slim and others day and night. Three carloads, always outside the house; everywhere I went they went with us. I'd drive Richard to school--he was going to the Eighty-seventh Street School, which was only a few blocks-- I'd be going there on my way to work, and these three cars would sweep along behind me on this little quiet street, on Eighty-seventh Street. I'd go shopping at Von's market, and the agents would immediately get out of the car and come into the market and go shopping with me. No matter where I went. I remember some rather amusing things about it. I never really cared that they were following me, because again, there was never anything I did that I gave a damn if the whole world knew about it. But occasionally,, in order to see if I couldn't shake them if I wanted to, I'd drive in front of a streetcar (we still had streetcars in those days), make a quick left-hand turn, swoop up and down alleys, and shoot through parking lots in and out, doing everything to try to shake them. One day I get a phone call. "Dorothy?" "This is she." "Hey, look, it's only a job, for Christ's sake. What do you want--to endanger your life and our lives, too? What are you doing?" [laughter] When they came in to arrest us--Slim had already left the house at about seven in the morning to go to work, and they arrested him three blocks away, but I didn't know that. But I heard them pounding on the door at about seven-thirty, seven-fifteen.

GARDNER

This very door.

HEALEY

Yeah, this door here on Eighty-fourth Street. I knew who it was, and I thought, "Oh, hell, it's too early. I'm not going to let them in. I'm tired." So they pounded and pounded, and then they came around to the back,and I heard them starting to come in the back door, just entering. So then I got up and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" And they said, "We have a warrant for your arrest." I said, "Oh, dear, all right, let me see the warrant." So they showed it to me, and I said, "Well, do you care if I call my attorney?" They said, "No." So I called Margolis-- John McTernan was back east on another Smith Act case, Steve Nelson--and told him I was being arrested. (Simultaneously fourteen others in California were being arrested in Northern and Southern California. I'll give you all those names in a minute.) Then they said, "Look, do you mind--when you get dressed-we have a stenographer out in the car. There has to be a woman with you constantly from now on; somebody has to be with you. The woman is here. Do you mind if she goes in with you to the shower while you're there and while you get dressed?" I said, "No, I don't mind. If that's what you have to do, that's what you have to do." So she came in and came into the bathroom while I was showering. I came out, and I was still so dopey and sleepy, I said, "Do you mind if I make coffee?" They said, "No." Very polite. So I made some coffee and I said, "You must forgive me. I'm very uncomfortable drinking the coffee in front of you and not offering you any. I'm not used to serving coffee, if I'm drinking coffee, not serving it to others, but I simply can't serve any coffee to FBI agents. It would violate all my principles." They laughed and said, "We understand your principles. Go ahead." I told the story mainly because other people who were being arrested at that time were totally not expecting it, as I was expecting it, and therefore there became very sharp, hot scenes in which they treated them very badly. One comrade, Rose Chernin, was washing clothes when they came, and they wouldn't let her change her clothes--that sort of thing. Another they arrested in front of the children, shouting and scaring the kids half to death the way they acted. But they had not done that with me. Oh, there was one other amusing story I should tell you about the FBI. During the time they were following us day and night, my practice, when I'd go to my office, which was then on Sixth and Spring, was to go down for a coffee break about ten-thirty. There was a restaurant right underneath the office. I was sitting there at the counter and one of them came in. There was an empty seat next to me, and I still remember I was reading the Daily Worker which had the whole description of the events and the decision upholding the Smith Act conviction of Gene Dennis and the other comrades. He said, "Do you mind if I sit down here?" I grunted, "Public place," and kept on reading. He looked over my shoulder at what I was reading and said, "Well, you know what that decision does for us, the power it gives us," he said. "We have really full power now in terms of what's going to happen to you and your family and your friends. If you will cooperate with us, as Elizabeth Bentley has cooperated with us, then we will promise you that neither your mother nor your son nor you will go into a concentration camp. Otherwise you will join the rest. They will join you in a concentration camp." I stood up, and I put my hand over my breast, and I started shouting, "This man is trying to attack me, this man is attacking me!" Everybody came running, and he got so embarrassed. "I haven't touched her! I haven't touched her! I haven't touched her!" And while he's trying to explain to all these people that he hasn't done anything, I just got up and walked out, walked upstairs to my office. I just enjoyed it, you know, for once; you could sometimes turn the tables on them. At any rate, we were arrested and taken down first to the FBI headquarters. That's when I knew that the others had been arrested. In the first group who were picked up were Rose Chernin, Henry Steinberg, Slim. Then came--at a later point, but within that same week-- Ben Dobbs, Frank Carlsen, Frank Spector, Al Richmond, Loretta Starvis, Oleta 0'Connor Yates, Bernadette Doyle, Ernie Fox. There were originally fifteen. Bernadette Doyle was later severed from the case because of her physical condition. She was very sick.

GARDNER

So the case, when it finally went through appeals and so forth, went in under Oleta Yates's name, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Yes.

GARDNER

What was the reason for that?

HEALEY

We did that because Oleta was the only witness, the only defendant who testified, and she was treated just ignominiously by the prosecution. That's when they started doing the same thing to her as they tried to do with us in the grand jury case. She was there to testify and answer the prosecution's charge against the party. Instead they kept asking her about individuals, knowing she would not answer, and whenever she would not answer, Judge Mathis immediately cited her for contempt; although she was a very sick woman she was put back in jail. We had finally gotten out on bail, and we decided in respect to her role and the courage she'd shown that we would ask the lawyers to name her as the first defendant. The name of the first defendant becomes the name of the case.

GARDNER

I see. Who were your lawyers?

HEALEY

Margolis was counsel, Al Wirin, Alexander Schulman, Leo Branton--who later became lawyer for Angela [Davis]-- this was Leo's first case of a major case. He had been involved in the Bucky Walker case in San Bernardino, but this was his first major case. He was very young, new then in the law. We really had a luxury of lawyers. In every other place in the country, Communists were finding it impossible to find lawyers to represent them; but we were being inundated with requests by lawyers to represent us. The first portion of the case was a tremendous battle over trying to get bail, the judge refusing to grant us bail. We went up to the appellate court; they'd order it; he'd find some other reason not to do it. Finally we went up to the Supreme Court twice. But we were in jail five months while we were fighting to get bail, because of his refusal to grant it. What he'd do is, first he'd refuse to grant it; then when they'd order him to grant it, he'd make it such a high bail, $100,000 a piece, that it was [out of the question].

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 1, 1972

GARDNER

As we left off in our last session you had been rounded up by the federal police and taken off to jail. Would you like to continue from there with the Smith Act story?

HEALEY

At the time we were being arrested here in Los Angeles, a number of Communists in Northern California were being arrested, as well as Bill Schneiderman in Neva York, who was arrested and brought back manacled in light chains and so forth across the country to be in the California Smith Act trials. Bill was in New York, where we had the national office at the time. In Northern California several people were arrested; among them were Oleta 0'Connor Yates, Loretta Starvis Stack, Bernadette Doyle, Ernie Fox, Al Richmond, Mickey Lima. Let's see, who else was arrested then?

GARDNER

That seems like about all. The rest of them would be Southern [California].

HEALEY

One of the things that was interesting about both the women and the men from Northern California who were brought down to Los Angeles, but most particularly about the women prisoners who joined us in the women's section of the Los Angeles County Jail--and it was also true of Rose Chernin, who had been arrested here in Los Angeles--was that none of the women had ever been arrested before, and what interested me was how enormous was the fear of the unknown. The fact that they had never been in jail really allowed them to magnify enormously what they thought the problems of jail would be. There were two things that they were just absolutely convinced of. One was that there would be a special viciousness and venom on the part of the jailers towards us because we were Communists. You must always remember all of this took place while the Korean War was going on and the hysteria was enormous in the country.

GARDNER

Really just after it started.

HEALEY

Yes, it started in June 1950, and we were arrested in 1951; it was a year later. This was expressed by the fact that, for instance, on just ordinary questions of jail routine, things done to everyone--the routine in itself is degrading and dehumanizing, debasing, but it's a routine; it was not especially meant for us. For instance, for every woman and man who was brought into jail, there was always a very detailed body examination before you're booked, or after you're booked but before you're placed in your cell, which includes examining all orifices. They're looking for drugs and whatnot. Well, as I say, everybody who's ever been in jail knows that that's standard operating procedure. But my comrades were all convinced that it was a deliberate plot on the part of the jailers and the government to do this, especially to the women Communists. I kept saying, "No, no, forget it. It's routine."

GARDNER

Were you the only one in the group who. . . ?

HEALEY

I was the only one who had been in jail before. The other thing they were convinced of is that the prisoners themselves would be very hostile and threatening toward us. This was just nonsense. In the first place, there's a casual curiosity as to why people are in. There's a kind of an unwritten rule in jail that you do not press people who do not want to be pressed in regard to the reason, alleged or actual, as to why they're in. Secondly, there's a great tolerance of why people are in jail. It's very rare that any overt expression against an individual prisoner would take place because of the alleged charge against them. Ordinarily, the only instances I can remember either from before or at that time where that kind of expression would take place would be some act perpetrated against a child, for instance; then there would be great hostility. But I can't remember any other expression of it. As I say, the first discussions, the first couple of days were--well, Rose and I were alone for about four or five days before the Northern California comrades were brought down--were spent with my convincing Rose that there was absolutely nothing to be concerned about, you know, nothing is being uniquely done to us. Then when the other women came in, by this time Rose was an old-timer--after a few days anybody is--and both of us were assuring them that all the indignities were really not unique. As a matter of fact, among the women prisoners there was great curiosity about us, in the first place because we were not in for the things that most women prisoners were in for, which in the fifties, as distinct from the thirties, were mainly questions of drugs and of associated activities in order to get the money for drugs, being a call girl or prostitution or something like that. But that was never the reason why they were in. They became that in order to get the money for drugs. As I say, it's kind of a social insight of the mores of a period that in the thirties when I was in jail, almost all the women who were prisoners were mainly in for prostitution as prostitution, not for--I can't remember a single drug case in the thirties in any jail I was in. One other little parenthetical note: there were very few Jewish women in county jails. The only reason that came to our attention is that there is provision made for religious observances in a jail, and lots of times people who aren't religious utilize it because it's a break in the prison routine. So we heard that once in a great while a rabbi would come around, and some of us were Jewish, so we would insist on our right to do it. When we finally saw the rabbi, he told us--as I say, it was mainly just to have fun, to break the routine of the jail--he was so amazed because, he said, he practically never had Jewish women who came within his purview as a jail rabbi. As far as the women officers were concerned, there was a difference between the Black and the white officers. The Black officers had a great interest and sympathy as far as we were concerned. There wasn't a lot they could do to express it, but little things would be done in terms of the way they addressed us, in terms of conversations and discussions we would have. But actually, when we were being taken across the street every day to the federal building to prepare our trial, we'd have long discussions both with the women officers and later with the marshals who would accompany us. There was always great curiosity about our theory and our politics, and I don't remember any expression of any particular hostility because of that.

GARDNER

Before you start in, unless you'd rather do this later, I have here one of the fact sheets that I took out of the ACLU file in the archives [Department of Special Collections], and I wondered if you'd like to go through the list of the defendants. Do you want to do that now or later?

HEALEY

I'll do it now.

GARDNER

Talk a little bit about them, too, as you knew them and what sort of people they are.

HEALEY

Well, in no particular order, Ben Dobbs. Ben had been one of the comrades assigned to the party underground in 1951 after the Supreme Court upheld the Dennis conviction. Ben was arrested--he had come back home and he was arrested while he was at a show with his son Maury; it left a very bad, sharp expression on Ben. I'd known Ben since 1932 here in Los Angeles when we had shared an apartment--he with his then-wife, Lolly Milder, and I with my husband Lou Sherman. We had known one another off and on all through the subsequent years. He was born in New York, but he was raised here in Los Angeles. One of the most notable things that had occurred to him in the thirties was that he was speaking at a meeting in Long Beach when the Ku Klux Klan attacked the meeting, burned a cross on the lawn, and all of them were beaten up by the Ku Klux Klansmen. He was in the army for four years during World War II and was probably one of the great raconteurs of army stories. He had a great time and enjoyed it, unlike many people. I think the only other person I know who enjoyed the army was my former husband Don Healey. But Ben had great times and, as I say, was particularly in demand to tell the stories of his experiences in Czechoslovakia immediately after the occupation there. He was the labor secretary of the party here in Los Angeles starting in 1947. Before that he'd been in San Jose as the party organizer. But he was probably best known all through the thirties and forties as the leader of the Young Communist League in Southern California. Frank Carlsen was the educational director of the Los Angeles Communist party. I had known Frank since the thirties. Frank was probably one of the brightest Communists I've ever known, and one of the sharpest and most difficult to work with. A very acerbic humor, and a sharp tongue which is still present even today. He had been under deportation proceedings for quite a long time, although he came here to the country when he was just a child and grew up in the United States.

GARDNER

Where was he from?

HEALEY

He was born in Poland. Rose Chernin, Rose Chernin Kusnitz, was the executive secretary of [what was] at that time the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign-Born; that committee is now known as the Committee for the Bill of Rights. When the government prosecutions against foreign-born ceased, the committee broadened out its work.

GARDNER

What happened with her?

HEALEY

She's still the head of the Committee for the Bill of Rights. Slim (Philip) Connelly, born in Pennsylvania, came to Los Angeles in 1912. It's not unimportant that he was educated in Loyola High School and I think had one year at the Loyola School of Law, the significance only being that until the late thirties he was very [religious]; he had been raised as a very devout Catholic, and his then wife Dorothy Connelly was also raised in the same religious tradition. They became Communists in the mid-thirties and, as distinct from the other people I'm talking about who'd been mostly old-time Communists, Slim and Dorothy were really examples of people whose whole lives were changed as a result of the great struggles of the thirties. Slim had been one of the first organizers of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild; he'd been a top rewrite man for the Hearst papers before that and had more or less accepted the Hearstian standards. But it was his own direct experience in starting to organize a union in the Herald-Express that first started him questioning and challenging the accepted standards and morality and mores of his society. By the time the arrest took place, he and Dorothy were divorced, and he and I had been married about two years. Ernie Fox came to this country when he was four years old from Germany, started working in the coal mines when he was fourteen years of age, and became a seaman when he was seventeen. He was one of the early leaders of the Trade Union Unity League and the Marine [and Shipbuilding] Workers [of America] Industrial Union and then later of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. He also later became an organizer for UCAPAWA and then worked in Washington for a long time.

GARDNER

Did you know him well?

HEALEY

I knew him briefly when I was in San Francisco during the war years, but I knew him, of course. We became very close friends during the course of the strike. Carl Lambert--the name is misspelled in the book you have here. You have Carl Rudio Lambert, his name is Carl Rude Lambert.

GARDNER

I was wondering.

HEALEY

Rude--and he was known only as Rude Lambert; I didn't even know myself that his first name was Carl-- became active in the movement during the veterans' struggles. He was one of those who helped lead the veterans' march on Washington. And then he was one of the organizers of the International Labor Defense. In the years I knew him, he was always in charge of what we called security for the party. He was the one who always looked out to see who the stool pigeons were and what was happening; or if charges were brought against people inside the party for activity that was not becoming to a party member, he always handled that. He was also a great fund raiser for the party, had enormous contacts. Albert Jason Lima, known mostly as Mickey Lima, came into the movement in 1933 from the Lumber [and Sawmill] Workers Union in Eureka, where he was very active and was actually president of one of the unions. He became a fisherman in 1940, and at the time he was arrested he was one of the state leaders of the Communist party. Al Richmond was born in London at one point when his mother, who was a very well-known activist in the Jewish Bund in Czarist Russia, was deported and went to London as an émigré. He came here when he was two, became naturalized while he was in the army in 1943. Al was one of the founding editors of the People's World in 1938, and just at the age of twenty-three became the first managing editor of the People's World with Harrison George as the editor.

GARDNER

Later he worked with your husband, didn't he? Didn't they more or less do it together?

HEALEY

Yeah, Slim went to work for the People's World in '49 or '50, I'm not sure which, after he had left the CIO Council, and they got to know one another. Well, they were never very close.

GARDNER

They put out the paper together, though.

HEALEY

Yes. Well, Al was in San Francisco where the paper was published; Slim was the bureau editor here in Los Angeles. But during the trial they would take turns-- the paper was still a daily newspaper, and they would take turns covering the paper as writers, as reporters.

GARDNER

What happened during the time that they were in jail?

HEALEY

Who wrote, who took over? Well, in San Francisco it was Steve Murdock and the staff, and in Los Angeles we mainly had volunteers who handled it. But Slim would continue to work out of the office; he'd go there before he came to trial, and he'd go there after the trial was over-- when we were not in jail, that is. Richmond, by the way--again, a very subjective judgment--is one of the best examples of the working class intellectual that I know. Although he had only high school education, he was an enormously well read and cultured human being and was considered a walking encyclopedia. The people in the PW used to say to the staff that if there was any question you needed to know of any fact of history, you didn't bother with an encyclopedia, you simply turned to Richmond and he would know it. But he had another great quality, and that was a gift for felicitous political phrasing. He was never a cliched writer; he always found a fresh phrase for what needed to be defined in current reality. Bill Schneiderman was on leave in New York, acting with the national office, the national leaders of the party. Actually he was then the state chairman of California and had been such since 1936, Bill was born in Russia but became a naturalized citizen as soon as he was old enough, when he was twenty-one. He was the subject of a very famous case, the Schneiderman decision, when there was an attempt to revoke his citizenship. His attorney was Wendell Willkie. The Supreme Court's decision in that case was really a remarkable decision: in answer to the charge that he had lied about the advocacy of force and violence to overthrow the government, the burden of the Supreme Court's decision was that it was reasonable to conclude from the testimony that the party advocated peaceful change even while it predicted that violence would come only because of the ruling class using violence against those who wanted to change the society.

GARDNER

In what year was that, do you recall?

HEALEY

In 1940.

GARDNER

So then the court was really doing a turnabout later. And then another turnabout still later.

HEALEY

Exactly. The old expression that the court follows the election returns--who was it? Finley [Peter] Dunne, something like that--that the court follows the election returns in the sense of the court reflecting what is the dominant pressure in the country, is certainly proven out by this. Frank Spector is one of the real old 1905ers of the Communist party, born in Czarist Russia, became a Bolshevik when he was just a teenager, was one of those deported to Siberia for his activities there, came to this country-- (this fact sheet is not accurate here either, that he was born in 1897; he's much older than that)--came to this country during the war, became a charter member, a founding member of the Communist party in 1919, and had an extraordinary life, a mixture of union and political organizing. Wherever there was a battle, Frank Spector was present. He was arrested under criminal syndicalism charges as a result of a strike in Imperial Valley in 1929, served a couple of years in San Quentin while the case was on appeal, and then was later released when the decision was overruled. Loretta Starvis Stack was a textile worker, started working when she was only fourteen, became active really as a result of her activities in the YWCA in Boston, and from that into the Young Communist League during the period of the American Youth Congress. She was a representative of the United Electrical [Radio and Machine] Workers [of America] in Los Angeles from 1943 to 1945, which was when I met her, and at the time of her arrest she was the state org secretary of the Communist party in San Francisco. Also there was one other interesting point. She had been married and was the mother of two children. Her husband was the son of Max Silver, the former secretary of the party who preceded me in Los Angeles. We were never sure whether or not Silver would appear as a government witness against us. That added a certain note of poignancy, even though she was by then divorced from her husband, the personal involvement on that. Henry Steinberg was probably one of the better-known community leaders of the Communist party. He ran for the board of education in 1951 and received almost 40,000 votes. He was very, very well known, not only in community circles of the East Side, which at that time was still predominantly Jewish but was starting to become Mexican. He had helped organize the CSO [Community Service Organization], the first Chicano-based organization to attempt to fight on the question of representation, and had been somewhat instrumental in the election of Ed Roybal, the first Mexican on the city council. And Oleta O'Connor Yates, who also had a Catholic background. She was probably the only one of us who was an old Californian, her great-grandparents having come here in the 1850s. She had a pretty typically "east of the mission" Catholic working-class upbringing. But she had also attended college, got her MA from the University of California at Berkeley. She also ran for office many times. She got 40,000 votes each time she ran for supervisor, and, as a matter of fact, while she was in jail she was running for supervisor even then. She was chairman of the Communist party in San Francisco and played probably the key role in our trial in that she became the only defendant who testified as to our beliefs on the theory, nature, and practice of the Communist party. Really quite an interesting woman.

GARDNER

Why was it that she was the only one who testified?

HEALEY

I'm going to come to that, because there was quite a big struggle, both with New York and locally, as to the policies and the action that took place.

GARDNER

Now that we've covered all of them, I guess you can launch into your historical summation of what went on.

HEALEY

Well, the first big battle we had when we were in jail was the right to bail. Judge William Mathis, before whom the case was being tried, first of all conducted a bail hearing. The government was opposing bail for us on the ground that four of the national defendants, of the first round of defendants, had skipped bail and left the country, not shown up for jail when their conviction was upheld by the Vinson decision, and that therefore we were bad bail risks. Of course, we argued that that was simply guilt by association, and that if one took statistical tables of the kind of people who did not show up for serving their sentences after conviction was upheld, the breakdown on how many bankers didn't show up, or any other category of defendants, that that would not prove anything regarding individual guilt or innocence or whether or not people would be good bail risks. We had to get lawyers for that first portion of the hearing, which brought into the case--the only one I particularly remember, interestingly enough, is Dan Marshall. Dan and Slim Connelly had become close friends both from their Catholic church activities and from the activities in the fight for free speech which Slim was participating in when he was the head of the Los Angeles CIO Council. Dan was the attorney for the Catholic diocese here at the time of the trial, and when he appeared representing Slim in his attempt to get bail, he was fired, which speaks in itself for the kind of temper of the country then, that the lawyer was held responsible for the defendant rather than the historic approach that the lawyer is duty bound to represent [everyone] and above all unpopular defendants. It was the other way around. Mathis put each one of us on the witness stand individually in order for him to conduct the questioning as to what our character was and whether or not we would be responsive to court orders and so forth. After the hearing, he ordered us held on $100,000 bail apiece, which was, of course, in effect no bail. The attorneys appealed that to the appellate court. They ordered--I don't remember the exact sequence any longer. All I know is that the cases went back and forth between the appellate court and then up to the Supreme Court. Each time the higher court would order that the bail be reduced, Mathis would find some way of circumventing the order. Ultimately--it had twice gone up to the Supreme Court and they had each time affirmed our right to a reasonable bail as provided for in the Constitution--my memory is that the appellate courts set the bail finally of $10,000 for some of the defendants and $5,000 for others. Those of us who were best known as Communist leaders were held on $10,000 bail, and the others $5,000. We were in jail, however, during that period for approximately five months. That five-month period had its own rather unique qualities, in that Mathis did order that we were to be brought across the street from the county jail to the federal building each day, each working day or weekday, brought into the marshal's holding cells, where we were to be allowed to participate in the preparation of our own defense. So each morning we would be taken across, the men all chained, taken up there and searched and then taken back at night to the county jail to go through the process of being searched again. What was unique about it was that there were no food facilities in the marshal's cells, so we were given permission to have our friends bring us food. Probably the most remarkable activity took place that has ever been known. About forty to fifty people undertook to provide two meals a day for us, and that was fifteen people. Twice a day the food was brought into us from the outside, the most remarkably wonderful meals, culinary accomplishments, so that people, the lawyers, for instance, whether they had to be there or not, would drop everything they were doing to be sure to be there when we were eating, because the food was of such extraordinary quality. All of us gained weight as a result of it. This voluntary action, for five months to do this twice a day, volunteers cooking and bringing in the meals, was really a testimonial to the unsung heroes and heroines of the radical movement. Those of us who had been on the state board [of the party] before the trial were elected to become known as what we called during the case the trial committee. That is, we conferred over the legal questions of what we were doing, what we were supposed to be doing while we were supposedly preparing our case, because what we were doing, in addition to the legal questions of the case--and far more importantly to us--was conducting an examination of the party, what the party's politics, line, and approaches were at the time. This was one year after a significant section of the party had gone underground as a result of the party's estimate of what the Vinson decision meant to the country. Both as a result of that decision and primarily because of the Korean War, the party had felt, as I think I told you before, that fascism was right around the corner for the country. Well, here we were in jail one year later, and we were debating that question. Was that true? Was the party's estimate accurate? And we came to the unanimous conclusion, those of us who were on that trial committee-- there were Bill Schneiderman, Oleta Yates, Al Richmond, Mickey Lima, and myself, five of us--we came to the conclusion that it was just nonsense, that the party had exaggerated what the problem would be. We used as our evidence the fact that if fascism was coming, if the classical way in which the Communist movement throughout the world has always defined the problem--that in response to an imperialist war, the home front must be secured, and therefore the reaction abroad would bring reaction at home in what is probably all too often a kind of mechanistic approach as far as Marxism is concerned, of seeing one thing immediately and directly having its effect on another thing, being a causal factor without any intermediary factors or with nothing mediating it-- we pointed to the fact that this was not what was taking place. While it was true throughout the country that the Communist party was being enormously harassed and persecuted and prosecuted, and while it was true that individual Communists working in jobs were being persecuted and harassed, the rest of what we defined as the people's movement was proceeding as usual. But first, even as far as the Communist party, the activities of the party in distributing the People's World were not being stopped; our bookstores were open and functioning; the leaflets were being given out. Secondly, this question of the rest of the people's movement. The Black liberation movement was increasing its pressures and was not being stopped in its activities, was not being curtailed from public expression. The labor movement, while there was the usual harassment, there was nothing extraordinary in it. In other words, it was not being ille-galized. One had the incongruous picture of a significant sector of the Communist leadership underground, not available for public activity, while the rest of the country and of the Left--the things, the institutions and sectors of the community we considered decisive--were functioning just as usual. So we wrote a letter, unanimously agreed upon by all of us, to the national leadership of the party, which was underground (we communicated with it only through writing), that we considered the estimate absolutely ridiculous and that in our opinion the underground sector of the party should cease and desist and the party should start functioning as it had before. Well, we ultimately got back a message telling us to mind our own business, that we were simply responsible for the legal defense, that we were the case we were in, and that they were the ones who would make the policy decisions, the operative decisions of the party. This was only the first of what really became a running series of debates and challenges, because even when we came out of jail our ostensible role was simply to be the public expressions of the party--"fig leaves," we used to call ourselves-- because the real decisions of the party were being made by the underground apparatus of the party.

GARDNER

Which was who?

HEALEY

Well, nationally there were--Mack Weiss was probably the most important person nationally, Gil Green, Henry Winston, Bob Thompson, Sid Stein, Fred Fine, Jim Jackson, Louise Todd, Celeste Strack, her husband, Leon Kaplan. . . .

GARDNER

Celeste Strack nationally?

HEALEY

Yes. She'd been taken for the national party from California. She'd been the educational director of California before then.

GARDNER

UCLA girl makes good.

HEALEY

Celeste, of course, was always--whatever she was, she was outstanding in it. And Nemmy Sparks. Locally it was Bill Taylor, Hursel Alexander, Lou Baron, Harry Daniels.

GARDNER

For what reason were they policy makers and not you, since you and the jailed defendants really seemed to represent a much more important arm of the local party?

HEALEY

Well, because the real important questions and decisions are those that must be made by the people who can be in direct contact not just with the party itself but with all the other sectors of the community which the party either did influence or hoped to influence. Theoretically they were in a better position to do that, not only because we were on trial, which meant that for some eight hours a day we were tied up with legal problems. Even when we came out, that was done, on the ground that we were all going to go to jail; there was never any question about that. That became one of the big fights, as a matter of fact, that I had with the underground leadership, most notably with the whole Los Angeles leadership. They thought we were stupid for thinking that we had any chance to ever win on appeal. We'd be back in jail, they were convinced, in two or three months. As a matter of fact, the big charge always present then in the party for anyone who felt there was such a possibility was that we were guilty of "bourgeois legalisms," which is the worst epithet that can be thrown--being taken in by a facade of bourgeois democracy. At any rate, the trial committee (in a sense an executive committee of the defendants is what it was) also started then to operate on the policy questions that would affect the trial. You should know that in almost all trials in which Communists are defendants historically and currently, the policy decisions are not made by the lawyers. They were made by the defendants themselves, the decisions that are operative as to how a trial is conducted. In the first Foley Square trial, the Smith Act trial, this had caused very sharp battles with the lawyers, and I think some pretty stupid decisions were made actually by the party. In our case this problem did not arise, for one thing, because we had a very high regard at least for the chief counsel, who was Ben Margolis; therefore we listened with respect to what his opinion would be on the legalities, and he in turn respected our political right to make the significant decisions as to the conduct of main questions at the trial.

GARDNER

Was Margolis a local lawyer?

HEALEY

Yes, he was a local lawyer. Unlike the other Smith Act cases, where they had terrible problems trying to get lawyers to represent them, we had no such problem. We were inundated, as a matter of fact, with requests from lawyers to become part of our team, including very non-left, non-civil-liberties oriented lawyers. Part of the difference was the political flavor of Los Angeles, which was not as bad as New York and Chicago and whatnot. Five lawyers were finally chosen. We had too many lawyers. As I said, Ben was chief counsel; Al Wirin from the American Civil Liberties Union came in as counsel and not as amicus curiae. Leo Branton, who had just finished his first case, an important case of a Black GI, Bucky Walker, who'd been charged with some crime I don't remember in San Bernardino; he'd come to our attention because of the intelligence and skill he showed in defending that case. You must understand, Communists always think of the question of the political composition of a law team; it has to represent different sectors of the community. So we had, first of all, the civil libertarians represented by Wirin; Branton representing the Black community; a man by the name of [Alex] Schulman, who was an attorney for the AF of L council (he also lost his labor practice as a result of defending us); and Norman Leonard from Northern California. In addition to the trial lawyers, we had two lawyers who were doing research work and all the other activity going on at that time for the case, Barney Dreyfus and Doris Brinn-Walker from Northern California. Well, the first thing we did, which was customary in any case, was the organizing of a defense committee to mobilize public support and to carry on public relations. The California Emergency Defense Committee was originally headed by Dorothy Forrest, who later became a Smith Act defendant in St. Louis herself. This committee really engaged in a number of important activities. The first was the circularizing of the truth concerning the indictment against us, a challenge to the indictment against us, to hundreds of trade unions, churches, and community organizations. Secondly, circularizing individual petitions, asking people to sign as amicus curiae, as individual signers challenging the indictment. Third, and probably one of the most successful things that was anywhere in the country, organizing the attendance at the trial so that we would never be faced with an empty courtroom. That in itself was quite an amazing thing, because even on those days when only the driest kind of legal argument was taking place, when the jury wasn't present, when we would be bored to tears sitting there by the tedium of these legal debates, there would still be lines stretching outside the courtroom, people waiting for their opportunity to come in. If you once left your seat, you couldn't come back again, so people would bring their lunch with them and they would eat standing immediately outside the door so they could come back in. The courtroom was never empty. This was most unusual; in other places in the country, including even the first Foley trial, that wasn't true. But also who was present as courtroom observers was important because in a sense the CEDC tried to get a people's jury there to see and observe and report back to their organizations. There were representatives of the Quakers, other ACLU chapters, trade unions, Black community and Chicano organizations and so forth, who came in and saw for themselves the character of the evidence against us. Of course, the evidence against us was the same as it was in every other Smith Act trial. The preoccupation with reading out of the books written by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Lenin, taking out every sentence that had any sound as if there was violence involved-- it was hysterically funny. These kind of trials could not have been conducted in any of the other so-called advanced countries, countries like France or England and so forth--even Italy wouldn't have tried to do that sort of thing--there would be no library, university library or merchant library, that wouldn't have these books in them. [Anywhere else] Marxism is now an accepted, even though not accepted in the sense of agreement, but a recognized school of philosophy and theory. But in our country, of course, that is not true, and we are probably the only major country that that's not true. Starting with the thirties, the Dies Committee and other committees have made Marxism in the university a forbidden thing.

GARDNER

That's still an issue sometimes. The fact sheet that we've been talking about has some of the citations of your [illegal] acts--do you want to read them or should I?

HEALEY

No, go right ahead.

GARDNER

Okay. Among the overt acts cited in the indictments are: "Act Number One: On or about January 31, 1941, William Schneiderman, a defendant herein, did attend and participate in a meeting held at the Danish Hall, 164 Eleventh Street, Oakland, California." Or, "Number Thirteen: On or about January 21, 1949, Henry Steinberg, a defendant herein, did attend and participate in a meeting." Or, "Act Number Fourteen: On or about May 20, 1949, Rose Chernin Kusnitz, a defendant herein, did attend and participate in a meeting held at 847 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California." So I think the idea of guilt simply because of attendance at meetings and that sort of conspiracy. . . .

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 1, 1972

GARDNER

At the end of the last tape, I was going on and on about the meetings that had been attended by some of your codefendants. I think the idea of conspiracy and the idea of what constitutes an overt act is one that would be interesting to discuss.

HEALEY

Of course, what most people don't realize is that when the charge of conspiracy is used, rather than the connotation of its being what is popularly accepted-- namely, that here you have some evil secret group meeting secretly to conspire to do all kinds of things--actually the conspiracy section of the law for anybody who's charged with conspiracy is done in a way that makes it easier for the government to get a conviction. In a conspiracy you do not ordinarily have to establish that any one member of that conspiracy did anything by themselves but rather only that unnamed (lots of times) or unknown coconspirators did things that brought you within the chain of evidence, that you had some connection with it. In our case, the fact that they produced stool pigeons who said that XYZ had somewhere made a speech which that stool pigeon or that informer had heard, and that that person was a member of the party, the same party that we were members of, meant per se that we were guilty of whatever that unnamed person had said. The actual charge of "conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government, etc." in plain language simply meant that the government said that at some future time we were going to so advocate--not that we so advocated at any time under the purview of the indictment against us, but that at some unnamed future time we might do so or would do so. Of course, to try to explain that to the public was almost impossible. Even our own supporters probably never understood the fine distinction between what the government was alleging in terms of this vague conspiracy charge and what was really the fact which the government would have to prove.

GARDNER

What was the government's case against you? What did they use?

HEALEY

The bulk of the government's case against us consisted of twenty-two or twenty-four informers (I've forgotten whether it was twenty-two or twenty-four) of whom the majority had been paid FBI informers from the beginning. Their testimony was always the funniest part because one of the usual characteristics of a paid informer is their total lack of understanding of the nature and character of the Communist party, most particularly of its theory, which bored them half to death. There wasn't one of them that didn't find this simply a lot of words which they didn't even try to understand. They would produce evidence against us, that riding up in an elevator somebody had made some remark which showed that they were going to advocate violence. There was one witness, Daisy Bates, who testified how she got in our good graces by making cakes and cookies and so forth for affairs where she'd always provide the bakery goods. As I say, the bulk of the testimony was really just simply fantastic.

GARDNER

Did you know most of these people? Were they familiar to you?

HEALEY

At that hearing, in that case, I didn't know many; I knew a couple of them. I knew a man by the name of Butch Saunders--David Saunders, nicknamed Butch--who testified against us. He was not one of the plants within the party, but he later testified against us. In our opinion, the reason they were able to coerce him into testifying was that he was one of the screened seamen, not allowed to go to sea by virtue of being a Communist--the Coast Guard regulations that were in effect then--and in order to get a release to be able to do that he agreed to be a witness. I had known him fairly well in the late thirties when I was in San Francisco. He'd been a very close friend, as a matter of fact, more than just knowing him very well--a family friend.

GARDNER

What were the regulations against seamen? Was this during wartime?

HEALEY

Well, it was part of the McCarthyism, and that is that anybody who went to sea, starting with the radio telegraphers but including able-bodied seamen and marine firemen, everyone had to have a clearance from the Coast Guard to be able to go to sea. You had to have papers that showed you were a citizen of good character, and you could not get those papers if you were a member of the Communist party. Then others: a man by the name of John Lautner was probably the key witness, the main witness against us-- not "key," because what he had to say was 99 percent untrue. Well, we believed he had always been a stool pigeon, but I think most of the Communists became convinced in the course of his testimony, both in New York and Los Angeles and other places, that he only became a witness after he'd been expelled from the party. He had been in charge of the security for the party in the New York district in 1948 and "49, and this was a period of the greatest internal suspicion against one another in the party, actually as a result of the trials that were starting in Hungary and in Rumania and Bulgaria, everywhere, coming out of the Cominform's break with [Marshal] Tito in 1948. I think he was unjustly expelled from the party on unjust charges. After a year of brooding about it, when the FBI came to see him, he did agree to become a witness against us. Well, the only good thing that differentiated him from the other witnesses was that he did know something about our theory as distinct from the professional FBI agents, who couldn't care less. But I remember the evidence against me that he brought was just absolutely fantastic. He claimed that when the party was discussing how to set up the underground apparatus, that he had seen me in New York, and he had given me a new kind of mimeograph machine that could be used for making illegal leaflets---you know, the party couldn't do it legally--that could be taken apart and put together so it looked either like knitting needles or a little radio or whatnot, and that I concealed it in the front of my dress to bring it back. Just the most fantastic sort of nonsense.

GARDNER

Good things for spy stories.

HEALEY

[laughter] Exactly. As an example of the kind of testimony against me, for instance, in addition to this testimony of Lautner's, there was the fact that after I had joined the Young Communist League when I was a child, I had attended a convention in Los Angeles, a section convention (that's a local body), where I'd said that I would just simply attend, but I wasn't going to speak because I was too tired; or in 1948 at a convention of the party I had said that the party should try to recruit workers who were going on strike in the basic industries because we were the party of the working class. The testimony against Henry Steinberg was that he had run for political office and spoken as to why he was running for office as a Communist. I remember there was one long thing of the government attorneys showing how we were part of this worldwide communist conspiracy because in 1946 the position of the party was that the United States should not interfere in the civil war in China on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, and this proved that the coincidence of position was not a coincidence, since we had the same position as the rest of the Communist parties in the world against U.S. interference there. But inasmuch as most of the questions of the trial are part of a public record, let me rather discuss the questions that were not part of the public record, that is, the questions of the great policy debates between us and New York primarily. The first way in which we differed from the first Foley Square case, the Dennis case, was in our vigorous cross-examination of the government witnesses. There was not a single witness who appeared whose testimony our attorneys did not challenge, and in many cases we forced from their witnesses the admission that what the party was doing was fighting on behalf of people's rights, whether it was the labor movement or the Black movement or whatever, and that there was nothing concealed or covert about it. Even in regard to the question of the force and violence charge against us, I remember one witness, Nate Honig, who was working for the Los Angeles Examiner at that time, who testified that as far as the party's theory was concerned, we had stated that there was a 70 percent chance that the revolution could take place peacefully in this country, that the 30 percent odds against it would come from the fact that the ruling class would not peacefully yield to the majority will and that, therefore, while we advocated peaceful change, we predicted that it could possibly not take place and that workers would have to then use working-class violence against the first violence, the prior violence of the ruling class. Well, New York, and most particularly William Z. Foster--but not only he, the underground leadership of the party (William Z. Foster was not underground, of course)--was violently critical of us for this. Over the Memorial Day weekend of 1952, Schneiderman and I as the two main party leaders, he of the state and I of Southern California, went back east to argue out some of the policy questions. There were two main ones, this question of whether or not to cross-examine witnesses, but also and most important, really, how many defendants would appear as witnesses in the case when the government's case was over. I remember Bill and I went out to Foster's home--he lived somewhere outside of New York City, I don't remember where--and he was terribly, terribly critical of us on this first question, the fact that we were cross-examining the government's witnesses, on the ground that by such cross-examination we gave recognition to the validity of their testimony. [He felt] that we should have simply ignored them, and refused to cross-examine them, and thereby given the impression that we considered their testimony of such inconsequential value and that they were people of such rotten character that we would not dignify it. But the main argument was on this question of the defendants' testifying, and this was also a big debate among ourselves. We knew that the government was coming to the conclusion of its case by that time. It was clear that the only evidence against us was of exactly the same kind as had been true in the other Smith Act case as it proceeded, primarily testimony from the books, the classics of Marxism, the quotations that appeared to be more violent being extracted, and secondly that the acts that we were alleged to have done either would not hold up under legal scrutiny or only demonstrated that we'd actually been carrying on legally protected, Constitutionally protected, activities. We therefore felt that instead of doing what the first Foley Square trial had done and what the second one did as well, where the bulk of the defendants took the stand (and in each case what happened to them was the thing we were worried about: they were then charged with contempt because the cross-examination did not go to the nature and character of our theory nor of our activity but rather to try to get the person on the stand to name other Communists as in fact being members of the party, a continuation of the old grand jury attempts to make us informers against our fellow comrades), there were those of us who felt that [if we did that] we would simply be needlessly inflicting more punishment on people that would serve no political or legal question. Particularly as far as the political atmosphere of the trial went, we felt that in California it was not necessary to have so many defendants because we had put on such a vigorous cross-examination and had also done such an important job in public relations that the atmosphere around our trial was totally different from that around the Medina courtroom or the trial in New York of Gene Dennis and the national leaders of the party. Therefore, whereas they could have felt correctly that they had the need of further defendants taking the stand to establish their innocence, in our case there was such a ho-hum attitude, anyway, in the press and elsewhere, about the evidence against us that we saw no reason to further prolong the trial. Well, both William Z. Foster and, as we later got the communications from them, the underground leadership were horrified by this attitude on our part. They charged all sorts of questions of cowardice and whatnot in not doing it, you know. But the defendants here were unanimous in their feeling that we should not extend it too long, and the question we were really concerned with was who could make the best presentation of our position. Oleta had volunteered to do it, and after a lot of discussion about it, all of us had agreed that she would be the most effective witness, both because of her background as well as her activities and her fluency in being able to describe and define our activity.

GARDNER

What is she like, parenthetically?

HEALEY

She's dead now. She was a very attractive woman of great intelligence. She suffered, however, from one problem that is often present in the party. I'm not exactly sure how to define it, except that I know it's a very widespread thing. It's an ironic thing, a paradox, that we who are the rebels against all established mores and conventions reestablish within the party a kind of operation of what is acceptable behavior on the part of Communists, so that many people, Oleta among them (but not by any means limited to her), would be far more concerned with what their fellow Communists thought of them than what was really necessary to be done either politically or organizationally as far as the needs of the party and the movement were concerned. So she had a kind of nascent bitterness and cynicism about her that I only got to know of when I was in jail with her. (You know, you are in very close contact with one another in jail. The women got to know one another better than they'd ever known one another before.) There were very sharp critical remarks she'd make privately in discussions about questions in the party that she would never make in a meeting. This produced a kind of ambivalence that was really very significant to me. Probably the reason it struck me so was that, as I said to you in earlier discussions, my life as a Communist was primarily outside of the inner life of the party; the things that constrained other Communists, that influenced them inside the party, I was really unaware of, I was oblivious to. I really wasn't aware of the force of this internal pressure of opinion on what you said or did. It has relevance to Oleta because, on the one hand, she did just a remarkable job on the stand in the presentation of our theory (our lawyer Margolis did an equally important job in guiding the course of the examination so that there was provided a maximum airing of our testimony)--and by the way, we printed her testimony as a separate supplement in the People's World as an expression of what the party did think and what the party did in real life about the injustices of capitalism. But on the other hand, when at a later point, after the Twentieth Congress, she was one of those who left the party, I saw her about a year after she left the party and said to her, "Well, Oleta, are you happier now?" And she said, "Oh, Dorothy, you don't know how happy I am, what a difference it makes, because now I can say anything that comes to my mind without having to stop to think about it." I looked at her in amazement and said, "Well, what's so unusual about that? I always have done that." She said, "Yes, you have, and look, you're never out of trouble in the party." That little anecdote always stayed with me as really in a sense summarizing part of the problems that we face of creating within the party that kind of atmosphere where the rebels against established society can also challenge the revealed and accepted wisdom of the current leadership at any one point, without which you really can't have an ongoing Marxism.

GARDNER

That's something we'll develop in a lot greater detail later, I think, because I think that's one of the salient points of any discussion of the American Communist party.

HEALEY

Well, Oleta went on the stand, and I've cited this remarkable testimony she gave. Then the cross-examination started. The prosecuting attorney against her, Norman Newcombe, a real ignorant man--he and Walter Binns, who was the main U.S. attorney for this area, were really totally ignorant of anybody's philosophy, much less Marxist philosophy. I remember the thing that so astounded Newcombe that he singled it out to argue before both the jury and the judge to show what kind of people, what horrible conspirators we were, was the fact that at one point one of the defendants had spoken in a party discussion of the need, no matter how old a Communist was, the need for continual study, that you never reached a point where you could stop studying. He said in amazement, "Imagine grown-up people feeling the need to continue to study history and economics and philosophy after they've already left school. They still feel the need to read these things." Then he started to do that, to jump on her with regard to this naming of people, and it became a most horrible scene in the courtroom. Here is this very slender, not too physically hale human being on the stand, week after week--I think it was three weeks that she was on the stand, most of that in cross-examination--the prosecution totally uninterested in her testimony in regard to the nature and character of the party but interested only in trying to force her to name other Communists as members of the party who had not already been named,. And her absolute refusal to do it even though she knew and we all knew what was in store for her as a result of it. And what we knew, of course, came to pass, because she would refuse to answer those questions on the ground that it had no relevance to her testimony. The judge would direct her to answer, and when she would continue her refusal he cited her for contempt of court. At the conclusion of her testimony--not even at the conclusion of her testimony, at the end of the first few days of cross-examination--the judge remanded her bail on the charge of her refusal to answer the questions and her contempt of court, and she was sent back to jail. It was really, as I say, quite an enormous spectacle, this woman who suffered from bursitis sleeping on the floor sometimes or on cots in the corridors because the jail was so overcrowded, being brought back into the courtroom to continue the testimony four or five, six hours a day, and then going back to jail at night. There was a great debate among us as to how far we could, should, and must go in terms of protesting this prosecution of Oleta, the question of whether we should ourselves commit acts that could lead us to a citation of contempt of court. We could not tolerate that we were out on bail while she was going back in every night, taken back to the cell. It was only on the basis of the lawyers' urging that they were going to be appealing this immediately to a higher court, that they would not wait for the rest of the trial before they would appeal, that we finally agreed we would not wage our own civil disobedience in the courtroom. Of course, when it was appealed to a higher court, the bail was reinstituted and later the charges against her were dropped by the judge, very comparable to the other contempt citations that have just recently been overruled in the Chicago Seven case.

GARDNER

Who was the judge?

HEALEY

William B. Mathis. I mentioned his name. He was always very smooth and urbane in the courtroom and very polite to all of us, and always vicious and vitriolic in all of his rulings. He didn't do any of the things that Medina did or that [Julius J.] Hoffman did in this last case of the Chicago Seven, but in his own way he was as vile and violent as they, except that he always maintained his cool and did it, as I say, with great suavity and urbanity. We had not gone into an extensive, prolonged jury challenge when the jury was first selected. At least, as my memory of it, the voir dire was not a very prolonged one. (I could be wrong by this time; I don't remember.) But at any rate, the case was given to the jury in the middle of the week; all the arguments were finished. The jury went out, I think, on a Wednesday afternoon. Thursday passed by, and the jury didn't come back in. Friday passed by, and the jury didn't come back in. We had to always be there on those days. Saturday and Sunday, and no jury--by this time we were really getting some increased hopes. My goodness, this was very unusual. But the strain was also enormous; we were really under great pressures while the jury was out. When the jury finally returned--I think it was a total of five days they were out--and brought in the verdict of guilty, we could see that some of the jurors were crying, their eyes were all red, and tears were running down the faces of others. I've often wondered what the debates must have been like inside. We never did find out. We were ordered by the judge not to have any contact with the jurors after the case; the lawyers were ordered not to. I've always regretted the fact that that was carried through.

GARDNER

I'm surprised no newspapermen followed through.

HEALEY

I'm surprised, too, because it was clear that there must have been great discord. It would be interesting to know on what issues they were disagreeing. We never did know. Each of us then stood up to give our speeches to the judge before sentencing, and on the conclusion of our speech all of us received the same sentence, five years in jail and $10,000 fine. Our bail was ordered eliminated, and we were remanded back into custody immediately. That started another round of legal fights, appeals, until finally the appellate court, again I think it was, ordered our release on bail, after the conviction, while we were awaiting trial. Oh, there was one other example of volunteer effort during our trial that needs comment on because it was unique, and it exemplified the kind of dedication that was present in the community, the left community. While we had raised considerable amounts of money to pay the lawyers during the case, we knew we could not possibly afford the trial transcripts that were necessary, both the daily transcript which the lawyers needed of the previous day's testimony as well as the transcripts for appeal. We therefore organized a volunteer service of stenographers and legal workers to transcribe each day's testimony and mimeograph it on stencils for the lawyers for the next day, and do it in such a way that it would be preserved as the court record for appeal to the appellate and supreme courts. This was simply a mammoth undertaking in which approximately twenty people participated, coming from their jobs after work to the lawyer's office, to the defense office we'd set up adjacent to the lawyers' office of Margolis, McTernan, and others working all night long in shifts to have that material ready, so that it was there. As I say, I don't think it's ever been noted and recognized for its really unique quality. Well, of course, upon conviction there were new problems that I was going to face, in this case as a mother. What would happen to my son?

GARDNER

Who had been taking care of him?

HEALEY

My mother and my stepfather had been taking care of him. His own father, Don, had remarried a very fine woman who was very good with Richard, Shevvy, and they in the meantime had a daughter of their own, Donna, who was seven years younger than Richard; they lived out in Willowbrook. There'd always been a very explicit understanding with Richard that if I went to jail along with Slim, who at that time was still my husband, that if and when we went to jail--I shouldn't say "if," because there was never really any question in our minds that we were going to go to jail (we had the hope but not great possibility) --that then his other set of parents would take care of him, and he'd move out to Willowbrook. Well, first of all, my mother and my stepfather were simply marvelous with the child; my mother most particularly had the greatest kind of dedication and devbtion. And Don and Shevvy also did all they could to express that he would not be bereft of parents, that if we went to jail his other parents would be there and it would be the same thing; he'd have one set of parents [in any case]. And I really believed that Richard was not being terribly bothered by this. On the surface it appeared that he understood, first of all, why we were going to jail, the social reasons for it, and secondly, that personally his life would still be secure and he'd be surrounded by love and the family. But two things happened that showed that that was not true. He started gaining weight and really became very, very--almost fat. I took him to the pediatrician about six months after we came out of jail. While Richard was in the patients' room, I went into the office of the doctor and asked him why he thought Richard was gaining weight. "Well," he said, "it's very simple. He's gaining weight because he's worried, he's insecure. He doesn't know what's going to be happening to his parents, to his mother." I laughed and said, "Oh, you don't understand. Richard understands that it's nothing so terrible. So I won't be there, but Don, his father, and Shewy will be there, and in the meantime, my mother is around, and we've lived adjacent to her since he was born, so there's no great shift in his care." He says, "Well, I still think it's bothering him." On the way home, driving away from the doctor's office, Richard said to me, "What were you and Tom"--this was Dr. Tom Perry--"What were you and Tom talking about, about why I'm gaining weight?"

GARDNER

How old was he then?

HEALEY

He was about eight. I said, "Oh, Richard, Tom doesn't understand you. He doesn't understand how much you understand about what's taking place. He thinks you're so worried about the fact that I'm going to jail that that's why you're eating and that's why you're gaining weight. He just doesn't understand it. You're not worried by that because you know you have your other parents who love you so." There was this silence for two or three seconds, and he said to me, "You know, Mom, there isn't a single night that I go to sleep that my last thought before I fall asleep is will my mother be there in the morning when I wake up." I thought, "Oh, my God." And then he continued, "I don't see why you have to do all these things. I don't see why you can't be like other mothers and just be home and take care of me. Why do you have to be the one that does things so that I won't have my mother around when I want her?" Well, I felt really as if a knife had gone through me, I don't think I've ever suffered so acutely in all my life as I did by that. I had thought because of all the superficial expressions of his conduct that there was no such feeling on his part, that he understood. I made some quick retort, about, well, I did it because I loved him, because I didn't want him to grow up in a world where injustice and cruelty were prevalent because then he'd be affected by that, too. We talked about it, but clearly he was influenced and did suffer enormously, and it left scars. But the other part of what happened to him was equally bad. I can't put any balance on it, I don't know, but, of course, there was great publicity in the newspapers all during this period. It was the period of great reaction in the country, and the effect on him in the community and in the school was greater. Again, it's something I only knew about later. He never discussed it when it was happening. I've always berated myself for the fact that I didn't find a way to get him to discuss it and tell me about it, that I was so unknowing of the fact that it happened. Little things such as--not so little to him-- a girl who he had a boy-girl crush on and who without any word or explanation to him must suddenly have refused to ever see him again, giving no reason for it. He didn't himself in the beginning connect what the reason was for it. Or the taunts and the jeers here in the neighborhood. The only exception I can remember to that kind of attitude was when I'd gone to his school--this was, I think, earlier, during the first arrests--and his schoolteacher, a Miss [Florence] Emerick, told me that the children in the classroom were so sensitive to "his problem" that on current-events days they wouldn't bring in clippings about Communists because they didn't want to make him feel self-conscious. But he obviously suffered from a great ambivalence, to say the least, during that period. I remember that right when we got out of jail the huge picket lines around the [Ethel and Julius] Rosenberg case were taking place. I took him down to one of the picket lines on the day that they were fighting in the Supreme Court for the stay of execution., There was a huge picket line, just huge, the largest I think I've ever seen in Los Angeles, thousands of people. The impact on Richard was really interesting and again indicated how I wasn't aware, as close as he and I were, how I wasn't aware of the pressures on him, because he was overjoyed over one point, the thousands of people there. He said to me, "My goodness, there's so many people on our side. I didn't realize that, that there's so many of us who think the same way." The very size of the picket line impressed him with the fact that he didn't stand alone, that he wasn't isolated, that he wasn't unique; there were others, including children, who felt as his family felt and as he felt.

GARDNER

Part of that I guess also had to do with the neighborhood and so forth. If he'd been growing up in, say, Hollywood, there would have been more kids at school and so forth whose parents were involved.

HEALEY

Not very many more, really. As a matter of fact, from what I understand, the children of the Hollywood Ten really suffered, in some cases more sharply than he did. Now, I'm not saying that it was a totally negative experience, because he obviously--and I can say "obviously" only by virtue of the man he's become--acquired great inner strength. He had to fight through the question of who he was and what he thought and what he believed in for himself, at a much earlier age than most children have to, and he became a relatively serene human being, a mature human being, because this internal problem was answered for him. He knew really what he felt because he had gone through his guts and his mind both. He'd had to work it out. I remember being very proud of him when he was in high school because on this question not only would he speak up in school, in classes, but I remember once, in 1959, when I first was on television, invited on the Tom Duggan program, a very reactionary commentator, and Richard was off at a party with his friends, he insisted that the party stop so they could watch his mother debate. He didn't try to hide it or conceal it but was actually having a certain pride in it. I say "a certain pride" within the framework, nevertheless, of the fact of a resentment that his mother was different, and his mother could be taken away from him, and his mother suffered problems that affected him more directly than other children would have to go through. Well, there was one thing connected with the Smith Act and the great debate with New York which had relevance, and that was how we were going to appeal the case, what were going to be the issues on appeal that we would emphasize. Our case initiated and made primary the question of the relevancy of the evidence to individual belief, whether the evidence went to the question of the individual defendant's intent and knowledge. And it was precisely on that point later that the Supreme Court in a really historic decision overruled the convictions for five people; they ordered them released immediately, and for the rest of us they ordered new trials on the ground that the evidence had not been sufficient for conviction. New York had argued against doing this, and they didn't do it on the second Smith Act case appeals on the ground that it was not political enough, that the political questions of the right of speech and so forth under the First Amendment had to be argued, and not the narrow legal question of sufficiency of evidence. But, as I say, it was precisely on that question that we won what is known as the Yates Case (we deliberately selected Oleta's name to be the defendant that led the case, so that it became known as the Yates case), and that later led really to all of the subsequent Smith Act" case reversals, and finally the dropping of the Smith Act as a weapon against the Communist party.

GARDNER

In that sense, it's an important judicial precedent. Can you explain what the exact precedent was?

HEALEY

Well, what the precedent was was that for the first time the evidence against us could no longer be this general conspiratorial evidence that some unnamed person had said XYZ, which was inflammatory, but rather that the weight of evidence against us had to be that we had ourselves knowingly participated in illegal or prohibited activities, activities not covered by the First Amendment. Of course, there never is such evidence against any of us, because we are not anarchists; we do not, for instance, advocate individual violence. It's against Marxism to advocate such things. Of course, partly we won not only because of this question. It should also be noted the atmosphere in the country was starting to change. This was no longer the Vinson court; it was now the [Earl] Warren court.

GARDNER

I was just going to mention that.

HEALEY

That's right. And Justice Warren and those who had been in the minority under the Vinson court--[Hugo L.] Black and [William O.] Douglas and [William J.] Brennan [Jr.] and others--now became the majority in demanding what really were the historic Constitutional provisions in regard to conduct and political membership.

GARDNER

Then the final Supreme Court decision came down in 1956?

HEALEY

In 1957.

GARDNER

So you were held in abeyance really for five years.

HEALEY

Five years, that's right.

GARDNER

Not knowing whether or not you would have to go to jail at any moment.

HEALEY

And never knowing--every Monday we would wait for the Supreme Court decision, scattered everywhere in California. We'd wait--what would the Supreme Court do? And each Monday--you lived really from Monday to Monday. You couldn't make your plans beyond that because you never knew how long you'd be around. But that didn't mean that other political activities weren't going on by then, because immediately on release we--well, while we were still not the "operative" leadership, we were starting to function; and in spite of ourselves and in spite of the so-called division of responsibility, we were starting to carry out our regular political habits.

GARDNER

The trials ended in 1952.

HEALEY

In 1952--August 1.

GARDNER

They went on and on all around the country but August 1, 1952, was the end for you. You emerged from there into another sort of interesting political situation, in that there, in the midst of McCarthyism, Elsenhower was about to be elected, and the Communists had to function, I imagine, in a very, very difficult, very, very unfriendly atmosphere.

HEALEY

Yes, that was the dominant atmosphere of the country. But also by this time there was gradually, very slowly, accumulating a feeling in the rest of the party, some of it exactly like ours. While we were at trial, what I've described of the trial committee, of our estimate that the party's line was wrong, there was a feeling growing in the party that our line was what we call "Left-sectarian," that we were taking positions that did not reflect the realities of the United States, and without any conscious declaration of inner-party debate or differences, they were starting to take place. But it took place very unevenly. For instance, in 1952 the Progressive party still ran candidates against the Republican or Democratic candidates. Charlotta Bass and Vincent Hallinan were the candidates in 1952, Hallinan president and Charlotta Bass vice-president. Horace Alexander, a Black worker, was running for secretary of state here in California. Rube Borough was running for U.S. senator. What was becoming increasingly clear was that the Progressive party was becoming a very narrow voice in the country, that it was primarily expressive of the Communist party. One of the expressions of that was around the struggle against white chauvinism, against racism. In 1950 the [Communist] party started to initiate and carry through a very narrow position on that, a position that construed practically any act as an act of racism. For instance, we expelled people because they used the word "boy" in referring to lack males, or because they served coffee in a chipped coffee cup to Black guests. Just the most incredible internalized struggle. This started to carry over to the Progressive party, where the same kind of demands of a very unreal character were being superimposed. Here in L.A., the Communist party, just in our county alone, we expelled 200 people between 1950 and 1952 on charges of white chauvinism, that they had not conducted themselves in an exemplary Communist fashion against the influences of white chauvinism. As I say, they started to dominate the Progressive party as well. But equally if not more important was the fact that the Progressive party could not act as any balance of power in an election; its votes would not be necessary to be sought for by any dominant party. It was more and more becoming a narrow little sector of the community, with no real significant public support. Big fights were taking place within the Progressive party because of the Korean War. Already at that point, I think, by 1952, Henry Wallace was leaving the Progressive party with an attack on it because it opposed the Korean War. But, I mean on this, in my opinion, if it hadn't taken the position against it the Progressive party would have failed in its reason for being, why it had been born. But where the sectarianism was shown is that a great fight took place at one of the conventions of the Progressive party, one of its last conventions, a fight which reflected itself in the inner-party fights in 1950. I know it was still '50, and not later, because Gene Dennis and Fred Fine and some of those whom we called the Young Turks of the party were fighting against the sectarian positions of the party. It came to a head around the question of a resolution that didn't place sole responsibility for the cold war on the United States but had some critical language of the Soviet Union as well, and this led to the big fight. In past years, we would never have agreed to putting in something critical of the Soviet Union, and now the leadership was saying we should include the language--nobody really thought there was anything critical, don't misunderstand me--but obviously you couldn't have a broad political movement that frowned only upon the United States and didn't take into account the other things that were happening in the world of a critical character. In 1953 or '54, the underground sector of the party issued a new draft program for the Communist party which started very imperceptibly and in very subtle language to challenge some of the dominant concepts of the past. But they were so subtle that most of us didn't recognize that there was a challenge. Evidently, I found out later, there was a big battle nationally between those comrades and people such as Betty Gannett and Pettis Perry and William Z. Foster, who represented the public leadership of the party, on what should be the party's line. At any rate, at one point the underground leadership, as far as the Progressive party, really pulled off a coup that was not good, even though it might have been correct objectively, in that they had printed a public statement of the Communist party which in effect called for the dissolution of the Progressive party, that it had long since outlived its usefulness, this without any discussion with the Progressive party or with anybody else throughout the country. And it came like a bolt out of the blue. Nobody expected it. And it caused enormous problems with our own closest allies.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO [part I] DECEMBER 1 and DECEMBER 15, 1972

GARDNER

One of the criticisms that I've read about the attitude of the Communist party toward the Progressive party has been that there was seemingly an international party line followed in assuming support for the Progressive party in 1947-48 and then in dropping the party in 1952, more or less along the lines of what the foreign policy attitudes with the Soviet Union were at that time.

HEALEY

Well, that's one of the areas where I think the charges are false and/or exaggerated. I would say that it's true in a lot of things, but it is not true in that. It's a commonly repeated story that I keep seeing written about in the various histories of the period, except by those who know anything about it; they never say it. But those who don't know anything about it keep saying that we originally started participating with others in the Progressive party because of a resolution passed by the new Cominform in Belgrade in September of 1947. The famous code words were supposed to be that "Communists must never overestimate the strength of the ruling class nor underestimate the strength of the working class." That sentence was supposed to be the indication to us that we should go ahead with the Progressive party. But what proves that that's just sheer nonsense is the fact that here in California, in August of 1947, one month before the Cominform, the founding conference of the Progressive party--of the Independent Progressive Party, which was the California expression of it--took place, led by Hugh Bryson, the then-leader of the Marine Cooks and Stewards union. It was not that we were anticipating the Cominform; nobody really had any concern with the application of any international feeling on this question. It was primarily our estimate of what had to be done and not done. Actually the only thing that had ever been debated within the party in regard to a Progressive party was the question of the extent of trade-union, working-class support that would be mobilized for it. It was a classic truism of ours that no new third party could take place without being supported and led by the working class, and if one could not see significant working-class support, then one was doing what we call a deviation. Secondly, in regard to our ultimate participation in the initiation, really more than the dissolution, of the Progressive party, that did not correspond to any particular change in our estimates of international relations; it was more accurately, as I've described already, the response of the underground leadership of the party to what they felt was a real pressure of our sectarianism, which was helping, in addition to what the ruling class was doing to us, [to further our] persecution and prosecution. We were isolating ourselves by all of what became "Left Centers," organizations in which we talked to ourselves and answered ourselves without influencing the mainstream of the body politic. Here in L.A. we had not done what the rest of the party had done. It's true that throughout the country the rest of the party, in what is almost a traditional Communist problem of going overboard on what is valid and going beyond the extent of its validity, had almost ceased activity in any other aspect of political life. Everything was placed within the Progressive party. We had not done that. We had maintained a very significant relationship with the Democratic party here in Southern California and the County Central Committee. I think I mentioned to you the fact that there was a caucus in the County Central Committee in 1949 that was based on the opposition to the North Atlantic pact. It was led, by the way, by a person who was very close to us (I never had any idea what happened to him), Kay Kalleher, a young man who was very, very left and very militant, very articulate. He helped to organize and lead that. But there'd always been a close working relationship between the people in the Progressive party and these people. But the same problem was becoming true in the labor movement, and a sharper problem even. There was great debate in the party as to the course of the eleven unions that by that time had been expelled from the CIO on the charge that either they were Communist-influenced and/or -dominated, or that their position coincided with the position of the world Communist movement. I think we have already noted that many of those who participated in that drive have since regretted it and said their mea culpa, most notably here in Los Angeles I think we talked about Paul Jacobs. But there was no question that the debate of the party as to what should be done was a very serious one, a result both of the Taft-Hartley affidavits, in which people, if they were to be in union leadership, had to say that they were not members of the party, as well as the increased pressures of McCarthyism within and outside of the unions. There were, for instance, great jurisdictional raids taking place within the CIO. The best example I can think of was in the UE, which was the largest union that the Left, the party-Left influenced, where a new union had been set up by the CIO, the IUE [International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers], led by [James] Carey, who had been one of the former leaders and had split on this issue of the role of the party and the Left. The labor movement was just being consumed by these jurisdictional battles. The question was whether the left-led unions should set up their own international confederation in which they'd all be of assistance to one another, or whether the component parts should try to affiliate with the existing CIO or AF of L components. And again, many times with the best of intentions--of trying, first of all, to end the isolation of the Left within the labor movement; secondly, to try to stop the jurisdictional battles; third, to try to revitalize the militant struggles within the existing unions--mistakes were made where, without sufficient consultation or thinking of long-range perspectives, the party in certain areas would influence local unions to leave their international union, say, the UE, and affiliate with the Farm Equipment [Workers Union] or UAW or some other international union, in some cases therefore just pulling the rug out from the established union. History doesn't judge you by your intent; it judges you by the objective results of what you do. And therefore there was great bitterness over that question. Over the political field there was great bitterness that was expressed around Marcantonio's break with us when he was running for something in New York. The Republican and Democratic and Liberal parties had really ganged up against him when he was running for Congress. He'd been reelected time after time in spite of the oppositions against him, but mainly he'd been elected because they all ran separate candidates. In 1952, I think it was, they united and ran only one candidate against him and finally defeated him. He then wanted to run for office in the Progressive party, I think it was for mayor of New York. The Communist party was very critical of this and did not, he felt, give its support. Actually, it sabotaged or opposed the campaign, and it marked a very bitter struggle in which not only did he break, but many people who'd always been associated either directly in the party or around the party's influence broke with the party over it. It caused enormous bitterness, a lot of which could have been avoided if there had simply been candor in relationships, a discussion of what the problems were, and then our recognition that we could not superimpose our position on other people.

GARDNER

What were you--as you emerged from the trial, you were Southern California party chairman?

HEALEY

No, I was county chairman; we were still part of the one state. There were also very bitter struggles going on within the state party. I think one of these struggles, while it goes back to 1950, is again illustrative of the coincidence of interest, the conjuncture between the objective problems and the subjective questions of the functioning of the party and our definition of party democracy. I think I mentioned that there had been great challenge in regard to Helen Gahagan Douglas of the United States Senatorial campaign in 1950. But I don't know whether I mentioned the fact that we in L.A. were violently opposed to the state position. Did I mention that already?

GARDNER

Yes.

HEALEY

And the fact that our own membership didn't know that we disagreed?

GARDNER

I didn't understand that.

HEALEY

Well, under the principles of democratic centralism, if you're under a leading body, you must adopt the position of that leading body even though you disagree. So when I'd come back to Los Angeles, I could not tell the county committee in Los Angeles that the county board disapproved of the state position of opposing Helen Gahagan Douglas as being no different from Richard Nixon and felt there should not be a Progressive party candidate against her. Again, the failure to--the party membership couldn't even debate the questions with full knowledge of the alternatives. They did not know of the differences in the leadership. Again, it's indicative of the problems which would continue to make difficult the question of a knowledgeable membership capable of making decisions with full alternatives before them. But Eisenhower, by this time, was elected with his announced purpose that he would end the war in Korea, and within a few months that, of course, took place, such as the ending was. For the first time I think a lot of people in the general liberal movement started to raise their heads a little bit. One of the stories that really needs separate development is the really shameful role of the liberals and the Socialists in this period. For instance, you have in your files the statement that Norman Thomas made about the Smith Act, in which he opposed the Smith Act, and that is well known. But what isn't so well known is that he accompanied that opposition to the Smith Act with the recognition-and I'm quoting from his column in the Los Angeles Mirror-News of October 17, 1955--and I emphasize the 1955 part because that's how long this atmosphere was continuing . . .

GARDNER

I was going to say. As late as '55.

HEALEY

... as late as '55--in which Norman Thomas says, and I quote, "Why, for instance, am I opposed to the Smith Act as employed against Communists and yet admit that Communists have no right to teach in our public schools? Because I believe that teachers occupy a sensitive position in training children for democracy. Loyalty to communism is a surrender of the teacher's conscience." End quote. Now, mind you, here is this foremost spokesman, supposedly not just of liberalism but of socialist thinking in the United States, saying publicly one of the chief arguments of the ultra-Right, admitting to it and agreeing with it, that the individual Communist should not have the right to teach because supposedly party discipline would prevent that person from being able to teach a subject freely. For instance, these are precisely the charges that were used against Angela Davis, that as a member of the party she couldn't teach freely. This is the whole basis of Sidney Hooks's whole antics of betrayal of civil liberties, precisely on this question. Of course, amusingly, nobody ever says that a Catholic has no right to teach because a Catholic believes in certain doctrines that are not part of the accepted doctrines of others. But the more important thing is the capitulation, the craven capitulation oh these important questions, of not just liberals like Arthur Schlesinger [Jr.] and others, but of the Norman Thomases. I emphasize it because there are so many attacks on the party, sometimes correct but usually ill advised and stupid, based on precisely this kind of approach, but no recognition of the fact that we stayed and fought and did not give in on any of these questions, while the Norman Thomases were providing the ideological rationale and defense for the attack on the Bill of Rights. In 1955 that was an accepted position from a foremost leader of the Socialist party. Well, if that was the position of a Norman Thomas, you can imagine what it was like in the rest of the country, in the schools, on the campuses. When people talk about the generation of the fifties as the Lost Generation, the Quiet Generation, it's no wonder-- although I don't think that was ever an accurate description, and I'll tell you why in a moment--but it's no wonder why you would have this kind of a lack of clarity as to where to proceed when you have the Norman Thomases coming forth with this kind of position. Well, what was the mood on the campus? It is untrue to say that there was no struggle taking place, that the generation was simply apathetic and cowed, that it was a generation that was totally internalized around social questions, that looked only for private ways of lifestyle. Now, I'm not saying that there was anything commensurate with the sixties in the fifties; that isn't true. But the sixties grew out of the fifties. Those people who marvel at the fact of what happened in 1960, the fight against the Un-American Committee and the sit-downs in the South, don't seem to realize that they didn't come out fully clothed like some kind of Minerva out of Jove's brow, but came out of what preceded them in the fifties. There was, for instance, the struggle that started on the campus called the Green Feather Movement against McCarthy--it started in McCarthy's own state--in which campus students wore a little green feather either on their hats or on their lapels or whatever it would be to indicate that they were the Robin Hoods of the 1950s, challenging the robbers of their thinking, of their thought, of their right to free association. There were these struggles on civil rights cases that were taking place in the fifties. That included the campus struggles. But what is true--why that vulgarization, the attack on the youth of the fifties, has had any validity--was that almost all the struggles were atomized campus by campus. There was not a nationwide significant struggle that was taking place.

GARDNER

Well, part of the change came, too--didn't it?-- at the time of the Warren court. In a sense, for example, what happened in the South happened a lot because of Brown vs The Topeka Board of_Education.

HEALEY

That's right, this was 1954.

GARDNER

Was there anything comparable out here? You mentioned the Green Feather Movement. But other than little dribs and drabs, I don't recall very much happening out here.

HEALEY

Well, for instance, the Labor Youth League was still very alive at that point; it lived until after the Twentieth Congress, which marked its demise. They were active both on campuses and in the factories. They were growing. Here in L.A., for instance, it was larger than any succeeding organized revolutionary youth movement has been, even today. In the sixties there was nothing in a radical movement that equaled their strength'. There were approximately 300 young people in the Labor Youth League in the early 1950s, which would indicate some measure of the resistance. There were big movements, sometimes initiated and led solely by us in the party, around the fight for employment and jobs--picket lines in front of the Bank of America, in front of Sears Roebuck, in front of markets--that were taking place, the movements in support of the Birmingham, Alabama, bus movement where Blacks were not allowed to sit anywhere they wanted on the bus but refused to sit any longer in the back. That's also the time when the CDC, the California Democratic Council, was started; I think it was 1954, it had its first convention. We helped participate in initiating that with its, for its time, advanced position, and that included much of the Young Democrats movement as well. In other words, the resistance had never stopped. And the idea that it had is untrue. In the Un-American Activities Committee, for instance, it's true that when they went to some of the industrialized cities like Detroit or places in the South and would hold the hearings, they would absolutely cause the greatest kind of social tragedies. Newspapers would devote themselves to headline descriptions of what the HUAC was saying, not what the unfriendly witnesses would say. The idea of taking the Fifth, you know, became just synonymous with being a traitor. But here in California, for instance, when those hearings took place, what was remarkable is that while the same positions were taken of fighting and refusing to answer the questions, an offensive movement was launched to support the people who'd been subpoenaed, in every profession, in every field, and in every union; so that the struggle, while defensive to start with, always had the elements of the offensive, of taking away the sole dominance of HUAC and all that that means, its dominating the body politic and becoming the only expression of politics. And CDC, as I say, was a reflection of the fact that as early as 1954, already the fight back was starting. The left-liberal movement was not totally in disarray.

GARDNER

To catch up on your personal life here, aside from waiting around on Monday mornings to hear of the Supreme Court decision, what were you up to at that point?

HEALEY

I was doing a great deal of speaking, mainly to left organizations, to maintain or pick up the morale and elan of the Left itself. Meanwhile, we were engaged in examining part by part the role of what was going on in the mass movement and in the party itself. We would go to very, very secret meetings with the underground leadership. We would be taken by car to one place, and then we would switch to another car and to still a third car and so forth--always, of course, with the idea that we were throwing off any FBI tails on us. It's more probable that the FBI was aware of where the underground leaders were and was tailing them. At any rate, we would hold these meetings in private homes. They would go on day and night with very sharp argument as to how to estimate reality. That would take an awful lot of time. As a matter of fact, I think one of the things that always exasperated me about myself was that here was a period where technically speaking I was not supposed to be deeply involved because of my not being the real operative leadership, and yet my own feeling of responsibility and concern and interest kept driving me on to greater participation, so that that period which could have been leisurely never really was. I was as much involved as in any subsequent time.

GARDNER

And you remained county chairman for this whole time.

HEALEY

Yes. I was county chairman. There were great challenges to that, as I've already indicated, in part because I was a woman--women were org secretaries but not chairmen--but also in part because I was already becoming very critical on specific aspects of the party line. I did not myself construe it so, the fact that it was a general line that I was criticizing; it just seemed to me that on specific questions I felt the party was wrong, nationally or statewide, and was arguing. It wasn't until very much later that I started recognizing that it was a general policy I was objecting to and not just isolated examples of one.

GARDNER

What were some of them? Give examples.

HEALEY

Well, I would say that one was the question of the estimate of fascism and war, that it was right around that corner. I felt we were not seeing the new [conditions] which would make it more difficult at least for the ruling class to launch a world war, or that fascism was not taking place in the United States in spite of our estimate of it. I had great annoyance with the way what we called the Left Centers were functioning--(Left Centers were organizations like the Committee for the Foreign-Born, the Negro Labor Council, the Jewish Cultural Clubs, and so forth)--not because I didn't think they were right (as a matter of fact, even when other parts of the country dissolved them, at later periods in later years, we maintained them), but what I objected to in the fifties was that all our attention went into them, that we didn't find mass alternatives which these Left Centers would feed into, and that they therefore became things for themselves in which we talked to ourselves. But by this time also both my coworker Benny and I were thinking that something was happening in the Soviet Union that nobody was telling the truth about. We were reading the Cominform newspaper--which had the long title For a Lasting Peace for a People's Democracy. Dreadful, absolutely dreadful newspaper, the most cliche-ridden one in the world--and we were finding little things that I think marked the first time that either of us had ever started to question the validity of what was being said in the Soviet Union. First was around the question of all the trials, the Leningrad doctors' trial, and the trials that were then taking place in Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria and so forth, the [Rudolph] Slansky conviction [in Czechoslovakia] and the [Laszlo] Rajk conviction in Hungary, the [Traichko] Rostov conviction in Bulgaria. We were very disturbed by the way in which the charge of Zionism was being utilized, its whole, almost implicit, anti-Zionism. Ideologically we had always fought against the concept of Zionism, which denied the class questions of Jews among Jews, or which argued that only in a Jewish state could Jews be free, because we believed that under socialism the Jews could find their only real freedom. But we never confused our theoretical disagreement with Zionism with either the failure to differentiate among Zionist trends--because there were Socialist-Zionist trends that we could find united fronts with--or the fact that Zionism could not be made synonymous with either Judaism or being a Jew. That was one factor that started to disturb us. Thirdly, we felt there was a real Russian chauvinism, a great Russian chauvinism being expressed in the paper by this special singling out of the tributes paid to the Russian people as distinguished from the rest of the Soviet peoples, of their exemplary qualities, et cetera. But then came Stalin's death, and we felt that within the paper For a Lasting Peace there was also starting to be a certain fight against what was called "the cult of the individual," without ever really saying that term for being critical of Stalin, and yet we felt that between the lines there was a reconsideration going on. But nobody in the party ever talked about those things, either in our paper or within the party itself. Benny and I simply discussed them between ourselves as something significant, although we didn't know what was significant about them. But I would say that on our level of party leadership throughout the country--that is, the people who were directly responsible on the county or section level for organization--that there was beginning a great criticism that the party's line was left and sectarian. In 1955, Fred Fine, representing the national leadership that was coming back out of prison, and Gene Dennis, who'd just been released on parole, came traveling around the country interviewing Communist leaders as to what we thought of the party's position on questions. This is the first time that that ever happened in the party; it was unprecedented. Already by the end of '55, in December, the first national meeting in five years took place. I don't know that it was called a "National Committee meeting" or some other name to disguise its actual role, because we still didn't know whether legally we could hold such meetings.

GARDNER

Where was it?

HEALEY

In New York. It was the first gathering of leaders throughout the party.

GARDNER

Did you go?

HEALEY

And I went to it. I would say its importance was that it was already starting to grapple with precisely this question of the great dissatisfaction in the party over what was taking place. It was greater in other places because the underground of the party had gone much deeper than it had in Los Angeles. That was one factor. More of the party, in other words, had gone underground. We had only seven or eight people here. But in New York and Chicago and Detroit and places like that, it would involve a huge number of people who lived the most miserable lives for five years. Just terrible.

GARDNER

What were some of the major issues of discussion?

HEALEY

Well, a major question was the question of our policy in the labor movement, that we were too much on a go-it-ourselves, go-it-alone policy, that we had to fight for unity within the labor movement, that we had to find the way of challenging the class collaborationist positions of the official labor movement from within and not from outside. On the question of Black liberation, great struggles were taking place around the question of the Brown decision, the Warren decision of 1954, that allowed for great progress to take place in the sense of mass organizations, mass protest, a mass offensive against discrimination. But some of our positions of attacking the NAACP and everybody else as betrayers and sellouts were not conducive to trying to find ways to struggle within those established organizations of the people. I will have to refresh my memory on some of the others because it was a significant meeting. Gene Dennis was not at that meeting; he was still on parole and never allowed to attend. But shortly thereafter, in January 1956, he and Johnny Gates spoke at a meeting in which for the first time Communist leaders started to talk about the possibility that the party's line had not always been correct. This caused a great stir in the party, at least among those who knew that they were saying it.

1.17. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO [part II] DECEMBER 15, 1972

HEALEY

Probably the most significant meeting that the Communist party held in twenty years was that which took place in New York starting April 28 [1956]. It was a formal meeting of the National Committee with invited guests, the guests being primarily those who were officers of the party but were not on the National Committee, which made it what the Communists would term "plenum," meaning an enlarged meeting. There were also some trade unionists and others who were not on the National Committee. The meeting opened with a report by Eugene Dennis, the general secretary of the party, a report that was later published in a pamphlet under the title "The Communists Take a New Look." What it was was an overall estimate of the work and the line of the party from 1945 on, an estimate that resulted in Gene characterizing the overall weaknesses of the party as having been, to use party language, of a "left-sectarian" character, meaning that generally, with regard to the most important aspects of international and national life, the party's estimates resulted in activities that tended to further isolate Communists within the mass organizations, within the trade unions, and in the people's movement generally. The report was unprecedented in the party because the usual formulation that was used in examining the policies of the party-- and this is an international characteristic, not unique to the American Communist party--is to say that by and large the line of the party was correct but that it got distorted in the process of being carried out by the lower bodies of the party; that, along with the approach which says that when the great mistakes are uncovered, usually there is an individual who is singled out as being the person responsible for that, and that person is then sharply characterized, removed from office, and many times expelled. But the party itself usually is always right; it's only the individual leader who is wrong. That's part of the development within the last forty years of the myth of infallibility of the party as the party. Individuals can be wrong, but not the party. So that Gene Dennis's report was unprecedented. To say that significant estimates, and therefore the decisions that came from those estimates, had been faulty, had not been accurate, that it was not a question of individuals who had not adequately understood all the phenomena that was necessary or had distorted it in the process down the line, but to say that the estimate to begin with was wrong was an absolutely unknown thing before that time. He singled out as the main error that had taken place following the end of World War II the overestimation of the war danger. Here was a very important question, because what he was saying is not that there was not a war danger, but that the way we phrased it made the question of inevitability of war, most particularly war against the Soviet Union, an almost inevitable thing that was bound to take place, and that flowing from the estimate we singled out foreign policy questions, within the labor movement, for instance, as the decisive thing that we fought on. In the CIO, for instance, the fight around the Truman Doctrine and then the Marshall Plan became really the mobilizing cry; as I say, primarily within the CIO where most of our strength was centered, although in individual AF of L international and most particularly local unions, the same thing was true. Of course, it was primarily because of this situation, the foreign policy questions (although not alone) that we participated in the launching of the Progressive party and the Henry Wallace campaign. I say "not alone" because a corollary factor to that was the fact that starting with 1946, when the first wave of postwar strikes took place, the Truman administration had acted in a very antilabor, reactionary way, in both the railroad strike and the mineworkers' strike. The administration had in one place, during the coalminers' strike, levied enormous fines through the courts for violating contracts. During the railroad strike it had threatened to take over [the trains] and run them with scabs. So that there was a domestic reaction. I don't want to say it was only foreign policy that we saw as impelling movement toward a third party; but it was primarily a foreign policy question. Now, what Gene Dennis was trying to stress was not that we should not have opposed the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine as representing aggressive actions of U.S. imperialism, but the way we opposed them in making them a do-or-die fight and then, as I say, making that the primary question of the Progressive party--and it was the fight around the Progressive party that was utilized by the national CIO to expel the left-led unions and to remove the charter of the Los Angeles and New York CIO councils--it was the way in which we fought in making this the main question that Gene was critical of. Along with that was the fact that we had a kind of an adage, a Marxist adage, which went that if and when there was a threat of war, the immediate domestic counterpart would be fascism: in other words, that imperialism could not engage in any imperialist war without securing the home front, which meant silencing and illegalizing all expressions of dissent from the imperialist war policy. We linked that up with the first Smith Act conviction, the Vinson decision on the Eugene Dennis et al case concerning the national leaders of the party, to say that fascism was around the corner. Gene [claimed] that when we said that "the decision marked five minutes to midnight," meaning that fascism was almost there, and then proceeded to have a large sector of the party go underground in order to protect it, that this came from this overestimation of the immediacy of war. Again, I want to emphasize that he didn't say that there wasn't a war danger--nobody argued that that was not always present--but that in terms of the immediacy of it, the uninterrupted evolution toward it, this is what he said we miscalculated.

GARDNER

At the same time, didn't it really seem like "five minutes to midnight" when everybody started getting hustled off into jail? Going underground wasn't simply a result of the Communist party policies. It was a fact that the Communist leaders were being arrested, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Well, the party leaders were being arrested; we were arrested here, too. But the fact is that side by side with that was an advancing Black movement (not that there weren't prosecutions there, too, but nevertheless it was there) and a labor movement that was functioning. What we did was simply overestimate the speed and rapidity at which the administration could move if it wanted to. What is really basic here, and this is present in sections of the Left even today, is [the failure] really to recognize the Constitutional safeguards that are present. While they're not guarantees of democratic liberties, they do make it difficult for any administration to carry through a total repressive action. As I say, that doesn't mean it can't happen; it means that it's much more difficult, more inhibiting, and that there's always the time lag--as, for instance, the fact that we Californians who had been on trial in 1952 were out on bail till 1957, and then the Supreme Court, as I told you, reversed the conviction for five and ordered new trials for the rest of us. But the original estimate of the party in 1950-51 was that this time lag wouldn't take place, that you'd have the fascist repression, the appeals would speed through in a few months, the convictions would be affirmed, and we'd all be in jail. But also what was present during that period was the emphasis on the part of the party on what we call Left Centers, whether it was in the field of struggle for "Negro rights," in the struggle for peace, whatever it was, whatever the aspect of social struggle, where we had initiated or set up or participated in setting up organizations around these struggles, the National Negro Congress in the Negro field, for instance, through which we primarily operated, and which tended to further isolate us from the possibility of influencing the people who were in mass organizations. And mass organizations in the fifties were still present. They're not so much present today, but in the fifties they were still present. Well, the debate immediately became joined with Bill Foster, the chairman of the party, taking the totally opposite viewpoint from Gene. He was really outraged by Gene's report. Gene had said about the Progressive party that in his opinion it might have conceivably been a far more important thing, if we were going to do it, to have had our influence felt through its simply being a third ticket, rather than a party with all that that represented.

GARDNER

Foster was much older than Dennis. He was a very old man at the time.

HEALEY

Oh, yes, Foster was already a very old man. And really what was underlying it and was rather poignant was that in the thirties and up until 1945, with Browder's dominance in the party, Foster had been pretty much shunted to one side by Browder. There had always been sharp hostility between them, or at least it developed in the course of the thirties. Then when Browder was rejected, Foster became the hero of the party, because the Duclos article had singled Foster out as the person who had opposed the new Teheran line. When Gene was elected general secretary, because Foster was already very old and very sick, Gene never really got an opportunity to function independently as the general secretary because Foster exercised a constant veto power. There was really Foster, Ben Davis, and to a significant extent young Bob Thompson, who was the chairman of the party in New York. Many of the fights and battles that took place never became known to the party; they were always in the top leadership, centered around the kind of estimates that I've just described, that Gene was now attacking. It was really a battle royal that started. It was added to by Johnny Gates's participation--Johnny was the editor of the Daily Worker at that point. His position was a position which I think correctly could be charac- terized as a right-opportunist, a revisionist position. He first of all took the position, which he then developed in many articles, that the party should again liquidate itself as a party and become a political association, not run candidates, not have its independent position. In almost every significant question, his was a position which really amounted to the repetition of what was known as Browderism. So you had almost immediately joined together what became for the next three years a sharp battle within the party, involving every district of the party in regard to the three positions: Foster's position, which was that in the main our line had been right, that we had made a few left errors but nothing of any significance, that Gene's report grossly exaggerated the errors, did not pay sufficient tribute to the fact that the party functioned and lived and fought during that period; then you had Gene's position, which I've described; and Johnny's position. And throughout the country positions formed around them. I'll come back to what that meant later, because at that same meeting, an even more significant development took place.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 15, 1972

HEALEY

On the second night of the meeting, at about seven o'clock at night, we had reassembled for the usual evening session, and it was announced that we were going to hear a report, a letter that we had received from the British Communist party, whose delegates had attended the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union as fraternal delegates, a report of that congress. Our party, the Communist party of the United States, had not been able to send any representatives to it because, starting with 1949 or '50, all Communists or those accused of being radicals of any kind had been refused passports to travel abroad. That included distinguished people like Paul Robeson, Professor Walter Briehl here in Los Angeles, as well as Communists, of course. Actually what we heard was not any report from the British Communist party, although then and for many years later I never even thought about it; I just took for granted that was what we were hearing. It was one of those polite fictions. What we were hearing was actually Khrushchev's report to the Twentieth Congress itself. And the young man who was Gene Dennis's political secretary started reading it.

GARDNER

Who was that, do you remember?

HEALEY

No. And none of us had any idea--let me say, most of us had no idea--of what was in store for us. I don't know if you've ever heard or read that [speech] before, but it is just a tale of horror, because what it recites in great detail and with just a constantly increasing crescendo of horror is the story of the violation, of socialist legality in the Soviet Union, starting with the early thirties and culminating with Stalin's death, the arrests and the tortures under arrest of thousands upon thousands and thousands of Communists and of Soviet citizens generally. As this young man started to read it, inside of about a half an hour, I can remember that I was simply--I was just almost dissolved in tears. I couldn't control myself. The description of the tortures, the description of the belief of the people who were in jail. . . . They read letters--Khrushchev was reporting on letters that they found in the archives of old Bolsheviks in prison who were convinced that Stalin knew nothing about what was going on, that this was being done by others--letters to Stalin describing the tortures that they were undergoing and telling him that he's being surrounded by enemies who were destroying the human beings who were the capital of a socialist society. Well, that went on, the reading of that went on, with one recess, for about four hours. By the time it was over I think 95 percent of those present were feeling exactly as I felt, and that was that--first, that it was incredible, and then, that it was the most terrible, monstrous betrayal of all that we believed of socialism. I remember that I got up from the meeting and, as I say, I was convulsed in tears and just wanted to get away from everybody. I ran out of the door, didn't want to talk to any of my friends and comrades who were there. I remember Ben Davis came after me, put his arm around me and tried to comfort me. I just said, "I don't want to talk to you." So he said, "Well, let me at least find a taxi for you so that you get back to your hotel all right." I got back to my hotel. I was staying at the Piccadilly Hotel, in the same hotel as Bill Schneiderman, the state chairman of the party. At about twelve o'clock the phone rang, and it was Bill Schneiderman very upset because of my feelings and wanting to talk to me. I said, "I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to talk to anyone. I have nothing to say to anybody. I just want to think about it myself." Well, I was faced with two problems. The most immediate problem was the fact that I was leaving the day after that to address a mass meeting here in Los Angeles, a May Day mass meeting. Ordinarily at these mass meetings the theme is the international labor movement, and for us that usually meant the description of the strength of socialism, and in the first place in the Soviet Union. We had been sworn to secrecy when we heard that report. We were told that we were not to discuss it and we were not to reveal it. It had not yet been publicized. Therefore, the problem on my mind was how I was going to prepare the membership in some way for what ultimately had to become known--and what they had a right to know--and at the same time not break my pledge that I would not reveal the speech. But of course the more basic problem •that was confronting me was what my own thinking was about what it represented, what that speech meant. As for the next day's meeting, which then went into a discussion of it, all I can remember are isolated episodes. There was some discussion on some of the new theoretical questions which Khrushchev's speech at the Twentieth Congress had advanced, especially the two most important ones. First, that there was no longer "a fatalistic inevitability of world war." Lenin had said in his writings on imperialism that as a result of the need for the redivision of the world's markets, because of the uneven development of capitalism, the shift to fight for new markets meant that there inevitably had to be world wars to [allow] new capitalist countries to fight for their right to exploit and oppress other countries. There was a great debate about that--not great, but a significant debate about that--at this meeting on the questions of it that was true; if the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism were still there, what would be the new expressions of how those contradictions would be fulfilled? What would happen to the uneven development of capitalism? How would world markets be redivided? The second theoretical question that the Twentieth Congress had advanced was the possibility in some industrial countries of the so-called "parliamentary peaceful path to socialism," projecting for the first time that civil war was not the inevitable only way in which a socialist revolution could take place. I don't remember an awful lot of the debate about that. But on the question of the speech of Khrushchev about Stalin and the "cult of the individual," the thing that stands out in my mind was the speech that one comrade, James Jackson, made, which just infuriated and horrified me so that I think I was ready to sock him. I never really forgave him for it in all the subsequent years. He said, "I don't understand what all this emotional reaction is to that speech, all this great political to-do. Why, comrades, everybody knows you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." I've read that expression since--the most cynical justification, you know. Well, it's true you don't have revolutions, you don't have qualitative changes taking place in society, without all sorts of consequent repercussions that are not always the most sober and balanced ones. It's almost impossible not to have them. But what was being described in that letter was not the immediate convulsions after a revolution; what was being described in Khrushchev's speech was the very deliberate actions in the thirties and in the forties of the murder and other things of the Soviet people during the Stalin period.

GARDNER

Was there much of that sort of thing from the Stalinists?

HEALEY

Not at that point. At that point Jim Jackson was really the only one who spoke that way. In contrast I remember Ben Davis's remarks, and his main point was that if our party had been in power, all of us could think back on the things we had done, and we could not say that we would have been immune to the same things, that we would not have made the same violations. He described unjust actions that were taken against individual Communists and so forth--all of us, and I thought of my own things that I had done--which were comparable. We didn't have the power of life and death, but we had the power of expulsion from the party and of discipline in the party, and that too became a very weighty weapon in terms of influencing people's lives.

GARDNER

What are some of the examples of that?

HEALEY

I remember one in particular that bothered me a great deal, which I participated in, a meeting of the state board in San Francisco where charges were preferred against Roy Hudson, who had been one of the national leaders of the party. I don't even remember what the charges were against him. Oh, one of them was--this was during our security-conscious days in the very early fifties--he was married to a woman who was a former Hungarian countess and she was considered a spy, a CIA agent. And he refused to leave her. But mostly it was fights over internal policy and, I think, questions of competitiveness. He had moved out to San Francisco from New York. It was a question of relationships between Bill Schneiderman, Archie Brown, and Roy Hudson. When the vote came to expel him I voted "yes" too, even while I was thinking inside of me, "What a lot of nonsense all this is." But here, what was operative--it was a very important thing in the party, a very important pressure on people--was that you didn't want to have people think that you didn't really understand the deep political things that must have been present. Otherwise, why were these people who were far more experienced than you taking such positions? There must be something there that you're not understanding, and if you raised questions, it would show how ignorant you were, that you really didn't understand what was happening, or that you were an oddball, didn't understand the need of party discipline and party procedure. Lots of people operated under those kinds of reactions. Or here in Los Angeles, the things I've done myself as one of the leaders of the party. I remember one particular incident involving Frank Spector and at that time Elizabeth Glenn, now Elizabeth Spector, who had been in the underground of the party. We had very strict regulations governing how people were to operate. They weren't to see one another; people who had personal relationships weren't to see one another. They had violated the procedure and done it, and we made a big to-do about it, a big public attack, a big document that we wrote, a semipublic document, attacking them and charging them with all kinds of bourgeois capitulations, capitulations to bourgeois pressures and bourgeois ideology. There were innumerable things which I have done, you know, not somebody else, but under the same guise, that you were the protector of the party, that [paramount were] always the questions of what you called "vigilance against the class enemy," which really almost became a heretic-hunting process. But Ben Davis's words were--everybody recognized or seemed to recognize the fact that there was a very basic discussion that we had to have about ourselves, not just about what the Soviet Union had done, or about the fact that we had so uncritically defended the Soviet Union on the very things that they were now being critical of. Well, when I came back to L.A. and made that speech at the mass meeting in which for the first time I tried to deal with the fact that in the course of building a socialist society, you are not immune to error, you are not immune to tragic mistakes--trying to find the most careful way in which to say it and yet indicate that mistakes had been made, tragedies had taken place--there was among a significant section of the party a very sharp reaction against my daring to do such a thing. It's true they didn't know about the Khrushchev speech, but the very thought of even indicating that there could be anything wrong in the line of socialism was the worst kind of heresy. I think the [Khrushchev] speech was published by the New York Times about a month later.

GARDNER

What do you think was the reason behind Khrushchev's making the speech at that particular time?

HEALEY

Well, I think the basic reason, the most important reason, was the fact that they could not proceed in terms of the new needs and the new demands of both the economy and the overall society as long as the dead hand of Stalin was still at the throttle of the society. Nothing could be done that didn't fit in with how Stalin had defined reality. No new changes could be made that in any way challenged what the past had been. Basically, in Marxist language, what was present was a conflict between the base and the superstructure. Because of these enormous violations of socialist legality--and that's really a euphemistic phrase that doesn't accurately describe the enormity of the sorrow of it--the superstructure, the society, the government, the institutions, the party itself had all become deformed. And either because of that or because of its operation within the economy itself--the economy had reached very serious challenges, a critical point--there had to be found some way to challenge this past legacy and move into the future. Now, that's part of it. The other parts of it--I can't really speak of with any knowledge of what was in the minds of the main leadership of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, of Khrushchev and the other leaders, but I would say there certainly had to be present very strong subjective feelings of the kind of semityranny under which they had lived as well. I mean, they weren't immune to the same irrational actions of Stalin; as Khrushchev described, they didn't know when they went to a meeting whether they'd leave it alive. I think that probably operated as well. But the more important reasons were the first two reasons I gave you. They had to break that dead hold of the past.

GARDNER

The deformed bureaucracy had to be destroyed, as it would be in this country.

HEALEY

Right. But of course it didn't happen. The bureaucracy didn't get destroyed in the Soviet Union, nor did the mythologies of infallibility in the Communist parties abroad get destroyed, because what happened, partly as a result of leaving it simply as the cult of the individual, was that everything then was ascribed simply to Stalin. The problems of what was organically present that allowed for a Stalin to have a cult, that allowed for the incredible dominance of one human being in a society, were never examined or debated. The structural problems of a socialist society, the need of their kinds of checks and balances--not what we have, but their aspects, the need of independent trade unions, of the Soviets being independent, or of the mass organizations of the people being independent; in that way the Communist party not being the representation of the dictatorship of the proletariat but being primarily responsible for the spiritual, the ethical, the ideological questions of the society--this was never debated. When, after the Twentieth Congress, among the few Communist parties to challenge this so-called cult of the individual as the main thing was [Palmiro] Togliatti, the leader of the Italian party, when he did that, the Central Committee of the Soviet Union slapped him down hard in a public statement saying that it was simply the cult, and any further speculation was wrong. Well, what was happening in the Soviet society, it was clear (and it's even clearer now), was that, first of all, just generally in the society you had to be able to counter and answer the needs of those people who had grown up believing in Stalin all their lives. There is no question of the fact that side by side with the horrible, terrible things that happened during his lifetime, socialism had been built. And people had identified the strength of socialism with Stalin. I remember, just to jump ahead of it, when I went to the Soviet Union in 1961 and spent two months touring around there, how in area after area of the country, both among the top people and the just ordinary people, you constantly found the reiteration of the fact that "our people died during World War II with the name of Stalin on their lips." Now, that was far more present down below than it was at the top of the leadership, where you found a far more critical judgment of Stalin. But for the mass of the people, the devotion they felt was a very real one, so that you had the mythology to overcome, and no real struggle to overcome it because that meant challenging present methods, not just the past. Secondly, you did have people in all aspects of the Soviet life, the bureaucracy itself, who felt challenged as a result of this opening. Without taking it on frontally--they didn't make a frontal attack against the Twentieth Congress speech--they would sidetrack, just like bureaucracies in every society, what the new reforms were supposed to represent. In the Communist parties around the world--most particularly let me talk about my own party, because I saw it there--you got very curious reactions. The Daily Worker reprinted Khrushchev's speech after the New York Times had publicized it.

GARDNER

Gates was editor.

HEALEY

Yeah, Gates was editor. There were sections of the party just outraged--outraged because they said the speech was a CIA document, that Khrushchev never made the speech. They would not believe that Khrushchev had made that speech, just absolutely would not believe it. And to this day I would say there's a large section of the party that never read the speech, even though, as I say, it was printed in the Daily Worker. They wouldn't read it in the New York Times because that's bourgeois propaganda; you do not believe a capitalist newspaper. But even when it was reprinted in the Daily, then you attacked the Daily for picking up CIA propaganda and justifying it. As I say, I know whole sections of the party--I mean, I'm not talking of our young comrades who have never seen the speech nor known of it really except by rumor, but people my age--who absolutely either refused to read it or having read it, refused to believe it.

GARDNER

Well, following from that, didn't this also engender defection from the party, to get back to the Stalinists? Or was this still later?

HEALEY

Well, see, there were the three events of 1956 that all interacted on one another, and it's hard to say which had the greatest weight. I would say this had the greatest weight, the question of the Khrushchev speech on Stalin, because most Communists had grown up, as I had grown up, believing in the Soviet Union. We did not believe all the stories about all the trials that were taking place; we just rejected that. We didn't believe the story about forced labor camps; these were all lies of our enemies as far as we were concerned. The emotional weight of that feeling was an enormous thing. And it wasn't easy to--I'm sure that there were tens of thousands of Communists who were, quote, "disillusioned" as a result of it. But the second factor was also Dennis's speech, because the party was not used to anybody in the leadership saying the party had been wrong. Therefore, you had lots of Communists who were furious, either furious over it and therefore bitter at Dennis for doing this and wanting no part of an examination of weaknesses, or others who said, "Well! If the party has been wrong"-- and particularly this long stint of the underground, of people living five years away from their families and all that, and the terrible lives that many people who didn't even go underground lived because of it--"Then I wasted my time. What the hell. I mean, if the party was wrong, look at all the tragedy I suffered uselessly and needlessly." But the third event was the question of Hungary, which started in October of 1956, the same year.

GARDNER

Before you get into Hungary, now. . . .

HEALEY

No, I'm not going to get into it now; there's much that precedes it. I'm only saying that we might have weathered the Dennis report itself and gotten the party to look at its weaknesses objectively. We might have weathered the Khrushchev speech on Stalin if it had been by itself. We might have weathered the Hungarian thing all by itself. But when you have the three in one year, it was just too much. It was just too much. And the turmoil in the party, the sharp feelings in the party--it was the meeting of these three things that took place from which the party has not recovered, not even to this day, as far as that's concerned. Well, back, however, to the National Committee meeting and what followed from that. The party had not had a convention since 1950 because of the feeling that we could not legally do it without everybody being arrested. A convention was being called for 1957. Well, the party went into probably the greatest interparty struggle since the early twenties. In addition to the three positions I've described, those roughly identified with Gene Dennis, Johnny Gates, and Bill Foster, there were the positions of those of us here in Southern California who didn't agree with any of the three, really. [laughter]

GARDNER

Before you go on with that, this might be a good place to ask a question I've been trying to figure out where to ask anyway for a long time. It would be interesting, I think, for the record, to define the center, left, and right of the party in some way, if it's possible. Browder and Gates, I guess, are right; Foster, left; and Dennis, center.

HEALEY

Right.

GARDNER

And then if you could try to figure out where the L.A. people would go.

HEALEY

Well, the terms are used all over the world and by every radical movement, including the young Left nowadays. They're really very imprecise terms that are frequently more epithets, used as a pejorative description, than they are as representative of any scientifically defined positions. But as to what they're supposed to represent, ostensibly what they represent: Foster's position on the left represented generally in this struggle the feeling that the main questions, the main problems, were still the same; there was first a justification of the past, that we had been, in the main, correct in our past policies; a continual emphasis on the danger of war; an uncritical approach toward the Soviet Union; really a status quo position, that what was always should be.

GARDNER

That's the left.

HEALEY

Yeah. But within that, what was very curious-- I was just refreshing my memory and I found here a speech he had made to the National Committee which was never printed (it was sent out to us after he'd made it) in which he's describing his opposition to Gene Dennis's speech at that meeting. And within that is a big sharp business, an attack on Dennis, because in 1949 at the Smith Act trial, Foster had made a deposition on behalf of the party leaders--he was not on trial because of his health; he was indicted but not on trial; he'd been severed for medical reasons--but he'd given a deposition on the line and theory of the party which was centered totally around the possibility of, quote, "the parliamentary road to socialism." In this speech in 1956 to the National Committee he centers on this as the outstanding contribution of the party during this period, and he claims Dennis and the other Smith Act defendants had argued against him on the ground that it was a reformist position, too far to the right; they had ordered it diminished, and there'd been a big fight about it in regard to the party's program of 1954, which had been published. I use that as an example of the real absurdity of these terms, because if any one issue would be used by the young Left today as an example of revisionism and reformism, it would be a primary emphasis on the possibility of a parliamentary path to socialism. Dennis's position was a difficult position, which is always that of a centrist. And again, I don't really like the terms, even though they're so famous and always so used.

GARDNER

I don't either, which is why it's good to define them.

HEALEY

Well, as I say, when you really examine and probe deeply into the development of positions, the terms are so imprecise and have so little real validity. First of all, they subsume the psychological conflicts, the personality conflicts that are present; they disregard totally the nuances that are present in lines. Well, all right. I'm really fulminating in this way because when I read all the material of the young Left in the last ten years with its stories about "revisionism, revisionism, revisionism," the terms have lost--they just don't have any meaning anymore. They don't know what they're talking about. They build up a mental picture of the Communists as the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, as if these are problems simply of--again, they want infallibility. At any rate, Dennis's position, as I say, is a more difficult one to try to define, because, well, his position on the Soviet Union was kind of typical. He had given a statement, I guess to the Daily Worker, which had been picked up by Pravda, commenting on the Twentieth Congress and Khrushchev's speech about Stalin. He had included two or three sentences about the anti-Semitism that had been present both around the Leningrad trial and then the things that had taken place in Poland. But when Pravda reprinted it--and this is considered a great coup for world communist movements outside of the Soviet Union, when Pravda reprints what you have to say; that's the stamp of approval--they left out those two sentences about the Jewish question. The Daily Worker under Gates's leadership started a public debate demanding that Dennis insist that the Soviet Union put those two sentences back in, and Dennis wouldn't do it. So that really Dennis, on the one hand, wanted to recognize the significance of the criticism far more than Foster, who wanted to just brush it off under the "cult of the individual" and let it go at that, but he didn't want to go too far. He didn't really want to let it become a question, for instance, of demanding that Pravda not be dishonest and say they printed him when they'd actually left out two of the important sentences.

GARDNER

It's sort of a pragmatism in a way then, a sort of middle ground between two determined idealisms.

HEALEY

Well, not really.

GARDNER

Or is that too decadent a statement?

HEALEY

What classically it's supposed to represent is a conciliating really of the right, under the guise of being independent of the left and the right, taking a position which helps the right in the party--not the right position, but the "right," in quotes, the right deviation--to triumph and to dominate. [But it claims to be] a conciliatory position without identification. By the way, Gene was further hampered by a personal problem that really entered into the politics of it. Here's Foster, a very dynamic man on the one hand and the long-time leader of the party, the hero in 1945 who single-handedly had slain the dragon of Browder, and then Johnny Gates, an extraordinarily dominating personality, and now Gene Dennis, who had great difficulty in communicating. He was a very shy man. We found out much later that part of his problem was physical: he had cancer and, of course, nobody knew; he didn't know. But he couldn't speak, hardly. He just had no mass presence, no platform presence. His influence was primarily a personal, individual influence. And this factor really played a bigger role in terms of some of the later developments of the fights in the party than anyone would have believed, that he just was not a personality who influenced people, who won their allegiance. Foster and Gates could do that. I said we in Southern California had a different position. First of all, we absolutely opposed Johnny Gates's position on changing the name of the party.

GARDNER

So you might now go into what Gates and the reformists, the revisionists, would stand for.

HEALEY

First of all, it was the question of changing the name of the party, which we considered just nonsense. What difference does it make? We didn't consider it a principle-I mean, those of us in Southern California who had this position--it was I think almost a unanimous position of our leadership. We rejected both Gates's and Foster's positions. We didn't think it made any difference. We don't consider it a principle question. But we thought it was nonsense to put it before the party, because all it was going to be was a distraction away from the examination of the real problems of the party, which it turned out to be. As a matter of fact, we felt--I mean, I felt, at least after going to these national meetings--that one could almost say Foster wrote Johnny Gates's stuff and Gates wrote Bill Foster's stuff, because all both of them did was distract the party away from a sober examination of the real problems. And there were very real problems.

GARDNER

What were some of the other reformist notions? Basically you mentioned the parliamentary approach as opposed to the--foreign policy, I guess it would be.

HEALEY

No, no. On the question of the constitutional path to Socialism, the real argument wasn't so much about-- it was really the question of how much emphasis you'd give it. The party had always historically held the position that we advocated a peaceful path but had always predicted that it would not be peaceful, that the ruling class would not allow it to happen. What was really at stake, which nobody would really put in plain words--and still doesn't put in plain words around this question of a socialist revolution--is the question of what had been defined by both Lenin and Stalin later as, quote, "the inevitable violent revolution." What that really means is the inevitable civil war, and nobody really wanted to debate it, and still, as I say, it's not debated in those terms: the possibility of a successful civil war in advanced capitalist countries with the enormous technology that the capitalist state has at its control, the ability to successfully challenge this military and electronic strength in the classical sense of civil war, of revolution in the way of the Chinese revolution or the Soviet revolution, and so forth. So that the arguments on that question were really not very many. As I say, Foster was the main protagonist of the possibility of "the parliamentary road." The disagreements would mainly come on that question of how much emphasis you gave to that as distinguished from the question of the need for the continuance of the mass struggles, of the fact that while the electoral arena is important, it is not the decisive arena in which social change takes place; it's secondary to the main arena, which is outside of the parliamentary pursuits.

GARDNER

Which brings us back to Southern California's position, I guess. From the way it sounds, you really were closest to Dennis.

HEALEY

Well, we started being closest to Dennis until Dennis started shilly-shallying around. And then, as I say, we found ourselves--I would still say we remained closer to Dennis in many cases as far as the overall position, but one couldn't really identify with Dennis because he just didn't fight, and he didn't advance policy and progress. He had some problems of his own back there which we weren't terribly sensitive to or aware of, these enormous fights that were going on in the top leadership for control. Here was the Daily Worker pretty much going off on its own under Johnny Gates's leadership and many times projecting positions that might or might not--we didn't care whether they were right or wrong; what we cared about is that he had no right to use the Daily Worker to put in editorial positions which in effect bound the party without discussions in the party. We resented and rejected that. I mean, just in terms again of the fight against bureaucracy, he was just as great a bureaucrat as William Z. was, albeit with different lyrics, but there was no difference in their song.

GARDNER

How did the struggles for leadership affect the Southern California people when you returned?

HEALEY

Well, here we had pretty much a united leadership up until 1957, after the convention.

GARDNER

So during that period between the [committee meeting] and Hungary then there was no struggle.

HEALEY

No. I mean, there were great debates in our leadership, obviously; everything was up for discussion and debate. But in the main, ours was a fairly unified leadership. I think the reason for that was the fact that we'd been together for a long time; we had enough mutual respect for one another's opinions that where there were any sharp disagreements--and I don't remember any particularly, maybe Slim does--but we would try to find a consensus that would unite people, and by and large we were in agreement. As of that time there was nobody in our top leadership that supported Gates. At the state level--we were still one state then--Gates had a little more support up there. I remember one big fight, for instance, that took place, and again it shows why these terms are so meaningless. Mickey Lima wanted to invite Johnny Gates to come here to speak to the party in California, and Al Richmond and I were the two people on the state board who opposed that, even though we were considered the rightists. But we didn't want any part of Johnny Gates.

GARDNER

You were considered rightists?

HEALEY

Oh, yeah. Well, I think later we were considered rightists, maybe not so much then. I think that Gates had a little more support in Northern California with Louise Todd and Oleta 0"Connor Yates. He had no support down here; there was one woman, Jane, from the valley, who supported him, and outside of that there was just none. Well, the National Committee issued a draft resolution for the preconvention discussion, which takes place three months before the convention itself, which was January 1957. We had to hold local conventions before the national convention to elect our delegates to it. They took place in December of '56.

GARDNER

Maybe before you go into that, we ought to get into Hungary.

HEALEY

Yeah, because that sure got into us. But first, before the Hungary thing, you must already see this great sharp debate taking place on questions of innerparty democracy. There were debates on democratic centralism, on the use of the language that the party had always had to identify itself as a monolithic party, a great reaction against that, which we in this district supported. We opposed the way in which the term was used as representing that all Communists had to always have the same opinion, that there could not be dissent. We were fighting on this question of the right to dissent.

GARDNER

Who were the local leaders at that time besides yourself?

HEALEY

Well, Slim was the bureau editor of the People's World here in Los Angeles. Ben Dobbs was the organizational secretary.

GARDNER

Pretty much the same leadership that had been there through the entire fifties.

HEALEY

Yes, been there all through, right.

GARDNER

What was party membership at this time?

HEALEY

By that time we had already suffered, I think, our first losses, although still not the significant ones that came later. Our first biggest loss, as I told you, took place in 1950 around the way we registered people, which was our own fault again. On this estimate of fascism, anybody who we felt was not going to be a staunch underground fighter, we said, "Be a friend of the party. Don't stay in." We went down in that year from 5,000 members to about 4,200. By 1956 I would say we had 3,800 members. Well, when the Hungarian events took place, that marked the first divisions in our own local leadership. I defended the Soviet action on the ground that the Communist party of Hungary had practically dissolved, had lost its capacity to lead; that as a result, all of the reactionary forces within Hungary, symbolized by the role of Cardinal [Joseph] Mindszenty, were gaining power; that with the [Imre] Nagy appeal for the United States and Great Britain to send armies in to, quote, "guarantee the neutrality of Hungary," the danger of world war was going to be a real one because this was not going to take place without a fight. My only difference really with New York, with Gene Dennis's position, however, was that I insisted that the cause of the problems was the great power chauvinism of the Soviet Union and the mistakes of the party leadership of Hungary. Their position was that it was totally a CIA-engineered activity. I argued that the CIA could not do that, unless there was a mass base of support for it, unless there'd been terrible errors ahead of time. But there were those, of course, and I remember most prominently Vivian Levine, who took the position that under no conditions was the action of the Soviet Army in going back justified. This had great repercussions in the party. We also were simultaneously having the discussions which had been going on for forty years in California concerning the internal organization of the state, that the state office should either be moved to Los Angeles or that we should split into two separate districts. And this got almost as much heat and vehemence and passion as all the big political and theoretical questions that were being debated. I mention that only because simultaneously with all the internal meetings that had to take place within Los Angeles to prepare for a convention, the preconvention debate, we also had to go up to San Francisco every other week to have statewide discussions because we were going to have one state convention, and to prepare for this separation into what became two separate districts. We also had to go back to New York constantly to attend the national meetings, the debate around the question of the resolution of the convention of 1957.

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 15, 1972

GARDNER

Now, you'd begun to talk about Hungary and the division of the party around then.

HEALEY

Well, not only was there a sharp division in the party for the first time here in Los Angeles in our leadership as to what our attitude should be, but nationally, of course, the divisions were equally sharp, if not sharper. There were just almost violent National Committee meetings to debate what kind of a position we should take. Again, the Daily Worker was taking its own position independent of any formal position of the party, under Johnny Gates's leadership. And their position was total opposition to the Soviet military intervention in Hungary. Just parenthetically, it should be noted that in the subsequent years of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the Chinese party came out with a document in 1964, the general title of which was "The General Line of the World Communist Movement." Within that document, however, the Chinese party states that the Soviet Union did not want to go back into Hungary on November 4 to intervene again, that it was the pressure of the Chinese party that compelled them to do that. The Chinese party said that they told the Soviet leadership, most particularly Khrushchev, that if the Soviet Union didn't do it, the Chinese would denounce them before the world movement as betraying the interests of socialism. The debates in the national meetings were along much this line: Gates's position and those who agreed with him that the Soviet Union should be denounced for military intervention; Foster's position (an interesting position, which most people have forgotten), while sharply critical of the mistakes of the Soviet Union and of the Hungarian party, the sum total nevertheless being that there could be no criticism of the Soviet Union for this intervention; and then Dennis's position, which was to deplore the need of it, but recognize that it had to be done. With positions flying around much like that, there finally came up a compromise resolution that had a phrase which was supposed to show the unity of the diverse forces; it said that we neither condemned nor condoned it. This was a big, hotly debated compromise, and what finally happened is that most of us accepted it as the only thing that could be gotten out as a statement to the party. But Dennis abstained on the grounds that it was still too critical of the Soviet Union. And Foster and Davis either voted against it or abstained. No, they voted against it, I guess, on the ground that it--I mean, their position would be [stronger] even than Dennis's, that it was too critical.

GARDNER

What was your feeling about it?

HEALEY

As I say, my feeling at that point was one of defensive reaction of the Soviet Union, that they had no alternative. My position only differed from the national position, and at that point the immediate international position, on the ground that I kept insisting that the reason for the whole collapse was the earlier role of the Soviet Union in its callous disregard of the national feelings of the Hungarians, their pressures upon the Hungarians, as well as the internal mistakes of the [Matyas] Rakosi regime. But by and large I couldn't see how they had any alternative but to do that. In retrospect, my position might be a little different. Number one, there'd be questions in my mind whether the Hungarian party by itself would not have been able to guarantee against fascist or anti-Communist control of the country, which at that time I didn't think they could do. But secondly, to paraphrase the old Alexander Pope saying, once evil is dealt with, you become familiar with it and then it becomes accepted; once accepting the need for it, then, of course, you open the door to the right of the largest socialist country--namely, the Soviet Union--to define and determine the character and quality of socialism in any other country by military means. But at that point I didn't recognize that. I just simply felt that they were justified, that they had no alternative, if socialism was to be maintained.

GARDNER

That becomes a sort of doctrinal question, in a lot of ways, doesn't it? Whether or not the Soviet view of socialism is the acceptable one, and whether or not the independent socialist countries have a right to choose.

HEALEY

You're absolutely right, as the later years showed, particularly and most notably around the question of Czechoslovakia, but not exclusively around that question. That is why I say I would now maybe question the certainty with which I spoke in 1956 and '57 about Hungary as to the question--although the Czechoslovak events can't be compared because the changes in Czechoslovakia were taking place under the leadership of the Communist party, whereas in Hungary the Communist party was in a shambles, it was really on the street. But also the fact is, what a lot of people didn't realize is that in Hungary in 1956 in those days fascist tendencies were--first of all, Hungary had been a fascist country, as distinct from Czechoslovakia, which had been bourgeois democratic. You don't wipe out that whole history of Hungary from 1920 to 1945 when it had been a semifascist dictatorship; you don't wipe that out and suddenly have a democracy-loving people, a conscious people. So when you found, for instance, Jews being hung by the heels because they were Jews--not because they were Communists but because they were Jews--by the so-called "freedom fighters" of Hungary, and Communists generally being slaughtered, obviously this was not what was taking place in Czechoslovakia. So I'd still differentiate between the two. They're not the same. But what was involved really in that debate and is still involved as a central question is the question of the definition of the relationship of Communist parties to the Soviet Union and/or now to China and so forth.

GARDNER

To interrupt the flow a little bit; as I recall, we were going to talk at one point about Tito. I don't know if we ever did.

HEALEY

I don't think we did either.

GARDNER

Should we insert something here?

HEALEY

Well, yes, because that also became part of the big debate later; by 1958, that became one of the biggest fights I had with Dennis, as a matter of fact, so sharp a fight that Ben Davis made a motion to the Los Angeles party to remove me as its chairman because of my position towards Yugoslavia. Well, in 1948 when the break took place with Tito, our party immediately sprang into action to justify it. Foster, in his history of the Communist party, describes Tito as a "fascist." We had a dozen articles--including those written by Johnny Gates, by the way--all saying that Yugoslavia had gone fascist-- not just that a capitalist restoration had taken place, but that fascism had come to Yugoslavia. And everything from '48 until Khrushchev and [Nikolai] Bulganin made the trip to Yugoslavia, in '54, I guess (maybe '55, I'm not sure), was that Yugoslavia was no longer a socialist country. There was just no question in the Communist ranks of accepting that: no analysis of Yugoslavia, no analysis of the basis of the fights; the uncritical acceptance of the definition which the Soviet Union made of Yugoslavia. We didn't even read anything of Yugoslavia's defense of itself. There was just no question of it. Well, around Hungary there was an interesting sidelight. Tito had taken the position that the first intervention of the Soviet armies, October 28, was a mistake, but that when they came back on November 4 they really had no alternative. (Now, it might be reversed: he might have said that October 28 was justified and that November 4--or the other way around. I'm not sure now any longer.) But whatever that position was, Johnny Gates took the same position and wanted to acclaim it in the Daily--and did, as a matter of fact. The attack on Tito at that point was about Hungary, that he was trying to say that Yugoslavia had the correct political answer for all of the socialist countries, and to get the other socialist countries of Eastern Europe to follow Yugoslavia's position as against following the Soviet Union. But I'll come back to Yugoslavia again, because in 1958, at a meeting of the National Committee, as I say, the question of Yugoslavia became a sharp fight--not so much because of Yugoslavia, but again because of the attitude of the Communist party towards the dicta of the Soviet Union in defining world reality, either accepting it or not accepting it. But around all these fights in late '56 and the beginning of the convention itself in 1957 in New York, this question of the attitude of the party toward the Soviet Union remained a central question. Again, parenthetically, in regard to the Khrushchev report, I remember that in the last portion of that report, Khrushchev says about Stalin that everything Stalin did, he did going in the name of what he believed to be socialism, defending socialism. This is an important thing to understand because I don't think there's any question of the fact that Stalin did believe that everything he was doing was to protect socialism. I don't think it's any excuse for what takes place, but one must understand this about communist leaders--and others, because we're not unique, we're not sui generis, I can assure you, on this question--the belief that the individual epitomizes the organization, and that the individual, the leader, the person who has built, automatically represents necessarily the best judgment in defense of what has been built. It was certainly present with Stalin; it was present with Foster; it was present with Dennis; present with every leader of the party. You saw it in the factional fight in the party in the late fifties--the belief in one's own purity, and one's absolute conviction that one's opponent was a double-dyed villain. There could be nothing good out of anybody who didn't agree with your position. You didn't listen; you didn't care; you weren't concerned. You knew you were right. You had absolutely every conviction that the other guy was just a dirty son of a bitch who was out to destroy everything that had been built. But this question of the definition of the relationship of the party to the Soviet Union was and remains a central question. The National Committee resolution that we were debating for the convention to define the party's program for the future contained within it some language to the effect that we had uncritically accepted the positions of the Soviet leadership and made them our own without examination, some such language as that. Not even Foster would object to putting it as ambiguously as that, as that relates to the past. But what became clear is that there was a very important sector of the party that might conceivably say, yeah, we oversimplified and uncritically accepted in the past, but who couldn't see that we were continuing to do it in the present, and therefore that it would also be the role in the future. I can remember making a wild speech at one of these national meetings and again here in Los Angeles, [noting] that quite often even when the Soviet Union discussed weaknesses of the past, we wouldn't even accept that. I mean, even when they showed some 20-20 hindsight, we refused to even accept that, because it was simply politically and/or psychologically impossible for Communists to reckon with the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't infallible, that any particular set of leaders at any one time didn't encompass all the wisdom, all the omniscience, of the ages. Well, in our preconvention and in our convention here in Los Angeles in December, and again at the national convention in New York, this became a very sharp question of debate. I would say that that question plus the question of the democratization of the party internally, the question of how you interpret democratic centralism, the question of guaranteeing the right of dissent in the party, the right of viewpoints of dissident leaders to be known to the membership as a whole--these were the kind of questions that then became fighting questions. Now, ostensibly the New York national convention debate was around the question of how to estimate the past errors. There were big, big fights over whether or not the errors were of a "left-sectarian" character, whether you'd say that our weaknesses were of that character or whether the weaknesses of the party could be attributed only to the objective strength of capitalism. This was Foster's position, that what happened in the CIO, the expulsions, had nothing to do with any weaknesses we may have had in tactical action, but simply that capitalism was strong enough to control the labor movement and therefore guarantee our expulsion from the CIO. He and his followers had the same approach for every explanation of our isolation, of our ineffectiveness, relatively speaking, of our impotence, relatively speaking, in all the mass events which once we had rather significantly influenced. The only mistake he was willing to recognize--and I say "he"; I would say the Midwest districts pretty much more supported him than they did anybody else--the New York district was pretty much in support of Johnny Gates's position, as were other New England districts.

GARDNER

They were the largest, too, weren't they?

HEALEY

New York was the largest; we were the second largest. Los Angeles was the second-largest district; Chicago was the third. But Foster had his main strength in the Midwest, and he ascribed that to its greater proletarian composition, which meant greater purity. If you came from the working class, you were automatically pure. CONNELLY: Corn fed.

HEALEY

Right. Now, on Hungary there was one interesting side bar on that. At the national convention in January, the leadership decided, under Carl Winter, the chairman of the resolutions committee, that the convention would not have any resolution in regard to Hungary, on the ground that it would simply split the convention into three different parts or two different parts, and we'd never get unity; the party would be split. Everything was being done to guarantee that there was no organized split, no organized separation of the party at this national convention. I think that our district was the only one that even had any mention of Hungary in its convention; I insisted on doing that in my speech to the convention. The chairman always makes the opening political speech. I did it in the following way: I said that I recognized that there were many differences among us on Hungary, that there was some agitation that we should not even discuss it, but I felt that this was an abdication of leadership if that was followed through; that while I did not think we should put it to a vote--because actually, what difference did it make, I said in my report, whether twenty Communists vote one way or fifty Communists vote another way? It's not going to prove anything in life--nevertheless, I felt as a leader of the party that the membership had a right to know what I thought and why I thought about a question, and, inasmuch as my report was a collective report of the board, what the board thought and felt. So our position was presented as part of the report, but not to be voted on as a separate resolution. But the issue of Hungary wasn't even mentioned in the national convention nor in any of the other district conventions throughout the country. There had been one other person in our leadership here in Los Angeles who was not on our board but was in the leading position of the party, Don Wheeldon, who was working for the People's World and who supported Johnny Gates. His brother Herb, who was a leader of the New York party and one of the more important Gates followers, came out here to California in November to offer us separate money, to the Southern California district as a district, to send our full delegation to the national convention. (I should explain that the delegates are elected on the basis of your dues payments. You are therefore allocated so many delegates per so many dues-paying members. But because we were 3,000 miles away from where the national convention was taking place, quite often we couldn't send our full delegation because we didn't have enough money for it.) What they were offering to do, the New York district, the Gates people who were in control of the New York district, they were offering to give us money from their district to our district to send a full delegation, because they knew that we were anti-Foster. They also knew we didn't support Gates, but they figured just putting our weight against Foster would objectively help them. We were very indignant about it, refused it, and attacked them for doing it on the ground that if they had any money to give, we'd be glad if it came through the national office, which is the customary way in which money is handled, but we wouldn't make any deals with them. As I've thought about it since, I'm not so sure we were right, [laughter] because as it turned out, the enduring problem in the party was really that which was defined around Foster. Gates was, as many of us thought, a lightweight without, certainly outside of New York, any significant base in the party membership. At any rate, when the national convention took place, the big thing was to show the unity on top between Foster, Ben Davis, Eugene Dennis and Johnny Gates.

GARDNER

This was January 1957, in New York.

HEALEY

A wet, snowy, cold, horrible place where the convention took place. There'd been a big fight at that convention about the seating for the first time in many years of non-Communist observers who would just sit there to observe. A.J. Muste and Dorothy Day from the Catholic Worker are the only two names I really remember of the people who were there. That was the opening battle of the convention, with the New Jersey delegation particularly opposing it on the ground that Communists wouldn't feel free to debate publicly and argue their differences with non-Communists sitting there observing, and that it was a violation of security (who knew who these people were?)--just a big fight over that. It was, however, finally voted by a huge vote to seat them and have them sit there and observe our convention.

GARDNER

Where was the convention held?

HEALEY

Someplace on the Lower East Side of New York on--the New Yorkers pronounce it "Howston" [i.e. Houston] Street. The only reason I remember the name of the street is because of that difference of pronunciation of what we'd call "Houston Street"; the Westerners kept giggling over it. I don't remember the name of the hall. All I remember is that there was a bar in it; it was freezing cold and there was no heat inside.

GARDNER

It was no major convention center.

HEALEY

No. As a matter of fact, the cameras were going outside constantly--the FBI and other cameras, but mostly FBI cameras. The party was still having great difficulty renting anyplace, finding places that would rent to anything in the name of the Communist party. McCarthyism had by no means died down. There was a second big fight that started in the beginning over a second letter from [Jacques] Duclos-- a second and third letter, to be accurate. It is customary at all Communist conventions all over the world to have greetings sent from your sister parties. One greeting had come from Duclos in the name of the French party with Duclos's signature, which was one of the usual kind of innocuous greetings that parties send wrapped up in language that doesn't say very much of anything (tributes to the "great fighting and courageous," etc.). Then, however, came a second letter which criticized our draft resolution, and at that the sparks started to fire. Here's Duclos doing it again. It wasn't enough what happened in '45, here he comes doing it again, and who the Goddamn hell does he think he is telling us what he thinks is wrong with our resolution? We don't care if somebody wants to say there's something wrong with it, but to do it in a way as if they had the answers and they're telling little brother or sister what to think. . . Well, I must say, on this question Dennis really took a very courageous position; he identified himself both in his speech and in the fight that took place around it for rejecting the second letter greetings, while Poster led the fight to accept it as a comradely act. But by a huge vote, the convention rejected the second so-called greeting. CONNELLY: Do you want to say what position Duclos took?

HEALEY

I don't remember it all very clearly now. I'd have to refresh my memory by looking at the documents. Some vague charge that we were going too far to the right. I don't remember the details. If you're interested, it'll just take me two minutes to look it up.

GARDNER

Fine. [Tape recorder turned off]

HEALEY

The first greeting from France was signed by Jacques Duclos himself. The second arrived the night before the convention opened, a cablegram signed by the Central Committee of France. Unlike the cablegram from the Central Committee which simply in general terms greeted our convention, the Jacques Duclos one went into detail on the question of our draft resolution, and it said--I'm quoting from it now--"In examining with great attention the opinions expressed by different comrades in your discussion and the official documents like the draft resolution for the convention, the November 6 statement of the Communist party concerning the events in Hungary, and other documents, we believe that we discern dangerous departures from these principles." (That's the principles of Marxism-Leninism.) "We have at the same time, however, been happy to see that a more profound study of the real facts has already permitted you to make certain precisions and happy corrections for our common cause in the future of the Communist party." And then after a paragraph which talks about the class struggles, the motor of history, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable arm for the transition to socialism, he then says that "the universal truths of Marxism-Leninism cannot be denied by any true Communist. It is not true that the Leninist principles of the building of the party and socialism would be only valid in the Soviet Union, that the socialist system would not have permanent worth, taking into account national characteristics which in particular Lenin advised should be carefully taken into account. To deviate from these basic conceptions is to slide into the morass of social democratic opportunism. Still more, it is to fall into liquidationist revisionism, that is to say, to turn one's back on the revolution, on communism, the class struggle. It is to play the game of Project X." (Project X was the State Department's project for which $20 million had been underwritten for "subversion within the Iron Curtain countries.") And then there's a long description on the part of Duclos in regard to Hungary, all of which is designed to prove that the CIA had initiated all of the struggles there and that the whole affair was the realization "of a plan of imperialism in order to split apart and destroy the camp of socialism and the Communist movement. The worst would be that some Communists would be taken in by this, having denied already in principle the role of imperialism. The worst yet would be that 'revisionism' which pretends to question everything and instead of fighting with ever greater intensity against capitalism, imperialism, and reaction leads the revolutionary movement to 'democratic reformism,' to the deception of democratic liberties, and to have confidence in the bourgeoisie to achieve 'a democratic socialism.'" Then there's a restatement of the fact that "Solidarity with the foreign policy of the Soviet Union corresponds to the essential interests of the international proletariat of peace and socialism, the interests of the independent movements, and of the oppressed and dependent countries in the world. That is why any penetration of the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet campaign in our ranks must be answered by an unrelenting resistance and pitiless rebuff." What he was doing by this letter was agreeing with Foster that if one insisted that we could no longer follow this path of uncritical acceptance of the positions of the Soviet Union, particularly in their foreign policy needs, as defining our national policies, that then one was giving in to anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism. And this would be true of all of the debates that were taking place on every question. So that was one fight that took place almost at the beginning, and it was answered by the convention's rejection of the Duclos letter and the acceptance only of the cablegram in the name of the Central Committee of the French party, which as I say was just a general one.

GARDNER

I was going to ask why it was that the French Communist party was the sort of pathfinder for the American Communist party in the sense that Duclos [had such a consistently important role]. Was it because he was the leading European Communist at the time?

HEALEY

I would think that's probably why. It's really an unprecedented thing to happen. The first one was as well--the article he wrote.

GARDNER

Was it done in any other similar cases?

HEALEY

Yes, there'd been other cases. My party has done it. But we've usually done it in response to the question of what we consider the line as defined by the Soviet Union. It's usually done in a very cautious way if it's done, because most parties do not want to put themselves in the position of publicly criticizing another party's position. Of course, it should be said in regard to the first Duclos letter of 1945 that it was true that the position defined as the Browder position, the position of the American party in 1944-45, was influencing other parties. Of course, this is the other side of the problem which the people who don't want any independence from the Soviet Union's position don't recognize, that when you have this position of a so-called "monolithic" world communist movement with all the parties having the same positions, then if any party does speak up it's taken for granted they're doing it with the agreement of the Soviet Union; therefore, it must be right. In itself, it then eliminates independent thinking and analysis of events. Well, agreement had already been pretty much reached in most of the state conventions preceding the national convention in regard to Johnny Gates's position on the name and character of the Communist party, that this would not be acted on at the convention but would be postponed for a future debate without foreclosing the right of people to continue to debate it. As I say, the Southern California convention simply felti and said that it was just ridiculous to elevate it to an important question. The convention was probably the most democratic convention that the Communist party has ever held in its history, with all the viewpoints being heard, time and time again, both in plenary session and in the subcommittees of the convention, the resolutions [committee] and all the other committees. In the main, the resolution that was adopted was the draft resolution that the National Committee had submitted with amendments throughout the body, but none of them in any significant violation of the spirit of that resolution. Then there was a big show--for the first time a new kind of national committee was being elected; it was proposed that the convention would only elect twenty people from the convention, and then when the states and districts went back to hold their next convention, which would be one month later, to elect their leadership, they would nominate additional people for the National Committee. This was unprecedented because it meant that the states would be directly represented on the National Committee rather than being elected by a convention of the whole. We had one big surprise that took place there as a result of the twenty being elected. A young Black woman had been nominated here in Los Angeles to go to the national convention, not by the convention; I had made the proposal at our convention that we allow the Young Communist [League] to have a separate meeting of a youth panel to nominate and elect one of their own to go to the national convention, again bypassing the convention as a whole. And this young Black woman, Charlene Mitchell, was the only one at that youth meeting who was able to go out of all the people who were nominated. The others couldn't go; so she was elected to go. Little did we know what was going to happen. [laughter] She was sent back there, and in the elections that took place--there was sharp fighting going on, the ballots being circulated, private little factional ballots being circulated around to the various groups--and lo and behold, this really totally unknown woman receives the highest number of votes of anybody who's elected to the National Committee, over Foster, over Gene Dennis, over everybody. She came in first. And here the news went over the wire about this young woman--I think she was twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time--getting the top vote; and they called Slim, the L.A. Times called Slim, to find out--or the Associated Press called him--who she was, and he said, "Beats me. I've never heard of her." [laughter] But she became the main representative of the Foster group in our leadership here in Los Angeles. As I say, we really didn't know anything about her when she went there.

GARDNER

What's happened to her since?

HEALEY

She is in the national leadership of the party now. She was our presidential candidate in 1968, and now I think she's working with a new defense organization they're trying to start to defend all political prisoners. But by this time, the happy, relatively serene life of the Los Angeles leadership was coming to an end, too. Because, first of all--well, as an example, Lou Weinstock, one of the national leaders of the party, one of the old-time leaders of the party, came to L.A., came into the party office to say he was in town (he was carrying through party protocol that when anybody comes in from out of state you go into the party office to say you're here) and very cheerfully and blithely announced to us that he had come to organize the Poster caucus of Los Angeles. We really hadn't had any organized factions here in L.A. up to that point. And we said, "We believe in people having the right to do anything they want to do. You want to organize something, that's your business. If our leader- ship is not accepted on the basis of what it's done here where it's known in L.A., then so much the worse for it. If we can't hold our own against you, we don't deserve to be in leadership. Go; do your best." And he sure tried. Well, both because of what he was doing and then other people coming back to L.A. who had lived in New York moving back here, for the first time the really sharp splits that were characteristic of other districts started to take place here. We had been amazed when we'd go to New York, for instance, to find that Communists who had lived side by side with one another for thirty, forty years, who had raised children together, the closest of friends, were no longer speaking to one another because some were in the Foster group, some were in the Gates group. Nobody was in Dennis's group. [laughter] We couldn't understand it. How could such venom enter into party relationships? Well, we started to get a taste of it in 1957 and that period from then on. And it is still present in the party. What it really testifies to is the validity of the old saying that a civil war is much worse than a war against an outsider, that the passions run higher, the tempers are deeper, the vitriol is greater, you're fighting your loved ones. There's nothing that is sharper than an internal battle. The National Committee--I guess I should start with what was taking place there. Let me go back. At the conclusion of the convention--and by the way, not only was that convention the most democratic of any convention, but the proceedings of that convention, for the only time since the 1923-24 convention, the full proceedings of the convention were printed, exactly what people had to say, who said it, and how it was voted and whatnot. That's the publication right here entitled "The Proceedings of the Sixteenth National Convention." Oh, it was in February, not January--February 9 through 12, 1957.

GARDNER

And the party itself published it?

HEALEY

Yeah, the party itself published it. Again, it would be a worthwhile thing for anybody who wants to understand the nuances of the Communist party--the pressures, the line, the policy, the debates--to read it.

GARDNER

I wonder if we have it in the UCLA library.

HEALEY

Well, it's a good thing to check, because if you don't, you should. It's impossible to understand some of the things of the party without the party's own documents to explain them. I should say that the difference between these proceedings that were printed and the usual convention proceedings is that ordinarily all that's presented are the formal reports of the leaders of the party and the resolutions, and that's all the people ever see. The debate that takes place, nobody, including the party membership that isn't present as delegates, really knows about. I'm not sure how many Communists themselves read the proceedings when they came out. But at least they were available. Well, in the elections of the new leadership, some very sad personal tragedies took place. Now, a lot of what was going on--these slates that I've talked about, private slates being passed around telling people how to vote--we from Southern California didn't know a hell of a lot about; or at least let me say I didn't, and I know Ben Dobbs didn't, because we weren't in anybody's group, and therefore we didn't have access to what these slates were. We only found out about them after the convention, not during it. Nobody gave us a slate of how to vote. The purpose of having a slate vote is that when you have a long list of names and most of the people are from other districts of which you don't know anything, that [guarantees] you, if you single-shot your votes, that whoever your slate wants to be elected will be elected. I think that's how Charlene got the high vote, because the Foster people knew she was on the Foster slate. But when people would come from other districts to our district to say, "Who is she?" we didn't really know anything about her, what position she had. We said, "We don't know. We just plain don't know." So she was on everybody's slate, had impeccable credentials by virtue of being Black, young, and a woman. Nothing better. Well, the tragedies that happened--and they were really tragedies: Someone like Mac Weiss, who had been for a long time in the national leadership of both the Young Communist League and later of the Communist party, who during the period of the underground party had probably been the pivotal person of the underground as what would be almost like the general secretary of the party, and who in the course of all the debate in '56 and then at the convention had played in my opinion one of the more important roles in trying to break with the sectarianism and the dogmatism of the past--he was just eliminated, again by virtue of these damn slates. I can't tell you the exact details because I still don't know whose name was on what slate. But he was not reelected, and he was just absolutely heartbroken by it. Nemmy Sparks, who I told you had been the chairman of the party here, who'd been taken out of Los Angeles to set up the underground apparatus in 1949 and then, after the underground was ended, had [undertaken] the educational work of the party, helping to edit Political Affairs--he was caught in this cross fire, and he was not elected for the National Committee. Those two names stand out as the most important, although they were by no means the only victims of what was taking place then. But you can't really overestimate the sadness of it again and the political significance. Nemmy simply made it his business, arranged to come back here to California and work in the district and really was exemplary, in my opinion, in his attitude about it; after having been a full-time worker for the Communist party for thirty-five years, in his mid-sixties he taught himself a new trade, that of proofreader, and simply went back to work on a job while functioning out of working hours in a responsible position as a Communist leader. But Mac Weiss never really got over the enormous blow to his self-respect that this defeat had represented, that he had so little independent, individual standing in the party that he could be not elected. There was no question that it affected his future, leaving the party. At any rate, when the results were announced, Al Richmond, Charlene, and I were elected. I don't remember why Bill Schneiderman hadn't been; I can't for the life of me remember why.

GARDNER

This is the National Committee.

HEALEY

Yeah. I just don't remember. Oh, I do remember that--no, that came later, the attacks of the Soviet Union on Schneiderman. He had been elected to the National Committee, but not to the National Board, that was it. We elected an Acting National Board of the National Committee, the portion of the National Committee elected in New York.

GARDNER

And you were on that.

HEALEY

And I was on that, yeah. The only reason--the first knowledge I had of these slate things was that Will Weinstone had come up to me after the convention to say, "I want you to know, Dorothy, that my slate voted for you." I drew myself up, kind of offended, and said, "Yeah, well I don't really care, but why?" I knew we didn't have very much in common. He said, "Because of your position on Hungary." And I screamed, you know, "Nonsense!" But that's what I mean, this coincidence of positions uniting on some thing that didn't necessarily go far enough to make any unity on any other question.

GARDNER

Is there anything else that happened at the convention?

HEALEY

Well, the main thing that happened really was this restatement of the fact that we would not again in an oversimplified way adopt the positions of any "Marxists abroad" (that's the way I think we defined it) as our positions, that we would build and develop an independent capacity of applying Marxism-Leninism in our own country. One of the big debates of the convention--it was typically silly--was the new draft constitution for the Communist party's membership; it included the phrase "Marxism as interpreted by the American Communist party." Foster was leading a fight to take the words out "as interpreted by the Communist Party of the United States." All this was really shadowboxing around the main question of the relationship to the Soviet Union; that's really what it was around. And anything that in any way challenged that, Foster was fighting then.

GARDNER

Well, who emerged with the mantle of leadership then?

HEALEY

Well, that's the point. On the last day of the convention, there was a great show of unity: standing on the platform together, holding their hands above their heads, linked together were Gates, Davis, Foster, and Dennis to represent the party had not split; we were united. Well, it was really a very shallow unity, because almost immediately the split started to show. I first was aware of it very accidentally. On the last day of the convention--it was already over, as a matter of fact-Foster was standing in the back of the hall with his followers around him, five or six people, and as I walked by I heard him say to them, "Well, we may have lost this convention but we'll win the next one." I just froze. I said, "You know, Bill, what you're doing . . . ."

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 15, 1972

GARDNER

Now, as Mr. Connelly says, it would be interesting to find out what Dorothy said to Bill [Foster].

HEALEY

I quoted him that phrase from the Oscar Wilde poem about "Each man kills the thing he loves the best." I should say, I was telling him that there were members of the party here in Los Angeles--old-timers like that, old-timers --people like Celeste Strack, Frank Carlsen and others like that, old-timers in the leadership of the party--who, unless they felt that party was really going to be capable of change, would leave. He was saying, "Let them go, who cares?" And then he added, "You must understand, Dorothy, that even if the party goes down to only fifty members, if they are true Marxist-Leninists, staunch people, it doesn't matter. It is better to have fifty true members than 50,000 people who are not genuine Communists." Well, I was telling you some of the fights in the convention. For instance, one of the biggest fights was over this question of putting in the preamble to the constitution the phrase "Marxism as interpreted by our party," with the Foster people insisting that the words "as interpreted. . ." be left out on the ground that Marxism-Leninism was of a universal character, had validity to every country, and therefore there could be no question of independent interpretation. There was only one true Marxism-Leninism. But another fight was even around the use of the word "Marxism," without saying "Marxism-Leninism," with Foster and his people making--even before the convention, but at the convention as well--a big fight over the fact that the preamble simply said, "We base ourselves on the scientific outlook of Marxism," insisting that word "Marxism-Leninism" has to be in. I can remember, for instance, a debate that took place on that. Most of us thought it was the silliest debate in the world, saying, "My God," you know, "in physics they don't say Newtonian-Einsteinian physics. You don't add the name of every new creative adder to a scientific thought. The term 'Marxism1 represents Marxism as it is brought up to date by whatever the current theories would be," and that to attempt each time to [revise it was silly]. Back in the thirties it was Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, of course; that was the proper term. And now, as you know, the young Maoists always add "Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Tse-tung" thought as the correct term. You know, the real religiosity that is involved in that, almost the crossing of oneself, the "stations-of-the-cross" approach, to carry it one step further. [laughter] But that was also part of the debate. Another big part of the debate--and I mention it in more detail because all of these foreshadow the continuing fights within the party that are still current; none of them have ended--was around the question of democracy in the party. In this convention we succeeded in inserting in the constitution a clause on the right to dissent. Democratic centralism, we said, represented, of course, the continuing subordination of a minority to a majority after a debate and a vote had been taken. But that did not mean that the minority, first of all, did not have a right to have its position known throughout the party on the ground that what's a minority today could be a majority tomorrow if its position is known; but also that it had a right to: have that minoritv position recognized and recorded in the party as a whole. We still felt, all of us that were fighting on this, that as far as actions, the minority had to carry out the actions the majority decided on. But on estimates, on analysis, clearly you could not decide by a majority-minority vote as to whether the world did move or whether it didn't. Only the continuation of debate would resolve those questions. Then, on the question of "monolithic," that was another heated debate, with [many] of us wanting to take that phrase out of the definition of the party on the ground that it disguised the real fact, that it gave the impression that all Communists think alike on all questions, which is nonsense. It never was true; it never will be true. Well, those are indicative of the debates that were taking place on the internal structure; they were very hotly fought. On the external questions, on the world questions, well, there surfaced all kinds of things. There was Homer Chase's position from New England that said something about how--this was just at the time of the spirit of Geneva when the summit conferences were taking place--that this was all a big trap and.... I can't do justice to his position. It was some crazy position; that's all I remember. But there were big debates as to what, if any, were the divisions in the ranks of the ruling class. Part of the debate was that Foster had always presented past questions of differences in the United States through what we used to deride here in Los Angeles as the family-tree method of defining reality. In other words, he'd say that those imperialists who were part of this group-- they would be [defined] by virtue of the way their profits were made--have this position, and then there's the group of monopolists, and it would always be a very rigid definition of varying differences within ruling circles of the country. He said the only difference between them is simply over time and place, that they all are devoted to world war, and so forth--which didn't help you any in trying to figure out a tactical policy for today or how you advance momentary interest by taking care of whatever momentary differences there are. Of course, this is a long-standing debate even present today in all sections of the radical movement, how much difference it makes to you what differences exist in the ruling class of the United States. This was present then, and it is present even today. For instance, one could, I think, accurately say that all sections of the ruling class are united on the determination of the protection of imperialist interests; they are divided on how to do that. Now, there are those on the left who say that's a very momentary, unimportant difference. But we say--at least I feel very strongly on this--that it can be a very important difference because it gives the revolutionary movement time and elbow space to increase its influence in the working class movement. For instance, in Korea, when [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur wanted to put down a cobalt bomb to seal off Korea from China which would have sealed it off for fifty years in the future, and Truman refused to allow it and then fired him for insubordination, that among other things--sure, that's only a tactical difference, but it's a whale of a difference to the Koreans and to those who were fighting against war. The same thing was true with Roosevelt in the thirties and the forties with the various, with the [Alf] Landons and whatnot. Sure, Roosevelt was there to protect and secure capitalist interests. So was Hitler. But there was a big difference between the way Hitler wanted to do it and the way Roosevelt did it. Well, this became part of the debate, and it's still a present debate. All of these. Not one of the questions, obviously, has ended.

GARDNER

In other words, this was a moment really in which all these questions came out and were open to debate in a sort of unresolved way.

HEALEY

Exactly. That's right. And at least a larger number of Communists for the first time got an awareness of what the debate was all about. This is why democracy in the party is so important. When these debates only take place behind closed doors and all the membership gets is the final collective estimate of a leadership, you have no idea of the different alternatives that are debated. Therefore you don't really put your own mind to work on the policy questions. I think that's true as a problem of the communist movement. Well, then we held our first district convention in Los Angeles in 1957, the first one in the sense that we were now a separate district, no longer part of the state of California. This also had its personal aftermath. Bill Schneiderman, who had been the state chairman of the party from 1936 on, refused to remain as chairman of the Northern California party, one reason being that the Northern California party was a very much smaller one than Southern California, and he was damned if after having been a national leader based on his leadership of the second largest district in the country, he was now going to be the leader of a very small district. But in addition, what was also happening was the interference of the Soviet party in our affairs by their publications. A man by the name of [Boris] Ponomarev, who was the Soviet Central Committee member who worked on the international relations--that is, relations with foreign parties--wrote an article for a publication in the Soviet Union, Communist, their chief theoretical magazine, in which he denounced Bill Schneiderman by name for the articles Bill had written in preconvention discussion, where Bill had taken on the distortions of the concepts of democratic centralism, had documented how this had led to great bureaucracy in the party, and had taken on other sacred cows of the international movement. The language that was used about him was absolutely vile, the whole implication being that he had become part of a capitalist-influenced group within the party. He and another writer, by the name of A.B. Magil, who had been the foreign editor of the Daily Worker for many years, were denounced by name. We were just outraged by that, and this also caused a sharp battle with Dennis, because at this point we were fighting to see that our party publicly answered this and said it's a, lot of -- first, of all, we reject entirely your characterizations; and secondly, we deny your right to even personally describe individual Communist leaders this way. The Foster people, of course, didn't want anything done by the National Board because they were the ones responsible for having had Ponomarev write this in the first place. Dennis and the people around him didn't want to do anything because Dennis was becoming increasingly afraid of what he called "the right danger in the party," and anything that he thought strengthened that, or anything that took on too sharply the question of the Soviet Union, he didn't want any part of it. A very cautious man. We were just outraged by his role, his nonrole in this, because the least thing the party [should do] is defend its own leadership. Of course, again there was the particularly personal note around Schneiderman. It meant more to him--I mean, I wouldn't have given a damn if the Soviet Union wrote about me; it wouldn't matter to me a bit. But Bill had been in the Soviet Union as the American representative to the Communist International from "34 to '36; all that generation that grew up both working within the Soviet Union and as part of the party apparatus had a feeling about the Soviet Union that was incredibly strong. This was just a dominant aspect of their life. So that for Bill it was even sadder than for a lot of people, this first-hand attack. He was just outraged when his own comrades, his own coworkers, would not take up the cudgels on his behalf. He practically had to fight it by himself. The national org secretary of the party at that time--there were two people who pretty much represented the positions that people like me were fighting on. One was a man by the name of Fred Fine, the one who I described who had come through earlier to represent the national office in interviewing party leaders in 1955, and a man by the name of Sid Stein, who--I don't remember their exact titles; one was the executive secretary and one was the org secretary, I really don't remember any longer. But what they undertook to do was to keep those of us on the National Board who were out of town advised of the deliberations of the resident leadership so that when we came into town we'd know about it. Of course, it's true, they kept us advised in a rather one-sided way, and in my innocence I didn't recognize that. I would have been far more independently critical, probably, because I am a person very critical of everything, except that by this time I was simply so--it was my first close contact with national leaders, and what was very disillusioning to me was that this feeling I'd had of these almost omniscient human beings who could sit in deliberation and come out with all kinds of extraordinarily able interpretations [was utterly invalid]. When I got into close contact with them I discovered to ray great horror they didn't know any more than I knew. And that was simply the most terrible blow to me. I wanted and needed to feel that here were people who I could look up to, who did know a great deal more than I did and who had at their command all kinds of extraordinary knowledge and sophisticated estimates and appraisals. When I found that they were very much of a muchness, you know--now, that didn't go to their character; lots of them were very fine, self-sacrificing individuals. But they simply were not extraordinary individuals, neither enormously gifted nor talented, any more than I was. As I say, I was brought up wanting, as others were, to be able to look up to and respect your leadership as being, if not infallible, at least more nearly infallible than anybody else, more nearly always correct than other people. And going back to those meetings, was, as I say, just enormously a heart-wrench for me, to discover how much of a muchness there was about all of us. Well, the battles nationally just kept escalating all through '57.

GARDNER

How many board members were there?

HEALEY

Twenty-one, I think, or twenty-three, something like that. An odd number. I'd said earlier I wasn't sure whether Schneiderman was on the National Board-- now I remember. What had happened is that I was the only one from California on this new National Board before the rest of the committee was elected from the districts--a practice which was soon rejected at a later convention. There were great discussions that were held before the meetings as to who should be added from California. I mentioned that Bill Schneiderman refused to be the chairman of the Northern California district, and Mickey Lima was elected. I insisted that Mickey ought to be placed on the board rather than Schneiderman, although I had a far greater respect for Schneiderman than I had for Lima, because I said it would be impossible for Lima as the new chairman to function if somebody else was in the National Board and he wasn't, that you had to give him elbowroom to grow and develop, and he couldn't do it if Schneiderman was placed back again on the board while Mickey still would have the responsibility of being the state chairman, the Northern California chairman. It's ironic, because Mickey, when he came on the National Board, at subsequent meetings where the rest of us were purged from the National Board, his position was just the opposite. He became one of the greatest protagonists of rigidity that had been. The battles, as I say, started almost immediately, first of all in the districts. The New York district was being just torn apart, and that's where the first big exodus from the party took place. The people who had been the foremost protagonists of change, the need of change in the party, left the party in New York. And that meant that the people who were representing their position, people like George [Blake] Charney, were left alone, without allies, with no support. Ben Davis was the main expression within the New York district fighting for [the left position]--he wanted to take over the New York leadership as the new head of the party. George Charney had been the chairman. And to my great embarrassment, I remember that on behalf of the National Board I was chairman of the subcommittee to meet with the New York board, the New York district, to convince George Charney to agree to a cochairmanship between himself and Ben Davis--the two of them would share the party leadership. First of all, it was a ridiculous proposal; in such an organization you can't have a divided leadership of that kind. Secondly, when you have two diametrically opposed viewpoints as regards the questions of the debate, such as those that Davis and Charney represented, it becomes even more of an absurdity. As I say, I am chagrined when I remember my very important role in doing that. George and I were very close friends and had great regard for one another. We always sat next to one another at National Committee meetings. He was one of the few Communists I ever knew in the leadership who had a sense of humor; he'd write the most delightful poems taking off on both the individuals and the subjects we were debating with such solemnity. I really dug it. And I'm sure that if we hadn't been so close, he would not have been convinced by everyone else to yield his own position and make way for Ben Davis. Of course, it didn't work, and the Foster group just kept up a real drumfire of attack on Charney and on all the others. Comparable things were taking place in our district, as I said. For the first time we were having factional fights here, with the center of the opposition being Charlene [Mitchell]. Very, very bright young woman.

GARDNER

Opposition in what sense?

HEALEY

To our policies. I don't really remember what all the fights were about in '57. Do you? CONNELLY: She was espousing the Foster position.

HEALEY

Yeah. One of them--I really don't remember now, although I remember what came up in '59 later with her, but I don't remember all the fights then.

GARDNER

How long did the Foster-Gates-Dennis struggle go on?

HEALEY

Well, Johnny Gates left the party in about January of 1958, somewhere around there, maybe earlier.

GARDNER

What were the circumstances?

HEALEY

First of all, the New York people, the Foster people, were refusing to turn over funds to keep the Daily Worker alive. A resolution came into the National Board to suspend the daily operations of the paper and to turn it into a weekly. Even though, as I say, I dislike Johnny Gates intensely, politically and personally, I was fighting this on the ground that it was a subterfuge, that what they were doing was challenging his policies on the paper and using organizational means to do it. It was really a vicious struggle, because they really were literally starving the Daily. They were keeping funds that were meant for the Daily Worker away from it; they wouldn't give them the funds, just making it impossible for it to function. You must remember that simultaneously Howard Fast, who had been a columnist for the paper and of course was the most notable leftist American writer, left the party with a very sharp attack on the party. Allan Max, who'd been the managing editor of the Daily and was one--I mean, Johnny Gates was no newspaperman and Slim, for instance, had only the utmost contempt for these commissars who were placed on top of newspaper people to edit papers. But it is true that the staff of the Daily Worker had a high regard for him because he fought their battles energetically. He was really a very hard-fighting man, while most editors always gave in; I mean, these political commissar editors always gave in to whatever the national leadership's posir , tion was at the moment. Allan Max was the managing editor and a very talented man. He left around then. Finally, when the motion was passed about suspending the Daily Worker, making it a weekly, that coupled with all the other fights which were taking place, Johnny called a press conference and announced his resignation from the party. There were byplays within that, too. I remember Jack Stachel was one of the old-time leaders of the party from its inception, always a top leader of the party. We had been having caucus meetings of the groups of us--I went back to attend these meetings, mainly because it was the only way you could find out what was going on, all the "who-shot-Johns" that took place in your absence. The only one I wouldn't meet with, really, in the same room with, was Johnny Gates. I just absolutely refused to be part of any caucus that had Johnny Gates. But Mickey and I both were attending these meetings of Fred Fine, Sid Stein, Carl Ross, Dave Davis from Pittsburgh, Mike Russo, a very talented sculptor from New England, from Boston. And Jack Stachel was also part of it. I remember that when it was very clear that we were not going to win--we were being outvoted and there were big fights taking place on things which I'll describe separately, because again they have continuing significance (otherwise I wouldn't bother with them)--Stachel just switched his positions from right to left; I mean, he just passed us without a twinkle of an eye. [laughter] He was the one that made the big speech in the National Committee meeting of February 1958, the attack on all that Gates was supposed to represent and everything else, but mainly it was an attack on us. What the fights had been about--and as I say, it has relevance today--the first was over something called "the twelve-party statement." The parties of the socialist countries had gathered together in fall of '57 and had issued a statement--and this was China and the Soviet Union and all the others together--defining their estimate of the world and what was happening and where to go. The statement isn't terribly important in itself. What was important was the fact that the motions were immediately made in our National Board that we should endorse it. The rest of us violently opposed that on the ground, "What for? Why should we endorse the statements made by their parties as to how they estimate the current questions? We'll make our own. We weren't there; we weren't part of the debate." And that became a national fight, including in our district, with people around Charlene and others leading the fight that we should formally have to adopt this twelve-party statement, and the rest of us saying, "Nonsense." And that was one of the things that was present at that time, a great battle. In February of '58 a National Committee meeting was called. By this time there was a very strong organized ultraleft group in the party, led in the National committee by a black man by the name of Charlie Loman. Of course, Foster was the main leader. Charlene was part of it. Buirt Nelson in Seattle and Milford Sutherland in Seattle were part of it. Lloyd Brown, the novelist, was part of it. I don't remember all the other names. There was to be a showdown meeting at this National Committee around the twelve-party statement, but including--there had to be. . . . That was it: there was to be a new election for a new National Board. Dennis was momentarily uniting with these ultraleft groups that he had nothing in common with in order to defeat Fred Fine and Sid Stein who'd become the symbolic leaders of the other forces, the rest of us opposing this going back. We kept saying that all they were doing was to tear up the Sixteenth Convention resolution, which was the truth. Dennis came in with a slate of proposals for the new National Executive Board to be elected. This was a Sunday that he was making the proposals. There'd been a meeting of some of the people I associated with, what was called the right, on Saturday night, the night before, to discuss what to do; I couldn't be at the meeting because Sam Kushner and Carl Winter, one from Chicago and the other from Detroit, had insisted I go have discussions with them on what was taking place, and I did. I didn't really care about the meeting anyway; I thought that by this time they'd come to conclusions, and all these meetings were just a waste of time, beating your gums. But I had sent word to this meeting that I was not going to stay on the National Board, that if I was not able [to make any headway], I would not accept, that I considered it a total waste of time and uselessness, futility, and I didn't propose to keep going back to those silly meetings. Mickey was at that meeting of the caucus, and it was finally decided, he told me, that everybody would do what they wanted to do; there would be no attempt to tell anybody what to do, whether they should accept or not, or should fight to be on. Well, the next day Gene Dennis comes in with a slate of recommendations to make, and my name is not on it. Somebody from the California delegation nominates me, and I make a very fiery speech in declining the nomination. But at any rate, what happened then was quick, what happened in the votes, because the Dennis forces--Dennis's main support came from Chicago, the Kushner people--they united with the ultraleft; and Sid Stein was out, Fred Fine, and a whole number of other people. And of course I hadn't accepted. Mickey was elected. Mickey came over to me, very shamefaced, and said, "Look, I think I really ought to be on. One of us ought to stay on, but I want you to know," he says, "I'm sending word to all our friends in the caucus that I'm there as their representative." I said, "Well, do what you like, I'm nobody else's conscience, Use your own judgment. I can't stand it. It just sickens me to watch this nonsense. But you use your own judgment." And again, it's only ironic in the sense that within three months he had totally forsaken the people he had said he was going to represent and was the archexponent of the tough line and a tough policy. Well, the Hungarian events were still continuing, in the sense that Nagy had been given safekeeping in one of the embassies--I don't remember which . . . the Rumanian. And just before our National Committee meeting in June the Soviet Union had delivered him back to the Hungarians. And the day before the National Committee meeting was to start, the Worker--not the Daily Worker because it was no longer a daily--came out with an editorial. Nagy was arrested and executed, and the Worker came out with an editorial written by Joe North applauding the execution. We were just outraged. First of all, to do this was a--I mean, it was an international question that required a National Committee position. And to do it one day before we were to meet, to deprive us of our right to debate with what the Worker had said, was outrageous. Of course, it illustrates the real absurdity of a lot of these debates on what is democratic centralism, because as long as the resolution coincided with what Dennis and/or the ultraleft wanted at this point, they didn't mind the violation of democratic centralism. When Johnny Gates did it, then they screamed to high heaven that principle had been violated. The Lord is with the legions of strength; your heart is right when it's your position that you want vindicated. Well, that was one thing that a group of us, eleven of us, attacked. There was Al Richmond, Si Gerson, Ben Dobbs--I don't remember the other names. First we attacked it on its substance itself, the question of the execution of Nagy. Again I remember a portion of the speech I made there on the question which became--ooooh--a very controversial thing, used against me from then on. I quoted my mother, said my mother had said, "How do you account for the fact that Rakosi could live through eighteen years of prison in a fascist prison, in [Miklos] Horthy's fascist prison in Hungary, but Nagy couldn't live through one year of a socialist prison?" [This] being a violation again of socialist concepts. That meant that I didn't understand, I was told, the superiority of socialism over capitalism, [laughter] Then the other thing of great challenge that I made was--Dennis made a speech, as usual, in which he resumed the attack on Yugoslavia. You know, first there'd been the reconciliation, as I told you, taking place with the Soviet Union in 1954, at which point, of course, we stopped all our attacks on it. But then new differences arose and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia had just had a congress, the proceedings of which none of us knew yet, had not yet been made public. Nothing was known about it except a couple of vague references in the New York Times. But nobody knew what its substance was. But Dennis went through the ritual again of condemning it as having left the path of socialism, that it was no longer a socialist country because of this congress. Everybody was accepting it, and I was just furious. "Here we go again," I said, "adopting a position about which we know absolutely nothing. What do you know? What does anybody here know about what their congress did? And what right have we got to make these judgments?" Well, at this point Ben Davis stood up--this was after Nagy and after Yugoslavia--and made a very fiery speech demanding that the National Committee take a vote and go on record that the Los Angeles party should remove me as chairman. The rest of the national people got a little upset about this. One thing, they knew they couldn't do it. They knew they'd lose in any such vote in Los Angeles at that point, and nobody likes to have that happen, you know, make a motion that you haven't got the power to enforce. Secondly, they were still worried about the effects of what would happen if anything happened, you know, even if they could do it here in the L.A. party, because we still were the second strongest district. Also at this time Bob Thompson had become the org secretary to replace Sid Stein. Bob had gotten out of jail--he'd been in jail on the Smith Act. He'd been attacked by a fascist in the jail, had been hit over the head with an iron pipe, suffered a skull fracture, and had a plate put in his head.

GARDNER

He was the old war hero, wasn't he?

HEALEY

Yes. He was younger than most of them.

GARDNER

Yeah, by old, I mean formerly.

HEALEY

That's right. He had been a hero of the Spanish Civil War; then in World War II, he was a staff sergeant and then had been proposed for a battlefield commission by this commanding general because of his great initiative in, I think, New Guinea, someplace like that. He had won a silver star, had all kinds of distinguished commendations. Bob had gotten out in the fall of '57 and had really been the one to stiffen up Gene Dennis and make the alliance with this ultraleft group. Bob made a report as org secretary in which he made as a central question the quote, "fight for the standards of democratic centralism and of membership." What that meant was very clear, that dissent had to be silenced, that there had to be only one expressed line, and anybody who didn't do it was to be driven out of leadership. So, of course, many of us attacked that position as well--to no avail, but we did. When I got back here to Los Angeles, however, this very significant group of leaders of the party for a long time, the people I talked about earlier--Celeste Strack, Louise Todd, Oleta Yates, Frank Carlsen, Don Wheeldon, Lou Baron, Bob Klonsky, whole numbers of others--decided that it was useless to try to continue the fight within the party. And while I battled them back and forth--you know, it was nonsense; I mean, it was true that they weren't immediately influencing national policy, but there was nothing to stop them from speaking out and trying to influence Los Angeles policy, which is where they were--they nevertheless issued a statement. I think there were twenty-three of them altogether, all well-known names, and they issued a statement, a very grandiloquent statement, that they were leaving the party in order to rejoin the mainstream of Americans to fight for socialism there. Well, that started a whole new fight then again in the L.A. party. There were two big fights immediately before us. The first was this position of Ben Davis's that I should be removed; I think it was Max Steinberg who made the motion in Los Angeles at a very large meeting that we should carry that through and I should be removed. But even the people who supported that motion here in L.A. insisted he withdraw it, that it not come to a vote. Only partly was it because they knew they couldn't win; also it was the fact that still, in spite of the harsh and sharp developments here internally, it was still not as bad as elsewhere. There was still the working relationship that all of us had together. You ought to always remember that these big dramatic things were only part of our lives. In the meantime, 90 percent of our time was spent on the things that the party was always concerned with in a local area--the fight for jobs, the fight for security, the fight against oppression and repression, whatever it may be. We were always occupied on electoral politics, a million and one things of a local character, and we never had any differences on those things, which again indicates something of how artificial some of these differences are on other questions. And there was still a bond that was present because we did function together 90 percent of the time very amicably with no disagreement. But when these people left the party--and it was happening all over the country; comparable kinds of people were leaving--what it really meant was that my generation was leaving. We had lost the younger generation to me immediately after the Twentieth Congress when the Labor Youth League went out of existence; that was our youth. Then with this new thing, my generation was leaving, the generation that had grown up in the Young Communist League, that had a great deal of experience in both mass work and in party leadership, the people who had done the writing and the things of this kind. It was a far more significant blow than we'd recognized at the time, just in terms of competency, just to be able to do the things, as I say, the ordinary things that preoccupied you 90 percent of your time as a revolutionary.

GARDNER

How large was the dropout at that time?

HEALEY

Well, by that time we really were in trouble. We'd gone down to 3,200 members. And the loss just kept going. We'd do some recruiting, but it was never enough to offset the losses of this sector of the party that was going, the middle generation. We were not recruiting the young sufficiently to compensate for it. Oh! I remember vignettes of the period that are illustrative of the atmosphere. The needle traders, the old Jewish comrades, the 1905ers, the salt of the earth, really, but usually the base of the worst kind of dogmatism (what they had learned in the past was all that they knew-- and they didn't even know that too accurately, but that was it): I remember shocking them terribly, absolutely innocently, once when I went to speak to them. I really had a very high regard for them. As a matter of fact, one of the things that I hated about Johnny Gates was his literal contempt for these people. I really loved them. They were people who'd lived all their lives fighting for what they thought was the right thing, and I had only the highest personal regard for them. I did consider them a political obstacle, in the sense that new thoughts couldn't come through. But it wasn't their fault; they were not responsible for that. If the national people had given the signal, they'd have changed their positions upside down without even a thought. They thought they were holding onto the truth, the Holy Grail of virtue that they had discovered. I remember how shocked they were once when I went to speak with them. We used to make the rounds of all the club meetings and industrial meetings on these big fights. I wanted to get at this question that all we could talk about was how great we'd been in the 1930s, but we didn't talk about how we weren't so great in the 1950s. So I told them the story about the eighty-year-old woman who'd gone to confession and said, "Oh, Father, Father, forgive me, I have sinned." And he said, "What have you done, daughter?" She said, "I slept with a man and I wasn't married to him." "Oh, my!" he said, "that's terrible. But before I can give you absolution"--or whatever they get--"when did this happen?" She says, "Forty years ago." "Well," he says, "why do you come tell me about it now?" She says, "I enjoyed it so much I like to keep talking about it." Well, you know, I would think the point of that was apparent, but they were outraged. They went around all over the town saying, "Dorothy is telling dirty sex jokes at the party meetings." [laughter] "That shows how far to the right she's gone: she brings sex jokes into the party." Well, then came the preparations for the 1959 convention. Here something very, very new entered the party. Gus Hall had just been released from parole; he'd been in jail longer than the others because he'd been picked up later. None of us here in California really knew him. He'd been an Ohio leader of the party; he'd been the acting general secretary in 1950 while Gene Dennis was in jail on charges of contempt of the Un-American Committee. CONNELLY: A former steel organizer in Ohio is where he got his reputation.

HEALEY

Yeah, but none of us really knew him terribly well. He came out, ostensibly on a vacation with his family, and stayed here. Again, my naivete is really disgusting, because what he was doing that I didn't realize fully--I realized part of it but not fully--he was leading a campaign to replace Gene Dennis as general secretary of the party with himself. In pursuance of that he would sit here and tell me stories about what Gene had done in great, enormous, terrible detail, things I'd never heard of. And I believed him. It just didn't occur to me that there would be an ulterior motive why he was doing this. It literally didn't cross my mind that that could be present. Gradually--he stayed here two weeks--in the course of his so-called "vacation," he was building up the idea that to save the party we had to get rid of Gene. It's not that I was the greatest fan in the world of Gene; I had no reason to be. What I was mainly concerned about--it was clear that the convention was going to be a collision again with the Poster-Davis forces. Davis wanted to be the national chairman of the party. Nobody really wanted him as national chairman because he was enormously concerned with himself, his own ambitions and desires, and there was a great feeling that this post would simply place him in a position to continue being a veto power on any move to break forward, to plow new ground for the party, that it would primarily fulfill a personal ambition and not a political need. But we, most of us, people in my thinking, also realized that Gene was not going to be able to keep the party united. He simply didn't have the human capacity for it, much less the political. And here comes this Gus Hall, who's an extraordinarily charming man, very, very winning when he wants to be, and who seemingly is in full agreement with us--and this is the important part--on the political questions, most importantly on our approach and relationship with the Soviet Union. He came to two board meetings of ours, district board meetings, where we explained our position in great detail. First, the fact that we felt we had no apologies to make for the position of the party in the thirties in regard to the Soviet Union, but that that was no longer needed. They no longer stood alone; there were fourteen socialist countries. Our partisanship went to defend all fourteen and yet [retained] the right to be critical of any one of the fourteen when we thought it necessary; above all that we had to develop our policies independent of their particular needs at any one point. And he totally agreed with us.

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO JANUARY 4, 1973

GARDNER

When we left off, last year, you were talking about Gus Hall and the events leading up to the 1959 convention. Do you want to take it up there?

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, I mentioned that he'd come twice and met twice with our district board here in Los Angeles; really the central question that was discussed at both meetings was what attitude we'd take in regard to the socialist world--as a whole, but in the main to the Soviet Union because of our history, our almost automatic reflex actions that took up where the Soviet Union was concerned. I remember very clearly that at both meetings he assured us that he agreed with us totally, that there had to be a change in our past approaches which really amounted to this slavish reproduction of what their positions were at any one moment. I remember the language he used, that not only was it no longer necessary because there were now fourteen socialist countries, but that it did them no service to do that, to have that approach, because it did not allow them then to develop independently in terms of their own culture and history and present needs, Well, we were very, very much impressed with him; all of us on the district board, or almost all of us on the district board, were impressed with him. But what I didn't know is that when he left here to go back east, throughout the country, as a matter of fact, where he was campaigning--I should add, by the way, that it's really unprecedented and unheard of for a quote, "campaign," unquote, to take place in regard to high office; it just doesn't happen (at least, I don't know of any other time it happened as directly as that; I imagine that back in the '28 to '32 period there were some, but nothing comparable to this)--he went around the country telling people that Southern California and Dorothy Healey were in full support of his becoming the general secretary. I had no knowledge of this. I had no knowledge of the fact that as a result of these speeches he was making that this was picked up, I guess by the FBI, to be given over to their favorite columnists; and there was a column that appeared by Jack Lotto in the Hearst papers, which I didn't see, stating that I was the one that was pushing Gus Hall for general secretary and that this represented a big shift in regard to the current trends within the Communist party. I only got to know of this by two things that happened, one immediately after the 1959 convention opened, when I became very alarmed at what I saw Gus doing. It didn't seem in harmony and consonance with what he had told us. I remember Claude Lightfoot, one of the important national Black leaders of the party, a long-time leader, came up to me and said, "Gee, I don't understand why you were quarreling about Gus. After all, you're the one that made it possible to put him in." And I couldn't understand what he was talking about. In the first place, who the hell were we here in Southern California? And secondly, what the hell did I have to do with it one way or another? I'd never expressed any opinion on this question. I hadn't even been aware of all the things that were taking place on the National Executive Board, where Gene was being challenged, and where finally an agreement had been worked out in the National Executive Board that Gene would become the national chairman and Gus would become the general secretary and they would work in tandem. I hadn't even known that at the time. The second occurrence when I became aware that I was being used in this way was when Peggy Dennis, Gene Dennis's wife, told me some two or three or four years later that this had become used as the argument, that Southern California, this maverick district that was always on its own, was supporting Gus Hall for general secretary, and that this had been used very effectively in other districts and in the National Executive Board debates, most particularly in the National Executive Board debates. But, as I say, I don't think any of us here were ever totally aware of it. At any rate, the delegation that was elected for the 1959 convention from Southern California to go back east was certainly not a delegation that was particularly overwhelmingly favorable to my viewpoint. I would say that probably 60 percent was, but 40 percent certainly wasn't. And we were rather proud of it, because we were a district leadership that believed in the need of having various trends represented and not trying to have just machine-like operation where only one viewpoint was heard. We did generally believe that you could not advance without the clash of opinion, and that to have a clash of opinion, people had to be represented in leading posts. Well, the convention took place in the Teresa Hotel in Harlem. Among other things, the party could still not rent facilities in most places in New York; the anti-Communist hysteria was still so great. Parenthetically, one of my memories of it is that I rented a room at that hotel, and all my clothes were stolen, [laughter] Everything I had was stolen from the hotel room.

GARDNER

That's the same thing that happened to [Fidel] Castro a year or two later.

HEALEY

Yes, exactly, that's right. He stayed at the Teresa, which became his headquarters. This indicates, of course, the fact that in Harlem, in the Black community, there was never the kind of McCarthyism, the anti-Communist hysteria, that was present in the rest of the society.

GARDNER

And that's still true.

HEALEY

That isn't as much true, but it is still some- what true. Well, there were a number of main trends being fought about at that convention. Foster was too sick to come, but he was very much a presence even in his absence because of the people who were there representing his viewpoint-- sometimes directly representing his viewpoint, sometimes only coincidentally as it helped their own approach. [I'm thinking of] Ben Davis, Jr.; I'd say he was one of the main ones. But throughout the country there were people who considered themselves the representatives of the Foster position. And Ben, as I say, was making a major thrust for the position. Then there was Gus Hall. And here you had a curious kind of thing that was happening, something which was not usual in my experience in the party, of people with opposing viewpoints who were supporting his candidacy or his approach, more than anything else, one, because it prevented an outright split in the party (it looked as though it might unify the party, hold it together to follow through at some future point to new ground); and secondly because, as I later found, different districts had different ideas as to what his position was anyway. A whole number of the people with whom I had been formally associated had already left the party nationally, most notably Fred Fine, people around him, with whom I'd probably been closest among the national people. My memory of that whole thing is not too clear. I remember I was on the Presiding Committee; that's the overall body elected at the start of the convention that acts, in a sense, as an executive committee of the convention because the moment a convention opens in the Communist party, the past leadership is no longer supposedly operative any longer, and therefore the Presiding Committee is elected as an interim between the past leadership and the new one to be elected. It became very clear in the course of the Presiding Committee that Gus was flirting with the forces we defined as the ultraleft and their thrust, the Foster-Ben Davis forces mainly. (The curious interplay of people and the positions changed so often and so rapidly that those terms left and right really had no great theoretical, political significances as representing sides or categories.) But I remember Hy Lumer and Carl Winter, who were very important national leaders even then--Carl particularly-- I remember meeting with them and telling them what was going on in the Presiding Committee, how I was watching this alliance that Gus was making. They were supposedly the closest ones to Gus, and they demanded two meetings with him to demand that he stop this kind of conciliatory approach. Then there was a very small, not very important, ultraleft position represented by a very sad man by the name of Homer Chase, an emotionally disturbed human being, [advocating] the rejection of any possibility of an international detente (the "spirit of Camp David" was still present, as you remember, at that time). But what he represented was almost miniscule. There was a big debate at that convention on the question of Black liberation. Under the leadership of James Jackson, a new resolution had been prepared for discussion before the convention which in effect stated that Black people in the United States no longer constituted an oppressed nation. We still said, "an oppressed nationality," but not a nation. That was an important differentiation for us because a nation has the right to self-determination up to and including secession. We'd always supported what we considered to be that right. Their argument was that the material base for that definition--mainly the existence of a majority of Black people tied to the land within the Black Belt of the Deep South and the plantation economy as the dominant mode of the economy--no longer existed. The migrations out of the South had taken place, industrialization had come to the South, and therefore there was no longer the plantation system; the agrarian economy was no longer the determining question. They argued that as a result, as I say, the definition of our estimate of the status of Black people [had to] change. Well, there was a very sharp battle over that, with many Black comrades being totally opposed to any change (most notably here were Cyril Briggs, Bill Taylor, and Charlene Mitchell), opposed to any change in the estimate. With the rest of us, I think there was more or less just kind of a sigh of relief because it had never been a concept that we had been able to do anything with in the mass movement. Nobody really understood how it could operate, what it represented. It was very much resented by large sections of Black people as being a new form of separation. But that was one of the most hotly debated questions. Another one was on the question of the perspectives on the independent youth movement of the party, independent only in the sense that it would be a separate organization from the party, and what approach to take on the question. That debate continued really for almost the next full decade, all through the sixties, with sharp disagreements all the way through. It only came to the surface there in ‘59, but it continued unabated roughly--without being too precise about it, because the dates of the changes in the policy are also present--[for the next decade]. Roughly what it involved were the differences as to how you go about assembling a mass base for starting a new Marxist youth organization. Our position here on the West Coast, and in Los Angeles particularly, was that we should do two things: one, we should have a party youth section that would allow us in the name of the party again to group together the new generation because it was true that with the dissolution of the Labor Youth League after the Twentieth Congress, we had practically lost a generation of youth, and we had to regroup a Communist cadre again; but simultaneously we believed that we should have our greatest emphasis in the mass youth, the democratic youth movement. (And by democratic I don't mean capital D but small d, what later became SDS and these approaches.)

GARDNER

Were there any organizations at all at that time that involved youth?

HEALEY

Yes, there were a number, none of them extraordinarily large or significant, because that was still the end of the decade where there was no nationwide organization of left youth. But there already were indications of the regrowth in areas.

GARDNER

What were some of the groups?

HEALEY

Well, there were the groups around the fight for equality. This had started with the Birmingham bus business and the Little Rock, Arkansas, integration fight. Around this whole fight for equality, there were already new signs of a breakthrough in that regard, both among white and Black youth, on and off campus. And around the fight against the atom bomb testing, which was the big issue at that point, there again had been regrouped significant youth groups, but not nationally. Young people acted in the antiwar fight, the anti-H-bomb-testing fight.

GARDNER

But they weren't in organizations that were really directly Communist party organizations.

HEALEY

No, no, none of them were. That's really what I mean by democratic youth: mass youth, not party organizations, nor necessarily even Marxist. They rarely were.

GARDNER

What about, as you say, the first bus boycotts and integration fights? Though Dr. [Martin Luther] King really didn't come into prominence until the Kennedy years, was there discussion of King and his situation?

HEALEY

Yes. As a matter of fact, I wrote an article that was printed in the Political Affairs in February, 1958, taking on the lack of analysis of the national party's documents. I started off giving the example of Jim Jackson's report on what was happening in "the Negro people's movement." As I remember, my main criticism was that here was a whole new phenomena around Martin Luther King in that one saw wedded together in a new way the traditional institutions of, quote, "Negro people" (that is, the churches, the insurance organizations, all the mass organizations) plus the ideology of Thoreau and Gandhi, of nonviolent resistance. This was something entirely new, and Jim had just not even given any thought or attention to it, nor analyzed it. I argued that we were simply pragmatically reacting to events, but we weren't analyzing them. You should understand that for size we were enormously active in these movements. In Los Angeles we had built up a very significant support movement for the Birmingham bus boycott, putting out all kinds of leaflets and cards. I remember a particular card, "They walked for freedom, you should do something else for freedom." We had picket lines. We forced through in our picket lines the hiring; we broke the [policy] at Sears Roebuck on Slauson and Vermont, where no Black people were employed--this kind of activity going on. There was a Florence Fair Play Committee that we helped initiate, Florence being an area to the east of my house here.

GARDNER

North of Watts.

HEALEY

Yes, it's north of Watts. Around housing and discrimination, Jim Crow generally--we were very active in those movements. But what we were outraged about is that there was no national strategy that was being seen, [no analysis of] what was new as far as the history of struggles for equality. Certainly one of the newest things was that symbolized around Martin Luther King; he was already known as the significant new national leader (it didn't just wait for the Kennedy years) because of the Birmingham bus boycott, which he hadn't initiated but of which he became the big leader, the figure that symbolized it.

GARDNER

What was the general party attitude? Or better yet, maybe a more interesting question would be, what was Dr. King's attitude towards the party? Was there much interchange?

HEALEY

I can't say that for sure. His assistant for many years--all I know, again, is what I read about it, because I never really asked--his top assistant, [Jack H.] O'Dell, was later Red-baited out on the charge that he was a member of the party; King "reluctantly fired" or "regretfully fired" him. But judging by King's speeches at the Freedomways celebration--that was a magazine which the party helped initiate--at some big celebration around Dr. DuBois, in his approaches (I'm not talking about his actions now, but in his approaches), he probably came closest of anyone to approximating what we would consider a Marxist concept, in that he first of all always saw together the question of the fight against oppression and exploitation; in other words, he dealt with both of them. He was certainly the first important Black leader to speak out against the war in Vietnam. Where we would have been critical was the same thing that the young Black militants were critical of: his going into an area, starting something, and then leaving it when it became crucial and going on to something else.

GARDNER

Plus the passive resistance after a while. One of the things that the young Blacks in the South started tiring of was getting watered down.

HEALEY

Yeah. I'm not so sure that we would have broken with him on that, criticized him on it, mainly for tactical reasons. While we don't strategically believe in pacifism, nevertheless, we've always estimated who's got the strength, and there's no question that if that tactic hadn't been used, they would have been mown down by the tens of thousands by machine guns. The tactic was successful. Later, there were great battles in the party all during the sixties over this question of the right to self-defense, most of us out here on the West Coast and most of the young Black comrades sayting that there absolutely is that right. It came to a head around the argument concerning the Deacons for Defense, when they were organized, with our saying, "Great, that's exactly what's needed," and some of the people, most notably Jim Jackson (but not him alone), being very fearful of all this. Again, we saw it as an example of what I think I indicated to you on an earlier tape, the danger of tactics raping strategy, your imperceptibly allowing the need for a momentary response to get elongated out into becoming a permanent, long-range tactic. That would certainly be true as far as the question of the right to defense, which is, good God, not just a Marxist question; it's a very easily understood mass question, again, a democratic one in our use of the word democratic.

GARDNER

So by 1959, at any rate, the national Black and youth movements had really sort of gotten under way--or at least the Blacks had gotten under way quite actively, and in the case of the youth organizations, there were those like anti-nuclear-energy and so on.

HEALEY

And there were beginnings of fights on campuses around academic freedom, the right to hear unpopular speakers and so forth. Well, obviously there must have been a great deal, because in 1960 the decade started with two great big things as far as youth was concerned: one was, again, the heightened thing around Black liberation with the refusal in Greensboro, North Carolina, where the sit-ins of Black youth first took place; the other was in San Francisco, the mass fight against HUAC, which in a way triggered off a whole new chain. Following then closely on that here in California was the enormous youth response to the fight against the execution of Caryl Chessman, which again opened up whole new areas of struggle. It's a big political lesson--I mean, around Caryl Chessman most particularly. We would never at any time have considered that any significant movement could be built around saving an, in quotes, "admitted rapist" from execution. We didn't initiate that. But we soon saw what was going on, that it had become a genuine mass question of great concern and great organizing [potential] and politically important lessons on the fight around the question of the immorality of not only the death penalty but against whom death penalties were used, the class question. It's the poor, the Black, the defenseless, and so forth.

GARDNER

Plus the question of rehabilitation in Chessman's case, the idea that he'd become very well educated and a writer while he was in prison.

HEALEY

Of course. That also opened up a big fight in the party. Another thing, again related to the Soviet Union--but this was a year later in 1962 (I had gone to the Soviet Union in 1961, about which more detail later)-- but while I was there they had just passed the legislation putting back the death penalty for economic crimes. And I was just outraged. How barbaric and medieval can you getl Everywhere I went, we were always having interviews with top party leaders of every area, and I'd keep raising it, "Why at this point do you go backwards in time?" Well, when I came back, in reporting, we were fighting on it. I remember Ben Davis came out here. (Now, as you can tell, I have very ambivalent feelings about Ben. On one hand, he was one of the most eloquent people in the party, a great speaker, a very effective person, and really far more able in analysis than others were that I saw around nationally. On the other hand, he always mixed in with the questions what I considered subjective questions, personal ego and whatnot. Little did I realize at that stage even then, as late as then, how common that was, not how unique it was. I just thought it was . . . .) Anyway, there were big fights on this capital punishment with my raising the question, "How can it be that we say capital punishment is wrong under capitalism, and yet tolerate it or even approve it under socialism?" After all, socialism, etc., should mark the more advanced social order. I remember a big party mass meeting we had here in 1962 at which Ben spoke, where he very vehemently defended the correctness of capital punishment in the Soviet Union, that it was absolutely correct to do this. And again, the response to that speech in our own party here indicated the continuing problem with the people who simply could not ever independently examine reality on any question as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. If they did it, it had to be right. Quote, "They know what they're doing," end quote, became the--anyway. . . . [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

Anyway, other issues in the 1959 convention.

HEALEY

Yeah. Then there were the starting of arguments around the whole question of our labor policy as well-- although that, too, emerged more clearly in terms of what we were fighting about in later conventions--but the start already of what we felt was an uncritical approach toward the working class, an un-Marxist approach. As Marxist-Leninists, we see the working class as decisive for social change, but we see the potential of that class for being decisive [only] when it becomes class-conscious. The operative word is when, because people like me were saying, "But that does not mean that that class automatically acts as the leadership of either itself or of the society, until it does become class-conscious." But there was already developing an approach--and Gus really pushed it forward by far more than anybody else had even done in the national leadership (as a matter of fact, I would say it's the central thing he just practically pushed for the next ten years)--the idea of an uncritical approach toward both the working class and the labor movement, that if you criticize the working class, if you saw what was backward in the working class or if you criticized the labor movement, you were being anti-working-class and anti-Marxist. This was just, for most of us, an absolute vulgarization of Marxism. At any rate, I was very. . . . Oh, just before the convention had taken place--a few months before the convention had taken place, as a matter of fact--Gus, as part of this whole business (again, my stupidity, I didn't realize what it was) utilizing what he saw as our support for him here in Southern California, had insisted that there be a meeting of the national organizational commission to hear a report from Southern California; he went back and reported that this terrible revisionist Dorothy Healey was actually leading a party that was fighting on what everybody thought were the basic elements of building a party, and that we were probably the most well organized and effective district in the country at that point. I was called to this meeting in New York to give a report on what we were doing. I didn't know the background of it, as to why this had been arranged--didn't even cross my mind. I gave a report, and I was just simply horrified in the discussion to hear this brought into it, that the reason for this, why I was being asked to do it, was to answer all these attacks on me. I was just outraged and upset. It was one of the first times--it became a pattern later-- where I just was absolutely sickened by it. What nonsense to believe that because I disagreed with many things the national [party] was doing that I wasn't therefore operating adequately and correctly as the district organizer of the party here, or that our work was being looked at in a different way than anybody else's work in the country would be looked at. I was just--I really never understood until many years later that this had been done by Gus. But I was simply horrified. I remember Gene, who was sitting there, Gene Dennis, because it became clear that he had been one of those who had said, "We must investigate what's going on out there. It must be terrible." You should know that Gene and I had been kind of good friends, as much as one was with [him at] that time, because I had known him before he had gone to the Soviet Union in 1930, and I knew his wife, and we communicated a little more. He had difficulty with communication; he was very shy--I think I mentioned that before. It wasn't easy for him to open up, and particularly he was always worried about the way things that he'd say to a comrade privately would be used publicly to advance things that he might not agree with. But he was already very sick, and he wasn't even at the 1959 convention. He died just one year later, of cancer. He didn't yet know what it was, why he was so sick. Well, in 1960, of course, the big question is the attitude in regard to the presidential campaign. On that I remember a National Committee meeting in Chicago. I think that was the only time the National Committee ever met in Chicago. (That was part of Gus's drive that we should become closer to the working class. Of course, where we met had very little to do with whether we were or were not closer to the problems of the industrial working class.) We had a big debate at that time on the question of election policy. Ironically, it was our district which was pushing that while we undoubtedly would have to oppose Nixon, we should nevertheless run our own independent party campaign and ticket; that we had to learn to put forward a position, to fight on two fronts, as it were, to put forward a position that identified us with the broadest sentiment, a recognition of the validity of the fear of the Nixon victory, while simultaneously going beyond that, to get into the basic question that in the last analysis, both parties are defenders of capitalism and of imperialism. That doesn't mean they're identical or interchangeable, but nevertheless both of them have the same national role as defenders of that.

GARDNER

At the same time, weren't there second thoughts in the sense that you had already seen Nixon win one election because of that sort of response to him?

HEALEY

No, because the response to him that I objected to before was to say there was no difference at all between him and Helen Gahagan Douglas. We were not saying that about Kennedy. As I say, I didn't think we should say that about Helen Gahagan Douglas either, anymore than one would properly say it (although now the party is saying it) about McGovern and Nixon. I mean, it just to me is a denial of what one sees, what is actually real and goes on. But the problem for the Marxist party is always how to reckon with the degree of validity of both arguments, because both have validity. There is validity in the fact that a Nixon and/or a Kennedy, and a Nixon and/or a McGovern are not identical. But there is also validity in the fact that neither one of them will at any time provide any basic solutions to what faces the country. There are differences between them, and it is important to use the tactical differences. Strategically, they have the same role, in that they're both there in order to defend the common interests of the system. Our job is to find out how to utilize the tactical differences, not to advance them [the candidates], but to advance the consciousness of the workers, to utilize those differences in order to go beyond the differences to a new understanding of the need for a new party, a mass party that would be independent of both Democrats and Republicans. We thought a party candidate would help do that, but we were just overhwhelmingly defeated on that.

GARDNER

So there was no party candidate?

HEALEY

There was no party candidate for 1960, no. The first party candidate came in 1968.

GARDNER

Is that so? I thought Gus Hall was running for office.

HEALEY

No, he's never run before. This is the first time he's ever run, in 1972. Of course, it's a hilarious story, but it doesn't fit now, as to why he wasn't the candidate in '68 when he wanted it so; he almost died from it. Charlene became the candidate. But that's another story. I think I missed the story of the Khrushchev trip to America, and my session with him. A very minor session, but only amusing and illustrative of the personality of the man. Did I tell you that story?

GARDNER

I don't think so. That was '58-'59, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Yeah.

GARDNER

So I think it got lost in the convention.

HEALEY

I think so, too. While I was in New York, I was invited to the reception at one of the socialist embassies-I don't remember which one, I think Rumania--around one of the days of tribute. I'd never gone to one; I never really wanted to go to one. I don't like those; they're very stuffy and protocol-laden, and I never much enjoyed them. But this one Khrushchev was going to be at, and I did want to see what he was like close-hand. I had very mixed feelings about him. On one hand, there was no question that he'd done an enormous job in thrusting to the fore the whole question of the dogmatism associated around Stalinism. On the other hand, he himself was proceeding in an erratic way about fighting Stalinism. There was the rejection of any question that it was not just la problem of] cult but that there was something organically present that needed examination. Secondly, the internal policies of the Soviet Union: clearly there were lots of individual expressions being made by him; you didn't know whether they represented a collective judgment or not.

GARDNER

Such as?

HEALEY

Well, the question of the approach toward Egypt, or the internal question of the denunciation--I remember being outraged and making big speeches publicly about his position on Soviet art, Soviet culture, with his definition of what was good and bad. He didn't like certain paintings because that isn't the way the birches looked to him when he looked at them in the forests, or the sculpture. I remember making public speeches at that time when I would be asked about his strictures on culture saying, "Well, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev has the same individual right I have to like or not like certain cultural expressions. But neither of us has the right either to superimpose our cultural opinions on the party, nor to have the party superimpose them on the society. It can't be done that way. " But anyway, I went to this reception, and before he came in it was the typical dull, stodgy, boring thing. You always stand up at receptions; I don't know why that is, why there can't be chairs, but anyway, you always do. You're on one leg or another, and it's very uninteresting. And then all of a sudden word came out, "Khrushchev is coming in." The place just kind of livened up, you know, curiosity. He bounced in, and he was accompanied by [Andrei A.] Gromyko. And really, literally, the atmosphere changed. Immediately. I mean, this bouncy, personality-plus man: he was exciting, he was exuberant--ooooh!--no matter what he was doing, it was dynamic. At one point I was standing next to him at some food-laden table, and I was introduced to him as coming from Los Angeles. I was thinking, you know, what the hell do you say to him? I mean, what does one talk about with this man? So in the process of trying to think of something to say, I said, "Well, coming from Los Angeles, let me apologize for our mayor." (This was, parenthetically, Norris Poulson, who when Khrushchev was here had been very insulting and condescending and boorish, just as far as diplomacy is concerned.) And Khrushchev's reply--just one-two-three, real quick, he says, "Oh, that's nonsense, comrade. Why, if there weren't so many fools in the world, one wouldn't need wise men." [laughter] But, of course, the big overwhelming thing was just watching the impact of this man. It was one of the few times when I'd seen the significance of one individual as differentiated from another, the sheer weight of personality, the vigor of this guy. He just transformed that whole place. It was lit up after he came in. I do remember noting what I thought was his contemptuous treatment of Gromyko, whom he was poking fun at while we were all a bunch of people standing around, his saying, "Why don't you smoke more? What are you so poker-faced about, so stony-faced?" And I didn't like it. I don't like seeing anybody personally embarrassed or called out in front of other people. But anyway, it wasn't terribly important. As I say, the only significant thing really was this personal evidence that I'd seen of the capacity of the man to change the environment around him simply by nothing else than the weight of his temperament.

GARDNER

Was that the only time you met him?

HEALEY

Yes. [tape recorder turned off] Let's see, what else happened in 1960? Oh. The big commotion, of course, was the Cuban revolution of 1959. And here there were big questions that were present. Number one, for the first time since 1917 a revolution had taken place that was not being led by the Communist party. And this caused enormous inner debate. I don't think it was ever publicly debated, but it was an inner debate, as we had a flat formula that no revolutionary movement could be successful unless it was led by the Communist party. And here was this Castro, who none of us had heard of up until the New York Times started publicizing him in '57-58--nobody had really heard much more of him than of anybody else--who's violating all the rules by which revolutionary change is supposed to take place. Almost immediately, of course, we hailed it and recognized the enormous political significance, even though we never did actually debate out the theoretical significance of the way in which he came to power. I'm talking now when I say "the way he came to power" about the question of the role or lack of role of the Communist party of Cuba in leading it.

GARDNER

Was there a Communist party in Cuba?

HEALEY

A very well-established, well-organized Communist party, one that had been recognized as a leader in Cuba by the masses of people, no question. But they had not felt that this kind of action, this kind of military, armed action, would be successful. They didn't think the United States would allow it to happen right under the nose of the United States. I think there were two or three Cuban Communists who were with Fidel in the mountains, most notably Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, who'd been assigned by the party as liaison. But certainly this was not led by the Communist party.

GARDNER

And yet at the same time, if not part of the Communist party, the leadership of the Castro group was Marxist.

HEALEY

Well, Castro two years later made two very contradictory interviews, in one of which he said he'd always been a Marxist-Leninist from his college days on, and in the other of which he said he was just learning about Marxism. My own opinion is that while he certainly was knowledgeable about Marxist concepts and Marxism, he was not a Marxist, in the definition that the world communist movement would have provided, and that's very obvious even by the course of the development of the Cuban revolution.

GARDNER

What about Che Guevara?

HEALEY

No, he had the same--I think Che had again more Marxist knowledge, but he was not again a Marxist within the definition.

GARDNER

In the classical sense.

HEALEY

Yeah, that's right. The classical sense of our definition.

GARDNER

Didn't Castro also solicit the recognition and aid of the United States at first, as opposed to the Soviet Union?

HEALEY

Oh, yes. He certainly did. Part of the reason for his trip to New York was precisely that. Of course, that's when they refused to see him, refused to deal with him at all.

GARDNER

So the Communist party reaction in America then to him must have been fairly strange.

HEALEY

We were rather nonplussed. But nevertheless we hailed it. Even though it wasn't taking place the way we thought it would, we nevertheless hailed it. But clearly there was in the national leadership--and by "national leadership," I'm really always talking about either the National Secretariat or the Political Committee, the smallest group of comrades who meet, who are usually the most important and really make policy much more than the large bodies do--well, I would say that the party, probably because of its reservations (although I'm not certain of this), did not become the initiators in the United States of mass defense of Cuba, you know, the "fair play for Cuba" treatment. As a matter of fact, we might have, except that the Trotskyists seized on it and immediately started on it, and we wouldn't go into something that they were running; therefore, they really took the ball on it for quite a long while. But the unfortunate thing for the party, the American party, was that, again, we were not analyzing reality. We avoided the question of how you explain the fact that a Communist party was not leading this revolution. I should add that I think we were correct in rejecting some of the mythologies that Castro and others were building up at that point as to how they had taken power, because the fact was that the United States government believed they were dealing in the person of Castro with another Latin-American caudillo, that he would come to power and then be as easily corruptible as others had been in the past; they didn't realize that there was something new in Castro's revolutionary struggle. Therefore, because they didn't, two months before Castro took over on January 1, 1959, the United States withdrew all support from [Fulgencio] Batista. They saw that he was done; he was not able to mobilize the people nor even the army to fight. If that hadn't happened, we still don't know what would have taken place as far as the success of the revolution. Secondly, if the United States had immediately exercised intervention of any kind against Cuba, one also doesn't know how successful the Cuban revolution would have been. But these were part of the things which all needed to be analyzed. And again, we were noting events without analysis of them. As a matter of fact, I remember Joe North, who was one of the first American Communists to go down there-- when he came back in 1960 (he was on a tour of the country speaking about Cuba), I remember private meetings that we had between him and our leadership discussing his report. I remember asking him the question of what class is in power in Cuba, because if it was a socialist revolution, it would mean the working class was in power. And here were non-Communists--the July 26 Movement was leading, and that was made up of a mixture of classes, including the middle class.

GARDNER

Largely middle class.

HEALEY

That's right. I remember his saying to me, and my being horrified by him saying, "What difference does it make? What do you ask such questions for?" I went, "Ahhh!" But all this was adding to the inner party strains, again this fight over what these things represented, the need, whether it was right or wrong. . . .

1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE JANUARY 4, 1973

HEALEY

To debate the questions, regardless of whether one was right or wrong on them, to air them--and again, the old truism that is as true for revolutionaries as it is for the rest of society, that it's only in the conflict of opinion, of ideas, that one manages to inch closer to truth. Well, also at that time we got our first awareness of the fact that there were fundamental differences between China and the Soviet Union. And this was an enormous continuing battle in the party from 1960 on.

GARDNER

You know, before you go into that, it might be interesting--although more of this will come later, obviously--to talk a little bit about what recognition there was of China. So far the American Communist party, which we've been talking about, has been portrayed really as very closely aligned with the Soviet Union. Now, the Chinese revolution was in 1949, I think.

HEALEY

Right.

GARDNER

So during that ten-or eleven-year span, did China have any influence on you?

HEALEY

Enormous influence on us. You've got to understand that first of all, it was the last thing from any Communist mind to believe that there could be any funda- mental differences between the Soviet Union and China. Secondly, particularly after the Twentieth Congress (although not just after the Twentieth Congress, even before), the prestige of China and the Chinese Communists among American Communists was incredibly high. They were part of the revolutionary pantheon of heroes: Mao, Chou En-lai, Liu Shao-ch'i. Anything and everything they wrote, we immediately reprinted and published. From the 1930s on we had made a major aspect of our struggle within the labor movement, the mass movement, the antiwar movement, everywhere, the whole question of the defense of the Chinese revolution. We had led huge picket lines and struggles on this question. As I say, we always reprinted everything that came from China, took it for granted that it was, you know, right. We were not at all critical about it or independent in our thinking. We looked upon it as we would have looked upon anything from the Soviet Union, as a matter of fact. And particularly after the Twentieth Congress, this increased even more, because they seemed to represent, first of all, the continuity. They had the same leadership, the leadership that had fought together against both Japanese imperialism, imperialism generally, and Chiang Kai-shek since 1921-22. But not only that. After the Twentieth Congress, after Khrushchev's report on Stalin and after the questions that were raised there for the first time as to new theoretical and political approaches, [we further appreciated] Mao's stuff on contradictions among the people, which is what we were really most concerned with: what happens in a socialist society after the revolution, what form the contradictions take, and ' particularly how they take place and how they express themselves when they're not hostile contradictions--not hostile antagonisms, rather, but what we call friendly contradictions So that I can remember articles in Political Affairs, which reprinted and hailed what Mao had to say on this, just generally a reproduction of all their material. Well, the first indication that any of us had that there were any differences--[when I say] "any of us," now, [I mean] my level of leadership, in charge of party organization). I don't know again whether the National Secretariat knew things that we didn't know. There was never any mention of it. Usually if there had been, something would have leaked out. I mean, when we'd go east, after all, we all knew the people personally; you're talking together, and some of it would have come out in personal conversations. So I don't think they were aware in the beginning of the basic differences. In fact, I'm sure they weren't, until 1960. Even then, they were not in agreement nationally in the leadership as to how to deal with it. As an example, the first thing that publicly emerged was a book from China entitled Long Live Leninism. It most basically challenged the concepts that had developed after the Twentieth Congress in regard to whether or not it was inevitable that there be a world war and what were the characteristics of imperialism. The most famous quote from it actually was a quote that said, "In the event of a nuclear world war, we will build a glorious socialist civilization on the debris of the dead capitalism." And we were just horrified by that, for two reasons. One, on the theoretical level, Marxism had always based the building of socialism on an advanced economic basis.

GARDNER

Not destruction.

HEALEY

Yeah, and [secondly], to say that you were now going to do it on the basis of destruction was crazy, stupid. Well, then articles started appearing in Peking Review that indicated differences, but very subtly. Very, very subtly. There was never anything explicit that said anything, and nothing at all from the Soviet Union that indicated anything. Well, we started organizing discussions here in this district, you know, with the membership again; there was something new taking place.

GARDNER

This is 1960 now?

HEALEY

Yes. I remember Carl Winter came out here from the National Secretariat. We organized a whole series of meetings. One was a big, what we call, functionaries' meeting, all the club activists. Another was a meeting in a private home for the professional and cultural people who didn't come to our big meetings, all Communists or people close to us; they weren't always Communists, but people who were close to us. And Carl Winter denied absolutely, unequivocably, that there were any differences between China and the Soviet Union. This was all--and I'm quoting--this was all "capitalist propaganda"; we should not fall for what capitalist papers are saying; it's ridiculous to assume there could be differences. Carl was staying here in my home with me when he came here. He and I were very close friends; even though we didn't agree on most things politically, we could fight in a very companionable, comradely way. I remember we'd stay up till two or three o'clock in the morning fighting with one another on this question. I'd say, "But look what they're saying!" And he made these big speeches everywhere that there were no differences. We thought, "Well, maybe we are exaggerating it." It didn't seem to us we were, but maybe we were. But then, of course, came a number of other things that happened. One was the pullout of the Soviet technicians from China. Then came the Eighty-one Party Conference in Moscow in 1960 and the reports we got--we didn't get a lot of reports, but I think we did get some. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was particularly honest in her reportage back. It was clear that while the statement that was issued looked like a patched-up unity, it was really a patchwork thing, because from the stories we got from the convention, from the conference of the eighty-one parties--and this was the first world conference that had been held since the Communist International had been dissolved in 1936--it was clear that there were the sharpest of differences, both in regard to questions of political estimates and approaches as well as the role of the respective parties. Well, on the political differences, on the surface the differences concerned whether or not it was possible to even discuss the question of a peaceful development of socialism, whether that was at all possible. Secondly, this question of whether as long as imperialism exists, one can say that there's not an inevitability of world war; and really, going from that, whether it is almost necessary in order for new revolutions to take place; that in the wake of every past world war, new social revolutions are taking place, and therefore this was still needed. There'd been some amusing squabbling at this conference over how to [phrase] the role of the Soviet Union, with the Chinese comrades insisting that the Soviet Union had to be named as "the vanguard party of the world," and Khrushchev saying to them, "Well, thank you very much, but when you have a head, that's the thing you lop off. And if you name us as the head, we'll be the ones that you'll try to lop off." And the Chinese saying, "But you are the oldest and the leaders," and so forth, and Khrushchev saying, "We decline the honor of being named that way." The relationships were obviously so bad there that Elizabeth reported that even on the question of translators. . . . That conference, like all other such international conferences, had trained translators. You had simultaneous translation going on, each earphone being fitted for the particular language that you knew and [offering] a translation simultaneously with the speaker. But when it came turn for the Chinese, they refused to let the Russians translate them, and all the Russian translators had to be pulled out of the booths, and all Chinese translators went in to do them in all the various necessary languages. It was again not big but illustrative of how deep the suspicions already were by 1960. Well, my own reactions were really predictable. I've said before to you that I am in many respects a very typical member of the party, and then I look inside of myself to think, "Why did I think what I thought? Why did I say what I said?" I try to examine what were the motivations. I know that I'm really, as I say, expressing what was present for other people as well, because I am so typical in terms of the life of the party, the training within the party, the acceptance of things. Even I--and I say "even I" in the sense that I was already critical and had been for so many years--I really just automatically assumed the Soviet Union must be right. I could not really think that with anything of this kind of dimensions, a difference of such dimensions, that the Soviet Union could be wrong or that it had done improper things or anything else. For some three or four years--!t might be more than that, six years-- wherever I spoke, whether in the party or publicly, I would take a position that leaned always toward the Soviet Union's position. Now, partly that was because of my past experiences, that no matter how often I might disagree on this or that question, basically I could not visualize--it just never occurred to me--that the Soviet Union could be so fundamentally wrong on any question. But it was also true that part of the reason why I didn't agree with the Chinese position was that simply in terms of Marxism, of the ability of Marxism to analyze a world and what was present in the world, I didn't agree with what they had to say. That quote that I gave you from Long Live Leninism, for instance, just horrified me as being non-Marxist in its nihilism really, its rejection of the realities of what nuclear war would represent.

GARDNER

In addition--this is something that maybe I should wait till later to ask, but maybe I'll ask it again later--isn't it similar to the basic fight that has existed all the way through for international communism, in the sense that it's more or less Stalin's approach of building up and approaching things slowly against Trotsky's of more or less world revolution as quickly as possible, the argument between the left and right or the left and center in the Communist party itself?

HEALEY

Superficially there might be a point in that. Actually, I would even want to reexamine the historic conflicts on the ground of what I now understand about this split between China and the Soviet Union, because now if you ask me to define those differences, I'd say that's a lot of nonsense, that each country was advancing its own [interests]. First of all, the basic reason for the split was the uneven development of socialism. Now, we Communists and Marxists talk a lot about the uneven development of capitalism and what that breeds in the way of rivalries and competitions and so forth. We have never examined the other side of it, the fact that in the socialist world, the fourteen countries, you were going to have an uneven development in the first place economically, then certainly great differences culturally and socially and all that that represented, and that there were bound to be clashes and contentions between them. We believed that with socialism you had the elimination of what we would consider "bourgeois questions" like nationalism, that that was just instantaneous. And so my present judgment would be--and I think I've read almost all the documents that both sides and everybody else have issued--that, unlike what I would have said ten years ago, the ideological differences are just so much mystification of the reality. Both countries are sub- stituting what they perceive to be their national interest based around their level of development and what they need, both internally and in the world scene, and inasmuch as nobody in the world is going to get excited about one or another country's national interests, they have to erect an ideological superstructure to defend those differences. Nobody says, "This is what we need. This is what our level is." They say, "This is the only pure Marxism. This is the only right policy. This is the only correct estimate." And you know, that really is sheer nonsense. You find it in an amusing way--amusing, but tragic again: one of the things that is an expression of it is that in 1963 the Chinese put out a document, a very major, important document concerning the, quote, "general line of the world communist movement." There they revealed the fact that at the time of the Hungarian events in 1956-- as I think I mentioned to you when we were talking about Hungary--the Soviet Union had not wanted to intervene on November 4, the second time they came back in. The Chinese say in this pamphlet, now issued in 1963, that they were the ones who insisted that if the Soviet Union did not intervene, they would blast them before the world communists as betraying the cause of revolution, and that for that reason they forced them back in. Well, clearly that's not something that anybody knows about or understands or debates if that ever took place. Nobody had ever heard of it. And yet their later positions are so in variance with that position. Now, there were things that were justifiable in the fights between them in terms of application, because one of the things that the Soviet Union does do and that the world communist movement does (and that China does too on its side) is to take something that has validity and to stretch it out beyond its limits, so that the validity is diminished and becomes almost an absurdity. For instance, on the question of peaceful coexistence, which became the big fight for ten years, I think it is true that the Soviet Union and those influenced by the Soviet Union overextended that concept of peaceful coexistence, which only is supposed to recognize the relationships between differing social systems and the need to avoid war between them to solve questions, the fact that this is part of the international class struggle. I think it is true that not just the Soviet Union--the Latin American parties, our party, other parties have accepted their position--we have overextended that in a sense so as not to give support to national struggles for liberation on the ground that this might jeopardize then the peaceful coexistence between the big powers. Nobody ever said this outright, but nevertheless it became the weight of the emphasis. And I think China was correct in its warning. On the other hand, China for most of those years up until the last two years went the other direction, and that was to ignore the possibilities of what was present as far as relationships between capitalist and socialist countries, seeing only the other question of national liberation as an independent thing. Not that they did very much about it. I mean, there was always the difference between Chinese words and Chinese deeds. But at least they recognized it. Now, of course, you're seeing the opposite, with China now being the great gung-ho of peaceful coexistence and making it the main question. It still continues to say national liberation struggles are important, independent and so forth, but again you don't see any sign of China itself independently doing anything of that kind of assistance to those struggles, outside of material, military weaponry.

GARDNER

This gives me an opportunity that I was hoping would come some time today, to ask a very topical question, because it's one thing that I suppose has aggravated a lot of people during the last few weeks. (I speak these words as if I'm really saying them for history, but that's nice.) A couple of weeks ago, when school let out and when Congress let out, President Nixon resumed the bombing in North Vietnam. This is, of course, after making the campaign pledge that peace was at hand and so forth, and then it wasn't at hand. Then after ten days, twelve days of bombing and losing airplanes and pilots and so forth, America finally got North Vietnam to come back to the bargaining table. Word has it, and seemingly fairly reliable word, that one of the reasons that North Vietnam came back to the bargaining table was because China and Russia, who are now great trading allies of the United States, if not great allies in any other way, both convinced North Vietnam to do so. What is your reaction to this whole thing?

HEALEY

Well, I would discuss it within a little broader area than just the last two weeks of negotiations and the bombings. I would say now what I would never have said two years ago: I believe that both the Soviet Union and China exert what I consider a nonrevolutionary pressure upon both North Vietnam and the PRG [Provisional Revolutionary Government]. I would say that the trip of Nixon to China and the Soviet Union illustrates the fact that they place their independent national rights above the world revolutionary movement. The fact is that when China agreed that Nixon should come visit China, at that point there had just peaked as the main political question in the United States the whole question of the fight against the renewed bombing of North Vietnam which was taking place at that point; and notice that when the world was notified that China had agreed that Nixon should come, the bottom dropped out of that campaign within the United States, because everybody took it for granted that China would only have agreed if there was going to be an end to the war in Vietnam. Nobody could have visualized the fact that China--this great gung-ho, great rhetoric on revolution--would ever allow Nixon to come while a sister socialist country was being bombed. Secondly, when the Soviet Union allowed Nixon to come after mining the harbors of Haiphong and the renewed bombing of Hanoi, it was again the same kind of thing. As far as the mass of people and the political leaders as well were concerned, particularly in the United States, the whole peace movement, and particularly the political people, had been saying that any such threat of mining or extending the war would bring us into collision with the Soviet Union and/or China, and this was one of the main [arguments] for caution in what was done. When no response of any kind was made to that mining--and I'm not saying there should have been World War III--but when it was just cravenly accepted, and when on top of that the Soviet Union allowed Nixon to come to the Soviet Union, and there wasn't one, neither in China nor the Soviet Union, one demonstration against Nixon. . . . I mean, the only place where Nixon could travel without demonstrations against him was in the socialist world! No matter what reasons of state (again, as a separate thing, there might always be reasons of state that you could debate), but the people--what kind of revolutionaries are brought up in those countries that there would not be independent manifestations of their hatred of what this monster of American imperialism is doing to the Vietnamese people? So I would say yes, something I would have dismissed with just absolute scoffing and derision five years ago, yes, there is in my opinion improper pressure in that they feel that this jeopardizes their independent relationships. Now, I would also add, however, that there is no question they are continuing to supply North Vietnam with the materiel necessary to challenge the U.S. Obviously, a little tiny country could not have successfully withstood the most powerful country without enormous military assistance. And there's no doubt that they are getting that from the Soviet Union and China.

GARDNER

Of course, it's more and more difficult to get those supplies as the different ways into the country are mined and bombed and destroyed.

HEALEY

Sure. There's also no doubt, first of all, that if there hadn't been a split, if they'd thought the two countries were together in the defense of Vietnam, I don't think that North Vietnam would ever have been bombed in 1965. Secondly, I would say that here again the split, what it represented--well, again, as far as the role of China is concerned, I think it is true (and I hope I'm not repeating old errors when I say I think it is true) that the Soviet Union did press China to say that independent of the differences between ourselves, we should develop an antiimperialist world fight against U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and that China refused to be a part of it, of anything to do with the Soviet Union, on the ground that the Soviet Union was social-imperialist and a lot of other mixed-up jargon that I think is woefully inadequate and silly and stupid. Secondly, I think it is true that China was deliberately making it difficult for Soviet materiel to come over on land, on trains over land, that shipments were being stopped, opened up, obstructed, and so forth, partly as a harassment of the Soviet Union, partly to get their hands on whatever advanced materiel was coming. It is true the Soviet Union does not have an adjacent border to Vietnam as does China, and therefore what they couldn't send overland had to come either by air or sea. And I wouldn't put it past them, at that period of two or three years ago, that China was hoping to intensify the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, even including into warlike reactions; they figured here were two enemies that could then be distracted into fighting one another. When I read China calling the Soviet Union social-imperialist--they even use the word "fascist"; they say capitalism is restored--it's amusing to me in terms of Marxist theory because they take the identical position of the Yugoslav revisionists, of Milovan Djilas and others, that there's a new class back in power; socialism is no longer there. Really, sheer nonsense. And the Soviet Union's attack on China is just as great nonsense. I see in the last issue of Political Affairs that there's an article by Gus Hall, a speech he made at a September meeting of the Central Committee of the party, discussing the mining of the harbors and blaming China for it, saying that this is collusion between the United States and China, that if China had allowed all the shipments to come through overland the mining of the harbors wouldn't mean anything. In other words, on all sides there is literally an abstention from Marxist critique and an indulgence in the greatest amount of non-Marxist bombast and rhetoric, factional rhetoric, depending on what side you want to help. And that goes for every single question that comes up.

GARDNER

Well, what's the solution? Do you think that-- well, [laughter] I'll take that question back; that's a little too heavy.

HEALEY

I don't know the solution.

GARDNER

Let me put it this way: Do you think that it's possible for socialism or Marxism to advance in any way until this difference is settled, until this national rivalry is ended?

HEALEY

Well, there's no question that whatever advances are made are going to be very much affected. Sure, advances are made: in Vietnam, the fact that the United States cannot militarily defeat a little country is an enormous change in the world. But [so is] the fact, the very idea, that a socialist country could have been bombed for ten years; there is no real recognition of what that represents....

GARDNER

. . . that any country could be bombed for ten years.

HEALEY

That's right; all right. But see, one of the big fights in the party--which I'll talk about in more detail--which has gone on since 1964 or '63, is the estimate (it's put again in ideological theoretical language) that the balance in the world has so shifted that the socialist world is now the decisive element in the world. And people like me kept saying, "But that's nonsense. It's not true," that that will be true some day is so, but how can one say that it is today? We give as an example the fact that a socialist country can be under bombs, and it continues for all these years. Secondly, we keep pointing at the fact that the world capitalist market is still the dominant market in the world, and as long as that continues, you cannot say that socialism is the dominant element in the world. But as for this question that you've just raised, yes, there can be some advance that I think can take place, but it'll always be distorted under the shape of this collision. I should also mention Lenin's footnote to a letter written by Engels to Karl Kautsky. In the footnote, Lenin points out--and doing this by memory, I'm going to paraphrase probably--that after two or more countries become socialist, because of the weight of the national interests short of nationalism, the dangers of revolutions against them and wars between them will be present until they learn to throw off the narrow national interests that dominate them. But we Communists weren't paying any attention to that language of Lenin. It was to us just an absurdity. Comes the revolution, and everything is transformed. Of course, it's not true. But I see again another generation doing exactly what my generation did in the thirties, and with less historic validity, that is, putting on its own blinkers again, saying that the alpha and omega of all wisdom lies in another socialist country.

GARDNER

One or another.

HEALEY

Yeah, one or another. It's the "my favorite socialist country" game. So you now have the Revolutionary Union or the National Guardian, groups of this kind, who are totally uncritical of China and accept whatever China says with the same awe that we did in the thirties with the Soviet Union, as I say, with less reason for it than we had in the thirties. When you find young American Maoists or the Guardian defending China's really outrageous estimates and actions around Bangladesh and Pakistan, you find the same tragedy being repeated. I keep thinking of that old expression which I hate, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." But that's part of the reality as well. Well, these were all part of the fights that were going on in the party then, too. I remember another big one around China again. I guess it was 1965--I'm skipping ahead, but it's okay. I was in New York for two months, had been asked to come in to work on the fight against the McCarran [Internal Security] Act. I attended a meeting--I don't know what it was, Secretariat meeting, Political Committee, whatever it was called then--where Gus was giving a report on the Chinese-Soviet split. He said that the reason for China's, what we call, "leftist" positions was the fact that it was predominantly a peasant economy, a peasant country, and "the weight of the peasantry lends itself to petty bourgeois radicalism," end quote. I remember standing up, sneering at that, and saying, "Well, until 1956 the bulk of the population of the Soviet Union was peasants. Would we say therefore that what happened in the Soviet Union all through the twenties and thirties and forties and early fifties came because of the weight of the peasantry?" I mean, that's a sociological explanation, not a political one, not a dialectical one. We fought over that, and then I remember at the 1966 convention we fought over that again because he made a big speech. I always accused him of being "the Norman Vincent Peale of the left wing" because he's always looking for positive, optimistic things; optimism is good, except that it shouldn't obscure your vision. He had a big statement in the materials for the "66 convention, and he was making the speech everywhere in the party, that China and the Soviet Union were coming closer together, that the differences were disappearing and there would soon be unity. We kept saying, "What are you talking about? Where is there any sign of it? Where is there any example of it? It's getting worse, not better." So you'd go from optimism to silly analyses and everything. Of course, it's understandable; the whole world movement was faced with a phenomenon, that it had no preparation for, no background on. You always had to take other people's judgments for it. I'll give you another example of what I happen to know by virtue of the materials I saw, being on the National Executive Board at the time. At the time of the Sino-Indian War, as you may know, the Soviet Union was very critical of China for this. I have here somewhere in the house the minutes which I took--and I take very detailed notes of meetings--of a meeting of the National Executive Board where Elizabeth Gurley Flynn sent us the speech Khrushchev made at a private meeting at the time of the Rumanian Communist party's congress where the Chinese were still present (it was one of the last meetings they attended together with all the other Communist parties) in which he attacked the Chinese just vociferously, holding them responsible for the war. (Again, parenthetically, this is one of the things I regret as I look back, because I accepted the Soviets' interpretation of what was happening in that and thought the Chinese were provocative and wrong. Now I would no longer make that statement without great qualification.) Khrushchev's speech at this private session said that--as an example, he said, "Why, what are they fighting about? They're fighting about desolate area, mountain area that is totally unusable for anything anyway. Now," he says, "in the Soviet Union we've never had that approach on border questions. We don't mind yielding on border questions to our neighboring countries because we figure 'What's the difference? Someday we'll all be socialist anyway.'" Now when I see the Soviet Union and China fighting over equally desolate areas, I think, "Well, why doesn't the Soviet Union say, 'Go ahead, you want to take it, what difference does it make?'" [laughter] It all depends whose ox is being gored as to how meaningful those platitudes are.

GARDNER

This is again a question I'll ask again later, but which of the two attitudes, of the two countries, do you think is going to end up dominant in the next few years? Do you think the Soviet Union will maintain its dominance?

HEALEY

Well, it no longer has the kind of dominance it had before. You now have, for instance, the Japanese Communist party, which is one of the major parties in a capitalist country, which for some years now has been independent of both China and the Soviet Union. The Italian party is more independent. Those are the two largest parties that are independent. The Australian party is very independent, although that's a little party, and the Soviet Union has helped to start a split-off from that group, a new party called the Socialist party of Australia (and my party leadership without consultation of its party welcomes and greets this little group). The world movement is no longer quite the same movement as it was in that sense. However, I couldn't even begin to speculate whether either or both or which one would be dominant. The actions of a party like the Spanish Communist party are significant. This is a party which, as a result of Czechoslovakia, took a very public and critical position of the Soviet Union. There's also been a split of a pro-Soviet character there led by General [Enrico] Lister, but obviously not very effective, while La Pasionaria [Dolores Ibarruri] has totally supported the position of Santiago Corrillo, and the Spanish leadership, critical of the Soviet Union on Czechoslovakia and subsequent things. Just recently the Spanish party sent a delegation to [our] party. I've read Santiago Carrillo's report on that trip. I think it is as uncritical as his report that he used to make twenty years ago on the Soviet Union. I'm very unhappy about that. Nevertheless, I think I see what is being done by many of these parties, and that is their feeling that if they break the dominance of the Soviet Union over the other parties, even if momentarily that helps the Chinese party, it will make it easier for parties to become independent without being challenged. It's a dangerous tactic, and yet I can see its having some significance: dangerous in the sense that I think it would be just as devastating to accept China as the beginning and end of all wisdom as the Soviet Union. I just think that has to end forevermore. There genuinely has to be an independence of the parties, the equality of each party, the fact that each party is the only one that can determine the validity of a position for that country. I don't think that's a denial of internationalism. I don't think you could have internationalism without the unity and diversity, as Togliatti, from the Italian party, called for it.

GARDNER

So you think that independence then is the independent fragments, really, sort of. . . .

HEALEY

And that they may, in a sense, finally force the reunification of the world movement, if it ever takes place again.

GARDNER

In a more democratic way.

HEALEY

That's right, because there will be so many independent components. Once the Soviet Union and China know they cannot rely on foreign parties abroad to pursue their own positions, they're going to have to think a little more carefully as to what they do in terras of relationships internally and externally. Basically, what I would say is that as far as both countries are concerned, their methodology is identical, how they view reality, what they do, how they function, even though the tactical expression is very different. They take different positions, totally different. Nevertheless, there's no difference in the way they do it, and that's what I object to the most. That's what I would say about the "cultural revolution," so-called: that I do not get excited about it because I don't think it represented what to me would be a genuine cultural revolution, namely, the Chinese people having access to information, to knowledge, with which to make meaningful decisions about what role they should play, what positions they should take. That means that instead of accepting that Liu Shao-ch'i is a dirty capitalist in hiding, or Lin Piao is the latest traitor and so forth--I don't know what all those people [are going to do] ; I guess all the people that had the Thoughts of [Chairman] Mao with Lin Piao's introduction have to tear up the introduction. It's just typical of the non-Marxist hysteria about such things. If the Chinese people obviously don't know any more about that than we know about it, what really took place. ... As I say, I would put more weight now on things that I would have considered impossible, struggles for power, who's going to be dominant, rather than over basic--as the Chinese put it, that there are "two lines in contention." I just don't think that's true at all. Not that there cannot be lines in contention--and many more than two, by the way, many more than two--but I think that that is again the same thing as the struggle between the Soviet Union and China, that you erect justification for what you're going to do, and your only justification is that this is the more pure Marxism-Leninism. That's the only way you can justify it for a Communist.

GARDNER

So in the long run, then, this split that began in 1964, whatever the reasons, ideological or nationalistic (as you indicate), is going to lead to a reshuffling of power.

HEALEY

Oh, absolutely. And it's a split, by the way, that obviously began in '57-58, only we didn't know it.

GARDNER

It came to the surface in those years.

HEALEY

In '60, yeah. I would not try to predict as to what I think the new shape of things will be. I would hope that--but I've been wrong on that hope before. I started to say--well, why I was wrong; maybe it would be more orderly to present it that way. In the early 1960s, when we first started to debate the split, we thought here in L.A. that the split was going to force American Communists to have to look for the first time independently at world phenomena. Because after all, as I say, we had considered the Chinese the absolute equals of the Soviet Union. We idolized them as much as we did the Soviets. So when the split takes place between equal idols, we thought, well, Jesus, people are then going to have to look independently and think for themselves. You can't stay suspended between two equal idols. You've got to then say, what do you do then about reality? Little did we know that either people would flop on the side of all Chinese correctness or go back to the position of the omniscience of the Soviet Union. There was very little to choose, as I say, between them, whether they did one or the other. But I don't want to [leave the wrong impression]. I spoke about my own weaknesses in this regard. I remember a debate I had with Frank Pestana for Discussions Unlimited in 1963 probably, '64, something like that, '65 maybe, in which I just totally accepted the Soviet Union's position as representing the valid position.

GARDNER

Would you say most of your comrades did in the American party?

HEALEY

Yeah.

GARDNER

Well, what else in 1960?

HEALEY

Oh, my!

GARDNER

Of course, that was the election year--you started to talk about before--one in which it was chosen not to put up a candidate.

HEALEY

Actually there was the beginning then of something that we became very critical of here in the West Coast; it became even more sharply expressed in 1964 when Goldwater was the candidate: that is, the difficulty the party had--and all revolutionary movements had, but we are talking about our party now--in trying to find the way to define the evil of, say, a Goldwater and/or a Nixon, without embracing the Democrats. We who were disagreeing with the way the party nationally was presenting it thought they were too uncritical of the Democrats. We kept saying, "You don't have to love Johnson in order to hate Goldwater." That was what we were trying to express.

GARDNER

Similar to the quandary over Roosevelt in the thirties.

HEALEY

Much more sharply defined, because in the thirties we had to deal with a mass phenomenon of the people, the mass of the working class, looking upon Roosevelt really as a god. Yes, it is similar; I don't know why I sav I different. It's very comparable. It's a standing problem.

GARDNER

Well, not as many people looked upon Johnson as a god. There is that difference.

HEALEY

That's absolutely true. Well, also in 1960--this is minor, I guess, but not minor to the person--there was an enormous battle over Alexander Bittelman. Bittelman was a founding member of the Communist party; by the time of this fight, he was already in his late seventies. He'd been in jail under the Smith Act. He'd come out of jail around 1957 or '58, or at least off conditional parole, and he could finally participate. He did take positions that I thought were very far, quote, "to the right." I remember he wrote a series of articles, his main emphasis being that the organized labor movement, trade unions, would be the expression of the vanguard role in this country.

GARDNER

He had been in jail for a long time, hadn't he? [laughter]

HEALEY

Yes, indeed. The belief in what he called the welfare state in the United States, somewhere along the line of the Swedish government, as representing a qualitative change. I didn't agree with anything he really had to say. But first of all I had a very deep respect for the role he played historically. Not that I liked everything he wrote--don't misunderstand me--because before he'd gone to jail, he'd been very sectarian. A very domineering man too, I gathered; I'd never worked too closely with him or seen too much of him. I was much too young in the forties (young not in years but in terms of my relationship with others). But I was just furious at the 1959 convention. Just before it took place, I still had enough influence to do something about it when I found out that he wasn't being invited to attend the convention. There was really just real hatred present as far as the national leaders were concerned. I finally got them to agree before the convention started to issue him a special invitation to come in as a guest. Then I discovered that they'd refused to print his preconvention articles, which, you know, I just took for granted; I had always believed the party prints everybody's articles in preconvention discussion. Of course, he had no voice or vote at the convention. Naturally he wouldn't have a vote, but he could have spoken as a guest. But they wouldn't let him. At any rate, he wrote a book outlining his positions, which they refused to publish and refused to give him permission to publish, and when he went ahead to raise money to have it Xeroxed or photo-offset or whatever (some inexpensive way of reproducing it), he was brought up on charges for expulsion. I couldn't go attend the National Committee meeting where it was taking place because I was in the hospital having a hysterectomy at the time. But I wrote in passionate letters attacking this expulsion. It was just absolutely outrageous that anybody could be expelled for this. Then when they went ahead and expelled him I sent him a letter with a copy to them urging him not to go outside the party to fight it in the capitalist press or anywhere else, but to fight it within the party, to appeal to the convention. Then they practically brought me up on charges in the national thing for daring to write him this. And, oh, it was a stormy session with me on it. How dare I go outside of channels to communicate with this man? Well, then questions were raised about my going on one of these delegations to the Soviet Union.

GARDNER

Well, what happened with Bittelman?

HEALEY

Oh, he was expelled. He was expelled; this old man was expelled. I don't know what he's doing now.

1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO JANUARY 4, 1973

GARDNER

Now, just before the last tape ran out, in the middle of the discussion on Mr. Bittelman, you had mentioned that it was also in 1960 that the first move was made towards initiating your eventual trip to the Soviet Union.

HEALEY

Well, what was happening is that everybody in the National Executive Board except me had been sent to the Soviet Union, people going [directly or going] to other party congresses in Europe and then from there going on to the Soviet Union.

GARDNER

How was that? Why hadn't. . . ?

HEALEY

Oh, it was very clear. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn told Ben about it while I was in the hospital. Ben had raised the question, "How come Dorothy's the only one that's never invited to go?" Elizabeth said--she was always a very honest albeit rather naive person--she said, "Well, after all, we can't take a chance on what Dorothy would say at one of those international things, the questions she'd raise." [laughter] Anyway, they decided that while they didn't want me to go to any conference, it was safe enough to send me as part of a delegation that was just going to be touring the country. So in April 1961, I left with a party of American Communists. Let's see, the other people on the delegation were Arnold Johnson, Ann Burlack of New England, Mike Davidow, Jack Kling, Sam and Ellen Davis from the Midwest. There were all sorts of amusing and ironic things about that, too, [concerning] this question of protocol and things that I really am horrified about in the world communist movement as representing bourgeois trappings to me, and not revolutionary relationships. Before I left, first of all we were all talked to, quote, "briefed," by the national people, by Gus, and I think it was Jim Jackson and Helen Winter. The big thing that was said to us was that we were not supposed to go around challenging or questioning anything in the Soviet Union, to remember that we were guests. I remember the expression they used: "Don't look under the rug to see whether there's any dirt swept up." In other words, be good people, just nice guests. The other thing that was amusing was that with every delegation that goes--you know, even with only two people-- there's always one that's named as chairman. That's very important in the world movement, because a chairman is the dignitary; at meetings and then other things, he is the person who makes the speeches or responds to speeches or asks the questions if there's anything--really, as if you were dealing with bourgeois diplomats. The person who's named as chairman is always the one who has the highest party responsibility. And I was the only one who was a member of the National Executive Board. But they didn't dare have me as the chairman of a party delegation, so they named Arnold Johnson as that. He was not a member of the National Executive Board, although he was a member of the National Committee, as were the others that were going. But they had to do something, they felt, in regard to my position, because the Soviet comrades wouldn't be able to understand that. I mean, they knew that I was a member of the National Executive Board. So they named me as something that's called in those circles, "responsible secretary." Now, what you've got to understand is when you see the word "responsible" before "secretary," that's supposed to show the person is not a tactical worker but a political leader. So that was supposed to suit me. Of course, I couldn't have cared less. I thought the whole thing was just hilarious and very--I just laughed. As I say, I thought it was such an amusing expression of this real nonsense that has crept into the world movement.

GARDNER

When did you leave, what was the date? Do you remember?

HEALEY

Sometime in April. All I remember is, we got there just before May Day.

GARDNER

Did you fly to Moscow?

HEALEY

We went to London. We had to go to the Soviet embassy in London to get our visas, and we were there overnight and one day. That was my only time I've ever seen London. I didn't see much of it then.

GARDNER

You're probably the least traveled of the party officials.

HEALEY

Oh, yes. Well, I went back again; that's a later story. In an attempt to keep me quiet they sent me in 1967 with Hy Lumer as chairman and myself as the only other person in the delegation to the congress of the East German party; and from there I went to Czechoslovakia and to Moscow, and then Italy and France. But Czechoslovakia was the most important part of that trip. At any rate, we got to Moscow and were taken to a hotel that is used only for visiting Communist delegations. At that time it wasn't public; I don't know whether it is now. It wasn't public then because with party delegations coming from countries where the party was illegal, fascist countries, they didn't want it to become publicly known that they were there, where newspapermen and others could find them and identify them, and then CIA and other things of that kind could find them. So it was not publicly known. It was very nice; not a very big hotel, but it was a very nice one. Very modern. Then I also saw the results of this protocol, what happens when you have titles. This became a kind of amusing byplay all the way through. We spent two months in the Soviet Union, and all the way through I kept doing things that had very funny effects. Because I had a title and Arnold Johnson had a title, we were given wuites in the hotels, two-or three-room suites, everywhere we traveled. We always got the largest number of rooms and the most spacious accommodations, whereas the other comrades, because they didn't have titles, got smaller ones. Sometimes we used to laugh that Jack Kling and Mike Davidow got the kitchen rooms all the time. I used to do a lot of teasing about it with the Soviet comrade who traveled with us, a young Soviet woman, Gali Udina. We were very, very good friends. Finally, we'd share these spacious accommodations I'd get because of my title; she finally started sharing with me. I used to keep needling her, "What the hell kind of nonsense is this? Why, because I have a title, do I have more rooms than the other comrades in my delegation who don't have titles and therefore have only one room?" The amusing part was that I did this all the way through for two months, and when we got back to Moscow, at the end of the two-month tour, they put me in a kitchen room, as if to say, "Okay, comrade, this is what you want, this is what you get." And then I really regretted having spoken up, because we came back in the midst of a heat wave. It was just simply horrible. I mean, Moscow heat is--I've never known anything quite like it; it's just terrible. The room was stuffy and small, not a bit of air--of course, no air conditioning, nothing like that. I thought to myself, "Why don't I learn to keep my big mouth shut and accept what everybody's given and keep quiet about it?" Everything has to be a principle with me. [laughter] I was so disgusted with myself. But I laughed, it was so funny the way they did it. "Okay, this is what you want, sister, you've got it." Anyway, we traveled around the Soviet Union for two months by plane or train, to Leningrad, and to at that time Stalingrad (now Volgograd). We went to factories, lots and lots of meetings. As I say, everyplace we went, we'd have meetings with top leadership of the party either in a factory or in a collective (lots of collective farms), or of the republic (we went to Georgia), or of a city soviet, or of a smaller area like Sukhumi. We'd meet with the top party membership. And then we went to Georgia and Azerbaijan, where we traveled by car. Those were very elaborate trips by car because they always had a second car to accompany us with a doctor in it, day and night, wherever we went--sometimes two doctors--to make sure that these precious American comrades stayed well, that nothing happened to them. We got awfully sick at times, both literally and figuratively, because part of the procedure with every delegation is an enormous amount of toasting. You'd go to either a new area geographically or to a new factory, and the first thing is always a lot of food and drinks and toasts and fating. People really literally got sick from the overeating and the overdrinking. And no matter how much we protested that this was not what we wanted and was not what we'd come for--not only did we have it happen but every delegation has it happen--it's just the procedure. You just simply get overwhelmed by it, just exhausted. Well, all kinds of things stood out in my mind in this trip. First of all, the visiting of the collective farms was tremendously important, I would say more for an American than for anyone else, because we really don't understand what the weight of centuries of peasant society represents. Just centuries upon centuries that helped to mold and influence human beings, and it is not eliminated overnight. It was, I think, one of the most revealing things that I noticed as far as my own consciousness of shortcomings in the Soviet Union was concerned, that I understood why there were these shortcomings in some respects. I might still be critical why they were not more rapidly overcome, and I think there is a criticism to be made of that. It is one of the things I think China is doing better, in the sense of decentralizing industry so that you don't have just the rural area but you have a rural area that is industrialized, which I think is enormously important. It's enormously important in ending what Marx considered one of the major questions of a socialist society: the separation, the division between the city and the country, the town and the country. But it was a big lesson for me to see the really great difference that existed from an American rural working class and the peasantry in the Soviet Union--just nothing to be compared, not at all. Secondly, I was enormously excited and enthusiastic about the extracurricular education attached to every factory. In a large factory there'd be one--if it's many small factories, they would feed into it--a palace of labor. And these palaces of labor were usually extraordinarily well equipped big buildings where workers would come after work for--the only thing comparable we have in this country is adult education. But there it's a very much more organized and rounded expression of the continuing process of acquiring knowledge in different fields. Every room would be filled with workers taking--it might be lessons in art, one or another aesthetic field, languages, mathmatics, sociology. You name it and there were people in a classroom studying it. Huge libraries, and there would be libraries both within the factories and within these palaces of labor. And obviously well-used libraries, libraries that were really very good, again, in terms of the rounded character of the selections--in other words, not just textbooks or presentations of Marx or of political things, but novels and history and poetry, all that. The system they had of continuing advanced education for young people, apprentices in the factory: they started the system (which people make so much of in China, but in the Soviet Union it started much earlier) where high school students, as part of their high school course, become part of the work force of a factory. It didn't always work very efficiently (and I gather from reading the more honest reports that in China it doesn't work too efficiently either), because, you know, it takes a long time for a student to understand what's being done industrially; it's sometimes a waste of time and money for the factory to have this responsibility. Nevertheless, within that, young people who were going on and studying independently in higher education, in formal educational institutions, by law had to be given time off with full pay to prepare for examinations, the final month off before examinations to prepare, and during examinations full time off with pay from the factory. There was no question to me--we went to dozens of factories and talked to workers without any problem; many of the people in our delegation spoke Russian so that we didn't even need translators all the time--no question of the spirit on the factory floor. They were running things, as far as they were concerned. They were making decisions, they determined things. As far as the, quote, "management" of the factory is concerned, there was no feeling that it was "they" and "us." They were the ones who decided who'd be management, and if they didn't like them they did something about it. There was no feeling of separation. And actually, the wage scale that I'd heard so much about, the great discrepancy, was not that great. The maximum that anybody that we found received as a director was 350 rubles a month, as against an average wage that we were seeing 100 to 110 rubles a month. While that is still too large a gap, nevertheless, it isn't the kind of gap that produces a "new class"; that is clear.

GARDNER

Well, it's still three times the earnings, though.

HEALEY

Yeah. But the point is that there was nothing static about it. Workers were the ones who became managers. In other words, there was a progression taking place. And the manager does not have unilateral power there, by any means.

GARDNER

Could you go through your trip more or less stop by stop, a short geographical tour, what your impressions were of each place you visited?

HEALEY

Yeah, as much as I can remember. Moscow, of course, was the first. Well, while I was there--and again superficially, because I don't by any means--in any of these places, you must remember that a delegation, any kind of delegation, and that includes a Communist delegation, is seeing only one aspect of reality. And that's true of those delegations going to China, too, believe me. You are seeing socialism through a limousine window, in a manner of speaking. That doesn't mean what you're seeing is not valid. It just means that it isn't the whole truth. What you're seeing is true--in other words, it's not a Potemkin village--but there's more to the reality than what you're seeing. You're not seeing the difficulties, the complicated contradictions. You're not seeing where the problems are not being challenged effectively. So the first impressions I had of Moscow--well, first of all, it reminded me very much of Los Angeles: big, bustling, not very pretty, not a very attractive city, a major metropolis. Although within that, of course--and what you see in Moscow you see in every Soviet city--is the enormous amount of green, the parks that are there and the kind of things that take place in the parks. There's something there for everybody in a park, and the parks are great centers of both recreation and education, dramas, everything. (I've always been convinced that's where Joseph Papp got the idea of Shakespeare-in-the-Park, just from seeing what happens there.) We'd go to the Bolshoi ballet almost every night till it started coming out our ears, frankly. Some people still loved it, but by the time I was ready to leave there, I had had it; I never wanted to see another ballet as long as I lived. Just generally, on the cultural scene, it's an impressive sight--first of all, the number of dramatic theaters available, both modern and classical. You'd go to something like their puppet theater, and it is really great artistry. The museums where they deal with old art or with the Western art are great. But both in the museums and just generally culturally, there's no question in my mind--I know the rest of my delegation wouldn't have agreed with me--that you're not going to have a cultural renaissance that would be equivalent to what that society could produce (new, imaginative innovations that would reflect the changing society) as long as there's this heavy hand that determines what's right, what's good or what's bad art. We had a very revealing, sharp session with the ministry of culture. [Yekaterina] Furtseva was out of the country; we met with her deputy. (Or at least they said she was out of the country; it's quite possible maybe if we'd been one notch higher in title we would have had Furtseva.) We had quite a sharp exchange, and particularly I did because being a party leader in Southern California, I'd had a great deal to do with the cultural movement, and I was very familiar with the sharp debates that took place. (We'd had an enormous one which I really ought to tell you about here with the Hollywood people around the whole cycle of "Negro films" that started in '48--Home of the Brave and going through--which our people, radicals, had pioneered against terrible attacks on them from both the New York party, the national party, and Jack Howard Lawson here in L.A. So I was acquainted with the battles in this field. As I say, at some point I should come back and tell you about that, because it explains a lot about what was happening with the party.) So I remember this discussion with the deputy when he was defining their approach toward the arts, and he said, "We want our dramatists, our playwrights, our novelists, to deal with what is important in Soviet reality. We don't want the nonsense about triangles and personal problems, but the whole depth of the problem of how you produce Communists." I said to him, "Well, how do you separate that problem? How do you separate the human problems that are expressed in the more familiar terms, with the new problems of developing the spirit of human beings, the emergence of new human beings who are capable of self-discipline, who don't need a government, don't need things." He said, "Well, it's very simple. We simply tell them this is what they must do." And I said, "Well, that's strange. You may have different experiences, of course, because you're dealing with a different society. I never found that the party could tell writers or dramatists or poets anything and have them produce according to what we said they had to produce. That's where the creative question comes in, and it has to reflect what the individual feels is the authentic response to a reality which that individual is experiencing or is attempting to identify." Quite a sharp exchange, and of course, always, in all these exchanges that I'll tell you about, my fellow comrades on my delegation were very unhappy with what I was doing. "Why do you do that? Why don't you sit and listen and accept what they're saying? Why do you keep doing that? It's so embarrassing!" And I'd say, "How are you going to know anything if you don't ask questions?" Also, as I said, that legislation had just been passed on the death penalty while we were there. And I was really genuinely horrified. You must know that the only reading material we had each day, no matter where we were--the Soviet Union puts out a translation of the main articles of their press in English, so we'd get that every day because the ones who didn't read Russian (or whatever other language of the country we were in, Azerbaijanian or Georgian) couldn't know what was being printed, and we didn't get any American papers outside of the Weekly Worker and the British Morning Star. None of them really gave us much of a picture of what was going on in the world. For the first time I really recognized the inadequacy of the radical press, because when you had nothing else to rely on, then you saw that this was really only supplementary, nothing else. So I got into just really very sharp fights, debates, everyplace we went, with the Soviet leadership with regard to that. One of our biggest meetings was with [Mikhail] Suslov, who was one of the top leaders of the Soviet party. And that was one of the questions I raised (that and the Jewish question, which was the other controversial question as far as our delegation). How did they explain that in a period where the Soviet society was advancing. . . ? And at the time we were there they were very proud of what they called "the communist work teams" that they were advancing towards. I haven't heard anything more about it for the last seven years or so; I suppose that, too, is something that didn't become quite the qualitative thing they thought it would be. But at that point, within their present environment there were going to be special groups in every factory and every enterprise that would already start to express that future communist society, people who produced not out of material incentive, but because of their recognition of the ideological spiritual needs of the society. Now, how, when you were going through this. . . ? The comradely courts had just been introduced; that was a system, a very exciting innovation, where on nonserious violations of socialist law, instead of going into a regular courtroom, the co-workers or coresidents of a building, as the case may be, the peers of the individual, would gather together to judge the question. They could not assess legal penalties, but they could do all kinds of social pressures and social penalties against an individual for drunkenness or absenteeism or parasitism or improper family relations. So here are all these really exciting things. There were other things, like the honor system in many industries (I still would like to know what happened with that one; I haven't heard any more about that, either), where they didn't have a time clock or timekeepers. The money that was due each worker: all the amounts would be placed on the table and each worker was to select out what was coming to him from his own calculations. No fares--no conductors. That I know they've still kept up. There's no conductor on most of the subways or buses. You were on the honor system to put your own fare in, and nobody was there to stop you if you didn't. So that here, on the one hand, are these very exciting (I thought) innovations taking place, and then side by side with that, the death penalty for economic crimes. Obviously, you only pass that kind of legislation when you have a deep problem. What they meant by that is people who'd steal from the factories, steal social property for private purposes. Well, everywhere I went, including with Suslov, the answer that was given me was always the same: "Our people are outraged, and they demand it. We are being responsive to what the masses of people want." I'd keep saying, "Well, that's no answer, because obviously the party and the government are supposed to help influence what people want and shape it. So what are you doing? If capital punishment is a medieval, barbaric thing, then what are you doing to shape people's attitudes not to want capital punishment?" "You don't understand, Comrade Healey, these are long-term things that take place." In the factories there were lots of very impressive things. Most important, what was at one time the strength is probably also a great weakness: there was certainly no speed-up in any factory we visited. Everybody works very leisurely. In a sense that's nice; they're setting slow paces and don't overwork themselves. It's also very bad because the productivity problem is a great problem for every socialist country. What it reflects is the continuance of a historic problem, that they do not have a working class that was shaped and disciplined by capitalism where workers knew they had to produce or they didn't get paid. Under socialism there's always the problem that, "It's our society, we run it, so why do we have to work? It's still ours; nobody can do anything to us about it." But the thing that bothered me was the absolute filth of the toilets. This was true in the factories, and it was even more true, of course, in the collective farms. Absolutely disgusting. It was incredible. For instance, in Azerbaijan and in Georgia, you'd go to the most modern new buildings of the party, the Central Committee and the government, brand-new buildings. No toilets. Or if there were toilets, they were the Asian kind: on each side of a hole in the ground there's like two footprints, one on each side, and you simply squat and that's it. Or if you were in the collective farms, just the filthiest kind of outdoor privies, with absolutely no method of flushing, of sanitation, anything. Well, both in Moscow and particularly in the collective farms--not in the collective farms so much, but in meeting with, for instance, the minister of health in some of these places like in Georgia--I'd keep bringing it up, "Why are you so backward on this?" I got two different explanations. From the Soviet comrade in Moscow who'd accompanied us on all these trips, his explanation was, "You must understand"--it was a little bit like the death penalty, although a variant of it--"You must understand that we are responsive to the pressures of our people. Our people have never historically known modern methods of sanitation. It's not to them a priority, therefore we get no pressure from that. We get the pressure on other things. We allocate social funds where the pressures are." And again, you know, the same response I'd give, "Well, what's your role in education?" I remember in one of the Soviet republics, meeting with the rural collective farm people, when I raised the question I got two answers. From the minister of health, who was a woman, I got the answer that there is no incidence of epidemics or sickness that comes from this lack of sanitation. I couldn't understand it, because one place where we ate at a collective farm, a very beautiful farm, the dining table outdoors was about ten feet away from an outdoor privy. The flies would come from the one over to the table, you know, just one little fly-jaunt. And I kept saying, "Well, it's impossible that people don't get sick from this kind of bringing of flies." There's no hazard that comes from this, I was told. Then again, they'd vary that with the same answer, that they were responsive to the masses. They told the story about Khrushchev and a meeting of collective farm representatives. He pressed that they should allocate some of their funds, the social funds, to the building of sanitary facilities, and they just scoffed. That is not where they wanted to put it. That could wait for another twenty years if necessary. Therefore, they were trying to show me, "We do try to do something, but we can't go faster than the people are ready to go."

GARDNER

You mentioned that Moscow struck you like Los Angeles in the sense of being large, a metropolis.

HEALEY

And bustling. Impersonal. Well, actually the difference between Leningrad and Moscow--and there's a great competition and rivalry between them--is very much like the difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles, both as far as the geographical distance, and as far as the atmosphere and environment of the two respective cities, one kind of light and airy, and the other kind of heavy and pedestrian.

GARDNER

Which is which?

HEALEY

Leningrad and San Francisco being the light and airy ones, Moscow and L.A. being the heavy, more ponderous, not very attractive ones. Leningrad's one of the most beautiful cities I saw, only exceeded by Prague. No, I guess Leningrad's even prettier than Prague. I don't know. Why do I have to choose? They're both beautiful.

GARDNER

To interrupt you with your train of thought here for a minute. ...

HEALEY

Oh, there's no train of thought.

GARDNER

What are the buildings like? Are there many single-family homes, or are they mostly apartments?

HEALEY

Oh, no, the single-family things are the dying-out part. That's the old part that has to be removed because it's so bad. The housing problem is a special problem in the Soviet Union, and it's only understandable when you realize that hundreds of thousands of homes and apartments were just devastated by the Nazi invasion, by the war. To try to catch up, to keep pace with the growth of population, to match it with good housing facilities, has probably been the single greatest problem in the Soviet government, and one that I would gather even by reading current material they haven't yet been able to catch up with. That produces all kinds of social problems, such as young people that have to stay in an apartment with their parents after they get married--they can't get separate facilities. There's great progress and change, but there's still not enough, and it's very difficult to do it. That's one reason for the inadequate and shoddy housing that tourists talk about; they were not so much concerned with quality as they were with quantity.

GARDNER

What are they like? Are they large complexes?

HEALEY

Yes, almost all of them are very large complexes, apartment houses.

GARDNER

More or less along the Parklabrea [Towers] sort of thing?

HEALEY

No, Parklabrea's much nicer.

GARDNER

But that sort of style?

HEALEY

Much more like housing projects, that sort of thing. Not entirely, because there were exceptions, and as I understand it, there's now much new housing, new apartments that are much nicer, but I haven't seen them; I hear from people who've been there. Oh, there was one other thing that has never really been commented on, in my opinion, sufficiently, either by the Soviet leaders, people, writers, or by visitors; when I was there in 1961, it stood out as an enormous social tragedy. In the war, over 20 million people were killed; while hundreds of thousands of women were killed, mainly men were killed in the war. This meant that there was a whole generation of women who either had lost husbands or had never been married. The discrepancy in the weight of population between women of, say thirty-five to fifty and men of that age was just an incredible figure. Well, it produced. . . . And it was very striking, mainly because I became very, very close friends with two Soviet women; we became very intimate. One was Frieda Lurie, who is the deputy to the American desk at the Soviet Writers Union, a brilliant, knowledgeable, sophisticated and cultured woman who knows more about American culture than any American I ever met, bar none. I never knew anyone who had her knowledge of the nuances of our cultural scene. And then this woman Gali, whom I mentioned earlier who was the secretary of the party at the Institute for International Relations and who taught languages there. Well, this story of women who either had never had husbands or had lost husbands and there were no other men available, what it had done was just absolutely incredible. [tape recorder turned off] You found things coming from this, leaving aside the obvious thing of the frustrations of the women, all sorts of strange kinds of offshoots resulting in the mores of the society. Big debates, for instance, were taking place as to the propriety of women deliberately going on to have children even though they had no husband and even though the father might be somebody else's husband, simply in order to guarantee that they had children (I mean, how else would they do it?), the propriety of communist women having extralegal relationships. Really, in most countries they wouldn't even stop to debate it. But there they were debating it. And I was interested in talking to these two communist women, their difference in response on this problem, one saying, "Under no conditions would I do such a thing because I'd just be taking some other woman's happiness and I don't want my happiness at her expense." And the other saying, "I have no alternative. What can I do? I will never have any physical relationship and know love if I don't." I've never seen a single novel or a single political statement, nothing that reflects what this enormous offshoot of the World War II meant to the Soviet people. Or the question of Stalin. There were very different responses, depending on the level of leadership the people were in. It was really ironic to me; with the people in the top leadership in every country we visited, and in every part of the Soviet Union we visited, the hatred of Stalin was a very intense and real thing. They had all known firsthand what that represented. But that was sure not true down below. I'm talking about wherever you went, both in Moscow and Leningrad, of course in Volgograd (Stalingrad), in Georgia--naturally I expected it there--but in Azerbaijan, everywhere. Finally this comrade who traveled with us, Gali, said, "Well, you must realize, our soldiers died with the name of Stalin on their lips." I couldn't resist saying to her, "Wouldn't it have been better if they'd died with the word 'socialism' on their lips? [Isn't that] the problem?" But with that, like the other problems, playing around the role of women there, we'd get into very touchy, intense things. It's a problem.

GARDNER

How did Stalinism come up, the remaining influence of Stalin?

HEALEY

Well, believe me, it's quite an influence.

GARDNER

How did it reveal itself?

HEALEY

Well, you'd see the same stodgy responses of what was true. For instance, I attended--all of us did--a one-week seminar at the Higher Party Institute in Moscow. The Higher Party Institute is an institution that every top Soviet functionary of every republic must go to at one point or another of their official political duties. So it's a very revealing place, again, as far as what kind of things--what's the methodology, what's dominant as far as the relations and how Marxism is taught. It was shocking. The pedagogic approaches: Lenin is taught by rote, you know, the same as is done with Mao Tse-tung, where you memorize slogans and you think you know something about Marxism. I remember one discussion we had on left-wing communism. "Lenin said, page two. . . . Why did Lenin say this? This is why Lenin said this. . . . Page four, Lenin said. . . . Why?" That really epitomizes the problem without by any means exhausting it. But it does summarize what you found. You'd find it in discussions. For instance, everyplace we went we'd meet with these leaders--and again, I didn't really always do it to be provocative or mischievous. Mainly I did it because I was getting bored with listening to the same chant of accomplishments, "We have accomplished this. We have accomplished that." So I'd ask, "What are your particular ideological problems in this area? Where do you find the thing that you have to focus on that gives you trouble?" They'd look at me blankly and say, "We have no problems." Now, it might have been the language, an inability to communicate in the words that would mean more to them-- maybe the way I phrased the question was foreign to their way of thinking--but I think it was more probable that they simply were not used to thinking in that way, that these are the obstacles to the development of a fuller, finer, final communist society.

GARDNER

What was your stop after Moscow?

HEALEY

We went to Leningrad on the train.

GARDNER

Which was where you found San Francisco.

HEALEY

Yeah, although of course much prettier than San Francisco. Leningrad's one of the most beautifully laid-out cities of the world. It's an architect's delight. Everything is in exact measurements, identical measurements. It's a lovely, graceful place. There, I must say I found myself somewhat disturbed for a reason I would never have expected--and it sounds strange coming from me--what I considered the impact of bourgeois Western influences far more than anything in Leningrad. We went to see a ballet, Spartacus, that just horrified me. It was like the worst of a Broadway production, serai-naked women and stupid choreography which had nothing that was significant or good. I saw a lot of drunkenness in the streets, and that bothered me. Of course, when you met with the formal party committees and went to lots of factories--oh, God, we went to factories! Day after day--you got a different feeling in talking with people again. I'll tell you, there's one thing everywhere I went: there were people whom I'd absolutely fall in love with as human beings. With some people you'd start to feel that these were the prototypes of new kinds of human beings, new people devoid of the former bourgeois hangovers. My main memory of the Hermitage was my exasperation over the bad lighting of the Rembrandts. They had a marvelous, just superb Rembrandt collection. But you know, Rembrandts are dark anyway, and there was just no lighting around them. I kept saying, "What are you doing it for? Why don't you do something?" "Oh, yeah, we know, that's something we've got to do some day." I had one other reaction that was my usual, "negative," as my comrades say about me. I can understand the great preoccupation with the ancient past, Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible. But Jesus, if you're going to do that in all the great detail they do it, at least make it have a political meaning of what that past represented, that was intolerable, not just a glorification of the pomp and the wealth and the splendor and jewelry. Of course, one thing we discovered about museums, the Soviets are great people in every part of the Soviet Union for museums. They'll drive you out of your mind if you let them take you to every one, because for every local celebrity, artist, writer or governmental leader, whatever, the museum starts with the baby shoes and goes on through every detail. You always know more than you needed to know or wanted to know about whatever person was being honored. I can't say that I noted any great differences between Leningrad party leaders that we talked to and met with or the Moscow ones.

GARDNER

How about the cities as far as housing? You mentioned Leningrad as being light and airy and so forth.

HEALEY

The overwhelming thing of Leningrad is the deaths that came from the siege of Leningrad. When I was there in "61, it was omnipresent. It's not only that they show you this film that just drives you out of your mind with the horror of what that siege represented (it's entitled The Siege of Leningrad). One of the things that happened that was extremely moving, we went out to a huge, huge cemetery (that Nixon also visited) where hundreds of thousands are buried in a common grave. There's a memorial, a beautiful place. We went to lay a wreath there, our delegation. A very moving scene took place. As we were standing there, we did something that's not Soviet protocol, but we didn't know, we were so stupid. The Soviet comrade made a speech, and so we thought we should respond, particularly about the question of U.S. imperialism and what it represented. So I made a speech as a woman, from women to women, about what was present as far as the threat of war and imperialism. And in the middle of it a Soviet woman came bursting through the entourage with everybody standing around, with flowers and whatnot, and threw her arms around me and cried and embraced me and kissed me and cried some more. I cried; our tears watered the whole area around us. And that's the kind of thing that kept breaking through, this human contact that kept on. There were some amusing things that also happened, again about this business of protocol. This chairman of our delegation, Arnold Johnson, is a rather heavy-handed stodgy person. We were on the Aurora, which is the great historic thing in St. Petersburg or Leningrad, where the guns first went off in 1917 attacking the Winter Palace. We were always getting a little bothered by Arnold's speeches at various places because he was so pompous. But all right. We were embarrassed, but we didn't let anybody know, because that's not nice; you're Americans abroad. But evidently our faces showed some of it, because that night--about twelve-thirty in the morning it was--two of the Soviet comrades, the woman Gali and the man from the Central Committee who was accompanying us, came and knocked on my door, and the man said to me, "Comrade Dorothy. Tell your comrades not to be upset about what your comrade Arnold says in these speeches. We don't translate what he says, anyway." [laughter] We just howled.

1.24. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE [video session I] FEBRUARY 5, 1973

GARDNER

This is our first videotape session. Dorothy, when we left off last time, which was quite some time ago, we were talking about your trip to the Soviet Union in 1961.

HEALEY

Yes. I don't remember exactly how far we discussed it then. Maybe if I repeat myself it won't be the most disastrous thing, and I'm sure it's not the first time it's happened to you. As I think I indicated, the problem of contrasts in the Soviet Union is an enormous challenge to the vision of the tourist. You can see anything you want to. You can see the most exciting, glorious examples of what is new and what is going to be dominant, you hope; but simultaneously you can see the most sad and terrible vestiges of the past. As an example, one of the things that impressed me was that in visiting the new cities that have been built up around huge industrial complexes--populated primarily by very young people, led by very young people, the mayor and the city soviet are all young people--that not only is the physical surrounding impressive (new architecture and well laid-out streets, always greenery everywhere you look), far more impressive and significant was the impression that the people made on me. There were people I met, primarily in these places but not exclusively, with whom one felt almost one was seeing the prototype of Socialist Man, of all of what I believed when I was growing up would happen just automatically as a result of a revolution, human beings who exemplified within themselves and their conduct and their relationships the most selfless kinds of people, people with whom the pronoun I had diminished, and the pronouns we and our had become dominant. One saw that in their relationships between themselves; one saw that in their relations with us. But then one could also go to places, as I did--the collective farms, for instance, in some of the republics in Azerbaijan and Georgia, where I found very distressing, the still present contrast between the city and the country, between the worker of hand and the worker who uses his mental faculties I found the contrast in collective farms rather overwhelming even as far as physical facilities were concerned. To me there still seemed to be far too great a contrast between educational facilities in the collective farm as contrasted with the [other] area. I must say, however, that visiting the collective farms gave me an understanding of something that for an American is tremendously important: the impact of centuries of tradition upon a people, in this case upon the former peasantry, who for centuries had been so horribly oppressed. In the United States, where you don't have a feudal background, where there wasn't a feudal peasantry chained to the soil, there's really nothing comparable in our history nor in our culture to understand what kind of people had been leading the Soviet government, even the wise ones. This challenge of transforming the consciousness of millions of people molded by the past, by the traditions of feudalism, would have been an incredibly difficult, complicated job, as I say, no matter who was responsible. But all my reading hadn't prepared me for the impact of that. Well, casual things that were not so casual, but that I just mention casually, things that struck me--I said we were there two months. I would say five weeks of the two months were spent traveling by car throughout Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Sukhumi. Within what is called White Russia, we were primarily in Moscow, Leningrad, and what was then Stalingrad, now Volgograd. They were just going through the process of what they called "communist teams" within the factories; they were trying to accelerate the development of conscious acceptance of discipline over productivity within the factory. It was not based on pressures from above but on their own understanding. There was a competition between teams as to who would win the Banners of Communist Production. I haven't heard about that in the last few years. There must obviously have been weaknesses in the development of it or it would have continued to be prominent, as it was when I was there in 1961. But what impressed me about it when I saw it, that I had really not seen written about, were the really exciting illustrations of, again, the emergence of a new society from within the old. For instance, in one factory we visited in Leningrad there was no longer a timekeeper. The workers on a team--all the workers in the plant--were responsible themselves for coming in and leaving, with no one to oversee it. It was totally a voluntary responsibility. There was no paymaster. At the end of the month, the rubles were brought into a common waiting room and placed in a pile on a table, and each worker paid himself what he had estimated he should receive, what his wages would be for that period. And when I talked to the trade union committee that was in overall responsibility for that plant, which had been elected by the workers in the plant, they told me that this had been in operation for over a year, and that what was really amazing was that the bookkeeping accounts had been impeccable as far as trusting and relying on the workers to do it themselves. For instance, you see on the subway or in the buses that there's no conductor to take fares; it's only a question of your honor that you pay your own fare without supervision or someone to throw you off. Another example of the same newness that was exciting was around the development of what they termed "comradely courts." The comradely courts were voluntary institutions, elected either in a factory or in a collective farm or what we would call a housing project, of people who acted, in a sense, as judges over social misbehavior. Their limitation was that they could not deal with questions of serious crimes; in other words, they had no penal sentencing authority. But they were primarily to bring the weight of public opinion to bear on such things as drunkenness or beating one's wife or not being responsible for one's children in the full parental sense of what that should be. They were elected and rotated, so that everybody was supposed to get experience in doing that. Of course, to me the exciting thing about it is that it potentially foreshadowed a withering away of the formal institutions of the state; rather than a separate defined set of human beings responsible for administering justice, it becomes a voluntary thing of all the people taking turns in having to be responsible for the counteraction, counterpressure against what they would call the "hangovers of capitalist ideology," you know, antisocial behavior of any kind. But one also has to contrast that then with dominant aspects of the old still being present and not fought against--and not only not fought against but being actively projected into contemporary society. The month we arrived there was the month that they enacted into law legislation which reactivated the death penalty for economic crimes, the stealing of socialist property, materials from a factory or community of any kind. I was absolutely horrified that this barbaric, medieval hangover should be reinstituted in a socialist society. And everywhere I went--you must understand that any city we visited, any new republic, no matter where we went, the opening thing was always that we would meet either with the leading Communist party collective of that area (the republic or the city or the county), or with the trade union or the factory (in some cases the trade union, in some other cases it would be the works project committee). Sometimes it would be the Communist party officials; other times it would be the soviet officials with shorn we'd meet, local or top level, but always with a great deal of formality. So everywhere we went, after they had finished their usual description of what was unique to their circumstances, what was characteristic of their situation, we would ask questions. And this was one of the first questions I'd always ask: "How do you account for the fact that at a point when you say you are going toward the building of the new communist society, you are bringing back into life, into society, the worst vestige of the past, capital punishment; that you no longer make as the dominant theme the rehabilitation of human beings, their capacity of change, but instead you kill them, and therefore end any capacity of change?" Everywhere I went, whether we were meeting with Suslov, who was one of the top Soviet leaders, or with just an ordinary person in a factory with no title, we'd always get the same response: "The people demand it. The people demand it. We are acting in response to the mass demand by people who are outraged by the fact that socialist property is being stolen." I would just laugh at this. I'd say, "Well, you know, that's nonsense, because the leadership has the responsibility of changing antiquated methods of thinking. I'm glad the people are indignant. But the answer to that is to then teach the people that their indignation should go in a socially desirable outlet rather than capital punishment."

GARDNER

What was the response to this?

HEALEY

Well, most of the time it was just a blank look as if I was talking a language that had no possible way of communicating with them. The young woman whom I think I described who was traveling with us from the Institute of International Relations in Moscow--she was traveling with us because she wanted to write a dictionary on American-Russian slang. She had learned her English-- spoke a beautiful English--from British English, and now she wanted to know the vernacular of Americans, and therefore she had volunteered to travel with us along with a representative of the Central Committee who was with us. In our intimate relations--because we were together quite a lot; we'd share these swanky suites that they gave me in the beginning because of my title as a member of the National Executive Board of my party--I'd press her when we'd come back to our room about it. For most of the trip she just simply looked at me blankly, and she too would repeat all this jargon that everybody will give you--in almost identical words, the same response. But the day I was to leave the Soviet Union to come home, she walked with me outside in the gardens in the hotel where we were staying, the party hotel, and said, "I want to tell you something. My mother, who was an old revolutionary, who'd been an old Bolshevik, wanted me to tell you that she agrees with you. She thinks you're absolutely right." The way she told it to me, kind of confidentially, a just-be tween-us sort of thing, indicated that obviously she herself felt much more deeply about it than she was willing to communicate. It was not only on that question that one would still see the pull of the old and the new. On the question of the role of women, the identical thing would happen. I don't remember whether we went into that last time.

GARDNER

No, I don't think we did. The first comment I would have made is that quite a bit comes out of the Soviet Union to the effect that the role of women is much, much greater in the Soviet Union than it is in America.

HEALEY

Oh, well, there's no question of that. What the Soviet Union does demonstrate is that the Marxists who say that the prerequisite for changing all other questions of either exploitation or oppression is a socialist revolution are right. But the key word is prerequisite. What people forget is that a prerequisite does not mean a solution. It only means establishing the grounds for a solution. So that on one hand, as far as equality economically for women, that is certainly true. There's no such thing as a differential in wages between what women earn and what men earn. There's no such thing as a prohibited profession for women. Any field, any career is open for women. As far as formal equality is concerned, that has been achieved. But formal equality still does not represent real equality. There's still a gap. In the Soviet Union the gap is that in the top leadership of the party, the political bureau of the party, the very top, there are no women. Not one. In the top bodies that we met with when we traveled around to the Soviets, there were practically no women. Now, that was contrasted, for instance, in a place like Baku with the fact that the head of the museum was a woman. The head of the oil industry, or the ministry for oil, was a woman. You would see that happening. And yet in the institutions of real power, women were not present. But more basically the problem was that they had not yet been able to do what was really one of the key questions of the emancipation for women, and that is emancipation from the drudgery of housework. The women actually work two shifts. They work on a job and in addition they then have to do the shopping and the cleaning when they get home, all the usual things.

GARDNER

That's very strange. There's no sharing of roles then.

HEALEY

Well, there is somewhat. There's a lot of talk on it. But basically, it is still the woman who does the second job.

GARDNER

What were some of the other inequities that you saw?

HEALEY

About women or just generally?

GARDNER

We11, women.

HEALEY

Well, then you see the results of that also in the people's consciousness, both men and women. We forget sometimes that the oppressed person shares the ideas that help to justify the oppression. For instance, this Soviet woman comrade Gali, who traveled everyplace we went--in the beginning I'd just kind of tease her about it, and say, "Where are the women here?" Because of the tragedy of World War II, where over 20 million people were killed, and of course the biggest percentage were men, there are far more women than there are men in the Soviet Union, particularly at the age level--at that point it was from about thirty-five to fifty. So just naturally by sheer quantity of numbers the representation of women in important places should have been greater. And Gali would get very indignant with me. As I say, in the beginning it was a jest, and finally it became very serious because I saw how she accepted the explanation of why women didn't play a more permanent role. I remember particularly in Volgograd: we came out of an all-day meeting with the heads of the soviet there, and there wasn't one woman among them. I said to her as we walked out, "Gali, where are the women?" She turned on me finally in indignation, because this jesting and badinage had gone on so long, and she said, "Dorothy, don't you understand that after all, women have children, and when the children get sick, the women have to stay home and take care of them, and we've got to have continuity in the work? We can't have leaders take time off to take care of children." I looked at her in utter amazement, and I said, "Gali, fathers have children that get sick, too. Maybe the father should stay home." Well, she was nonplussed; the idea had never crossed her mind that this was not the woman's job to do this. Or another example of it--and this other example is again an interesting one to me, of the complexity of social change, that you do something that is demonstrably good, you reach a new plateau, and then you discover you've got new problems that you hadn't anticipated, not because it is backward but because you have reached a new social plateau, and new problems come from that. For instance, the Soviet Union and all socialist countries have passed great legislation for women who have children, babies. For three months before the child is born and three months after, you're off with full pay. When you go back to work, there is a nursery right within the place where you're working, so that the child can be there with you if you want it. This is great. But what it did at the same time was that those industries and those institutes where the question of continuity of productivity is so important would not take women, young women still capable of childbirth, in those jobs because they didn't want that six-month break to take place. So, as I say, here you've reached a great stride forward--child care, everything taken care of, nurseries, the things that women in this country are still just dreaming about--but it hasn't solved the problem because new problems then arise. Really, as I say, it demonstrates more than anything that the active revolution, while essential, only poses the possibility of solution, and that possibility is only answered if there is the constant scrutiny of what happens, with millions of people participating in that scrutiny, in order to draw new lessons to go on to another level, to answer the new weaknesses that come from the momentary solution that has developed. I spent quite some time on the status of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union, only partly because I am myself Jewish. I say "only partly," because I'm an internationalist, and I wouldn't care whether it was Jewish people or Moslems--if it was any question of discrimination I would feel a sharp question of identification; I would not feel it solely nor primarily because of being Jewish. Well, again, you find the interesting contrast. And it's a complex thing, and people don't like complex answers. They want simple ones. Either the Jews are oppressed or they're not. There's nothing in between. Of course, you cannot give that kind of an answer as to what really happens in a society that is more involved than that. For instance, there are more Jewish students in the highest institutions of learning in the Soviet Union than almost any national grouping within the Soviet Union, including the Ukrainians or the Georgians or anything, in proportion to their numbers in a society. In a society where education is the absolute need for going further into the society, this is, of course, a very important thing. So that if you looked at only that aspect, you would have to say, well, of course then the Jews are not discriminated against, because greater numbers of Jews are students than any other people. Obviously with that significance of education, then there's no such question as discrimination. It's true, and yet it's not the whole story. Because what I found was that when it came to the question of Jewish identification, devoid of religious identification, the Jewish people had no way of common organization together, of secular organization. You could have the temples, but if you were an atheist--and this would be true of a large number--then there was no way of identifying yourself secularly with fellow Jews. Or another example of a problem: in a society where anti-Semitism played a comparable role to that slavery played in the United States, where the Jews, in other words, had been the defined butt of ridicule and attack, the subject of pogroms for the whole society, clearly, I think, a Marxist approach required a special approach towards Jews. In other words, if you were fighting, as an example, against religious survivals in the minds of people, you cannot in the course of that approach [treat] the Jewish people in the identical way that you'd approach the Greek Orthodox. Why? Because the Greek Orthodox Church was connected with the oppressor in the past, with the Czarist regime. And the Jews were the oppressed; Judaism therefore was the religion of the oppressed. That didn't make it a better religion, didn't make it more accurate or anything else. It was still a religious manifestation and, therefore, to a Marxist, a manifestation of obscurantism. Nevertheless, when the antireligious propaganda takes on all religions equally, without differentiating between the religion of the oppressor and the religion of the oppressed, in life that becomes anti-Semitism, even though it's not conscious of it. Or a second example of what I think is lacking in sensitivity in the Soviet Union: again, when you're dealing with a historically oppressed people where there has developed a great sense of oppression over the centuries, you've got to have a special sensitivity to the outraged feelings of the oppressed, whether it's in the way you use the language or in the jokes you tell. If you are a part of the nation that was oppressing--in other words, of the Russian nation--then you must be responsible as a Marxist for not continuing the attitudes and language that characterize the oppressor. Well, there, too, there is not a sensitivity in my opinion, or sufficient sensitivity, so that you still heard derisive epithets used for Jews. Culturally there is still a problem where, as an example, the facility for learning Yiddish was not as present--as a matter of fact, I didn't find it present at all; but that doesn't mean it wasn't present, because I can't say I did a total, scientific job. But I didn't find it present in any university, as it should have been.

GARDNER

Is that true of the other minority interests, too?

HEALEY

No, it is not true. Because other minority languages, particularly where they have a common territory that they inhabit, are taught as the first language that everybody learns. At least, they were when I was there. So that it is not true. Other languages have newspapers in their languages, even though they all read Russian-- most everybody reads Russian, because it is the overall unifying language of all the peoples. But they always still nevertheless have newspapers available in the language of that people. But except for one that comes out twice a week in Birobidzhan--which is really just an excuse for a paper, it's no real paper--there was no such newspaper in Moscow, where there are hundreds of thousands of Jews, or in Leningrad or the Ukraine, in Kiev, and so forth. As I say, it's no excuse to say that the Jews read Russian. Of course they do. But so do the Georgians read Russian, and the Ukrainians, and whatever other minority there is.

GARDNER

What about Jews in the upper leadership as well? You mentioned the high percentage in universities. There's not a very great percentage of Jews among the high levels of the party.

HEALEY

That's correct, there is not. And again, it was not possible for me to ascertain the relationship of that to conscious policies, although I would say that the contrast between the thirties and the sixties is just enormous, because in the thirties there was a very large percentage. But here again, you come up against a very complicated question, and I am not one to say I know a quick answer on this one, either. There was the feeling of resentment on the part of the non-Jew over the great numbers, and it played on the ancient anti-Semitic training and agitation and propaganda that had gone on for centuries: "Aha, the Jew always looks for the easy way. The Jew is there where it's comfortable. The Jew is the one who gets away by his wits and therefore outwits all the rest of us people." They gave me an example of that in Leningrad, of how that applied in life. Before the Nazis came close to Leningrad, the Soviet government evacuated almost all the Jewish population, because it was recognized that the first victim of the Nazis, if they were able to get any further into Leningrad, would be the Jewish people, the Soviet Jews. Well, think of the feeling of the ordinary Leningrader, who said, "See, there again, the chosen people." Then after the war, the evacuated Jews were brought back to Leningrad, and although they had not gone through the same suffering and horror--and the siege of Leningrad, of course, is one of the incredible stories of history--they nevertheless got their jobs back, they got their share of apartments, and so forth. So again the ordinary Russian said, "Aha, you see, they didn't suffer, but right away they get it good when they come back." Well, whichever way the Soviet government would have moved in that situation, they were going to be damned by somebody. If they didn't evacuate the Jews, they were right; the Jews would have been the first ones killed. But doing it, they then perpetuated the problem. There was one other factor that perpetuates the anti-Semitism, two other factors that I comment on because of its current relevancy. There is, of course, the one that I thought would be obvious, but I guess it isn't so obvious. The people who continue to go to the Greek Orthodox church or any of the Christian churches imbibe in their church teaching the Jew as the killer of Christ. When I was there, for instance, there were the examples of the old grandmothers who mainly--you know, the mother was working--were taking the child to church. And that child while going to church was again absorbing the historic anti-Semitism that was present in the Christian religion, the Jew as Christ-killer. Therefore you saw the anachronism in this modern society, the centuries-old ideology re-creating itself. Now, I also found in the discussions with the top leadership--particularly I'm now thinking of the meeting we had with Suslov, because he was the highest party official with whom we met--a curious blindness, curious to me, in regard to this significance of the Jewish question. He said he recognized and was willing to see that there had been no question of anti-Semitism in the late forties after World War II as far as the execution of Jewish cultural representatives, doctors and so forth. But then he said, "We are not going to re-create the facilities for creating again a Jewish identity which, whether for good or bad," he said, "is gone. The answer is to accelerate the processes of total assimilation, so that there is only one people, the Soviet people, and not these separate identities." Now, again, this is a question of Marxist theory and Marxist practice, that while one could agree--I could agree--that the objective, the goal of a socialist society leading to a communist society would be the ultimate elimination of national distinctions, a flowering of the human race, clearly that can only be achieved through a voluntary process, a voluntary process first of all on the part of the national people (in this case, of the Jews) of wanting to voluntarily become a part of this, and simultaneously a voluntary process on the part of the non-Jew of the acceptance of this. As long as there is the slightest trace of anti-Semitism in this society, the Jew is going to maintain the identity as a Jew, perforce, willy-nilly. Therefore, what Suslov reflected to me was this curious blindness of not being able to see that you cannot pass a decision as to when a people will feel that it is ready for total integration, that it has a confidence, that it is totally accepted with the whole; that can only be [achieved] through the processes of mutual confidence that is gained only in life and not, as I say, by a party body passing a decision, "This is it, and now take it." One saw that in other things, but, as I say, it was most notable on the question of the Jewish people. I mentioned that there was another factor that perpetuated the stereotypes. When Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia again became a part of the Soviet Union in 1940, the Jewish people who lived in those countries were not among the Jewish revolutionaries who had been an organic part of the revolutionary movement that made the revolution in Russia. They were not people who wanted to live under socialism. They were a people living in these three republics, living under the conditions of capitalism and in some cases of semifascism, who lived primarily by their wits, what the Yiddish call luftmensch. When they were brought into the Soviet Union as a whole, and particularly when because of World War II they were also evacuated out of these three border areas, they brought with them all of the worst of what is produced by oppression--the worst characteristics among Jewish people, in this case, although you find the comparable thing with any oppressed people, the attributes that come as a result of it, of living by the wits, not wanting to work on a regular job, thinking how you can outwit the society and get what you want at the expense of somebody and not caring about somebody else. So you have that, too; that was present. Again, I wouldn't want to exaggerate or overemphasize it, because then one would be placing on the Jews the responsibility for anti-Semitism, and that would be nonsense. And yet not to see the interaction of the problem. . . . Another cultural characteristic--and I say it somewhat tentatively, because I'm not certain scientifically how far I'd extend the point--there is kind of a tradition among Jews of respect, of reverence for learning, for education. I'm not saying it's present among all Jews, but it is a dominant tradition. Therefore, that partly explains why there is such a large percentage of Jews in the higher institutions, because it is a drive in the family. "Education, that's what you must have." At least some members of the family must have it. Well, the revolution's too young yet for that to have become the overwhelming, dominant thing for the Soviet people, any more than it is today for the Chinese people. So the Russians would look around and see this large percentage of Jews, and, as I say again, it would produce that. But among Jews it also produced it. In my discussions with Soviet Jews, there were again some of these bad characteristics that come from the still uncompleted realization of full freedom, of what that realizes. A certain feeling of superiority : "Well, we Jews are just smarter, that's why there's so many of us [in universities]. We Jews don't have to go through. . . ." So back and forth these tendencies interact. The old tendencies of the anti-Semitism still acting upon the mass of Russians, and the old characteristics that come as a defense against oppression, of Jewish superiority, of the chosen people, acting and still influencing Jews. As I say, they're not separated and isolated things; they interact on one another as well.

GARDNER

What about Birobidzhan? That's something I've heard a lot about. What do you know about it?

HEALEY

Well, what I know about it is it's not very desirable, but, as I say, I don't really know about it. I gather it's in a portion of the country that does not have the most desirable physical characteristics. Very few Jews wanted to go there in the thirties when it was set up because as far as they were concerned, it would have meant the re-creation of another ghetto. Suslov was right in this point; most of the Jews of the thirties and of the forties, until World War II came long, until Nazism arose again in the world--Zionism was not a big thing among Jews--what most Jews wanted was not a separate identity; they wanted a common identity with the right to preserve their own special characteristics as they desired, but not separate and apart from others. And of course, that part of it is true in the Soviet Union. You don't find ghettos in the Soviet Union; you don't find separate communities where Jews live and other communities where Gentiles live. It's all mixed up. But there was a feeling in the thirties, when Birobidzhan was set up as being a Jewish state, that the Russian Jews, the Soviet Jews, didn't want any part of it. They had helped build a revolution for the whole people; they didn't want to go to a separate one. I would doubt very much from what I've heard whether that's a situation that's too much changed.

GARDNER

But you mentioned that the only Yiddish language newspaper was there.

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, it's not the only Yiddish publication. Just before we came into the Soviet Union, there was started a publication known in English as Soviet Homeland, I think it is. At that time when I was there in 1961, it had a circulation of 25,000 copies. That's not a lot in the Soviet Union, but it's more than any paper of the United States has in Yiddish circulation. I think there's some argument as to how much of that's circulated internally and how much goes for export. I don't really know. Then there are a lot of books that are published in Yiddish. But again, there's a very great debate among Jews even on that, the great majority wanting books written by Jews to be printed in Russian where everybody can read them, and then the others who say, "Yes, that may be true, but we have a right to have it in Yiddish never- theless for those who still do want it in Yiddish."

GARDNER

Did you meet many Jews personally?

HEALEY

Yes, yes. When I was there in '61, I would say the overwhelming mood, the dominant mood, was a rejection of wanting to be separated in any way from the total of Soviet life. But already one could see the signs developing of what has transpired in later years, of the Jews who have left the Soviet Union to go to Israel. It was no great thing when I was there. As I look back now, of course--a lot of this is 20-20 vision looking back, hindsight, not current vision when I was there--I see the kind of things that would produce that. The desire to be someplace where, "So you're a Jew, so what? Everybody else is a Jew, so it no longer has any significance."

GARDNER

What were some of the other things? Have we covered just about all of it?

HEALEY

Oh Lord, no. I was there two months and every day was a new experience.

GARDNER

You have some of the letters. Do you want to start looking through those?

HEALEY

Yes, I have all the letters I sent home to my mother, and I wrote something every day, every time I went anywhere. Well, the cultural life. I won't go into that because it's been so accurately described by every tourist who goes there--the ballet, the theater. Of course, one thing should be said, though, about it, even though, as I say, it's not unusual to know about it: the accessibility of the ordinary people to culture. There are more theaters in Moscow alone--I'm talking about legitimate drama--than probably, well, I'm sure, than in any city in the world. It's very low-priced, and everybody can go. Equally important as far as culture, although not usually recognized as such, is what I'm sure I talked to you about the last time we talked, and that was the workers' education in the factory. This to me was an exciting thing. In a number of the factories we'd go to, they'd put on workers' performances of cultural productions, you know, what we'd call amateur productions. It is an amateur production. That to me is a very exciting thing, that the ordinary person is no longer just passively sitting, watching the specially trained person distribute a cultural talent, but the ordinary person is finding within himself or herself the talents that have not been developed or cultivated and finding an outlet for them. It's on a far more massive scale than anything we have in amateur theatricals and amateur drama in this country; first of all, because it's supported by the state, it doesn't have to be out of the pennies and nickels out of the people participating. Contrasts again. And it's important on the contrasts because, as I say, the supporter of the Soviet Union is prone to see only the extraordinarily exciting, good things that have developed, and the anti-Sovieteer sees only the negative things. Both of them have some validity, and yet out of it one is not able to arrive at a vision of the society that lets you understand it. What good does it do to have these a priori definitions if you can't understand it? Well, you go into a factory, and really--particularly for one who has some knowledge of American factories, of the speedup, of the discipline, of the tension that operates in the American factories--it is really just an eye-opener to see the relaxed atmosphere that is present. But that isn't an unalloyed bliss. It comes as a result of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Soviet working class became a working class after the revolution and not before, and therefore had not acquired the habit of disciplined work which capitalism forces the worker to learn. You either learn it or you starve under capitalism. Therefore productivity is way below what it should be. Now, it hasn't yet been compensated for by ideological and political understanding, where there is the consciousness of the workers that productivity is necessary for the society to move. This, in my opinion, comes from the way in which the Soviet leadership, both party and government, since the early thirties has approached the question of changing the habits and consciousness of millions of people; it is a very dogmatic, heavy-handed [approach] that doesn't work. Just doesn't work. It's done through lectures--and I don't mean lectures in a formal sense only. Every newspaper has a hectoring article lecturing people on what they should be doing that's desirable. The propaganda is heavy-handed and I think totally--not totally, because obviously nothing is total--but, in the main, not productive. You don't change people by exhortations alone. Exhortation has its role, but not alone. As a result of not having done it in a convincing and persuasive enough way in terms of education, agitation, propaganda, communication, they have had to rely too heavily on material incentives. Material incentives are a very important part for a new socialist society, because people are not yet ready, have not yet become new socialist human beings, capable of working with all inner self-discipline. Well, I think that, as I say, the contrast on this, too, is important, because you do see examples of human beings who are selfless and work without outward pressure. And yet, you go into that factory and you see the fact that it's great and groovy, nobody's standing over you with a whip, and you don't have a foreman pushing; but it's very sad as far as what the socialist society should mean because the test of socialism according to Lenin was its ability to outproduce capitalism, and they're a long way yet from being able to reach that standard of productivity.

1.25. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE TWO [video session II]

GARDNER

The last time we talked, Dorothy, we were talking about your trip to Russia in 1961. You mentioned that you wanted to tie it up with events that were happening in America at the same time.

HEALEY

Well, the last week we were in Moscow, the Supreme Court handed down its decision on the McCarran Act. The McCarran Act had been passed in 1950 and amended in 1954 by that distinguished liberal Hubert Horatio Humphrey to include something known as the Communist Control Act. Essentially what the McCarran Act did was to provide for what was called the registration of Communists by the federal government, [forcing them] to register as admitted foreign agents, agents of a foreign power, of course the foreign power being the Soviet Union. There had been some eight, nine years of litigation: first, of hearings before the Subversive Activities Control Board; secondly, when they did what everyone knew they would do, that is, to say, "Yes, you are in fact communist agents as well as agents of a foreign power," it was tested in the courts; and finally, ultimately, the Supreme Court decision came down affirming that section of the McCarran Act--not all sections, but that section of the McCarran Act which ordered us to register as foreign agents. One amusing part of that involved the fact that I was in Moscow when it happened because we tried to explain to the Soviet leaders the meaning of that decision. They were absolutely convinced that with such a decision (which in effect illegalized the Communist party, because no Communist was going to register as a foreign agent of another country-nonsense!) that we would be coming back to this country to be immediately thrown into jail, brutalized and whatnot, and that the party was to all intents and purposes immediately illegal. I can remember discussions with Suslov, one of the more important leaders of the Soviet Union, trying to explain the way in which the American capitalist system operates, as far as the question of further appeals and further tests, that it wasn't as immediate. In the long run what he was fearful of could well take place, but it wasn't going to be the next day, and if we came back we would not be immediately arrested and thrown in jail. But he was not the only one, interestingly enough, that didn't understand. Americans, including American Communists, didn't understand it. When I came back to the United States, the first thing immediately upon my arrival back in New York, there was a big debate taking place among Communists as to what procedure to follow. There was a section of Communists led by Milt Rosen, who later organized Progressive Labor [party] in the United States, which insisted that we had no alternative except to dissolve the party; then, if we wanted to start anything else, we had to do it secretly and underground, but the Communist party must dissolve. The majority of us felt that this was sheer nonsense, that what was at stake was not simply our right as Communists to be organized in an American Communist party, but that if this could be done to us, then the next step was obvious and automatic: anybody whom this committee decided and defined as a Communist would be involved as well. The definition of that, the kind of things that were used to determine a Communist, was any degree of coincidence of other people's programs with the program of the Communist party. As an example, if we were against juvenile delinquency and anybody else was against juvenile delinquency, that meant that they were a communist agent and also had to register. The bulk of the Communist party, its leadership and its membership, decided that under no conditions would it register, and we would therefore face what the alternatives might be--and those alternatives were serious because refusal to register after being ordered to could result, for the individual, in five years for each day that one didn't register. That could amount, as it did in my case when I was finally ordered to register, it could have amounted to 100 years in jail, plus $10,000 for each day one didn't register (and that, of course, then became in the millions and millions of dollars that theoretically one would owe to the government in fines). While we recognized that this was, therefore, going to be an enormous battle that was before us in refusing to register, including a possibility of very long sentences, we nevertheless had no alternative except to stay our course and to fight, in the first place for our own rights, but secondly for the rights of everybody because, in a sense, the party was the first line of defense of the Bill of Rights. Even though that was not necessarily recognized by others, it was by some, and I think the minority of Justices Douglas and Black recognized both that the order was illegal as far as the Constitution for Communists, and also that its hydraulic pressure on the liberties of others would be inevitably present. However, the party did take certain steps that it hoped might meet this new legal problem in regard to the identity of who was or was not a Communist. It had serious effects as far as the future functioning of the Communist party was concerned. In what became really a silly and futile effort to try to deal with this question, it was decided that the clubs of the party would not be called clubs, but would become readers' groups of either the People's World or of the Daily Worker (at that time the Weekly Worker); that various other clubs would take on the outward form of forums or study groups, study societies, whatever was most conducive to being able to do it. This was carried on throughout the country, and it had really very devastating effects on the party.

GARDNER

Where was this decided?

HEALEY

In the National Executive Board of the Communist party.

GARDNER

Was that including yourself?

HEALEY

Yes, I was present when that was decided. As is true with many other questions of this kind, when the proposals are made as to how to handle a particular immediate legal attack, I at least tend to subordinate any question I might have as to its efficacy on the ground that whoever the people are who are making the proposals obviously have studied and prepared for it. Of course, the most obvious thing was that the party had not expected to lose that Supreme Court decision, and it was totally unprepared for any consequences of the loss of that decision. But here in Southern California we did do one thing of using our own judgment, which made less terrible, less dire, the effects of what these organizational changes meant, because when you took clubs of the party and changed their character, you simultaneously tended to loosen the bond of identification of a member with the party. Either their fear was increased that by virtue of their membership in the party they would be further persecuted and harassed, or else the tie itself, the organizational tie, the affinity, the habit, the routine of membership meetings, of club meetings, became loosened/ and lots of people drifted away.

GARDNER

What was the party membership at this point, before the McCarran Act?

HEALEY

Well, here in Southern California by that time we'd already been hit by the enormous and significant losses of people after the Twentieth Congress and after Hungary, including some of our brightest and most able people coming out of the thirties. I think we were down to about 1,000 by then.

GARDNER

Locally.

HEALEY

Locally. That meant that nationally probably there were maybe 5,000 members.

GARDNER

Compared to what?

HEALEY

Well, in 1949 the Los Angeles party had 5,000 members, and I would say nationally there were probably 50,000 members. We did decide in Southern California not to carry through all of the decisions that were made, to test them first. It wasn't that we weren't going to carry them through, but we wanted to test them before we did them, take just a few clubs and test out these new approaches and see what happened to those clubs before we made it so general. So we took one professional club and one industrial club, had long discussions with the members of the party in those clubs, suggesting this changed form to see what would happen, and they accepted the idea. Well, within six months we were convinced that it was total futility, and, worse than futility, that it was a dangerous thing that was going to corrode the very membership and identity of the people with the party, because in both cases for a variety of reasons--not only the organizational, but that was included--those people drifted away from the party. The loose form did not maintain sufficient cement to keep the relationship going. And therefore we refused to carry through the other proposals. We just said, "No. They won't work, and we're not going to. It's better to stand as we are and fight than to let it go." The other thing we did do, however, we did carry through, had very little significance as far as this problem of maintenance of the party. In order to make it more difficult for the Department of Justice to prosecute us under the individual membership provisions or as officers of the party--because those were two separate provisions of the McCarran Act; we were subject to the provisions both as individual members, and there was a second part of the statute that made us subject to other legal prohibitions by virtue of our being officers--from that point on there were no further definitions of the titles of people. For instance, I was at that point, to use the language of the sixties, the chairman of the party. Today I guess you'd say, "chairperson." From that point on, I became the "chief spokesman" of the party. It was the hope of the lawyers that we would make it that much more difficult for identification as to specific title. The National Committee as such was not called the National Committee; instead there were various other names used; "legislative conference" was used one time to define the meeting of the national conference, and other such titles. In 1962, I received a notice signed by Robert Kennedy as the attorney general of the United States, an official notice, special delivery, ordering me to register under the McCarran Act as an agent of the Soviet Union, and stating that if I didn't register within a certain period of time as to my identity as a member of the party and an officer, a formal hearing would be held here in Los Angeles before the Subversive Activities Control Board in which testimony would be heard. Then it would go through the legal--the board's not legal; it's only quasilegal--then I would have the right to appeal any decision of that board in court.

GARDNER

It seems interesting to me that at such a late date all this was going on. What were some of the reasons that even in this post-McCarthy era, under the New Frontier, that something like the McCarran Act could be passed and someone like Robert Kennedy would be enforcing it?

HEALEY

I think there are two reasons for that. The first is that I don't think people recognize that McCarthyism was not simply a state of mind of a particular period in the fifties. It became institutionalized in the laws of the country. Legislation was passed in federal and state and even municipal bodies that carried through the content of what is called McCarthyism into law. That was one question. Secondly, the Communist party as the Communist party has always been somewhat unique in the United States, always subject to attack, where other radicals were not being harassed off jobs, were not being challenged by laws and so forth. The Communist party has always had this, from its very inception in 1919. That was not just a momentary thing then, McCarthyism; it is a chronic thing of capitalism. So the two coincided with what was taking place in the country--I mean the contradiction of it, or at least the paradox of it. What was taking place in the country and, quote, "the New Frontier," the opening up, the hopes that other people, not Communists, had of a new relationship in the country--it was not true. You still found the time [the same] as far as the Communist party was concerned. Of course, someday somebody ought to make a separate study around that McCarran Act, as an example, in the sixties, say, how it was treated in the Los Angeles Times. It would do that institution some good to be a little self-critical of itself. I remember big editorials in which they demanded that I be prohibited, for instance, from speaking here at UCLA on the ground that I had refused to register as a foreign agent under the McCarran Act and therefore was not eligible to be a speaker before such susceptible human minds as students'. They helped to build up the whole hysteria, the anti-communist hysteria, even in that period. Well, the hearing was finally held here. Simultaneously with my hearing other hearings were going on throughout the country. There were ten Communists that were singled out to appear to register, or, having failed to register, to be cited. John H. Abt came out from New York to represent me, the attorney for the Communist party. We had encouraged representatives of various organizations to come into the hearing room to judge for themselves what kind of evidence there was that would subject me to the kind of penalties--as I say, over 100 years in jail and millions of dollars in fines. There were quite a number of organizations who sent representatives into the hearing room. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Quakers, some unions--among others. I don't remember all of them.

GARDNER

Who were some of the codefendants?

HEALEY

In Los Angeles I was the only one who had been ordered to register at that point. Later on there were more, but at that point I was the only one. The main person who testified against me--again, one found this question of the stool pigeon within the party, and again I want to comment that it was totally unexpected to me--the person who finally appeared was a Black woman, Elizabeth (I don't even remember her last name [Williams]) whom I'd had absolutely no suspicion of in the previous years. She testified simply that she had seen me as a member at party conventions, that she had witnessed my being elected as the cochairman of the party in Southern California, and therefore she knew me both as a member and an officer of the Communist party. It was a very pro forma hearing and of very little significance because everybody knew what the outcome would be, that the Subversive Activities Control Board was going to order me to register. As they did. There were simultaneously hearings brought on a different aspect of the McCarran Act against Gus Hall and Benjamin Davis as officers. I was being charged, I think, with being a member; they were charged with being officers.

GARDNER

That was in New York.

HEALEY

In New York. There was a hearing against a Seattle worker who they said had violated the provision of the McCarran Act that anybody who worked in what was defined as a defense facility and failed to identify themselves as a member of the Communist party was guilty of violating the act. And Eugene--I think his name was Roebuck--in a Seattle shipyard was so cited.

GARDNER

Of whom did the Subversive Activities Control Board consist?

HEALEY

A man by the name of [Francis] Cherry was the chairman.

GARDNER

Were they congressmen or. . . ?

HEALEY

No, no. They were appointees of the executive. Really, the most comfortable jobs--they continue in effect today. The people get, I think, $36,000 a year, some huge sum. I mean, there's very little they ever have to do now because increasingly every aspect of the law has been ruled unconstitutional. But all of them were political appointees, One man who had been appointed from Seattle turned out to be a big surprise because he kept exposing the undemocratic procedures of the board. But he was soon removed. Their other appointment was the man who was fired from, I think it was, the State Department because he kept furnishing documents to McCarthy illegally, violating government regulations. The ultraright, the Birch Society and others, had carried on a huge campaign around him, and he also became an appointee on this board. At any rate, ultimately all of these cases found their way into the Supreme Court under one challenge or another, and each one then was declared unconstitutional, as a violation of the First Amendment, without exception. So that for all intents and purposes, ten years later the McCarran Act is dead. But that doesn't answer, of course, the fact that for years we were both harassed and always had hanging over us the fact that we could in fact go to jail for an incredibly long number of years, and that--the example I gave at UCLA is not unimportant--that our rights were already curtailed by virtue of this order to register and the legal harassment that resulted from it.

GARDNER

As a result of your trial, was there a conviction?

HEALEY

The Subversive Activities Control Board ordered me to register. I, of course, refused to register on the grounds that I was not a foreign agent. The order to register was appealed by me through John Abt, along with the other nine people throughout the country, including Roscoe Proctor and William Albertson--I think the case went up under those names, Proctor and Albertson, I'm not positive, I think that's it--to the Supreme Court. It marked the third time I had gone to the Supreme Court, and each time I had ultimately won, in the face of long sentences that faced me if I didn't win.

GARDNER

But you never spent any time actually in prison.

HEALEY

In federal prison? No. I've spent time in county jails. Not on the McCarran Act, though. This was a strictly civil proceeding to begin with, and only later criminal.

GARDNER

How long did it take before you were finally exonerated?

HEALEY

I think it was 1965 or "66, something like that.

GARDNER

So it was five or six years.

HEALEY

Yes. Something of that kind. I'm not positive. I should mention that the year before, 1960, I had appeared before HUAC here in Los Angeles. That was a very stormy appearance, for one thing because the committee had fed the Los Angeles newspapers a lot of material ahead of time in regard to the inner-party fight that was going on, claiming that I was always subject to excommunication by the national office, that I was a dissenter and a rebel and whatnot. There were big headlines all during the sixties preceding the HUAC appearances in L.A. When I finally appeared, it was an executive session, and I went into the session with Ben Margolis. The testimonies have all been printed, of course. First of all, I objected to the executive character. I had nothing to hide; I wanted a public hearing. But I had already had enough experience appearing both before grand juries and other congressional and state committees, the Tenney Committee and others here in California, to know a little more than some people knew about my own rights, that I could answer any question that the man on the street could answer, anybody without privileged information, without yielding my rights under the Fifth Amendment to refuse in turn to answer any questions that would in fact make me a stool pigeon against other people, which is always the intent of these committees. Therefore, it became very funny, because Congressman Francis Walter was presiding over the HUAC hearing, and every question he'd ask me, I'd simply make very long speeches in answer to him, extremely long speeches. These were speeches on general politics. For instance, what was my position in regard to Hungary in 1956? They were trying to probe into this inner-party fight and try to get me to discuss the party's own affairs, and I, of course, refused to do that. It was none of their damn business. As I kept telling them, every time the Republicans fought among themselves, or the Democrats, nobody considers that of extraordinary news value or of great significance, and the fact that Communists disagree among themselves is no more unique. We share a common ideology, but that doesn't mean we share a unanimity of viewpoint. I really kind of enjoyed it in the sense that obviously I had nothing to lose. I wasn't going to lose a job because of all the publicity. Every political opening they gave me, every time they'd ask me a question of general political import, I would make a very long political speech, and then when they'd come to the thing they wanted to get at, my testimony on people, I'd simply claim the Fifth Amendment. As I say, I did not ever waive my right. If you start answering some questions concerning people or yourself, you waive the right to use it later on. You can't just pick and choose. But you can always answer general questions which anybody who reads a newspaper can answer, and therefore I did that. Of course, what was going on in the country and in the party at that time was even more important in the larger society than these particular attacks on us. The 1960 election campaign between Kennedy and Nixon [was] a campaign in which the Communist party refused to give even critical support toward Kennedy, warning that a Kennedy administration would not provide any fundamental solution, but also pointing out that both Nixon's history and his current approach were for an intensification of the cold war and its heating into a hot war. Most particularly we pointed that out in regard to both China and Indochina. But the sixties opened up with a veritable explosion as far as the youth were concerned, both Black youth and white youth, that had great significance on the continuing debate within the Communist party and around our activities. Nineteen-sixty had seen in San Francisco the first great demonstration against HUAC--that was the same year I appeared--when the students by the hundreds, if not thousands, demonstrated both within the hearing room and outside the hearing room, against the intrusion of HUAC into the private life of the people being called. This was tremendously important, for two reasons. The first was that it marked the first time in the history of these Un-American hearings from the thirties on in which large numbers of people who were not Communists showed a solidarity with the Communists, recognized that it was not simply the Communists. They may not have agreed with us-- in this case, I'd say most of the students didn't agree with us--but that was unimportant. They recognized the larger issues that were at stake and thereby presented a mass effect against them. This had great importance in subsequent years because finally this and comparable actions started to diminish the ability of the HUAC to make its own headlines with friendly newspapers, to utilize the testimony, in a way, to further increase the harassment and prosecution of anybody, including liberals, whom they could identify as, quote, "dangerous radicals." But it also was important that the youth did this; it demonstrated something else that in long-range terms I would consider very important. The youth of the fifties were called the Silent Generation, yet clearly there was something going on among the youth of the fifties to have produced the eruption of the sixties. That didn't just come by itself. That didn't spring up without an antecedent, without an origin. I place great stress on this because revolutionaries, particularly the younger ones, tend to become discouraged and demoralized by what appears to be the apathy of any significant section of society. They don't look beneath the surface to see the kind of tensions that are inherently present in the society, and that can and will erupt. They go too much on day-to-day things and, as I say, lose the perspective and the ability for long-range struggle, which is important if one is to be a revolutionary. Well, coinciding with the demonstration against HUAC was, of course, the start of the sit-downs of the Black students in the South, starting in North Carolina where the courageous young Black students sat at a lunch counter and had a literal sit-in over the refusal to serve Blacks in the restaurant. There was a lot of ultraleftist nonsense, sheer gibberish, that [criticized] some of these things on the ground that, "What difference does it make if you have the right to sit down to have a cup of coffee if you haven't got the money in your pocket to pay for the coffee?"--not realizing that the very struggle against that which is immediate (in this case, the social discrimination, that Blacks as Blacks could not eat in facilities; whether they have the money or not is unimportant: even if they had the money, they couldn't eat where white people were eating) in itself was first of all important as a social struggle, but secondly, it generated further struggle. It didn't stop with anything of that kind. And of course, that happened. So you saw the development of two things within the Black community simultaneously: on the one hand, the huge struggle for integration, symbolized around Martin Luther King and nonviolent resistance; but at the same time, the struggles of a nationalist character symbolized by Malcolm X. Well, these things and the student eruptions that kept continuing throughout the sixties with the rise of SDS brought with them great debates and great fights within the Communist party, first of all, as to the meaning of the events (what did they signify?), and secondly, the tactical approach (what posture should the Communist party take toward these enormous social developments?).

GARDNER

We might talk about some of the groups that were forming then, right at the beginning. CORE and SNCC are the ones that--well, of course, CORE formed long before that.

HEALEY

Right. But it changed its character in that early period.

GARDNER

Could you talk about that, about the character of those groups, about their size and effectiveness in Los Angeles?

HEALEY

Well, on the side of what would be defined as the nonviolent resistance [on behalf of] integration, the fight to have the right to participate with equal access to whatever channels were open in the economy and the society of all people, SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE were probably the earliest two organizations with the most importance. Both of them in the beginning were predominantly of the nonviolent-resistance character. And I emphasize the word resistance, because many people were simply looking at the nonviolent part of it and not seeing the other aspect of it, which was resistance, which in my opinion became a dominant theme. The resistance became the important thing; the nonviolence was tactical. It was or was not useful at any one point, but it wasn't that which was the most important of this contradiction that was present as far as Black liberation is concerned. CORE was a very old organization, but up until the sixties a very unimportant one, represented maybe at the most a few dozen pacifists, mostly white, with no real connection with any significant section of the Black community and no particularly significant effect on the society as a whole. But Blacks and whites flowed into it to utilize it as a channel for fight, and in the course of that transformed its character, so that in the sixties it became a very important weapon, in the first place through developing Black leadership for struggle, but simultaneously also by [allowing] integrated struggle, Black and white.

GARDNER

Was there much of a CORE chapter out here?

HEALEY

Oh, yes, in Los Angeles there was. There were big struggles; they were very complicated struggles because of their character. They were primarily on housing. The first struggles were at Woolworth's on the hiring of Blacks, in front of the dime stores, [F.W.] Woolworth's and [J.J.] Newberry's. They were part of the nationwide demonstrations against the ten-cent stores ("ten-cent"--ha! That was long, long ago--but as they were known in my youth). And those were very important and big and popularly accepted. From there, however, CORE went into a big struggle out in Torrance in regard to opening up the housing tracts, to allow Blacks to either rent or buy, mostly to buy. Very big demonstrations were held, but they had no significant continuity--again, partly because of the internal debate within all sectors or the movement at that point, with a very loud sector saying, "How many Black people even have the money to buy? The fight should be over rentals, not over buying." Also because of the geography: with Torrance being where it is, it was more difficult to mobilize lots of people, particularly with the police attacks that were always present at the demonstrations that were called out there. Nevertheless, they were very big demonstrations to begin with in Torrance and had some significance.

GARDNER

Who were some of the prime movers in CORE here? Do you recall?

HEALEY

Well, yes, I do remember, I'm trying to think of his name. There was one particular Black leader who I thought was enormously effective. I don't think I remember his name offhand, although I see him occasionally now and I have a great affection for him. He's an architect, as I remember. [Arthur Silvers]

GARDNER

Well, we'll catch up on that later. But what about SNCC in Los Angeles?

HEALEY

Well, SNCC in Los Angeles was only called the Friends of SNCC; it had only a very peripheral relationship with SNCC as a whole, and that was an unfortunate thing. SNCC in the South had originally started also as a Black-white youth movement, to begin with also part of the nonviolent resistance movement within the orbit of the Martin Luther King dominance. What they did in the Northern cities was to organize supportive movements that were simply to raise money for SNCC in the South. Well, you can't build a movement anywhere that is simply looked upon as supportive and nothing else; people will do that in an initial contact with an organization or a concept, but there's nothing of a sustaining character about that. Therefore the Friends of SNCC went through very difficult times, and finally it dissolved here. But simultaneously, national SNCC was going through great changes, which also led to its demise. [In the early days,] they led and conducted the freedom rides, which were of great importance--and CORE participated in the freedom rides as well--where Northerners, including probably disproportionately large numbers of white people, went down from the North on buses to fight to integrate Southern institutions and facilities, restrooms, depots, etc. They just met, of course, with the traditional white Southern ruling-class response of beatings, clubbings, and being thrown in prison by the hundreds and hundreds. SNCC and CORE together opened up freedom schools in the South to attempt to provide alternative institutions where Black history could be taught, where a sense of tactics could be taught on how to fight, the fight to register to vote, remembering that at that point Black people by the millions were disenfranchised in the South. But at the 1964 Democratic Convention, SNCC in Mississippi participated with the Freedom Democratic party to elect a delegation to demand seating at the convention in place of the white segregationists, who of course never supported the national Democratic ticket. Therefore, technically, legally, the Freedom Democrats should have been--if one went by what was legally right--the ones seated. After the compromise-- which really was a defeat for them, where they were convinced by the great liberals, Humphrey and others, to accept a modified relationship (some of them could be seated on the floor but not others, and whatnot)--I think SNCC drew the wrong conclusions, and it's not surprising that they did. They were young, and in my opinion my party was not playing a proper role of leadership, and there was not an experienced leadership in the movements. They drew three conclusions that were very serious and affected the movement in the late sixties and today very seriously. One was that in order to establish what it was important to establish (and I quite agree with it), the significance of Black leadership, that whites should stop having any organic relationship with Black movements and just simply devote themselves to dealing with organizing white people. Now, this is basically a correct thing, a correct concept. Clearly, whites who are going to fight against racism have their main job to do among their fellow whites. They don't have to agitate Black people that racism is bad; they have to both agitate, educate, and organize white people to fight racism. But because it was done in a very mechanical, arbitrary way, before many of the white youth had acquired an ability to be able to organize and sustain something among whites, the movement was simply split in half, and there was very little communication from that point on as far as the leadership was concerned. Secondly, many of the young leaders in that period-most particularly I'm thinking of a man like Bob Moses, who was probably the most important leader of SNCC, clearly a very charismatic individual, a man who had earned the respect of both Blacks and whites in the South, decided that being a leader was a trap, that in the first place he could be far too responsible for placing people in jeopardy because they followed him as a result of their trust in him, and he didn't want that responsibility; and secondly, he believed that they would develop more rapidly their own talents if someone as charismatic as he was not there. So he therefore withdrew from SNCC, and so did a few others. But he was the most important operative leadership.

GARDNER

Where did he go?

HEALEY

He went to Alabama and has to all intents and purposes just disappeared, really.

GARDNER

Is he teaching there?

HEALEY

I don't know. I read an article in Liberation magazine by Staughton Lynd a few years ago describing Moses. He changed his name after he left Mississippi and got some job. But at any rate, he was no longer a significant figure within the movement. Well, the fact is that while this question of leadership has always been a difficult problem, how much weight to give the individual or collective leadership, and how you maintain the constant interaction between the mass and the leadership so that there is always a new set of leadership that is developing from its experience and through the help of more experienced people to become leaders, you don't solve the problem by removing leaders. You solve it only by leaders being more sensitive and conscious of not becoming burea-crats or The Great Leakier, and not taking it as a sense of personal importance what the individual does or doesn't do, seeing it with modesty, within the realm of the job of millions acquiring the talents of analysis, of tactical judgment, and of strategic judgment. Well, as I say, lots of people like Moses--but Moses is more important--withdrew at that point, and that left the door open then for anybody to be self-proclaimed as a leader; and what you saw in the sixties happening in both the Black and white radical youth movement, television started to define who were the leaders. The prominent personalities on television, regardless of what organized base they represented (most of them didn't have any), became the well-known figures, and by virtue of their prominence became, quote, "leaders." This was a very dangerous thing and became even more serious as the years went on because leaders who don't have an organized constituency to whom they have to relate to and to whom they're responsible, can proclaim anything anytime they want, any random thought. I would suggest Stokely Carmichael is as good an example of that as there can be. He changed his position every other day, and whatever thought crossed his mind became the important thought, the identifying characterization of the movement. Because he didn't have to answer to anybody: what he wanted to do, he did by himself. Then the third thing that was important, that hurt a great deal at that period, was this contempt for the history of the past, the belief that youth as youth was holding the answer, the idea that anybody over thirty was a cop out; the fact that capitalism had been enormously successful in creating a ditch between generations so that the continuity of the experiences learned by past generations just ended. There was no continuity handed on to the new generation. Therefore, you saw their contempt for what they called reforms without seeing how reforms can lead to revolutionary struggle but that you have to be related to reforms. So in the Black movement, for instance, you saw the contempt developing around the fight to register to vote. Well, who cared if you had the right to vote? After you got the right to vote, all you could do was vote for bourgeois capitalist candidates--not seeing that that very struggle itself equipped and trained generations of people on a new level of political relationship to their society, of doing something and being able to struggle more effectively within their society. And, of course, you saw the enormous contempt for Martin Luther King on the part of the young militant activists, both Black and white.

GARDNER

What about the movement out here? There was an organization called the UCRC [United Civil Rights Committee] for a while.

HEALEY

Yes. That was a little later. Well, that was again an example of the early part of the relationships and the struggle of Black and white together. It was really initiated by people like Eason Monroe, the ACLU people, who had done an enormous amount in trying to find a new organizational channel around these specific issues (the fight for equality) that Black, white, Chicano, could all relate to. The UCRC was started and had a limited success for a few years of doing that. And then it, too, was eaten away by the contempt for organization, the contempt for what was considered the nonmilitant--and militant became defined by who could use the greatest radical rhetoric, not by effectiveness but simply a blowing in the wind, literally, of radical epithets.

GARDNER

What about the NAACP and Urban League, while we're racking up Black organizations?

HEALEY

Well, at that point they were really the tail end of the stream. Neither one of them--while the NAACP was pursuing its legal challenges, it had really no significant influence among the young. But it still maintained, as it does today, an influence that some of the young have learned to respect--not because they respect the NAACP, but because of that influence among a very large section of the Black working class, those who are working in industry as well as the Black professionals. But again, the sixties are characterized--both Black and white and Chicano--by this split, which is a dangerous thing to ever happen between those who define themselves as radicals and those who consider themselves reformists, both in terms of tactics and in terms of the strategic goal. And you saw that--I mean, one would see it present here in L.A.; for instance, when Martin Luther King came to Los Angeles, 30,000 Black people filled the Coliseum because Martin Luther King had the capacity of being able to involve both the sharecropper in the South and the Northern Black urban participant, the worker and the professional. But the young militants only sneered at Martin Luther King and derided him as a cop out. It's not that he didn't make great mistakes himself--because, of course, he did have the tendency of coming into the stormiest situations; there'd be a great confrontation, but then he'd leave the next day, and the local people were left without the national focus or the ability to carry on. So there were legitimate criticisms of him; I don't want to say there weren't. But I think that people failed to see the significance of it. Well, simultaneously, however, there was this enormous movement that started in the early sixties around the Black Muslims. Here in Los Angeles we had great fights in the party because there was one Black Communist who kept insisting on how important they were. That was Cyril Briggs. Our national line didn't consider them very important. We considered the NAACP more important. But the Muslims were growing by leaps and bounds, and in the center of the Muslims, of course, became the man known as Malcolm X. It's another sign of the great fights we had then in the party and the difficulty and the need of a correct estimate at any one point of current things. The Daily Worker at that time was being edited by a Black man, James Jackson, who had an absolute hatred against Malcolm X and all that he thought Malcolm X represented. So here on one end is this man arising in great prominence among Black people and young people generally. . . . [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

You mentioned the problems caused in the Communist party by the situation of the Black Muslims.

HEALEY

Malcolm X was acquiring an enormous effectiveness, most particularly and more importantly in the Black community, but as well, of course, among more advanced whites. And it's true that in the beginning he was arguing around what we would consider bourgeois nationalism--that is, the separation of Black from white and all white people being the enemy--nevertheless, it is simultaneously true that as Marxists we should have seen the significance, the greater significance, of what he was doing. I started to mention earlier his ability to articulate the needs, the feelings of millions of people for them. It's not that when he went into the Black community he was telling them something that they didn't know in regard to what segregation, discrimination, and repression represented. It is simply that he put it in a way that gave voice to the sentiment of millions--and that is an enormously important thing--and he gave it a focus. But both in regard to Malcolm X (although most particularly in regard to Malcolm X), and in regard generally to the young militants who were developing--the white militants on campus, Black militants in the street--the party was very slow to see the significance and the importance of it. It was primarily concerned, really, with its concern that it was going with such a direction that it would be used to split white working-class and Black working-class members from one another. So you had the incongruous, to me, result of the Daily Worker--as I say, edited by James Jackson, under James Jackson's name--coming out with editorials denouncing Malcolm X, without any recognition of the potential revolutionary significance of what Malcolm X represented. And we had one very stormy National Committee meeting on that. There were others besides myself who objected to this and felt that it was just an outrageous thing to do. But the old problem of being willing to speak up--in the first place to challenge a Black leader, but secondly to challenge a leader, a national leader of the party--was present. And so when I spoke up and attacked this in a National Committee meeting, I spoke alone, without any support, although, as I say, privately, people--many people--agreed with me, including almost all of the Black comrades. But the Black comrades didn't want to be seen as fighting another Black comrade. And so for some time, this really very bad, reformist policy was a dominant policy of the Daily Worker--although I think by that time it was a biweekly paper. I mentioned Cyril Briggs earlier, who was conducting a very sharp struggle here in L.A.; and as a matter of fact, while I would argue with him here, he would have great influence on my thinking, even though I didn't always admit it, because again I felt I had to defend this national line. He was one Black guy who was very independent, a very experienced man. He was one of the earliest Black Communists in the country in the very early twenties, had organized the African [Blood] Brotherhood and had edited a Black newspaper, The Liberator, in 1922-23. And he was carrying on a ferocious struggle: one, against our idea that the NAACP represented the most important organization in Black life; secondly, trying to force us to see the significance of what the Muslims were representing, how important they were and what they represented-not because he agreed with them but because he saw them as mobilizing an independent strength of the Black people.

GARDNER

Do you think they did that?

HEALEY

Oh, yes, they certainly did. No matter what else happened, they did do that. Now, it was also used in a very dangerous way; one has only to see what happened when Malcolm X broke with them and why he broke. But also just generally the thrust of their policy is really the self-aggrandizement of the leadership of the Muslims; they own millions of dollars' worth of property, in institutions and whatnot. And basically their idea is the separation of the society, Black and white--which is, of course, what the segregationists want, what the most reactionary wants; you see the curious synthesis of the most reactionary white elements with this kind of line because the separation of two societies, Black and white, is entirely the common denominator for both. What we had to find the way to do, in the opinion of many of us here in L.A., was to take on this thrust of separation, while simultaneously recognizing the importance of independent organization of Blacks as Blacks, but hopefully with a policy that saw the need for unity, a Black-white unity, if there was to be any effective struggle within the United States. And the party has always--all revolutionary movements have, and we are among them--great difficulty in fighting on two fronts at the same time, of recognizing both the incorrectness and even the reactionary character of a movement but also its progressive character potentially, and how to encourage that and work with that tactically.

GARDNER

But don't you think that the Black separationists, in the long run, only helped to fragment the movement?

HEALEY

Well, that again depends on how much conscious intervention there is on the part of Black and white revolutionaries in the movement. It depends, first of all, on whether white revolutionaries are doing their job, of building up movements among white people that are going to struggle against segregation, against discrimination, against inequality, because clearly if millions of Black people see that there are white allies--that whites as whites are not the enemy; that it is a system, a capitalist system, that is the enemy--if they see people who are sensitive to police brutality, then the thrust to separate black from white, either by Black or white leaders, becomes ineffective. But at the same time, to disregard the fact that the nationalism arises -- the fact of separation of Blacks and keeping Blacks away from [whites] arises out of the white racist society, the dominant white society with its racist institutions--is not to see cause and effect. You're not going to challenge that separatism, which--of course you're right--can be the most dangerous detour away from any significant change of conditions, of alleviating social oppression. But you're not going to change that by verbal arguments against it. It's only going to be changed insofar as millions of Blacks see whites in significant, earnest, honest struggle against racism among whites. And of course, that is, as I've indicated, the challenge, and one that, again, is still before people--I don't mean to say [it's] a problem that has been solved. But in terms of the party history, it had its own significance because, as I say, of the great struggles that took place within the party internally around a proper estimate of what was taking place and, from that, adequate tactics that were commensurate with what the movement was doing, the mass movement was doing, that allowed the party to both be related to it and ultimately to provide leadership to be recognized as being significant to any evolving of the problem. For instance, I remember a huge fight at the 1966 convention. By this time, young people had joined the party, and therefore the fight was far different, you know, than when I was carrying on this struggle in regard to the attacks on Malcolm X. Jim Jackson had given an interview in which he criticized SNCC--which at that point was still the most important Black youth organization--because it had adopted the symbol of the black panther. And Jim made some comment to the New York Times that he had thought it would be better if they'd adopted as a symbol the American eagle. Well, our young Black communists inside the Communist party just erupted at that convention in New York. And they were the ones who led the fight and demanded a public retraction of that, a recognition of what nonsense that was--a catering to the most backward kind of prejudices, rather than being advanced.

GARDNER

Perhaps we could double back now. Still in the early sixties, SDS was being formed, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Right.

GARDNER

Do you recall the genesis of that? I'm sure you recall the genesis of that, but was there participation also among students out here?

HEALEY

Yes. SDS was a little slower coming to the West Coast, its start coming out of the Ann Arbor Declaration, when they broke with the League for Industrial Democracy, which was their original genesis.

GARDNER

Who were the founders?

HEALEY

The founders--Tom Hayden, Paul Booth; I think Staughton Lynd was influential (if he wasn't there, he was influential as far as their ideas were concerned). And SDS really swept the campuses of the country in both the early and mid-sixties in the most significant way and, in its origin and early development, represented, I think, the most promising development of the organization of students in a formation that united the general student constituency with the more advanced students, who already realized that what was at stake was not just bad education cum bad education but an education that was designed to equip people to be docile servants of an imperialist, capitalist structure. The same thing was true as far as the antiwar movement was concerned. Certainly SDS played a highly important role in the struggle against the war on the campus in helping to participate in the first teach-ins. And those first teach-ins were, I think, extraordinarily important. They were never repeated; and therefore, the antiwar movement always suffered, I think, from the lack of it, not keeping on with that. Because the first teach-ins did two things: number one, they provided the necessary information on the meaning of the war, on the facts of the war. Armed with that information, tens of thousands of people were prepared to go out to do something about it, and that was the second important thing: information that led to organization and demonstration and activity. In later years, as you know, the antiwar movement became far more [concerned with] rhetoric than it was of facts--I mean, demonstrations were held on campuses where all the speakers did was to see who could produce the most, quote, "revolutionary rhetoric." And any idea of fact--you know, how to arm people with factual material that they could then take out to millions of people--was just considered nonsense. It was laughed at.

GARDNER

Maybe this would be a good time to talk about the origins of the war, since I don't think we've really discussed that. The sixties is such a complicated period, a checkerboard. Do you want to talk about the late fifties, early sixties, the involvement in Vietnam?

HEALEY

By 1961, the war in Vietnam had taken on, for the first time, a dominant U.S. character. In the fifties, one was fighting--as far as those who were even aware that there was a war going on in Vietnam--one was fighting two things: one, the dominant French imperialist attack against the Vietnamese people, and, two, the supporting character of the Nixon-Eisenhower administration. I remember in '53 or 54, Nixon had made an off-the-record speech to the [American Newspaper] Publishers Association suggesting that by this time the French were obviously defeated in Vietnam, suggesting that the U.S. should go to the aid of Vietnam--I mean, to the aid of the French. It was one of those, you know, speeches that are quoted without saying who it is, without attribution. The fight against that, however, was a really limited one. It was really only the most dedicated and advanced people who realized the significance of what Vietnam meant. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time I spoke on campus--it was later, as a matter of fact; it was in '63 by that time, the first time I spoke on campus in practically fifteen years, that I was allowed to come back--and the war in Vietnam was my central topic. And the change in atmosphere--so enormous. Two things: one, I used the word imperialism to define what the United States was doing, and even young radicals came up to me after the speech and said, "Oh, Dorothy, don't use that word imperialism. Nobody but you old people, you Old Left, use that word. We don't use that word. Nobody knows what it means." The other thing: I ended that speech here at UCLA with the call, "Bring the boys home," because by that time, Kennedy had himself accelerated the war and had sent in the Green Berets and others under the guise of technical advisers, had expanded the--there were 600 Americans there, supposedly as advisers. . . .

1.26. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE ONE APRIL 6, 1973

GARDNER

Dorothy, last time, when we talked up at school, we talked about the early sixties, things that happened after your return from your first trip to the Soviet Union. I don't think we discussed in great detail what was happening to you yourself personally. We did talk about the McCarran Act and so on. But perhaps we could pick up more from 1961. Before I turned the machine on, you mentioned that you'd like to talk about what your life, your own daily routine was like, your work for the Communist party.

HEALEY

Yeah. It's a rather difficult subject to describe, because one really has to understand the way we define the function of the Communist party and, within that, the function of the officers of the Communist party to get any idea of, to really decipher, the kind of daily activities, the daily routines, the responsibilities of a Communist organizer. In the first place, of course, one is responsible for meeting with one's collective, the reading body-- in this case it was the district executive board, and the district staff (which is usually made up of all the others who are full-time organizers for the party), plus the district committee (which is the largest body)--to debate and discuss what your policy should be in regard to current questions. That is a very time-consuming process because the meeting of minds arriving at what usually--it was at least my effort always to try to arrive at a consensus rather than to have mechanical majorities that would vote one way, and then the minority have to subordinate itself and accept it under our definition of democratic centralism. My effort was always to try to find a way through the discussion and the debate so that, as much as possible, a consensus would emerge that represented the overall estimates and conclusions of whichever Communist body I was dealing with. But that does require a lot of time with individuals and time with the collective to do that. Clearly, people in different fields of work, with different political and theoretical awareness, don't have identical viewpoints on questions. And therefore this hammering out, this evolving of a "line"--which in effect means simply a policy--if what you're interested in is doing it so that it does express as much as possible a common viewpoint and not simply a majority which will vote one way or another, that is a very time-consuming process. Then after that is done, there is the responsibility of communicating it to the rest of the Communist party. That takes a good deal of time. There is the responsibility of meeting with Communists in all the various fields of work--trade union, PTAs [Parent Teacher Associations], Black liberation, Chicano liberation, the students, women, whatever the particular formation may be--not only to discuss the question of what your policy is but then to discuss in a far more concrete way what to do about it in the field in which they're working. In other words, what difference does it make what position you arrive at, what your policy is? The difference it makes is how you attempt to make it live, come to life, make the policy mean something, influence something in the area in which Communists are functioning. Well, that would also occasion enormous debates, discussions, and, again, is very much a great question of time. You meet with a group of trade unionists, for instance, and in the first place you have to be aware of what's going on in that particular union, because you can't propose policies in the abstract. You have to be able to see how--if, for instance, in the 1962 elections you have as position number one the exposure of the Birch Society and the ultra-Right, which was really important and significant then and still is (but that was just peaking to public notice at that point), and [you desire] the defeat of their candidates--you cannot do that within the trade union, for instance, without being aware of the rhythm of that union's life, of precisely what would mark an advanced position in that union--advanced in the sense that not only does one seek to develop in this case, as we did, a common front against the most reactionary candidates, but how, within the framework of that, you simultaneously advance socialist thinking, independent thinking, the need for independent politics. Well, as I say, when you think of that in relation to every field of work--because there are Communists in almost everything that humanity organizes itself--then of course you can see the enormous amount of time that takes. Secondly, as a spokesman of the party, there is the responsibility of presenting in every arena possible outside of the party the viewpoint of the Communist party. In our district, this area, both Ben Dobbs and I (Ben as the executive secretary of the party and a long-time co-worker of mine) had a standard policy of never declining an invitation to speak or to debate; so we would debate every right-winger, we would debate anybody that wanted to debate us, and we would accept any invitation, even though in many cases it took us into very reactionary centers, where there was enormous hostility and vicious-ness. But that didn't make any difference as far as we were concerned, and I'm rather critical that today there isn't that kind of zeal, for want of a better word, in taking the struggle to where the human beings are and not just talking to oneself, not just debating and talking among Communists or people who are already radical. If you cannot defend your ideas before antagonists, then there's something wrong with you. I think it's a very important, indispensable element of activity. Well, just about this time, in 1961-62, for the first time we were starting to break through the isolation of the party in the sense of the absolute refusal to let Communists speak anywhere, but anywhere.

GARDNER

The party had refused?

HEALEY

No, no, everyone else had refused to let us speak, As a matter of fact, it's a subject of great amusement to me, particularly now when I read the L.A. Times editorials taking all kinds of supposedly "liberal" positions, to remember that the Times was one of the newspapers that editorialized so loudly and often, and shaped their news articles along the same thing, to justify the refusal to allow me to speak at UCLA the first time I was invited because I refused to register under the McCarran Act, using that as an excuse, that I was violating a law of the United States by refusing to register and therefore should be denied the right to speak, in spite of the fact that I was, of course, doing what has to be done, that is, testing a law that I considered unconstitutional, testing it in the only way that it could be tested, by refusing to abide by it and challenging it within the framework, first of the hearing before the federal hearing officer, and then in the courts of the United States. Well, also at that time in terms of the public arena, I was being invited to speak on television shows. It started a few years earlier, actually, but it's important only insofar as it is still not a very common practice, and we did more of it here in this area than anyone else. And I did most of that. The first invitation I got was with Tom Duggan's program. I don't know whether you remember that. He's dead now. I think it was Channel 13 or 11--Channel 13, I guess. That created a great deal of debate and discussion and notoriety because they were very vigorous, hard-swinging debates. I enjoyed those, as I did the subsequent ones, not only for the reason that I've already said (that I think the important question of your beliefs is your ability to present and fight for them in an unfriendly arena), but also because in each case, every time I'd appear on one of these programs, the commentators or moderators would always try to get me to lose my temper, to get angry, either by snide, personal, insulting remarks, or through politically insulting remarks. Of course, I very early acquired the approach that I never lose my temper with my enemies, only with my friends. So when I was debating [John] Rousselot, as I did in later years on the Les Crane show, or when I debated him in Santa Barbara--that is, a form of debate, which I'll explain later, because he wouldn't appear on the same platform with me--in each case he would do very provocative personal things, thinking I'd get angry and blow my cool; and, of course, I never did that.

GARDNER

What sort of things would he do?

HEALEY

Oh, very nasty kind of things about the betrayal of humanity by Communists, attacks on the Soviet Union, but always of a very vitriolic character. Just a constant, without letup, attack. Or on the Tom Duggan program I remember one example. We had to stop for a commercial, and the man who was giving the commercial was a furrier. He was giving it in person; in those kind of programs, as you know--well, they don't do it anymore, they tape them now, but in those days they didn't tape them--on these small programs on the independent stations, the person with the business firm would come on to do their own pitch. And this man made an apology before he gave the commercial, to the effect that he was giving a commercial on the same program on which a Communist was sitting. I interrupted his commercial to laugh at him and attack him for such cowardice, for such miserable groveling at public opinion, that he couldn't even give a commercial without apologizing for his presence with a Communist.

GARDNER

This would be when, about '61 or '62?

HEALEY

The first program started in the late fifties with Duggan. He was the pioneer with it. It took an ultra-reactionary--and that's what Duggan was--to dare to have a Communist. A liberal wouldn't have dared to be the first one to have a Communist, just wouldn't have. For the beginning years, most of [the appearances] were with reactionaries. Later, as I say, I was on Les Crane's program several times, and--what's the name of the Black commentator?

GARDNER

Loui s Lomax.

HEALEY

Yes, Louis Lomax--I was on his program quite often, I enjoyed those more than others because Lomax knew more and therefore was able to ask more sophisticated questions.

GARDNER

Les Crane's show was also one that was much more sophisticated.

HEALEY

Oh, yes, no question of it. But the importance politically of all of these appearances is that it did break this pariah circle that all Communists were placed in. Most Americans had never seen a Communist, as far as they were aware. They didn't know what a Communist looked like, had no idea of the human identity of Communists. So on a human level, this was very important because it was very much easier for the McCarthyists and that whole reactionary era to build up a hysterical hatred and fear of Communists because Communists had no human form; it's easier to hate the unknown than it is to hate the known. So that was one thing. Secondly, what was important is that it did give us some opportunity, albeit not clear, but some opportunity to speak our position, what it is we really stood for, so that for the first time people heard it from ourselves. I really can't overestimate this--I don't think I do overestimate it--because a whole generation grew up believing the "I Led Three Lives," Herb Philbrick line, the spy television and movie productions. Their whole concept of communism was totally warped and deformed by this mass cultural presentation of it--"culture" in quotes--this mass media presentation of it. So that these appearances on the media, on the medium of television, also played that role and were important, I think.

GARDNER

How about Joe Pyne?

HEALEY

Well, Joe Pyne would call me quite frequently. What would happen is that Joe Pyne's producer would call me and ask me to come on; I didn't really particularly want to go on because his was, I think, one of the most vulgar of shows, but I would accept. As I say, we had a general policy: we never said no; we would debate anybody, anywhere, anyplace. But then Joe Pyne would call me and say, "Dorothy, I'm cancelling your invitation. I can't have you on. I can't have you on for two reasons. First of all, I can't do the kind of attacks on you that I do on others"--he was very blunt about it--"because you're a woman. You have to be very careful how you attack women on television. You can't do it the same way you attack men. Secondly," he says, "you know more than I know, and I know it, and I can't debate you. I don't intend to have you come on for that reason, either.! I don't intend to be confounded by your facts." He was very honest about it. Of course, that was all private. But his was the only program that I didn't appear on of the talk shows.

GARDNER

Who were some of the others that you were on?

HEALEY

I mentioned Lomax, Crane. . . .

GARDNER

Talk a little longer about Louis Lomax and maybe later about Les Crane.

HEALEY

He was a fascinating man and a tragic man--again, a man who is kind of characteristic of the period, one who knew more than he could ever possibly allow himself to show that he knew on public television. A very knowledgeable and sophisticated man. He would say to me privately before the show or during commercials or after the show how uncomfortable he felt with some of the stupid things he had to say and do in order to hold his job, in order to be accepted in the industry. There was one amusing thing with Lomax. He decided that he was going to be a great innovator and go to Southeast Asia and really get the scoop. So he asked me for letters of introduction that would clear his way-- privately, of course. I said, "Well, all I can do, all I would be willing to do"--because while I personally liked him, I didn't trust him; I mean, anybody who has to be consumed as he was with ambition is going to have to give in to pressures from the State Department or the CIA, and I was not about to provide an introduction in the sense that I would vouch for him--I didn't mind introducing him to people abroad and saying who he was, but I would not under any consideration do it in the sense that said I was vouching for his integrity because that I couldn't and wouldn't do. So I wrote some general thing just saying that he was a moderator on a talk program here. But what he wanted to do--he decided that he had a big scoop. He called me up when he got back. Vietnam wouldn't let him in, just would not let him in--North Vietnam, that is, Hanoi. This was before they were allowing any Americans in, so it was not too surprising, particularly because he announced before he left the United States that he'd gone to Washington, D.C., and gotten briefed by the State Department, the CIA. They had agreed to accept him before that, but after that public announcement they wouldn't do it. But he went on to Thailand, and he claimed when he came back, in private conversations with me, that he had discovered the identity of some Thai woman who he claimed was the revolutionary leader of the forces fighting against the dictatorship of Thailand. I don't even remember her name; it was a very romantic name. I'd never heard of her then, and I've never heard of the name since, but he was absolutely overwhelmed that he had gotten an inter- national scoop. So much for that. There was one other earlier confrontation that was rather interesting. I guess the very first program I appeared on was with a man by the name of Dan Lundberg, who had a program, again, I think, on Channel 13. It was the small independent stations that in the beginning used these programs, because they were very inexpensive. You got your guests free of charge; it didn't cost you anything. The only one you had to pay was the moderator. The guests were all glad to come because it gave them a forum. Dan Lundberg had Bob Finch on the same time I was on. Before the program started, Mr. Finch and his wife and I were sitting out in the patio of the television station waiting for time to go on. This, as I say, was the early fifties. I have not forgotten the fact that his wife said to me that she was horrified by what McCarthy was doing and what McCarthyism represented, that she had a very staunch feeling about the need of civil liberties and the right of people to speak and to think and to be free to join any organization they wanted. I was just astounded to hear this coming from an--at that time not too important Republican because he was just starting at that time in Republican politics. Nevertheless, it stayed in my mind as an example that you shouldn't stereotype any people, including Republicans, [laughter] although I would imagine that by this time he, too, has trimmed his sails to fit into the Nixon entourage.

GARDNER

Well, he was trimmed out of the Nixon entourage, wasn't he, in the last administration?

HEALEY

Well, he was trimmed out as far as an official position in Washington, but obviously he's still considered within the family.

GARDNER

More of a distant cousin than he once was, I think.

HEALEY

Yeah, yeah. But I would not imagine that he would show any significant independence in terms of politics. Of course, that leads back to what was starting to take place already by 1962, which is where we left off. As you remember, the 1962 gubernatorial race was between Richard Nixon and Pat Brown. Simultaneously there were three congressmen running who publicly identified themselves as members of the Birch Society, two of those names I remember; the third I don't. One was Rousselot, one was Edgar Hiestand, and then there was a third one, and, as I say, I don't remember. [Bill (H.L.) Richardson]

GARDNER

It could have been [John] Schmitz.

HEALEY

No, not yet. Schmitz was not yet running for office; he wasn't even a state senator, which was his first elected office. This coincided, of course, with the enormous publicity which the Birch Society was at that time getting and with its very significant growth. The 1962 elections started to provide evidence of something that has continued since then to be of great significance as far as the political structure and politics and relationships of the country. And that was the role of the ultra-Right in defining its activity in a way that, as Robert Welch says, they learned from the Communist party in the thirties, what in our language we would call our independent role and our vanguard role. What they meant by that--and what we did is the same, but I'll give the example from their activities--was to build up an independent strength to go into the Republican party, to push it as far to the right as it possibly could, while simultaneously organizing outside of it, never putting all their eggs into one basket. And the Republican primary in 1962 showed the first battles that were to then come to a head with Goldwater's winning the Republican nomination over Rockefeller in '64 and, as I say, the subsequent shape of things as far as the Republican party, which means as far as politics in general, because the dialogue between the parties helps to influence and define the whole mass dialogue. Joe Shell, I think, was running for the Republican nomination in the primary. Without any question, Shell represented the ultras. And here it's interesting to see the distinction with Nixon, who is certainly as reactionary a candidate as one would find, but who is not, in the same way as they, an ideologist. In other words, a Nixon, as we now know, will compromise, will change his positions enormously, always while pushing in a right-wing direction.

GARDNER

But pragmatically so.

HEALEY

Exactly. Pragmatically. That's exactly the word. Whereas they would never do such a thing: their whole concept of, quote, "purity" would prevent it. Well, the primary campaign among the Republicans was a very hot one, and I think played a very significant role in Nixon's defeat in November, even though what Nixon was trying to do is what always happens in the shape of politics. The Republicans in the primary will go to the right, take as far as right a position as they can; then in the general election they'll try to come back to the center because they have to win then the non-Republican votes. The Democrats do just the opposite. In order to win a Democratic primary you take a position as far to the left as you possibly can manage to do, and then after the primary, you go to the right, to the center. For the Democrats, it means going to the right to do that after the primaries; for the Republicans, it means going to the left. And those terms are, of course, very relative, depending on where you started from. But in that period--well, first of all, that was the year that the Francis amendments were on the ballot as Proposition 24. Those were amendments which would have outlawed the Communist party. There were a whole series of them that were just extraordinary legislative exercises. Remind me to tell you the story of Jesse Unruh's role in that.

GARDNER

Well, tell it.

HEALEY

Tell it now?

GARDNER

Sure.

HEALEY

Kind of parenthetical. When the Francis bills came up in the state legislature, before they were finally defeated and therefore the reactionary forces had to circulate an initiative petition and place it on the ballot as a proposition, one of the state legislative committees held a hearing in Los Angeles at the State Building, and I went down to testify against the Francis bills, representing the party. The only two people to appear to testify against the bills were Al Wirin and myself. There were probably four or five hundred people sitting there in the State Building in the hearing room before the legislators, and the only ones that I remember were Phil Burton, still a state legislator, Nick Petris, and Jesse Unruh. Before I testified, Unruh asked me to come out in the hall. First he said to me, "You don't remember me, do you?" I said, "Well, I can't say I do. I know who you are, of course." Everyone knew who Jesse Unruh was; he was at the height of his power at that point, "Big Daddy." He said, "Well, I heard you speak at USC in 1949"--which made me feel very old--and he said, "I made up my mind then that I was going to be one to change the system from within the system, and not the way you people are doing it from outside the system, that I could work within the system and change it." I said, "Well, that's fascinating, to see how much you're going to have to tack and yaw and whatnot in order to manage to maintain yourself. But go ahead, more power to you! I don't mind in the least anybody who thinks they're going to try to do it that way, as long as other people don't have any illusions in it." He said, "Well, what I wanted to talk to you about, I'm going to ask you not to testify today." I said, "Why not?" He said, "Well, who needs you? Look, the only ones testifying will be you and Al Wirin. Now, Al Wirin, all right--that's American Civil Liberties Union; that's fine. But you," he says, "who needs your testimony as a representative of the Communist party against these anti-Communists? You won't help us. And I can assure you the bills are going to get bottled up in committee; they're not going to pass. I can tell you without any question they won't pass out of any committee, so that there's nothing to worry about. Who needs it?" And I said, "Well, that's unprincipled. I came down here to testify, and I'm going to testify," and I insisted on my right. As I say, I always kind of giggled about it, because of course he did bottle them up in committee. At any rate--end of parentheses--they then circulated them as initiative measures. Now, what took place was really rather an interesting thing because on the one hand Nixon, for instance, was campaigning in that final election as the expert on anti-Communism and was proposing all kinds of unconstitutional and extralegal methods of dealing with "the threat of communism in this country." But simultaneously he was opposing the Francis Act, Proposition 24, on the ground that one of the provisions--and I don't remember which one any more--was so patently unconstitutional that if it was declared unconstitutional in judicial review then all of the bill would be thrown out and therefore the anti-Communists would have lost rather than gained. The L.A. Times opposed it on the same basis. There was an enormous commotion on the campuses of organized activity against it-- on some campuses, not all--and it really marked the emergence of the students in defined politics for the start of the decade. They took more part in that than they took in the Brown versus Reagan contest. Also at that time, as you remember, in--what was it?-- October, came the Cuba blockade. It's interesting to look back to see what the public mood was and how it was reflected in the election campaigns, because to one degree or another campaigns act as a kind of a barometer that measure mass moods. They're not very scientific and they're not exact, but they give some idea of trends at least. Well, when that blockade took place, and particularly when the ultimatum to the Soviet Union was given that the Kennedy administration was going to board the ships, the Soviet naval vessels, there was no question but that a wave of fear hit, at least in this state--I won't speak for the rest of the country--a real fear. I know of people who packed up and left for Mexico immediately, kids that drove down there, wouldn't stay here. They were sure that nuclear war was just around the corner and that there was no alternative.

GARDNER

I was in Louisiana then.

HEALEY

And you found the same thing?

GARDNER

It was right across the Gulf of Mexico from the missiles, and throughout the entire South, all the National Guard was called up and put on active duty. All over the South.

HEALEY

I didn't know that. They felt it as that imminent a threat. Well, the Republican candidates had big ads in all the papers the last few weeks before the election based on that, first of all that they were the ones who had exposed the fact that the Soviet Union was building bases in Cuba, putting missiles in Cuba; and secondly that if there was to be a real handling of the problem to, quote, "defend the United States," they were the only ones who could be entrusted with doing it. I've kept a collection of those ads because they were so illustrative of the period. Well, there were big debates going on in the party and in the left movement, the radicalist movement, as to what position to take in regard to this campaign. There was no argument, of course, about Proposition 24. One of the interesting things about Proposition 24: it's the last time, to my memory, that a reactionary measure was voted down or that a progressive measure could succeed, because actually the initiative measures in this state are now more determined, more than ever before, by the amount of money that is available for either the antagonists or the protagonists to capture the mass media and the propaganda around it. What used to be possible--that is, the mobilization of large numbers of people to counteract these things--is less and less possible. As I say, my memory is that '62 was just about the last time that anything like that. . . .

GARDNER

Well, the farmworkers last year.

HEALEY

Yeah. But there again, the farmworkers aren't a good example because that proposition and the commercials on it were worded in such a way that thousands of people were not sure whether the "yes" vote or the "no" vote was the vote that was going to help or hurt the farmworkers' union.

GARDNER

And also there was a great deal of publicity, national publicity, for Chavez and his group.

HEALEY

That's right. Well, the kind of debates that ensued--for instance, I heard one very amusing story about the Trotskyists in that position at that time. I heard it later, but it was related to the Nixon-Brown campaign. As you may know, the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] has the position that under no conditions, as a matter of principle, does the SWP ever take a position, nor should radicals ever take a position, that in any way supports anyone who isn't running on an independent slate. You never support anybody running either as a Democratic or a Republican. But a young man by the name of Les Evans, who is now the editor of the International Socialist Review, their main magazine, tells me the story that he was at James Cannon's house-- James Cannon is the founder of the SWP--the night of the election returns. He said that when it appeared that Nixon was winning, he [Cannon] was just absolutely in a terrible mood. When it finally was clear that Nixon had been defeated, he was simply overjoyed and delighted. And Les said it had always kind of bothered him in view of their position that it didn't make any difference whether it was a Republican or a Democrat, why the founder of the Trotskyist movement was so moved one way or the other towards either joy or despair by the result of, quote, "capitalist elections." I think it's really illustrative of the fact that even when people won't recognize it or won't verbalize it, won't recognize it as far as policy is concerned, any radical knows way down deep that it does make a difference which branch of the ruling class is in power, what aspect of ruling class policy is dominant, whether it's the carrot or the club. Even though they're both going to defend capitalism, it makes a lot of difference to you whether or not it's going to be done with the carrot or the club, to you, the radical, of course. That was also the year when the party's office was bombed.

GARDNER

Here?

HEALEY

Here in Los Angeles.

GARDNER

Where was the office?

HEALEY

The office at that time was on Spring Street, 524 South Spring. Here's the front page of the L.A. Times for January 29, 1962, the major headline being "Bomb Rocks Longtime Communist Party's Office." Then it says, "An ingeniously made bomb was set off early Sunday in the doorway of a downtown building which houses the Communist party headquarters." It also housed the People's World. What was important about this, outside of the fact in itself--and I say "the fact in itself" because we were not the only party office being bombed; this was happening in New York and elsewhere--was that as a result of it we were forced to move. We were evicted. It took us four years to find another place that would rent to us. I must have spent two years off and on going around to office buildings asking if they would rent a headquarters to us. Absolutely refused. Even buildings that had maybe 10 percent occupancy, who obviously needed tenants desperately, as soon as they found out that we were the Communist party, they refused to rent to us. I mention it because there's so much feeling, so much superficial idea that the worst of the McCarthy period ended with the fifties. Of course, it's just sheer nonsense. McCarthyism became institutionalized in this country, both in law and in practices. And in this case we were dealing with the practices, where we could not find a headquarters. We finally broke that barrier only in 1966 when I was running for county assessor and rented an office as an election campaign headquarters and not as the party office.

GARDNER

Where is that?

HEALEY

That was on Manchester here, near Normandie, between Norraandie and Denker, Normandie and Raymond, that we finally got a building that would rent to us. That is past now--there are office buildings now available--but that's how long that particular episode lasted.

GARDNER

Where did you have your office in the meantime?

HEALEY

We didn't have an office in the meantime; we had no office.

GARDNER

You operated out of your own home.

HEALEY

I operated out of my own home, and we had a post office box for mailing. That was all we could do.

GARDNER

Right over here?

HEALEY

Yes, the Wagner Street Station, naturally, so I could pick it up easily. As a matter of fact, I still get mail here addressed "Communist party" and addressed to this particular address.

GARDNER

Bombings were quite the rage in the early sixties around Southern California, weren't they?

HEALEY

Bombings? They still continue. The Long March, for instance, gets bombed pretty often. A few months ago, I think, was the last time they were bombed.

GARDNER

Where1s their office?

HEALEY

On Parkview. The Citizens' Committee Against HUAC would get bombed every few months and finally had to build a steel door. You can't get in unless you ring a bell; they look out the window and see who you are before they'll open the door. In addition, what would also happen in radical offices of all kinds is that they would break into your office in order to steal the files. That took place a lot. As a matter of fact, even when we were on Manchester, the office was vandalized, and the mimeograph machine destroyed, and the ink thrown all over everything, pamphlets and materials. That continued even then. Just as of last Christmas, I got a Christmas card from the Minutemen threatening me with death and saying that I would never know anytime I started my car whether the car would explode or anytime I would walk to the corner whether I would be ambushed, but always, all the time, I was within the cross-wires or something of their gun that they could. ... So that continues; that hasn't ceased either.

GARDNER

My Lord. Was it a form letter? [laughter]

HEALEY

No, it was a Christmas card, literally, with this message typed on it.

GARDNER

This is perhaps a naive question in some ways, but do you turn anything like that over to the police or FBI?

HEALEY

Well, the lawyers tell me I should mail it to the FBI. As a matter of fact, I still have it here in the house addressed to the FBI in the same envelope that I put it in. I just didn't mail it because I thought, "Oh, Lord, I don't think they'll ever do anything about it." As far as I'm concerned they're not too different. I can't get over my inhibitions against having any connection with them even in that way. Anyway, I know that nothing would happen even if I did turn it over. Too many people have turned over things. The only other thing I did turn over to them, as a matter of fact--I'd forgotten--was in our post office box one day, a package from March Air Field Base, and in it was what appeared to be lots of plans of the base and the naval installations and whatnot. I decided that was just a plain frame-up, so I promptly took that and mailed it immediately to the FBI as a registered document so that there couldn't be any question of any relationship with it. I never did know whether that was a frame-up or some idiot who thought I cared. Because it's also true I sometimes got letters from people in the military service saying that they'd like to go to the Soviet Union and live there and go over to the other side, and would I please tell them how to do it. In all cases I'd simply say, "I have nothing to do with such things. Just simply write to the Soviet Embassy." Nineteen sixty-two was also, of course, the formal hearing under the McCarran Act, where John Abt represented me. I was one of ten Communists throughout the country who was being ordered to register as individual members of the Communist party. Of course, you must understand that what it meant by registration was our acceptance of the definition of the McCarran Act, that we were in fact agents of a foreign country. Of course, I wouldn't for a minute think of registering. Well, we got to the hearing--and we'd done a lot of work in getting people to the hearing as a kind of a people's jury (the ACLU, the Quakers, various other church groups, a couple of unions, a number of Black organizations who'd send out representatives to listen to the so-called evidence against us), and it was by no means a sure thing that we were necessarily going to win in fighting against this registration. And if we lost, as I told you last time, it meant incredible penalties: five years in jail for each day we failed to register and $10,000 a day for each day. One would never have a long enough life to have lived for that. The hearing really had only one thing of any significance, and that isn't terribly significant, and that was the appearance of one of the stool pigeons, a Black woman, Elizabeth Williams, who'd been a very close friend of mine. I mention it only because, as usual, I was never right in estimating as to who the informer was inside the party. I had a clear batting average of zero. She'd been very warm, very friendly--almost in a personal sense, not just in a political sense, coming over to my home frequently and seeing me talking. What turned out, the story is that--not untypical of what happened to a lot of people--either she or her husband, I've forgotten which, were working for the post office in 1946-47 when the loyalty oaths were first put into effect and had signed one, and the FBI came to them and said they could prove that they had perjured themselves, that they were members of the party and that unless they cooperated they would be sent to jail. That became their answer then, so they cooperated.

GARDNER

Who was the woman who was mentioned in the Times article? It was a Lulu Mae . . .

HEALEY

Lulu Mae, yeah. Lulu Mae had appeared first in the Smith Act trial. She was really the source of great amusement because in the Smith Act trial she testified that she used to bake pies for the Communist party affairs and for individual Communists. Her testimony against me here was simply that she'd attended meetings with me at the convention of the party in 1959 and that I was elected to the National Committee. Her testimony didn't mean anything to me or to the record. It was nothing at all.

GARDNER

Who was she? Did you know her?

HEALEY

I had only met her when she appeared as a witness against us in the Smith Act trial. First time I'd ever seen her. I had no memory of her. Well, no, she couldn't have been a witness in the Smith Act trial if she saw me in the national convention. But at any rate, I didn't know her. Oh, I know where I had seen her. It wasn't the Smith Act. I had met her when I went up to San Francisco to attend the joint meeting of their district and our district leadership together. She came in from Fresno, I think, and I met her at that time. I didn't have any idea--I don't think I ever said two words to her--and she testified. As I say, it was nothing that really mattered. But the case went up through appeal through the various courts to the Supreme Court. I don't even remember what year the Supreme Court finally ruled that it was unconstitutional to compel us to register, to be witnesses against ourselves. A couple of other things happened during that McCarran Act hearing process. I'd become a commentator for KPFK in 1959, and part of the provision of the McCarran Act is that anybody who utilized the mass media in any way had to be identified as a member of this prohibited organization and all the rest of it; they had a whole line that had to be said. KPFK was under great attack by the government, by the FCC [Federal Communications Commission], and mostly by the Senate internal [security] hearing committee sometime around that period I was subpoenaed, as were a number of other people from the Pacifica Network--but that happened later. KPFK decided that they were going to identify me in their folio. Their original thing was to say, "Dorothy Healey," something about representing the Communist party and then some of the language of that McCarran Act. I said, "If you do it, I won't go on the air. I just will not do it." So the final compromise that they worked out with me was to identify me as Dorothy Healey "from the Communist party, a Communist organization." I said, "That's all right. You can say that if you want because that's what the Communist party is. But I will not do it with any other adjectives added." But it was a sign of the times, too, again, of the continuing pressures. The hearing before the Senate [James] Eastland Committee was very funny. They used as their evidence--and it's in their folders--KPFK had done an interview with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and me on the private, personal lives of communist women. It was really a very--well, it was as personal as any communist woman's life is going to be. In other words, most of it was on our politics, but it did have some things on our personal life, you know, marriage, children, things of that kind. So I was part of the evidence that KPFK and Pacifica were putting out communist propaganda. And then my broadcasts, my commentaries. All I remember about that hearing was first of all the government paid my way to go, gave me first-class fare, which of course I didn't use. I got my usual tourist ticket, and we used the balance of the money for political activities. Secondly, that [Senator Thomas] Dodd was the hearing officer when I appeared, and there again I did what I had done with the HUAC committee when I appeared before them when Francis Walter was the committee chairman, and that was to utilize my knowledge of what you can and cannot do before a governmental investigating committee. It's really a very simple formula to say, but it does take some experience to know how to apply it. The formula is that you can answer any question that the person on the street can answer, in other words, information that does not come simply by virtue of your membership in the party. You do not waive your rights under the Fifth if you answer that. But you cannot answer any specific questions that indicate special knowledge because if you answer any one of them, you have already waived your right. You have to then answer all questions; you no longer have a right to claim the Fifth as a privilege against incrimination. So in both cases, both here in Los Angeles before HUAC and in Washington, D.C., I did the same.

1.27. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE TWO APRIL 6, 1973

HEALEY

I would use the occasion of every question that they asked to launch into a great soapbox speech. Literally I was soapboxing, long political analyses, for which their questions simply provided the springboard, had nothing to do really with what I was saying. [laughter] They'd just get so exasperated. All I remember really of that in Washington was Dodd's face getting redder and redder and redder and redder because I was attacking him. At that point he had either defended whoever had registered as the lobbyist for Katanga, for [Moise] Tshombe's secession movement in the Congo (or he himself was the lobbyist for it, I don't remember which), but I used it as the exposure of U.S. imperialism through the U.S. Senate. The other things that were happening, however--as I say, it started--this was also the period when I finally was able to start speaking on campus. Of course, part of the irony of these attacks on me, these great big huge attacks because of my refusal to register, is that they made the appearance of a communist on campus a great cause celebre. Students who would no more think of going to one of these kind of speeches--because in fact what was I doing but something that ought to have been done in a political science course or something, philosophy or economics?-- by the thousands students would turn out for these speeches that I was making. As a matter of fact, they told me in several places that the only ones who could compare in drawing power at that point on the campus were Peter, Paul, and Mary. [laughter] But there were some interesting things that took place. I'm not sure of the exact sequence of the years when they all happened, but I remember I was asked to come speak in Colorado on my way to New York one time, at Boulder. I had a kind of sentimental reaction to doing it. I don't usually accept speaking dates outside of California, for one thing because it always got me in trouble with my national office or with the local people there, and also because I just really was always too tired to take on any more than I had to do already. But this time I did because it was Boulder and [when I was] a baby, my family had gone to Boulder from Denver for a few months in, I guess, about 1915 or "16. I didn't remember it. At any rate, two weeks before I was to come the Birch Society caused a great commotion, big resolutions against my speaking; they put up signs in every one of the stores of the city telling people to stay away, warning them who I was and whatnot. Well, when the kids picked me up in Denver, the students who were to take me up to Boulder, they were very worried about what was going to happen. They were particularly upset because of the financial problems of their student speaking program. They had had James Forman there two weeks earlier, and it had been a big bust financially. The agreement they made with all speakers was that they gave you 50 percent of the gate plus a standard speaking fee--I've forgotten what it was. They had lost their shirt with Forman; only twenty students had shown up, and they had to give him the guarantee anyway. So they didn't have any money. So in one of my usual involuntary actions which infuriated the treasurer of the party here in Los Angeles because of what it meant to it financially, I said, "Oh, forget it, I don't want you to give me half of the speaking"--you know, the paid admissions; they were charging two dollars to come in, and they were to give me one-half of that. "I don't want that. That's all right. You just pay my fare, whatever the extra cost is for me to come here from my trip to New York"--which amounted to forty dollars--"and we'll call it quits. I don't care about the money. I've come to speak because I want to speak." Well, they had about 4,000 people--it was absolutely jammed--and they made an enormous amount of money. My comrade Dobbs said to me, "Don't be so damn bighearted next time. Look at all the money you'd have gotten for extra leaflets and pamphlets that we could have put out!" There were a couple of interesting things about all of those speeches. The first one was at UCLA (the first one actually was in Claremont, at a professor's home; then UCLA was the first of the big ones). Before I appeared, the Birch Society students had distributed big pamphlets on the campus exposing my history, who I really was, all the terrible things I'd done in my life as an organizer. The football squad came marching in to sit right in the front on my right . . .

GARDNER

This is at UCLA?

HEALEY

At UCLA. It was in the Grand Ballroom, and it was just packed, absolutely full. There wasn't a seat available, filled the whole thing up, all the way. Generally everything went very smoothly. Of course, they had that rule under which the regents had finally allowed a communist to speak on campus. The rule was that a member of the faculty had to be on the stage to introduce you, and you had to agree to answer questions. Well, I love that; I like that much better than making speeches. So I didn't mind either one.

GARDNER

Who was the faculty member?

HEALEY

I don't remember any longer, just no memory of it, although the UCLA alumni magazine had an article on it which talked about him. I don't remember who it was. But what interested me was two things. One, I gave a lot of statistics, material on poverty in America--this was before Mike Harrington's book [The Other America] had come out on poverty in America; it was before Kennedy had done anything on the War on Poverty--and that was the part of the speech that was greeted with jeers and incredulity. The students simply didn't believe it. It was simply incredible. The other reaction that I remember that interested me, again as a sign of the mores, the temper, the whole question of mood and mannerisms: in talking about Vietnam I had quoted from the statue to the British soldiers which is at Lexington, "They came three thousand miles to die to keep the past upon the throne," and I said that's what we Americans were doing in Vietnam. I used the word imperialism to describe what we were there for and ended the speech with the slogan, "Bring the boys home! Stop the war now! Bring the boys home!" Well, after it was over, the young comrades, young communists, came up to me--not very many, two or three--to plead with me, first of all, not to use the word imperialism because no one outside of communists ever used this word, and secondly, not to call for "Bring the boys home," because that's just a middle-aged slogan. Young people would never react to such a slogan. Of course, within three years the word imperialism became as common as anything else, and of course the slogan "Bring the boys home" was widespread. But again, that was 1962 or '63, whenever that speech was, the first one. The difference--how quickly the moods change and therefore the concepts change with them, and what is acceptable changes with them. Another speech that stood out in my mind was one I made in Nevada. There again it was just jammed. It was held in the gymnasium. Big controversy again before I was allowed to speak, and the students who arranged it feeling so proud that they'd triumphed and they finally could let me speak. Again I was rather amused at one thing. It was the easiest of all places to answer questions because the questions were not very sophisticated, although there, too, as in every other place I spoke, it seemed every place I went there was either a Hungarian refugee or a Cuban refugee who was present to say, "I know what communism is really like. You're just fooling these people." But there, as I say, most interesting was the response of the press, their delight that something outside of the usual goldfish-swallowing activity was going on on campus. All of their reports were very, very nice and very colorful and favorable, mainly not because of anything I said but the fact that it was not the usual thing that was going on in Nevada at that point. It was a break with the rural idiocy of what was happening which was dominant in the culture. The same thing happened when I spoke up at Ventura. Again, weeks of battles in the city council and the board of education before they finally said that they couldn't stop me from speaking. Therefore, again, they produced an audience of huge size, and again the same--I mean, in each case the main thing you hoped to do is simply to neutralize people. You know that you're not necessarily going to make communists out of anyone, but if you can at least get them to think in a different way of their everyday reality, to question it, then you've accomplished something. When I went to Irvine to speak, there they thought they were very cute--it was cute, but all it did was cause me to laugh. I was speaking in a classroom that had been opened up for this purpose. In back of me was a movable blackboard, one that switched around. When I started to speak, it turned around and in back of me were the words, "From Russia with love." [laughter] Of course, everybody howled, and so did I; I thought it was very funny. Then in the middle of my speech, there'd be signs held up, "Don't be egotistical. We came to jeer, not to hear," slogans of that kind. But again the aftermath, there was--oh, my God, Schmitz went crazy, the Santa Ana papers went crazy. For week thereafter there was a big commotion over how dare they invite a communist. What is significant today is that in most of those places the communists still couldn't speak as a regular thing. The other thing is that just generally speaking, and as you know from UCLA with Angela Davis, the idea that a communist should be on the faculty as a regular member of the faculty in a philosophy course, in an economics course, in a history course--where Marxists and communists belong--this would still be considered impossible for this society. We are alone among all the Western capitalist countries in the reaction to communists in this way. Communists are publicly identified as heads of departments in the various disciplines in England and France and Italy, in any modern country. It is only the United States, where the anticommunist hysteria has been so effective for thirty years, that the idea of a communist on the faculty is considered so impossible. But there's always a lot of-- that was the one drawback in my appearances, that then the liberals could comfort themselves with how democratic things were in America because they let me come out and speak one day in five years. Well, those activities, however, were important around later things--I'm not doing this in any strict chronology at this point--because those activities were primarily important in what they did as far as my campaign for assessor in 1966.

GARDNER

Do you think they also had some influence--and this is such a general question that it may include all the other party members who were doing similar things at the time--in creating the freer atmosphere that existed on the campuses? Which is the chicken and which is the egg, in a sense?

HEALEY

Well, inasmuch as my appearances were very early in the sixties--well, it's hard to tell. I couldn't have been invited if there hadn't already begun to be a freer atmosphere than the fifties. But certainly without any question the appearance did help to break down the logjam, the ice floe. There's no question of that, again, mainly for the reason I mentioned earlier, that it's so much harder to build up a hysterical hate against something that has human identity and human form, and because the ideas clearly were not the ideas that we'd been pictured as having in I Led Three Lives or J. Edgar Hooker's annual tirades or the L.A. Times's editorials. But there was one other dividend to it, and that was what I learned. I have never mentioned this, but the questions I would get, the pressures from those questions, having to try to be as honest as I could in answering them, forced me to rethink a lot of things that I had accepted unthinkingly concerning the Communist party's policy or thinking or program or my definition or the party's definition of Marxism. As an example, in the question of civil liberties, without much question we had the position which today is more identified with [Herbert] Marcuse around "repressive tolerance," that civil liberties are only for those whose ideas we agreed with, in effect, that the ultrareactionary should not be allowed to teach--[Arthur] Jensen, some of this kind. As a matter of fact, Angela and I used to have great fights over that because she accepted that, as you may remember, in her campaign, that she should have the right to teach but that Jensen shouldn't have the right to teach his racist theories of white superiority, genetically speaking. My argument against that--and, as I say, I really started thinking this only under the pressure of the questions from the students and the faculty and having to think through a logical, coherent position which satisfied me; I was never interested really just in trying to find an answer that would satisfy an audience, but what did I think? What did I believe? Why did I believe it? What did it mean to me? And I came to the conclusion that, in the first place, the concepts that are identified, for instance, around the Bill of Rights are not the property of capitalism. They are part of the human heritage of humanity that has fought for centuries for those rights. The fact that under capitalism they are truncated, that you cannot have real democracy until you have economic democracy, is certainly true. But nevertheless, even with the contracted aspect of capitalist democracy, it is still important to recognize that if you are fighting for it, you cannot say, "For me but not for them." Words have to be protected; deeds and actions are the only things that can be challenged. That's still a very--I mean, there is no agreement on this even today in the Communist party. The usual answer is given, "Well, would you let the Ku Klux Klan go free?" And my answer to Angela and to others on that has always been, "It is not the words of the Ku Klux Klan that are so murderous. It is the fact that they have state power in the South. If they didn't control police, the sheriff, the mayor, the governor, then their words would not be important. It is that they can use state terror, state brutality, against the Black people that is so horrible." Other questions, certainly in regard to the Soviet Union, had forced me to have to think through my position and influenced what became a later position. Again I remember being asked at UCLA--Khrushchev at that point had just come out with a big denunciation of some sculptors and writers and poets in the Soviet Union, and I was asked what my feeling was on that. Under ordinary circumstances, if I hadn't been confronted with that kind of pressure through those questions, I might not have had to confront myself: what did I think on it? I finally answered that Khrushchev had as much right to his opinion as I had to mine as to what I liked in art, good art, bad art; but neither of us had the right to superimpose our private opinion on the society as being the definitive opinion of what was good or bad art. I would still hold that true. But I give these examples only as illustrative of the educational process that I received. I was not only trying to bring new ideas to the students as to what communists; really believed; I, in turn, was learning from the very impact of the constant pressure of what their questions meant to me to have to define my own thinking in a way that I could accept. But there was the additional dividend from all the publicity that came as a result of my speaking, the television programs and everything else, that when I ran for assessor in 1966, even though that's a nonpartisan office and one cannot identify oneself as a Communist on the ballot, everybody knew who I was. The name was well-enough-known so that it didn't make any difference. People knew that Dorothy Healey was a Communist. And it made campaigning--well, as an example, you must know that we had not run candidates for many years. The year before, my comrade Bill Taylor had run for supervisor, but it was a little-noticed vote and campaign. This, however, created a lot of publicity. As a matter of fact, in looking over a few of the clippings that I kept, I notice that after the elections, when I got 87,000 votes, every columnist, from the liberal Paul Coates to the reactionary Morris Ryskind, just went crazy in commenting on this vote, that it was the largest vote that a Communist had received in forty years in America.

GARDNER

Where was your vote centered? Did you ever do a little population analysis?

HEALEY

Yes, we did a check, and it was even. In every precinct there were votes. It was pretty evenly distributed, the number of votes throughout all the precincts. In other words, there was absolutely no precinct--or almost no precinct--that was left untouched. In some precincts, as a matter of fact, I'd get the majority vote.

GARDNER

Which ones?

HEALEY

On the West Side. Although there it's ironic, the only place I was ever refused to speak as one of the candidates on a candidates' night--and I went everywhere to speak as a candidate (the real estate board in Glendale, the most conservative places I'd go)--the only place that I was denied the right to speak as a candidate on a candidates' night was on the West Side of town at one of the junior high schools in a Jewish community by Jewish Birchers who stood up and raised so much hell that the liberals putting on the program gave in and wouldn't let me speak.

GARDNER

Really, Jewish Birchers, or is that a euphemism?

HEALEY

No, no. Jewish Birchers. They defined themselves. There are both Jewish and Black Birchers. Segregated, of course, but they're there. [laughter]

GARDNER

They have a separate meeting house in back.

HEALEY

Yeah, exactly. Of course, that campaigning. . . .

GARDNER

What year was that?

HEALEY

This was 1966 that I ran. I'm going way ahead of the years, as a matter of fact. But as I say, it follows in political sequence from what I'm telling you about, as the result of all the public speaking, the fact that probably more than any communist at that time I was speaking publicly. Gus Hall, however, then made a tour of the country in '62-63, and again, as the first communist ever to appear on a campus, he got huge crowds. That did not hold up, but it was the initial reaction. That always reminded me of a phrase of Lenin's about how when reactionaries scream and yell the loudest, they build an audience for us; of course, that has some truth to it. But again--so I don't have to come back to the question of this campaign, my own campaign, as distinct from what was going on in the big campaigns, the significant ones that meant something in the country--first of all, I'd done an enormous amount of research on taxes. I didn't know anything about property taxes at the time that I decided to run for county assessor. I had to run for a county office, because it was nonpartisan and we couldn't get on a ballot in a partisan race. So I spent weeks reading, reading, reading material. By the way, the best that I've ever read was a legislative hearing on taxation, property taxes in California. It provided just enormous statistical material, including the fact that the people with incomes of $2,500 and less pay a higher percentage of the property tax than people with incomes over $20,000. And I'd meet Phil Watson in lots of places where I was debating. It was clear that we were the only two who really knew what we were talking about. The other candidates didn't know. The Property Owners Association fighting the property tax had lots of individual meetings with me (private meetings, secret meetings, because they were terrified of being seen talking to me) to get my information and my data, and would have loved to endorse me, but they didn't dare. They had endorsed some jerk from Venice whom they couldn't stand--O'Connell I think his name was or something [william J. O'Connor]--because they didn't dare endorse a communist. But what was clear was that wherever I went to speak, including to these very conservative audiences, on the question of what to do about property taxes and my knowledge of it, even the conservatives were giving me support because of the factual material that was involved. Back to the [earlier] years. I mentioned the blockade of Cuba and the Soviet missiles there. . . .

GARDNER

Was there any sort of reactive effect upon the Communist party immediately following that? Actually there was a thaw in the relations between America and the Soviet Union after the missile crisis. From that point on, things got progressively better for a while. Was there any reaction towards the Communists after the big panic?

HEALEY

No. Not a bit. As I say, as far as most attitudes are concerned, I don't think they're too changed even now. I think the anticommunist mystique has gone very deep in this country. The real terror of liberals of ever being identified as being communists, or being in the company of communists is a paralyzing action as far as the ability of the country to take any initiatives, to do anything, the fear of being attacked and identified as communists. It's a separate subject, but it's one that a number of very worthwhile studies can still be made of, the extent to which anticommunism acts as a paralysis upon liberals and others in the country in trying to meet today's social problems. The universities are as good a barometer as anything else; the fear of having a communist) on the faculty, as an employee, is still present. The fact that new generations grow up with this nonsense embedded in them is still true. Every once in a while I'll note in the TV Guide a renewal of films, either in The FBI stories or something else. They're not as vulgar as they were in the 1950s, not vulgar anticommunism. It's a more sophisticated type now. But still it's the same old, you know, spy story, where spies for the Soviet Union are involved.

GARDNER

On the other hand, some of the films that were used as so-called evidence against the Hollywood Ten are now always on TV. The one that comes to mind is the one that Alvah Bessie wrote about in his book [Inquisition in Eden]. I think he wrote it; it may not have been--Action in the North Atlantic.

HEALEY

That was John Howard Lawson.

GARDNER

Was it Lawson? In it one of the sailors or merchant marines, whichever it was, looks up and sees a Russian plane flying over and says, "Hooray! It's one of ours!" And this was used in the hearings as showing what nasty Communists they were.

HEALEY

The amount of our influence. Well, you know, my favorite story of the Hollywood Ten hearings in Ginger Rogers's testimony that she was forced to say, "Share and share alike, that's America to me." [laughter] But I think you'll agree that neither then nor now in their replaying do any of those films in any way offset the anticommunism. I

GARDNER

True.

HEALEY

Well, the Cuba blockade, of course, renewed at a higher, sharper pitch the Chinese-Soviet split. While other people were debating the blockade around general, political questions, we Communists had the very sharp debate within our party as to the Chinese charges that, number one, the Soviet Union had no business placing the missiles in Cuba, and number two, having placed them, they had no right to take them off without Cuba's permission to take them out, unilaterally without their agreement. With the whole question of the Chinese-Soviet split, you see this inability of Communists and of the party most particularly to be able to deal with what is new in a world that previous theories and ideology could not account for and do not define. It was unthinkable and unheard of--no communist anywhere in the world, anywhere, would have ever believed that the two major socialist countries would become, to all intents and purposes, opponents of one another. What happened within the party: the first knowledge that any of us had that there was this split was when the Chinese issued this pamphlet Long Live Leninism which in effect took on the Soviet Union's approach towards peaceful coexistence, but most particularly the whole question, within that realm of peaceful coexistence, of the ability to prevent a world war. That's when the phrase was used that, "If a new war comes, upon the ashes of the old world we will build a glorious new civilization." We just laughed at it. I mean, the fact was that if a nuclear war took place and destroyed the human beings and the advanced economy and technology of civilized societies, you'd be building stone age socialism, and that's not socialism. Socialism requires--hopefully--an advanced technology. But within the party there was great debate as to whether there even were any differences between the Soviet Union and China, up till and through 1961. I remember two things about that. (I should caution you, however, that in these discussions of history, as you know, the human animal remembers those arguments where history seems to validate and vindicate one's own judgment. You remember the arguments that you had where you turned out to be correct; you don't remember the other ones. I'm saying that with great emphasis, very emphatically, because as I think about all the things I've told you, I notice that there's always a built-in prejudice as to what I select out, which are the things in which I think history has vindicated my judgment. And that doesn't necessarily represent any balance as to what was taking place.) But I remember that when we here in this district decided not only that it was clear that there was a split between China and the Soviet Union but that the party membership had to be made aware of it, I remember how many of those who are now the current leaders of the party here in this district denounced us as the worst kind of betrayers of socialism and of proletarian internationalism, denied that there were any differences between the Soviet Union and China, and scoffed at the idea that it was possible, saying we were simply reading the bourgeois press and believing what the bourgeois press had to say, and that's the worst sin you can [commit as] a communist. So when we'd hold these membership meetings and I would speak on these questions, there would always be, I would say, at least a third of the party people present who would greet it with absolute hostility and fury and just reject totally out of hand the idea that there were differences. Then a couple of amusing things happened in the light of what is now obvious to everyone. I remember Carl Winter, who is one of the editors of the Daily World and who has been a national leader of the party for forty years, came here to Los Angeles to speak at a series of forums that we were proposing on this subject, and at each forum he absolutely denied the existence of any differences. He insisted that it was simply bourgeois propaganda and that there was no truth to it at all. This was "61, before the Cuban crisis. One amusing part of it was that one of the places where he spoke was at Frank Pestana's house. Frank is now one of the major Maoists of the United States--at least of Los Angeles; I shouldn't take on such territory. I remember that when Carl made this speech there, just brushing aside any possible differences, denying--I mean, we read Peking Review to him and said, "Well, what does that mean?" Or this book on Leninism: this is not the same line. He'd just scoff and say we don't know what we're reading, we don't understand what we're reading, we're building into something, but above all, we're falling prey to bourgeois pressures, bourgeois influence on communists. You're getting really sinful when that happens. I remember Frank's joy at Carl's presentation at that point. Because clearly it's a great traumatic experience. You believe in the infallibility of the Communist leaders of the socialist countries; particularly after the Twentieth Congress lots of communists felt so good about the Chinese leadership because none of these stories seemed to be true there; here was a leadership that had stayed united since the Long March and seemed to have such urbane approaches towards questions and whatnot. Well, to tell communists that (a) there were differences in political and theoretical opinions between these two giants, and that (b) they had to then make a decision which was right or wrong--and that's one of the things that both Benny and I were very pleased about. ... If they even have to do that much, they're going to have to start thinking that there is no such thing as infallibility, papal or otherwise, and they'll have to think for themselves and make decisions. Well, little did we know--we're very shortsighted--because what really happened was that a certain section of the party then simply decided the Chinese were no longer a socialist country. The main party explanation for it (I remember Gus Hall giving it at a national executive meeting in 1963) was that the reason China was not following Marxist policy was because of the huge peasant population. We Marxists believed that out of the peasantry comes petty bourgeois theory, petty bourgeois pressures, rather than the good staunch working-class concepts of the pure, pristine working class that is untouched by any of these terrible moods. The fact that the Soviet Union until 1956 was predominantly peasant didn't enter anybody's mind or bother them, that maybe that would have then influenced what happened there. So for a large section of the party, most particularly its leadership, China was eliminated as a factor in the socialist world. It was now following a Maoist line which was not the Communist line and therefore, although it still could be considered a half-assed socialist country, it no longer represented anything that you could defend. The Soviet Union remained as the only real example of a socialist country. The old test of internationalism, which in the thirties had validity because it represented what the real world was like, namely that your attitude toward the Soviet Union was a barometer of your internationalism, was then transformed in this period where it no longer could be true because there are fourteen socialist countries. To define one's attitude solely by uncritical acceptance of anything the Soviet Union does is simply to make a mockery out of what was valid in the period of the 1930s and '40s. That created, again, sharp splits, because then other people within the party left the party as confirmed devotees of China. China represented the alpha and omega of all political wisdom for them, and anything [the Chinese] said was correct. And you see that both in the party and out of the party today; the seriousness of it still exists. The Monthly Review supposedly consists of great independent radicals who tailor their political analyses as to what is correct or incorrect from a Marxist viewpoint, but [it's always] depending on in which country it happens: if it happens in China, it's right; if it happens in the Soviet Union, it's wrong. Or our publications, the party publications, which say just the reverse. Or this week, for instance, in New York, the National Guardian reports that they're starting a new Communist party for the United States and that will be a Maoist party; it'll be one that follows uncritically anything China does. It's really a very sad and tragic thing because the kind of blinders which my generation in a sense was forced to put on in the thirties in regard to the Soviet Union--forced to put on because it stood alone; it was the only example of socialism in the world, and therefore it had to be defended at the cost of anything else--that same policy becomes a travesty when it's applied in a world where there are fourteen socialist countries and not one of them stands alone. There are fourteen. To see another generation start to try to develop a radical movement based on the "my favorite country" syndrome is just a tragedy to me. Well, anyway, this whole question became a great source of fight within the party, most particularly in its national leadership; I was still a member of the National Executive Board at that time and of the National Committee.

GARDNER

Were members of the board actually at one another's throats over this?

HEALEY

Oh, absolutely, absolutely, because there was this simple definition that reality means--whatever the Soviet Union says is ipso facto correct. Certainly without any question the most important single event I think of the sixties as far as its radicalizing effect on the country was the Vietnam War. What we did here in L.A. was first of all to participate in organizing what is now known as the Peace Action Council. In the beginning it was the Peace Exchange, in which all the existing peace organizations--including WISP [Women's International Strike for Peace], the Quakers, the Unitarians (I don't remember them all anymore)--would simply meet together to exchange information on what each was doing. A big part of it at that point was the air-raid-shelter controversy. I remember Kennedy and Rockefeller and others were promoting a shelter in every backyard. (Again, parenthetically, when I read about how China's diverting so much resources to building air raid shelters against their alleged fear of a Soviet attack on them, I feel like sending them the thousands of pamphlets I have in my garage on the scientists' testimony that air raid shelters don't protect from nuclear attacks. They're good for conventional war, as for instance Hanoi has shown with the United States, but in a nuclear attack, the air raid shelters won't hold up. [laughter]) At any rate, that was part of the mobilizing activity at that point. Another was the question of stopping the atomic tests, the fallout fight, the fight of how much--what is it, Strontium 93 or something?

GARDNER

Strontium 90.

HEALEY

The fallout fight against testing of nuclear weapons was a campaign that we were very active in, helping to organize and then participating. That also was the occasion for another debate within the party because, as you remember, the Soviet Union and the United States had agreed on a temporary ban on nuclear testing and in 1963 the Soviet Union broke the ban by testing the biggest and dirtiest bomb that had been recorded up to that point. I remember that Archie Brown was running for some office, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and he criticized the Soviet Union for doing this. My God, the attacks on him for daring to criticize the Soviet Union! There was also the big fight around disarmament. It was not a very big fight because actually all of these fights moved only a certain sector of people into activity; I would say it was almost entirely an academic and upper-middle-class reaction. It was not really until the teach-ins on Vietnam on the campuses that you started to get the first real antiwar movement in this country. I think it's important that that be emphasized, because the teach-ins did something that no subsequent action can be compared to, and that was to provide highly sophisticated, well-organized knowledge at the disposal of the people, in this case mostly students. It gave them the facts that they needed to have as to what was at stake in Vietnam. I emphasize that because in subsequent years and subsequent demonstrations, the antiwar activists contented themselves too much with vague rhetoric, with empty shouting of slogans, and not with providing detailed material. Well, here one of the fights that started--and nationally, as well--with the emergence of a slightly larger group in the fight against the war was with the Trots, with the Socialist Workers Party, with the Trotskyists. Again it started as a battle of slogans, which favorite slogan do you have as your panacea, the cure-all, the magic potion that solves the problem of how you mobilize millions of Americans to fight against the government's action in Southeast Asia?

GARDNER

Who were some of the people on each side of this locally?

HEALEY

Locally? If I can remember--on the Mobilization Committee's side, on the PAC and nationally, the National Mobilization, that was the first national antiwar formation. Of course, Irving Sarnoff was there even in the beginning. Mary Clark, Don Kalish, Bob Vogel from the Quakers, Herb Magidson--although I think he was maybe a year or so later. Jim Berland and Marv Trager were the first organizers of the Student Mobilization Committee. As a matter of fact, we organized it and in a moment of pique and frustration they, who were both members of the Communist party, walked out of the SMC, and the Trots took it over and have held it ever since.

GARDNER

Taking up as a new mobilization.

HEALEY

Same one. They didn't even change it. They kept the name, but they changed the slogans. I joined the committee that the Trots organized. It met on Sunset Boulevard in the Echo Park area. What was it called, Keep America out of the War or something like that? [Los Angeles Committee to End the War in Vietnam] The silliest kind of debates on these slogans would develop. Of course, it all became a big thing at the first National Mobilization Conference that was ever held in Washington, and ultimately it led to an organized split when at a later point the Trots walked out and organized the National PAC, N-PAC.

GARDNER

PAC?

HEALEY

It was called N-PAC, National Peace Action Coalition.

1.28. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE ONE APRIL 19, 1973

HEALEY

The National Executive Committee of the Communist party had a meeting--it must have been near the end of 1960 or the beginning of 1961, where for the first time the statement was made that the differences between China and the Soviet Union had to be publicly discussed. Always before that, as I think I've indicated previously, there had been either the attacks on those who said there were differences that were pretty obvious (attacks that they were taking it out of the New York Times, "How can you believe the bourgeois press?"), or else that people were simply blowing up minor things that obviously didn't have any significance in terms of relationships between the two giants of socialism. At this meeting of the National Executive Committee, we received a document; it is, by the way, I notice in my notes, a letter from the Communist party of the Soviet Union to all parties. It was read to us, and it's the first time I can remember that such a thing was done. That followed the congress of the Rumanians in Bucharest where a number of the parties had sent fraternal delegates, which was customary. Behind the scenes of that congress, in private sessions, there was a new eruption of the differences between the Soviet and the Chinese Communist leaders. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, as I say, was there representing our party. Gus introduced the document by saying that in his opinion these questions are of enormous significance and actually go to the life and death of this party, the American party, as far as finding the proper solution of them, that they can mean, in other words, the difference as to whether the party maintains a principled political position or not. The Eighty-first Party document had been signed by all the parties present [at the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties] and endorsed by others who could not officially be present. But while it was officially announced that this had been done unanimously, one party out of the eighty-one [the Chinese] signed it with reservations. However, when the discussion continued, a number of the parties adopted resolutions commending this position and sent letters to all the parties that there should be unanimity on this question. The questions were directly related to our party, and he said, "Our leadership deserves credit for arriving at the conclusions it did at the Seventeenth Convention because they are very much the same as what the other parties are now in agreement with: the character of U.S. imperialism and the definition of the possibilities of the fight for peace, the emphasis on how to organize masses against the war, the fight against U.S. bases. All of these questions are directly related to our own political struggles." Some of the questions that were involved included, one, the definition of the character of the epoch. (And this, let me say parenthetically, is a fight that is still going on. I think it's a vastly exaggerated and ridiculous battle that's going on, but I'll describe that separately.) [Two,] questions of war and peace; [three,] peaceful coexistence, the possibility of disarmament [and the nature of local wars]; [four,] the question of different forms of transition to socialism; [five,] the attitude of the Chinese party to international democratic organizations (that means organizations like the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth--these are what they mean when they say that); six, the departure of the Chinese from a lot of the other parties; and seventh, the need for a closer unity in the socialist camp and within the international communist movement. And here starts, I gather, the official letter [Mrs. Healey reconstructs the official letter from her extensive notes]: "For decades we know that relations between the Communist party of the Soviet Union and the Communist party of China were based upon the solid foundation that there was always fraternal cooperation. The Communist party of the Soviet Union always gave all-out support to the Communist party of China at all stages. There was the closest political cooperation in economic, social, cultural and technical affairs and in the building of socialism. When China was threatened, this was considered as an attack against the Soviet Union. The Communist party of China in its turn supported the Communist party of the Soviet Union. "In recent times, a variance has been noticed around the following questions: number one, the struggle for peace." (Oh, first came the variance around the struggle for peace and then other problems.) "We noticed the differences first at the World Peace Council and at the Conference for Asian Solidarity as well. In January Chou En-lai, in a discussion of the Soviet Union, stated that we should let our differences ride and not discuss them. But the Communist party of the Soviet Union said, 'No, let's discuss them. Let's go over them now rather than let them pile up. Let's try to find solutions.' However, in June, at the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist party of China unexpectedly presented certain positions that run counter to those of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. They showed extreme dissatisfaction with the policies of the World Federation of Trade Unions around the issues of peace and disarmament, and stated, 'We refuse to sit at one conference table with representatives of the bourgeois organizations to discuss the whole fate of mankind. War cannot be prevented as long as imperialism exists.'They threatened to expose the World Federation of Trade Unions as being led by right-wing opportunists. Lo Yan-ni called together the Communist party members from other countries and presented to them the position of the Communist party of China attacking peaceful coexistence. On almost all issues, while only discussing the issues, they were actually [presenting] disguised fights with the Communist party of the Soviet Union; they openly disagreed with the positions arrived at at the congresses of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. When certain comrades who were well known to the Chinese comrades as leading Communists in their own countries disagreed and said that they did not want these kind of meetings, the Communist party of China, in the name of its political bureau, called a supper where Liu Shao-ch'i said, 'Yes, there are different viewpoints on major theoretical points.' Next, the general secretary of the Communist party of China charged that the Moscow Declaration had been thrown overboard ..." (The Moscow Declaration was a declaration signed by almost all of the parties of the leading socialist countries in 1957; it was called the Twelve-Party Statement.) "... charged that the Moscow Declaration had been thrown overboard and came forward with propositions attacking those enunciated at the Twentieth Congress. "There is more to come. After the unanimous rejection on the part of all the parties, this discussion was not pursued further. But the discussion continued behind the backs of other Communist parties, and the opinions of these other Communist parties and the leadership were criticized by the Chinese comrades, including those endorsed by the sixty-four parties in their Peace Manifesto. The Communist party of the Soviet Union considers this form and method of criticism unacceptable and against proletarian internationalism. The Communist party of China also told the fraternal delegates that there had been disagreements for a number of years. If there were, they should have said so. They have carried over this attack into other open meetings, such as that of the World Federation of Trade Unions, in front of non-Communists. They have tried to make the line of the Communist party of China the line of the World Federation of Trade Unions and have made open appeals against the Communist party of the Soviet Union. They are circulating documents in various parties attacking the Communist party of the Soviet Union. Therefore, the Communist party of the Soviet Union considers it obligatory that it must state its opinions on these various questions. The Communist party of the Soviet Union meanwhile shows surprise that these very problems were collectively discussed and adopted by the sixty-four parties in their statement on peace, which included representatives of the Communist party of China. "The Communist party of the Soviet Union believes that the main content of our epoch is the transition from capitalism to socialism that was begun in 1917. The shape of the epoch is determined by competition between the two diametrically opposed social systems. Of late, the Communist party of China sees only one aspect of the present epoch and emphasizes only the danger of wars. All other aspects, they consider departures from Marxism-Leninism and from Lenin's characterization of imperialism China erroneously views this present epoch as if no major changes had taken place and thus misinterprets Lenin's interpretation of decades ago. To estimate the epoch as merely a period of imperialist wars and revolution does not give a comprehensive picture. It is not a Marxist-Leninist analysis of modern society. It does not see the enormous changes that have taken place in favor of socialism on a world scale. Our epoch is not merely one of imperialist wars and revolutions. It is the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism, based on the formation and consolidation of the world system of socialism. Lenin said in 1917 that no world phenomena could be properly understood unless the existence of the Soviet Union was considered as the paramount factor. Today the world system of socialism is the paramount factor. The world socialist system is already a powerful factor, capable of exerting decisive pressure on world politics. What has taken place is a transformation of the dictatorship of the proletariat from a national phenomenon to an international one. Imperialism has ceased to be the dominant factor in the world to be replaced by the world socialist system. The world socialist system has become the dominant factor in the world which determines the cause and rate of world developments. The pillars of imperialism are being undermined by the strength of the world socialist system and by the fight for independence of the formerly colonial countries. Under these circumstances imperialism has been deprived of its dominant role and the possibility of doing just as it pleases. If this were not so, there could be no such rapid disintegration of imperialism as has been taking place. If it were omnipotent, this would be unthinkable. Therefore the definition of the present epoch is of the greatest significance to determine the strategy and tactics of all Communist parties, to discuss the diverse forms of transition and of peaceful coexistence. "The Communist party of China says that any such discussions gloss over the aggressive character of imperialism. This is not true. There is no such glossing over in the document of any Marxist-Leninist party. The Communist party of the Soviet Union has always educated its people that imperialism is inherently aggressive and will remain so, and you will see that in our documents of the Twentieth Congress. As long as there is the economic basis of imperialism, there is always the danger of war. In the Twenty-first Congress we reemphasized the need for vigilance. Both the Communist parties of France and Italy in 1959, while they indicated there could be understandings reached between the U.S. and the USSR, [noted] that nevertheless the advocates of Cold War still played a very considerable and dominant role. When Comrade Khrushchev was in France he reiterated that under no conditions could there be any illusions as to the aggressive character of imperialism. The Communist party of the Soviet Union sees no difference between parties in defining the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism. But obviously this analysis of the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism cannot be interpreted nor carried out now as it was done fifty years ago. Would we say that the situation is unchanged in fifty years? The position has changed radically, and therefore any other analysis that fails to see the differences that are present in imperialism between now and fifty years ago is dogmatic and sectarian. "[Secondly,] on the question of war and peace, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union talked of the possibility of preventing war in this present period. All parties, including the Chinese, associated themselves at the Moscow meeting in the statement that, 'At present, the forces for peace have grown so that there is a real possibility of averting world war.' The Communist party of China was in agreement with this and stated at its own Eighth Congress in a speech of Liu Shao-ch'i that this analysis of the Twentieth Congress was an enormous contribution to all parties. But in recent statements, the Communist party of China has been departing from this estimate. The Communist party of China now says that it is an illusion to believe that there is a possibility of preventing war. If one is to judge from their statements, imperialism can decide unilaterally whether there is to be war or peace, whether there are to be local wars or automatically global wars. In the final analysis, the Chinese say that imperialism decides all questions of war and peace. They say that it does not depend on the world socialist system. Therefore there is in their documents and in their analyses an overestimation of imperialism and an underestimation of socialism. The Communist party of China is not therefore giving an objective analysis. "There is not only the economic factor of imperialism to consider. The question depends on many factors. It depends on the strength of the respective classes, on political forces that are present, on the inter-imperialist contradictions in the relationships of capitalist countries to one another, and the degree of consciousness of the people to fight against war. The chief peace factor that is objectively present to prevent war is the mighty world socialist system. In Asia and Africa there are also the tremendous liberation activities that have taken place which add to this possibility. Peace is not achieved by a spontaneous process but by the united efforts of the people. War was inevitable until the world socialist system had developed. World events since the Twentieth Congress have validated the theses of the Twentieth Congress. As the USSR and China become indestructible powers, even the most rabid imperialist source will see the futility of war. That can happen even before the victory of world socialism in the entire world, even before the victory of world socialism banishes war from the life of society forever. "At the Moscow conference, Comrade Mao said, 'In the final analysis, the point is to achieve fifteen years of peace. Then peace will be inevitable. No one will make war on us. There will be lasting peace.' The Communist party of China now departs from that thesis. There is a contradiction in their thinking as to how they estimate the question of the paper tiger. You see the contradiction between the idea that imperialism is simply a paper tiger as against their emphasis that imperialism is all-powerful and can unilaterally decide all questions of war and peace. We say there should be no underestimating nor overestimating of the questions of imperialism. "The Chinese comrades say that being against war is to be against wars of liberation. That is not true. The people's fight for liberation is one to be supported by all those who fight for peaceful coexistence. Actually, the fight for coexistence makes it more difficult for the imperialists to launch their wars against the colonial peoples. The example of this is what has taken place in Egypt, Iraq and Cuba. Coexistence does not imply renunciation of national liberation. On the contrary, it makes it far more possible. And communists have always stood for wars of liberation." And the third question, on peaceful coexistence [and disarmament]: "This fundamental thesis was proposed by Lenin as the only alternative to imperialist war, not as a temporary nor as a tactical slogan, but as the general line for all parties. At Bandung, the Communist party of China followed this line. But in its recent article it says that as long as imperialism exists, wars will continue to take place; that while temporary agreements may be possible, "Even in such a situation, as long as imperialism exists, one cannot be rid of even the most acute form of violence, world war. Until there is a complete abolition throughout the world of capitalism, the alternatives of war and peace are constant and inevitable phenomena.' The World Federation of Trade Unions at their conference made the same point, had the same line, and they added that to express the fight for disarmament was simply an illusion and a violation of the Twelve-Party Document. The Communist party of the Soviet Union cannot ignore this. Comrade Khrushchev, true to the spirit of Leninism, has said clearly that there are only two paths open before the world, either peaceful coexistence or the most devastating war in history; that there is no third way. The vital interests of imperialism also find it necessary at this point to avoid war. The possibilities of peace are accelerated by the building of communist society. But we emphasize as well the disastrous consequences to the entire world of what a world war today would mean. A war today, unlike World War I and World War II, would be one in which entire nations would be wiped out and society would be thrown back hundreds of years. We cannot allow hundreds of millions of people to be destroyed. The Chinese comrades say, 'You don't have to be afraid of war, and you don't have to be afraid of the atomic bomb. It is actually not at all terrible; if there are sacrifices of millions of lives, they will be redeemed by the fact of world socialism being strengthened.' We say that Comrade Lenin said that everything that can be done to ward off the moment of war, that wins a respite for the peace forces, must be done. We have promised that and we shall do so. "It is wrong to identify peaceful coexistence . . . ." (The Russians are now saying this; this is back to the Soviet line.) "It is wrong to identify peaceful coexistence and class peace within particular countries. Peaceful coexistence is the existence of [peace] between states with different social systems. It is actually a form of class struggle on a world scale, and socialism will be benefited from that expression of it. In the Rome Declaration, seventeen Communist parties pointed out that 'socialist parties grow more rapidly during the period of the struggle for peaceful coexistence.' The class struggle does not cease. Class struggles will develop. During the past fifteen years, twenty-seven countries freed themselves from the yoke of imperialism. This confirms the possibility of revolutionary forces maturing in the condition of peaceful coexistence. "The Communist party of China charges that the Communist party of the Soviet Union is flirting with the national bourgeoisie. This is not so. We support national liberation movements, but we use the alliances with the national bourgeoisie as anti-imperialist alliances just as the Chinese themselves used to do. As of March 1, the Communist party of the Soviet Union gave aid to India, Indonesia, Iraq, Cuba, etc. Despite pressures and blackmail, these countries constitute a zone of peace. There are no military bases in these countries. Therefore, the objective result of our help is to promote peace and weaken the foundations of imperialism. The Communist party in China, since it has come into power . . . ." I can't read my handwriting here so I'm going to have to skip a sentence. "Marxism-Leninism teaches us that the basis for our policy must be the appraisal of all class forces, that they run in stages, that we cannot skip stages, and that if we try to skip stages we can only damage the revolutionary struggle. "Imperialism is making frantic efforts to involve us in military blows." (And then here's the question of the Chinese--this is my interpolation--the Chinese and the Indian war, the first time that they came to blows, not the second.) "Privately we have condemned the Chinese invasion of Indian territory, if for no other thing than that this is throwing the Indians closer to the imperialist camp and has also done considerable harm to the Indian party. Nikita Khrushchev said the Indian comrades do not have to automatically endorse the actions of China. In the old days, Lenin said, 'Scratch a great Russian and you will find a chauvinist.' At that time we said, and we include in our statement now, that if we started to get into a battle with all of our neighbors over borders, the definition of borders, that then everybody would be left without hair on their head, even within the Soviet Union itself, there would be such a free-for-all. We emphasize that internationalism requires this kind of an approach toward borders. For years the Soviet Union had extended discussions on borders. It gave territories back to the Turks, back to the Iranians, back to Finland. We did it very simply on the basis that some day the working people will take that land over, anyway, so what difference does it make which national boundary it's within? "The Communist party of China used to pride itself on its slogan, 'Struggle, Alliance, Struggle.' But they do not follow that now. Marxism-Leninism teaches us how to use the contradictions in the enemy's camp, how to apply tactics, how to compromise for the sake of the ultimate goal. Lenin taught us of the need of great flexibility, how to use even the smallest rifts among the bourgeoisie, but also in securing the help of an ally--no matter how temporary and stable or vacillating the ally may be--to maintain our own independent strength. The Soviet Union continues to carry on negotiations actively and constantly through which millions of people are reached to show people the real meaning of our politics, how it is necessary and possible to build a world without arms or war. In World War II those contradictions were used to build a great coalition. But now the Chinese comrades say that there cannot be such a thing as coming to temporary agreements with imperialists. They say that they 'will not sit at the same table with imperialists.' We do not underestimate the strength of imperialism. The Communist party of the Soviet Union proceeds in its discussions not only as regards the interests of the USSR, but also to safeguard international proletarianism and the world socialist system. Socialist technology has given a security to the world socialist system, yet nevertheless we pursue the policy of peaceful coexistence. Even the Elsenhower administration admitted that in the next war there would be no victors. "Around the question of disarmament, in 1922 it was Lenin who initiated this struggle. However, we repeat that at the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Communist party of China said that this is an illusory struggle, that it is only an issue that can create illusions and should never be advanced, that the Soviet Union has the military edge over the imperialists and therefore doesn't need to have such approaches. At least, it should not strive for the prohibition of nuclear weapons. What they miss is the fight against the stockpiling of weapons and the testing of nuclear weapons, as well as the enormous and terrible burdens that are laid on the masses of people by the financial costs. That is why they do not understand why the struggle is gaining ground. The present nuclear stockpile of the two countries is enough to wipe out the world; never before could one make that statement about technology. Now, as a result, there have been formed wide and popular movements to fight this. The struggle, therefore, to prevent the testing of nuclear weapons and the destruction of the stockpiles of nuclear weapons is one that involves the activities and aspirations of millions of people throughout the world. Posing the issue of disarmament makes more difficult the intensifying of armaments. Even the Pentagon has to constantly engage or try to engage in provocative actions in order to get increased appropriations because of this mass response to it. The arms race can only take place at the cost of the standard of living of millions of people. Even a little slowing down of the armament race would help the working class, would lift the tax burden. The Communist party of the Soviet Union aims to achieve the abolition of all bases, and it will not, as a matter of fact, agree on a treaty or the abolition on the means of delivery of nuclear weapons without similar abolitions of all bases. Disarmament strikes a blow at all blocs and pacts. India is an example that possibly other countries will follow. The international disputes can be settled by peaceful means. The struggle for disarmament today is not merely diplomatic but is an extremely serious political action for the world socialist system and for the people of the world. It is not based on any Utopian dream that imperialism has lost its aggressiveness, nor is it based on an idea of immediate success. But no matter how long it will take, it is a fight that must be intensified. The Communist party of China alleges that the disarmament slogan disarms the masses, that it dooms the colonial peoples to passive existence. This is a groundless attack. Disarmament is the disarmament of the great powers. If that were successful, it would be easier for the colonial peoples to win their liberation. It is not merely a propaganda slogan; it can be done. "The third question under this [third area of peaceful coexistence] is the position that the Communist party of China took at the World Federation of Trade Unions Conference, where they said that since there cannot be a world in which one eliminates world wars as long as imperialism is alive, therefore all local wars can automatically lead to world war. But if you follow this approach, one would say that one has to agree that there will always exist this permanent cold war that is presently dominant. Secondly, one would have to agree to the continuance of the armaments race, which means a continuance of the plundering of the workers' welfare. And third, to create this policy would create political difficulties in trying to pursue any policy of peace. "The fourth major question concerns the transition to socialism. The Communist party of China disagrees with the position of the Communist party of the Soviet Union that under certain circumstances there can be the possibility of winning power by peaceful means. They state that we are advocating this as the only way for a transition. This is contrary to the truth. We never made such a statement. The Twentieth Congress simply said this is one of the ways and that under certain circumstances it was possible. After the Twentieth Congress, analysis of the contemporary world situation shows this to be correct. As a matter of fact, the possibilities of transition will be even more varied in the future and need not be associated with civil war in all circumstances. This does not mean that capitalism will voluntarily surrender. What we are emphasizing is that the various paths will depend on the degree of resistance by capitalism, whether it resorts to the use of power, the number of countries that are already under socialism, the strength of the working class in various countries at that time, and so forth. The Communist party of the Soviet Union has never agreed in making a fetish out of the parliamentary path. As a matter of fact, at the November 1957 Conference of the Twelve Parties, during a discussion, Comrade Mao agreed that different ways were possible for the struggle for power. 'The conclusion is the possibility of a variety of forms that are opened up now,' [said Mao]. 'This debate in itself has opened up possibilities and new approaches for Communist parties to win masses to their side. These opportunities for peaceful transition will increase.' If the Communist party of China has now changed its position on this, on what Comrade Mao said, they should say so openly and frankly. "The fifth question is the status of the international democratic organizations." (And again, they mean by that the World Peace Council, the World Federation [of Trade Unions] and so forth.) "Many have been thrown into crisis as a result of the Chinese action. In some, as for instance the World Peace Council, there have been people who have resigned or threatened to resign because of the sharp clashes. These organizations unite millions of people. They represent varied views and diverse social strata and classes. Up to now, there was always a common line of the Communist parties there. Now the Communist party of China has taken its own stand, and therefore there is no longer a common line in these organizations. Now the Chinese prefer to isolate themselves. They refuse to attend any longer either the World Federation of Trade Unions, the World Federation of Democratic Youth, the Women's International Democratic Federation, or any others. The Chinese objected at the last meeting of the World Peace Council to even discussing the establishment of contact with pacifist organizations. At the International Student Organization's meeting at Tunis in February of 1960, the representative of the Central Committee of the Chinese Youth spoke against that organization having any broader contacts and said they would not sit at the same table with bourgeois youth. At the World Federation of Youth meeting in March 1960 and again at the Afro-Asian Solidarity Association in April, the Chinese were against any discussion of disarmament and stated, 'If appeals are made on this basis, this will only mean the loss of vigilance and the demobilizing of the masses.1 Once before, at the trade union conference of the Asian trade unions in 1940, the Communist party of China's representatives at that time said that there had to be armed struggle everywhere, that everyone should form liberation armies. We never agreed to this as a formulation, and certainly imperialism used it and made it difficult for the World Federation of Trade Unions to increase its influence. However, in 1954 the Communist party of China reconsidered and sent a written report to the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in regard to the All-Chinese Federation of Labor, stating that they were supporting all approaches to the fight for peace, including democracy and a united front of the workers on all economic and social questions. The Communist party of China now calls any struggle for a broad unification of the World Federation of Trade Unionists with other trade unionists "opportunism" and threatens its unity. "The sixth question, the departure of the Communist party of China from the Moscow Declaration and the Peace Manifesto of the Sixty-four Parties. The Communist party of China claimed adherence to the Moscow Declaration of 1957, in which they agreed that the main content of our epoch was the transition from capitalism to socialism. The Chinese have now reversed this and say that this is the epoch of the last stage of the development of capitalism, that is, the epoch of wars and revolution. China says that the statement of the twelve parties--that at present the forces of peace have grown so strong that there is a real possibility of averting war, that war is no longer inevitable--now the Chinese claim that this is just an illusion. They say, 'A world without war can only be achieved when socialism has been victorious all over the world.' Such a conclusion can bring joy only to imperialists. When the declaration of all the Communist parties at the Moscow Conference declared that the fight for peace was the foremost task, the Chinese Communist party agreed. Now they say this thesis is erroneous and anti-Leninist, that it is spreading the illusion that it is possible to have peace with capitalism. Whereas before they agreed that the forms of transition to socialism would vary from country to country, now they say that any idea that there can be varied forms of transition stems from an incorrect conception of imperialism. Whereas before they hailed the conclusions reached at the Twentieth Congress and said that it had opened up a new stage in the world movement, now they challenge every conclusion. "Whereas before they hailed the condemnation of the cult of the personality, now they have reversed this position. It is true that there were difficulties that followed our revelation of the cult of the personality, but we have in the main overcome those difficulties. This question of Stalin was discussed very thoroughly with most of the Communist parties, and it is actually a thing of the past. But the Chinese are raising it again. At the Eighth Congress of the Communist party of China in 1956, the Communist party of China endorsed the question, and they said,"--and here again is an inner quote from the Chinese document of '56--"'It revealed to us what grave negative consequences the deification of an individual can have.' Mao himself stated personally, 'By criticizing the Stalin cult we were relieved of a heavy lid which pressed strangely on us and prevented us from understanding many questions properly.' And Mao added, 'And who relieved us of these pressures? Our comrade Khrushchev. And we are grateful that he has expanded the creativity of the parties and the norms of party life as well as aided the relations between socialist states and all parties.' Now the Communist party of China hinders this process and in some countries is preventing them from completing their job." (They mean Albania--that is, the Soviet Union is now talking about Albania.) "They say that we must always hold up two swords, one the sword of Lenin, the other the sword of Stalin. Well, we say to them that the sword of Stalin is a little rusty, and it's rusty because it has the blood of our people on it; we will not wipe off that sword. "The stress on proletarian internationalism presupposes good fraternal relations. But behind the backs of other parties, the Chinese Communist party has been undermining proletarian internationalism and undermining the world socialist system."

1.29. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE TWO APRIL 19, 1973

HEALEY

Continuing with the letter of the Communist party of the Soviet Union to all communist parties: "The Communist party of China criticizes under the pretext of its defense of Marxism-Leninism, but Marxism-Leninism is not a petrified dogma. It must be constantly enriched with new propositions and must be constantly advanced in the debate of new propositions. The Chinese comrades oppose a number of the new conclusions of Marxist-Leninist theory drawn up by all of the collective parties. The Communist party of the Soviet Union has always upheld Marxism-Leninism. It has attacked the Yugoslavs and others who ideologically would introduce modern revisionism. The Communist party of the Soviet Union constantly puts Marxism-Leninism into practice because practical application is the most important criterion of Marxism-Leninism. In the entire imperialist camp, the USSR is seen as the Enemy Number One. The unfair cirticism of the Communist party of China directed at the Communist party of the Soviet Union and others does not make for either prestige or unity in the world movement. The Communist party of China disagrees with the statement of the seventeen Communist parties at Rome and has declared that the document is an opportunist document. They have assumed the role of judge over a group of the oldest fraternal parties, all of whom had great experience, as well as attacking the Communist party of the Soviet Union indirectly and behind our back." Point seven, the struggle for closer unity: "The Soviet Union has entered the stage of full communist construction, and this means a victory for the entire world socialist system. Under such circumstances, the Communist party of China's attacks cause no little harm. In their attacks against unity and their attempt to divert us from the correct path, they aggravate the international situation and help build up war hysteria. Never before has there been such a need for vigorous cohesion and unity. The Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union is compelled to note with regret that many actions have been uncomradely and illegal. At one time the Communist party of China, in the interest of the communist movement, emphasized that the Soviet Union was the focal point and that the USSR was the leader of the socialist camp. Now, without notification, they attack our party and criticize it in the trade union movement and in all struggles. They have violated the principle of proletarian internationalism and there is a lack of sincerity and respect. "We have tried to resolve the questions bilaterally, but the Chinese comrades reacted painfully and started public criticism against the Communist party of the Soviet Union. The CPSU continued to observe comradely tact. As an example, we did not agree with the slogan, "Let all flowers bloom. We thought it was wrong, but we said nothing about it publicly. We felt that the Communist party of China had cast overboard the Leninist principles of incentives during the stages of socialist building with the policy toward the communes, but again we took no public position. At only one meeting without accusations did we observe privately in the most comradely fashion that we believed it was a departure from Marxism-Leninism. But we never made any public comment on their internal affairs. We said that even when differences arise, as they are bound to arise, they must be [resolved] within the framework of our fight for unity. We have fought to maintain a standard of loyalty by deeds, not only by words, in our fight to give aid to all socialist states; and sometimes in that struggle to give aid to all the socialist states, we have had to deprive ourselves. We have had to commit acts that were detrimental to our own economy. But we knew that it was part of our needs as well to see that all socialist countries were able to catch up economically and improve the lot of their people. Our fraternal assistance to China in the last ten years included"--well, I'll read the figures, but I'm not sure any longer what some of them mean--"anywhere between 35 to 50 percent of their total output. Fifteen thousand million rubles was given. In addition, credit of 6,000 millions rubles was provided. Over 300"--something, factories or something--"were built. "On June 17, representatives of the Central Committees of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and of the Communist party of China met, empowered to exchange views. The Communist party of the Soviet Union's representatives discussed very frankly why we objected to both their methods and some of their views. The representatives of the Communist party of China said that they would consider these questions if the majority of parties disapproved, and if they were shown to be wrong, they would admit their errors and rectify them. "Since the Moscow Declaration was adopted unanimously by all the parties present, the Communist party of the Soviet Union now considers it advisable to exchange views with all the parties in the struggle to safeguard unity. We have been confident that the Communist party of China would hear our views in comradely manner. But since then, however, while the Communist party of China signed the document, they did so with reservations . . . ." And at this point my notes stop, for some reason, just totally stop. And that's the end of that thing. It has its own significance in that, first of all, it was the first time at least in our party that it was publicly, in a sense, admitted to all of us, not just the Secretariat of the party or the Political Committee (which is the smaller body), that the struggle was there. But it was also significant in recognizing and in trying to define the issues. My own opinion is that while these were and remained for a long time the ostensible issues on which the differences took place, I would no longer feel that that is still so, although I used to believe it very violently and strongly. In my own observation, based on discussions that I had when I was in Moscow in 1967 with the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, as well as with representatives of Communist parties who I met when I attended the congress of the Communist party of the German Democratic Republic in 1967, while these issues have certainly been ferociously debated by all of the Communist parties, to me they generally have become almost an ideological smoke screen that obscures a number of very valid questions. Obviously, for example, you have in the socialist world an unequal development, just as there is in the capitalist world; and within the course of this uneven development, the national interests of the various socialist countries are not identical. They are not symmetrical. They are not interchangeable. The needs are great. There's part of that being expressed. For instance, you cannot really understand China's great objection to the Soviet Union providing aid to countries that were, quote, "neutralist," such as India and Egypt and others, except in two ways. The first is to say, well, at that point their needs were so enormously great--after all, China is a huge country--that they didn't want money going to any nonsocialist country that they could use themselves (in other words, money from the Soviet Union going to Egypt or India). But I would say the reason why I became convinced that's just a stalking horse is that if you watch the actions as distinct from the words of the respective parties, [you see that] China itself gives millions of dollars to nonsocialist countries in aid; obviously, therefore, the great principle involved in this disappears when it becomes [a question of] whose ox is getting gored. That's true as far as I'm concerned on both sides.

GARDNER

What about the disposition? We know what the reaction was over the long term, but how is this now carried out in the Communist party?

HEALEY

Nowadays?

GARDNER

No, after that, taking it from that point on, as long as that's where we are.

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, this became the major issue of debate internally in the Communist party, partly for the reason I indicated to you last time, and that is that there was always a kind of feeling, particularly after the revelations about Stalin that Khrushchev gave at the Twentieth Congress, the feeling that, well, at least there was the senior leadership of China--most particularly, Mao--where seemingly there were no such differences or difficulties in a united leadership since the days it was organized in 1921, on the surface at least, all of them being veterans of the struggles of the Long March and the bloody wars of the thirties and forties. That--or at least there, there was great wisdom and objectivity. And there was, as I've already indicated, an enormous reluctance to admit there were differences. The Chinese spent lots of money doing what the Soviet Union did also (depending again on whose ox was getting gored), subsidizing groups within the Communist parties in other countries to organize groups that would support just the Chinese point of view. Sometimes it meant breaking up parties for instance, in Belgium they must have spent just hundreds of thousands, if not more, subsidizing a so-called "Marxist-Leninist Communist party" (in opposition to the original Communist party) because it was pro-Chinese, a totally pro-Maoist grouping. As I say, this is not unique to them. The Soviet Union did the same thing in Japan when the Japanese party refused to take either position. Each party continues that. The tragedy to me--I could go into great long discussions on these battles, but as I say, I think the biggest tragedy is that in a certain sense it's a kind of repeat of what Marx said, that the first time something happens, it's a tragedy; if it repeats itself, it's a farce. At this point I'd say he's not quite accurate because it is a bigger tragedy in its repetition of our attitudes of the thirties, the uncritical acceptance of anything the Soviet Union did. I've already said to you, I think, that in my opinion there was a certain historic justification in that the Soviet Union stood alone in the thirties, and that this solitary example of the ability to build a system without capitalism was decisive for the Communist parties of the working class of every country. To do that for fourteen socialist countries is sheer nonsense. But when you see repeated today, as you do, groups of so-called revolutionaries in each country identifying themselves solely as the protagonists of either the Chinese or the Soviet Union, I think you see a real tragedy, and I think it's expressed in our country as well as elsewhere. You can see almost the mirror images of revolutionary groups. For instance, my party, where the Soviet Union could never do any wrong: when the talks opened up between the United States and China, my party saw great dangers of opportunism and collusion and betrayal on the part of the Chinese, of the Vietnamese; but when the identical talks took place with Moscow, then of course they saw nothing wrong. But if you read the National Guardian or the Revolutionary Union's material, then just the opposite is true. When talks are done by China, they're just great; when they're done by the Soviet Union, they're betrayals. You see that with the tactics around the Pakistan-Bangladesh war, the pro-Maoists applauding China's betrayal of Bangladesh and the Communist [party] being uncritical of India's role in regard to that. More dangerously, when it comes to the question of possible military collisions between the two giants of socialism, this attitude of "my favorite socialist country" only leads further to the possibility of conflict. If revolutionaries all over the world would simply say to both of them, "Look, we support you both as long as you are fighting imperialism and building socialism in your own country. If you tangle with one another over these territories, no revolutionary will support either one of you. We don't care who says they're right or wrong." That, at least, would provide them with no rationalization of foreign support as they presently have. But what it really illustrates more than any other question is the difficulty of maintaining a political balance when viewing the world scene and world events that are current and not something you can read about in a history book, the ability of being a partisan, a supporter of all fourteen socialist countries, and yet simultaneously being able to view the development of socialism within each of the fourteen countries with the same Marxist eye as you'd give to any other phenomena under capitalism. When you can't do that, you cannot first of all have a posture that is meaningful in fighting against your own ruling class, your own capitalist system, because you are simply seen as an echo of another country's needs; secondly, you cannot even any longer define socialism, what you're fighting for, because you're constantly having to alter it to provide for a justification of what may be temporary and momentary in any of the socialist countries but which is always justified as the most decisive, principal thing. When people accept that, then they lose the ability to struggle for a socialist alternative in a capitalist society because socialism as a system no longer has any definition that is meaningful. It is simply overlaid each time by temporary rationalizations and built into great universal frameworks. Well, we had terrible battles in the party over all of these questions, nationally and locally.

GARDNER

Should we pick up the thread now again back where we were?

HEALEY

Yeah, I think so. These will come up again in terms of chronology.

GARDNER

In terms of a lot of different things. Well, I think the place to go back to perhaps would be 1964. We've covered a lot of the ground up till then, and we were talking before we started today about the status of the party in 1964. Plus the fact that that's really the point where--well, February 1965 is the point where there became a war to have an antiwar movement about.

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, actually, of course, the war was long in existence even before 1965. Certainly the status of the war entered into the question of the 1964 elections. Well, the 1964 elections really reflected, on the one hand, the question of the fight against the war, because Goldwater was making speeches about destroying North Vietnam, that the whole problem had been that there was too much restraint. But it coincided as well, as did Goldwater's nomination from the Republican party, with a very, very significant and still continuing strength, the new strength of a new wave of the ultra-Right in the United States. It really marked the first time that the most reactionary concepts and theories were handled independently, both through such things as the John Birch Society, all the dozens and one quasicommittees that they would set up for every single action, and also through what we would call the vanguard role within the Republican party, the ideology, the ideas, being consolidated within a major party. There were two other factors that were present during that 1964 election. One was the whole approach toward the fight for what at that time was called civil rights, with Goldwater's chief motto being that you could not legislate such questions as civil rights, that the change had to take place in the hearts of human beings, this in the backdrop of the enormous struggles, particularly in the Deep South, that were taking place, struggles accompanied by the worst--just use the word Bull [Theophilus Eugene] Connor and one has a shorthand symbol of the repressive action being taken to stop people from acquiring the most minimum of civil rights. By the way, the answer that I gave at UCLA at a public speech on Goldwater's statement about first changing hearts--I still would say it is true because I noticed last week Goldwater was saying the same thing again--is that we first must enforce the question of equality, and do that right away, and then let the change in hearts take place gradually. Let the gradualism come in the change of hearts. That's less significant than making possible the enforcement through law of the equality of Black and Chicano peoples. Well, these were the major things, although underlying always was the question, of course, of the status of the fight for the right of collective bargaining, the rights of unions and the working class, again with the Goldwater sector of the Republican party representing the whole "right to work" theories, the right to work in the sense of preventing any legislation that provided for union shops.

GARDNER

You mentioned the debate that you had in the party with Vincent Hallinan.

HEALEY

Yes. This was actually a debate that the DuBois club sponsored. The Progressive party was, of course, no longer in existence. Vincent Hallinan had been the candidate for the Progressive party in 1952, and he still pretty much represented that character of independent politics. There was enormous debate in the Left as to what attitude to take. People like Vincent Hallinan and many others (the Monthly Review, the Guardian) took the position that there was no difference between Goldwater and Johnson, that both the Republican and Democratic parties are capitalist parties (which they certainly are), that it made no difference to the people in the United States which candidate would win, and that the job of independents was to have independent candidates but certainly under no conditions to differentiate between the dominant candidates of capitalism. In the debate with Vincent, I first of all wanted to attack a theory that was very, very big in SDS and was present in a lot of the independent radical publications at that time, which was that politics is a waste of time, anyway, that we should ignore politics. I kept arguing that you can ignore politics, but politics won't ignore you. While you think you're being, quote, "independent of bourgeois politics," the bourgeois politicians are passing the laws and making the appointments and taking the actions that in large measure help to determine the arena in which you're going to be struggling, whether you know it or not, in which you're going to be living. They're going to be taking the actions that will have a lot to do with the freedom of the radical movement to organize and agitate and build independent alternatives. As far as the individual is concerned, there's no way you can opt out of society. The idea that you can live without being influenced by the dominant society is sheer nonsense. You can't build a little enclave and fence yourself off from it. As far as Goldwater and Johnson, our position--that is, some of us; the position of the party in Southern California was slightly different from the position of the national parties--our position, and the position I took in this debate, was, first of all, that there's no question of the fact that Johnson was still prosecuting the war in Vietnam, although that point when the debate took place was before the Gulf of Tonkin. He was making all those speeches attacking Goldwater for the threats on Vietnam and all the speeches about what he was going to do. But in the debate, I said it's because both of them are representatives of capitalist parties and because Johnson represents what he does that I as a Communist hated all capitalism. I mean, there was no part of capitalism I was for. But nevertheless, I said I thought that there was an underestimation of the significance of the Goldwater nomination in its transferring all political dialogue to the pight; that meant that the kind of discussion that influenced masses and millions of people, that dialogue [had moved] further to the right than at any past time as far as the two political parties were concerned. Secondly, the change as far as the potential significance of the struggles within the two parties where millions of people still--you know, the people who are essential for independent politics, the working class, the blacks, the Chicanos, youth and so forth, they still operate within the orbit of the two parties; and the Goldwater nomination, because of its ultraright flavor, would have even greater significance in making it more difficult for a left-of-center coalition to develop in one respect only. The example I gave was that in future Republican primaries, it would be increasingly difficult for the more liberal Republicans to find any way of getting through a Republican primary in order to get to a general election, that more and more, the Republicans would only enunciate the ideas of the ultra-Right and the Goldwater wing. But the most important question of all--and, of course, it's still the current question now just as much--was the fact that capitalism rules, as I said in this debate, alternatively with the carrot and the stick. Clearly it's better for the radicals to be operating when the carrot is present than with the stick. Why? Because the stick narrows down the opportunities for independent political action, makes it more difficult. Repression is the dominant question; the ability to build independence both ideologically and organizationally is limited. Now, our difference with the national party on this question was that we thought their position was so totally anti-Goldwater that it became too uncritical of Lyndon Johnson. We kept arguing that you do not have to love Johnson in order to hate Goldwater, that we had to maintain an independent critique of Johnson at all times. In a dozen ways, we had to say to people that if they were going to achieve anything, they were going to have to be independently organized to fight for it, and that means independently outside of the Democratic party as well as independent groups within it to keep fighting.

GARDNER

Now, how was the party able to maintain communication? You mentioned before that with the McCarran Act effective, there were no conventions as such. How were party communications maintained in those days?

HEALEY

Well, this is really kind of hilarious. This is one of the things, I guess, where we sometimes think--I think we kid ourselves on what we're doing. But, anyway, because of the McCarran Act, because our cases were all still pending in the Supreme Court, there were no conventions of the party held from 1961 to 1966. Further than that, anybody who examines the statements of Communist party leaders during that time will find that we're all identified with one euphemistic phrase, and that is, we are called "spokesmen for the party." There are no longer titles; for instance, I was still the chairman, of course, but in everything that you'll see issued by me or anybody else, I'm simply identified as a leading spokesman. Gus Hall is identified as a leading spokesman. The reason for that was that there was a separate section of the McCarran Act that dealt with officers of the Communist party, so that was to prevent that. We couldn't hold National Committees either for the same reason, meetings of the National Executive Committee, so what they were called was always "legislative conferences" of an anonymous organization. It was never spelled out whose, but just "legislative conference." You'd get a letter inviting you to a legislative conference, and that was actually the National Committee that was meeting. In other words, this was our own way to try to find a legal way in which we could continue to operate and yet not at the same time incur more legal jeopardy than was absolutely necessary. If we had lost in the Supreme Court, I don't know whether any of those legal subterfuges that we found would have meant anything. But we continued and maintained our communication all during that period just exactly as we had before, only, as I say, with different titles, different expressions.

GARDNER

So there were meetings then, and you were able to communicate?

HEALEY

Yeah. No problem. Except the big thing was that we didn't hold any conventions during that period. And when you don't hold conventions, first of all, there's no formal organized way to really review the work and see who's been right or wrong. There's no way to review the leadership to see whether the work of the leadership has been adequate. There's a number of things that take place. Then when finally, for instance, the "66 convention took place, there was so much piled up that nothing was really systematically done; and of course the "66 convention only marked another stage in the very sharp struggle that was present between us in Southern California and the national office of the party. Of course, many things were taking place all during that period, including the building of the antiwar movement, with very--again, because nothing in life takes place without struggle--with very sharp struggles. I'm not sure how much I mentioned in an earlier interview about the internal evolution of the antiwar movement in the United States.

GARDNER

You mentioned some, about the people who participated in it and the moving away of the Trotskyites and so forth.

HEALEY

Well, ultimately what they did was to split the National Mobilization, which became the biggest umbrella organization, and form what they called N-PAC, the National Peace Action Coalition.

GARDNER

Right, you had spoken about that last time.

HEALEY

Yeah, I thought I did.

GARDNER

But how about as far as you yourself are concerned? When the antiwar movement started to gain ground in '64, '65, '66 and later--you spoke about the teach-ins too last time--what would your participation have been?

HEALEY

Well, I did a number of things. One, I became a member myself of the Los Angeles Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which was really a Trotskyist-initiated and -dominated coalition (it used to meet in Echo Park on Sunset Boulevard), to see for myself how they were functioning. Simultaneously, and much more importantly, I met with a number of people who were active in the peace movement, non-Communists, and that's when the agreement was made also to start the Peace Action Council. It had been originally the Peace Coordinating Council, where organizations simply came together to tell what each one was doing against the war, but it was agreed that more was necessary than simply describing what each organization did, that there had to be something that moved independently and organized mass actions. And third, I participated in the teach-ins. There's one big lesson from the teach-ins that I don't think the peace movement, nor the radical movement, has ever drawn. The teach-ins I would define as the single most important turning point in the building of a mass movement against the war in Vietnam. And the reason for that was that they were the first and--tragically--only expression of building a mass education about the meaning of the war in Vietnam. The teach-ins provided a whole galaxy of speakers from every direction. There was very little of the later rhetoric that came to dominate the peace demonstrations, where every speaker made practically the same speech; I mean, you'd hear one and you'd listened to them all. But the teach-ins, on the contrary, really represented very organized, thoughtful exposures of what the United States government was claiming it was doing in Vietnam on the economic level, on the political level, on the social level, on the diplomatic level--there was no facet left untouched--so that tens of thousands of people were equipped to be able to go out and do something to organize. They had knowledge; they had facts. I've always considered the most sorry problem of the later peace movement, the reason why the peace movement always remained so ephemeral, so amorphous--millions would join in demonstrations but they never joined an organization; there was never any continuity or any perspective that developed from it-- to be the fact that the idea of the teach-ins wasn't continued, not only not continued on the campuses but not continued, the form of them, in the neighborhoods so that workers would have heard argumentation based on [the kind of] analysis that the Pentagon Papers put together five years later. I was in teach-ins on almost every campus where they took place--UCLA, USC, Cal State [Northridge] in the valley. . . .

GARDNER

What was your role? What sort of things did you do?

HEALEY

Well, I mainly tried to focus on questions of the analysis of the war as an expression of imperialism, that while it was very important to recognize the moral revulsion against the war, that that wasn't enough. People had to recognize what caused the war; it wasn't just this or that good man or bad man or good policy or bad policy. There was an inherent quality in the system that was present and had to be recognized. Secondly, I tried to take on some of the politics of the ultra-Leftists who fought against any idea of divisions in the ranks of the bourgeoisie, who simply interpreted imperialism as meaning that as long as you had an imperialist system, there could never be an end to the war in Vietnam. I kept using the example of France. France was an imperialist country, but it was forced to come to terms with both Vietnam and Algeria--not because their character had changed, but because there was no alternative. There was the combined military-diplomatic-social struggle that made it impossible for them to continue; they were in more jeopardy for imperialism's sake if they continued the war than if they ended it. I tried to do this around the question of seeing momentary alliances, utilizing people like [J. William] Fulbright and Bobby Kennedy and others who were speaking out because, as you may know, there was a great attack among certain sections of those who called themselves Left against even letting these people speak. I kept saying, "Look, they're not going to say anything about imperialism. But if they just open a door, they will reach more ears than any of us will. Millions of people are influenced by them, not by us. It is then our job to take what they say and put it into a further position than they would ever go because they're not anti-imperialists. We have to be. But to reject any alliance with them is to be stupid."

GARDNER

This is really one of the crucial points--maybe you could expand on it--because it seems to me that as it went along, what you called the Left seemed to feel more and more that it was responsible for the widespread sentiment and the huge demonstrations and so forth, and more and more disdained those leaders who weren't really in the same camp as they were. This seems to me to have led to the tremendous factionalizing that's weakened the whole movement now.

HEALEY

That's true. And of course that's true in any facet of social struggle. It doesn't make any difference what aspect you're talking about--Black liberation, the fight against war--this same question of tactics, of alliances, always comes up. It was most notable in the antiwar movement because that was the biggest movement. I would say that the fight against the war probably did more to radicalize tens of thousands of Americans than any other single social issue did. But I think you have two problems. First of all, the people who are newly radicalized, who as a result of the war discovered the real iniquity of this system, its total turpitude, forget where they came from. They forget the processes through which they became radicalized, and therefore they believe that to be radical you must always take the position that would least accommodate itself to new people discovering why they should be moved against the war. So you had things like the burning of the flag, which, from a revolutionary point of view, is kind of adolescent and silly. Why? Because you're trying to reach and mobilize millions of people who have been taught that the flag is the symbol of all, and when you give over those symbols, as we did, as the antiwar movement did, as the Left did, when the symbol of the flag is given to the "hard hats," the ultra-Right, and the Birchers, that's ridiculous. You never give over the national symbols to fascists or to reactionaries. Secondly, you saw the expression of what Lenin called the "infantile sickness of leftism," infantile sickness because every young movement--not chronologically young but politically young--goes through these exaggerated statements of its left identity in the rejection of any approach toward the nonradical antiwar activists. Part of it was because there was a genuine desire to identify, quote, "an anti-imperialist sector" of the antiwar movement. Part of it was because of this genuine feeling on the part of some of the radicals that any momentary alliance tarnishes you, builds up new illusions in the minds of the masses of people that these are alternatives, that a Bob Kennedy or a Fulbright or a McCarthy or any of these people provide a genuine alternative, and that therefore you are being an opportunist and betraying the basic struggle. I think one example I had of that was during the Cambodia shut-down of the campuses in 1970. I called the UCLA Student Strike Committee to ask for a speaker to come on my program to talk about why the students were on strike. And a young Black man by the name of Li'1 Joe came. The first question I asked, obviously, was, "Will you please tell the audience why the UCLA students are on strike, why the campus is shut down?" "Oh," he says, "we're on strike in order to radicalize the masses." I kind of gulped and said, "And to try to bring an end to the war in Vietnam?" "Oh, no," he says, "you end that war, they'll just start another war someplace else." I got kind of indignant, and I said, "Well, the Vietnamese might not agree with you, that it's as simple as that." "Well, sure, they might not. But after all, if you're anti-imperialist you've got to realize that it doesn't make any difference who's doing it, where it is; it's always going to go on." Then you also saw it in the Trots' approach, which was simply to be in love with demonstrations for the sake of demonstrations and to absolutely oppose any other tactic. Now, demonstrations on the street have a certain significance because they do show or potentially can show a mobilizing together, a forceful expression of large revulsion against the war in Vietnam, and therefore it can conceivably--first of all, it helps to influence others when they see other people are willing to demonstrate; secondly, the people who are participating do acquire some new knowledge on the question of their right and need to demonstrate that way. But to see it as the only tactic, which is what the Trots saw, is of course just as childish as the attitude of Li'1 Joe, because there are lots of ways in which you build up an antiwar movement--as I say, including the fact of teach-ins in communities--a dozen and one things, all of which should have been focused on hopefully trying to influence working-class participants. Clearly, any time you could have gotten any significant number of American workers to do what the Australians did these last few months, where they refused to load any American ships designed to go to Vietnam. ... If throughout the United States--and this was one of the other things I kept speaking about in all my speeches to indicate the direction in which the antiwar movement should go--if we had focused on reaching the working class, if in the United States for even one hour a day the American workers didn't work because of their protest against the war in Vietnam, that would have had more to do with ending the war than 10 million students shutting down the campuses for months.

GARDNER

Who were some of the people who appeared at the different teach-ins with you around town? Not necessarily the local names we've discussed, but. . . .

HEALEY

Well, of course, [Herbert] Marcuse was one. I was at one where Paul Schrade, from the Auto Workers, was present. I'm just trying to remember who all the names were. There're always so many of them. The teach-ins always packed in dozens of speakers. Bob Scheer.

GARDNER

I recall at UCLA a lot of the big, quote, "eastern" names.

HEALEY

Yeah, but I can't remember who they were.

GARDNER

People like--oh, [John Kenneth] Galbraith I remember used to appear regularly at that sort of thing.

HEALEY

I really don't recall.

GARDNER

Well, it's a question from left field. Let me ask you another one then. Since there was such a swing towards radicalism around a large segment of the college campuses, was there also a rush on the part of college students to join the party? Was there an increase in party membership during that period, or was it really a sort of in-and-out thing?

HEALEY

Well, there was an increase, but not significantly so. This was, I think, a big problem in the party. Partly it was the fact of a certain, I think, immature approach, which was not alone in our party (it was present in other parties as well, the French party most notably) the great suspicion as far as student youth are concerned because of our conviction that the working class is the major force to make change, a suspicion of any other sector where there's an enormous amount of emphasis. Because it's true, if you look at the sixties, it was student youth, Black and white, that were the initiators of the struggle. [We were] not seeing that the really significant question is not who acts as the catalyst in starting something, recognizing that in the end it has to be the working class that leads it through. We did not see the significance of the student movement. I don't think the party's policy as regards the student youth was adequate during that period. Therefore, for instance, instead of seeing SDS as a major instrument through which to work and trying to prevent its doing what finally it did do, and that is simply to become another expression of ultra-Left rhetoric fighting ultra-Left rhetoric--you know, PL fighting Mike Klonsky. . . .

1.30. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE ONE APRIL 19, 1973

HEALEY

... in some respects where the greatest upheavals were taking place. Not entirely. In Berkeley, for instance, people like Bettina Aptheker and Mike Myerson played a significant role on the campus. Here in Southern California a guy like Jim Berland played an important role, and there were other young people, Bob Dugan and others, who were developing during this period. But the party's policies toward the student movement were not conducive to really becoming a dominant sector and building up a new student membership of the Communist party. Then of course, too, the party was very much inhibited on that, I would say, and I think the students were somewhat inhibited. After all, this was the generation that did grow up watching I Led Three Lives on television. Unquestionably that also inhibited them. A lot of the young radicals had totally fallen for what was really a Madison Avenue slogan of, quote, "the New Left." They adopted that; they forgot where it came from. It didn't come from them originally; it came from Madison Avenue, from the Saturday Evening Post, from Fortune magazine and others. They thought it was just great that it showed a differentiation between them and us, the Old Left. They carried it out in terms of their disdain for ideology, their disdain for theory, their disdain for leaders, and so forth. So that on both the question of where the young radicals were coming from and where we were coming from, there was unfortunately not a meeting, a conjuncture that would have both stabilized their activities in, I think, a more significant direction, as well as placed the Communist party in having to deal with a new generation coming in in large numbers and therefore having to rethink its own approaches and attitudes.

GARDNER

There's a question I posed while we were turning the tape, one that you might want to expand upon: the idea that it was still really dangerous, for everybody concerned, for the Communist party to get too involved in a lot of this at this point because of the situation, because of the continuing existence of the McCarran Act; that black mark still did exist on the Communist party, and it would have worked both ways.

HEALEY

Well, that's a very important question because it has lots of both political and psychological nuances that no one has really thought through and examined. On one hand--and I'm not going to do this in any particular order of priorities or hierarchy of importance, but just the things that I know did influence us and still do, as a matter of fact--on the one hand, because we were so aware of the enormous success of the anti-Communist hysteria in the United States and how effectively that had been utilized in the past periods to smash mass organizations and eliminate individuals from jobs and activities, and because of our feeling of responsibility-- this is a very important thing to understand: we felt responsible for the building of mass movements--we would not place ourselves in any leading role, in any important public role, around these new activities. It was, for instance, all right for me to speak at a teach-in because I was just one of hundreds who were doing it. But I would not have openly participated in some dominant [role]. For instance, if there were only three or four speakers at a demonstration I would not--nor would any other Communist--have insisted that we be one of the three or four. It's primarily because of what you just brought up: because of the effect of the Red-baiting, we didn't want to see these movements Redbaited and destroyed before they had any strength. But we took it ourselves to too far an extent, where we remained so much in the background, doing all of the Jimmy Higgins work--distributing leaflets by the thousands and addressing the envelopes that called people to meetings and all this sort of thing--that it became almost a method of work and in a sense, in an ironic sense, helped to increase the Red-baiting. People knew we were around--they knew we were doing things--and if we weren't public about it, it meant we were manipulating or conspiring somewhere. Furthermore, a lot of our young Communists acquired very bad habits of work as a result of it; they thought that they could never speak of themselves as being Communists, that they always had to conceal their membership because they saw this becoming the big thing. It is still a problem within the ranks of the party. Both the problems: the objective problem of defeating the redbaiting, and the subjective problem, its impact on us, of taking a lesser role publicly than we would ordinarily take or that we should take in terms of advancing the question of the citizenship of the Communist party, its right to be publicly present, because of our fear that this will only endanger movements. This is a very big problem to overcome. There's a tendency right now in the party that's been very dominantly expressed through the latest speech of Gus Hall at the Central Committee meeting in New York in 1972 in a pamphlet called The Lame Duck that the way to attack is for the party to build united fronts. But this is really just talking to itself; in other words, it looks like we've got a united front, but it's really just Communists with their heads turned around. People don't accept us in broad ones so we'll do our own. That's not what was called for by Gus; don't misunderstand me. It becomes the result of trying to defeat the other policy, which is a big problem. So that you have both the combined political and psychological reactions: political in the sense that in a mass way it is an objective fact that anti-Communism remains a very strong potent force; psychological, in that individual young people becoming radicalized know that if they join the party, the chance of their being attacked is far greater than if they just say, "I'm an independent radical," or join any of the other radical groups, because the other radical groups have never been under the attack that we're under. People don't get fired for being members of those organizations, only if they're members of the Communist party. So of course, there's no question that that entered into why they didn't join the Communist party. But then there is also the other part of it--and I just don't think that this can be skipped over--as I say, a lot of it also was our own improper estimate of what was taking place among student youth, of its significance, and [our failure to] design policies that would be commensurate with this new radicalism that was forming.

GARDNER

There's a curious anomaly here, in that a lot of the student radical groups quickly moved to the left of the Communist party and became much more radical in a lot of ways--if that's the right term. Forgive my terminology.

HEALEY

Well, that's the terminology they use.

GARDNER

Is this partly because of poor public relations that this appears to have happened, that they were able to maintain groups that were separate but farther left?

HEALEY

My own response is twofold on that, too, and kind of contradictory. I don't think they were genuinely farther left. They said so; everybody else said that they were farther left than we were. I don't think so, because I think theirs was a leftism that could not last. It was a leftism made up of manner, of rhetoric, of posture, and not of content. It was not a left position that was going to do the two things necessary for a genuinely left position: one, strengthen an independent radical movement in its own right; and simultaneously, two, build a mass organized movement in its own right--the two always being intimately and integrally connected together. But in terms of rhetoric, you're absolutely right that they appeared to be "farther left" than we. Well, that was true, for instance--and here let me give just a "bad" example, bad in the sense that they were not using genuine leftism--in this question again of the burning of the flag and things of that kind. However, where we were wrong, where there was a genuine authentic radicalism that we didn't respond to was for instance in Berkeley when the movement went, quote, "from protest to resistance," when they stopped the troop trains. We were very fearful of these kind of things, and too fearful. We lagged behind too far. It's true that sometimes they led to silly excesses. But if we had been there, as we should have been, leading these militant actions against the war, hopefully our influence would have been such to prevent them from becoming simply the trashing of buildings for the sake of trashing buildings. I can remember, for instance, one example. I spoke at Stanford--I guess it was '67, '68 maybe; I'm not sure when. I'd been invited by one of these "ultraleft" groups, these groups more radical than ours, and they were going to really show me up. So when I was through with my prepared speeches, the leader of the group stood up and said, "Mrs. Healey, we are announcing a movement to capture and take over the Pentagon. Will you join us in that?" So I gave the only response that I could give, I said, "After you've captured it, what will you do with it? What does the physical sitting-in of that building actually represent as far as power in the country is concerned? We Communists say the power comes from the organized strength of masses who know what they're doing. So if you have the Pentagon--first of all, they can get you out of that Pentagon, but even if [you can stay briefly]--while you're there, what will you have succeeded in doing?" Now, I was partly right and partly wrong. I was partly right in that that is not where power lies. I was wrong, however, in the sense that a proper approach towards sitting in at the Pentagon, making it impossible for a day or a week for the normal processes of the Pentagon to operate, might have had an important effect, if it didn't lead, as I say, to the nonsensical things, like trashing, which only turned off everybody you wanted to reach, everyone who was potentially an ally.

GARDNER

How about the DuBois clubs? That conies in here just about this time, too.

HEALEY

Well, it's like everything else; that also caused big struggles in the party. We in Southern California were not very happy about the timing or the definition of the DuBois clubs.

GARDNER

Was it a national idea?

HEALEY

Yeah. As I say, on the one hand we felt there should be the concentration on SDS, which by 1963-64 was a dominant student movement on almost every important campus in the country and in which there were very few Communists at any time ever functioning, always just a very small number, never with any official party approach that they should. Meanwhile, we thought that the thing we should build was a youth section of the Communist party or a Young Communist League in its own name. The DuBois clubs would be neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. However, because it became a national decision, and democratic centralism operates, we did participate. Before the national decision, San Francisco had built a DuBois club which had done some very significant things in the civil rights movement, forcing the auto row in San Francisco to hire Blacks and forcing the hotels to hire Blacks, sit-ins and so forth. It had been very good, and it was hoped that this would be the character of it all through the country. Well, for a number of reasons it never became a very substantial organization. One was the fact that it was so clearly tied to the Communist party that you didn't gain anything by not having it as an explicitly Communist youth organization. Secondly, the debate on its role just really became an enormously difficult one. By its "role" I mean this: a Communist youth organization explicitly and implicitly should recognize that it not only has to do things in its own name as a Communist youth organization, but it simultaneously has to have its members active in other youth organizations influencing them toward a common policy and a common estimate and a common activity. The DuBois club could never do that. People couldn't see why, if they've joined the DuBois club, they should also be working in a union or any other mass organization of people. Secondly, they had great problems on the question of defining, for instance, some of their tactics on the question of the antiwar movement--a big, internal struggle--because when the party first advanced the slogan of negotiations, this was considered counterrevolutionary by all the other'radical groups. There were big fights in the DuBois club as to whether it was proper for revolutionaries to ever call for negotiations between the United States and Vietnam. The question you asked earlier about these groups that considered themselves more radical had another psychological impact on the DuBois clubs besides the one I've already mentioned: it made them very defensive and very subjective and very self-conscious always about the quality of their radicalism. See, my generation had grown up conscious of the fact that nobody was to our left. I mean, we were the Left. This generation of young Communist radical youth was always under great attack from others who considered themselves more radical than ours, and this affected the DuBois clubs too. Then the Subversive [Activities] Control Board ordered them to register as a Communist organization. Now, again, the immediate response on that. . . .

GARDNER

This was still pre-'66 then.

HEALEY

No.

GARDNER

It was afterwards?

HEALEY

It was after, I think. I think it was in '67. As an immediate response, a very significant sector of college youth, non-Communists, non-DuBois members, said they would come forward and register as DuBois members, too--in other words, to show their solidarity with them. But the DuBois club leadership didn't have either the imagination or the capacity to know how to utilize this sentiment and how to fight back. So in effect this became another significant barrier to its building because, again, young students who were going on to work in professional fields knew that this would later be held against them, that as members of the DuBois club, they would not get the jobs that would otherwise be available. So there was a whole mixture of problems. I would say the key one, however, was really the quality of leadership, as well as the political line that reflected the party's inadequacy in all these mass things. The Black Liberationists [could] say the quality of the party's ambivalence was always present, just as I've described in the peace movement.

GARDNER

At this point I'd like to ask a question about something that was sort of simultaneous and sort of backtracking. That's about the Free Speech Movement, which was coming about now--I'm thinking of the DuBois clubs, and you mentioned Bettina Aptheker before also (she was very active in that). That sort of predates the antiwar movement and in a sense was the first instance of student activism. Did anything go on down here in reaction to that?

HEALEY

Nothing comparable to it, no. You know, the Berkeley campus and some others in the East and so forth--campuses which are not commuter colleges, campuses where students either live on campus or there is a defined college community where people live, as there is in Berkeley--were always able to achieve a far higher response than campuses which were all commuter campuses-- and this characterizes most of Southern California, outside of, say, the Occidental-Pomona-Claremont complex, but almost all the other campuses (Cal State Los Angeles, UCLA, City College, the valley colleges). To develop that community of ideas, the reaction, the solidarity of a college community, is far more difficult on our kind of campuses than on those that either have the community adjacent to the college or where there are people living on campus. There never was a time when the student response at the campuses here in L.A. was commensurate with that of Berkeley.

GARDNER

Did you get to go up there at all during that time?

HEALEY

Oh, yes, I spoke at UC Berkeley twice. A couple of times I had to decline invitations because the party in Northern California insisted I not come and speak; either they would be invited or nobody would speak. That was, again, while these internal battles were taking place. I never accepted an invitation outside of my own area without the agreement of the party, within those areas where I could do that. For instance, I went to Nevada without asking anybody because I didn't have anybody to reach in the party in Nevada.

GARDNER

Was there a great conflict at that time between Northern and Southern California?

HEALEY

Oh, yes. Well, historically there'd always been a conflict between the north and the south, ever since there was a Communist party in California. Back in the 1920s there was one. Partly it was based on the very great objective differences between north and south. I mean, they might as well be two different states as far as character and ethos and anything that makes an area distinctive was concerned. And that's true everywhere; you'll find that in the labor movement, that battle between north and south. I remember in the CIO that the state headquarters of the CIO were in Northern California; we always used to call them the Market Street Commandos because they'd just go ahead and make all the decisions for the whole state without consulting us. We were just looked at as the colony, and they were the mother country. It's true in the business world; you find great differences. . . .

GARDNER

The university.

HEALEY

The university, that's right. In our case it was aggravated by the fact that the bulk of the party was in Southern California, the bulk of the readers of the People's World were in Southern California, but the decisions were all made in Northern California. Even after we split into two districts, the problem still remained that the People's World was the one newspaper, the bulk of the readership was here, but it was issued in San Francisco. There were big fights as to what line, what policies it would reflect. After 1958, this was added to by the difference in our relations with the national office. Where before 1958 their district took almost the same positions our district took on all the national questions under debate, after 1958 their main leader, Mickey Lima, suddenly switched his political positions, and there was no longer the struggle over policy and line with the national office. That also reflected itself in very sharp differences between the two districts. One of them came out in print, the difference in our approach toward the New Politics Conference in East Los Angeles in September 1966. We had been most instrumental in organizing this very, very big [conference]. It was really the first time in twenty years that a conference of this kind was being called, one which would try to unite the liberals and the Left together into one conference and fight to build an independent organization around the big issues that were confronting the people. The initiating forces of that had come from the Californians for Liberal Representation and from other independent political groups which we influenced here in L.A. through our old friendships with individual old-timers who'd always been part of the liberal-left movement, or through people who were Communists, like Jim Berland. Well, that conference soon came into violent collision with itself when the forces around Bob Scheer and others even more to his left came in and organized for one thing, to call for a boycott of the Brown-Reagan campaign; they would have nothing to do with Brown. This became the biggest fight of the conference. Here in Southern California we were opposed to the boycott. First of all, there was no opportunity: the election was in November, the first Tuesday of November; it was clear that a conference that was being held the last week of September was not going to find an independent alternative to Brown, an electoral candidate. Therefore, to simply call for the boycott of Brown meant that you were actually supporting Reagan, whether you liked it or not; objectively there was nothing else that your abstention from politics could lead to. It was a hysterical session because everybody had one vote. So somebody who was there representing an organization of 10,000 people didn't have any more influence than somebody who just came with that one vote. All the little ultra-left groups had all mobilized to send down carloads from Berkeley and whatnot, determined not to have any approach toward Brown. Well, what happened is that the conference, by a very narrow margin--very narrow--carried the vote of boycott, with Scheer's impassioned speech for it probably being the most important influence. Scheer had just run in the Democratic primary [for Congress] that June, just three months earlier, had only gotten 47 percent of the vote, and I remember taunting him and saying, "It was all right for you to run as a Democrat and to utilize people to try to win, but now when other people talk about the same thing, now it's a dirty terrible thing to do." At any rate, when the vote was taken--in spite of the fact that of the panels in which the comrades had been broken up, fourteen out of the panels, the majority, had brought in a proposal that there be a critical endorsement of Brown (in other words, not to give three cheers, but one cheer; to differentiate between them, to point out the danger of Reagan's election and what it would mean, to make him the main target)--when the vote finally was taken and the boycott won by a very small vote, then the people who came there representing mass organizations, Chicano organizations, the farmworkers, almost all of them just got up and walked out. Now, we Communists didn't get up and walk out, even though we understood why they were doing it. But Carl Bloice wrote an article in the People's World in effect hailing as heroes the people who called for the boycott. So I wrote an article and sent it up to the PW--which I rarely did; that is, I rarely wrote an article disagreeing in print with something--pointing out what I thought was the silly sectarianism of this thing: first of all, the total destroying of this potentially important independent movement, the Conference for New Politics, which if it didn't do anything in the '66 elections, could have been then held together for the spring and the next year; and secondly, disagreeing sharply with the political line that is expressed in Carl Bloiee's report -that approved the call for boycott: the call for boycott is always under those kind of circumstances simply a boycott of despair and not of struggle. Well, Mickey Lima called me before my article was printed, and then I got a letter from him affirming what he said on the phone, saying that if I insisted on my article being published, he would then have to print an article answering me and attacking my answer. He thought that would stop me. I said, "Go ahead, I think that kind of debate in the PW is just great." "Well, it's not right for Communists to be publicly divided." "That's fine. Why shouldn't we have the public debate? It's great. Let people understand the issues and participate more knowledgeably." So my article was printed one week, his was printed the next week--and then we had quite a battle with the National Committee on it. A meeting of the National Executive Board had taken place which in effect approved the line of the Southern California district, what we were proposing for the fall elections. Gus Hall was not at that meeting; he was in Europe for three months. When he came back, without any discussions with anybody--and this was after the elections were over and Reagan had been elected--he made a report to the National Committee attacking me and the district (ostensibly the district, actually me) for this line, praising the boycotters. I mean, it was just a purely subjective intervention in the thing because of his great hostility toward me, taking positions that I'm sure did not represent considered judgment, saying that Brown lost because he supported the Vietnam War. Well, some things are the same things as he says now about why McGovern lost it, "McGovern moved too far to the right." Of course, he moved too far to the right maybe for the Left, but he sure as hell didn't move too far to the right as far as the 54 percent of the American working class that voted for Nixon. What outraged me at that meeting was the fact that the national board members who had just approved our line in October of that year, just without a word switched their position and now approved this new attack. I have a great disdain and contempt for that--for what is really pusillanimous behavior, just sycophantic behavior. If Gus Hall says it, it must be right. I'll tell you, this question of the cult of the individual in the communist movement worldwide is by no means over with the Twentieth Congress in their attack. At any rate, the conference was over. There was never any follow-through on the New Politics because there was no chance of any alliance with anybody at that point. But it leads also to this question of whether there are people who are generally more radical than we; and again then the authority is the definition of what is "more radical." Let me just give one further example on this question of what difference it makes in regard to whether you have a Brown or a Reagan, or a Nixon or a McGovern. Again, if you present it as any of them being against capitalism, that's ridiculous; none of them are going to be against capitalism. But does it make a difference, for instance in California when a Reagan gets elected, as to who gets the appointments, as to what kind of legislation is vetoed or approved, as to where the dominant, the cutting edge of the approach is? What we argued then--and I think life has vindicated us--is that the fight now would be a defensive fight to try to keep what had been done under the Brown administration, not to advance to new plateaus. Of course, that's exactly what's happened on all the campuses, in the welfare struggles, in the labor struggles; it has been simply that, a defensive struggle to retain the little tiny bit that had been achieved in one administration and which was now being taken away in another. Someday somebody ought to write something about the cost of Reaganization in California: what did it mean in terms of education, what did it mean in terms of welfare, what did it mean in terms of the social services to the people, and so forth? Then there is this question of appointments. On a national scale, of course, you see it more with such a thing as a Supreme Court. But even in California, with the state supreme court, does it matter to the radicals whether it is a court that is going to take the Nixon or Reagan approaches to decide a constitutional issue, or whether they're going to take what we Marxists call the bourgeois democratic approaches (in other words, the liberal democratic concepts, the Warren court, and what Douglas and Brennan and so forth represent)? Well, I think it matters a lot. It matters around this one key thing, that for most of the revolutionary struggle you are trying to get elbow space, you're trying to have room in which to organize, in which to challenge capitalist ideology, to destroy its hegemony over the minds of people; and therefore anything that has the aroma, the ideological aroma of fascism, of reaction, of repression, of anything that tightens up, makes it that much more difficult to deal with. If our job is to widen instead of narrowing the arena, then clearly it matters how you do it. Now, it would be just as bad, however--and lots of my attacks used to go against them--for radicals who worked in the political structure to simply have the politics of whoever they were with, not to advance advanced concepts or issues, not to fight to try to break the control of the formal machine of the organization, to simply go along and become good members of whatever they were and no longer be radicals, So the twin devils, the Scylla and Charybdis of the revolutionary movement, either the opportunism of the Right, which simply identifies with whatever is dominant, or the Leftism, which makes it a principle to always see only the Left and not to see the masses--well, you can die just as much from either one of those two dangers, and they can intermingle, too.

GARDNER

To switch a little bit, since we've gotten ahead now into 1966 and so forth--I've been trying to figure out how to phrase the question about Watts. The Watts riots were in the summer of 1965, and in a sense in this narrative they really don't seem to fit into any one logical space, although in American history they really do. I guess there is kind of a place for the question. Now, you live right down in the heart of the riot area. Could you talk about it for a while?

HEALEY

Certainly in the heart of the curfew area. Well, when the Watts rebellion broke out, all of us in the leadership in the party here in L.A. were in Northern California having a coastwide meeting on something, the PW or some other thing; I don't remember what it was. At, I guess, one o'clock in the afternoon we heard about it, and we immediately left San Francisco and flew back down here. The next day we called an emergency meeting at Bill Taylor's house to discuss what to do. We invited to that meeting some of the Black Communists who lived directly in Watts. I'm in the curfew area, but I'm a little bit north and west of Watts. The Black Communists from Watts--I remember particularly a couple of comrades [Fred and Oneal Cannon] who had been right in the heart of it and told us what was going on, what it represented-- said that there was no question that in their opinion the original thing had been a very scattered thing, but that then what had happened is that the whole repressed feeling of what oppression brings to people had just percolated over, seeped over, and that it really became a mass phenomenon. The looting, for instance, of the shops: I remember Freddy very particularly emphasizing that you'd see the most respectable church people out participating in taking things out of stores and whatnot. He said you also saw organized looting; you'd see big trucks back up, organized activity. But the main characteristic of it was this almost kind of a festive atmosphere of celebration, of, "By God, we're doing something on our own." Of course, it followed very significant patterns in that there was no attempt to injure whites as whites at that time; there was a very selective approach towards which places got burned. Those stores which had a reputation of having gouged and cheated, the big chains or big furniture stores--including one owned by my cousin by marriage [Al Sussnan], Martin's, where there were credit rackets of all kinds, I think-- these were the places that got burned. Other places that didn't have that bad a reputation were left untouched.

GARDNER

Did it reach over here to this neighborhood?

HEALEY

Well, it reached over to Vermont.

GARDNER

Did it get over to Western?

HEALEY

No, it didn't get to Western. I was home alone. My mother was in Northern California, I guess visiting my sisters. Richard was up in Reed College, and I was here alone. And Saturday night before this meeting Sunday, I got frantic calls from everybody in the city urging me to leave, that it was just too dangerous to be here. "What nonsense. I'm not leaving anywhere. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to stay right where I am." The safest thing was to be where people knew me. While it's true I was one of the few white people in the whole community, at least I felt I was safer here than someplace else. Well, the party put out a leaflet almost immediately, mainly addressed to the white community, pointing out the reasons for it. There was one other significant thing that caused some debate both here and in New York as to what position to take, and that was that it was clear to anybody living in the community that the Blacks were welcoming the National Guard coming in, that they were terrified and hated the police (the police were just an invading army in the colony as far as they were concerned), but they welcomed the Guard. In other words, there was not simply a mood of identifying all this as being the same. We were very surprised by this, taken aback, because our first reaction had been to oppose the calling-out of the National Guard. It was the Black comrades in Watts who kept saying, "You just don't know what you're talking about." It's true, there was a feeling that everybody was endangered. Why? Because the cops were shooting at random. As long as the cops saw a Black face, they were going to shoot. With the Guard, you were going to have lots of Blacks who were members of the Guard, first of all. Secondly, they had far more military discipline, people thought, and there would not be as much random violence as with the police. As I say, there's always the individual thing that happens, the unique thing in each mass event which you're not quite prepared for. Even now it's a very controversial question, even more so because, of course, the Guard no longer has that reputation. I don't think anybody'd welcome the Guard anymore, anywhere. [tape recorder turned off] There was a lot of criticism of the party by our young comrades, most particularly for the fact that Black Communists weren't seen in any public way in terms of helping to give leadership to this mass upsurge and providing the action. But then in addition, the youth were very critical--and we were, too--of the fact that the biggest thing that was needed was to work among whites, to get whites to understand what all this meant, including the fight against the curfew. That curfew--it was really something to live out here during that curfew. It was a strange feeling to know that after a certain hour you couldn't go out if you wanted to. It had never happened before. The most terrible part of it to me was the acceptance by people of the fact that they couldn't go out. It was just as if there were the God-given right that anybody could tell you you couldn't go out of your home. But there were other things that were characteristic of that period. You know, New York had gone up before Watts; Harlem had gone up before Watts. I remember talking long-distance with Bob Thompson about it. He called when Watts went up. Well, for one thing, of course, the party always has to find a definition of what these things mean; so we discussed that. He was the one, as I remember, who said that it should be defined not as a riot or things like that, that those were terms of the ruling circles, but instead it should be defined more properly as a rebellion that came from oppression. But he also indicated that without previous mass organization in the community, there was a certain spontaneity to it that nobody could define or determine. Of course, what became clear as the other cities went up was that because they were so spontaneous neither the FBI nor the Department of Justice nor anything of the government had any way to really anticipate any of it. There was nothing that was organized that they could infiltrate to find out the plans of what was going on.

GARDNER

Yet at the same time there was the great hue and cry about outside agitators, especially on the part of [Police] Chief [william] Parker.

HEALEY

Oh, yeah, yeah, no question that that was their cry, and yet there was no doubt of the fact that that was just nonsense. Of course, I remember Martin Luther King came and tried to get people to stop firing and throwing rocks and so forth, and he was just met with real hostility. But, as I say, the other thing that stands out in my mind in that period is that in no city were those upsurges ever repeated. They'd be one-shot stands. There'd be this great upflow of hatred and resentment over their status, and then you wouldn't see that same city again repeating itself, which would indicate the ambivalence among Black people themselves, including even one and the same person, feeling the outrage and yet also feeling that this was not significantly going to alter their status. It should be said that certainly those rebellions in the city added to the whole tone of the social crisis in the country that compelled the administration, the Johnson administration, to initiate what they called the War on Poverty. As you know, that was never a war that was pursued very energetically, but nevertheless, they did at least try to take immediate actions on some of the more glaring questions of hunger and of unemployment. Great studies, as you know, were made afterwards--there was the [McCone] Commission here in California that made a study, and then there was the U.S. civil rights one and the Kerner Commission report*--and no matter what, all of them had to come face to face with the fact of the result of inequality in the United States, that when you oppress a people over a long period of time and there's no opportunity and no options being placed before those people, that then there are not going to be alternatives to these kind of reactions. Very few of them ever--well, a lot of them had some good analyses as to what caused it; none of them came up with very good conclusions as to what to do about it. But this, of course, also entered into the 1966 campaign, in the sense that Reagan used two things in *In the order given, the commissions and their reports were as follows: California Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots [McCone], Violence in the City, an End or a Beginning (December 2, 1965); U.S. Civil Rights Commission, An Analysis of the McCone Commission Report (January, 1966); The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [Kerner], Report (March 1, 1968). his films over and over again as to why he should be elected--one was the scene of student upsurges on the campus; the other one was of the Blacks in Watts--to threaten all these white folks as to what was going to happen to them, that the students and the Blacks were going to come and overwhelm them.

GARDNER

Did the party make any move towards organizing in the ghettos after Watts?

HEALEY

Well, we had always had some organization, and we continued to try to extend it. It was around that time, as a matter of fact--maybe a little bit later but as a result of the upsurge--that we set up the Che-Lumumba Club, which was an all-Black collective. For the first time in the history of the party, such a thing was being officially done, and it's still very controversial. But the main thing we kept trying to do was to initiate again the question of mass organization in Watts. Our equal activity--and I would say even greater--was trying to get white response to organize whites. As a matter of fact, a number of mass meetings that we helped initiate were held in white communities and white churches and whatnot in response to what we organized. The most immediate thing we did as a result of that weekend's activity, though, was to organize relief for Watts, because nobody could get stuff in. We organized truckloads of foods to be brought into Watts; all kinds of white organizations participated in raising food. That was one of the most immediate things. But the big thing as far as the ghetto itself was concerned was really to try to find a way to organize an organization that would deal with these issues in a way that would lead to mobilizing millions. And that's when we really came into conflict with some of the ultra-Leftists, really with the Maoists. That was when the thoughts of Mao were getting their biggest thing. What you found going on in some places in the ghetto, for instance, is that people were being taught to just memorize those thoughts and chant them over and over again. And of course the most popular was, "All power grows out of the barrel of a gun." We kept arguing that to a Communist that's not true: all power grows out of the power of an organized mass movement. Whether you have guns or not may at some point become very important, but without the power of the mass movement, the power of the consciousness of people moving together, the guns are very irrelevant. Our big fight was against the independent, seemingly heroic action of people taking a gun and shooting somebody, which was all the rage at that point.

1.31. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE TWO MAY 2, 1973

GARDNER

We'll begin in 1966, as we've been discussing. There are a number of conventions and so forth that I think we can talk about.

HEALEY

Yeah, well, what was happening of course generally was that that was the year in which Reagan ran against Pat Brown for governor. It was a year in which--that year and the preceding year--there had been an enormous growth of militancy, both in the ghetto and, of course, on the campus. The Vietnam war had become a major issue in the country and in politics, and it expressed itself very sharply as far as the California electoral activities were concerned. On the one hand you had the CDC--the California Democratic Council--which, while still organized within the Democratic party, was ideologically independent of the national Democratic party and the state Democratic party as well, as far as its endorsements were concerned. Well, CDC had played a very important role in 1965 and the early part of '66 in helping to mobilize statewide demonstrations against Vietnam--this was before there was really any peace organization as such--as well as helping to publicize and educate people on the issues. Si Casady was at that point still the chairman of CDC. Pat Brown had played a not unimportant role in refusing to retreat before the attacks of the Birchers and the ultra-Right as to the role of CDC in the past. Starting in 1964, there'd been a great deal of just major attacks on the CDC from the ultra-Right, that it was a Communist organization, that Pat Brown was tied therefore to communism, and so forth. Up until '66, he had really refused to retreat from his position of welcoming the support without necessarily endorsing all the actions that they took. He himself had in a general way--in a very vague way, however-- refused to be a prime supporter of the war in Vietnam. However, a number of things coincided with that election which helped to change and influence the course of the events. The Berkeley campus had been particularly active; that was the time of the great sit-ins in Berkeley. It was also the point at which Brown, on the basis of a phone call that had come to him from one of his administrators, had ordered the state police in to clear out Sproul Hall, I think it was, where 900 to 1,000 young people were sitting in, and to arrest them. That coincided at the same time with his attack on Si Casady, the state chairman of the CDC, on the ground that his speeches all over the state attacking Johnson for the war in Vietnam and the Johnson policies were divisive. He used enormous public pressure in the CDC convention in the spring of "66 to get rid of Si Casady. And that marked the first real public split between the center and the left-liberals in Democratic politics. It should also be said that Reagan was using as his major campaign activity the showing of films everywhere of what was happening on the campuses, with particular emphasis, of course, every time there was a burning of the American flag or people taking off their clothes in public demonstrations and whatnot--anything that in any way would benefit Reagan's attempt to show that this was all part of the great anarchy that was going to consume the state, and that only he would be able to bring law and order back to the state again. In the Democratic primary, [Carlton B.] Goodlett, a Black publisher in San Francisco, the physician-publisher of the Sun-Reporter, was running for governor. The [Communist] party was very much supporting Goodlett.

GARDNER

What was his first name?

HEALEY

Gee, I know it as well as my own. I'll think of it later and come back to it. However, we thought there had been agreement that in his campaign--oh, Yorty was running as well in the Democratic primary--that in his campaign Goodlett would make as his main object of attack Yorty, so as to build up a conscious left movement that would then also pressure Brown to stop his capitulation to the right, his movement to the right. What was present then, and has continued to be present all too often as far as electoral politics are concerned, is that the organized sector within the political movement is primarily from the ultra-Right, which puts the pressure on; the Left is more amorphous and therefore cannot exert the pressure that is needed. That was also the spring where Bob Scheer ran as the Democratic party candidate in the Berkeley primaries for Congress against a middle-of-the-roader; on a very explicit, straight-out peace program, he finally won 47 percent of the vote, really came much closer to being elected than that figure shows. This was very important in showing the potential that could be organized within the Democratic party primaries. As I've indicated to you before, primaries have a far greater significance in the shape of political campaigns than radicals usually notice. In most states, most notably California, the intraparty fights between the tendencies to go way over to the right or to stay on a left-liberal position are first defined within the party primaries themselves. To ignore them is to ignore one of the big political realities of the state. Nineteen-sixty-six demonstrated that even more conclusively around the Republican party; the capture of the Republican party by the ultra-Right, which was first signaled by Goldwater's victory in '64, had really become a very great reality. So then the liberal Republican couldn't do what in past years he could do, that is, to get through the Republican party primary and then win enough Democratic votes to be elected. A liberal Republican could no longer win a Republican primary. This was, of course, all part of the whole huge debate that was going on in regard to the tactics of the Left, the tactics specifically around Vietnam, around the question of Black liberation, around the fight on the campuses against the war and for democratic rights. There was absolutely no sector of public life that was not being touched. At that time, particularly, what was present as far as the labor movement was concerned was the whole question, as is still true, of the farmworkers and of the role that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta played in terms of the whole general Chicano movement that was being unified around support for the farmworkers. There was greater politicalization developing around that than around anything else in the Chicano community. But this was also the year in which the Peace and Freedom [party] emerged. And our position was a very confused and ambivalent position; it indicates really the fact that neither we nor any other radical movement has yet arrived at any significant analysis of U.S. politics, of the U.S. governmental structure, of the differences between abstract theory and actual political reality as to what to do. Here we were faced with a situation where there was an important movement to try to build this Peace and Freedom party, starting, as I say, in '66. But it came almost totally from white middle-class elements who had no relationship to the working class, no relationship to the Black movement, no relationship to the Chicanes. Our line of course had always been based on the fact that in order to build a third party, to break the two-party monopoly, it had to be based primarily on its ability to influence the working class. And here was something that was totally devoid of working-class influence. In addition, it was clear that the ultra-Right had passed over the stage of just being a minor voice on the right but had become a major and dominant voice in U.S. politics, which it continues to be today, that the relationship ideologically and organizationally of the ordinary conservative in the Republican party and sectors of the Democratic party had lent itself towards the direction of the ultra-Right. There was a very thin dividing line, if any at all, in this position. So the second question that we were faced with in trying to define our position [with regard] to the Peace and Freedom party and what to do about it was the question of whether this ultra-Right threat, as expressed around Reagan's candidacy, required a unity that in the first place would defeat Reagan; the Peace and Freedom party was that kind of action that would only add to the total election of Reagan and the defeat of Brown. We had quite sharp debates on that. Among other things, one of the greatest debates we had about what to do with Peace and Freedom was really about their inherent racism. The fact that it was certainly an unconscious one is not the point; it was implicit, never explicit. But the total contempt they felt for having to struggle to win any support in the Black community, and its 99 percent all-white character. .

GARDNER

Is that so? And yet the Peace and Freedom candidates in the '68 election were Black.

HEALEY

Well--except this was still in '66. That was one of the great problems, because. . .

GARDNER

Well, how did this manifest itself?

HEALEY

You mean the racism?

GARDNER

Yeah.

HEALEY

Well, the total contempt for any approach toward having to have support from Blacks. Now, wait a minute, I may--did Peace and Freedom emerge then? I don't think Peace and Freedom got organized now; I think I'm missing the date.

GARDNER

Maybe you're two years ahead.

HEALEY

Yeah. I think it was '68 that it emerged. I can check that in a minute, [shuffles papers]. Yes. I'm wrong. At any rate, the same kind of problems were displayed at the first conference for independent political action that was called in Los Angeles, a statewide conference that met at Cal State Los Angeles in September of 1966. I think I mentioned this last time.

GARDNER

I don't think in too much detail, no.

HEALEY

Maybe to somebody else. [laughter] This was initiated by most of the people around the Californians for Liberal Representation as a call to a conference that would unite those people who were fighting around Vietnam and those people fighting on domestic issues into one organized left-of-center movement based on issues. It was the first time such a conference had taken place in California, in other words one that appealed not just to Democrats but to every political activist, since 1938, actually. It was a highly significant conference as a result of that.

GARDNER

Were you invited in any sort of advisory role to speak there?

HEALEY

No, but I was certainly there publicly as a participant. I was there representing the party. It was a very large conference, and it had an interesting combination of people. On the one hand, you had official representatives of unions; you had official representatives of larger organizations that represented organized constituencies. But at the same time you had hundreds of people who were there simply representing themselves and no more. For instance, many of the students from Berkeley came down, the so-called "independent radicals"--I don't know why I say "so-called"; they were in some cases that. The fight over the question of how voting would take place only really indicated what was finally going to be taking place. Clearly people who came there as official delegates of their organizations were not in the mood to have themselves placed with one vote for that delegate and one vote equally for the person who came representing nothing but that one individual. The final solution to that, by making it "one man, one vote," sounded very democratic, but it was in effect really very undemocratic because of the inequity of representation. The dominant representation under that guise really became the unorganized people as against those who were organized. MAPA, for instance, the Mexican-American Political Association, United Farm. Workers: these organizations had one vote. But so did the people who represented nothing else. Well, Bob Scheer was one of the main leaders of the so-called independent radicals at the meeting--I say "so-called" in this case because a lot of them came from organizations like the International Socialists, Trotskyist organizations, group sects that had their own ideas as to what the future should be, with their principal positions being against any identification with what they call "bourgeois politics," that at no time does anybody from the radical movement ever support any candidate except if they're independent of Democratic and Republican parties. The big fight then came as to what position this movement should take towards the Reagan-Brown election. This was of course after the primary where both Yorty and Goodlett had been defeated. Goodlett had gotten, at the most, about 100,000 votes, which was not too bad considering the character of the campaign and considering the fact that in spite of the general agreement that the main target should be the fight against Yorty within the Democratic party as representing the right wing there, he had made his main target Brown, which was always the easier thing to do because Brown was the governor. So that by the time this conference took place, there was no independent alternative as between Reagan and Brown. There was no possibility by the time of that conference, which was the end of September, to field any independent candidates under state law. You could have write-ins but nothing else, and a write-in campaign is rarely a very meaningful campaign. Well, the people around Bob Scheer--and I use him really as symbolic of that whole movement--were leading the fight for a boycott as between Reagan and Brown, [an alternative] which was simply not to vote. The farmworkers and many of the other groups that were there representing comparable approaches were opposing this on the ground that a boycott in effect was a support of Reagan, that you could not take thousands of the most active people in politics around the issues and tell them not to have anything to do with either candidate without its objectively becoming a support of Reagan, no matter how you sliced it. Our position was that this kind of conference should not vote at all on this question because it was clear it could only be a splitting issue, and that therefore the conference should try to remain an organized force that would first of all concentrate on unity on all the issues that were affecting all the diverse groups there; and secondly [should try to] prepare them for the 1967 and '68 elections in an organized way so that, if there was to be an intervention in the political arena then, it would be done in an organized way and not this scattered way. There was a fight between the Communist parties of Northern and Southern California on this question because, while they were not terribly in support of the boycott movement, they were absolutely opposed to our position, which was that while it had to be a very publicly critical approach toward Brown, nevertheless the defeat of Reagan as representing the ultra-Right [was paramount], that to let Reagan become governor meant to consolidate the ultra-Right in California and therefore to influence the whole country's elections, because clearly California as a major state does have a very important role in shaping up national politics. Well, the conference was broken up into twenty-two workshops to discuss specific aspects of the struggle. In each workshop there was a vote taken on the question of what attitude to take on this major question. Fourteen out of the twenty-two workshops voted to take the position of not taking a position in regard to it and not to split the conference. In spite of that, the forces around Bob Scheer-and, as I say, I want to emphasize I use him really as only symbolic of it, because he was certainly the most vocal and articulate person on that floor and the most influential as far as these independent sectors were concerned--forced through a vote calling for the boycott of the elections. Well, at that point there took place a gigantic walkout. All those who represented organized groups of any significance just walked out very demonstratively. Certainly the CDC walked out, and the MAPA people walked out. Most of the black organized groups walked out. Now, we didn't walk out; the Communists didn't walk out. But we were nevertheless very critical. We put the blame for the walkout not on the people who left but on the people who forced through that vote because they knew what would happen. There was no question that the organized people would not stay.

GARDNER

That more or less invalidated the whole conference at that point, didn't it?

HEALEY

It destroyed it. There was nothing further left to it. It was done, gone, over with. There was never again grouped together this kind of significant force. It ended any possibility. And this is exactly what we'd predicted. But it had a further significance on the question of the interparty fight. First of all, Carl Bloice had reported the conference for the People's World and had written an article as a reporter in effect approving of the position taken around the Bob Scheers and condemning the people who walked out as the ones who'd split the conference. I insisted on writing an official reply to him in the paper in which I primarily emphasized the facts that knowing that it was too late to have any effect on the election in terms of entering independent candidates and knowing that the conference would break up over this motion, the insistence on forcing this motion through was the responsibility of those people who no matter what happened were going to insist on their politics dominating over the need for unity; that the call for a boycott was a stupid call; that abstention from politics is never an answer for radicals; and that we had to oppose it. Well, before the article was printed, I got a letter from Mickey Lima, the chairman of the party in Northern California, saying that if I insisted on having my article printed, he was going to reply publicly, answering it and disagreeing, and that he didn't think it was a very good idea to have two publicly known Communists fighting in public. I answered that I thought it was great. What was wrong with it? This was a very big, complicated difficult problem. It was not a private argument between us, and fine, let other people hear and participate in the debate and thereby clarify their own thinking. I insisted that no matter what he did, my article criticizing this position of Carl Bloice had to be printed. So therefore both articles appeared. It was one of the few times in Communist history that you have that kind of public debate taking place between the leaders of the party in the state, Well, then in October of that year I went back to attend the National Executive Board of the party, at which the major question was what would be the party's attitude toward the final elections which were in November of that year. New York had a big election campaign. One of the Roosevelts was running for mayor--I don't remember which one at this point [Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr. was running for governor]--and it was the first real emergence as a serious thing of the Conservative party in New York. At any rate, I gave a report to the National Executive Board on the position of the Southern California party; namely, [the necessity for] the defeat of Reagan as representing the most dangerous thrust in California politics and therefore strengthening the danger to American politics as a whole. Gus Hall wasn't present at that meeting. He'd been in Europe for three months, his first trip abroad in probably twenty-five years. Even though he was still out on bail on the McCarran Act, he'd been given permission by the government to travel to Europe and, of course, mainly the Soviet Union. Winnie--Henry Winston, the chairman of the party--was presiding over the meeting. When I finished my report and after considerable debate and discussion--oh, Mickey Lima wasn't present at this meeting also because there was something taking place in San Francisco, so he couldn't come--but when I finished my report a vote was taken to endorse the position of the Southern California party as representing a correct party estimate. And it was passed unanimously. In the meantime, the only thing that intervened between that and a final meeting of the National Committee, which is relevant to this question and took place in December, was that on the eve of that National Committee meeting, Discussions Unlimited, a local group that had initiated a whole series of debates and public forums for about four or five years, had arranged a debate at L.A. [Trade-] Tech between Professor Eugene Genovese, Bob Scheer, and myself on the question, "Which Way for the Left?" It turned mainly into a debate between Bob Scheer and me in which these were the particular questions that we fought about, my own arguments being primarily on the question of how you build a left, particularly among the youth, that is not just simply a fly-by-night thing. How do you develop young people to be not just rebels but revolutionaries, who don't only react to the moment but see a long-range struggle that's ahead of them? I made as my chief question the need for what I called compassionate political solidarity among all those on the left fighting together rather than the internecine battles that consume one another. Bob's position was that the Old Left had nothing more to offer, that the New Left--with its disdain for theory, ideology, and strategy--was the way to do it; it was a happening, a do-your-own-thing thing. This has on minor significance in that in Bob Scheer's review of Al Richmond's book A Long View from the Left in the Washington Post, Scheer is very self-critical of the positions he took in those years; that was the only relevance to it now. At any rate, that debate made me one day late to the National Committee meeting at which Gus Hall was to make the major speech. I came in on Saturday; the debate was Friday night. The National Committee meeting had opened on Friday night with Gus's report. Gus's report was an all-out attack on Southern California--on me--on our position in regard to the election: first of all, that no matter what, we should have found an independent candidate to run against Brown; that under no conditions could we give even indirect critical, publicly critical support; that the reason Brown had lost was because of his position on Vietnam. A total rejection of the danger of the ultra-Right. This was ironic because he had been one of the first in the party to talk about the danger of the ultra-Right. Then in his analysis of the rest of the elections in the rest of the country, a theme that he was always striking in regard to every election all the time was that "the peace movement," the people, always won great victories--a mandate for peace, a mandate for that,a mandate for this. Where there were great defeats suffered, it was always because the liberal-left candidate had sold out and betrayed and so forth. In the first place, there was a total rejection on his part of the increased impact of racism--this is when the whole question of "law and order" and all those words were coming as a symbol for racism in the country--a total ignoring of the fact that the ultra-Right had managed to do what the McCarthy movement had not done, what no previous ultraright movement had done, and that was to unify and consolidate these tendencies, with bigotry and racism as the cement that held them all together. They might disagree, as groups have always done on various other questions, but this was the solid thing. I remember, for instance, an example of this approach and of our big debate in this national meeting was the Chicago elections, where Senator [Paul] Douglas had been defeated, where it was clear, when you looked at the Illinois precincts, but particularly at the Chicago precincts, that he'd been defeated in those areas that are now called the "ethnic areas," among the Poles, the Italians, and so forth. There was just no question that their vote had been predicated on the whole question of the hatred of Blacks, on racism. To take this Panglossian view, you know, "This is the best of all possible worlds and it's always getting better and better," was just brushing under the carpet the seriousness of the problem, particularly as it influenced the question of the working class. But what appalled me in addition to everything else about this report was that of every member of the National Executive Board who had already previously voted in support of our position, not one of them stood up to say, well, they didn't quite agree; or if they agreed now, they hadn't agreed before, but this was why they were changing their position. It was simply like a bunch of sheep now silently accepting a total change of position. What it was, I'm convinced, had very little to do with a really thoughtful, coherent analysis of what was to be done. There were two factors in Gus's attack. One was an absolute determination to try in every way to isolate me in the national leadership and to attack my leadership in Southern California in any way. The second factor, equally important--I don't mean secondary; this was equally important--is this kind of approach toward politics, whether on a world scale or in the country, which thinks that the way to encourage persistence and dedication in fighting on an objective is to simply be buoyant, to be enthusiastic, to only look on the bright side of the picture. I earlier characterized him as Dr. Pangloss, and as a matter of fact, at the national convention I later called him the "Norman Vincent Peale of the left wing," with the power of positive thinking. If we simply ignore defeats or setbacks, they'll go away, they'll disappear. Everything is fine; it just needs more enthusiasm. But a total absence of analysis: what causes things to happen, why did they happen, what lessons do we learn in order to have a more scientific policy for the future?

GARDNER

Apropos of this: from a lot of the things you've described, it seems there have been very few real authentic dissenters who remained within the party, over the years.

HEALEY

That's right.

GARDNER

In fact, you seem to really be the party's gadfly; whenever there's something you disagree with, you are willing to state it. But most party members seem to drop out over points of argument. Are there others who have been like you in their attitude?

HEALEY

Well, it's true. The biggest tendency is, first of all, to drop out, to leave. The other one is to remain silent on the theory that the unity of the party means unanimity. I've never accepted that. I don't think unity and unanimity are synonymous. Furthermore, I was becoming increasingly convinced in the course of these debates and struggles, more in the sixties than at any other time, that there were long-range questions of great significance as far as the role of the party was concerned that had relevance both as to the history of the party, but more importantly, as far as I was concerned, as to the future of the party. The definitions of democratic centralism were strictly Stalinist definitions that had come into currency in the twenties, that had really been originally decided on even in the Soviet Union as only temporary things to take care of the serious problems they faced of famine, of a backward country, of world isolation, the failure of the world revolution, the revolution in Germany, and so forth, [problems] which left them totally on themselves--all the factors they thought would be of assistance. So in their ideological and political tight-buckling of having to see it through, they had projected certain questions--and at this point I don't even want to discuss whether all of them were valid even for that point--but certain definitions (first of all, of democratic centralism, secondly of internationalism), all ©f which revolved around the total deification of the top leadership and, within that top leadership, of the general secretariat of the party.

GARDNER

The atmosphere of Stalinism has remained, the cult of the personality?

HEALEY

Oh, absolutely. Never challenged, never questioned. And, of course, you see the same thing repeated in China. One can understand with all those countries maybe some sort of historic need that is present, a need to present to millions of people--mostly peasants who have always been accustomed to great authoritarian societies, either as far as religious concepts or as far as the society itself is concerned--to have a transition in which, in order to identify the change to the millions of backward people, it's done around the individual symbolically: Stalin, now Mao. But clearly more than that has now taken place because you see the same process repeated-- and also repeated, I would say, in Cuba with Fidel--the absolute leader, the cult of the individual. I think there is a far more significant question which I'd like to discuss a little later because I think it goes to the whole question of the nature and character of an authentic revolutionary movement in each country and of the changed definitions of internationalism from the period of the thirties.

GARDNER

We can go into that in detail later in the overview.

HEALEY

But to me it was just intolerable--coming back to your question--to think that one could be a leader of the party or a member of the party and not say what one thought, not fight for what one believed. It really brings into question the complicated problem of the contradiction, the dialectical contradiction if you will, of the role and relationship of an individual and of the collective. On the one hand, you cannot change a society without an organization that moves as a unified organization against a highly centralized capitalist society. Individuals by themselves do not influence or change anything; it can only be done through organization. But it is also true that the minute you are in an organization, there is by necessity a loss--and I don't think it's a terrible thing--a loss of some aspects of individuality. That's true if you're a member of the PTA. Obviously, you're going to give up some of your individual views. But the balance between the need of the collective and the need of individual responsibility is a very delicate one that has to be constantly reassessed. There's no formula; there's no blueprint that satisfies it for all time. The greatest tragedy of the revolutionary movement has been precisely the mythology that unanimity must always be present, that that's the definition of unity, and that differences that take place in the leadership--on estimates, on analyses, or conclusions--are to be kept hidden, not just from the public but from the party membership as well, so that there's no way the party membership can even debate with any knowledge of what the alternatives are. Well, at that meeting of the National Committee in December, as I say, I was outraged both politically and personally that there was this total contempt for accuracy, this total contempt for analysis, and the total contempt as far as the other members of the National Executive Board-- Carl Winter, Hy Lumer, Henry Winston, every one of them-- to separate themselves from Gus's position, to in any way indicate any difference, although I knew that they didn't agree but wouldn't say so. [tape recorder turned off] Now, of course, there were other arguments that were going on. The 1966 convention, the first convention of the party since 1960--because of the McCarran Act, we had not held others--was also a big battle over policy and line. Again, the point to the question you asked has relevance here in that ours was the only convention where the differences were publicly expressed, our differences as far as national policy.

GARDNER

"Ours," meaning?

HEALEY

The Southern California district. And I would say that generally, as far as both our leadership and most of the membership, it was a very united position; we were always publicly debating the questions, so people knew what it was about and why they held the position they did. Well, the [same] kind of issues were debated. My report to that convention is important because not only did we publicly express our differences in the report, but afterwards the FBI reproduced the report, sent it out all over the country with a little inscription saying, "This report is being suppressed by the national party"--which it was--"and in the interests of party democracy we think you should know about it," implying that it came from me. They know the psychology of the party leadership very well. By the way, Bill DiValle confirmed after he left the party that while an agent for the FBI in the party, he was the one who had taken it to the FBI and he could verify the fact that they mailed it out throughout the country. At any rate, when the national convention took place, although all other reports were being made available to all the delegations from the various states to the convention, they refused to allow my report, which we'd brought back there to distribute as part of the pre-convention discussion, to be read by anybody. They confiscated it. The main issues that were dealt with: Well, in the first place, the question of inner-party democracy; the fact that the party had been functioning really--and I used the term--with "bureaucratic centralism" and not democratic centralism; that there was an absence in any of the preconvention materials of any real analysis of what was happening as far as the working class in the United States was concerned, that here we lived in a country which at that point had not been in a serious depression since 1939, and that this period of relative prosperity had had an effect on the working class (to ignore it was to ignore the realities of what was taking place). Secondly, that there was absolutely no analysis of the differentiations that are present within the working class. As far as the labor movement was concerned, we were always being placed in a position through the national statements, most particularly of Gus Hall, [which made us sound] as if we were the business agents for the business agents, an uncritical support of anything that the labor leadership, the labor bureaucracy, did. Gus was impelled to do that because the New Left and the ultra-Left attacks attacked the labor movement as a whole. And correctly, we would have no part of that position because we recognized the difference as far as the significance and the importance of an organized labor movement. But not to differentiate between the bureaucrats of the labor movements--the labor mis-leaders, the pie-cards-- and the honest trade unionists who were fighting for what they thought were working-class interests was to place us as the uncritical defenders and to fail to recognize the whole meaning and significance of the opportunism of the labor movement, most particularly as far as the fight against racism was concerned.

1.32. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE ONE MAY 2, 1973

HEALEY

One of the big fights was over the question of how to view the labor movement itself. What intrigued me about this struggle is that, as you may know, the party has a lot of classes, as do all revolutionary parties, on the questions of dialectical materialism. One of the essences of dialectics is the understanding of contradictions, the fact that within the same phenomena there are contending contradictions, that you have a unity of the contradictions but at the same time you have the opposite of the contradictions, and that one or the other of the opposites must triumph. As an example of what we mean by that, you have the bourgeoisie and the working class. That's a unity in the sense that the bourgeoisie cannot exist without the working class. It's a contradiction in the sense that--I mean, the opposite of the contradiction is that clearly there can never be a solution of the differences between them as long as there's socialized labor and private appropriation. Ultimately one or the other will triumph; of course, we say socialized labor must triumph, that it is precisely that difference that brings about the class struggle. Well, as far as the labor movement is concerned, on the one hand, the trade unions are an instrument of class struggle, one of the most elementary and basic instruments for class struggle there is; but simultaneously they have become an instrument for providing a disciplined working class to the employers that allows them to have long--range planning for their product without any problem of labor strife. If you don't see that twofold instrument, that twofold contradiction, then you can't see the reality of what happens to the labor movement here. You saw it in '66--and this was part of what I said in my report [to the district convention] which caused such a storm. Proposition 14 was on the ballot that year; that was the [anti-open] housing initiative. And as you know the racists, the bigots, won.

GARDNER

Even though even Art Linkletter did television commercials against it.

HEALEY

And all the church people were united, and all the labor unions were ostensibly united against it. And yet in spite of that, it won, because the labor unions never really fought against the racism of their own members. They tried to argue on other questions as to why they should [reject] it. Of course, what is ironic about that as far as this inner--party debate was concerned, and as proof of this question that you could never discuss the weaknesses of the working class, that to discuss that was just a betrayal of Marxism: Mickey Lima, in writing an article on the California elections, mentioned the fact that a large number of the votes supporting Proposition 14 came from--or opposing it, whichever, I've forgotten which is the yea and nay on that . . .

GARDNER

"No" was the correct one [i.e., a vote for open housing].

HEALEY

. . . and voting for it were a large number of white working--class voters in the white working--class precincts. And that sentence was taken out of his article in Political Affairs. They just deleted it because that would indicate there was something wrong about the white working class.

GARDNER

What do you think is responsible for that? Do you think it was mostly racism, mostly backlash against the Blacks wanting to get an economic slice of the pie?

HEALEY

Oh, absolutely. I think the question of racism in our country is the single most important question domestically--the ability to whip up hysteria on it, the fear of Blacks, the hatred of Blacks--the most dangerous phenomenon holding up all social progress. The illustration I used of it, which I think is so indicative of how it is used demogogically to conceal the real interests of white workers, was when the New York Times was interviewing people on the unemployed line in Detroit during the 1972 elections: when they asked a white worker who was getting unemployment--who was out of a job, no prospect of a future job--what he considered the major issue facing him, he answered, "Busing." Not the fact that he had no job, that he didn't know how he was going to live, but the danger that his child might be bused to a school where Blacks were going. I don't think there's any question that can play--and does play--the same role of mobilizing the most reactionary emotions in defense of the most reactionary politics as that single issue of racism. And that's why it's got to be confronted as it influences the white working class because without that, every other program that you advance as far as the unions and the working class cannot be fulfilled as long as this question is left unsolved.

GARDNER

This is a--well, I should qualify my question before I ask it. Do you think that there's an economic base to racism, or is it just something that's ingrained in society and the separatism of Americans?

HEALEY

Well, the economic basis historically has been present there as far as the bourgeoisie is concerned in the fact of the huge gap of wages between Black workers and white workers. You know, where does that extra profit go? If they're doing the same work and yet the wages are so unequal, who gets it? The white worker doesn't get it; he doesn't get it, generally speaking. What he does get, of course, is the priority on jobs and the high--paid jobs because of his white skin. There's no question of that. That is present. However, even when there isn't a direct economic ratio that is present, by this time the ideology of racism is so dominant that it colors any other question, Another aspect of the economic interest that is ostensibly present--not really, but ostensibly present--was shown around Proposition 14. What was moving a lot of the white workers was the fact that California has more individually owned homes than any other state in the union. There was a fear that if Proposition 14 was defeated, then Blacks would live next door to them, would be their neighbors, and their property values would go down. The fact that statistics show that doesn't happen doesn't mean anything at all to them. The fear of it has become so dominant that reality is just unimportant; there's no longer any examination of the truth. Of course, this is a very interesting illustration of the fact that when that kind of ideology dominates, there is no longer an analysis of reality. The facts that challenge that are ignored by the mind, simply skipped over. This was also the year when the question of Black Power, "Black is Beautiful," first emerged. And this also became a subject of great debate, most particularly in the national convention. It just is really intriguing to me. One of the things the party had always correctly prided itself on in past years, the thirties and forties and fifties, was our sensitivity to what was new, to mass trends that were just starting to emerge. But by the sixties we had already become so frozen on some of these positions that we had lost this sensitivity. So then, for instance, around this question of Black power and Black consciousness, we were simply terrified by it. As part of this fight, I supported the question in the way in which SNCC was presenting it. I said that I thought that the way they were doing it did not inherently reject white allies, which is why we had always condemned what we called bourgeois nationalism, the Black nationalism which made the whites the main enemies. But it did insist that the whites' main role was to mobilize white people and not to braintrust the Black community, saying in effect that real Black and white unity could only be reached when Blacks were independently organized, that you can't have unity when Blacks have no independent identification because numerically they'll always be overwhelmed by the greater numbers of white people, and saying that inasmuch as most of our party, like most of the country, is white, the responsibility of the struggle within the party and in the mass movement was winning whites to an understanding of this. Well, this and the labor question became big fights at the national convention. The latter question of the Blacks was probably best dramatized when Jim Jackson, a Black leader of the party who had been the editor of the Daily Worker and, as I think I mentioned to you at an earlier point, had attacked Malcolm X in the early sixties at a point when he--Malcolm X--was just starting to develop his approach, Jim Jackson at a press conference held during the course of the convention (during the recesses of the convention, people would go out and meet with the press to tell them what was going on) attacked SNCC for having taken as its emblem the black panther, and said he thought it should have been the American eagle instead. It was really illustrative of the fact that what our critics on the left were saying was true. Just an enormous amount of opportunism and reformism and lack of revolutionary militancy and consciousness had crept into the party. This is not to say that we should have taken the position that many on the left took--I think this was true of Marcuse and others--who uncritically welcomed everything young people were doing on the ground that anything the youth did was right, or anything Blacks did was correct.

GARDNER

Well, the mere fact that they were acting after all these years was good enough.

HEALEY

Exactly, of course. And at a later convention of the party in 1969, the last convention at which I was present as a chairman of the party--chairperson of the party, although I refused to use that term--we had a big fight in Los Angeles over the use of the word Black. The young Black comrades were insisting that the older people should stop saying "Negro," which everyone was still saying, and recognize the emphasis around the word Black. And not only did you have white comrades, like I remember Pierre Mandel particularly who was just plain insulting on it, but you even had Black Communists like Bill Taylor attacking the use of the word Black.

GARDNER

Well, isn't part of that the fact that thirty, forty years ago, Black was as derogatory a term as Negro is now?

HEALEY

Sure. But again, as I say, a Communist usually is the most flexible of people in regard to what these concepts represented, new trends and new consciousness. And here you saw both Black and white Communists--of course, old people; you never saw that among the youth, only old people--just absolutely resisting and rejecting any change. Well, then, other questions that came up at that convention, still on my report to the Southern California district convention, [included] a question that I dealt with in some detail last time when I read you Khrushchev's private speech at the Rumanian Party Congress on the differences between China and the Soviet Union, in which I said that one of the things was this question of how you define the world, the epoch, the period in which we live. This was the first time I had challenged the way it was being dealt with. The line which Gus Hall was always repeating along with everybody else was that "the balance of forces has shifted in the world, and now world socialism is the new reality that determines the course of affairs." And I said, well, that's true in the long run--that will be true, that the world socialist movement will be it--but to say it now is to ignore the reality, the realities that are present. First of all, how does one explain socialism as the dominant [force] in the world . . . ? (Let me interrupt myself and say that one reason I really am taking the time to explain this thing is that lots of times debates among Communists seem so goddamned abstract and so unrelated to life and so scholastic--"How many angels dance on the head of a needle?"--but usually that's because the language conceals the real debate that's taking place. The debate is conducted with such cliched language that nobody but the initiate knows what's being debated. It's so esoteric that even our own members don't know the significance of what the debate is about.) So on this question, I said if that's true, if the balance of forces has shifted on the world scale, how does one explain the fact that a socialist country, namely, North Vietnam, is being bombed? If the balance of forces has shifted, it's not a capitalist country where war is going on, a [capitalist country] being attacked by socialism. It is a socialist country that is being bombed without the socialist world being able to prevent it. This was back in '66. Little did I dream that that would continue for six years. Secondly, how do we talk about the strength of the world socialist movement when it's split, when the split obviously has enabled U.S. imperialism to bomb a socialist country like North Vietnam? And then I again took on this happiness--boy Gus Hall's approach where on the question of the split he kept repeating over and over in the preconvention materials which we were debating, and I quote him now, that "the process of reunification is evident on all sides"--the reunification between China and the Soviet Union. I said that's just nonsense, that the process of reunification is not taking place, that not only is the split between China and the Soviet Union not healed but North Korea has obviously separated itself from other sectors of the socialist world; the differences continued and, in my opinion, would be sharpened. But most importantly I felt that what was not being recognized was the dominance of the world capitalist market as the most important thing, that when you say the balance of power has shifted to the socialist world, for a Marxist who looks first of all at the economic question to see what the underlying reality is, not to see that the world capitalist economy, the world capitalist market, was the dominant market was not to analyze then what its effect could be, first of all on the newly liberated countries (where were they going to turn to as far as their industrialization or their economic planning and future were concerned?), as well as the relationship with the socialist market and the socialist economy (what was going on with them?). I used as my example in 1966 the enormous setbacks in places like Ghana and Indonesia, where if the socialist market were the dominant market, if the socialist economy was the dominant economy, it would have been able to provide the all--out assistance to those countries which would have prevented U.S. imperialism from intervening. For instance, in Ghana, by depressing the price of cocoa on a world scale, they placed Ghana in an internal economic crisis which made it easier for them to get rid of [Kwame] Nkrumah. And I used other examples of that kind. Then I approached the question that, of course, was the most controversial of all and continues to be the single most controversial question, and that is what our approach should be toward the Soviet Union. How do we define internationalism? What I dealt with was the fact that--and I am quoting now--I said, "Our party has not developed an ability to be totally partisan and dedicated to the new social structures being built in fourteen socialist countries and yet simultaneously to be thoughtful and critical when the need arises." I kept insisting that the reason we had to have that approach was, first of all, to increase our ability to accept or reject experiences gained in the building of socialism for America. (What would American socialism base itself on? What would its approach be? How could one even discuss that without discussing the reality of socialism in these countries?) Secondly, that unless we were able to do that, we could not be a revolutionary party in our own country challenging our own imperialism because nobody would trust us or believe us, if we simply [acted] as a representative of some other country's foreign policy. Then I raised the question of what was happening to the Jews in the Soviet Union. What I said about that was that I felt that there had not been sufficient sensitivity on the status of the Jewish people in the Soviet Union, that I recognized that the issue had been deliberately built up in our country by professional anti--Sovieteers but that nevertheless, the fact remained that there was a basis for their ability to build up the hysteria. I compared it to the status of the Black people in the United States in that in Russia, historically, the Jewish people had been the main victims of Czarist tyranny, and the issue of anti--Semitism among masses of people had been used to divide the people. Then I insisted that while there was formal equality in the Soviet Union, that that was not sufficient, that what was needed was a recognition of the special needs of overcoming the centuries of anti--Semitism in Czarist Russia. For instance, it's one thing to have an antireligious approach toward all religions, which of course Marxism has, but when you're dealing with the religion of an oppressed people, clearly you cannot attack it in the same way as you attack, for instance, the Greek Orthodox Church, which had been the religion of the Czar and the Czarist establishment; clearly there is an emotional identification that is different. Secondly, in regard to the Jewish people, many questions which on the surface appear to be questions of religious identification are not. They are historical identification. For instance, you will find Jewish Communists in the United States who have seders at the time of Passover, not because they are religious but because it has by this time taken on a social implication that has nothing to do with religion, with an approach toward the belief in God or so forth; this is done by Jewish atheists. As I say, in my opinion there was in the Soviet Union a lack of sensitivity to what we would call in our language a true Leninist approach towards winning the confidence and trust of a minority of people who had been oppressed. I'm not going to deal with all the questions clearly that were debated because some were of peripheral importance. One thing I did do in regard to the youth was to take on the use of LSD and drugs and so forth as being a cop out that our youth ought to set an example in fighting against.

GARDNER

This is as early as 1966?

HEALEY

Yeah. Well, that had also come up in the debate with Bob Scheer. It's the one point where I clearly lost the sympathy of the audience. [laughter] One of the questions asked me was what I thought about marijuana and drugs and whatnot, and I'd said that obviously I can only speak shaped by the things that influenced and molded me in the past--it was clear that there was a new generation with new problems--but that, nevertheless, I felt that the drug culture was a dangerous culture, that revolutionaries who deified and/or utilized it were leading youth in a terribly wrong direction, that it was going to destroy a youth revolutionary movement. And Bob Scheer stood up and applauded the drug culture. No question that he had a far greater support from that audience than I did on that question. It was mainly a youth audience. Then I took on some of the questions of democratic centralism in the party. One thing I again took on, while I was never attacked for it, was clearly one of the things that they were most critical of. I took on one of the real myths of the party that was present in every party all over the world, seemingly based on what is called democratic centralism. All party constitutions provide the statement that the highest body of the Communist party between conventions of the party--conventions are supposedly the places where party policy is set--is the National Committee of the party. (Now, the National Committee is a very large body, much larger than-- I mean very large; I'm always comparatively speaking, but large.) And I said that's just nonsense. The large body does not make policy. People are gathered together from all parts of the country, they hear a report for the first time--the report is two hours long--then you get to take five or ten minutes to speak on one aspect or another of something that has taken two hours to hear. Clearly you're not having a discussion on all the issues; you're just speaking off the top of your mind. I said that the real leadership of the party is the operative leadership, which is always the smallest body of the party. In the party now it's called the politburo; we've gotten still more away from the terms we had started developing that related more to American experiences. In our own district, I said, the same thing is true; it's not our district committee that makes the policy--that's a body of sixty people which comes together once a month. The real body that makes policy is our board and our staff. Policy is made by the body that operates day by day. And we ought to stop the nonsense of saying that it's the National Committee or the district committee. Why don't we tell the truth? Oooh! That's like saying the emperor has no clothes--has the same reaction. This has a later significance. I dealt with my own campaign (that was the year I ran for assessor). I mentioned the fact that the results of the campaign had created enormous comment in the capitalist press, that one columnist after another, from the liberals like Paul Coates to the reactionaries like that donkey that writes in the Herald--what's his name? the guy that used to be a screenwriter. I can't remember anymore.

GARDNER

Morrie Ryskind?

HEALEY

Yeah. Morrie Ryskind. All of them had written. And Bill Buckley in the National Review. All over, there had been these comments how horrible, how dangerous this was, that people should realize the threat to America there was in the fact that a Communist had gotten such a high number of votes. I said that we had not made a very big campaign out of it ourselves; we had underestimated what its impact would be. I didn't say what was also true, that we were in no position really to independently put much strength behind the campaign. It was mainly what I did when I went around speaking at all kinds of places, radio and television, Birch Society organizations, and whatnot, depending primarily on voter recognition of my name because there"d been so much publicity. But we didn't have the forces really to separate out from what we considered the big mass campaigns. We didn't want to do that. With me as the candidate, there couldn't then be any criticism of the party later that we had underestimated it, because I made the decision we shouldn't give much support to my campaign. You can't do that when it's somebody else that's running. Well, when the campaign was over, the only comment we ever got from the national office--we never got anything from the national office, but Gil Green, who was the chairman of the party in New York, had sent a wire congratulating me on it. The reason I mention it now is that in a later attack on me Gus attacked the district and me for underestimating the significance of my vote and not paying any attention to how important it was. And you know, it was such demagogy, when they didn't pay any attention. They hated the whole thing, that it had been me that got this vote, because it was the wrong symbol for the party. Anybody else, they'd have been delighted, of course. It's the petty subjectivity that is present that is so rarely recognized in the revolutionary movement when people are talking about it. I said to you earlier that in regard to China and the Soviet Union, it's clear to anyone who knows the world Communist movement that part of it was [because] when Stalin died, Mao was absolutely convinced that he would then be the senior Marxist theoretician of the world. Nobody could compare to him. The fight between Foster and Browder, likewise, had so much of a personal subjective thing, just as Trotsky and Stalin had it. While one shouldn't allow it to dominate as the major reason for a lot of these things, to ignore it is to ignore part of the reality. As I say, in my own time I have seen this petty subjectivity that is really almost malice operating, depending on who the individual is and what is being fought about. Well, the resolution was passed by the [Los Angeles] convention with only two opposing votes and one abstention, and there were about 200 people at that convention. Now, of course that doesn't represent quite what it sounds like because there are a lot of people who'll vote for things simply because the leader is [advocating] them; they're so accustomed to accepting anything that the leader says that the vote would not necessarily represent a conscious political identification. But we had developed, as I said, through lots of great debates in the party and great openness in the debates, a very knowledgeable body of Communists who did know what the meaning of these issues was and who voted very consciously on them. Well, the FBI mimeographed [the report] and sent it around the country. This first produced a letter from Henry Winston to me which I still have, telling me that they [the National Secretariat] had discussed this. They didn't ever believe it was the FBI. They were really always convinced that I had done it myself. This is also how knowledgeable the FBI is; they really knew that they would think that, and they did. It never crossed my mind that they'd think I'd do a thing like that. A letter from Henry Winston [arrived] instructing me on behalf of the National Secretariat that I was to issue a public statement that our district had withdrawn that document, that I had withdrawn it as having been replaced by the national convention line, that that was not a line, that what I had to say was simply preconven--tion. I simply wrote back and said, "Sorry, I withdraw nothing." I wrote that after a big discussion in our district board and our district committee on what our position was. [tape recorder turned off] Well, the national convention of that year in New York was a very dramatic convention, as I say. First of all, it was the first one for so long. There were a large number of young people coming into the party then. There were big debates that took place on lots of questions. But the problem was always the fact that in the panels where these things were debated, people had great difficulty in debating the substance of questions; the ability of the leadership to utilize this prestige is really incredible, to stifle any real thought, the repetition of the same phrases over and over again-- which, as I say, do more to obscure reality than they do to illuminate it. Particularly the cliches around the working class, around which there's deep emotion in the party, or the Soviet Union, about which there's even greater emotion, make it almost impossible to. . . . Well, some of the things I remember that have some significance--I don't remember everything that happened. I was on the Resolutions Committee, and I was also the chairman of the Political Action Subcommittee, which was to bring in a report. The latter was a kind of--they had to do something about me because I was the chairman of the second largest district in the country. I had just gone through this election which, although they wanted to ignore it, the bourgeois press was building up. So they couldn't just ignore it. I went through a difficult thing. I lost my voice for the first time. Can you imagine? Me? Lost my voice. I think what happened is that I stayed in a hotel with the air conditioning on all night, and I think it affected me. It was boiling hot New York weather. At any rate, one big fight I remember in the Resolutions Committee was with Carl Winter over Indonesia. That was the year that a half a million Communists were killed in Indonesia. Young people, mobilized under the slogans of Islamism and "Drive out the atheists and the unbelievers," had been used for a literal bloodbath. The rivers of Indonesia were red with blood from the bodies that had been thrown into them. And illustrative of the things which don't appear publicly, which people don't know about and don't recognize on this question of the significance of the international relations and the role of the party, was the fact that in a really very naive, very ingenuous way, I had proposed a resolution in which we extended our solidarity to the Indonesian Communists who were under attack and condemned the murders, the coup d'etat that removed Sukarno and the murders of the Communists. And Carl Winter had opposed it, absolutely opposed it. Of course, I didn't at the moment even stop to think why he was doing it; I thought there must be some big reasons that I didn't understand. Only later did I understand that it was because the Soviet Union had not yet decided how it was going to treat this question, how it was going to handle it. It was really a significant thing in terms of our supposed internationalism, that we wouldn't just automatically and voluntarily speak up in indignation over this kind of horrible massacre. The second thing that was a big debate started first in our subcommittee on Political Action. When it came time to give the report, I couldn't give it because I'd lost my voice, but I wrote it out, typed out the report, and Si Gorsen gave it for me. Of significance there was the fact that I kept emphasizing that everybody, Gus Hall and everybody else in the country, was talking about this huge new radicalism in the country. I kept emphasizing that we had to look at the fact that none of it had yet resulted in mass organization, that it was still an ephemeral thing, people participating in the demonstrations but not joining anything. Until we'd looked at that problem and focused on it, we weren't going to think of answers for it. You could not build a radical movement that did not have a relationship with an organized mass movement, one which is not necessarily radical but which involves people on local, immediate issues that they can see. Well, there the only significant thing is that. I don't remember the other things that I dealt with in that report, but the interesting thing is showing again this continuity in regard to the personal subjectivity and the personalization of political fights, which always bewildered me because I never could understand. ... I mean, one fought, but one didn't have any personal reactions to it. It was actually when I later started to feel myself becoming highly personal that I decided it was time for me to get out of the leadership. Always before that, I had never, you know; a political fight was a political fight on ideas, nothing to do with whether you liked or disliked people. But as I say, typical of the kind of personal subjectivity is the fact that when the proceedings of that convention came out, mine was the only report that was not even mentioned, not referred to. All the others were dealt with. I was the nonperson in party history, which has now become even more so. But during that convention, or just preceding it-- just before it opened, actually--our delegation to the national convention, our members on the National Committee of the national convention, had been called into a special meeting with the National Secretariat in regard to my report, in which they were demanding that we repudiate it. This was after the letter from Winnie had arrived. We said/ why? Why does it need repudiation? And some of the examples that were given again illustrate what is not ever explicitly described or defined in histories of the party or in write--ups about the party. I remember one-- Hy Lumer started in, gave the report for the Secretariat as to what was wrong with the report--was that all through my report, and particularly in the opening, here was the first convention of the party that had taken place, and I paid tribute only to the fact that the bulk of the party membership had remained firm and stayed in the party all during these years. I did not pay any tribute to the role of Gus Hall as the general secretary in having been the leader of the party during those years. As I say, when you read any document, or most of the documents of Communist parties anywhere in the world--most particularly of the Soviet Union or of my own party--you will always find interlaced in every document quotes from the general secretary. In the Soviet Union now, it's [Leonid] Brezhnev; every other page has a quote from Brezhnev. And my party, you will see no matter what book or pamphlet is written, no matter what the subject, who writes it, there's always a quote, something Gus Hall said that you quote, too. I was just plain amused by it. The second example of its anti--Communist character came from Jim Jackson. In the report I'd said that Lenin's favorite poem was the poem of [Heinrich] Heine, the German poet, something about "Gray is the stuff of theory, while green is the tree of life." In other words, the emphasis on life is the only thing that determines the realities, not abstract theories. And Jim Jackson said, "How did you dare quote that? Don't you know that was Earl Browder's favorite quote?" [laughter] I mention these two things--!'m not being unfair, really; they're illustrative of the level of the debate. Again, with the exception of Bill Taylor--although Bill wasn't a member of the National Committee yet--all of us members of the National Committee from Los Angeles just rejected without any problem the demand, the pressure on us, to repudiate this report. We said it was a collective report, it expressed what collectively the comrades felt, and we were not going to withdraw it. I'll mention one other thing that happened there of some significance. That was a debate that took place in the National Executive Board in regard to the proposals to be made to the convention for the election of a new leadership, new in the sense of the incoming, not the outgoing leadership. That is important only because it opened my eyes to the question of what was also taking place behind the scenes. There were a number of people in the National Executive Board, the National Secretariat--those were the people on the Board who were the resident members of New York--who were people who had always been the leadership and were very nonproductive, either because of age or incompetence. There'd been a big debate in the Board because some of us kept insisting that in some respects the party was getting to be like the Steelworkers Union: once you got a job, you were in there for life. There was never any judgment as to what you accomplished, what you did, no review of the work. It was simply who you were, that if you were of this--the phrase Nemmy Sparks once used to me was "the old--school--tie bunch"--then you stayed on, no matter whether you ever accomplished a damn thing or not. This was true of people like Carl and Helen Winter; it was true of Jim Jackson, true of a number of other comrades. And what, as I say, really surprised me--shouldn't have, but again I really have always been incredibly naive about these questions and still remain in some respects--was Gus's insistence that these same people be placed back on. Not only were new young people not added, which is of course what we were fighting about; the young people had to be integrated physically, and you could only do that by--you know, two bodies cannot occupy the same place, the same position--by taking older ones out. I remember as again illustrative of the approach that Gus insisted that a guy from Oregon [Ralph Nelson], who was in his late seventies, be added to the Executive Board rather than the young man by the name of Don Hamerquist who was still in the party, was a very vital and important leader of the party and very respected among the youth, but who was also a very independent and critical thinker. And to watch that happen just horrified me. Its other significance was the fact that it convinced me that if I were going to continue to fight that old people had to get out of the way to make room for youth, I had to do the same thing--that I could not make the fight if I stayed in, because, after all, I'd been the leader of the party here in Southern California for almost a quarter of a century. It was ridiculous. Well. . . .

GARDNER

If that finishes that off, do you want to go ahead on to the trip?

HEALEY

Yeah. In about February or March of that year-- see, they, too, had to have a very ambivalent attitude toward me. I must have been a very terrible problem to them. On the one hand. . .

GARDNER

Don't use the past tense.

HEALEY

Yeah. But no, it was more so because then I was the chairman of the party and as such had a united district pretty much behind me. There was no way they could penetrate into here. And this was just terribly vexing. So I think--and this may be unkind to them--they proposed that I go with Hy Lumer as the representative of the party to the East German congress that was taking place--"fraternal representative," it's called. I think, in effect--and as I say, I may not be fair to them in this, but [I doubt it] because of the whole way they'd always reacted to me, particularly in trying to prevent me from attending these international things (while other members of the Executive Board went constantly to these things, I had only gone to nonofficial things in 1961), and this would be the first official thing I'd go to--they hoped it would be a sop. You know, I, too, could get all these travels and all these lovely little secondary fringe benefits that come from being a leadership of the party, what you get by going to the socialist countries, where you really are treated in just an enormously significant and luxurious way. So I went with Hy Lumer to East Germany, and that trip turned out to be a very significant mark in my relationship to the party and my role in the party and my understanding of the issues that had to be fought. Hy and I were just automatically placed on what is called the Presidium of the Congress--that is, all foreign representatives are made members of this honorary presidium. You don't do anything; all you do is you sit behind the speakers in a row of chairs.

GARDNER

Who were some of the others?

HEALEY

Of the people who were there? Well, the new general secretary of the French party [Georges Marchais] was there. I met for the first time a really wonderful guy from the Italian party who was there [Pietro Ingrao], and I'll tell you about him more in detail. I met the British Communist delegates, who just amazed me because they were so much more independent than my party was of these international pressures. And I met a guy from the Australian party [Rupert Lockwood].

1.33. TAPE NUMBER XVI, SIDE TWO MAY 2, 1973

HEALEY

And then at the Congress of the German Democratic Republic I met the delegation from Vietnam. Hy and I were invited to have a dinner meeting with them. What was particularly just overwhelming to me of that was that--I think I mentioned to you how shocked I had been by the kind of protocol that was present among Communists, dealing with people, leaders of the socialist countries. To me it was almost like a bourgeois kind of approach of diplomacy rather than a communist approach. The most obnoxious part of it was, when you met with any of these people of the socialist countries, the hierarchical way in which only the chairmen of the delegations of either side ever spoke, and everybody else was just supposed to sit quiet as onlookers. Even in the Chinese embassy [in Moscow] I had seen the same thing happen when I had visited their embassy in ‘61 with Arnold Johnson. But the Vietnamese were totally unlike that. The leader of their delegation was a member of the Politburo, and there were about five others. First of all, they had no such protocol among themselves. All of them talked; all of them participated without any hierarchical rank being observed. And they treated us the same way. Unlike the others, where the only questions were always addressed to Hy Lumer, here they just naturally and casually included me in and so forth. I was simply--I mean, the fact that it could happen confirmed my feeling that it should happen, that this was not an unusual thing, that there was nothing ordained that this other nonsense had to be the dominant atmosphere. And it was nonsense. There were a couple of other amusing things, before I go into the substance, and that was with Brezhnev. Brezhnev was there representing the Soviet party. I didn't recognize him. I'd heard his name, God knows; I knew who he was. But I didn't recognize him. And twice in the course of the recesses of the congress, we were going downstairs to where the refreshments were in the general hall where people just talked and relaxed away from the congress; twice as we were going down, I was on the stairs next to him, and each time he embraced me and kissed me. Finally the comrade whom I was sitting next to in the Presidium, a representative of the Belgian Communist party, the editor of their paper, who was a very cynical guy, said to me, "My God, you certainly must rate!" I said, "Who, me? Why?" And he said, "Well, to be kissed twice!" I said, "Well, what's that? It's just somebody being polite and friendly." He said, "Don't you know who was kissing you?" And I said, "No, who was it?" He says, "That was Brezhnev!" And I said, "My God! No, really?" [laughter] Anyway, he was simply overwhelmed that I hadn't even known it. Of course, I was just amused by the fact that it was clearly-- It had no meaning at all. He said, "You're not a very political person." [laughter] It is customary among comrades to embrace. Well, the congress itself, I found a very disturbing thing. It was the first time I'd seen the congress of another party, and particularly of a party in power, and I found it very disturbing. First of all, in its--Well, I guess I can best illustrate it by what happened. In the course of his speech, [Walter] Ulbricht made some announcement about how wages of the workers were to be raised so much now, and the head of the East German trade unions stood up to thank Comrade Ulbricht on behalf of the German working class for this great approach. I was just furious, What the hell kind of nonsense is this, that Ulbricht decides what the wages were to be? Where's the role of the East German trade unions in regard to it? Secondly, the canned speeches--which is the only way I can describe it, this goddamned jargon, the cant that has grown up in the world movement, these shorthand phrases that are supposed to explain all of reality but don't tell you a damn thing. They're just cliches that one person after another uses. One saw that likewise in the language that was used by the foreign parties in their greetings. Underneath the surface, one of the big issues that was being fought about--which you'd never know unless somebody told you, because you'd never tell by those speeches-- was what attitude the eastern socialist countries should take towards trade relations with West Germany. The East Germans were fighting for a position that no eastern socialist country should independently go ahead with any relations with West Germany until West Germany recognized the independent existence of the sovereign state of East Germany. But the eastern socialist countries had their own problems. They were all having great economic problems, were desperately in need of western technology, and therefore there was a great pressure among them to do that. And one saw that in the debates. As I say, one didn't see it unless you already knew. It was like the old saying about how you can't tell who's playing without a roster, a baseball roster; you wouldn't know what the debate was about unless somebody already clued you in to the meaning of the debate. In this case the Belgian editor was explaining to me what was really being said underneath all those identical sounding words. The Rumanians were the first ones to challenge this on the basis of their own needs, that they had to do it. That was probably the biggest thing that was at that point being debated. The other thing, of an American party character, that I remember is that Hy Lumer and I were together, but Hy was the chairman of our two--person delegation, which meant that he gave the greetings on behalf of our party to the congress. And here what happened was really again only significant as illustrative of this marching to the same tune no matter what the realities are. While at that congress, I had met and had long sessions with the Laotian Communists; it was the first time I'd ever had any such experience. These were the things that made these congresses and these internationals so exciting you're meeting person to person with all these people whom you only know from general newspaper reading or reports about what's going on. They were beautiful, wonderful human beings. They described in great detail what the United States was doing to their country, the fact that actually the bombs had started to fall on them before they started to fall on Vietnam, the meaning of it and the tragedy of it. Well, Hy Lumer, out of party courtesy, came to show me the speech he was going to give to the congress as the fraternal visitor's speech on behalf of our party. Aside from the fact that I thought all these speeches were an intrusion on the time of the congress--the German delegates didn't get a chance to take the floor because the foreigners took so much time up on this canned stuff. . . . But I read his speech. It was about the question of Vietnam and the bombing and our support, our solidarity for Vietnam. So I said, "Well, I think you ought to add Laos to it. I mean, after all, bombing's going on there, too." "I will not," says Hy. "That's not what our emphasis is. Our emphasis is solely on Vietnam, and I'm going to keep it on that." Well, as I say, really what he had to say or didn't have to say doesn't have any world--shaking importance to anybody except Hy Lumer, because nobody else cared or paid any attention to these speeches. But again, as I say, only illustrative of this one problem--it had only that limited significance. Although it also was significant of our relationship. I mean, clearly if I had been Carl Winter or Gus Hall, someone on, quote, "his side," he would have been more responsive to any suggestion I made. But there was no suggestion I could make that he would have accepted, even one so obvious as that one. Well, other things that happened on that trip There was an East German woman comrade who had been assigned to be with me, be my interpreter and so forth, Ursula [Herzberg]. And as had happened in the Soviet Union in 1961 with the woman comrades I met there, within half an hour we were very, very close and warm together, as sisters would be. I say that very deliberately, that choice of words. We found that we thought alike and reacted alike. Through her I got to see some of the reality of the existence, because ordinarily a tourist to any country, and I don't care where it is, unless you have some prior knowledge or some help when you get there, you really don't know what you're seeing and what it means one way or another. She was a very independent thinker and very much bothered by the contrasts, the challenges of the contrasts of what was taking place in the DDR. On the one hand, the country was more prosperous than any other socialist country. For one thing, the Soviet Union, after the 1963 revolts in East Germany, had allocated an enormous amount of funds to help. Secondly, the East German working class was a trained and disciplined working class as to how to produce, which was not true of many of the socialist countries where the working class came from peasantry and had never worked in the factory, had never been disciplined by factory life. Third, it was a working class that had been subdued by Hitlerism in the sense that it was used to working without complaint. And just working, working, working. There were great inner debates taking place that were not apparent and were not being discussed at all in the congress as far as any foreigner could understand--now, again, I'm sure that underneath the surface they were being reflected--on such questions as the approach toward culture. I had met the guy who was at that point the minister of culture when I arrived; when Hy and I arrived at the airport, he had been part of the welcoming and we got to know one another. He was a man who had absolutely no concept of cultural questions, of aesthetic questions. He couldn't have cared less. He was simply an overseer to make sure that the right things were being filmed, printed and said. We'd get, he and I, into quite a sharp fight when we'd go to receptions--he and I were always seated next to one another; I really don't know why--over questions of culture and the approach toward cultural things. They had just destroyed millions of dollars of film on the ground that it was all revisionist film, that it was soft on the West and conciliatory and whatnot. Secondly, they were carrying on an enormous attack against Stefan Heym, the American man--originally of German birth-- who had gone back to Germany in 1950 at the time of the Korean War, given up his American citizenship, taken out German citizenship, as a protest against our war in Korea, and who was a pretty free--swinging Communist. There were and still are enormous battles against him on the ground that he was also a rightist and a revisionist. Those terms have very little scientific meaning. It depends on what you're trying to prove as to who you call a revisionist or a dogmatist. So we argued about that, and at a later point I met with Stefan Heym and his wife, Gertrude. She was the head of Seven Seas Publishing House, an old--time American Communist. They also then filled me in with many details of what was really happening, particularly in terms of the questions of socialist democracy, which is the base of both the party and the state, a socialist state, as far as the access to knowledge, the ability to debate publicly, to debate openly, the freedom of debate in Germany, in any socialist country. Then, just before May Day, one of the important German woman Communists who was the deputy minister of finance and who was also on this presidium--I remember her as a very huge woman; she must have been about five feet ten and was big in size as she was in length--had come over to me and extended an invitation to me to come to dinner at her home on the night of May Day after the demonstration. I had been rather unwilling to go because my usual reaction to meeting with big--name leaders of this kind is that it's a waste of time. Nobody talks candidly or frankly, and it's just protocol, and I was really totally bored by it. But politeness impelled me to say yes, I would come, and so I did. It turned out to be very interesting and again proved an old point of mine, that if you indicate yourself that you have some independent thinking and analysis, that you're not just repeating by rote all of the famous sayings, that then there will be some people in the leadership in these countries who will open up and candidly discuss the problems, or at least a little more candidly than would otherwise appear. When I came to her house, the first thing she asked me is what I thought of the May Day parade. I said to her, "Well, frankly, if you want an honest reaction, I was shocked by it. Why the hell have you brought back the goose step? Why do you have an army that goose--steps? Why did you revive that again? And secondly, the lack of enthusiasm of the people was clear." "Well," she said, "on the goose step, you know, there are many of us who feel the same way." What ensued was that the German Communists who had been in exile during Hitlerism in the West, in England or in Canada, were first of all under great suspicion when they returned to Germany, were not necessarily trusted as being good Communists. That even went for Gerhart Eisler, who had returned, as you know, from the Soviet Union after getting away from U.S. imprisonment, escaping and getting in. She said, "You know, we know what the goose step means to other people, what it represents. But the Communists who had been in exile either in the Soviet Union or the people who joined the party after 1945 don't realize it. They do it because they say this is the way to show the continuity of the history of Germany, that this is what the German army always used to do in the past, therefore we should do it again. We can't stand it either." Then she said, "Well, what are your other impressions?" I said, "Well, you know, I'm really very shocked by your television and your radio. You're faced with a problem that no other socialist country has here in Berlin because people are right across the border in West Berlin and your people with a flick of the knob can tune into West Berlin television and radio, and they can hear it. You've got to compete, in other words. The other socialist countries don't have to compete. They have a monopoly. If people don't want to watch their television or radio, there's nothing. Unless they listen to BBC or something like that, there's nothing else they can get. But you've got that problem." "Oh," she says, "you must go over and talk to Gerhart Eisler about this because he's in charge of radio and television."

GARDNER:

He still was then?

HEALEY:

Yeah. She said, "I want you to go right now." And I said, "Oh, no, I'm not going to intrude. I mean after all, who am I? I wouldn't think of doing a thing like that." "Oh," she says, "you must. He's not like that. He'll want to talk to you." She immediately called for a car, called Gerhart, and he said, "Yes, indeed. Have her come over." She called for a car, and I was driven over there from her house. And that, too, was an interesting revelation of the problems that are underneath the surface. The first thing he asked me was why I had not accompanied Hy Lumer when he had a meeting with Albert Norden, a member of the German Politburo, one of the top leaders of the East German party. I said, "Well, I wasn't invited." "Well," he says, "that's what I thought. Therefore, although Hy Lumer is trying to have an appointment with me, I'm not going to see him either. If he plays games like that, I will not be a party to him." He says, "You go right ahead and tell him you've seen me even though he hasn't. That'll teach him a lesson." And I looked at him (My God, a human being, this is strange to me!). Then he said, "I hear you have comments in regard to our television and radio. What are they?" So I said to him what I felt. He said--his wife Hilda was there, and clearly she was also very unhappy about the things that were taking place. Both of them, of course, spoke excellent English. He said, "Well, you know, one doesn't have a free hand in doing what one wants to do." Then clearly the question came up of the fact that he, too, had waited years to even be elected to the Central Committee. Even though he was of such international fame because of his exile in the West, he might not necessarily be pure enough. And clearly he was also a man who thought independently. He said, "You know, one cannot unilaterally do what one thinks is necessary. There is the collective that decides, and I'm outvoted. I know that we're not competing, but even though ostensibly I'm in charge, there's nothing I can do about it."

GARDNER:

What was he like physically?

HEALEY

He was a very small man. You'd have passed him by anytime without ever noticing him a second time. Very inconspicuous.

GARDNER

He must have been quite old by that time, too.

HEALEY

I don't think he was that old. I would say he was probably in his sixties, although I'm not sure. Of course, the question of age depends on where you are.

GARDNER

It's all relative, isn't it?

HEALEY

That's right.

GARDNER

You hadn't known him before.

HEALEY

No, I hadn't met him in the United States.

GARDNER

Had you been involved at all with Hanns Eisler and with that whole affair?

HEALEY

No, not with any of them. (The only international representative I'd met--I think I mentioned it in the beginning--was this guy from the Soviet Union, the representative of the Young Communist International who later committed suicide rather than return to the Soviet Union. This was during the purges; he knew what would probably be in stock for him. That was Max.) Anyway, then he started asking me about the American party, with which he was very familiar, of course, because he had spent years here. He said, "I don't understand. Don't you have any intellectuals in your leadership who could provide more thoughtful analyses and more intellectuality to the process?" I said, "Well, the only intellectuals we have are people--I mean, if you want to use the word intellectual, I think it's wrong--like Hy Lumer; after all, he has a PhD " He says, "No, no, I mean real intellectuals. What about Herbert Aptheker?" I said, "Well, although the bourgeois papers called him the party's intellectual ..."

GARDNER

Theoretician.

HEALEY

"... the theoretician, that's really not true. He's not in the leadership of the party, that is, the top leadership." (He was on the National Committee.) "And he's not involved. And secondly, you're faced really with the more important problem that whether it's a Herbert Aptheker or anybody else of this kind, they consider their main duty to provide the intellectual rationale for whatever the current party line is, and therefore their competence in their fields means nothing because that's never the important question. The important question is how you justify a line. So that whether he was on the Secretariat or not wouldn't have made any difference, in my opinion." But he [Eisler] was very knowledgeable and, as I say, very critical of what the status of the party was. Then I met a whole number of other Americans who lived in East Germany either as exiles from this country or as people who worked there. Most interesting was Ollie Harrington, the Black cartoonist, the man who'd started the cartoon "Bootsey" in the Pittsburgh Courier, and who lived both there and also had a home in Paris. He was also very revealing on some of the problems, told me that when he had tried to discuss what he thought were questions of chauvinism with Henry Winston when he came through, or with other leading Communists, they just simply wouldn't listen to him because it was impossible that within a socialist country these problems could exist; therefore, if you said they existed, you were just inaccurate or a revisionist or a liar or any other choice, pejorative word. But he did arrange for me to go on German radio, he and three other Black people who lived there, because they wanted me to be interviewed on what was the meaning of this whole surge about Black power, what it meant. There was great fear and hatred of it as far as the German radio people were concerned, and the party leadership as a whole. They didn't understand it; they thought it must be nationalism that was all directed against whites. So I got on radio and discussed it, was interviewed. Then Hy and I were supposed to go to all kinds of other cities together as representatives of the party. I just plain didn't want to. I didn't want to for two reasons. One, I knew very well that on those trips when you're going in that way as the official delegates, you are--it's true, you're treated really incredibly. You have a police escort, and you're wined and dined and toasted and felted, and they give you all kinds of presents and whatnot, and you make speeches--but you're not seeing the reality of the country. I'd learned from my trip to the Soviet Union that the best thing was to stay in one place and sink roots, get to know something about that one city, and then maybe you'd know something about the reality, rather than seeing the surface of a dozen cities. So even though I was curious about the physical characteristics of the rest of East Germany, I wanted to stay right there where I was in Berlin, particularly because Ursula was taking me around and telling me what was really happening. [With us were] her own children, one of whom was a student of twenty--three or twenty--four who was describing to me the great cultural clashes as they expressed themselves among the students. The East Germans had just passed a regulation that the folk singers--he was a folk singer-- could only sing a certain proportion of Western folk songs, even if they came from the Left. They had to have 80 percent that were German, and you had to report at the end of each night what percentage you had sung. They changed the names of the clubs that the young people frequented. [The young people] had used names that came out of the old American folk--singing past; they'd used words like "hootenanny." And party leadership insisted that they no longer use phrases like that, that they use good German phrases. Of course, hanging over everything was Berlin, the division of Berlin, the division of the country. It's just an ominous, overwhelming, ever--present thing that you could feel in the air. I want to be careful in my judgments about the DDK for that reason, that Berlin is not the most representative of all places because a divided city is a kind of psychotic city. This influenced everything. There's no question of the fact that the U.S. and West German imperialists were using Berlin as a deliberate thrust into East [Germany], and also no question that they were doing everything they could to subvert and carry through activities against the interests of the socialist country. For instance, around the question of the Berlin Wall, which I went down to visit, there's no doubt that there was a validity to why they [the East Germans] had felt they had to put it up. What was going on was that as a very deliberate thing the skilled workers and professionals from East Berlin were being wooed to come over to work [in West Germany] for enormously high salaries subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, salaries that socialist Germany couldn't afford; this was a deliberate brain drain that was going on. Secondly, the people who lived in West Berlin were being encouraged to go across the line to buy their groceries and the other things that they shopped for to live on in East Berlin because the state subsidy of the food and clothing and so forth made everything much cheaper; but that was a drain on German currency and was therefore a very inflationary thing. There's no question that spies, saboteurs, all that has come out since, were a real threat to the existence of the socialist Germany. But added to their intransigence and their dogmatism and their inflexibility, I kind of shocked them, I think, when I went down to see the wall. Every guest writes in a book, anything you want. I had written, "To the day when all frontiers disappear and therefore all walls are eliminated." That evidently was not considered very nice to do at that point. I had really not done it to be mischievous. I thought it was a very correct communist perspective. But the big thing that started to emerge in my interviews with people--as I say, I had broken away, refused to go with Hy on these trips because I didn't want the official tour, and I refused to be treated as a delegate; I just wandered around by myself with Ursula helping me--was that what I call Prussian communism was there. I could understand the great pressures and threats against them, but that the reaction to it was really Prussianism and that. ... I remember being particularly struck by the curious kind of split approach, the split personality on the one hand, I remember [Erich] Honecker, who is now at the head of the East German government, speaking at the German congress and saying, "In our country we see the definition of socialism is the freedom of each individual"; but just at that point they had removed from all offices as a teacher in membership of the society a man by the name of Haberman, a philosopher, because they felt that he was threatening the purity of German socialism. Of course, as I say, what makes the tourist have such a hard time seeing the reality is that the East Germans, more than any other socialist country, have a group of people to act as your translators and interpreters and delegates and whatnot to take you around--all English--speaking, of course, very, very lovely, warmhearted individuals. And you think that they really represent all that is new in socialism. You don't realize that they are really there to do that kind of a job. It's very hard to arrive at an independent analysis of what is going on, on the one hand not to disregard the legitimate problems and hardships they face in building; and yet, on the other hand, not to try to glorify or gloss over some of the very rigid and sectarian reactions to it, particularly around this question of socialist democracy. On the cultural thing, just one postscript that was again revealing to me. They took a number of us western delegates from Canada and the United States and England to a nightclub. Here they are carrying on this campaign against "bourgeois culture" (that meant Stefan Heym's books and the folk singing and all these things I've indicated, the movies), and yet the entertainment at this nightclub could have been done in New York City. It was the most vulgar, sexual entertainment.

GARDNER

Really? Folies--Bergere sort of thing?

HEALEY

Yeah, that sort of thing. Seminude women and vulgar jokes, all around sex questions. I remember one young man from the university, a German, with whom I'd been conducting a big argument on questions of the party and Marxism and culture. He was just loving it. I said to him, "My God, how do you reconcile this kind of junk, which really corrupts human beings and debases them, with your fight against what you call bourgeois culture? You've taken the worst of bourgeois culture, not the best, that which has enduring value." But again, as I say, it was only a vignette that was illustrative of what bothered me.

GARDNER

So East Berlin was really the only place you went then in Germany.

HEALEY

No I went to another. I went to a steel town, Eisenstadt I think it was called. But that was typically one of those trips which reveal absolutely nothing to you. You see lots of buildings; you see the steel mill; you see the housing; you talk to people. But you're not getting any feeling of anything, unless that's what you want to get carried away with, which most people do. That's not very important to me.

GARDNER

And then Czechoslovakia was next?

HEALEY

I said I wanted to go from Germany to Czecho --slovakia. Actually one of the reasons;I wanted to go was that I had a friend there. One of the Hollywood black-- listees, Paul Jarrico, was living in Czechoslovakia with his French wife [Yvette], who spoke Czechoslovakian and had lived there.

GARDNER

In Prague?

HEALEY

In Prague, from 1953 or --4 on--'52. And I wanted to meet them. Oh, I should mention, before I got to Czechoslovakia I had interviews backstage in the party hotel where I was staying with all these delegates of foreign countries. One of them besides the Laotian one was interesting and had some significance. I interviewed first of all the Egyptians. [tape recorder turned off] The Egyptian whom I interviewed was a man by the name-- He was just a fraternal delegate, he was not representing any party. He was from the Arab Socialist Union, but he was not a Communist. His name was Hussein Zulfacar Sabry. He went into a very long description to me of what was taking place in Egypt-- this was, of course, while [Gamal Abdal] Nasser was alive--in which he described the UAR as in a period of transition going through a noncapitalist path towards some kind of a socialist perspective. It would not necessarily be, he said, under the leadership of the working class, but through an alliance of class forces in which no one class would be dominant. He described how under Nasser there had been this great change as far as the peasants were concerned, that land had been given, that the villages had been democratized and so forth. I have the full interview here, but just a couple of things are of significance. One thing he said about Palestine was that for thousands of years it had been an Arab country, that "The Hebrews who lived there were Semites like us," he said. "They were simply Arabs, as far as we were concerned, of Jewish faith." And that there1d never been any trouble historically between the Arabs and the Jews until Zionism as an ideology and as a political force had taken over, that they were creating a state there that is pulling the heartstring of Jews all over the world because of the murder of the 6 million Jews during the war. But the fact is that the dominance of Israel is coming not from the people who had lived there all these years as Jews, but it is coming from the East European Jews who are dominating and controlling the future of it, that this is what is creating the problem, that they would have no problem with the Israelis who had lived there historically. He said that actually the Jews who come from the Oriental countries are treated as second--class citizens. Then he described all the examples of what the present leadership meant. [David] Ben--Gurion came from Poland, [Abba] Eban from South Africa, and he said, as a matter of fact, that Eban was stationed as a part of the South African army in Egypt in World War II. They have a great respect for many American Jews who fight against this question, and he mentioned a Rabbi Berger--whom I don't know anything about. Then he said they are trying to create a nationality where there is none, that the Palestinian refugees legally own 75 percent of the land and that what is important is for Jews on a world scale--radical Jews--to see that Israel is a capitalist state and not a socialist state. Well, then I talked to a guy from the Communist party in Syria. [tape recorder turned off] His name was Chari Badr. He had become a Communist when he was nineteen years of age in an Israeli jail and had been recruited by a Jewish Communist. But after a long description of what was taking place in Syria--which is interesting as far as that history--what he was particularly trying to emphasize was the great differences with the UAR, the United Arab Republic, and with Nasser. And he was really very contemptuous as a Communist of what was happening there. "As an example," he said, "the differences that we have with the UAR"--and he's talking now about not only the [Communist] party, but the Balath party, which was the dominant party--"is that we do not use religion as a dominating thing to mobilize, but we see the importance of the role of the working class and build on that importance." He says, "In Egypt the agrarian question, the peasantry, is not seen from a Marxist viewpoint because there still is the emphasis on the private owner-- ship of the land. The Arab Socialist Union is really led by the officers of the army and Nasser, and what has really taken place is that the old members of the old feudalist classes still control the Arab Socialist Union in the villages. But," he says, "as regards the approach toward Israel, as a Communist what differentiates our approach from others is that while it's true all Communists see Israel as being a kind of cat's--paw for imperialism and a major obstacle to our country's development towards socialism, we have a different approach from the others in trying to solve the problem. They"--meaning the UAR and even the Baath party--"think that they can solve it by waging a national war of invading Israel. But we do not agree with that. We see that we have to live together as one people, as we used to, and that there has to be a solidarity with the working class of Israel, that we have a common struggle. The problem of the Palestinians is a very complicated one. Whenever you have a situation where one people come and push another out. ... It is true that Arabs have lived in Palestine for five to six hundred years, but it is also true that 3,000 years ago the Jews were there. However," and then he then also repeated what the Egyptian had said, "what we mainly now see taking place is that the leadership of Israel is not indigenous to the area but is made up of the European Jews. However, we are also pressed by the feelings of the masses of people who see Israel as the main enemy, and any attempt at conciliation is looked upon as a betrayal of Palestinian issues. Frankly, my own feeling is that in the beginning it should have been set up as a federal state with two nations, a binational state with two national states. And," he says, "let me assure you, we are not for pushing Israel into the sea." Don't forget all the debate on what took place over the Six--Day War. I was in Europe when all that publicity was taking place.

GARDNER

So this would be about the month before.

HEALEY

Yes, it was in May.

GARDNER

About when Nasser was asking the United Nations to pull out.

HEALEY

Right, and when all the big propaganda was taking place, what people were saying the Egyptians were going to do to the Israelis and whatnot. But, as I say, what--well, I gave you it wrong. His full name--I guess it's all right to give it; he wrote it out later for me--was Abdul Ahmad, and he lived in Latakia in Syria. ["Chari Badr" was his pseudonym.] What interested me, however, was his sharp criticism of the Egyptians, really almost a contempt that they parade as radicals and revolutionaries, not true in his opinion. It was the first time I ever was even aware of such things. Oh, one other thing I must mention from East Germany. I met with John Peet, who is the editor of the East German Report. He's an English journalist who now lives and has lived for years in East Germany, in Berlin, who was married to a woman by the name of Georgia, a Bulgarian woman, who was in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. She and Peet, she particularly, had been advisers on the film Judgment at Nuremburg, giving the authentic details and history and so forth of what had happened in the concentration camps. They told me stories that just curled my hair, just shocked me, describing what had happened, how German Jewish Communists after the Nazi--Soviet pact had been deported from the Soviet Union to Germany and turned over to Hitler as part of the pact. Georgia had said that the only way you could exist and live through the concentration camp was if some of the groups took you under their wing and protected you. In other words, if you were part of an organized group, you could survive, unless there was a total extermination. Because the Communists had been the first ones arrested, they were usually the senior people in the concentration camp; they'd been there the longest. When these German Jews arrived, there was a big debate among the old German Communists, including Jews, as to what attitude to take toward them. The fact that they had been deported by Stalin meant that they must be enemies--obviously the Soviet Union and Stalin would never send back good Communists to Hitler--and therefore they refused to protect them and defend them and make them a part of their group. Therefore they were all killed. She lived through it because she was protected. She'd been a volunteer in Spain.

GARDNER

What was her name?

HEALEY

Georgia.

1.34. TAPE NUMBER: XVII, SIDE ONE JUNE 1, 1973

GARDNER

When we left off last time, Dorothy, you were about to embark from East Germany, I believe it was, to Czechoslovakia. Could you talk about that?

HEALEY

Right. The visit to Czechoslovakia in May of 1967 probably, as I look back now, produced a changing point in my political life and thinking, not because what I heard when I got to Czechoslovakia was anything novel but because of the people from whom it came. In other words, what I heard from leaders in Czechoslovakia were thoughts, ideas, concepts, programs that coincided with a great deal of my thinking but which I never expected to hear from Communist leaders in a socialist country. It was that that was so totally startling to me. To start at the beginning of that trip, when I arrived at the airport, I was met by two friends of mine, one of whom I had known very well here in Los Angeles and the other, his wife, whom I'd met in New York. The man was Paul Jarrico, one of the blacklisted screenwriters, who had married a Frenchwoman, Yvette. Yvette had been in Czechoslovakia all during the 1950s and as a matter of fact had been a translator during the Slansky trials. Perhaps the flavor of the woman can best be described by quoting a conversation I had with her before I got to Czechoslovakia. I asked her, after she described to me the tragic, monstrous events involved around the Slansky trials, the arrest and conviction and murder--Slansky as the general secretary of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia in the early fifties--of him and other notable Communist leaders. I asked her how it was that after all she had seen and witnessed of such, really, as I say, monstrous proportions, how she would now describe her political beliefs. She said, "I haven't changed my political beliefs at all. I still believe in socialism. These things that I'm telling you about," she said, "these are our tragedies. These are the tragedies which come from that which is new and has not yet been able to develop a mature approach on how to build socialism in these countries. There is no alternative, however, to that as the perspective, inasmuch as the existing alternative is simply the acceptance of capitalism, and that is a far greater wrong and monstrosity than the mistakes that we make in the socialist countries." I mention this to you because this question of political balance always is essential to me when viewing the problems of the socialist world. I had long ago made up my mind that because one was horrified and outraged and indignant over the injustices committed by our people--meaning in the socialist countries--more so than one would be in some respects by those committed in capitalist countries, because in capitalist countries you expect it (after all, that's why you're a Communist in the first place, because you hate what is present under capitalism), but I'd seen too many Communists who because they were outraged by the injustices and crimes under socialism thereupon became so simply cynical and apathetic that they in effect moved back to capitalist positions, and I was determined that this was not the course I could believe in. When I heard her say this, I was really very much impressed. I mention all this because it was through her that I came in contact with a group of people who were already among the most influential in debating when I was there, and then a year later in carrying out what became known as Prague Spring or, to use the other shorthand expression for it, what became known as "Socialism with a Human Face."

GARDNER

What was Paul Jarrico doing there?

HEALEY

Paul was writing screenplays, not for use in Czechoslovakia but for Europe, for England and also France--and Hollywood, if he could. They lived in Czechoslovakia six months of the year and England six months of the year. They could not come to America. She could not come to America because when she'd come in on a visitor's pass with Paul, she was ordered out of the country because of her own political background and could not come back in. Well, when I landed at the airport, as I say, Paul and Yvette were there. Paul was carrying a big sign, "Welcome to my Leader!" [laughter] Also present, however, at the airport was a representative of the Central Committee of the Czech Communist party, the international department, which is the department always in charge of foreign visitors. I don't remember the name of the guy from the international department any longer, although I saw him almost every day of the time I was in Czechoslovakia. A real political square--very nice, but not very perceptive. He told Paul that they would have to see me later, that he had to take me to the party hotel where I was going to be staying. So we made arrangements--I arranged with Paul and Yvette that I would see them later--and I was driven with this representative of the Central Committee to the party hotel. This is the hotel where all international visitors of any prominence stay. In other words, tourists can't stay there. There's no sign that identifies the hotel, and there's no way that the passerby would even know what it is, but it is a hotel in the middle of Prague. On the way in, I explained to the comrade that I was not in Czechoslovakia officially, as I had been in the German Democratic Republic; I was there on my own, and that while I had credentials establishing me as a member of the National Executive Board of the party, I wanted to be on my own. I did not want to see Czechoslovakia as a political delegate. I appreciated their putting me up in the hotel, but I did not want the usual services that were accorded you where you are taken to all the factories and you visit all the institutions of culture.

GARDNER

You'd seen enough factories for the time being.

HEALEY

I'd seen enough. He was somewhat taken aback, but, after all, there was not much he could say about it. As I say, almost every day he observed his international obligations by coming to the hotel and having either breakfast or lunch or dinner with me, as the case may be, and he usually brought with him a representative of the international department, a young man. And the three of us would mainly sit and argue whenever they did come. At any rate, Yvette was in contact through her long activities in Czechoslovakia with the group headed by a man by the name of Radovan Richta. This group that he headed was an interdisciplinary research team that had been set up by the Czech Academy of Sciences to debate and discuss, among other things, power in a socialist country. How do you guarantee that the party--ostensibly the whole party--does not become the sole expression of the governing of a country? How do you deal with the very well known fact that even within the party, it is not the party as a whole that does this but the very top leadership of the party, what is known in Communist parties as the Politburo, which is the top political body in every country. She introduced me first to a man by the name of Ota Klein. Ota was a sociologist, a man of--I would say he was around my age, a well-traveled man, and a very cynical man. You must understand, [Antonin] Novotny was still the leader of the party; there were always jokes being told about him everywhere. The most common one was "The reason Czechoslovakia has escaped the cult of the personality is because we don't have a personality around whom to have a cult." Novotny had been both the head of the state and the head of the party ever since Slansky's execution. Absolutely held in contempt by the majority of both Communists and non-Communists. Czechoslovakia's a country where in 1963--the only socialist country where a recognized economic crisis had taken place. This is ironic in that Czechoslovakia was the only one of the Eastern European countries that was an industrial country, the only one with both a trained working class, an experienced working class, and a history of bourgeois democracy. Ota Klein, as I say, was the first one I met, a sociologist. He was the one who really took me around to show me just the physical sights of Prague. It's, I think, the most beautiful city I've ever been in. I kept saying when I came back here that it's really a city for young lovers. It has that kind of beauty that really deserves young people in love going hand in hand around it, a really beautiful place. The contrast of the old and the new is remarkable. But then Ota took me out to the Writers' Castle some miles outside of Prague where Radovan Richta, the head of the team, was staying at a tubercular sanitarium not very far from the Writers' Castle. The Writers' Castle itself was a very exciting thing to see, a very beautiful old castle that had been turned over to the Writers Union. What happened there was that writers would stay there as writers in residence while they were writing their books. The day I was taken out there, as I say, there was Ota Klein, there was Radovan, who--when I say he was the head of the team, he was the head only literally in that he had the overall responsibility for this very strange interdisciplinary project (strange for Communists) which had been authorized by the Academy of Sciences, as I say, to debate the one question, power under socialism. What do you do to make it democratic? Accompanying us as well was--just looking at the list of names, let's see.

GARDNER

What is that document, by the way?

HEALEY

The document I'm looking at is called Civilization at the Crossroads: The Social and Human Implications of the Scientific and Technological Revolution. It was produced by this team with Radovan Richta at the head. As I say, they just adored him. They considered him just a spiritual and intellectual leader, and there's no doubt that he was. Accompanying me, besides Ota, there was a man by the name of Bedrich Levcik, who was an economist, as well as a lawyer whose name I have forgotten (I don't see it listed here.) [Zdenek Jicinsky]. There was one little amusing byplay on our way out there with the economist. He asked me about my son, Richard, whether he was a Communist, and I said, "No, he says that in his opinion the only way to defend Marxism and to develop it is to stay outside of the Communist party." The economist laughed and said, "Well, that's nice. When you live in a socialist country--my son-in-law, who knows nothing at all about Marxism and couldn't care less, will join the Communist party and be one of its most stalwart members." So we both laughed at the irony of it. I got out to the castle and met with a whole number of them who were working on the team. We spent the day and they described to me the problems that they were debating and what they saw as the problems--in the first place, this problem, as I've indicated, that the Politburo has the authority over anything else, that there's no system of socialist checks and balances. I'm not interested in ours, but theirs, [one which would] provide that power cannot be corrupting. There was also a very major question that they faced, a very interesting one. They had the problem--they're not alone in it, but there it was very pronounced--that because of the theories of an egalitarian society, that everyone is equal, and because of the definition that theirs was a working-class society, unskilled workers in the factories were earning as much, if not more, many times more, than any professor or any scientist, any doctor, any professional. Therefore young workers felt absolutely no incentive to go on to study in any professional or scientific field. Why should they? They were already earning as much as anything comparable to what any future scientific or professional degree would give them. The problem they had to face is that you cannot clearly build a society that is going to have an advanced economic base, which requires the most advanced cultural and scientific knowledge, unless there is the knowledge that is provided primarily through academic study. Yet how do you do that in a society where there's no incentive to do it outside of the spiritual incentive? Here there was the question debated that spiritual incentive--in other words, the desire to create simply because it is rewarding, not because you are compensated for it financially--is something that affects a minority of people. But you don't move the majority by that until you have a whole new society, and they knew they didn't have one. So it was this combination of problems that they had to discuss. [They discussed] the fact that the leadership of the party and therefore the leadership in the factories, the leadership in institutes, all too often represented people who might be "reliable politically," reliable in the sense of unthinking, unquestioning, unchallenging, always faithful to whatever the last political word was, but not competent to advance toward a scientific future. Therefore they had this terrible contradiction in the society of the recognition that they had to have this approach toward education as the prerequisite for reaching a higher stage of society, as compared with the egalitarian theories, "It's a workers' society--the workers are the ones who run it--but education is not unimportant." Well, I had just, as you remember, come in from East Germany. Now, while East Germany technically was more advanced economically than the other socialist countries, in part because the Soviet Union had extended a great deal of their seven-year plans to guarantee that there'd be no more revolts from below, as had happened in 1953, and in part also because they also had an educated working class-- educated in the sense of factory discipline (I'm not talking about any professional, scientific knowledge)--the atmosphere of East Germany, as I told you, had just simply shriveled me. As far as I was concerned, I had seen Prussian communism, and while I could understand its background and its reasons, it just shriveled my spirit. I was very dubious as to what the future would hold unless something happened that made them change.

GARDNER

As an aside, do you think that's happened?

HEALEY

Well, some things have happened clearly in East Germany, from the little I've read. But it's always hard to know whether to believe what you've read, because I know what fairy tales visitors are given, or partial fairy tales. As I told you before, some of what the visitors see is true. It's not just a Potemkin's village, a make-believe, that's thrown up for visitors. But it isn't the whole truth. So it's very hard to tell how much loosening up there has been. Really, there have to have been some, or they would not have entered into the relationships with West Germany and whatnot, to what extent, I don't know. At any rate, I sat there in that castle that day, absolutely stunned, listening to these Czech Communists--and they were all members of the party for long years, most of their lives--debate the very questions that had so disturbed me ever since the Twentieth Congress, if I were to try to date it. And at the end of the day, I remember it was rather amusing. After Radovan, who was the main spokesman, and the others had all participated, they turned to me and they said very politely, "Well, Comrade Healey, do you have any questions you'd like to ask us?" I felt a little self-conscious. I mean, here were these people who obviously were enormously better equipped than I was in any field of activity. I said, "Well, yes, there are two questions that are in my mind, The first is, you are talking about the fact that you have to find a way to insure that the Politburo of the party will not exercise unilateral power as it now does, How do you propose to convince them to give up their powers? When did any ruling committee ever voluntarily give up its authority, its power? The second question is how do you propose to go so far ahead of the Soviet Union in democratizing? How will you be able to carry it out?" Well, they burst into laughter, all of them, and I felt so embarrassed, I thought, "Oh, dear, now I've shown my ignorance, how provincial I am, this person from L.A." And Radovan turned to me and he said, "Dear Comrade Healey, would you mind asking us any other two questions? Those two questions we ourselves don't know the answers to yet." [laughter] And another thing was very clear as I traveled around: the credibility gap that existed, the same I had found in East Germany, as far as the youth were concerned and the pronunciamentos of the party through the newspapers or through the radio and. television or the trade union leaders or anything else. It's a very important question because it's also true in the Soviet Union; I know from my experiences there. When they continually din into people one official line on every question, even when what they're saying may be the truth, the youth stop believing them. They don't believe anything any longer. They have told them so many untruths about the things that they can check up in their daily life of what is going on that when they tell them even the truth about international events, they don't believe it. As an example, take the war in Vietnam. I was utterly amazed to run across people, Communists even, but particularly among the youth, who really didn't believe that the war was an imperialist war, that the United States was an imperialist aggressor. They didn't know anything, really, about it, but they were not prepared to believe that for one main reason: their government was telling them that. Their radio was telling them that. Because they didn't believe them on other things, they therefore wouldn't believe them on that. I say this because all those radical youth and others who later went into Czechoslovakia, talked to others and then came back so scornful that the demands weren't revolutionary didn't realize how many things would have to be undone before they found what they could believe in and trust and put their idealism to work at. This was really marked at a farewell party I attended the last night I was in Prague at Yvette's and Paul's apartment. There were about twenty people there. Half of them were members of the Communist party who were working on this team or who were associated with it in one way or another or high governmental officials. The other half were cultural figures--artists, writers, singers--who were not party members. The most incredible kind of conversation developed. I mention it because it goes again to explain some of the psychological political problems that developed in 1968. A writer by the name of Vladimir Valenta--I'm not sure of that spelling; that's my memory--had just come back from Spain. He started telling me--I wasn't sure whether he was serious or not, and I got very exasperated--how he felt that there was more freedom in Spain than there was in Czechoslovakia. Now, I should add all of those people either had been in prison during the fifties themselves, or their relatives had been. There wasn't one untouched by it. As Valdimir starts telling me how he found more liberty in Spain, I said, "What the hell are you talking about? How can you make such a statement?" I was really very indignant. "Well," he says, "you could see signs written all over the walls, 'U.S. Out of Vietnam,' 'Stop Bombing Vietnam.' You won't see that here. As a matter of fact, here if a demonstration is to take place because of Vietnam, even against the American Embassy, it's all very carefully arranged ahead of time. The embassy is phoned ahead of time by the Ministry of the Police and told about it, and it's all very neat and polite and respectable and kept within bounds. No real honest indignation is present here, as different from Spain, where honest people honestly [oppose the war]." Well, we started to get into a sharp and violent argument about it, but it turned into a debate on the questions of all the arrests in Czechoslovakia, what was present in Czechoslovakia as far as the definition of the society. I was interested to see that the very Communists who in discussions with me were the most critical about what was wrong, when they discussed it with these non-Communists started to get very defensive and refused to recognize any of the same criticisms they were making. I know what was present because I find it in myself even now when I discuss questions of the Soviet Union or other socialist countries. I know that when I'm being critical I do it within the framework of great partisanship toward the Soviet Union. I trust myself on it. But when I hear others criticizing the Soviet Union, I get uneasy because I think, "Well, theirs will be a distorted criticism. They don't understand the framework of the positive advances made by socialism." And that's what these Czech Communists were doing, almost as a reflex action that could not be controlled.

GARDNER

Like a family almost.

HEALEY

Right, exactly. Right. You stand together against the outside critic, even though between yourselves you're quite willing to be critical and fight.

GARDNER

Were there inklings of 1968 there, though?

HEALEY

Well, I wasn't sure. I look back and I wonder. One thing was absolutely clear: the dissatisfaction, the mass dissatisfaction. The discontent was so great that I knew--anybody would know, the most casual observer--that something was going to have to give, something would take place. Now, even while I was there, they were very proud. . . . For instance, this guy from the Central Committee came to see me one day. The things he would boast about to me probably would not be the same things he would boast about if it were a different kind of American party representative he was talking to. With me he boasted over the fact that hundreds of thousands of Czech citizens were given visas to travel abroad, unlike East Germany or the Soviet Union, and all came back; they traveled abroad and came back. He was very proud of that. But outside of people like him and his coworkers-- I mean, outside of the apparatchiki, the official representatives--there was nowhere you went that you didn't feel the enormous discontent. Simultaneously there was a great cultural revival taking place, or the beginnings of one in Prague. Prague was a world city of cultural fame, and deservedly. I went to a number of productions there--plays, symphonies--and there was just no question of the cultural excitement that was in the air, of the ideas that were even then starting to bubble forth. But if you had asked me when I left Prague whether the events that led to Novotny's removal in December of '67 and January of 1968 could have taken place so fast, I would not have believed it could happen so fast. Of course, that, too, is a big lesson--that one never knows either how near one is or how far one is from rapid change. You cannot estimate it accurately.

GARDNER

Did you have any contact at all with [Alexander] Dubcek, or knowledge of him?

HEALEY

No, I never even heard his name while I was there. My other very close friends while I was there [were] a man by the name of George [Shaw] Wheeler and his wife Eleanor Wheeler. They were Americans. George had been in the American military government in Germany after World War II, and when he saw what was happening, the re-Nazification of Germany, that all of the same old nonsense was starting all over again, he publicly denounced it, held a press conference and denounced it; and then, since he was clearly going to be arrested on all kinds of serious charges, he and Eleanor left West Germany and went to Czechoslovakia in 1947 and raised their family in Czechoslovakia. Now, George was the only foreigner who had ever been made an associate member of the Academy of Sciences. It's the top prestigious body and very hard to get into. I had not been going to look him up when I got to Prague. He used to write articles, he and Eleanor both, for the Daily Worker and the People's World. I had kind of concluded in my mind that it would be a waste of time to talk to him, that it would be another one of these Pollyanna stories that I was always running across, that everything here was the best, the most wonderful, and I really was just bored with listening to that kind of nonsense. But then George had had an article appear in the Political Affairs for February of 1967, dealing with the problems of agriculture in a socialist country, that absolutely stunned me. There were all kinds of critical remarks, clearly an awareness of the problems of bureaucracy and the heavy-handed bureaucracy in producing change--stifling change, that is--the heavy hand of bureaucracy in having incompetence, total incompetence, in charge of decisive areas of social and economic life. So I decided, "Well, Jesus, maybe the man isn't just another Pollyanna." I called him up, and he and Eleanor came down to the hotel where I was staying. They came in about ten in the morning, and we must have sat there in the lobby talking until ten that night, both of them of them just pouring out the daily experiences--as I say, that a foreigner (I don't care how experienced they are and how much they know politically) just wouldn't know, and would have no way of knowing, the nuances of life that tell you more than any statistic can tell you as to what problems are present that have not yet been overcome. There was one other person I met that again made a big impact on me, a man who was the head of the Czech radio. I had credentials from KPFK as I traveled because one of the things I wanted to do was to make arrangements with all the socialist countries to send cultural and/or political recordings to KPFK for exchange use. So I had sent him word through this guy from the Central Committee that I wanted to see him. I only remember his first name, Karol. He came to see me; he was very patronizing when he came in: "Another American Communist." He was very blunt. He said, "Look, you people come here on these party delegations. You see socialism through the windows of a limousine. You're toured around. What the hell do you know about our life? What do you know about our problems?" He spoke English very well; he'd been here in the United States for a very short time. And he spoke with great derision of how the American Communists whom he had met, including some Czech-American Communists, lived in a fairytale world, believing myths that just didn't reflect the reality of socialist life. Well, when I left I was simply the most excited person in the world, because for the first time I had met Communists talking about real problems and not engaging in this mythology. I went from Czechoslovakia to Moscow. When I got to Moscow, I was met at the airport, as always, by all the visiting--as I have told you, everything is very hierarchical depending on your title, and I was still a member of the National Executive Board, so that meant that my comparable counterparts of the Soviet party in the international department met me. You must understand one thing that's very wonderful about traveling that way--as I say, if you have a sense of humor and a certain sense of reality, you see the other part--but the one part that's just lovely [is], you never have to worry about your luggage; you never have to worry about transportation; you never have to worry about anything. You put your suitcases outside your room at night and they appear at your hotel the next day in the next city you're going to be in. You never had to think of a thing of that kind. [laughter] Well, they took me into the party hotel room in Moscow, and when I got there, there was an American delegation there headed by Helen Winter. Evidently they were all just really practically at one another's throats when I met them--which happens quite frequently with delegations, You live in a very close and tense circumstance. The pressure of the time, the way a delegation is treated-- particularly in the Soviet Union--is very intense. You're constantly on the go. You never get a minute to relax, to think over, to ponder over anything. You're either seeing factories or museums or libraries or interviews with official bodies, all of whom lecture at you and tell you all the statistics of their particular field. I've never yet seen a delegation that was not physically absolutely totally exhausted and emotionally depleted as well. So many impressions superimposed on top of one another: there was just no time to draw conclusions from it. So when I walked into the hotel and there were a number of comrades on that particular delegation whom I had known from before, they were all really very hostile--and particularly hostile about Helen, who considered herself the chaperone, duenna, and political chastity holder of everybody on there. They told me a hilarious story when they came to my room late at night, some of the women on the delegation, how when they arrived in Moscow, for some reason the party greeters from the Soviet party were delayed getting out there. So they're standing in this airport, the Moscow airport, and Helen refuses to let them talk to a single person, one Soviet person, or anybody who approaches them because, she says, "You must remember the CIA is everywhere. We might fall into the hands of the CIA by mistake." [laughter] I just loved it. Well, it was clear that my reputation--I mean, already when I was there in '61, they had a very ambivalent approach toward me. On the one hand, the ones on the top who I was in a lot of contact with, I think--I'm pretty sure--respected the fact that when they talked to me, I didn't give them the usual "Dear comrades, you've got paradise on earth, and you are the Jesus Christs who have come among us to bring knowledge." I was very candid with them. On the other hand, they were equally horrified by me, and concerned, you know, being careful. A couple of things happened, none of any great moment. I did not want to travel around the Soviet Union again. I was anxious to go directly from the Soviet Union to Western Europe, which I had not been able to see in 1961 because then I'd come straight home. I stayed there, I guess, a total of a week.

GARDNER

Where did you go in Western Europe?

HEALEY

I went to Italy and then to Paris. I'll tell you about that. But, anyway, a couple of interesting [things]--and they're significant again only in that they indicate this question of hierarchy in top diplomacy that, as I say, I think is just such a hindrance to establishing communist relationships, using really almost a substitution of bourgeois hierarchical standards rather than communist relations. Helen Winter, who was the head of the delegation, was at that time not a member of either what would be called the Secretariat or the Political Committee or the Politburo--the words were used interchangeably. But she was the chairman of this particular delegation. She came to my room one night and said, "Look, Dorothy, would you do me a favor? I have told the comrades here that I'm a member of the Secretariat because it makes it easier to deal with under those circumstances. Would you please not indicate that I am not? If they ask you anything, please do not in any way give away the fact that I'm not." I looked at her and laughed and said, "Well, if you enjoy those kind of fairy stories, I'll not say anything. I couldn't care less." I was furious at her and told her so over another thing. She and I had dinner with the Soviet comrades from the international department whom we'd meet with. The four of us would eat dinner alone several times during the week. (Again, I had to be included because of my title. She didn't want me, and I'm sure they would have just as Isoon excluded me], but there was no way not to do it as long as I was already in Moscow. They couldn't exclude me; I mean, it wouldn't be nice. It was not proper. That's really the word, not proper to do it.) I was furious to listen to the kind of remarks she was making to them about people--very nasty, behind-the-back sort of attacks on people. So at the end of one of these dinners, I finally said, "Look, I've sat silent now through two of these when you've done this. I don't want you to interpret my silence as meaning agreement. I think it is stupid and scurrilous, and I don't agree with it. I just want you to know so." But I did not at any time reveal the fact that she had been untruthful in her describing her own political position.

GARDNER

Which probably wouldn't have been reciprocal.

HEALEY

Oh, no, you're absolutely right. Of course not. I'm sure I'm one of the people whom, when I wasn't there, she described in lurid detail. [laughter] But the kind of thing that takes place as a result of it--I'm talking now of physical arrangements: when we all went to leave Moscow on a Monday morning, Helen and a few other people whom she'd selected were given the honor of going on to other socialist countries to visit them, and as I say, some of the other people on the delegation just had to go directly home because there was no provision, they were not included on these trips. Helen had the sole authority to decide who'd get to go and not, which exasperated me, too. But I had already come, and I didn't want to go back. Anyway, so we got to go out to the airport. Because Helen was a member now of the Secretariat, they thought, she was taken out privately in a limousine, while everybody else was sent out in one of the buses. Not a public bus, of course--vans, like we have here, too, that took the rest of the delegation to Moscow. Just this physical differentiation, which I thought was simply hilarious. And sad--both funny and sad simultaneously. The only other thing that happened while I was in Moscow was that Hy Lumer came in while I was there. As I told you, Hy and I had been official representatives of the American party to the East German party's congress. When he arrived, we were taken to the building of the Central Committee to meet with one of the people in the international department who was to brief us on the current status of the relationship with China. We listened for two hours to this guy's explanation of what was taking place--the Cultural Revolution had already started--what it meant. Some of it was, to me, an accurate analysis in terms of the fact that the Cultural Revolution at that time was really not cultural. It was really a negation of what a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint would be on the continuity of culture, the continuity of knowledge. But I was also very annoyed by the factional approaches. For instance, when he was through with this two-hour briefing, I said to him, "Well, what do you think are the general problems that are present in the socialist world that allow first for a Stalin cult to develop and then, in China, for a Mao cult to develop?" He looked at me, and he was just horrified. He said, "What do you mean? There's nothing at all comparable between them. There's nothing the same. Stalin never hurt the party. He injured and killed people, individuals who were in the party. But Mao is destroying the Communist party. Therefore, there's nothing at all between them." As I say, I laughed. It was so typical of the one-sided approaches. At any rate, it was clear that I was not going to see some of the people whom I wanted to see. I did have some long conversations with some individuals, and most important of all, a man--his first name was Rupert--who was the Australian Communist party's newspaper representative in Moscow, who lived there year-round and had his own apartment and so forth. He and I had become very friendly in Berlin; he had represented the party there. He was another one who saw Moscow from within and not just with a visitor's eyes. He arranged two parties for me at his apartment where I could meet Soviet leaders, Soviet representatives, who would discuss honestly some of the problems. The most important was a man who wrote under the pen name of Ernst Henri, who had written a book in the 1930s called Hitler Over Russia, who I discovered when I met him had been in a party concentration camp in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. When I saw him, he was a man of about seventy-six, a very scholarly, very knowledgeable man. We started talking and talking and talking, and when he left the apartment at midnight that night, he bent over, kissed me, and said, "My God, you don't know what it means to find that there is someone who is a leader of another party who sees through the problems, who is not taken in by the propaganda, who realizes that we face a common task of saving Marxism-Leninism, of rescuing it from the hands of those who are using it to dwarf the building of socialism." I remember being almost in tears listening to this old man and watching him leave, even though I would probably never again see him, because I was sure I'd never be back in the Soviet Union. I left Moscow on a Monday morning to fly to Italy. When I got to Italy I went to the party headquarters to introduce myself. I had a credential signed by Gus Hall and Henry Winston--who I was, asking for the mutual courtesies that are extended. I then made contact with Communists who are among the most impressive that I have found anywhere in the world.

1.35. TAPE NUMBER: XVII, SIDE TWO JUNE 1, 1973

GARDNER

Okay, if you just want to pick up in Rome.

HEALEY

The first person I met in the Italian Communist party's leadership is a woman by the name of Dina Forti. Dina was the deputy director of the Italian party's international department, a woman maybe a few years younger than I am (I'm not positive), just an extraordinary human being, a thoughtful, intelligent, analytical, warm human. She was the one mainly responsible for scheduling my trip, whom I talked to, whom I'd interview and so forth. The first interview she arranged was with the people in the Central Committee who were responsible for the party organization itself, the organizational department of the party, because I was very curious as to how the Italian party functioned. The thing that stood out really in my discussions both with Dina, with these comrades, with others whom I met, and wherever I traveled in Italy, was the total honesty of the answers that they would give to my questions. I talked to party leaders who traveled here in the United States whom I met; I later talked with those in France. Of course, when you're in Moscow--even when I was in East Germany--when you stay at these party hotels, you're meeting party leaders from everywhere in the world. What impressed me about the Italians was their absolute candor. There were no forbidden questions as far as they were concerned, and there was none of this nonsense about protocol, which I so disliked and resented. I remember, for instance, with this first interview I had, I was not asking easy questions. The main thing that interested me was the most difficult problem that the Italian party faces. Here is this huge party. And I said to them, "How do you keep a revolutionary elan, a revolutionary spirit, in this large party when you're always poised on the brink of victory but never achieve victory? You don't have a qualitative change in your relationship to society." They said, "You know, comrade, that is the most difficult question we face." The problem always is, particularly with a large party, a mass party such as they have, that of avoiding either extreme, either the party becoming accustomed to always working within the framework of bourgeois democracy, within the framework of what is, and the danger that that brings of reformism, of taking for granted that what is is the only thing that can be; or the other, which is a policy of adventurism, of saying, "Well, you cannot forever tolerate the existence of what is; you've got to make the revolutionary stab to change it." And if it is not a period when you can do that, when you're doing it simply based on your own will and not on the objective conditions (a crisis of a social, political or economic quality that brings into question the whole society), then you destroy all that you've built up. You've made the valiant effort and wiped away all your gains and lost your credibility to the mass of the working class. They said, "What we have to have is the most intensive and constant--first of all, party education in making sure that Marxism stays alive, and," they said, "constant, open debate." This, of course, is what I found the most remarkable about them. There was absolutely no question of the differences that existed in their leadership being concealed from their membership, as they are in any other party I know, in the name of democratic centralism, that when the higher body voted on something, you were duty-bound only to present that position and not your own private position. Well, when they had debates in their Central Committee, they printed them on the front page of the party newspaper. I was absolutely astounded by it. What it meant was that the party membership learned to think. It had to differentiate between the positions of various leaders. For instance, I met only one of the two leaders of the two different positions within the party. There were two most notable: One was a man by the name of Amendola; the other was Pietro Ingrao. In rough political terms, Amendola was to the right, Ingrao was to the left-- and that's right-left within party parlance, not in any other. But they openly, publicly debated their differences. And party membership could read and understand those differences and decide what position they'd take on it. Which, of course, to me is in the genuine Leninist tradition because that is precisely what happened to the Bolshevik party. It was even true in the Soviet Union after the revolution until 1928, that differences were publicly debated. They had other things that were unique to their party that were interesting. One of the things I'm not entirely sure of, but I was nevertheless impressed by it. One of the big things that's supposed to differentiate a Leninist party from any other kind of Marxist party--in other words, a Marxist-Leninist party--is the fact that everybody who belongs to it must be an activist and participate in carrying out action. Well, they really have a party within the party in Italy. I would say that out of their whatever it is, million, 2 million members--I don't remember the exact figure--a large number of those are simply people who once a year may attend a meeting and once a year pay their year's dues for membership. Then within that, there was the core, the cadre of the party, the people who function to initiate and carry out, apply, whatever, their local bodies or the Central Committee or whatever it may be. But this is very unusual. I asked them why they did it. They said, "Well, you know, in Italy there's a tradition that every Italian belongs to some political party. If we didn't make our membership open to this loose kind of membership, then there are many Italians who just by virtue of the custom of belonging to a party would join one of the other parties. This way, by our making ourselves open, they join us. Then comes the challenge to us, whether we are able to carry through the process by which they move from this periphery around the party into really becoming part of the cadre of the party. That's our challenge. We then have to meet it. But if we did not have them within the party, we would not be able to then carry through that constant dialectical struggle for them in large numbers, moving them always from the outer to the inner." The third problem that I discussed with them, and I discussed this in the provinces when I traveled around as well, was a problem that all parties in capitalist countries have, and that is what we call shop clubs. Those are the clubs of Communists working in factories, again, according to traditional Leninist doctrine, the most important clubs of the party. And yet I knew from my experience in my party, and I was sure they couldn't be too different in any capitalist country, that there are great difficulties in the way those clubs function in factories. After all, all the life of a worker doesn't take place within the factory; a lot of it takes place in his community. All too often, actually, the shop club becomes almost a refuge from the rest of the political activities which the party is carrying on in the community, whether it be some mass campaign against the war or an election campaign, whatever it is. Thirdly, they tend to become what in party language is called "economists," that is, they concern themselves solely with the internal questions of the union, the factory, the economic questions, and not the general broad political questions that affect all Communists, or should. Well, the Italians had experimented, were experimenting--and I don't know what conclusions they currently have on it, but [this was going on] while I was there--with a dual system of membership, that a member of a factory club also belonged to his community club and once a month had to attend a meeting of the community club. [This was only] if he was already part of those that were considered the cadre--in other words, not this loose fringe. So that there was the interaction and interrelationship between where the worker lived and where the worker worked. I thought it was fascinating and thoughtful and intelligent. It seemed to me very obviously a good thing to do. I was always surprised that no other party really experimented on a large scale with it. Maybe they have by now, but I haven't heard about it. One of the places I visited--first they sent me to Florence, and there--well, first, as always, you go on the cultural tour. Everything about Italy fascinated me. I loved it; I adored it. First of all, the contrast with the old--you know, old beyond anything that an American can visualize. The aqueducts that had been built by the Romans, you know, in absolute splendid condition. Everything. The Vatican--I was absolutely charmed by everything I saw, and, to this day I don't know whether my great affection and respect just for Italy as Italy came because of my political response to the Italian Communists, or whether it would have come just as a cultural effect no matter what the party was like.

GARDNER

Even if you'd been visiting in Mussolini's time.

HEALEY

That's right, I can't separate it out. It was so intermingled.

GARDNER

Were they your hosts really for the whole time? Did they show you around?

HEALEY

Yes. They showed me around. Now, as different from the French party or from the other socialist countries where I visited, there I paid all my own expenses. The Italian party did not pay for it except they'd take me out to dinner and things like that. When I went to Florence and when I went later to Perugia, they paid my train fare as a guest because everybody who ever accompanied me from their party as a translator had the tickets. But they didn't pay for my hotel or anything like that, which, as I say, the other parties did. I was glad even about that. There seemed to me to be something good and correct about it.

GARDNER

So what did you visit?

HEALEY

Well, first, as I say, I went to Florence. In addition to falling in love with all the great things that anybody would fall in love with in Florence, the beauty, when I arrived, the leaders of the party in Florence greeted me, along with the Young Communist League. Again the same kind of very candid discussion--no flowery speeches about the greater grandeur of the party but always the emphasis on the problems they faced. They really carried out this definition of Gramsci's, of a revolutionary having optimism of the will and pessimism of the mind. They were always aware of the problems, the obstacles, the difficulties of what they still had to carry through, the challenge before them. And yet, of course, [they also had] this great serenity of spirit, the confidence in their party, the confidence in the Italian masses. They had good reason to feel that way. In Rome itself I had attended one major antiwar demonstration against the war in Vietnam. Of course, what was so unique to me as an American was the breadth of the opposition to it. I mean, speaking on a platform of the Italian Communists were the representatives of outstanding cultural and political leaders of every trend. They'd asked me to speak at the antiwar demonstration, representing the American peace movement, and I'd objected. I said, "First of all, I'm not a representative of the American peace movement, and secondly, I really don't feel up to it at this point." I'd just arrived; it was the second day I was there. Well, later, when I got to Perugia, there was to be a march from Perugia to Assisi, and I had agreed that I'd speak at the end of that march at the demonstration in Assisi. Well, again, I sound like a babbling tourist because I cannot separate out of my mind, my memory, this combination of the beauty of the countryside, the charm and the grandeur of the combination of the old and the new. But the old, of course, was always the most impressive to me as an American because it's an oldness, an ancient culture, that we Americans can't have any knowledge of. None of the books I'd read really prepared me for the impact on me. While I was in Perugia, the comrade I was traveling with invited me to go to dinner that night, the first night--the march was the next day. At the dinner was this man Pietro Ingrao, the leader of what was called the left within the party, on the Central Committee and the Politburo. We discovered when we sat there talking that he had been at the East German congress just as I had been. And in my usual indiscreet way, I started saying what I thought of that East German congress, how appalled I'd been by it. He started to grin, and all barriers were immediately down. He didn't speak English-- we talked through interpreters--but it was just as if we'd known one another all our lives and shared an identical outlook on everything. We marched, as I say, from Perugia to Assisi, and the demonstration culminated the huge, long march. Of course, I couldn't do all that marching--it was about ten miles or so--and they were very concerned about me. Every two or three miles they'd take me out of the line of march and have me ride for a while and then put me back in the line of march. The foreign comrade just didn't have the stamina that they had. They marched, all the way, including the leaders. [laughter] The march, as I say, culminated in a huge field way up high and adjacent to an old monastery. When I got up there, I noticed that the Maoist youth had written across it, in that indelible writing that our youth also used to use, some slogan, "Down with U.S. Imperialism," whatever it was. I don't remember what it was. But what had struck my mind was really the fact of the hurt that the other Italians felt at this desecrating of something. It had no religious significance to them; it was a cultural symbol of the past, the continuity of their past. The vandalism of it, the needless vandalism. You could have all the signs you wanted anywhere; it didn't have to be on a monastery wall. At any rate, I spoke there, and the only reason I mention it to you is that it brought me under the firsthand scrutiny and attention of the Italian counterpart of the FBI. [laughter] When I got back to Rome--I was staying at a little tiny hotel, I guess you'd call it. It was about two blocks away from the Communist party headquarters in Rome. Nobody spoke English at all; it was very, very small and very, very inexpensive. I was up on the third floor, and every morning I'd come down and go across the little tiny alley--I used to call it a street, but to us it would be just like an alley--and I'd have coffee and something for breakfast. It was very inexpensive, always. Well, when I came down the first morning after I spoke at Assisi, the people who owned the place or ran it--I don't know which it was--were clearly very, very disturbed. When I came in--it was a stand-up place, you know, two chairs, but mostly people stood up--I could see that they were very upset, but I didn't know why. I looked around, and there I saw two men, and they looked just like the FBI would look in America. [laughter] I mean, the minute I looked at them I thought, "Oh, Lord. I'm back home." They all look alike, no matter what country you go to. [laughter] I don't care what country it is; the secret service or the internal police--these were the state policemen--they always physically resemble one another. Well, I saw that they started to follow me everywhere I went. I had fun for a while. I'd duck away. For instance, traffic in Rome is incredible. Crossing a Roman street is an act of bravery or stupidity, I was never really sure which. Well, to try to just give them difficulty--there was nothing I was doing that was secret, of course, and nothing I had to worry about, but I don't like police of any country--I'd make a dart across the street; twice I got stuck in the middle of the street, and they came rushing after me to stop traffic and take me across to the other side. I'd jump on a streetcar, a trolley, and they'd come onto it. I'd get off the other end real fast; they'd get off the other end real fast and come after me. Finally, as I was walking down the street they came up abreast of me, and one said to me, "Not like FBI, not like FBI. Not at all, FBI. Simpatico, simpatico." I said, "Simpatico yourself. Get away from me, I don't want anything to do with you." "No, no, no, no, you don't understand. Simpatico." "Never mind, I'm not simpatico with cops of any country." I went over to take a taxi one night to go visit some journalist, an Austrian journalist who lived on the Street--the formal title is the Street of Journalists. And as I walked over to the taxicab stand they accompanied me. I had written down the address of where I was going because, not speaking Italian, I had a little difficulty. I showed it to the taxi driver, and they put their head inside the window to look over the taxi driver's shoulder to see where I was going. They then followed us up there. I had noticed that when I'd go to the party headquarters, I'd get within half a block and they'd suddenly disappear. Then when I'd come out, after about a block they'd pick me up again. They wouldn't come near the party headquarters itself. Later Dina Forti came over to the little place where I was staying in response to the calls from the managers of the little hotel. They talked to her at great length, and she turned to me and said, "They're very worried." She said, "Everybody in the neighborhood is either worried or laughing." She said, "Everybody around here in the community votes for the Communist party or supports the party. So everybody is watching and laughing at these people and at the questions they ask. They want to know where does the American go? Who does she see? What has she been doing? What phone calls does she make? Of course, they won't tell them anything." And she says, "You know, you can move if you want to." But I said, "No, I don't care. I'm quite used to this." So nothing happened about it. Well, I finally left Italy--oh, one other thing that happened. Pietro Ingrao invited me to come to his home for dinner. This is a little unusual because these comrades are always having visiting firemen come from other countries, and it's a very great intrusion on their lives. I was really very touched by the fact of this, you know, over and beyond the call of duty to do that. He had five daughters, all of whom spoke English, and I discovered what it was that made this man so representative of what-- to my opinion, my politics--was new and important and happening in the world. He listened to his daughters--not as a father patronizing his children, but aware of the fact that they represented a new reality, a new consciousness, that they were in contact with it, in relationship to it, and therefore he learned from it. I was just really so struck watching the relationship, the banter, the give and take, their rebuking him for dogmatic positions of the party, the freedom with which they criticized things he had said, the comradeship that was present in that family. Its only later significance is that during the French events of 1968, the tremendous upsurge there, his daughter, one of Pietro Ingrao's daughters, was one of the Italian students studying in France, in Paris, who helped to lead this left group that was making direct contact over the head of the French Communist party with the workers in the factories, the trade unionists. Well, so I left Italy and got to France. By the time I'd reached France, by the way, I had learned a big lesson about the suitcase I was carrying. I had brought far too much stuff with me, far too many suitcases. I never wore anything I had except one or two things. I just checked all those extra little suitcases in the locker at the terminal. But I had made no reservations for a hotel. I just figured I'd go into the Latin Quarter and find a hotel. I was riding on the terminal bus coming into Paris, and a young man sitting next to me who spoke English asked me where I was going. It was clear I was a foreigner. I said, "Well, when I get into Paris I'll phone around and see whether I can find a place to stay." "Oh," he says, "you can't do that. You'll never find anything! You don't even know how to make the phone calls. They don't speak English. Who are you going to call? What are you going to do?" I said, "Well, I don't know, I haven't even thought of it." He said, "Well, you're crazy. You can't do things like that in Paris in the tourist season." So I said, "Well, there always seems to be somebody that takes care of the stupid and the crazy." He said, "Well, I guess I'm going to have to be the one, because my conscience won't let you wander around Paris looking for a hotel. How much can you afford to spend?" I said, "Well, I want the most inexpensive." So we got to the terminal, and this very nice young man, whose name I never learned, spent at least an hour phoning different hotels, finally found one for me, put me in a taxi to send me over there, and I never saw him again. But all the stories about how rude the French, particularly Parisians, are supposed to be--at no time in the week I spent there did I find it true. I walked all over by myself, and everywhere I went they were so helpful and so kind and so solicitous of a stranger that I decided it was like the myth about New Yorkers. Just not true. I mean, it depends on you. If you're reasonably friendly, other people are, too. Well, the first few days I was in Paris, I was really exhausted, not physically but emotionally. All the experiences of Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union all piled up. I hadn't sorted out all the impressions. I just didn't want to see anybody or talk to anybody. So for three days I didn't call [anyone]. I had lots of friends to call, people I knew; and, of course, I could go to the French party headquarters and turn in my credential there and get to know them and so forth, but I just didn't want to see a soul. I walked--I never walked so much in my life--I walked the streets of Paris, going from one famous place to another, guidebook in hand. And in a curious mood, not wanting to see people and yet getting to feel very lonely because I couldn't talk the language, there was no one I could just talk to, finally, on Tuesday, I guess it was, I gave in, went up to the French party headquarters, and went to the office of Raymond Guyot, who is the head of the international department of the French party. I met his deputy Francois {Raymond Drossier]. They were very, very kind to me as far as physical kindness is concerned. They immediately moved me to a hotel near the party headquarters. I was staying in the Left Quarter and they moved me over to a hotel on the other part, not far from the party headquarters, which they then paid for.

GARDNER

Where is the headquarters? Do you remember?

HEALEY

I don't remember anymore. A huge place. As a matter of fact, there were two places. Now there's a brand new building that is an architectural showplace, but when I was there it was just being built. Of course, I went to the Central Committee and then to another place. Well, I went through the usual routine of long interviews, first with Guyot. This was early June by the time I got there. And then he had me meet with the head of their organizational department, and I asked 1,000 questions. One thing I enjoyed, I had dinner with Madame iMarie Claude] Vaillant-Courier, a great woman, whose husband was at that point the editor of the French party's theoretical magazine. Of course, as usual, with my nasty, sardonic humor--the one story I remember of his--we were talking about the Soviet impact on other parties and their diplomatic problems and what it meant for parties. He described how he had written an article for Pravda about what was going on in France; part of it had very sharply attacked the one-man rule of Charles de Gaulle in France. He said they never printed his article [laughter] because it didn't suit their diplomatic needs. Of course, all I did was to underscore this question of what happens when the party and the government become indivisible. But I must say that as far as what I saw of the French party--and it was very limited, what I saw, the top, a few top leaders--I was not terribly impressed with them. I found Guyot, with whom I had the longest interview, kind of stuffy, a socialist Babbitt type. This may not be accurate or true; it may be very unfair. But as I indicated to you when I was describing East Germany, one of the things you learn to do is to throw out a few questions yourself, or make a few statements yourself, and you can usually tell whether you're on the same wave length, whether it's worthwhile. I mean, no matter how wise they may be, no matter how knowledgeable they may be, if they're not going to talk to you candidly, if they're going to give you what you could read in their press, then I don't want to waste my time, and I don't want to waste their time. The only thing that happened that was of any significance, I suppose--very limited significance--[was that] while I was in the office of this international department, a Yugoslav came in who was introduced to me as the representative of the Yugoslav party. The young woman, the deputy, took me to one side to say, "Be careful. Don't talk to him too much. He's Yugoslav, and we've got problems." Well, of course, that to me was like a red flag. [laughter] He was very glad to see me, and he asked me to go out and have lunch with him. I was delighted because I hadn't gotten to Yugoslavia and I didn't know very much about it outside of what I read, what was happening. Well, the Seven-Day [Six-Day] War had just started. I was really interested in his reactions. What the Seven-Day War was indicating in his judgment was that the Soviet Union had really failed to recognize that no matter how much weaponry they gave to Egypt, number one, they had no political say-so as to what Egypt would or would not do (in other words, it was clear that the Soviet Union had absolutely no knowledge of any of the events or, if it had knowledge, had no agreement with the events which preceded the Israeli attack); secondly, that they had yet to reckon with the enormous qualitative change of military weapons in terms of power, that you simply couldn't use atomic weapons, and not being able to use them you couldn't brandish them. The Yugoslavs, as was true also with the Italians, were of course enormously concerned with anything that happened in the Mediterranean because always anything that happened there meant a direct threat to them. The other thing we talked about, the Yugoslav and I, was about my experiences in Czechoslovakia. I told him what I had seen. He made a comment that I thought very revealing. When I was saying that I'd seen these kind of debates and challenges in Czechoslovakia but no sign of it in Moscow, he said, "Well, you want to remember that Czechoslovakia's a little country, and they can afford to experiment because they're not the umbrella over the whole socialist world. They don't have any of the responsibility for the other socialist countries that the Soviet Union has." He said, "We can experiment, Czechoslovakia can experiment, far more easily than the Soviet Union can experiment. They're too big and too important, and therefore experiments for them are far more dangerous and significant than they would be for the rest of us." I thought that was really a rather thoughtful remark, particularly coming from one who had no great reason to be so balanced in his critique and judgment. At any rate, we spent quite a long time together. He took down my name and address, and he arranged for the Yugoslav party to send me material, which I continue to get to this day. It's one of the few parties that sends me everything gratis, their international review and other things. He was quite horrified that I hadn't gone to Yugoslavia and had no way to get there at that point. How could I miss the experience? But I could and did. And mostly, as I say, I was sightseeing more than anything else in Paris. Of course, it is a city that deserves all--it's beautiful, although its beauty did not have the same effect on me that Prague had had. It's a different beauty, and also probably I was more tired physically by that time. I was leaving Paris to go to England. All I'd ever seen of England was an overnight stay in London, and I was very anxious to meet with the English party because the ones I'd met in East Germany representing their party there had again intrigued and challenged my interest because they were open and critical and aware of all the problems. But by the time I got to London, two things happened. First, it was clear the Seven-Day War was already over, that enormous changes were taking place because of it. And again, I knew the National Committee was meeting the day after I arrived in London. I felt that silly stupid obligation that in a moment of great crisis I ought to be back in my own country. I knew it'd be a crisis as far as the Jewish Communists were concerned, at least; a great number of our members are Jewish. But also I was really--I was tired. When I got to the English airport, I changed some money into English money. When I started looking at those pounds, shillings, and pence, trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with it--I'd already had difficulty in Italy with money; I'd had difficulty in France with money--I looked at this money, and I thought, "Oh, Jesus Christ, this is too much. I can't figure it out." I suppose the third reason for what I did was that I called one person, John Williamson, who was an American Communist leader who had been deported to Scotland during the McCarthy period, who was a close and dear friend of mine, whom I respected a great deal. He wasn't home, and he wasn't at his office. I didn't know anybody else there that intimately. So [because of] all these three factors--the fact that the National Committee was meeting the next day and I knew what it represented in terms of the turmoil in the party, and secondly the money, the hassle of trying to figure out money and making my way around by myself, and third the fact that the first person I called wasn't there--I didn't even leave the airport. I just walked across the room and transferred my ticket over, and I left within a half an hour to come back to the United States. I arrived just in time to attend the National Committee meeting.

GARDNER

This was in New York?

HEALEY

This was in New York. I had made no allowances anytime, either going to Europe or coming back, for what now is defined as jet lag. And I sure suffered from it when I came back. I suffered from it over there; I suffered from it when I came back. Everything was blurred, far away, remote.

GARDNER

Where were you staying when you went back to New York? Where did you usually stay?

HEALEY

I used to stay at a little tiny hotel called the Stanford Hotel, a block down from Herald Square, a little, little, tiny, not too clean place, but very cheap. I'd stay there all the time I went to New York. The management just--we just always got along. We were muy simpatico. It was mostly Latin-speaking people who stayed there, people coming from Latin America and South America. They looked upon me as an old client, I'd gone there so often and stayed there so long. I liked it because it was only a few blocks away from the party headquarters on Twenty-third Street. Well, that National Committee meeting--I don't remember what the whole agenda was anymore. All I remember was a debate on Israel and the Mideast and what position the party should take. As always, I had one of these positions that didn't fit into anybody else's positions, which meant that I was never satisfied, was always a minority, not a happy position to be in. On the one hand, I was utterly appalled by some of the things being said by the leadership. I remember one speech that was made without anybody challenging it by young "Dynamite" Hallinan in which he said, "By God, if Israel doesn't become a real multinational state and stop its treatment of the Arabs, the Palestinians within Israel, it has no right to exist and should be eliminated." I was just outraged, you know. Would you say that about the United States? Would you say that about any other capitalist country that is just as outrageous and just as bad, if not worse than Israel? But I was equally annoyed--and the official party position, of course, was that Israel had been the aggressor. And I agreed with that; I didn't disagree. But what they totally ignored was the character of the Arab governments. The glorification of them, ignoring their--I mean, it's one thing to take on Zionism, I quite agree. I have theoretically opposed Zionism all my life. On the other hand, the fact that Israel is a theocratic state, which I as a Jew am opposed to, doesn't blind me to the fact that some of the Arab states are also theocratic states; only theirs is Islamism. A Communist, it seems to me, has to be critical of both, while still recognizing tha t Israel and Zionism are far more identified with a proimperialist position at that point than Islamisra or the Arab states were, because no matter how bad the character of the Arab regimes was and is, objectively their struggle-- not because they want it to be, but objectively--becomes an antiimperialist position. As I think I've indicated to you, I think a Communist always has to see not only the primary characteristics--in this case, the anti-imperialist characteristic--but the secondary characteristic, the class struggle within the Arab countries themselves. So that while I was generally in agreement with the main line of the party, I was not totally. And as I say, I was exasperated by the excesses that were expressed by individuals. But I was also not in agreement with Paul Novak, the editor of the Morning Freiheit, who considered that the war was a just war, that this was a war that Communists had a right to support, that Israel had been right. I thought that was simply bourgeois nationalism, and I didn't agree. But I nevertheless fought for and defended his right to have that position even though it wasn't the party's position. Again, I thought that in the course of debate letting all the positions be printed [increased] the possibility of arriving at a correct position.

GARDNER

What I was going to ask you was, there's a fairly strong Communist party in Israel. Does this Communist party have any ties with any other Communist parties?

HEALEY

Well, there were two Communist parties by that time. They split in 1966. One is led by Mikonis, the other was led by Moishe Shneh. But it's the other that was, quote, "the good Communist party." When they originally split, there was no real significance to their split as far as the world movement. But by the time of the Six-Day War, the party that was called the, quote, "good" Communist party, the party that is still recognized by the rest of the world communist movement, was the one that criticized Israel's actions in the war, whereas the other party, led by Moishe Shneh, took the same position as the Freiheit, that it was a war of defense, that Israel had no alternative. That battle continues today. The "good" Communist party is the only one that the rest of the world movement recognizes. The "bad" one is not considered. (I oppose this approach, too, on the ground that only the people of a particular country can decide which is the Communist party that is valid and which one is not. As far as I'm concerned, none of the rest of the world movement has any right to interfere in the internal affairs of a party. And so if there are two parties there they ought to be treated as two parties by all the parties, and not treated as they are, where only one is invited to the international meetings, where only one is praised, and the other one is ignored--or attacked, as the case may be, as it is in Israel.)

GARDNER

What were the repercussions, finally, to those who opposed the national party stance?

HEALEY

Well, when I came back to L.A., I started a series of speeches before the party membership, mostly over and beyond the general meetings, meetings particularly with our Jewish Communists, those active in Jewish community life. As I say, my position was generally one in agreement with the national position, that it was not a question. ... As far as I was concerned, Israel did represent U.S. imperialist interests in the Mideast. Not that it itself was a U.S. flunky--because I think that oversimplifies it--but that that is its role in the Mideast, as "the outpost of world capitalism." It itself defines itself that way. Its conduct both before and after the war against the Palestinians was a direct violation of their self-determination; Jews who for 2,000 years had fought against discrimination and attacks on themselves were in turn practicing it on the Palestinians. One had to recognize that Israel was a state that was there to stay--and anybody that said differently was stupid--but nevertheless that it was a capitalist state, that it was not a socialist state, that it had the same class differentiations within Israel as any capitalist state had, and that its leadership was a proimperialistic leadership. This was demonstrated by their attitude towards the United States in the Vietnam War; it was demonstrated by the fact that they had vetoed any assistance to the Algerians in the U.N. during that U.N. debate, that on almost every international debate in the United Nations the Israeli government had taken the position of the U.S. government. As far as the sentiment in the party here, I found pretty general acceptance of the way I presented it, except in my own family. Here I found that with my mother and my brother, it became a subject that we could not even discuss rationally. It was really a remarkable thing, not from my brother--that I expected--but from my mother, who had been so tied to that television in the month I'd been gone, when all it showed were Arabs threatening to throw every Israeli into the sea, that she was convinced that this was what faced the Israelis.

1.36. TAPE NUMBER: XVIII, SIDE ONE JULY 25, 1973

GARDNER

Today we'll move away from the chronological flow of things and talk about the events of the last few weeks. I'll let you describe them in your own words. First I think you ought to describe the background, start with the original background, what happened around 1968, the Czechoslovakian crisis and so forth, or whatever else helped lead to your crise de foi.*

HEALEY

Well, I would say that the question of the relationships within the party, how policy is made, the way in which, in my opinion, the manipulation of the membership was carried through--Czechoslovakia most certainly epitomized that problem. Within Czechoslovakia one actually saw the reflection of all of the current problems: first of all, this first part that I've just alluded to, what information, what knowledge is made available to the party membership on the basis of which they can form knowledgeable conclusions; secondly, what attitude one takes as an American revolutionary in regard to the developments within socialist countries; third, is it possible to arrive at decisions that bind every member in regard to world events *Ms. Healey resigned from the Communist party on July 9, 1973, publicly announcing her decision on her KPFK program. A transcript of her statement is included as an appendix to these volumes. that are always changing, that don't stay static? And within that framework also, can you silence debate within one party when other parties who are part of the same world communist movement have positions totally at variance with your party's estimate on the same subject? That last question is, of course, a pretty new one in the world communist movement because before, if and when there were disagreements on international questions, nobody ever knew about them outside of the top people of a particular party. But I would say [starting with] the emergence of the differences between the two superpowers of socialism--that is, China and the Soviet Union--more and more other parties have taken positions that are at variance, one from the other, and have publicized it.

GARDNER

Well, let's trace it back. Let's start out, I guess, in the most newsworthy manner. What was the date and what were the circumstances of that KPFK resignation speech that you gave, just historically?

HEALEY

Well, the immediate circumstance was a report given to the Central Committee by Gus Hall that included, among other things, a political estimate of a book written by Al Richmond entitled A Long View from the Left; The Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and an article written by Peggy Dennis in the National Guardian where she took on and argued against the Guardian's Maoist positions of once again deifying Stalin and Stalinism as a proper revolutionary lodestone for an American revolutionary movement. Hall not only supported the review of Al's book written by Hy Lumer ["A Subjective View of the Left"], but he himself--Hall, that is--labeled the book as, quote, "a weapon in the hands of the class enemy." The Southern California district committee passed a resolution here, prior to two-thirds of either the leadership or the membership even having read the book, agreeing with this characterization of Hall's, that Al Richmond's book was "a weapon in the hands of the class enemy," but adding to it a proviso that was really made just for me--I'd pun about it and say it was tailor-made (the party chairman's name is Taylor)--saying that every party member was obligated publicly to take the same position as the Central Committee, which meant as Gus Hall. It was this latter phrase, that every member had to take the same position publicly, that was directed at me, because I am the only Communist party member who speaks publicly.

GARDNER

Has this been standard practice?

HEALEY

No, of course not. Well, it never arose in past years, to my knowledge, particularly. Well, during the years that I was the main spokesperson of the Communist party in Southern California, I always took the position that I would--for instance, in regard to the socialist world or the Communist party's own weaknesses, I had no hesitation in speaking about them. But I should say also, to be more accurate about it, that the question as to what constitutes "the line of the party" and what are simply the ex cathedra statements of Gus Hall and other leaders is a very fine one. One never really knows. But at no time in the past was I challenged for violating the line for doing what I have always done, which is to speak my own opinion. Czechoslovakia represented a new thing, of course, because there a formal decision had been made that did uphold the correctness of the intervention. With the passing of this decision, there were just three alternatives before me. One was to do what the party leadership asked me to do and urged me to do, and that was simply to retreat from my positions of defense of the book, not to keep challenging their right to superimpose their opinions on mine, to just keep quiet. The second would be to challenge publicly their decisions and let them go ahead and expel me. The third was resignation, Of course, I wouldn't even consider the first, of retreat. It would be totally against my principles as a communist. Secondly, on the question of expulsion, all that that could represent--there were two problems with that. One was that it would tie me up in inner-party hearings, during which period I couldn't speak publicly because the hearings would be proceeding, for two years, three years, or as long as they wanted to stretch it out. And, also, as far as being expelled was concerned itself, that would have represented the need then of a formal split in the party because other people in the party who supported my position would have felt obligated then to place themselves in the same category. I was not anxious to see that happen for a number of reasons, one being that it would then place me in constant political responsibility for the people who had left, and I had no desire, at the age of fifty-eight, to assume that kind of pivotal relationship with others. I have no desire to be a guru.

GARDNER

Though you have been.

HEALEY

No, that's not my desire. Not my cup of tea. So that actually I felt that I had no alternative at that point. Therefore, I made the announcement, after having notified the party a week earlier that I was going to do that. I will add to it also that there were two things that confirmed my judgment that I was correct, and why I could have no consideration of postponing the decision on it. One was that Gus Hall's analysis on Watergate had just been printed; this was made at the same Central Committee meeting where he had dismissed Peggy Dennis's and Al Richmond's writings as being both anti-Soviet, anti party , white racist, everything else. The Watergate analysis that he provided was, in my judgment, bankrupt. He had nothing to say.

GARDNER

What did he say?

HEALEY

He simply dismissed the whole thing as representing the crisis of monopoly capitalism, that all monopoly was united, the ruling class were united, and this was their crisis--which is, of course, nonsense because it doesn't deal with the essential fact that the exposure of Watergate came from the ruling class itself, that what was different about Nixon's role from his predecessors' in the executive office was that he had more deliberately, thoughtfully, carefully and conspiratorily used [his office] in order to, in effect, complete what would be called a proto-fascist administration. The other thing that convinced me that I couldn't delay is that I'd attended a membership meeting held by the district to mobilize support for this decision that Al Richmond's book was a weapon in the hands of the enemy. Here you had what I characterized in my statement as an example of the trials in Alice in Wonderland, you know, the Red Queen's command, verdict first, trial later. After having passed the decision attacking the book, then they called people together--again, most of whom had not yet read the book--to get them to agree how bad the book was. In other words, first you make a decision, then you let people talk. And the atmosphere of that meeting was simply incredible. A man like George Morris, who was a charter member of the party, an old-time labor journalist, standing up and saying about this book that Al deliberately sent it out to a, quote, "bourgeois publisher"-- that is, a nonleft publisher--knowing that they would only accept it if they considered it an attack against the party because, clearly, no one would ever publish a Communist if it wasn't going to attack the party. This ignores the fact that Angela Davis has been published by bourgeois publishers, Herbert Aptheker has been published, Bettina Aptheker has been published, and of course during the thirties many Communists were published.

GARDNER

And [Cedric] Belfrage was published by Bobbs-Merrill, which is a subsidiary of ITT.

HEALEY

Well, you're right, but Belfrage isn't a member of the party.

GARDNER

Well, still, ITT is hardly his bedfellow.

HEALEY

That's right, of course. Secondly, Morris charged that Al had deliberately written the book as a factional effort to divide, split, and hurt the party, and that he had written a disgracefully anti-Soviet, antiparty book; that he still couldn't understand the significance of the bravery and gallantry and communist devotion to internationalism that was expressed by the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. And I listened to that. ... I mean, you should understand, just parenthetically, the personal jealousy that is involved, because of a fact that you wouldn't otherwise know, that Morris is one of the oldest of the party newspapermen. He's also not a very competent man in his craft. He and a man like Eric Bert have always been ferociously jealous and competitive about Al Richmond because Al Richmond is always recognized as a craftsman. In the first place, he was an able newspaperman and also an extraordinarily competent writer. Or to listen to a man like Bob Klonsky, who gave the report to the membership meeting on behalf of the district board. (Klonsky's one of those who left the Communist party in 1958 with twenty-two other prominent California communists on the ground that the party had become irrelevant and no longer could carry on its task, left it publicly, carried on a campaign to try to get others to leave it in 1958, and several years later could not find any way to function outside of the party and made application to come back in. The national leadership demanded a complete restatement of his views be aired before they took him in. Ben Dobbs and I felt that if he wanted to come back in that was proof enough that. . . .) In the meantime, during the last six months, Klonsky's political line has changed totally from what it had been even since the years he came back in. To listen to him [claim] that what was wrong with the book was that here was the whole question of the Spanish Civil War (Bob happens to be a veteran of it) and Al hardly mentions it, ignoring the fact that his two main heroes, Al Richmond's two main heroes [Joe Bianca and Harry Hines], both died in the Spanish Civil War. Or making such political comments showing the racism in the thirties--a huge roundup against Chicanos had taken place for deportation, just as is going on today, and Al doesn't mention that--ignoring the fact that Al didn't even come to California till 1938 and these deportations took place in '35 and '36. In other words, made-up, contrived attacks on the book, not representing it. While many people made some splendid speeches attacking both the method and the way in which this was being done, the way in which this discussion was handled, it was clear that the overwhelming bulk of the very old and the very young, the young people in the Young Workers Liberation League, were making equally stupid attacks. In other words, chronology and the generation gap had nothing to do with it. You can be as ignorant when you're old as when you're young, and vice versa. But listening to the combined nonsense and hysteria of that meeting, also coupled with Gus Hall's ideological bankruptcy--the party's bankruptcy, because nobody in the Central Committee challenged him on this Watergate analysis-convinced me that any hope of struggle within the party, even if I were not immediately under attack because of this district committee's decision, was absolutely futile. And it was added to the fact of why my position was different from that of other Communists, why I urged other Communists to stay. Not only did this decision not apply to them as much, but the fact was that the fight had become so personalized that it really didn't make any difference if I stood up at a meeting and said the most sanctified things, crossed myself ten times and bowed in the direction of Mecca, that would not have proven my revolutionary fidelity or credentials. Anything I said was suspect, open to attack. As an example, a young Chicana [Evelyn Alarcdh] who doesn't even know me--I never even talked to her for two minutes (she's very new, been in the party for six months)--stood up and attacked me as a "white middle-class liberal racist." Its only significance-- I mean, I've listened to those kind of names before so it doesn't have any deep effect on me, but it is symptomatic of an atmosphere in which anything I'd say would be suspect.

GARDNER

Well, now, should we go back to ...

HEALEY

. . . Czechoslovakia.

GARDNER

Yes. Describe--you can do it just briefly, since it's more as background than anything else--the circumstances around Czechoslovakia that led to this eventual conflict.

HEALEY

Yes. Well, as I told you in a previous inter-view, I had spent some time in Czechoslovakia. I had met and talked to, interviewed, discussed with the people from the Academy of Sciences who were primarily responsible for what became known as Prague Spring. I'd been overwhelmingly enthusiastic and excited by it in the sense that for the first time the things I was critical of in the socialist world, I saw being tackled by those who lived inside a socialist country. Well, starting with [Alexander] Dubcek coming into the leadership and Novotny's removal, it became clear that East Germany and the Soviet Union particularly were carrying on a really vile attack against what they were trying to do in Czechoslovakia. You didn't have to read a word of either country's press, Russian or German, to know that, because the Daily Worker, without any discussion in the National Executive Board (in which I was still a member), any consultation with anybody in the leadership outside of New York, started to carry on a veritable journalistic onslaught against the Dubcek administration with the wildest, most ridiculous kind of stories that human beings could contrive. Absolutely made up of thin air. Deliberately tried to create an atmosphere of hysteria within the party along the lines that the West Germans were starting to advance, carrying on maneuvers that would let them cross the border of Czechoslovakia, the counterrevolutionaries were in control of the Czechoslovak party. It was just an incredible series of stories. Then we heard. . .

GARDNER

Was there reaction to that?

HEALEY

There was from us. The other comrades in other districts--after all, they couldn't believe what they read in the New York Times or any other paper that challenged that because those were capitalist newspapers. They had absolutely no access to Czechoslovak materials. It wouldn't occur to them to do what I did, which is to write to the Czechoslovak embassy and ask to be placed on the mailing list of their foreign press publication-- it's called Prago Press--so that I was getting regular communiques from them where they described what they were doing. We sent in two resolutions--from Southern California, and Northern California sent in a resolution as well-- because we heard that Gus Hall was holding meetings on the East Coast and in the Midwest mobilizing the membership on this line, that Dubcek and all that Prague Spring represented was counterrevolutionary, etc. We demanded first of all that there be a meeting of the National Executive Board to discuss it and/or that he come out here, where we could debate it. I had been making speeches both in Northern California at the invitation of the district up there and down here, on my experiences in Czechoslovakia as well as on my knowledge of what was currently happening based on their materials. We had some very large meetings here in Los Angeles to discuss it--this was before the invasion--large meetings of the district, membership meetings and whatnot, and there was practically no opposition to the viewpoint I was expressing. There was none in our leadership with the exception of Bill Taylor, who always had his finger up in the air waiting to see what position the national [leadership] and the Soviet Union would take. Even he didn't really seriously debate it because he didn't have enough--he only had what everybody saw in the Daily Worker, and he knew we could answer those as lies, so he didn't want to even advance that. But our leadership, including our district committee (which had about forty members on it), and our district board, and I would say 60 percent of the membership that came--there was very much a consensus in regard to a defense of what was taking place there in Czechoslovakia. By coincidence we had scheduled a forum, a political affairs forum (which meant a party forum), for Baces Hall on the night of Friday, August 19, I think it was, to discuss Czechoslovakia. Of course, that was one day after the invasion.* And the meeting was just jammed. There must have been about 600 people in a hall that holds 450 or 500. Everybody came to hear what position we'd taken. *Friday, August 23, 1968, was actually two days after the invasion, which took place on the night of August 20-21. Before [the invasion] had happened, there had been a meeting in either Cierna or Bratislava of the Czech leadership with the rest of the Warsaw powers on August 3, in which it appeared from all the publicity that was given on all sides that agreement had been reached as to their--Czechoslovakia would go ahead. The big thing that seemed to be of concern is that they would try to convince the writers and the television and radio people--all censorship had been withdrawn--to hold it down a little bit; there were lots of provocations being said on the air. None of this bothered me too much because I don't think you can undo great evils that have been done in the past without making some new mistakes; so you'll make new mistakes. From August 3 on, till the very day of the invasion itself, it appeared that agreement had been reached. On Wednesday night after midnight the five Warsaw Treaty powers invaded Czechoslovakia. [tape recorder turned off] On Thursday morning, about seven o'clock in the morning the telephone starts ringing, and it's one or the other of the television channels and the Los Angeles Times calling to ask if I have any comment to make on the fact that the five Warsaw Treaty powers have invaded Czechoslovakia. I said, "I don't believe it," so they read me the wire dispatches. I said, "Well, I don't have a comment to make yet, but our staff will be meeting over in the office at ten o'clock, so call me up, and then I'll give you a statement." I promptly called Gus Hall. Gus said--and what he had to say is very important, in view of what happened later--"Oh," he says, "don't worry about it, Dorothy, it's going to be over in a couple of hours." He named the Czech leaders, Alois Indra and a guy by the name of [Vasil] Bilak, and there was one more whose name escapes me at the moment. He said, "The three of them are going to be placed in power almost immediately by the Soviet Union, and everything'11 be fine. Everything's okay." End of quote. Now, the only way he could have possibly known that, of course, is that he had been told that the day before. Of course, what is amusing and sad and tragic and everything else about it is that for some four months after the invasion Indra, Bilak, and whoever that other donkey was--can't remember his name--the three of them kept denying that they had ever invited the Soviet Union in, because the Soviet Union had issued a statement that they'd been invited in. They had to, they felt, technically say they'd been invited in because part of the Warsaw Pact included the fact that no army could come on the soil of any of the signatories without the explicit invitation of the government of that country. So the Soviet Union had to keep repeating, "We were invited to come in." And everybody in the Czech government is saying, "That's not true. None of us invited," including these goddamned stooges, who then three years later say, "Oh, yeah, we did it." Because by then they had silenced all challenge and dissent. So I said, "Well, that's not good enough. You know, we've got to give a statement. What's the Secretariat going to say?" He said, "Well, we're just meeting now. We'll call you at your office as soon as we're through meeting." Well, you know, there's three hours difference in time; I figure that's going to be plenty of time. Ten o'clock comes, the phone calls from the press are coming through, and I don't have any answer from New York yet. So I called again and this time I talked to Helen Winter, who says that nobody else is there. They've held the meeting, the meeting is adjourned, and they've decided, inasmuch as they did not have collective agreement as to what to say, that Gus would issue an individual statement only giving his own opinion, nothing else. His individual statement, which she read to me, was something about how he was sure that they had good reason for what they were doing and some general round of nonsense. He didn't say any of the things he said to me on the phone, of course, but some euphemistic set of words to cover it up. Well, we then talked about what to do locally and agreed that if Gus could issue an individual statement, clearly there was no official position yet taken; there- fore, we were as free to issue a statement as he was. So what we did was to issue a very short statement--the television came out and interviewed us and so forth--in which we limited it to one thing.

GARDNER

Who was "us," by the way?

HEALEY

The staff. That was Ben Dobbs, Nemmy Sparks, Tom Foley, who was now one of the foreign writers for the Daily Worker--he later changed his position--some other people. I don't remember who was actually on the staff at that point. The statement simply said that--first of all, we denounced Yorty and Reagan for their deliberate cold war use of the invasion, etc., that they had a lot of nerve to talk. But then all we did as far as our position was to quote the program of the Communist party, which talked about the sovereignty of nations and the equality of all parties and noninterference of the rights of any of them. Not one additional word--only what the party's official program said. The following night was this forum. Now, probably I would say in retrospect I was somewhat insensitive to the old Communists, to whom the Soviet Union could do no wrong, of their feelings. When I spoke there that night--and this was, as I say, one day after the invasion--I made a very, very heated attack on the invasion, and while I gave the reasons which I thought the Soviet Union would probably be advancing to defend it--it wasn't yet known what they were saying; this was just, as I say, one day later--the fact that Czechoslovakia is at the crossroads of Europe, the soft belly of Europe; that it would appear that 1941 would be repeated, an attack at the Soviet Union through this, I then discounted this fear by saying, number one, that there were thirteen Soviet divisions in the soil of East Germany, so that if the West Germans started to march, then the Red Army troops were already there; there were ten Red Army divisions during the summer around there in Hungary, which is one hour's ride away from the boundary, the frontier. Furthermore, the Czech Army was the second strongest army of all the Warsaw Pact forces, and there was no evidence that they would allow the West Germans to come in. One final point was that if the Soviet Union could guarantee the security of Cuba through its ICBM missiles 9,000 miles away, there was no reason to believe that they couldn't protect the security of Czechoslovakia if there was really such a threat of West German invasion or CIA subversion. Then in regard to the story--you still see this same kind of nonsense being said, by the way, "All the West German tourists that were there were there as part of a CIA plot"--I pointed out there were more East German tourists in Czechoslovakia than there were West Germans. I then gave what I thought was the reason for it, and that was that the Czechoslovak party Congress was set for September 14 [actually September 9], and that that Congress would without any question have removed all the rest of the people like Bilak and Alois Indra, the stooges, just absolute stooges of the Soviet Union; and that what, in my opinion, frightened particularly the East Germans and the Soviet Union and the others the most was nothing being done economically by Czechoslovakia but the difference in the interpretation of the role of the Communist party in a socialist country, that they no longer saw themselves as being the expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat; they saw their role as leading, not directing, not formalizing, passing all decisions in their name and superimposing them on all other aspects of Czechoslovak life. Well, that meeting sure went into an uproar. We opened up the thing to comrades from the floor. A whole number of the older Communists came up and took the mike and really challenged my interpretation. But even those that didn't were just turning red with fury. And I couldn't have cared less because to me this invasion was a travesty. Well, the next week the Daily comes out with all its editorials--the Daily Worker in New York, the Daily World--applauding the intervention as the greatest thing that ever happened, continuing this same line of bullshit. Well, some of the younger comrades in New York--I stupidly listened to them--who were in agreement with our position (Carl Blolce among them, Charlene Mitchell, Don Hamerquist, Michael Meyerson) kept calling me and insisted that I demand that there be a meeting of the National Committee to discuss the question. If I'd had any brains, I'd have known that to get a National Committee meeting called as quickly as this one would have to be called would be absolutely useless and futile because all that the majority of the people who came there would have was the information that came through the Daily World and through what Gus Hall was giving them privately. And that once the National Committee met, and we spoke and were voted down, as everybody knew we would be, we'd have no immediate alternative as to what would be said or not said. But I was very much touched by their pressures, that they had absolutely no way to express themselves in New York. Oh, Gil Green had given an interview very much the same as mine. He was the D.O. [District Organizer] of the party in New York. Mickey Lima had given the same kind of thing in Northern California, that the heavy hand in the National Office was now shutting down all dissent and discussion in the New York district, and that Gil was going to resign his post or something. They passed a motion that he couldn't teach any classes because of his position. This guy was one of the oldest of the leaders of the party. He begged that we put our pressure on here for immediate calling together of the National Committee. As I say, stupidly, very stupidly, I agreed, and took it up in our board, and we formally demanded a calling together of the National Committee. Well, the National Committee meeting met. Gus Hall gave a speech which was then printed almost immediately and reprinted in eighty-five languages almost immediately, none of which could have come from him directly. It was impossible. First of all, it was filled with nonsense, but even the kind of nonsense it was, he couldn't have known. We were one of the parties that had absolutely no representative in Czechoslovakia. We didn't know what was going on. It was filled with the kind of stuff that only--I mean, even if it had been true, you could have only known it if you were there. But, of course, none of it was true, such things as that counterrevolutionaries had already erected a hangman's gallow in the central square of Prague to kill all the loyal Communists, and how huge armaments had been discovered in the homes of the counterrevolutionaries. Just, from beginning to end, just one nonsensical thing after another. And then I remember one particularly famous phrase, that, "While it is true that we believe in the sovereignty of the socialist nations," (which our party program says) "it is the exception that proves the rule." You know, the Czechoslovaks are just an exception, that as a rule we are for this, but this exception--if we didn't do this, counterrevolution would have reigned, World War III would have started, and that would have been the end of everything. Well, there were a number of dissenting speeches there. Bettina Aptheker was one I remember. I don't remember them now. The meeting is kind of just a nightmare to me now, as I go back. I remember particularly the speeches of a man like Herbert Aptheker, this historian, who had just written something in the Catholic Reporter--the hypocrisy of the man is what got me--on the question of sovereignty of socialist countries and socialist democracy as an essential thing, and all this sort of stuff. He stands up there, this great historian, to say that the reason this had taken place first, this kind of action in Czechoslovakia, this was a counterrevolutionary action of the Dubcek regime. "What we must remember," he said, "is that unlike the other Eastern European countries, Czechoslovakia had a developed bourgeoisie." Well, of course they did; that's why you had a developed working class. One brings the other, and vice versa. It was precisely because there was a working class which had been developed there that there was also a Communist party which, of all the Eastern socialist countries, was the only one that was really a big, powerful, influential party in its own right. Socialism hadn't come to Czechoslovakia on the bayonets of the Red Army, which is the way it came everyplace else. Therefore it was a quite natural thing--I'm quoting myself now, not him--from a Marxist viewpoint, that these great changes for real socialist democracy would come first in the one country that had both a tradition of democracy, of bourgeois democracy, which the others hadn't. In Germany it had been wiped out by fascism; Hungary had never known it; Poland had never known it; Yugoslavia had never known it; Bulgaria had never known it; Rumania had never known it. It was quite natural that it would come first in this country. But Herbert, as I say, in a very Jesuitical way, was the one who tried to provide the ideological rationale for the intervention, including such things as that the proof of their perfidy was their resurrection of [Tomas] Masaryk as an important figure, the first president of the Czechoslovakian republic. But again, this is the same man who talks about American revolutionary heroes, including Thomas Jefferson and Washington, or people like Abraham Lincoln from the Civil War, and sees nothing wrong with the Communist party in the United States showing the continuity of democratic thought as being an important, valid question which has to be included by revolutionaries. But when the same thing takes place in Czechoslovakia, it's only a sign of counterrevolution. At any rate, by just an overwhelming vote--I don't even remember how great it was--I think we had probably about twelve votes, and then a whole number of people like Charlene and others abstained, just didn't vote at all-- but overwhelmingly the vote was in support of Gus Hall's statement. As I say, like a miracle the next day it was in print, and the day after that it was translated and being printed in those countries where their parties took a different position. And of course this was what was notable, that the parties of Italy and France and Great Britain--among others who had observers right in Prague all this time, reporters from their daily newspapers right at this time-- took the opposite position from this party's, and all condemned the invasion as unnecessary. Well, however, what had happened here in Southern California as a result of this was that for the first time the membership here was terribly split. For the first time, the national people--they had always come into the district before, but for the first time they could come in and find a base to attack our local leadership. Every question was inflamed and made ugly and horrified by it. And it became very clear within three or four months that it would be absolutely impossible for, quote, "normal political work" to go on, that there would be this body organized primarily by a man named Al Lannon. He was a man who was almost a party exile, since he was part of the ultraleft group which had been expelled from the party by the Northern California district; then the National Secretariat, while they were opposed to it, had asked that this expulsion be lifted. He came here and simply because he was an old-timer, and because I don't believe in carrying these political grudges, we decided he should be around whether his ideas agreed with mine or not. I had gone out of my way to invite him to participate in discussions, to feel free. Well, he was one of the real old-time organizers in factional work, and he knew how to whip people up to hysteria on the question of the loyalty to the Soviet Union as the parameter of all dedication to the revolutionary movement. He and Bill Taylor, Shirley Taylor, Sid Harris, a number of such people, just worked day and night in organizing a real--almost a civil war in the district. All this was leading up to a convention that was to take place in 1969. When the delegates were elected to that convention here in Southern California, the number of delegates elected overwhelmingly came from the people who agreed with our position. I think there were two exceptions, Bill Taylor and Al Lannon himself. (Al was elected as an alternate, didn't make the delegates' list.) I had done a very foolish thing around that convention. As you can see, my technical sense of inner-party fighting is not the most astute. There's always been a mythology that has always griped the hell out of me. In electing delegates to the national convention, you are supposed to guarantee that the leaders are always elected, national and local, by having clubs who don't want to send delegates because of their security problems--the professionals and people of this kind--simply elect you in their place as delegates, or else one person will be added to the delegation list of the large clubs so that there's room for them and for an additional leader. So I proposed we do what I think the Japanese party or another party I know had done, and that simply is to say that all outgoing members of the district committee would be seated as delegates without going through this charade. It was just a--because we could always be elected; you know, no one's going to say no to a leader. Even the ones that don't agree with us would elect us. But to get away from this nonsense--I'm so sick of the hypocrisy of it--we disregarded it. Well, that meant that when we got to New York, to the national convention, our delegation was immediately put under challenge by Gus Hall. We were elected illegally. Of course, we then discovered simultaneously that most of them had been elected illegally, because the party constitution provides that all delegates must be elected by secret ballot. We discovered that in one district after another, Gus Hall's and Helen Winter's and Danny Rubin's and these people, they had all been elected by acclamation, by public vote, at conventions where nobody would dare to vote no. And this violated the constitution. But even there I didn't have brains enough after they challenged our delegation's right to vote to formally make a challenge to their delegation. It seemed so petty and silly and ridiculous and farcical that I didn't do it. But you should never overlook those kind of things if you're going to seriously fight within an organization. We were really the pariahs of the convention. Nobody would come near us. No delegation wanted to even sit near us. We were the outcasts. I mean, it was the most incredible thing to watch inside of, supposedly, a convention of people who were challenging established ideas of capitalism but who were themselves the most conformist within their own organization. The atmosphere was just amazing. I remember I started to light a cigarette and found I didn't have any matches, and there was somebody from another delegation sitting across the table, and I leaned over and said, "Have you got a match?" and the answer was, "Not for you." It went to that kind of a limit. [laughter] It was just fantastic and funny and sad and tragic. At any rate, one of the other things that happened-- most of the work of the convention is done through the subcommittees of the convention, and I was on the Resolutions Committee that dealt with the world around us, the international relationship of forces in the world. We got into a sharp debate there on the estimate of what was happening in the world. I objected to the oversimplified nonsense that was present in the preparatory documents of the World Communist Conference that took place later that year in the Soviet Union's documents, and our own draft resolution, with their use of these vague terms like "The balance of power has tipped in favor of the socialist world. The socialist world is now the strongest and most defining aspect of world development." I kept saying, "Well, if that's true, how do you account for the war in Vietnam going on? A sister socialist country being bombed? How do you account for what took place in Ghana? How do you account for Algeria? How do you account for Indonesia? We never analyze the defeats on a world scale; we only look at the things where it seems to be a victory." I particularly took on the approach on Vietnam, which I still do: that while it's true that the U.S. cannot and could not then militarily defeat Vietnam--and this is of enormous significance--what we ignored was the equal truth, and that is that Vietnam could not militarily defeat the United States. And that had to be reckoned with, and we didn't want to reckon with that.

GARDNER

At this point, then, you were already confronting the party leadership on these positions.

HEALEY

Well, that had been true all along.

GARDNER

Right. But this seems to be a. . .

HEALEY

This was a sharper level, right. But it was nothing different or new. Every meeting with the Central Committee or with the national committee, I was usually the only one or one of the few who ever disagreed with anything that was being said. It was just a running constant thing going on at every meeting. And I particularly objected to the form of the meetings, more than the content because, as I say, every meeting was the same. Gus Hall would make a two-and-a-half-hour speech; everybody else would get ten minutes to talk about that speech; no two people necessarily ever talked about the same thing; we never voted on a resolution that summarized what positions we were taking. At the end of the meeting, a vote was taken to endorse the general line of Gus Hall's report. That general line could mean anything to anybody in the country, whatever they wanted to interpret. It was never specified or defined in precise language. And the meeting would be over, and that would be the end of it. They were just simply a waste of time as far as I was concerned, and I was getting more and more bored with even attending them.

GARDNER

You and Gus Hall had not gotten along then for some time, had you?

HEALEY

Well, almost since, I would say, since 1961, there had started a very sharp deterioration of relations. That would be two years after he was elected, when I started to see what was happening, that, I mean, the man just. . . . I never was quite sure--nor am I now--how I would define it: first of all, a consummate ego that has to be constantly fed with flattery of the most exaggerated kind; secondly, more totally responsive to the questions of the foreign policy needs of the Soviet Union than any general secretary I've ever seen; third, more totally contemptuous of inner-party democracy than any general secretary I've ever seen.

GARDNER

But anyway, the seeds were already planted back then for the conflict.

HEALEY

Oh, there's no question.

GARDNER

And in a sense it was just a matter of time in a lot of ways until the. . .

HEALEY

Well, that was when I decided, however, that. . . Always these stories go around. I just looked at the last issue of the Militant that deals with my resignation from the party. It's just totally untrue, a falsified picture, as it always is with the SWP. [They say] I was not reelected to the National Board. The fact is, I did not stand for nomination for it. Now, I don't think I could have been elected it if I'd wanted to; I think they'd created such hysteria. But I didn't want it. When I came back, I had already, as I think I've indicated to you, decided I'd been in office long enough anyway. But now it was an impossible situation because you could not lead a party that was as hopelessly split as this one was.

1.37. TAPE NUMBER: XVIII, SIDE TWO JULY 25, 1973

GARDNER

So in 1969, then--I guess you've covered the convention board meeting.

HEALEY

That was the national convention.

GARDNER

Yeah.

HEALEY

Then came the question of our local convention.

GARDNER

And Czechoslovakia all this time is still hanging over the party.

HEALEY

Oh, a central question. Oh, absolutely. It was just absolutely the main thing. As I say again, Czechoslovakia in itself was important, but Czechoslovakia was also important as you debated the questions of the internal life of the socialist countries. It was important most of all to us here as we debated the definition of internationalism. Was our job simply to be the claque, the applauders, for whatever they did, no matter what it was? So that all those questions were involved. Well, they sent out a whole team of national leaders to go from club to club here in the district to speak, fight, and organize people against any idea that I would stay in leadership. They didn't believe me when I said I wasn't going to stay; from their viewpoint, this was unnatural conduct. They really believed that I was in a factional struggle for leadership, that I wanted to be it. I really didn't have any desire for it--I wouldn't do it for the world--because, as I say, more and more I'd been convinced of the absolute aridity of these discussions, They were nonsense. It was just a total waste of time to talk to people who are already convinced of their position and aren't listening to your position anyway. I was just getting too old to just waste my life that way. I kept feeling "time's wingeid chariot" at my back and I decided there was a more useful way to spend the remaining meetings I had left in me in my life. But they sent Carl Winter and Lou Weinstock and Danny Rubin here. It was ironic; Carl and I'd been the closest of personal friends of probably any two people in this party. But when he came down, he wouldn't even see me because he was going to all these clubs--because he'd formerly been one of the leaders of the Southern California party. Well, we came to that [local] convention, and Gus came in triumphantly to finish the job. While I had determined that I wasn't going to remain in the leadership--that is, as the chairman of the party--a whole number of us, however, who had very much the same opinions, decided we'd stay in the district committee, mainly to teach these national fools a lesson--namely, that they couldn't run this party yet, that they may have thought they could, but that we'd still be the ones elected. When the elections were held for the district committee--and the district committee is the one that elects the district board and these particular officers--just overwhelmingly, people who had my viewpoint, shared ray viewpoint, were elected to the district committee: Ben Dobbs, Nemmy Sparks, Sadie Doroshkin, Sophie Silver, all of the young people. They were just outraged by that, but there was nothing they could do about it. Then we let them have the executive board. We didn't want to be on it. When they nominated us, we all declined, because that is really where the policy is made. The district committee is like the national committee; it is just a large sounding board, doesn't make policy decisions, although theoretically by the constitution it's supposed to. But no large body in any organization is the policy-making body. It's always the smaller body that is the operative day-to-day leadership that makes the policy.

GARDNER

Maybe this is a good place to throw in the comment which you said Richard commented to you about. Isn't the nature of the--what is the phrase?--"democratic centralism" supposed to be that the decisions are made from group to group?

HEALEY

Well, the nature of it is supposed to mean the combination, the combined expression of democratic discussion among the membership, and then the centralism comes in on the fact that once the decision has been made, the minority splits to the majority, and the centralized leadership is therefore supposed to be responsible for the implementation of what the membership has decided.

GARDNER

But ideally doesn't it go from the largest to the smallest in the first step; in other words, the one group chooses and then passes that on to the smaller group, which passes it on to the smaller group?

HEALEY

Yes, that's technically, yes. Everything is a delegated relationship with the party. Of course, that's in the abstract. In reality, of course, that never has happened, and, as I say, I don't think ever will. However, this question of Czechoslovakia at our convention was only one of the examples that we gave of the betrayal of democratic centralism and the fact that decisions were first made on every question and then superimposed on the party. I gave many examples in my report to the convention. I'll give you a copy which you can have as an appendix to this, because it's very long and probably the most complete summary of what my views have been in twenty years of fighting on policy questions, specific policy questions. This combined question that I keep emphasizing, how the decisions are made, the methodology, what are the elements that a communist leadership has to take into account before it comes to a policy decision, the analysis of events; [noise of passing motorcycle] and then the examples of what the failure to do that means around specific issues: these two together make up the whole question of what I would consider a Marxist approach toward utilizing a, quote, "scientific" approach rather than a subjective approach of, "This policy looks good today, but tomorrow it could be something else."

GARDNER

Well, then I guess you can skip through the years now until--we've already established the abrasive nature of your relationship with the party. Let's get down to the more immediate things. Then Al Richmond puts out his book. . . .

HEALEY

The more immediate thing came around Al Richmond himself. In early August [1968] after this August 3 agreement of the Warsaw Pact nations at Bratislava, we just took for granted, as I say, that everything was going to be all right now. And I called Al Richmond up and said, "You know, there's going to be a [Czechoslovak] party Congress in September"--September 9 was the day. "Why don't you plan to attend? We'll help raise the money for you to go."

GARDNER

At this point he was editor . . .

HEALEY

He was editor of the PW. And had never really ever challenged the line one way or the other. He felt that as editor he had to reflect all the tendencies. He said, "Oh, that's a great idea, if enough money could be raised. I'll take it up with Mickey," who was the district organizer in Northern California. He did, and Mickey agreed it was a great idea--although you would never know now from Mickey's statements. Down here, I raised most of it just by going to people whom I had known for years and telling them what we wanted the money for and why it could not be part of the regular PW drive, which has to be kept up just to keep the paper alive. This was extra and above anything anybody would give. And between the north and the south, we raised enough money to pay for Al to go. I won't describe his trip because it's in his book, the last chapter of his book. But what happened is that the reality he saw was not the reality that the Daily World was saying. He doesn't mention, in his book, by the way, the fact that he left from this famous National Committee meeting which took place on Labor Day 1968 on Czechoslovakia after telling Gus he was going. And Gus uttered no objections to his going. That's all concealed now, the fact that he went through the party formality. He had abstained from the vote on the invasion on the ground that he hadn't heard the report. It was only when he came back that he sent them a very long letter asking that his vote be recorded as "no" instead of abstention. Well, I'm not going to discuss the other things that happened with Al because it's all part of his book, the last chapter of his book, except to verify how accurate his description of what took place was. But his dispatches in the paper only further inflamed this civil war atmosphere inside of the paper. You really cannot appreciate how violent that was. Here was just a sample of it: again, this one man Sid Harris stays in my mind as the complete donkey; after Al's speech at the PW banquet the first day he was back from Czechoslovakia (still was having jet lag, poor man), [Harris] was one of those who led the booing of Al because of his description of what he saw which was at variance with what the official Soviet position was. He claimed in his club that Al ought to be taken up to a thirteen-story building and thrown out of the window; that kind of warm, comradely exchange of opinion that was not present. [laughter] At any rate, a West Coast meeting was held at which Gus was present. Mickey Lima pulled one of his typical examples of mendacity and duplicitous conduct, totally changed his position and denounced Al for violating democratic centralism by writing these dispatches printed in the PW, even though he had himself agreed they should be. There was only one other amusing thing that happened at that meeting, again not terribly important, more revealing of atmosphere than of anything else. Both Gus and I were going on from that meeting to New York to attend a National Executive Board meeting. This was in October or November of '68. We got out to the airport by different cars--neither one of us knew we were on the same flight--only discovered as we met in the flight area that we were on the same plane. We started to go on the plane, and he says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I must leave you here," and I said, "Why, aren't we on the same flight?" "Yes," he says, "but I'm first class." [laughter] And there his comrade was, sitting in tourist!

GARDNER

What were the dates that Al Richmond stayed on the People's World?

HEALEY

He came here in 1938 and he left, I think, in '70, but I'm not sure.

GARDNER

And was it over the same issue?

HEALEY

Oh, sure, exactly the same issue.

GARDNER

So this carries through now--I guess that's more or less the background--to the publication of his book.

HEALEY

Well, by then the other big thing that had erupted here was that in last August 1972, I did a broadcast about the arrests of the Czechoslovak comrades who'd been jailed because they were circulating leaflets telling people what was in the Czechoslovak election code, how they could express their vote if they wanted to. I had done something that was a little mischievous before that. I'd just seen Franklin Alexander, who was formerly a close friend of mine, and had said to him casually that I was going to be circulating a petition protesting the arrests of these comrades and the violation of socialist legality and socialist democracy. He promptly went everywhere in the country, alarming everybody in New York and Northern California: "Healey is organizing a petition!" I had no intention of doing a petition. I said it deliberately, knowing what he would do, and I was just being kind of mischievous, watching him promptly proceed to do it. But what I did do was to do a broadcast that had four or five names on it--Ben Margolis, John McTernan, Helen Travis, Bob Travis, and my own--protesting these arrests. None of the others being members of the party-- I deliberately did not want other party members to do it because I knew how it would be considered. The fact is, the party has never taken a position upholding the arrests, so technically I was not violating anything by doing it. But oh, my God! the screams that came from one end of the country to the other! I had, of course, violated democratic centralism again because the very word Czechoslovakia-unless you were going to praise the intervention and what Husak was doing now and all the great glories that are present--was a forbidden word in the party. As a result, last December at a Central Committee meeting, Helen Winter, who's the new secretary of international affairs for the party (which means that she makes the arrangements on trips, meets with the bigwigs, goes on delegations), in a speech entitled "On the Standards for Membership and Leadership in the Party," launched into a very sharp attack against me on the ground that my broadcast violated democratic centralism. Of course, nobody from here who went there had the nerve either to challenge it there, or to even come and tell me about it when they got back. I found out from other people who were present from New York, who called me to tell me about it. And Jim Jackson, who's the new education director, formerly the international secretary, did the same thing in his speech on Communist morality or something, used me as the example of a violator of all the principles of Communist morality because of this broadcast I did on the arrests in Czechoslovakia. After that, two different meetings were held with me by the district leaders, subcommittees coming over to see me, each one trying to press me on the question of "democratic centralism." I must not speak out publicly on those questions which were controversial. Each time I just told them to go chase their tail; they shouldn't come teach their grandmother how to suck eggs. I was quite as aware as they were of what the concepts were, and I didn't agree with their definition of the concepts and didn't propose to change my definition for their contrived conclusions. But it was obvious that great pressure was being put on them by the national office to force me to conform. In honesty, I should also mention that at the last national convention, which was in 1971, maybe '72, Danny Rubin had come out here from the national office, and they had gone through great pressure, he and the other leaders, to get me to agree to go as a delegate to that convention and to serve on the leading committees. I had two theories about why they were doing it. (I didn't do it, of course. As I say, I had made up my mind it was a waste of time to go to those conventions or to serve on those committees.) One reason for their doing it was that there was some pressure from some of the Soviet comrades in regard to this--it's interesting--because while they didn't approve of my politics, they did feel I was an important voice. It seemed to them totally unnecessary to freeze me out of the leadership; [they thought] that I could add something, and they should make every effort back East to see that I feel included. I found that very ironic and amusing. The only reason I knew it was going on is that one of my friends had just come back from the Soviet Union and one of the leading comrades at the convention told me of their concern over there for my future and my well-being and so forth, their respect for me and regard for me. But the other, the more important factor to me, why I would not even consider staying on the district committee any longer, was that the meetings were becoming sillier and sillier. The debates at the convention were absolutely abysmal. A new D.O. had come in, a young man, younger than I was, by the name of Lou Diskin--a very nice man, but totally incapable of handling the problem because of the line. It wasn't his fault. Then they took him out and sent in an even younger guy, a man by the name of Arnold Locks hin, who only proves one thing, and that is that you can have a PhD and be abysmally ignorant. Very rigid, very dogmatic, very unknowledgeable, and totally unconcerned, totally convinced that party history started in 1967 when he joined the party. But it was clear, as I say, that the pressures were there. My own club meanwhile was carrying on its own independent discussions. We found ourselves in general agreement. There were a whole scad of older comrades--the club I was in was mostly, except for me, young people--but there were a whole number of older comrades who still shared the same opinion but, again, felt hopeless and impotent about being able to do anything about it. There was just no way in which they could find a way to express themselves. But it all came to a head around Al Richmond's book, because two years ago the political committee of the party had passed a decision which most people didn't know anything about at all, saying that no leading Communist could submit a book for publication without first getting the idea of the book approved and then the manuscript approved by the appropriate party body. Well, we didn't even do things like that back in our strictest days. I mean, it's such nonsense, a prior censorship: before you even write, you must get what you've written approved by a party body. But, as I say, very few people knew about it. Al Richmond knew about it because he was still on the National Committee at that time. He was not going to abide by such a decision; nobody with any self-respect would. At any rate, when the pressures came to a head two months ago, it was clear as far as I was concerned that the idea of trying to stay to fight not only was totally useless because I could not effectively fight, but that it would represent more: in order to stay, I would now have to conform to a degree that had never been demanded of me before, and this I totally, completely, passionately, vehemently rejected as an alternative. I was not going to stand up publicly and make these silly speeches that they wanted. I gather that in the Executive Board meeting they discussed the fact that I was resigning. Harry Hunt, who's an old friend of mine, a neighbor who lives just a few blocks away, expressed the opinion that I had long ago set out a course for myself of becoming a professional anti-Soviet speaker on the college circuit, and the proof of this was that I had spoken at UCLA extension courses and gotten paid $150 for it by UCLA, which was proof that this was the way I would now earn my living, by being an anti-Soviet specialist. The rest of them all agreed that without any question I had become a counterrevolutionary, would help the capitalist class, and all this kind of nonsense.

GARDNER

Will you talk about Al Richmond's book? What are some of the issues in it that make it so. . . ?

HEALEY

Well, of course the most controversial issues are in the last two chapters. The next to last chapter is entitled "Reappraisal," which includes the impact of the Twentieth Congress, Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin, how our generation, we Communist leaders of roughly the same age and experiences, how we felt about it. Then the final chapter describes his resignation as editor because of, in the first place, Czechoslovakia, then the continuing pressures on him as editor. However, they don't want to say that--they don't want to admit that that's the reason--so they invent the charge that it's a racist book, because I think they mention the fact that a whole number of Black leaders are not mentioned by name in the index within the book and therefore the omission of Black leaders is significant, and that enough time is not taken in his memoirs to describe the centrality of the fight against racism and the party's role in this. There's the charge that he was always secretly the, quote, "ideologist of the Johnny Gates revisionist group." And that, of course, is kind of hilarious because he was, first of all, not in the national leadership during that fight; secondly, he was not part of the Gates group. Mickey Lima was, who's a member of the Executive Board today, and Claude Lightfoot, who was the head of the Chicago party, was part of the Gates group. But that isn't mentioned. Al Richmond was never involved in the national meetings because these were the National Executive Board meeting where these debates took place, and he wasn't on it. Then, of course, I was brought into it because in his book his wife [Nancy] and I were singled out--no, Tom Van Dyke, who was his agent, and I were singled out for comment [acknowledgment]. Really the only reason he included me was that he had a chapter dealing with the thirties; I had done an enormous amount of recent research on--not for him. I was making speeches on the history of the thirties to various college groups and others and had reread all of the party documents of that period, had arrived at conclusions about it which I had shared with him as I did with many others (lots of graduate students who were writing their material or others writing of the period--I was always delighted to share the results of my own analysis and research with others). This was, of course, proof that he and I had been conspiring all the time. And then he had sent me some of the chapters--I didn't see the entire manuscript-- for comment, and we engaged in quite prolonged correspondence on aspects of the chapters I saw. But then the other part that I was charged with: it was said that "he came sneaking into the district behind the district leadership's [back] " to attend parties that were organized to promote the book when it came out this spring. Well, I had been the one to organize both those parties where he could promote the book and his appearance on TV programs, the same thing I had done for Gil Green when he wrote his book. Any book I particularly approved of, I was very glad to get it circulated. I wouldn't do it for books I didn't approve of, but I did it for those I did. And of course he hadn't come sneaking in. This Arnold Lockshin, who's the current district organizer for the party, was sitting in my club when I announced the fact that these parties were being held for Richmond. But they were using, you know, anything to inflame an atmosphere of conspiracy. A couple of things that were significant about my leaving was that my own club, the Venceremos club, came in with two resolutions to the membership meeting. At both membership meetings, the board announced when they opened the meeting they would not allow any motions to be made. Here's supposedly the highest body of the party, the membership itself, meeting, and the leaders have called together the people to tell them they can't pass any motions nor bring in any resolutions. But my club insisted on reading its own resolution, which was in effect a resolution of solidarity with me, pointing out the other people who had left, and [arguing that] the party should draw lessons from it, why this was taking place, as well as a resolution, a very thoughtful one, they drew up on the question of democratic centralism. They'd done a great deal of research, what it should be and what it wasn't. They insisted on distributing that resolution to the other members of the party who were present there, which is technically a perfectly legal thing; they weren't charged with factionalism for doing that. As I say, when the final vote was taken at the district committee meeting itself on the statement which the district executive board drew up condemning me, the vote was twelve to six, with six opposing it, which was unheard of. I mean, I don't recall any other time that's happened. And that's on the district committee, in which, as I say, most of us who shared the same viewpoint had already refused to serve. So these were new people in the main, new as far as the struggle was concerned, who were voting against it and expressing themselves against it.

GARDNER

Had you at this point written anything in support of Al Richmond?

HEALEY

No, no. But I had done several broadcasts on his book, and I interviewed him on my program.

GARDNER

And on the broadcasts had you editorialized?

HEALEY

Sure. And not only had I done that, I had done something that just infuriated them. One broadcast about six weeks before the final act, I had announced where Hy Lumer's review was and where it could be gotten, and I told them of some other reviews that had appeared in publications like Ramparts and others, suggested that they read the book and the interviews, and said that in a subsequent broadcast I was going to discuss the reviews as well as the book itself. And this just sent them into a veritable tizzy because that would mean a public critique of Hy Lumer's really politically illiterate review. That, by the way, is one of the heartbreaking fallouts of this whole thing in the party, the capacity to deal coherently and intelligently with current questions; there's almost a law that is in operation that the more rigid you become, the more stupid becomes the output of what you're issuing, the less content it has. One of the things that intrigued me in doing this research on past party documents is that even when we issued material that wasn't maybe always accurate in terms of what was commensurate with a current scene, there was an intelligence to it that you could follow, there was a reasoning, a logic behind that line that you could examine and see why a particular line was being presented. What has really happened since Gus Hall became the general secretary is that bad politics drives out good politics. No analysis drives out any analysis. And that's really the hallmark of the current materials that come out. They are barren, bankrupt. They're sad. I feel a great tragedy, just totally aside from any individual relationship with the party, that they can be so terribly devoid of content.

GARDNER

Al Richmond quit, what, a week later?

HEALEY

Yes.

GARDNER

Okay, now, the next--well, first, just for the historical record which may not have it anywhere, the broadcast you made on KPFK was July 9? [tape recorder turned off]

HEALEY

July 9, 1973.

GARDNER

Right, at seven o'clock. Listening to the show, I was intrigued by some of the questions that came. Would you care to comment on that?

HEALEY

You comment. You heard the questions.

GARDNER

Well, the one that I thought was the most interesting was from a Black girl who was obviously . . .

HEALEY

A Black woman. Kendra Alexander.* Yes. Kendra is a member of the Central Committee and she's the org secretary of the party in Northern California and a very good friend of mine. I recruited her into the party, and I kept her in the party at times when she wanted to leave. Her questions went to two areas. One was the nature of Al Richmond's book itself, and the second was in regard to democratic centralism. She kept insisting that she was speaking there in a room with four Black Communists, and that Black Communists saw the party as the primary instrument for liberation. (Just parenthetically, after the broadcast, one of the Black women sitting there, who is the chairman of the Che-Lumumba club, a young woman by the name of Tamu [Valerie Mitchell], called me the next day to say that when Kendra hung up the phone she promptly criticized her for daring to say that she was speaking in the name of the Black Communists down here, that she didn't represent their feeling; they didn't feel the way she did.) But at any rate, I was very soft on Kendra that night, as you may have noticed.

GARDNER

Well, she didn't give you much time to respond either. She talked till the tail end of the show.

HEALEY

I know, I was very deliberately soft. For one *The exchange between Kendra Alexander and Dorothy Healey is included as part of the transcript of the KPFK broadcast in the appendix to these volumes. thing, she is young, and I don't like to feel, you know, I'm pushing her. Secondly, then and in the meeting where I spoke at the Unitarian church the following Sunday, I found myself in a very paradoxical position. The questions which for twenty-five years I'd been speaking publicly about, the questions of what the attitude should be toward the socialist world, questions of party democracy and what a revolutionary party should be, the weaknesses of my own party, which before I had no difficulty in ever speaking about--I found that, now that I was not in the party, it was much harder to talk about those things than before. I had not yet found a way to come to grips with the questions because on the one hand I was determined not to say anything that would help reaction, and secondly, I didn't want to say anything that would help those on the left like the Maoists or the Trotskyists, both of whom; I consider even more dead-end traps than anything else. Well, the one thing, however, that you should know about the Kendra Alexander exchange was that she, as you know, went into very great detail on what she considered the racism in the book, its failure to deal with the question of Black liberation. I did not take on one thing with her publicly that I did take on with her when she came over to visit me three days later here at my home. That was that part of what she objected to, she, of all people, knew was not true. Al Richmond, in one of the chapters, has what is in effect a polemic with the national party and the leadership end of the Communists who were very reluctant to take any position in regard to the San Rafael shootout or with the defense of Angela Davis in the beginning because Communists don't approve of those kind of actions, individual actions of that kind. Al had done an enormous amount of research which the Angela Davis committee,* the Communists on the Angela Davis committee, used, including Kendra and Franklin, in their debates within the party to back up their position that of course we had to defend not only Angela but, in effect, we even had to understand why Jonathan Jackson had done what he had done, and George Jackson's action. What Al had done was to show the historic comparison, that when McNamara bombed the L.A. Times [in 1910]--in which lots of people got killed--William Z. Foster, who did not approve of that specific act because we don't approve of individual terror, nevertheless came to his defense on the basis that what McNamara was fighting for, even if he did it incorrectly, was the working class, and that therefore we had to, in an act of solidarity, be identified with McNamara. Al did this to show that that should be the comparable approach in regard to San Rafael, the shootout, *The United National Committee to Defend Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners. [D.R.H.] and Angela. So I said to Kendra that in spite of the fact that Al Richmond didn't use the word Angela Davis and he didn't talk about San Rafael and didn't say the words Black liberation, clearly that's what he was talking about. Now, what's important, the content or the form? She then said, "Well, that's true, I hadn't thought of that." But what was really motivating her mostly is something that's very honest among the young people. The sixties were their generation; that's when they came to political life, and therefore to them that was the best of all possible times. They really couldn't understand, those who were honestly feeling as she felt, how those of us who were in the party leadership could [contend], even while young people like them were coming in, and in quite a few numbers, that the party was missing the boat in the sixties, that we were not in the center of struggles for liberation.

GARDNER

As you had been in the thirties.

HEALEY

As we had been before. They couldn't see that, that this was what was really the truth. The irony of it, however, is that some of those who'd been the most critical-Carl Bloice, Kendra, among others--were the most vehement in their criticism of the national line during the sixties because they felt that it was an opportunist line, that we weren't taking a militant enough position. But that they had forgotten by now. They forget it honestly; I don't want to impute dishonesty to them in their forgetting of it. As they become the party leadership and have to defend the totality of the party, they forget their own yesterdays, what they were fighting about. That's part of it. Part of what also is present in their approach is that they're convinced that when they get into the full leadership of the party, they will give better leadership than the old leadership has. In order to do that, they have to soften their current criticisms of things they don't like, because if they keep criticizing they're going to be in the same position I'm in--they"re going to be looked upon as being negative. That is the most terrible adjective: "You're just negative." Or, "You're antiparty." Or, "You're antileadership." But what they don't see is the tragedy of imperceptible accommodation to things that they really don't agree with; they don't want to fight on everything, so they keep quiet. So that, as I say, Kendra's exchange with me on that telephone on that radio program. ... I thought she presented a very intelligent--a presentation that intelligently represented what the party leadership thinks about these questions. And I, as I say, was very reluctant to challenge or take her on very sharply, although as you may remember when I finally did she uttered her usual lament, "Oh, Dorothy, that's what you always do to me," whenever I push her in terms of the logic of the question or the facts of it. It's the facts that drive her even angrier. I ended with that note.

GARDNER

What about other reaction? Two -and -a -half weeks had gone by.

HEALEY

Well, it's really quite surprising. In addition to the fact that the internal party debate continues here-- I don't know about elsewhere and I would doubt that it does elsewhere; but here at least it does--is the fact that outside the party (if I wanted to, but I just don't have the energy for it) I've been inundated with requests from independent radicals to meet with them to discuss the future alternatives, to explain in more detail some of these questions that you and I have just been talking about. A really great warmth has been expressed by radical groups, radical collectives--independent ones; not, I assure you, either the Maoists, the Revolutionary Union, nor the various Trotsky sects that have that approach.

GARDNER

Sect is such a perfect word.

HEALEY

Yes. Unfortunately and tragically, that's true. I've gotten lots of letters and incredible phone calls-- to me, incredible, from people--either people I'd known for long years who were not Communists but with whom I'd worked, and aside from non-Communists, anti-Communists in some cases, simply a feeling that here is a struggle they feel an identity with, a search for truth. I had one letter, for instance, from a professor whose name I won't mention, from UCLA, who's always been very antiparty. Just a very loving and warm letter after the broadcast, how much she agreed with me.

GARDNER

Well, one of the things both you and Al Richmond stressed was the insistence that the two of you were remaining Marxists, or remaining Communists, although not within the Communist party. Have you been able to maintain that?

HEALEY

Well, so far I have had no difficulty in doing it. The problem is that what I have had to do is give a great deal of thought precisely around the problem that I've described to you, that in anything I say, I'm not going to give any ammunition to those who--you know, the ex-Communist confessional who tears into everything that's ever been written. For instance, Lowell Ponte, who's the right-wing commentator on KPFK, sent me a column he had written which just horrified me and disgusted me, his conclusions of what he thought my resignation proved. So I wrote him back--he considers himself a friend of mine; we've known one another for many years, even though we've always disagreed--so I wrote him back a letter and said he totally misrepresented my position and my thinking, denouncing him. Yesterday I received from him a copy of the book The God that Failed. So I just sent him off a letter saying, "Dear Lowell, I've never believed in a God in the first place. Therefore, no God can fail for me." However, I will admit that there are two things I have done that I ordinarily wouldn't do. I was asked to appear on a number of television programs and radio programs, and I have turned them down. I do have to find a way to express myself in such a way that under no conditions can what I have to say be used as anti-Communist ammunition. Of course, that's what they want. They don't want me to come on and tell them what I think of capitalism, which is what I'm going to talk about. And I want to be certain that there's no misunderstanding when I appear as to what I say.

GARDNER

Who were some of the invitations from?

HEALEY

[Robert] Abernathy's program. George Putnam has called me twice.

GARDNER

Well, he's an old friend. [laughter]

HEALEY

Oh, my God, you should hear him. Just incredible what he says privately. What a deceitful human being! Anyway, I'd also agreed to appear on Tempo. Both programs I called up and postponed. I told them one or another reason why I couldn't do it at this point, and they said I could do it later. Tomorrow Al will be down here, and we're going to be interviewed by a Ron Ridenour, who's doing an interview for the Washington Post, with the understanding that we have full determination as to the questions and the answers, [laughter] and they won't change the copy at all.

GARDNER

Sounds like Nixon.

HEALEY

I hope we come out better than that. And the L.A. Times is coming out here Monday. They want to do an interview in depth.

GARDNER

Who is that?

HEALEY

John Kendall. But he also understands the conditions of it, that I will not under any conditions discuss questions that in any way could be considered as aspersions on the party. I'm not interested in that. I've been called up and asked if I won't give an answer to the party's attack on me that appeared in the Free Press (the only paper that printed it), and I said no, I'm not going to get into a slandering match with them. I quite understand why they made such a harsh statement. I have a great passion for the problem I think they face, and I'm not going to get into shouting matches, "You're a liar, I didn't say that," you know, anything like that. I'm just not going to do it.

GARDNER

Well, how will this affect your public appearances? In a sense, won't it be hard for you to avoid that kind of thing?

HEALEY

Very hard. As I say, it was much easier to be critical of the party while I was in the party than it is when I'm out of the party. I'm not at all satisfied that I've found an answer to it. As a matter of fact, I've agreed to attend a couple of meetings with some of the young lawyers, with some Asian radicals--for my own benefit, not for theirs--because I want to test out, think out loud with others, how to handle this problem. If I can't handle it, I just won't talk about it; that's all. If I cannot keep as the center the fight against capitalism and imperialism, then I'm just not going to do anything.

GARDNER

But what do you do when a party member stands up and asks you a direct question at one of your speeches, say at UCLA or somewhere like that?

HEALEY

Well, I've got to find a way. My son is very critical of me. He think that I should stop being inhibited. He says, "You keep quoting Lenin's phrase that 'Truth is revolutionary.'"

GARDNER

And you've never been inhibited.

HEALEY

I've never been. He says, "If truth is revolutionary, then let the chips fall where they may. You've got to say what you think is the truth." But that's no answer, really, because truth is a very relative thing. How it appears in the long run to a certain sector of people, it may appear in a different way to another. But I think that ultimately I have no doubt of the fact I'll find what I consider a proper, balanced way to handle not just easy ones ("What the hell's wrong with capitalism?"). Well, as an example, I've appeared on Mike Jackson's program twice because I didn't have to leave the house; that's why I did it. It was ABC, the conference call, and I could take the calls right here in my home. Both times every question that came in was the usual question, "Why don't you go to Russia as long as you think that socialism is so great?" You know, the usual nonsense that you get, that I've always gotten whenever I appear on one of those kind of things. So there was no problem then of dealing with those kind of questions. But as I say, I've got to find a way to do it that satisfies my conscience. It doesn't make any difference what it does to anybody else's, I've got to be satisfied with it. I can't say I've yet found the way in which to do it. It can only be done--you know me so well, after all these years of interviews--it's got to be what I really genuinely feel; otherwise I can't speak about it. If I don't honestly feel it, then I'm tongue-tied. I don't know.

GARDNER

Well, what do you think of the future? Are you going to remain on the circuit? Are you going to keep as active as you have been?

HEALEY

Well, not the same kind of activity. I'm not going to be going to the same kind of meetings. I'll probably continue reading everything, and then I'll continue speaking wherever I'm given an invitation. I'm going to try to do some writing, which is what I agreed to do for a long time since, on the complicated questions that I think Marxist theory requires, that we need to do more than cross ourselves and say our prayers to it, which is what I think we do now. I'm going to rest, too. I'm tired; I'm enormously tired. I found that emotionally, spiritually, I was far more depleted than I had any idea. These last few weeks had clearly taken a toll on me that I had no idea of; I was totally unaware of it, just plain was blotted out.

GARDNER

How about organizations? Is there any group, any organization anywhere, that you can find?

HEALEY

Well, there are two groups nationally--one is organized, one is talking about organizing--that I would be glad to help. I'm not going back to the position of being a pivotal person, an organizer. I'm too old. In my opinion, new movements have to be led by young people, not by old people. I'm glad to help, but I will not be "a leader."

GARDNER

This is going to be hard to avoid.

HEALEY

One is the New American Movement, which I've been following from its inception and which I think has great promise. It has great problems, because organizing anything nowadays is very difficult. But it has great promise in terms of an honesty of approach, not falling into some of the pitfalls that the Maoists and the Trots are in. The other is a new thing that's just shaping up. Professor Arthur Kinoy has written a document--it was written about six months ago--a document calling for the organization of a mass party for socialism in America [the Mass Party of the People]. They've been holding national meetings. I gather they've just had one in New York, with very significant representation, Black and Puerto Rican leaders and white radicals. They called me yesterday and said they're meeting in San Francisco in two weeks. I've just gotten in the mail today an airplane ticket--they asked me to come up and attend--and to get out of it I said, "I'm sorry, I can't afford it." [laughter] I open the mail this morning and there's a round-trip ticket, PSA, saying, "Now you have no excuse." I don't know whether I'll go to it or not. I really don't. Mainly, as I say, I'm tired. It's not a political objection. My opinion now is the same as when I was in the party. I always felt the party should encourage all these groups to organize, independent radical groupings, that we would only be strengthened by the variety of groups that considered they had a common outlook as far as Marxism is concerned that we should not be competitive and say, "We have a monopoly on the franchise. We're the only ones who can organize." I used Chile as the example. The existence of a Chilean Socialist party that considers itself Marxist is a great help as far as the new path that they're developing. And the Chilean Communist party, I think, has generally, it seems to me, a sensible approach toward them, not as competitors but as comrades-in-arms. And so my position toward these new groups is no different than it would have been if I were still the chairperson of the Communist party of Southern California. I would encourage every radical group whose position had a sober estimate of the country and did not play silly games like either the Trots or the Maoists--by all means, I'd help them with everything possible.

1.38. TAPE NUMBER: XIX, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 10, 1973

GARDNER

When we left off, sometime last June, we were talking about 1967, and we'd just finished off, really, with the Six-Day War. You mentioned a conference that came up around that time.

HEALEY

Well, actually, the New Politics Conference which took place in Chicago in 1967 was an illustration of both the complexities and the uniqueness of U.S. politics, not only in the sense of electoral politics, although that's included, but of the character and composition of the peoples of the United States. This was a conference that had been called by a whole number of organizations and very (in a qualified way) significant individuals. I qualify the term significant individuals in the sense that they were none of them individuals--because, again, of the kinds of movements that developed in the sixties, representing actually organized constituencies, but all of them representative of trends within the political and social struggles of the United States. It was a conference that was designed to consider alternatives for the 1968 elections, to try to organize some meaningful way for the Left to make itself felt in the '68 elections. As you remember, at that point tte war was still escalating. No one dreamt for a moment that Johnson would not be the candidate. There was certainly the overwhelming feeling that Johnson would run (there was no question of that in most people's minds), and that if he decided to run, he would get the nomination, inasmuch as no incumbent had ever been denied the nomination. And actually, very rarely has it been true that an incumbent president has been defeated in the final election. So that was part of the consideration of what was going on. The New Politics Conference in Chicago almost immediately started to have its greatest difficulties around the question of Black participation. Just prior to the opening of the conference itself, a whole number of Black organizations and/or Black spokespeople had had a meeting, a Black caucus. There was a pressure being made on Black participants from some of the nationalist groupings in Chicago that they should not participate in the conference at all inasmuch as it was Black-white, along with a very small gathering of Chicanos. This was again the height of the "Black power" pressure, the very great pressure that under no conditions should Blacks be participating. And this Black caucus kept meeting constantly throughout the conference.

GARDNER

Who were some of the participants at the conference?

HEALEY

Well, I remember James Forman spoke at the conference. The BSUs were there. I really don't remember all the participants anymore. I should have looked that up, because I remember making a series of speeches on it when I came back, because it was a very significant thing, primarily on the political relations that developed there. What finally happened as far as this question was concerned is that a very significant number of Blacks decided to remain, but to remain by giving conditions to the white participants as to what the basis of their continuance in the conference would mean. They drew up a nine- or ten-point program of demands to present to the whites. The ones I remember are the demands that were the most controversial and caused the most commotion and, later, the greatest reactions The first was the demand that Blacks be given 50 percent of the vote, both at the conference and in any continuations committee that was elected. Now, there was a very great legitimacy to this, in my opinion, although I should say that my opinion was very much a minority, both in the party and, what was interesting, in the entire white Left, where the reaction was the same as the national party's reaction was. The party on the spot, those of us who were in the party and in the party leadership who were in Chicago, all took one position, but people who weren't there took another.

GARDNER

Who are the ones who were there?

HEALEY

Gil Green was there; Arnold Johnson was there; Charlene Mitchell was there. Uh. . . .

GARDNER

Well, that's a good representative sample. About how many in all, would you say?

HEALEY

Oh, I'd say there were maybe twenty Communist party members there. The demand for 50 percent vote, as I said, had to me a great legitimacy, in that there will never be a time in the United States when Blacks can equal the votes of white participants in anything because of the numerical minority that they are in the country. Historically, what has always happened is that all the coalitions included under the slogan of "Black and White, Unite and Fight" have always been predominantly white-led, of necessity, because of the character of the country. Therefore, there is the implicit assumption that this is what should be, that Blacks should be content to accept the leadership of whites on the grounds of, quote, "democracy," that the number of votes present determines it. But when you make politics into an arithmetical question, which is what that does when you say "one man, one vote" (or "one person, one vote"), whites will always have the majority. So that I personally felt that this demand was a legitimate one. The question of how it would be utilized in a responsible way by Blacks--in other words, for unity rather than for simply unilateral definition of a politics--was a later question. But the initial assumption, it seemed to me, was a correct one. The second of their demands that was highly controversial was a question in regard to the Mideast and a condemnation of Israel. Both of these questions, as I say, indicate the continuing problems that are present in the country as far as the Mideast is concerned, where actually no organized sector of the peace movement has ever yet dared to take a position, a mass position, a public position, because of the pressures within the United States. And the third question that was present there, which again is part of the history of the country and is continuing to be, was the whole approach toward electoral politics, with a significant sector of those participating arguing that the Left should not participate in electoral politics at all, that it's just a bourgeois trap in which no significant change can take place, and another sector arguing that the main thing that the Left should unite on was--well, let me rephrase that. . . . The first sector included those who felt that the important question of left organization was simply the grass-roots organization on community issues and the total abandonment of any [attempt at] a nationwide approach, that grass roots was the whole slogan; and this was, as I remember, mainly the feeling of a lot of the still-present SDS people and the groups around them. On this debate on electoral perspectives, there was another sector that felt that the main question was to come out with an appeal for a third party, the organization of a nationwide third party. The party people were primarily concerned around this issue, with a third ticket, rather than a third party, based on the estimate that there was really no base yet for an organized third party; that it would simply be a representation of isolated individuals, that it would not represent the most significant sectors of either the working class, the Blacks, the Chicanes or anybody else who still operated primarily within the orbit of the Democratic party; and that while a third ticket might have significance, a third party was premature. Actually we were pushing for a ticket, hopefully of Martin Luther King and Ben Spock, or Ben Spock and a Black candidate, but, as I say, the hope was that it would be Martin Luther King and Ben Spock. King spoke at that conference and, I thought, made a very important and effective speech. But as part of the mood of the country, this genuinely infantile leftism that always accompanies the development of a new sector coming into politics--in this case, the students, the young people--there was a great derision of anything and anyone who did not couch their language in "revolutionary" rhetoric. (And "revolutionary" should have quotation marks around it because it was simply a question of looking for bombast more than for content, thinking that revolutionary approaches are dependent on who can sound the [most] revolutionary, rather than significantly changing and altering the immediate relationships in the country to move forward.) But the most important question of what took place there was this demand of the Blacks, because this was the thing that caused great walkouts, significant walkouts on the part of white participants, that and the Israel motion of the Black caucus. My own feeling was that some of the demands put forward by the Black caucus were really almost mischievous demands, like the Israel thing, because it was not a significant thing. It's not that they were really feeling it, but they were testing and pushing and in a sense taunting, some of them. This was not true of all of them, of course, but some of them were doing it [because] they wanted to see whether or not people would trust them and make any question. . . . Well, some people--I remember a guy from Harvard by the name of [Martin] Peretz, who was quite a significant figure for a while in New Left politics (liberal-left politics really; that's how he would be defined), walked out at this point, and other white groups with him. And even among the Left, as I say, there were great differences and dissension on that--I'm talking about the radical Left. This continued even after the conference. For instance, the Peace and Freedom conferences here in California later when this issue came up, the white radicals--I'm thinking particularly of people like Mike Hannon and others who were leading the Peace and Freedom party at that point, the people from the International Socialists--absolutely would not agree to this question of the 50 percent vote for Blacks. But the other split that came was on the question of third ticket versus third party. What was rather sad there was that if that vote had been combined together, if there had been unity reached between those who wanted a party and those who wanted a third ticket, there would have been something in the field for the 1968 electoral politics as a third alternative. But because no agreement was reached on that, those who didn't want any kind of electoral politics really won in the last analysis because no position gained a majority position. I said that there was criticism of the position followed by the party forces there in Chicago after the Chicago conference was over. I went on to New York for a National Executive Board meeting, where there was a report given on the conference. I remember people like Jim Jackson and, well, I would say Carl Winter, almost all of the resident party leaders, Gus Hall, were all very critical of the position we had taken in Chicago, first of all because they felt that it was totally nonrepresentative, including the Blacks--and Jackson kept emphasizing this, that these were mainly what we call lumpen elements, the street cats, and that therefore they were not of any significant question. And secondly, that the agreement on the 50 percent was impossible, that you couldn't build any kind of significant unity in the United States with that approach. Well, in terms of realistic politics and the level of the consciousness in the fight against racism, that's true. But it was a symbolic gesture of fighting against precisely this racism--the recognition, as I say, of the elementary fact that there will never be a time when Blacks will have a majority vote in anything that has to do with multinational participation, and that if you really mean to fight for equality, then you've got to have a special approach. You can't do it by arithmetical counts. It's got to be a political approach, which recognizes this.

GARDNER

That's the old quota theory.

HEALEY

But there's no other way around it. If you're going to make up for inequality of centuries, if you're going to do that and you're serious about it, then you've got to do it in a meaningful way. Otherwise what one is saying is that Blacks will always have to have confidence in white leadership, that they'll be honest and fight against racism, and there's nothing in history that [explains] why they should have that confidence. But whites never have to acquire confidence in a responsible Black leadership, that they will not utilize in a mischievous way that 50 percent vote. As a matter of fact, in Chicago, I might add, in the balance of that conference, there was no time really when it was not used, when the Black caucus did not exercise what in effect was a veto power in a responsible way. They did. I remember when the main spokesman of the Black caucus was Carlos [Russell], a Black educator from New York who was the most important spokesman, conducted himself in the most responsible way that anybody could ever ask for. But this became a subject--I mean, every commentary that was written in all the left publications and in all the left-liberal publications after the conference, all denounced this and all scoffed at the whole question. But the conference itself, in addition to these factors, had as its significance the fragmentation that was present, the fact that no one really from the white or the Black community spoke for any significant organized movement; individuals don't have to be responsible for anything beyond their own whims. That was in great part present then and is still present as far as the Left is concerned in the United States.

GARDNER

Were people like the Black Panther party represented at that time? Because after all, [Eldridge] Cleaver ended up being on one of the tickets.

HEALEY

Yeah, although I don't remember--if they were there, I don't remember their playing any outstanding or important role.

GARDNER

Stokely Carmichael, say, on the. . . .

HEALEY

No, although at that point, Forman represented a viewpoint that was very close to Stokely Carmichael1s. Carmichael had not yet split, either out of the country or away from the rest of the movement. G ARDNER: Or into the bourgeoisie.

HEALEY

Yeah. At the same time there was a big debate going on in that year in the party. One big debate that was taking place which again foreshadowed other developments or reflected them, as the case may be, was when I got a call one day from Carl Bloice and Don Hamerquist, who were both members of the National Committee in New York at that time-Carl Bloice was working for the World--telling me that the national leaders, the Secretariat, were proposing to postpone the national convention that was supposed to take place in '68 according to the party constitution. There was a deliberate effort to postpone it because they did not want to go into the whole question of the examination of the leadership, of what it had been doing and not doing, and because they also didn't want to come to grips with some of the major political problems. They urged that we organize National Committee members out here to vote against it when they came into a National Committee meeting. The procedure of the party constitution for the postponement of the convention is that the National Committee would have to vote to have a referendum of the membership to allow for postponement. Since that time, the constitution has been changed. Now the National Committee by itself can postpone the convention. But that's because of the fact we put up such a fight then, that's why. They almost lost--well, they didn't almost lose. They lost in Southern California; that's the only place they lost. But we fought against it at the National Committee. The only reason it has some momentary significance now is that (I was thinking mainly of the role of people like Carl Bloice and Charlene Mitchell and some of the others who had so agitated us to fight it) when the showdown vote came on the question of whether we'd go along with the postponement of the convention, actually Carl Bloice"s vote is the only one I remember--he abstained from the vote after having agitated so long. My own opinion, which is a very unkind one, is that Carl was already seeking ways in which, on the one hand, he'd be seen as dissenting from the decisions that were not within the framework of what would be considered responsive to the needs of the party, while at the same time, he was not going to be really out on a limb fighting against them in this. You dissent, but you do it safely and within, quote, "responsible bounds," responsible meaning that the leadership in New York knows that you're not going to really fight till the last ditch on a thing that you consider important. At any rate, we then went into 1968 politics. Let me backtrack a little bit on this question of what was happening as far as Blacks were concerned, because it's also had its impact on the party. Naturally, the party is not immunized from the pressures of the outside world. But it was at the peak of the Black power and nationalist pressures. The Black Communists here in L.A. were urging that a special club be set up of only Blacks within the party. This was really something frowned on in the party on the ground that the party always had to show internationalism, Black and white together, and that if it were all Blacks it would be nationalist. Well, I never could see the sense of that argument. It always seemed to me that if this is what any significant number of Black Communists wanted, it's what they should do. Internationalism is shown in content, not in forms; so you can have a meeting of all Blacks, but if they're internationalists, then they're not going to be fighting on nationalist politics. Likewise, you can have a meeting of whites and Blacks together, and the fact that there are whites present won't stop nationalist politics from dominating. Furthermore, nobody ever got excited about the fact that there were all-white meetings of the Communist party that would take place because of geography. It always seemed to me a spurious argument, a phony argument, to oppose the question of all-Black meetings. There was a second reason why I thought it was an important step, not as a permanent method of organization but as a question of Blacks acquiring confidence in whites, of their feeling that white Communists and white revolutionaries could be trusted. That was the fact that, again, because of the weight of white racism, it was very clear to me after my many years of involvement in relationships in the struggle for equality here that quite frequently, for a significant number of Black people, there was not the same ease of speaking, of being candid about opinions, as long as there were whites present. We found this out later with the women's liberation movement that there were women who felt the same way, that they could not speak with the same ease when there were men present. Even though [you can] inveigh against that as backwardness, and you've got to fight against it and so forth, you don't fight against it by ignoring it. Sometimes you have to recognize that this exists and take steps that would in a sense be temporary but that would indicate the willingness to provide for it; and then hopefully a giant stride would be taken later that would make it unnecessary for that to happen. But as long as there is the lack of confidence, you can't legislate against it by ignoring it. Well, so the Che-Lumumba club, which was an all-Black formation, was set up. It has some significance around two questions. One was that it did provide at that point a way for Black Communists, particularly young lack Communists, to play a role in the Black community or on the campuses as an all-Black formation which, during that period of pressures of Black nationalism, they could never have done as a mixed group. The count had always been against them that as Communists they were a minority in the party, therefore it was a white-led party, therefore they were just simply carrying out the dictates of whites. The second thing of significance is that if there hadn't been this all-Black formation, I don't think that Angela Davis would have joined the party. Angela Davis was at that time a member of the Black Panthers. She was going to school at UC San Diego, completing her requirements for the doctorate with Dr. Herbert Marcuse. She also had an apartment here in L.A. She was here in L.A., I think, four days a week, at San Diego three. She was at that time going around with Deacon Alexander, who is the brother of Franklin Alexander and Charlene Mitchell.

GARDNER

This is 1967?

HEALEY

No, this is the beginning of '68, the end of ‘67 and the beginning of '68. I met Angela at some discussions or meetings primarily called as to what one did to stop the attacks and terror against the Black Panthers, which was a main question at that point. She was interested in the questions about what the Communist party was doing and yet was very critical. Some of the criticisms were legitimate, some of them based, really, on influences that were not particularly revolutionary. But I remember very clearly that the course of her relationship with the party included our inviting her to come as a guest to the special conventions of 1968. (I should say that when the national proposal to postpone the convention till 1969 was carried through, they did agree that there would have to be a special convention in 1968 to decide what to do about electoral politics, whether there'd be a ticket or not. Of course, that was a highly expensive action because conventions cost close to $100,000 to bring people together from all over the country.) Well, Angela was invited as a guest of the convention, and after that she came over here with Kendra and Franklin and Deacon to discuss her joining the party. Franklin and Kendra were urging her to do it on the ground that if she joined, the first thing they were going to do in the summer was to open up a Black youth headquarters in the community that would provide a gathering point for mobilizing those who already considered themselves revolutionary, but to then go out to carry out community work, mass work in the community. What stays in my memory mainly are the discussions she and I had as to whether she should join, primarily on the question of my emphasis to her that she should not join the party if she thought it was already a clearly defined revolutionary organization with perfect politics. I kept saying to her, "If you come in with those illusions, you will go out very quickly, because it is not that. It has many weaknesses." I was very blunt in describing what the weaknesses were, but I was equally blunt in saying to her that it seemed to me that the job of the revolutionary is to recognize that the building of an organization, a party, a revolutionary party, is always the most complicated and important task; it requires the greatest courage because it means you have to be willing to fight with your fellow Communists, not just with the ruling class, and that you have to question and challenge your own beliefs, not just those of the bourgeoisie. Finally, really somewhat reluctantly, she decided to join. (I'm jumping ahead now simply to follow the sequence of Angela, of my own knowledge of what happened.) There were a great deal of pressures on her from almost the beginning--this was even before the UCLA action took place-- which were rather symptomatic of what was going on in the country again, illustrative of it. Here is this woman who was and is an intellectual at a point where antiintellec-tualism is running rampant, where the only thing that counts is being a street cat and showing that you're as tough and rough as the guy with the gun. Everybody, by the way, was practicing with guns at that point, including the Communist youth, white and Black. That was the most popular thing. (It used to drive us older ones a little crazy because we knew that at this stage taking up the gun was not the most important question. At this stage the most important question was organizing movements and organizations that would follow radical politics, revolutionary politics.) So Angela was really divided between on the one hand being an intellectual, and on the other hand proving her toughness. She was carrying on some of what I consider the youthful antics of the gun practice and the posture of toughness. Right after she joined the party, the Panthers expelled--well, I know they expelled Deacon. I think they also expelled her--or, if they didn't expel her, they dropped her because of her being a member of the party. Then came the issue of UCLA. My knowledge of it was first when she came over here one day by herself to bring me the letter that. . . . She had gone to Cuba that summer or spring, and while she was gone a letter had arrived at her San Diego address (which she didn't get until she came back) from the Board of Regents, asking her to answer the questions as to her status, whether or not she was a Communist party member. When she talked to me here--I remember our going out into the yard to talk so that the FBI and other people couldn't tape the conversation inside my home--I posed to her very sharply the question that she had to be very sure in her mind what she wanted to do, whether she wanted to be a Communist. This might have been '69; I'm not sure of the year anymore.

GARDNER

Let's see, her year at UCLA was 1969-70.

HEALEY

I think it was '69, too, because I know that it was some period after she'd joined the party. (As I say, I'm jumping ahead. I'm not trying to put the rest of it in the sequence.) I knew that she had many reservations about being in the party. She had discussed them with me over and over again during the five months while she was functioning in the party. She was very critical of national party politics. I had seen too many people who were pressured into doing something that they really didn't want, who later felt that they'd been, quote, "betrayed," you know, and then got disillusioned. I had determined I was never going to be a part of that again; so I refused to give her any advice on what she should do except to keep posing the alternatives bluntly, that if she was going to fight, no matter what tactics she used to fight this question of UCLA, then she had to make up her own mind whether she wanted to remain in the party or not. She had to think it through. Well, I know from my own direct knowledge that she really never did at that point solve the question to her own satisfaction. What really happened is that she was propelled into a series of positions mainly by events more than by her own decision, At any rate, Angela and I went down to consult with John McTernan, the attorney, as to what procedures, what alternatives, she had before her. Her own inclination at this point, and I don't think she probably even remembers this--and if I hadn't been present I might not even believe it, but I saw it and heard it and watched it happen--her own inclination at that point was to take the Fifth and refuse to answer the questions of the regents, which she had a perfect legal right to do. John McTernan, in discussing the alternatives, assured her that she did have that right, and that if she exercised it they couldn't touch her. He also pointed out, however, that this would not create new legal ground. This had already been affirmed; therefore, there was nothing new that would be achieved by it. However, if she were to take the position, "Yes, I am a member of the Communist party, and so what? You have no right to do anything about it," this would then be a test of whether or not a public member of the Communist party had a right to teach. As I say, I know that her first inclination was to take the Fifth, that she was somewhat startled and taken aback by the idea of saying, "Yes, I am a member of the Communist party." Actually, the decision on what she would do had not been fully decided by her or by anybody else because at that point Bill DiValle, an informer inside of the party, wrote a letter to the [UCLA Daily] Bruin. (He had already emerged as an informer at the hearings of the Subversive Activities Control Board against Cliff Freed and David Maris, who had been ordered to register as Communists. Bill DiValle had already surfaced as an agent.) He wrote a letter to the Bruin saying--without mentioning Angela's name--just saying that he knew that a Communist party member was being hired to work in the philosophy department, that he had nothing against that but he thought that she ought to come out publicly and say she was a member of the Communist party. In a sense, therefore, the decision was really one that was placed from the outside. But by this time, that portion of the struggle is history. Just a couple of comments on it. Because she was Black, because she was young, because she was extraordinarily able, intelligent and fluent, and because she's a beautiful woman, it became a big public question. The name "Angela" by itself became as well known as any one individual name could be in the country. This was long before the incidents at San Rafael. Already I personally felt a great deal of compassion for her, because she was being propelled into a position of being a public spokesman at a point where neither politically nor emotionally was she actually prepared for that position, either in terms of experience, knowledge or maturity of an emotional or political nature. Generally I would say she handled it in a very, very important way.

GARDNER

There was a story during the period of her tribulations while she was teaching at UCLA, during the various inquiries and meetings, that Don Kalish had also had a lot to do with creating the confrontation and bringing her to campus, more or less knowing that there would be a confrontation created. Do you know anything about that?

HEALEY

I don't think that's true. I'm sure it's not true, not only knowing what I know about it from Angela's point of view, but from discussions I had with Kalish. I think that he may have thought she was a Marxist--he knew she was a Marxist. I don't think he thought beyond that, and I don't think he even thought it proper to inquire beyond that. But once the die was cast, I think he was clearly determined that it had to be fought out on these civil liberties grounds. I remember the big arguments that took place, in the first place in the Che-Lumumba club and then among the people around and with Angela, in regard to policy during that fight. Again, it kind of mirrored the oversimplified leftism of attitudes that really were always present. In a certain sense this arose because there had been many opportunist capitulations on the part of the party on important confrontations where these young people were very critical of the fact that they felt we had not always shown our face and played our role and so forth. And in the absence of a real national public struggle against this kind of opportunism, then the leftist attitudes just bubbled over. Around the question of Angela, for instance, I remember particularly the role that Franklin and Kendra played--Franklin and Kendra Alexander--just scoffing at the idea that we should have any approach towards academic freedom, that this was a bourgeois ACLU libertarian position and this was not what we were concerned with. Angela was very much influenced by them, still is, as representing a genuinely radical position. In those meetings--as I say, I used to attend them regularly, and I had very close and warm relations with the Black Communist youth, but it was based on the fact that I'd fight them, that they knew I would not take a position simply because they had it; I would always fight for what I thought was a balanced position--on this question we used to have enormous struggles. This and the later question, when Angela developed a line that fascists should not be allowed to teach in the university, which was also Marcuse's line and also the national party's line. There was always a curious identity of viewpoints [of which] neither of the protagonists like Marcuse or the party had any idea--I used to get a kind of a grim humor out of it, because I knew what both positions were. The party had always had the position, which I considered a vulgarization of Marxism, that a "class approach" towards civil liberties was that we had the right to speak in the name of the working class but that reactionaries should never have the right to speak. No question of the First Amendment as far as reactionaries were concerned. And this is also the position of Marcuse and the position that Angela took publicly. So that on these two questions we had tremendous battles. I did not succeed in being the dominant influence, I assure you. I was rather unhappy as I saw her more and more starting to echo the kind of speeches that Elaine Brown of the Black Panther party was making--again, the mindless rhetoric, the meaningless leftist chatter that had nothing to do with significant things. But on the other hand, you had to contrast this with what she was doing in the classroom, where she was a skilled, talented, equipped teacher. There was nobody who sat through any of her lectures who could fault her in terms of her capacity of holding that position at UCLA. She had been drawn into a meeting, the first meeting that took place around the defense of the Soledad Brothers. There again one had again the same illustration of the weakness of Left politics at that point, because this issue of the most gross kind of frame-up and persecution of all the Soledad Brothers in the first place, and of George Jackson [in particular], was a case that should have evoked enormous mass response and mass support. The people who were working in that case, the two co-chairpersons , were Angela and Tamu (who was Valerie Mitchell), who were really never able to get anything but the narrowest kind of support for the case and no real significant kind of mass movement. Always the substitute of the Left rhetoric for the hard, tedious work of having to go out to speak to the non-Left, always the satisfaction if you could get all the Left spokesmen to appear for a case, but never thinking that if you put all the Left together it didn't represent anything very much in the United States. [They ignored] the dirty, pedestrian task of reaching out, first of all, to the organized sectors of both Black and white community, of ringing doorbells, or distributing leaflets, you know, all the things that are absolutely essential if you're going to build anything beyond the already convinced. That was true in the Soledad case as it was in everything else that was happening at that point. In the process of that case and while she was fighting her own case for retention on the faculty, Angela became closer and closer to Jonathan Jackson, the seventeen-year-old brother of George, a very brave, handsome fine young man, and to George Jackson himself.

GARDNER

The Jacksons weren't party members, were they?

HEALEY

No, no, never, never. George, as a matter of fact, was a member of the Panthers, although he had many politics that were different from theirs, and there was much internal battle going on about that which never surfaced. At any rate, I don't want to go into the details of all that ensued around the question of the shoot-out at San Rafael except to say that again, one can well understand and sympathize with the absolute feeling of desperation and frustration that Jonathan and the other participants of that shoot-out at San Rafael felt because there was no mass support for them, and the feeling was that clearly there was not going to be justice given to them in the courtroom--at least, so they felt--and therefore that any action that was taken was legitimate. I say one can understand that without agreeing that it was a correct estimate of what to do. By this time the history of that case and of Angela's involvement in it is well known, and I would not go into any other discussions of them anyway. Just a few other comments in regard to my own personal knowledge of some events in it. All the way through that trial when Angela was arrested, both in New York and when she was later extradited to California, the policy questions around the trial again mirrored the same debates. This is always true with these kind of questions; rarely are the policy questions simply things that occur in a vacuum. They reflect mass pressures, mass trends, mass debates--I shouldn't say "mass," because I don't mean to say that millions were involved in them--but of the Left, of the debates both in the party and out of the party. The question of lawyers, for example. The biggest question had to be whether or not Black lawyers would be the main lawyers. I remember that John Abt, for instance, who represented Angela in New York when she was in prison in New York, who is probably one of the finest constitutional lawyers in the country, was really not acceptable to Angela because, number one, he was white, and number two, she didn't feel comfortable with him. He was an older person, and she just didn't want him.

1.39. TAPE NUMBER: XIX, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 10, 1973

GARDNER

Now, you were speaking of the lawyers.

HEALEY

First Howard Moore was brought in from Atlanta, Georgia. He was the first chief counsel in the beginning, as a matter of fact, a Black lawyer who had defended the Panthers in the South, the brother-in-law of Julian Bond. In the beginning the party wanted to have a party lawyer, not necessarily a member of the party but one who would understand the important questions for the party in this case and who would be sensitive to those kind of needs and issues. But of the ones that they proposed, none of them would Angela agree to, then nor later. John Abt and I had gone to visit Leo Branton--this was while John Abt was still representing her when she was still in the jail in New York--to see whether he would come into the case. At that point he was not willing to unless--he felt he could not have a free hand. He knew Angela and didn't feel she'd trust him. I was pushing for him because he'd been in our case, in the Smith Act case; that was his first big case, in 1952. I knew that he was a man of enormous talent and very necessary legal ability. Finally, after she was removed to San Rafael, she and Leo had several conferences, and she did agree to Leo coming in. Leo's condition of coming in was that he was to be chief counsel, and that was finally agreed to. In addition, Doris Walker, a white woman lawyer, was added to the staff of lawyers; again, this question of composition, not how much you need but that everything has to be rounded out. Margaret Burnham, a Black woman whom Angela had grown up with, really, but who had never been in a trial or had trial experience, was also on the staff. But all through the trial there were great debates between the defense committee, headed by Franklin--including Angela's position on the questions--and the lawyers. Actually, if any one of the participants was to write a story of that trial, each one would probably write it entirely differently than the other, would single out very different things as to what took place or what didn't take place. Let me come back to some of the events of '68 now, however.

GARDNER

Let me ask you a question or two that you sort of led into or hinted at. What comes to mind is the Black Panther party and its origination, which is around that period, and its relationship to the Communist party. So many of its members seem to be sort of a fringe of or affected by the party. You mention two or three who became members. Do you recall when it came about, who the leaders were around here?

HEALEY

Well, the initial leaders were and are Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

GARDNER

Well, that was in Oakland. Did they have much relation with the Communist party up there?

HEALEY

Well, before the Panthers were actually formed, there'd been a very loosely defined Black caucus of some kind that met mainly to debate and discuss questions in which Roscoe Proctor, a Black Communist leader who was at that time in Oakland or New York, had participated. He had considerable prestige and status in the community. However, I think it would be a distortion of reality to think that the party played any major role either in their organization or in their posture. The only time there was a momentary relationship, and not for very long, was at the time the Panthers organized their big conference in Oakland called the United Front Conference. They were very much influenced--at least at the top--by Bill Patterson, a very long-time Black Communist party leader, a very old man. For a very short period of time there was a momentary coincidence of position. It's important to stress how short a period that was.

GARDNER

About what period would that have been?

HEALEY

That was around 1968 or '69.

GARDNER

Where did Huey Newton get his rhetoric? That's where it all began, actually, at--was it Merritt Junior College?

HEALEY

Yes, yes, absolutely. The rhetoric was typical at that point of almost all the Black groups. It was very much influenced by Maoist slogans, most particularly that "All power grows out of the barrel of a gun." I should say that Communists have always--in this country and other countries--derided this as being an inaccurate chronology, that first you have to have masses who have achieved a degree of revolutionary consciousness, and only then can the question of whether you want guns or not be decisive. But to place that first is sheer nonsense. It's part of the historic battle that's always gone on between what in Marxist theoretical terms are called voluntarism and determinism, those who think human will by itself can create the conditions for revolution as against those who think that there is a kind of inevitable and inexorable process it has to go through in which human will is almost nonexistent. The fact that you have to have elements of both--that history is not changed without human beings who want to change it but, at the same time, unless there are conditions that are right for the change, human beings aren't going to be able to do it anyway--that both positions have to be included in any genuinely dialectical approach is usually disregarded by all sides of the debate. Of course, as is usual, the rhetoric is always misleading, anyway, when it comes from the originators like China with its great rhetoric about "All power comes from the barrel of a gun" and "All peoples have to fight for independence." The best contrast to that is that Hong Kong and Macao, both of which are on Chinese territory, are still either a Portuguese possession (nominally) or British, because although there are millions of Chinese being oppressed in those areas and living under conditions of extreme poverty, it serves the People's Republic of China better at this point to have that as an entree for dollars than it does to take back that territory. As I say, when you examine the rhetoric of any of the protagonists in any of these debates and then look at the reality of their actions, you see the great gap that exists. The problem is, most people don't examine the reality; they just go by these slogans. So throughout the world, I would say that the young, newly radicalized activists were very much influenced by what appeared to be the very outstanding revolutionary slogans coming out of China. They seemed to be pure and free of compromise, and they never bothered to examine the reality of Chinese politics. All they wanted were the slogans.

GARDNER

Well, at that point the slogans were probably more important, anyway.

HEALEY

Well, they were pretty disastrous, as a matter of fact. As I say, the fact that today, outside of Oakland, there is nothing really left of the Black Panthers, or of any of the other protest movements of the sixties, would indicate that neither the opportunism on the one side of the radical forces nor the leftism on the other served to create the mass alternative to dominant bourgeois politics.

GARDNER

What about the Panther party down here?

HEALEY

Yeah, I had some contact with it. It was really always to me a very tragic process to watch. In the first place, there were lines on what they called the "lumpen" elements--either the present or former hustlers, the street people, the prostitutes, pimps, reliance on dope, always mingled--I mean, you could never find the dividing line between that and the sober, serious, very dedicated, very selfless Black leaders who were trying to find and push alternatives. Sometimes it could be one and the same person who combined both elements of these pressures in their positions. For instance, the way the Panthers taught Marxism-Leninism, "with a stick"--and I'm quoting--they would have these classes every Saturday on Marxism in which people had to memorize sections of the thoughts of Mao in the red book. If they failed to memorize them and couldn't carry through their assignment, they were beaten up, literally, as the penalty for failing to carry it through. The same thing was true if they failed to carry through the quota of how many Black Panther newspapers they sold. Or the other kind of things that went on. I remember when Bobby Seale and Erika Huggins went on trial in Connecticut--before they went on trial, but while they were arrested and in jail in Connecticut--a committee known as CUP, Committee for the--United Prisoners?--organized a rally at the Federal Building. I remember listening to Elaine Brown speak at the rally, saying that they didn't want any more such rallies, that they weren't going to fool around with this question of winning masses, they were just going to take the gun and march in there, and that would be the way they'd free Bobby Seale and Erika. Just sheer nonsense, and clearly it was not what happened in Connecticut because there they organized masses and they also got damn good lawyers. [laughter]

GARDNER

Who were some of the leadership?

HEALEY

Black Panthers? Well, what's her name, Elaine Brown, was certainly an important one; and then, too, one whom I had known somewhat well [John Huggins], was one of those who [along with Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter] was killed at the UCLA shoot-out by Ron Karenga's group, US. It was not a stable leadership. And while Huey was in jail, there was no question that Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver's dominance in the party nationally and in the state was a very unfortunate one because he went even further in the use of rhetoric than Huey and Bobby; although it was again hard to differentiate because at one point everybody was saying the same things. Of course, it's also true that the enormous attacks against them, the shoot-outs that the police organized, without any question short-circuited the process by which politics would have been debated and a more sensible politics decided upon, defined, just in the process of trying to deal with the questions of mass oppression. They didn't at that point have any opportunity for doing that because they were constantly on the defensive.

GARDNER

Were many of them convicted eventually? That you know of?

HEALEY

Well, the only one in Los Angeles--the main one, not the only one--was nicknamed Geronimo; that's Elmer Pratt. He was one of the Eldridge Cleaver people. After he'd been arrested, he was out on bail, skipped bail and went to Texas with a guy whose nickname was Cotton who turned out to be an FBI informer. He was picked up in Texas. I think then the Panther leadership, the Newton-Seale leadership, did something that was unforgivable, and that was to abandon him really because he'd become a supporter of Cleaver. By this time Seale and Newton, on one side, and Cleaver, on the other, had broken. I think it was unforgivable because when somebody is in prison, you first have to fight for their freedom before you can fight out who's right and who's wrong or whose politics are proper. And Geronimo is in prison today, probably a life sentence. Furthermore, with the kind of politics they had, and that big sections of the white Left had as well, it was impossible to separate out who was honest and who was a paid professional provocateur. There was absolutely no way you could determine by politics who was. We Communists were fortunate in our past, in our history, in that because of the nature of our politics these kind of provocations of "Get the gun and shoot down and go rob because it's"--you know, all this sort of stuff--never had any currency because anybody who would have done that would have immediately stood out as an agent provocateur. But in a good deal of the Left, Black and white, as I say--Weathermen, Panthers, the Brown Berets in the Chicano community--it was impossible to differentiate who was honest and who was a paid agent. All the lines coincided. In addition, the Panthers had been far more effective in winning the very rich white sympathizers than they were in winning the Black masses, the Black working class. They did have success with the Black students but practically no success with the Black working class. I know of a lot of whites who got caught up in the whole business of getting ammunition and guns and hiding them from the police and whatnot, some of whom as a result are now in probably lifetime exile from the United States to avoid arrest, at least till the statute of limitations runs out on the activities they carried on. It was also a period when because there was no real mass movement--again, you notice I keep coming back to that as the definitive question of defining politics, of developing a maturation of politics--there was a big tendency on the part of white radicals, not Communists (we went to the other extreme, disassociating ourselves from what produced this kind of leftism), of simply acquiescing in anything the Panthers did as being the last word of revolutionary politics. You wouldn't dare challenge it or question it because if you did it would show you were only a muddleheaded liberal.

GARDNER

Was there a philosophical difference between Cleaver and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, or was that mostly power play?

HEALEY

Well, I can't answer that because I can only judge from the outside or from what I've heard.

GARDNER

Well, didn't it manifest itself down here at all in any way?

HEALEY

Well, it was very hard to tell from down here because at the point when the break took place, both sides, to anyone who wasn't within it, sounded extraordinarily infantile--again: rhetoric, rhetoric, rhetoric. I would not exclude the question of the personalities that were involved, Cleaver versus Huey Newton really more than anyone else. I think Huey was far closer to a Marxist approach than Cleaver was. I think Cleaver had been carried away by the adulation he was getting, primarily from white circles, by the feeling of being the supreme arbiter of what was right or wrong without the political qualifications for being able to do that and without, therefore, the necessary recognition of the limitation of any individual's capacity. He started to believe all the things that were said, which is always the trap, the kind of flattery that goes around charismatic individuals. But I think, as I say, there were also, which obviously emerged later, what were significant differences. Regardless of the extent to which he may have tried to avoid it, Huey may have overcorrected the approach, in the sense of giving up a great deal of militant politics, recognizing that the gun was not at this point going to determine the future of Black liberation and placing the emphasis on what they now called "survival projects." As I say, I think they've gone to another extreme in that way, in the sense they do not build up a consciousness, they do not change the consciousness of the Black masses by providing shoes and chickens and the things that they give out free. That comes as a result of struggle. But clearly what was influencing Huey to a large extent was the fact that if the Cleaver line continued to dominate, the Panthers would be out of existence. They would be simply destroyed by, on the one hand, the police attacks on them which their rhetoric produced; and secondly, by their increasing isolation from the Black workers, because people who had any degree of roots in their community were not about to simply pick up a gun and start shooting. Oh, I started talking about this speech of Elaine's at the Federal Building. The main thing that I remember her saying that just horrified, angered, and infuriated me was that the answer was for all the Blacks there to find a way to get some--and she named a kind of automatic repeating weapon that she was telling everyone to get hold of (I don't remember)--and saying that you can get it either by knocking over a cop to get it or by stealing it or buying it, but that this was going to be the way in which Bobby and Erika Huggins would be freed. I didn't care what the hell she was saying, but I looked down: the audience was not very large, but there were maybe 100 Black teenagers there--you know, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old--just cheering their heads off. I was just furious at the irresponsibility of anybody who claimed to be a leader giving this kind of advice to children. So that's why I hesitate when you ask rne the question, "Were there philosophic differences?" because Elaine immediately switched over to Huey Newton's position, and yet just only yesterday she'd been one of the most senseless in regard to the Cleaver position. When I watch these rapid acrobatic changes, whether in or out of the party, in any other party, I never have a great deal of respect {for anyone] who so facilely changes to a diametrically opposed position.

GARDNER

We're a bit away from our chronology now, but as long as we're on the subject--Ron Karenga came up in conversation. I suppose that it's almost unfair to put him under the classification of "Black radical," but he did have a very important effect, I think, on the evolution of the Black activist community here.

HEALEY

Yes, I think he did, again, primarily as far as students are concerned. There's no question, I know from just living here in the ghetto, at one point he had great influence among Black youth. There's also no question he was getting police protection because the people who were in US who were friends of mine because they lived here in the community without any question had the biggest arsenal of any group, and they were left unchallenged with that arsenal. The police never tried to do anything about it.

GARDNER

Can you talk a little bit about his background?

HEALEY

Well, my knowledge is very limited.

GARDNER

Of course, only your knowledge of it. It's the only time it will ever appear in an oral history index, I'm sure.

HEALEY

Here again you have this interesting combination of the Black academic--because he was that, a Black intellectual--who becomes the baddest of the street cats. Now, how Karenga would have developed and how the movement would have developed in the absence of the police relationship with him, with the movement, I can't answer. The degree of genuineness of his positions I don't know; I would not even try to speculate. I did attend one meeting. I think it was Stokely and somebody else of national significance--but I can't remember who--came to town, at the home of Vera and Frank Greenwood, and I was invited. It was almost entirely Black except--as a matter of fact, the only other white person there was Rose Chernin. It was a strange feeling for me, an eerie thing, totally unusual, in that in this living room where we had come to listen to, I think it was Stokely, the US people were all lined up standing guard on all sides of the living room, and I must say that for the first time I found myself under constraint as to opening my mouth. The antiwhite feeling was so patent, was so clearly in evidence, that I certainly was inhibited by it. I wasn't about to do my usual, just saying what was on my mind, irrespective of anything else. I do remember one other amusing thing about that same meeting. Sam Yorty's field secretary, a Black guy, was there. Again, I can't remember the name. But he had been Yorty's Black field secretary for a long time, and he used to go to everything of the radical Black movement in order to report back to Yorty. Everybody knew it; he made no bones about it. He always knew everything that was going on, too. He was at everything. I didn't see one demonstration or action take place that this guy wasn't there. And in this little house, one of the guys who was a Maoist came up to me--a young Black guy--and said, "I just have one question to ask you, Dorothy." At the time he was asking me that I was still as a representative of the Communist party. "Is the party going to help provide guns for us?" As he's asking this, this guy from Yorty's office is standing right at my elbow. The Black militant sees him standing at my elbow, knows anything I say is going to be taken back. I thought it was so typical--he didn't care either way what my answer would be; it was just a question of trying to embarrass me, because clearly, if we were going to do anything about providing guns, I wouldn't say so in this guy's presence. But we weren't. I remember another occasion, going to a New Year's Eve party at the ILWU Hall that was put on by some Black militant group. While I was there, some of the local Black militants brought over a guy who said he was just in from Detroit and introduced him to me. And without knowing anything about me at all, this guy from Detroit also asked me where they could get guns and then started to describe what his organization was doing, this little tiny--all these were little grouplets really--the most ridiculous antics, what they were going to do about reservoirs and electric grids and whatnot. After about two seconds of it, I whirled on him and said, "I don't know if you're a stool pigeon or not, an agent provocateur or not. If you're not, you're a goddamn fool talking to me this way because you don't know me. And I sure as hell am not going to talk to you, because I don't know you!" I just turned on my heel and walked away. But it was par for the course is really what I'm saying. It was simply in the atmosphere. And the same thing was true in the party as far as the youth were concerned. This was at a time when Franklin and Kendra--Kendra was going to Southwest Junior College then and the student strike took place (it must have been around '68, '69, I'm not sure which). Both at that strike and then a few months later at the Carver Junior High School walkout, I can remember the sharp battles we'd have, because again Franklin and Kendra would think that I was going for, quote, "the least common denominator of unity," and I kept thinking they were just blowing every chance of consolidating, winning a momentary victory in order to consolidate, to go further. The whole tempo of everything in those struggles, starting from San Francisco State, was nonnegotiable [demands], always looking for the maximums which you knew you couldn't get unless you had state power, in order, they thought, to heighten the contradictions and produce more radicalism. I kept arguing, "Maybe I am being an opportunist, but I'm saying to you that you've got to show some visible victories at some point. Human beings don't stay on a perennial struggle, on a tension-filled struggle." In Southwest, for instance, the fact was that they called for a student strike right at the point when finals were to take place. Southwest is made up of Black working-class kids whose parents go through, and they go through, enormous sacrifices [for them] to even be there. Clearly, at the time of finals, no matter how legitimate the grievances may be, most of that student body isn't going to follow you because they've got too much invested, unless there is no alternative. Well, there were plenty of alternatives present in all these struggles at that point. By no means had there been built up this kind of consolidated movement that can grab victory out of something. I kept arguing that they were grabbing defeat out of the jaws of possible small victories. Of course, I'm sure that if the Black people or the party were telling the story, they'd say that I was always pressuring them into compromise too much. You'd have to consider both problems, because there was legitimacy also in their criticisms. But I think it's possible that from a lifetime of watching struggles take place, the ebb and flow of struggles, the ebb and flow of mass movements, I was far more concerned with the momentary victory that could lead to consolidation, and they were far more concerned with, quote, "elevating the consciousness of masses of people." It reflected both a generation gap in terms of the experiences that shaped all of us, as well as [a difference in] political estimates as to what was necessary. The same thing was happening with the Brown Berets, with the Chicano movement at the time. It later happened with the women's movement. In that sense the sixties can be defined as the decade of the rise of uneven consciousness, all the various sectors of the community, each time arising almost inevitably in an overdefinition of their stance because that is the thing that a young movement does. It first overdefines, exaggerates what its status is, in the sense of finding its own identity. Now, if there*d been a vanguard party able to relate the parts to a whole, able to convince, able to have the strength and political influence to convince Blacks that they would only find independence of Black politics insofar as they were related to whites (that they were indispensable) , the same thing with Chicanos, the same thing with women (as far as men are concerned); in the absence of that--and there was an absence of it--the party did not have either the capacity to politically analyze and project politics for that period or the influence to carry through any of the analyses it made. As you know, we start the seventies with no unity as far as these various segments of the population, and with nothing more advanced as far as the mass movements are concerned, even in the separate sectors of the society. Now, the Trots on the other hand played a very mischievous Irole] , deliberately, I think--not deliberately mischievous, but I think the politics led to only mischief and irresponsibility--because they kept encouraging the separatism in order to be the ones to emerge as the party which you'd have to support in order to advance a whole politics. For instance, they support--from the beginning, and still do--the question of separate Black political parties, of separate Chicano parties. Well, clearly, if there's a separate Black political party, a separate Chicano political party, neither has the strength to command overall support; and if you wanted overall politics that united everybody, then you would have to support the SWP. That is their thinking, and that's why they have that position. That's the kind of what I call irresponsible politics. Or their splitting of the peace movement in '67, setting up a separate National Peace Coalition, which only existed because the SWP throughout the country devoted itself to it. Again, it would be misleading if I didn't place the emphasis that the important thing was that these militant movements were arising, that there was a new kind of social ferment in the country, and that nobody on the Left played a very noble role, a very correct role. None of us found the way to be in touch with what was new, what was totally different from our experiences, things which were important, legitimate and necessary to recognize; and what was new was not able to find a way to consolidate itself. A rather inglorious chapter.

GARDNER

Well, this might be a good point, though, to return to 1968, because 1968, it seems to me, was really the crux year in a lot of ways for all of these different movements--assassinations and so on--and at the same time, the first major student riot was in 1968 at Columbia. So if we return to our chronology, where do we find you at the beginning of 1968? Then I'll toss in events as they come to mind.

HEALEY

Yeah, please do. [laughter] It was a very action-filled year. Well, the most compelling thing still was, as it had been through most of that decade, the war in Vietnam. It was even more so by then because of the escalation of the war.

GARDNER

This ties in a little bit to what we've been talking about. Did the ©lack activists ever get very much involved in the peace movements?

HEALEY

Well, Martin Luther King and SNCC were the first Black activists who linked up the struggle of what was happening with Blacks to the issue of the war. Martin Luther King was the very first one to do it, still sneered at, I might say, by the Black militants and the white militants. Then I think certainly Stokely Carmichael played a key role during that, as you remember with the chants, "Hell no, we won't go," and "No Viet Gong never called us nigger." But while that was going on on the top, I don't remember any demonstration or action around the war that ever involved a significant number of Blacks in any city of the United States. There was enormous sympathy for the antiwar movement in the Black community and, I think, understanding; and yet I think for two reasons--the white leadership and the problems of Black leadership (the white leadership of the peace movement, the Black leadership of the militants)--there was never any fusion of the mass movements. That was true on campuses as well as off campuses. On campuses, I remember, for instance, during the strikes around Vietnam, the student strikes, or around Cambodia and Laos, only a few Black militants would participate with the white students organically, I mean join together around the strikes. They'd be sympathetic, but they'd day, "That's your business. That's whitey's job." With very few exceptions they [did not] participate. I think it would be a separate analysis that really ought to be done concerning the history of the peace movement which was, as I say, from the beginning, predominantly white, of its inability to find a way to work and move and relate to other movements. Now, of course, the big exception to that was the Chicano Moratorium here in Los Angeles, and that was really unique. It was initiated by Rosalio Munoz, a former UCLA student body president. It was a mass outpouring, the largest antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles history, initiated and led by Chicanos, organized, mobilized by Chicanos [August 25, 1970]. It ended, as you know, in the tragedy of the attack of the police on the demonstration at the park and the death of Ruben Salazar. Here again at that demonstration we saw this combination of events, a provocation taking place which you could never be sure whether it was simply youthful leftist spirits or whether it was a deliberate police trap. I remember at that demonstration first of all standing on the side there watching. At every demonstration I never immediately got into it. I always watched to see the composition of the crowd, the numbers, what it represents and so forth. This demonstration was the most remarkable to start with. What it represented from the Chicano community was really the significance of what Marxists call a national struggle (by national, meaning crossing class lines, involving people from all walks of life in the Chicano community). Side by side with the Brown Berets was the Chicano branch of the American Legion, the Chamber of Commerce from a small--you know, it was really an amazing thing. But then, seemingly from the Brown Berets--but again I wouldn't blame them because in my opinion it was a deliberate police trap, and we know that many of the people who were in the Brown Berets--peole who were in the Brown Berets later emerged as police agents--there began the provocative throwing of rocks at the police, all kinds of actions that anybody with any sense could tell were going to produce trouble. I can remember as a matter of fact half an hour before all of the people had marched into the park, standing there talking to people, watching the parade coming marching in, watching these actions of stone throwing at the cops' cars, and all of us, four or five of us standing there, saying, agreeing that without any question there was going to be a police attack. You just knew it, that it was going to take place. You could feel it in the atmosphere. It was a great tragedy, and I'm absolutely convinced it was a police trap to do it. Because the Moratorium, as you know, never regained its strength, that mass appeal it had, that mass outreach that it had. Every action they called from then on ended in a police riot. But always there was enough provocation to allow it.

GARDNER

That was pretty well true of all demonstrations in those days, in those later years, 1969, 1970, 1971.

HEALEY

That was true on the campus as well. I mean, here is where the question of fuzzy politics comes in: the whole Weatherman phenomenon, the business of burning ROTC buildings, that sort of thing, which I thought was childish leftism. Clearly it was not going to broaden out and consolidate support again. Mass violent actions only have significance when they represent movements of millions in motion who see and recognize the need for it, [but never] isolated acts of "heroism"--I put "heroism" in quotation marks--of bombing or burning. I remember a sharp debate I had with Bob Scheer when the gents' room at the U.S. Senate was bombed. He was making speeches-- he and I were going on the same circuit speaking at campuses here in Los Angeles, Orange County, at USC; we spoke together at Valley State [California State University, Northridge]--and he always started out by holding this up as an act of advanced revolutionary consciousness. I would follow him and say, "Well, so you bombed the gents' room in the Senate. What have you done as far as power is concerned? What have you changed as far as the ability of the U.S. government to prosecute the war against the Vietnamese? Not a goddamn thing." The same thing happened when I spoke at Stanford. I'd been invited up by what was really a Maoist group hoping to put me on the spot in front of the students, to show that I was a right-winger or revisionist or a liberal or whatnot. The first question I got when I finished speaking was, "Mrs. Healey, we are recruiting a group to go to Washington to capture the Pentagon Building. Will you go along with us to capture that building?" My response was, "If you tell me what you're going to do ten minutes after you've captured the building as far as changing the military, I'll be glad to. But what do you think occupying the building does as far as changing the character of the U.S. military forces?" But this whole mood in the Brown, Black, and white student movement was the dominant mood of the late sixties. Partly it was frustration, which was clearly there. They'd demonstrated, they'd marched, and what the hell was happening? The war still went on. What do you do? Partly it was in great measure the question, again, that there was not an influential Marxist vanguard party that could develop good politics, that would move things enough so that people would see first of all the need for unity, the need for linking up the issues domestically with international questions, the need of consolidating mass movements. A bigger example--I mean, not bigger, but illustrative again of the problem, and one that is still a present problem--my generation was very much influenced by the fact of what we saw when Hitler came to power, the enormous use that the Nazis made of the feelings of patriotism and national pride. We knew that the Communist parties of Germany and other countries where this had been successful had not recognized this question of national pride as a legitimate question you had to deal with. It's there; it's part of the consciousness of people. And when we ignore it, then the right wing knows how to take advantage of it. We learned a hard bitter lesson: that you cannot ignore it, that what you instead have to try to do is recognize it and give it a new consciousness, a revolutionary consciousness. You can't do that by just ignoring it. So while we could understand their hatred of the hypocrisy of the 110 percent patriots, how young people would burn the flag and do these kind of things, we also knew what its effect was on the working class, that they would reject anything to do with these movements because it was an attack on what they considered, quote, "their country." I became very conscious of this in 1966 when Reagan was running. I don't think the Left ever paid much attention to the kind of campaign he was putting on. But there wasn't a single mass meeting that he'd call, a single activity carried on, in which he didn't show the films of Berkeley, the violent actions of the Berkeley campus, and then the silly actions, the nudity and pot and whatnot--but mostly the violent actions. He was able to mobilize this great fear and use it as a battering ram,that these crazies were going to take over the campus and the country. Well, what also was taking place then at that time was the collapse of SDS and the emergence of. . . . First of all, the Communist party was not playing any role in SDS because we were busy building first the DuBois clubs and later the Young Workers Liberation League. There were only a handful of Communists in SDS. It's just incredible--this was part of a very sharp innerparty fight--that we could stand by and watch this nationwide movement on the campus which SDS represented at one point and not be in there trying to influence it. PL moved into it; and the tragedy was that along with PL, to counter PL, others who were in the SDS leadership tried to out-revolutionize them in rhetoric, and really SDS collapsed between the battle of absurd rhetoric on both sides. Out of that, then, as I say, arose the Weathermen with their "Days of Rage" in Chicago which amounted to a whimper and not a cry of rage. And the bombings. But the collapse really of any significant mass movements on campuses.

1.40. TAPE NUMBER: XX, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 25, 1973

GARDNER

Last time we talked about the New Politics Convention and the Black movement mostly. You mentioned that you want to finish up on that.

HEALEY

Well, I think also illustrative of the period-- both of the highly increased political consciousness as far as Black militants were concerned, as well as reflecting the lack of strategic, theoretical, or political goals of that same movement--was the meeting that was held at the [Los Angeles] Coliseum sponsored by almost all of segments of the Black militant organizations. At that point Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers had what they called "organic unity"; supposedly SNCC and the Black Panthers were joining together as one organization. Karenga's outfit US was also part of it. The Black Congress here in Los Angeles was just starting then. It had actually been--although none of us knew it at the time--initiated by Karenga, and he had dominant control over it, but it did include representatives from most of the organized sectors of Black life. The meeting at the Coliseum was, as I say, illustrative of both its strength and its enormous weaknesses. The strength, in the sense that the . . . wait, I guess it was at the Sports Arena that the meeting took place.

GARDNER

Yeah.

HEALEY

Thousands of people there, jammed. An audience that was 75 percent Black, and young. Well, at this meeting the thing that stands out in my mind more than anything else was the speech that Stokely Carmichael made. Stokely is an enormously effective orator, with every flourish, every technique really incredibly well honed. You really watched an audience almost being mesmerized in the course of his speech. But the content of his speech was simply--I thought--dreadful. I sat and listened to it, and to me it was just a monstrous deception being played, in that what he had to say--his analysis, his proposals--were totally devoid of any concreteness as far as the U.S. was concerned, totally devoid of a strategy that really would have provided a capacity for either uniting Blacks as Blacks or providing a bridge of Black-white unity in the country. Oh, that meeting also marked the first time there was an attempt to bring in Chicanos. The leader of the Alianza from New Mexico was present there [Reies Ldpez Tijerina]. He, too, illustrated the same problem of the new militancy of the country, although he's not a young man; he's a middle-aged man, but newly radicalized. His speech, too, was rhetorical--slogans, bombasts, rhetoric-- but again, nothing that lent itself to practical organization nor that pointed a way for a long-range perspective.

GARDNER

Well, what was the gist of it?

HEALEY

Well, when you're dealing with oratory that is dependent upon "revolutionary" rhetoric--"revolutionary" in quotation marks--it's hard to capture the exact part because really, as I say, it is not susceptible to analysis It is simply slogans and the chanting of slogans, the righteousness of the cause without even any precision as to that. Stokely's, while far superior as far as technique is concerned, had precisely the same problem. The main thing that emerged in Stokely's was this ferociously antiwhite character of it, that there could be no such thing as allies, that Blacks had to go alone, the defining of the enemy as all whites. Well, as I say, what interested me really, though, was its impact on the party youth, Black and white--and not just youth, but predominantly it was an effect on youth. This was a problem that was present all through the sixties, that almost all of the movements that were arising were engaging in this tremendous rhetoric. You know, "All power grows out of the barrel of a gun." It was a question really that the definition of who was revolutionary had nothing to do with the capacity or the effectiveness in mobilizing and organizing, but simply who could bad-mouth more than the next one and shoot more epithets at capitalism. I remember the discussion we had. It was probably a board meeting, a district board meeting. I remember four people who were there more than anybody else. There probably were others there, but I remember Charlene Mitchell, Bob Dugan (who was still in the party but who left about a year later; he was at that time our youth director), and Kendra and Franklin Alexander. I guess I remember them most because the debate was between all of us more than the others at the meeting. The thing that stood out to me was the continuance of the problem, that our younger people, as distinct from my generation, were always feeling threatened as revolutionaries because our rhetoric did not match those of others who were moving in the mass movement. And willy-nilly they were tremendously influenced by that rhetoric and by that posture of guns and whatnot. As a matter of fact, there was a time, at least here in Southern California, where our youth were as much engaged on the question of buying guns and target shooting and whatnot as other young militants were, this in spite of very strenuous battles that we were having ideologically as to their efficacy or relevancy at that particular point in the mass movement. But at this board meeting we were discussing Stokely's speech. The people I just mentioned, all without question and without criticism, defended him as being absolutely correct in his approach. It was quite a ferocious and intense and vehement argument. It's not that any of those people today would defend that position. I don't think any of them would. But it really is the age-old question of being able to look at the emperor and seeing if he has clothes or not, whether or not you get so carried away by the sweep of the momentum, the atmosphere, the mood, that you lose the capacity to look at its content and say, "But what's really there?" Shortly thereafter Stokely and SNCC broke with the Black Panthers on political questions, although I would say a lot of it had to do with ego questions in the sense of which leaders were going to be the dominant stars in the mass media and of the campuses. But at least at that point as far as the Black community was concerned, and sectors of the Brown community, there was a consciousness and a mood among the teenagers that has a separate sociological importance in that it was also at that time that there was such a great diminishing of the gang warfare either between Chicanes or between Blacks, or between Blacks and Chicanos. I think this is a very important question because when these teenagers felt that there was something political with which to identify, then the antisocial characteristics of gangs diminished and they became more or less conscious political organized groups. Again, to me the enormous tragedy, just incredible tragedy, is that there was no force in the country capable of infusing into that potentially decisive movement a political consciousness, one which placed the question of mobilizing and organizing masses of people into conscious action, rather than just having a relative handful of advanced revolutionaries in the struggle, because once you do that, you're on a suicidal course with the system. It's one of the lost opportunities of the sixties, the cost of which we're still paying and will continue to pay for a long time to come, because there's been nothing that has really compensated for it. Nowhere in the country is there a significant movement in either the ghetto or the barrio of a mass character. I'm not saying there aren't movements, but there are none of a mass character, that which both excites the imagination, arouses the excitement, and gives a feeling of pride and identification in struggle, in organized struggle of tens of thousands of people. But all of these diverse movements had their unequal and uneven consciousness and the lack of a perspective, in the fact that the party did not provide anything of more depth. While on the one hand, nationally the party was correctly inveighing against the ultraleftism of these movements, it had nothing to offer of a more sober perspective. It was simply in a position of saying, "Nay, nay." But nay-saying is not sufficient for a revolutionary movement. So that when you come to discuss the question of the 1968 elections and what was taking place, it can really only be understood, I think, against the backdrop of the fact that the ultra-Right and the Right were organized and knew where they were going and why, but the liberals and the Left were totally disorganized, disconnected, and amorphous in both their political and organizational perspectives. The antiwar movement had done an enormous job in being able to mobilize millions in demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and that meant against Johnson. Certainly the Century City demonstration against Johnson here added to the fact that he reached a point where the president of the United States could no longer campaign in the old ways, could not just simply appear before millions of people and speak; the kind of police protection that was needed and secret service protection and so forth further removed him from the ability to campaign.

GARDNER

Were you at Century City?

HEALEY

I sure was. Oh, it was the most frightening feeling I've ever had, frightening because--I don't know if you know the terrain. It was at that time a terrible place to. . .

GARDNER

Describe it.

HEALEY

Well, it was a terrible place to hold a demonstration then. Now it is built up across the street from the hotel. At that time it was just an empty lot that sharply veered off into a culvert or something--a cul-de-sac, really, for a demonstration. The demonstration had taken place at the park a couple blocks down from Century City, from the hotel, and it had been a very huge--you know, moderately huge, I think about five, six thousand people just at that part, at the park demonstration, before we marched over to Century City. I think the biggest drawing card there was Muhammad Ali, who was at that time still prevented from fighting because of his refusal to go in the army. My God, he was really the mass hero then. There were thousands of kids flocking around for his autograph. I thought that the speech he made at the park was a very intelligent, very thoughtful one, very well done. I must say, I was very much impressed with him. But in the planning for the Century City demonstration, there had been a small group of people who had decided that the day of peaceful demonstrations was over and they were going to carry on actions when the parade would get to the hotel which would cause a confrontation. There had been big fights and a big split in the peace movement over it, but this group was determined to go ahead. Well, when we marched toward the hotel we had to pass over a culvert. I was in that portion of the crowd at the time when the parade was stopped. The plan, I should say, was for the parade to simply march around the hotel, march down the streets, surround the streets, and then if necessary just keep repeating this as a moving-picket-line sort of thing. But what happened is that by the time the parade started--actually there were easily over 10,000; the figures ranged anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000, but no one really knows; they must have had some [official count] but one's never sure how to count those kind of crowds-- two things had taken place. One, a small handful of people who decided a confrontation was necessary, part of them had sat down directly in front of the door of the hotel and refused to move on. Now, there was really plenty of room for the police, who were there by the hundreds, to have I allowed the rest of the demonstration that didn't want to sit down, who weren't interested, [to get by]. There were all kinds of plans being discussed by this smaller group-- letting mice loose in the hotel, silly ideas. There was plenty of room though for the police to allow the line to proceed adjacent to the sit-downers, so that the sit-downers wouldn't block the line. But they wouldn't do this, and the sit-downers sat there and the police insisted the line had to follow the path where the people were sitting down, so the thousands of us were just jammed--nobody could see ahead to know what was even going on at the head of the line, to know what was taking place, just jammed. I was standing with my mother right on the culvert. I was really worried. Here I am with my mother, who at that time was eighty-two, eighty-three. It's nighttime. You can't see a damned thing around. There are more police than I have ever seen at any demonstration, all there both in the command post and all around. As I say, we didn't have any idea, none of us did, what was happening at the front of the line. All of a sudden--none of us heard any order to disperse; nobody heard any police order that this was an unlawful procession or anything else or to leave--all of a sudden, the police attack just simply starts. It was a wild, uncontrolled attack, everybody being beaten. And of course people turned to flee. It just happens to be, the most fortunate thing as far as my mother was concerned-- this is a personal reaction, not the political estimate of what happened that day, but just personally this parenthesis on it--that about two minutes before the actual charge took place, I had gotten worried about my mother just being jammed in there physically, that she was going to get suffocated (because she's a very short woman, as you know); so I had taken her by the hand, and we had eased our way out of the middle of this jammed crowd on the culvert, walked off of it and back down to where my car was parked. I had gotten probably a half a block away with her when the police attack came, and people were running past us so fast, it was just something. You could hear the clubs pounding at people's heads, and you could see people being pushed around. It was just pandemonium. Of course, the important thing was that to the knowledge of the tens of thousands of people who saw this, it was a totally unprovoked police attack. There was no violence coming from anybody, including even those people who had sat down. That's an important political question because when an attack is visualized not only by the participants but by the community as an unjustified one, then the political anger increases, whereas if it looks as if you have yourself provoked a confrontation with the police, then the police get the sympathy. But there were just too many reporters and television men who were able to validate the fact of the unprovoked character of the police assault. But this demonstration had an enormous national political effect because of the police attacks in defining and particularizing the unpopularity of the president of the United States and the fury of millions of people (or tens of thousands of people, to be more accurate) at the course of the war in Vietnam.

GARDNER

Do you remember the day of that?

HEALEY

I think it was in the summer, although I'm not sure. I'm not positive. I think it was June or July [June 23, 1967]. The combination of these antiwar demonstrations which were taking place throughout the country made it possible and pushed forward people like Eugene McCarthy as candidates, peace candidates, to * oppose Johnson. I'm emphasizing this because if you read one sector of the radical press you would think that it was simply the peace movement by itself that compelled Johnson not to run again. It was a very unusual situation that an incumbent president does not exercise the right of running for a second term, particularly a man who is as vainglorious as Lyndon Johnson. But I would suggest it was a combination of both tactics. It was both the fact of the huge mass continuing activity that encouraged and gave a base to a McCarthy to announce his running, and then the New Hampshire primary which, while McCarthy didn't win it, [gave him] such an enormously bigger vote than anybody anticipated he'd get, that solidified the Johnson decision that he would not run again in '68, that it would be impossible for him to do it. It also then ultimately convinced Bobby Kennedy to enter the race as well. While this was happening at the top of the political [scene], again we should come back to what was happening among the masses of people because for my purposes and my opinion that's more significant in long-range importance and relevance as far as its impact. Continuing in 1968 were the same factors that I indicated were present in the mid-part of the decade, this uneven development of consciousness, different sectors arriving at a radical critique or a more advanced critique, a more sophisticated critique of the status quo and of their desire to challenge it, but not evenly, and lacking totally any mass organizations that people would join and participate in and therefore develop through their activity in the organization, and also the lack of any radical vanguard that would unify these parts into a striking role. So that there was really no organized base for either of the two aspects of the antiwar political action. . . . in the Peace and Freedom [party], as you may remember, Eldridge Cleaver became the first presidential candidate and thereby practically, for all intents and purposes, stopped the party from ever being what it potentially could have been as a third party in California politics. All he used it for was really the most ridiculous, almost obscene, mouthing of radical phraseology and vulgar language that simply turned off all the potential sympathizers who did want a radical alternative to the two-party system. Yet the left-liberal constituency was also totally disorganized. First of all, it was torn between the rival candidacies of Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, but even more significantly than that, [it was] torn by the fact that there was no organized base for thoughtful and advanced mass activity and mass participation. Now, it was true that in the course of that campaign there were differentiations between Kennedy and McCarthy that had to be noted. What their significance would have been or could have been, I don't think one can know because of the murder, the assassination of Kennedy. There was not enough time for the essential characteristics of each to have developed to have known what would have happened. Without any question, McCarthy had the best antiwar credentials of the two candidates. But also without question Bobby Kennedy was the only candidate--of the two; I should put it that way--who was able to bridge the gap between the domestic issues and the issue of the war in Vietnam. It was really kind of symptomatic of what was happening that a McCarthy with a far greater--at least defined-- credentials as left-liberal in his politics did not have any Black constituency, and the Black masses really just totally disdained him. Whereas Bobby Kennedy could go into any ghetto at any time and get an enormous response. Some of this might have been also a carry-over from Jack Kennedy, but it would be wrong, I think, to make too much of that. I think that for those, really, not-too-definable reasons why one captures the imagination and another candidate doesn't, Bobby had captured the imagination of masses of Black and Brown people, and McCarthy hadn't.

GARDNER

Well, didn't a lot of that have to do with the personalities of the two, the ways in which they made people respond to them?

HEALEY

I'm sure that enters into it. But I think also it had to do with the fact that Bobby had, as a politician, a sensitivity to mass trends that McCarthy didn't have. McCarthy was far more the ideologist; Bobby was far more the political pragmatist. One of the carry-overs I should mention, by the way, from the New Politics Conference around the fight that I described, 50 percent fight for Blacks and so forth, one thing which we had carried through--when I say "we," I'm talking now very broadly of the left and left-of-center alliance that operated in the California Democratic Council here in California--was that at the nominating convention of the CDC in September 1967 where the whole McCarthy slate was first put forward (this was the first state that formally projected him as the candidate in the primary) we had organized and mobilized a very important following at the convention that successfully insisted that the slate could not just be a peace slate, that it had to be a peace and equality slate, and that the participation on that equality slate, if not equaling 50 percent Blacks and Chicanes, had to be an enormous figure forward, one which would be in some way commensurate with their role and their significance in California. This is a rather little-known part of California history, and yet it did come out of that New Politics Conference with its thrust of that kind of approach, that there had to be the fight for a special approach toward the oppressed people, that it could not just be a liberal taking for granted that liberals would do well and nice and that they mean well for all people. At any rate, [then came] the national Democratic convention in Chicago with the incredible police riots that took place there, Mayor [Richard] Daley's attempt to throttle all demonstrative action. Actually, if Daley had left the question of left mobilization alone, my own opinion is nothing would have happened. While it is true that for six months the young radicals had been organizing and planning for massive demonstrations in Chicago, it was by no means a unanimous thing. SDS, for instance, was boycotting it for most of the time of the preparations. It was only in the last few weeks, when they saw the people starting to come in, that they got interested. There was no agreement nor unity among the top participants as to what they were planning. As is always the way, it's the overreaction on the part of the Establishment that produces and generates the response. Because there wasn't that kind of organized magnetic pull, So what if 10,000, 15,000 kids had come into Chicago? If they'd been left alone to demonstrate in the parks, to make their speeches and to parade down the avenues, nothing would have taken place. There just wasn't that kind of pull, nor was there yet dominant the kind of desperation and frustration that was later to evince itself in the Weathermen phenomenon, as an example; that had not yet really become any significant feeling. There was still the feeling that the mass movement could force changes as far as policy in the establishment.

GARDNER

Did you participate in the campaigns at all in the spring?

HEALEY

Only around the Peace and Freedom campaign--that is directly. And then indirectly, of course, I was still the party organizer here, which meant that we at that point still functioned on all levels of politics. It wasn't just Peace and Freedom, but also what was taking place in the labor movement, in those unions where the big push was to get endorsements for McCarthy, which was already a very advanced step. As well as in CDC.

GARDNER

Were you at Chicago?

HEALEY

No, I didn't go to the convention.

GARDNER

Were others of your associates or friends there?

HEALEY

No, nobody from here. Young people went that I knew, but none of the party spokesmen went.

GARDNER

Purposefully or just by chance?

HEALEY

I don't think we even thought about going.

GARDNER

I just asked because, of course, there was so much publicity around going to Chicago. I was in the East at the time, and in the East it was almost impossible not to be besieged practically everywhere you went with the thought of going. So many people did go, even from there.

HEALEY

There was no question it was going to be a--it became the thing to do. Well, my point would be that if you look at the later period, the '72 convention in Florida, there were some minor episodes of violence, but by and large while there were thousands of youth there, too, it passed by almost unnoticed as far as either convention was concerned.

GARDNER

How did the '68 Democratic convention affect things out here? Was there any sort of backlash?

HEALEY

Sure there was a backlash, and it's a backlash that I think helped to defeat Humphrey in that even those who recognized all that Nixon had meant historically, what he represented in California and national politics, the most determined people saw that, nevertheless, the whole. . First of all, Humphrey's role at the convention, the role of those who supported him at the convention, including from California, was such that there is no question that tens of thousands of liberal Democrats refused to participate in the campaign, wanted nothing to do with Humphrey, and that margin is what defeated him. Nixon's popularity was not increasing. Toward the end Humphrey actually almost caught up with Nixon. But I would say without any question that it was precisely the margin of the disillusioned left-liberals who refused to touch the campaign that cost Humphrey the election. However, the party also had a campaign that year, its own candidates, and that was a separate story as far as party history is concerned. The '68 convention that took place was, to begin with, a hotly debated convention because it was to have been a regular national convention of the party such as was called for in our constitution, but as I think I mentioned to you earlier, the National Secretariat decided it wanted to postpone it for one year. At that time our constitution called for a referendum for them to be able to postpone a constitutionally called convention. I say "at that time" because since then--this year, for instance, they had again called off a convention that was supposed to be held for 1974 (they proposed it be advanced to 1975), and there isn't even a whimper of protest. We really organized an enormous reaction against postponement because there was no good reason to postpone. It was simply the desultory character of functioning in New York that was responsible. Conventions are a lot of work, in addition to which, you've got to be prepared to supposedly or allegedly examine your work, analyze the activity and whether your line has been right or not, and elect a new leadership. And they weren't about to want to do that yet. But just one aspect of the convention around the question of a presidential campaign: in September 1967, at a National Executive Board meeting, I had proposed that we start preparing then for a national party campaign, a national party candidate, that no matter what else happened, we had to be in the field with our own I candidate. The degree to which we'd campaign, what our emphasis would be, how we'd present the candidate, would depend on what was happening in the mass scene. Obviously you're not oblivious to what the surrounding circumstances are. But if you're going to do it, you've got to prepare long enough in advance. It's a serious thing and not a last-minute thing, particularly when all of us knew that the party did not have the kind of organizational capacity that it had had in past years. There was absolutely a rejection of any consideration of it at the Board meeting when I raised it in September. Got no support. But by January of '68, Gus was making noises that we were going to have a campaign and that he wanted to be the candidate. That was very obvious. But my dear friend Charlene Mitchell, who has in some respects a very Machiavellian mind--she really thinks ahead and plans ahead--decided she wanted to be the candidate because it would make her not only nationally known but internationally known as well. It would be the first time a party candidate had run since 1940, so it would be a very important step. The reason I knew what was happening with her and why she was doing that was that she had already moved to New York from Los Angeles to work in the national office, simply because she wanted to live in New York. (It was one of the few times I've ever seen a person do that without being asked to come by the national office. Nobody had asked her to come; she just decided this was where she wanted to be, this was where the action was. She was right, of course; that's where the action is, if what you're concerned about is the top politics of the party.) She came here to attend our local convention, representing the national office. And afterwards all the young Black comrades with whom she was working on the business of being a candidate--who also were very good friends of mine; I was very close to them-- told me of the discussions that were going on. She never once said anything to me about wanting to be the candidate. But she kept agitating with me as well--we were still close-the fact that there should be a Black person, not her but just a Black person. At our convention, our local convention, which took place at the East Side City Terrace Cultural Center, Kendra Alexander, her sister-in-law, made a big, very emotional speech including the motion that it had to be a Black candidate in this period of Black rebellion, and a Black woman candidate would be even that much more significant, and that it should be Charlene. The motion passed unanimously. But what was amusing about it to me was that after the convention was over, I--Ben Dobbs and I always stayed around to clean up all the notes and things that were left behind just so that, you know, lots of times people leave names and things of that kind, and we didn't want them floating around--I found a note that Charlene had written to Kendra saying, "Be sure you stand up and make the nomination for me immediately after So-and-so gets through speaking." At the national convention when the issue came up, Charlene had mobilized a whole number of Black youth throughout the country to fight on this question. There was a presiding committee, which was the definitive body of every convention where the real proposals on decisions are made, and in effect the decisions are made, because it's very rare for a recommendation of the presiding committee to be turned down. It's an executive committee of the convention. Charlene and I were both members of it. But Kendra made a speech on the convention floor before the presiding committee had finalized a recommendation on the presidential candidate which was really a call to arms, that, by God, this was the year of a Black woman candidate. So that when it came up in the presiding committee, Gus recognized that he was up against a real potential problem, that if he stood in the face of this he'd be charged with chauvinism, with racism, with insensitivity. He and his buddies, Jim Jackson and Carl Winter and the others, were just outraged by what had happened, but they were really caught in a wedge with what to do about it. There was one further revealing and amusing episode, something that at a later point I want to talk about in more detail (some of the human characteristics that are present in political decisions that are usually ignored in political histories, because all they know or see are the big political decisions, and they don't have any knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes that make those decisions one way or another). When the presiding committee in its closed session then started to debate the question of what nomination to make to the convention for presidential candidate, and the issue of a Black candidate--of Charlene--came up, Charlene stood up and said, oh, she didn't mean for herself to be the candidate. She just wanted to make sure that it would be a -Black candidate, and maybe it should be Claude Lightfoot or Jim Jackson, and she named two or three other Black Communist leaders. When she sat down, I turned to her-- I was really just furious, I suppose because I always maintain my own naivete and stupidity in these things-- I turned to her and said, "What the hell are you being such a liar about, such a hypocrite? You know that you've been organizing for this for a whole year, so what are you playing games with? Why don't you simply say, 'Yes, comrades, I accept it and I'll work like hell. And this is why I'll accept it, why I think it's important.' There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the candidate. But be honest about it, don't now suddenly be shy and coy as if you have to run because you're being forced to." That was probably the start of the diminishing of the close relations between Charlene and me. Well, her campaign was a very sorry campaign. In the first place, even for Gus it would have been not a too good campaign because the party wasn't mobilized or organized for a campaign. This convention was in the summer of '68; we had two or three months left of the campaign to do. Clearly, you don't put on a major campaign with no organized preparation before that. But when it was not Gus, where the party at least is attuned to respond to top pressures, it was a very sad campaign. We were on the ballot in only two states in the whole country, Minnesota and maybe New York (I'm not sure where; I'm not positive, but I know it was two states). There was no feeling of pride in the party membership about the campaign, no feeling to go out and really bust your fanny to work for a candidate, just nothing of that kind. It was a very lackluster sort of thing.

GARDNER

Why were you on the ballot in only two states?

HEALEY

Well, first of all it's hard to get on the ballot; you have to spend months ahead of time in most states to be able to do it. It's an enormous job. Some states, it's almost impossible.

GARDNER

What do you have to do?

HEALEY

Well, for instance, in California we still couldn't get on the ballot. In California you need around 600,000 valid signatures of citizens, voters who will sign the petition for the party to get on the ballot. The alternative is to have, I think it is, 87,000 people who will change their registration to that of the new party which wants to get on the ballot, have that as their voting registration, which is the way Peace and Freedom got on, and that's almost impossible to get. Every state has just great obstacles to getting on the ballot. Of course, George Wallace and the American Independent party got on the ballot in an enormous number of states, but that's because the ultra-Right is organized and has both its own independent organization through the John Birch Society and all these various groups, plus the fundamentalists like Billy James Hargis and all these other religious right-wing groups, the enormous radio contact they have, their television programs, and the huge amounts of money. So that their problem is an easier one.

GARDNER

Well, faced with that, how does that affect the way you run the campaign.

HEALEY

Well, the main thing you can hope for--first of all, as I say, the main thing is preparation ahead of time. If you start organizing to get on ballots, there are probably about thirty states where you can reasonably easily; they aren't as difficult as others. For the others you need to have legal challenges as to the unconstitutional barriers for a minority party to get on the ballot. Of course, there's still a third way, but that's the harder way and nobody'11 do that. The regulations for getting on the ballot are all made by the state legislature, and that means trying to elect those kind of state legislators who would recognize the responsibility of making it easier for minority parties to get on the ballot. But that's a longer-range thing that radicals are rarely interested in doing. At any rate, the campaigns of '68 were remarkably lackluster for all candidates. The most sorry thing was really to watch what happened to Peace and Freedom and its comparable groups in other states. Here in Southern California, for instance, the party had opposed any great stress in the beginning on Peace and Freedom's getting on the ballot because we saw that it had absolutely no Black base at that point. It had no Chicane base; it had no working class base; it was almost entirely a middle-class white movement and almost entirely a student movement. But I think we were wrong. I think I was wrong in my approach. What we didn't see, what I didn't see, was that despite all those problems, there was a certain momentum, a political atmosphere in the state that would allow it to win that number of signatures, and that once it got on the ballot it has a logic of its own, that then the fact of its initial character doesn't have to remain its permanent character. You can work to overcome its disabilities and handicaps. However, when Eldridge Cleaver became the candidate rather than Dick Gregory, who was the opposing candidate for the nomination of Peace and Freedom, that sealed its doom for that period and actually left its mark on it for future years, one that it has yet to overcome. There was also the fact that it could not overcome the twofold contempt for electoral procedures that are present as far as the New Left, the young Left, is concerned (when I say "New," I mean the newly radicalized, because that's old and young people both). Either, on the one hand, a total contempt for elections anyway: "who cares?" Or treating it as if it were a farcical game. But not regarding it with a seriousness that a political campaign has to have.

1.41. TAPE NUMBER: XX, SIDE TWO OCTOBER 25, 1973

HEALEY

Concurrently with that fight over the question of the presidential candidate for the party, there were other fights and important struggles that only foreshadowed what was later to become even more sharply divisive in the party with regard to the estimate of international and national events. This special convention where Charlene got the nomination for president was a convention that marked a great change that was taking place at that point among very significant sections of the young people in the party and others, but mostly the young people in the party. For the first time, they were strong enough to really force a change in what Gus Hall, as the general secretary, was saying and doing. He had opened the convention with a report that was called something about the road to socialism (I remember it only because when it came by, the young people marked over it "The Primrose Path to Socialism"; they put in the word primrose) which was primarily a critique against the Marcuses and those whom he called the ultra-Leftists of the country. But in the course of doing it, the party's really conservative approach on questions stood out as the answer, including the absolute unwillingness to examine what was happening both in the world and in the country. The old cliches were still operating. But because of the battles that the young people put up there--primarily the young people--there was a real shift in the course of that convention. I remember one dramatic episode. Danny Rubin had made a report as the org secretary of the party, the national org secretary, which was really a dreadful report. It had come under enormous attack, and Gus had to stand up and repudiate it. That just never happened. Usually there's a buddy system that operates; it's all for one and one for all, until somebody gets to an advanced vulnerable position of attack, and then the person is thrown to the wolves, ordinarily, unless it's some spectacular thing that I can't remember happening. But on issue after issue, the young people were really pressing forward, and the more "conservative" sector of the national leadership--that's usually the grouping around Carl Winter, Helen Winter, Jim Jackson and Hy Lumer; they represented the cornerstone, and still do, of that tendency in the party--was being forced into real retreat. If that convention had been a regular convention to elect a new leadership, there is just no doubt that those people whom I just named, most of them at least would have been out of the leadership, would not have been reelected, because the feeling about them was so great. But then Czechoslovakia came, and in the course of that pressure Gus, who would have been willing at the special convention to have abandoned these people because of the pressures, because of feeling that his own position would be in jeopardy if he maintained his alliance with them . . . after Czechoslovakia the dominant question simply became the old one, loyalty to the Soviet Union as the only criterion for leadership in the party. Now, I don't know whether I explained already about Czechoslovakia, the things that were taking place.

GARDNER

To a degree. We talked about it in that tape on your own leaving the party. But anything else you want to embellish. ...

HEALEY

I just don't remember whether I mentioned the fact that for months before the invasion took place, Gus had been organizing an attack on the Dubcek government everyplace except the West Coast. The Daily World had simply been turned into an organ of the most vicious, vitriolic attacks on the Dubcek administration, of a scandalous character. Again, the party [in the U.S.] was playing a role that internationally is always laughed at, where what the Soviet Union is not yet really ready to say publicly, it has our party say, and then they pull their chestnuts out of the fire: they quote us back in their presses saying, "American Communists say...the party in the heartland of American imperialism, the staunch and embattled Communists, this is their position." So that the Soviet Union's position expressed by us then becomes carried into other parties. Well, when the actual invasion took place--and I'm pretty sure I mentioned the question of my phone call to New York about the statement that was to be made and so forth--we had been holding a whole number of meetings here in California, Southern California and Northern California, because both districts had the same position on the question. Both of us were equally outraged over, first of all, the fact that the National Secretariat was making policy without consultation with the Board, and secondly, that the Daily Worker was being used in this outrageous way. Both districts had been united that the People's World was not going to play this kind of role, that it was going to give equal publicity not only to what the Warsaw Treaty powers said but also to what Czechoslovakia had to say in answer to it. We were the only ones to do that. The Daily just never would do it. But when the invasion took place, here I think I made a number of errors, if what I was concerned with was maintaining a base in the party and being able or willing to stay in leadership. I'm really sorry that I don't remember all I said before. That's why I should always keep chronological.

GARDNER

No, no, by all means, go ahead.

HEALEY

Well, we had had a forum planned, long before we knew about the invasion, for August 23--it was a Friday night, whatever that week in August of 1968 would be--at Baces Hall. It was a political affairs forum where I was to speak on Czechoslovakia. But it certainly had nothing to do--I mean, none of us dreamt there'd be an invasion. That meeting and all of the events, including the invasion, took place after a meeting had been held in Bratislava on August 3, 1968, where all the Warsaw Treaty powers except Rumania were present, but Czechoslovakia, of course, included. There'd been full agreement on the fact that the Dubcek administration would continue but that they would exercise more restraint in regard to the kind of articles that were being written and the speeches on television that were being made. What was happening, and I think it's quite understandable, is that a people who have not had the right to speak freely or independently before don't always exercise balanced judgment once they get the right to do it. There were bound to be exaggerations and distortions, and this did happen in Czechoslovakia. But the outstanding fact was that a new party congress was being called, a regularly organized one, and it was pretty obvious that the remaining voices representing the Soviet Union on the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak party were going to get removed, that this was the overwhelming sentiment of the party membership of Czechoslovakia. My own opinion is that the reason for the invasion was to stop that congress from taking place. There had been dozens of articles in the Soviet press which were not reprinted anywhere, singling out the holding of the congress as the impermissible thing. At any rate, this forum at Baces Hall, where I was to speak, was just jammed. There must have been six, seven hundred people. It usually would never hold anything like that--people just standing up on the rafters to get in. It was one day after the invasion, a day and a half after the invasion. And I really spoke my mind at that meeting, what I thought the problem was, and it was one that I'd done an enormous amount of research on. I had a great deal of factual material. Well, that was really the opening wedge as far as this membership was concerned, as far as disassociating the sector of the membership from my position, because it was all right to be critical of the Soviet Union on this or that question, but here the chips were down--the armies had marched. The fact that the treaty of the Warsaw Pact powers specifically says that no army from any of the Warsaw Treaty powers shall come on the soil of any of the countries without the express invitation of that country, the fact that that was being violated, didn't matter a goddamn bit to people--including Gus Hall--who had that position. The fact that the Eighty--first Party program, which was the last international conference of the world communist movement, had restated the autonomy of each Communist party in its own country to build socialism in the way it felt best--that didn't matter a bit. The fact that our own party program here in the United States, adopted unanimously, had specified the fact that each party was independent and autonomous and that each country was sovereign in its own right--that didn't matter a damn bit. As Gus said later in his apologia for the events, "It's always the exception that proves the rule," and this, Czechoslovakia, was the exception. Well, the second thing that happened--as I say, when I look back on it, if what I was interested in was staying in the leadership, the second mistake I made was urging that a National Committee be called immediately to debate what the party's position should be. It was foolish because I knew that Gus and the national leadership had had the sole hand in influencing and propagandizing and mobilizing all the rest of the country. It was only those places, those states that read the People's World--and that's really only California and Washington--which would have any different opinions, because you must understand the psychology of 99 percent of the Communist party members, that what's printed in the capitalist press you discount, anyway; you don't believe what's in there. If you don't see it in your own press, it's not true. It doesn't make any difference how verified it may be, what it may be. Well, that meeting of the National Committee was just really a travesty. Gus gave a report; my own opinion is that he had nothing to do with writing that report because it was based entirely on what was ostensibly happening inside of Czechoslovakia. (We were one of the few Communist parties that didn't have a single representative in Czechoslovakia at the time. Others were there either because the World Marxist Review, the magazine, has its headquarters there, or [because they were] representing their own newspapers.) It was filled with the kind of things that are calculated to make the blood of every Communist run cold: that the West Germans were getting ready to invade Czechoslovakia; he even had such things as that there were gallows that had already been set up to hang Communists, that the internal counterrevolutionaries were going to do this; that capitalism was on its way back. I mean, the most elaborate, seemingly detailed, quote, "factual" stories. One month later they appeared in the white book which the Soviet Union issued to justify the invasion. So we knew that it was just the voice giving it, that it didn't come from any direct knowledge he had. But it did its job. The only people who opposed the invasion--Bettina Aptheker was one. It was a very dramatic thing, with her father, Herbert Aptheker, taking the position of full, wholehearted support of the invasion, using such arguments against it--I mean, I get indignant when I even think of it, because this man's supposed to be a historian--as the fact that bourgeois democracy had had such a long reign there, as distinct from the other socialist countries. Well, of course that's true. That's why it was possible for socialist democracy to be that much more advanced-- because there was a history of bourgeois democracy. There was also the fact that this was the only party of the eastern socialist countries that had been a mass party before 1948, that had massive support from the rank and file. It's also true that when you have bourgeois democracy you have a working class, and this was one of the few countries in which a big majority of the country was working class and was organized as a real working class. The very things that we would ordinarily laud, he was here attacking as showing the perfidy and the treachery of what was going on. But opposing him, as I say, and very dramatically, was Bettina Aptheker, his daughter. Bob Dugan was still a member of the National Committee then. Gil Green had spoken out just as I had spoken out. He was at that point the chairman of the New York party. He publicly criticized, as I had done, in the New York Times when they called us for interviews, and was under enormous attack as a result. He was removed almost immediately. He resigned, actually, but it was the same as removal. And Ben Dobbs. Almost everybody from our National Committee delegation from Southern California opposed it. Mike Stein in New York. That's just about a handful. Now, on the sidelines, opposing it but not speaking vehemently and then abstaining from the final motion, were people like Charlene, Carl Bloice, Si Gerson (the editor of the Daily), maybe two or three others besides that. As I say, it was really just an exercise in futility because there was no chance of influencing the people who were already there, because they came there with their minds made up from having read the Daily and listening to Gus's private meetings with them all during the preceding months. But in addition to that, the proceedings of the National Committee, our opposition was never printed. The only thing that was ever printed were the speeches applauding their position. A great deal was made of the fact that in the ensuing year Gus's speech, which was printed immediately as a pamphlet, overnight--and again, you've got to have a lot of money to do that overnight; we all grinned at that--his speech there was printed as a pamphlet entitled "Czechoslovakia at the Crossroads" and was translated into, what? sixty languages or something. Of course, everybody knew who did the translating and who printed it and who published it in all the other parties, because most of the major parties opposed that intervention. This was the first major difference in the world communist movement outside of the Chinese--Soviet differences. Well, then came the whole rallying cry and mobilizing cry here in California, in Southern California particularly. In Northern California Mickey Lima did what Mickey Lima's always done in the history of inner--party disputes: takes one position that he considers principle to begin with, then quickly backtracks as it becomes clear that it's not going to win, and lands safely on the other side in support of the majority position, what the national leadership wants, but always with the kind of a demeanor that he's been upholding righteousness. That happened on this issue as well. Most scandalous of all was his behavior around Al Richmond. He had agreed that Al Richmond should go to Czechoslovakia to cover their congress. When Al started to write the articles coming back from Czechoslovakia on his own firsthand observations, Mickey had not disagreed with it. But when the attacks from Gus came on those articles, Mickey then agreed it was a violation of democratic centralism and should never have been done. It was as if he had never from the beginning supported Al's doing it. He is the district organizer of Northern California and therefore more responsible for the editorial policy of the paper than any other party organizer. It was just a cutting adrift and abandoning of Al's principal struggle and the rest of the paper's principal struggle around presenting their aspect of what had happened, their aspect of the events.

GARDNER

Was this all after your convention?

HEALEY

This was after the special convention in '68, but it was before the '69 convention.

GARDNER

No, I mean the convention at which the campaign was supposedly launched?

HEALEY

Yes, right. And what it meant was that the momentary successes that we seemed to have won, those of us opposing this cabal in New York, were just dissipated immediately, because then, as I say, it became just one thing: you rally around the Soviet Union, and that was the only thing. That is a hydraulic pressure that is just incredible inside the party.

GARDNER

How did this affect the campaign then? Supposedly you were trying to get a president. . . .

HEALEY

Yeah, as I say, there was really no enthusiasm for the campaign anyway; it was a very mediocre campaign. The national office was not about to put in a hell of a lot of activity to help the campaign, inasmuch as it was not Gus Hall who was the candidate; it was Charlene. And while they couldn't ever say so--nobody ever would come right out and say so--it became a fact of life that it was a second--class--"All right, she's off on her own," and that was all. She was very aware of it and very angry about it, but not angry enough to pursue the question. Don Hamerquist was traveling with her as her campaign manager, and he and Mike Meyerson were doing a great deal with the speech writing and preparation. They were the only two people who really worked on the campaign and helped. But as I say, it was almost a nothingness; it was a spit in the wind without any enthusiasm or push or pressure or anything else. Well, the events leading up to the '69 convention then became very stormy as well. Number one, we were challenging the resolution from 1969, the characterization that the American working class had become radicalized. We said this was nonsense. If you want to say it's militant, fine, but "radicalized"? If you say that, then you have to advance far more advanced political slogans than we know we could advance today, because nobody could claim, we said, that the working class was really radicalized. Secondly, there was a huge debate which continued on what seems to be very esoteric, and that is the definition ,of the character of the epoch. Internationally, and particularly with Gus, the whole definition was that the balance of forces in the world had so shifted that the socialist countries were now the dominant factor in all of world development. And that's nonsense. First of all, there was an absolute unwillingness to examine any setback that was taking place--for instance, Nkrumah's overthrow is just one example, but there were others, as you know, taking place in that period--an absolute unwillingness to even discuss it. We kept saying, "If the world socialist system is dominant, how can you explain the fact that a socialist country is being bombed, for four years at that point? You don't see a capitalist country being bombed, but it's a socialist country being bombed. If the socialist system is so strong, that wouldn't be happening." Really what we were getting at was this Goddamned Panglossian politics that is the character really not only of Gus Hall but more seriously of the Soviet Union, of always substituting what conceivably may be at some point in the future for what is today, and therefore an unreality about estimates, an inability to be specific or concrete or meaningful about political analyses and political estimates. So that it was another big fight that was going on in regard to estimates. There was a third one, again around the question of the character of the American working class--it seems again kind of esoteric--and that was whether or not Lenin's definition of a section of the working class being part of an aristocracy of labor had any validity to current reality, It was really an illustration of the lack of theory on the part of Gus. I mean, what really is true is that Gus is an eclectic thinker, so any kind of position that crosses his mind is used regardless of what it means to an overall matrix of theory or where it fits into an overall concept or a grand analysis. Oh, he was dismissing--he and George Meyer, the labor secretary, who is a nice man but not well known for his acuity--they were making speeches at national party schools and at international conferences that even if that concept of Lenin's of an aristocracy of labor had once been true, it no longer was. Well, I'd originally started to challenge this in 1966 at the convention, and they were just outraged that I'd dared to question it. I just kept saying I never had an objection to revising anything Lenin said--nothing he said is sacred--but that then you've got to do what Lenin did, and that's substitute new empirical data that proves that something is no longer valid. But rather than its being no longer valid, I would suggest the opposite is true, that it is even a larger aristocracy of labor which enjoys these benefits that imperialism gets of an affluence over and beyond what regular exploitation produces in this country. It allows for the extra standard of living that the American working class enjoys. That was a terrible battle. Then we were challenging the way the concept of antimonopoly coalition was being treated. This was the party's basic document of its program, has been for many years. It's a concept that has some real radical validity; most of the Communist parties in capitalist countries have something resembling it. What it's supposed to do is provide a transitional program leading towards socialism, an awareness that you don't reach a socialist revolution in one fell swoop, a recognition that in this period of state monopoly capitalism, the dominant sectors of monopoly threaten and challenge and jeopardize capitalists who are not monopolists, and that therefore there's a wider section of those who are victimized, in a sense, by monopoly capitalism than just by capitalism itself. That's true, but it can also become a very dangerous catch--all, because what it becomes is a loose formulation of a potential that you are actually never in a position to create, of a coalition that is antimonopoly but not anticapitalist. As to the idea that a government could be created on that, one elected of that kind, that would then proceed to go from that to a socialist revolution with the agreement of the majority, my argument had been twofold. One, there's no guarantee that we have to go through that period; it may well be that with the speed with which change takes place, the country will go directly to a socialist revolution, and the hows and whys of that will depend on what's happening both internationally and the changing relationships within the country: how strong a revolutionary movement is, how disillusioned and outraged masses of people are with the status quo, how incapable the ruling class is of sustaining itself through its mass propaganda, its ideology, and its institutions. But mostly what I was getting at was really not just a far--off perspective of whether it was true or not. It was the way in which our political line kept veering back and forth without any consistency or long--range perspective. I used this example, the fact that in 1964 to listen to Gus Hall or Henry Winston talk, you'd think we were the left wing of the Democratic party. And then in another speech, why, we would be the opponents of anything; the liberals would become the main danger. As I say, what I was mainly objecting to was that there was again no informed intelligence that was capable of sustaining a long--range perspective.

GARDNER

How did Gus Hall reach the position of leadership?

HEALEY

Well, that was an interesting story. He had been in jail or on parole during the inner--party struggles after the Twentieth Congress, which were the sharpest inner fights that had taken place. Gene Dennis was the general secretary, but opposing him were William Z. Foster on the one side, mostly usually with Ben Davis, and on the other side John Gates and others. I would say the bulk of us were somewhere--we didn't want what Foster wanted because all he wanted was the status quo of the party, the same old things; we didn't agree with John Gates because, as far as we were concerned, his position would have led to the liquidation of the party, and we wanted no part of that; but Dennis did not have that essential charisma that, for instance, Gus Hall does have. [Gus Hall] is a very personable person when he wants to be. When he wants to turn on his personality, he's a very charming man. I think probably also that Gene, who died of cancer in 1960, was already sick, and none of us, including himself, knew how sick he was in that 1957 to '59 period. At any rate, Gus came out of jail and then out of conditional release about 1958 unscathed by the battles on each side of the inner--party fight and determined to remove, replace Gene Dennis. Now, I don't know of any time when you really had in our party an open competition for the post of general secretary. It's not nice. It's always supposed to be the principle of unanimity operating. So whatever takes place always takes place behind the scenes, as far as leadership. What Gus did was to travel around the country in just an open--well, almost open, not directly open, but almost open--campaign to mobilize support to become the general secretary to replace Gene. Os--tensibly he was on vacation. He came here to California with his wife and son and two nieces and stayed at my house campaigning everywhere. What he did with me, I'm sure he did with other people throughout the country. As I have already indicated, I was not the most sophisticated on these questions. I was very naive; I'd had no direct contact with most of these people in the national leadership of a personal character. When he would tell me horrendous stories about what Gene Dennis had or hadn't done, I didn't dream that he'd be inventing them or that he had any ulterior purpose. I just took for granted everybody's objective is for the good of the party. And I was critical of Gene because he wasn't decisive; he never felt a strong line on any question. So anyway, Gus came to meet with our board, and I'm sure what he did with our board was not atypical. He had two meetings with our district board before the 1959 convention, which was where he was later elected. He wanted to know what was on our minds, what did we think were the important political questions. The thing we emphasized above anything else was this question of our approach toward the Soviet Union. Our line was that we should not be ones who were apologists for what we had done in the thirties. [At that time] the Soviet Union did stand alone, and in submerging all other questions to the defense of that solitary country we thought no matter how we exaggerated or distorted in the process, there was legitimacy to it. But it was preposterous to take that attitude when there were fourteen socialist countries, that it was non--Marxist to maintain that the Soviet Union was the barometer, the test of your attitude of internationalism and prosocialist loyalty. He totally agreed with us at these two board meetings, said, "You're absolutely right, comrades. I fully associate myself with you. I think that's the only logical position." Well, he went back to New York to the National Executive Board. At that particular point I wasn't on the Executive Board. I had refused to--well, there had been a purge of the National Executive Board, as I indicated earlier, in February of 1958, one which Gene Dennis and Bob Thompson had united on to do, so that Mickey was the only person from California on the board. I did not go back on the board actually until 1960. I only heard later what took place. Mainly I heard about it from Gene Dennis's wife, Peggy. What happened is that Gus came back and said that California was totally in support of him for general secretary, that it was clear that the convention would divide, would split--on the one hand, there were the Foster forces, who were supporting Ben Davis to be the general secretary; on the other hand, the Midwest around that time was still pretty much around Gene--but that he had New York and the West Coast. Most particularly he emphasized that he had us in Southern California because we were the second largest district in the country. We had no knowledge he was saying those things--just none at all--that we were in the bag for him. At any rate, intensive negotiations took place in the National Executive Board, and finally Gene agreed that the only condition under which he'd step down as general secretary was if he became national chairman with Gus as general secretary, but that it would be a coequal leadership. And Gus agreed to that. But by the time of the convention in 1959, Gene had already become ill. He wasn't at the convention. The speech that Gus gave at the convention was one that Gene had written for himself to give. Nobody was told this; they thought it was Gus's. And Gus was elected. Well, actually, Gus was elected to the National Committee, the National Committee then elects a general secretary. But by this time it was clear--I then found out also (and actually Gus told me this)--that he had gone to Foster and worked out a whole alliance with Foster to get Foster's support. Because Foster just hated Gene Dennis with a passion; he just considered him a milquetoast, that you couldn't rely on him. But that's how Gus got into the leadership. What he did was to bring into the leadership for the first time, at least to my knowledge--all kinds of politics that are associated with trade union politics, and not the things that are ordinarily true with the party: the use of large amounts of money, getting people extra vacations or things of this kind, slander campaigns, alliances with these duchies (like the Winters and the Lumers, and all of them had little bases but nothing very secure of their own). Elizabeth Gurley Flynn replaced Gene Dennis as chairman when Gene died. Elizabeth was a very fine mass worker really, an important mass worker, but she had no great experience in these inner--party fights, no great liking for it, and while she was extremely close to Gene Dennis and had adored him, she was not capable of standing up to Gus and all the pressures that came there. At any rate, when the '69 convention came, there were some amusing byplays that had limited significance, I suppose. One of them was around a man by the name of Al Lannon, who has since died, who after his death became practically deified in the party press. Al had been a maritime worker and a party organizer after that, a very militant person who, in that inner--party fight of the '57--'59 period, had been very much in what is called the ultra--leftist group. He had moved to San Francisco and got into immediate political battles with the Northern California leadership. At one point he was expelled by the Northern California leadership, but nobody knew about it. When he moved down here, in my usual sentimentality towards people who have lived their lives fighting for "the good fight," I went to see him. I knew that his position and mine were diametrically opposed, but I really didn't care. He was a person who had been in the leadership and, I thought, deserved the respect that that should bring. So I, quote, "politically rehabilitated" him, brought him back into party activity. And oh, boy, did he really [laughter]-- he really utilized it and became the most important pro--Soviet spokesman here, particularly when Czechoslovakia erupted. He was far more experienced than any of the other people who were opposing our position. We had pretty much a majority position. We had had all these long meetings with our membership; people were prepared to back up our position. When the nominations for the national convention took place, Al ran and just barely made it as an alternate. But when he got to New York, he became the hero of the convention. He could get up and make a rabble--rousing soapbox speech that had people cheering and standing in the aisles. We had done another thing that, as I look back I know it now, was stupid on my part. It was part of the thing I was doing in showing my contempt for the kind of mythologies that operate in the party as in the practice where party leaders are elected to the convention not from their own clubs--everybody has to be elected by a club--but from those clubs that aren't going to send delegates because of security reasons, like cultural clubs or clubs where people just don't come to public, semipublic things. It's a real farcical thing. For instance, every district has to take two or three national leaders and add them to the list of people to be elected at their convention, to the national convention. I just think it's a mockery of the whole thing. But it shows how democratically everyone is elected. So I proposed at our '69 Southern California convention that we just do away with this nonsense and that the outgoing leadership simply be elected with one vote to the convention. There was no problem for a leader in being elected. Any club would add you to their list. But I argued that we not do this, that we make room for the rank and file to come by not taking their place, that we fight with the cultural people and the other people that didn't like it, that they had to be at these conventions, that they had the same responsibility as we. And that we do away with the mockery, the hypocrisy. Well, that was seized upon both locally here and in New York as the arch--violation of the constitution. When we got to New York, our right to be delegates was challenged--the whole delegation--on the ground that we'd been elected illegally. This official challenge was placed against us. We proved at the committee that was set up to hear it that the national leaders had also been elected illegally, in that the constitution provides everybody must be elected by secret ballot but that when Gus Hall and all these big shots were elected it was never by secret ballot; it was just by voice vote. But it was stupid on our part to have taken that crucial opportunity to add a new issue to the party's turmoil. To get people to look at reality is hard enough on big things, but taking a thing like that, we really were stupid to have brought that issue into it. So what if we'd gone through the hypocrisy one more time? What difference would it have made? Essentially nothing. But as I'm indicating to you, my tactical head isn't always the greatest when it comes to inner--party struggles, I suppose partly because I really have such a hatred of the superstition that operates in the party, techniques and methods of work that are just absolute violations of what we're supposed to believe in and what Marxism is supposed to represent. But it sure made a mess out of our status in New York. Of course, by the time we got to New York we were already the lepers, the political lepers of the convention. We were the ones attacking the Soviet Union, defending the counterrevolutionaries in Czechoslovakia. And it didn't matter what you'd say. You'd say, "Look. All right, this convention is taking place, what, nine months after the invasion. Gus Hall said counterrevolutionaries were threatening. Why hasn't one been arrested? Why hasn't there been a public trial showing that there was counterrevolution and counterrevolutionaries in Czechoslovakia? How do you account for the fact that if the big danger was West German invasion, the Soviet army when it landed turned its guns on the building of the Central Committee in Prague? It didn't go to the border of West Germany." We were really, as I say, the pariahs, and people didn't want to talk to us; they didn't want to sit next to us. It was an incredible scene. I had refused to be on this presiding committee, which technically, as the chairman of the party here, I had a right to be on--or practically always, you were put on. I was sick of the nonsense and sick of the waste of time. So I suggested that Ben Dobbs go in my place, which again was a tactical error: I would not compromise or give in on their chicanery as to who was to be elected, for instance, to the new National Committee or what compromises would be made, whereas Ben, who is a much nicer person than I am, would give in, you know; he wouldn't stay out and fight on it. All kinds of silly things were taking place. The pressures were very great; the hysteria was enormous. But really the only thing that was of any great significance that was taking place was that the party had to be cleansed of any anti--Soviet tendencies, and that meant anybody. Well, I had already known I wasn't going to run, under any conditions. There was no question in my mind also that if I'd run I'd probably have been defeated, because once, they put out a slate of who they want elected, then there's not going to be. . . . But the whole business had become so distasteful, sitting in meetings that had absolutely nothing to say as far as policy--the policy was just determined as soon as Gus Hall got up to speak (that was the policy; there was no debate on substance)--and I just didn't want to waste my time. I was too old to sit through meetings that didn't have significance. But what amused me was to watch people who would have the same position I had on the political thing, continuing to scramble to stay on that National Committee. It was so important to them to have the title. Again it's a separate psychological question that is too often ignored in regard to how political decisions are made and what significance human beings have to do with that. It's a separate thing that we can come back to at another point. At any rate, we were to hold our follow--up convention here in L.A. to elect our leadership a month after the national convention. It got postponed because the national people said they couldn't send representatives here and they wouldn't agree that we should hold a convention without them. About a month before our convention was to take place, Carl Winter, Danny Rubin and Lou Weinstock came here to L.A. and went from club to club agitating that all of us, our old former board, should be thrown out, and that a new leadership should be elected. When the convention finally took place--I had already said I would not stay as D.O., and I had been announcing that for many years, that I thought we ought to change--a whole number of us stayed and ran for office again on the district committee, not to be in the leadership on the district board, just to show them that they couldn't get away with invading the district. Of course, any one of us who ran got reelected. But then we turned over the leadership to them entirely. Now, that, too, was probably wrong. I mean, if you're going to stay in and fight, you've got to stay in with a base. If you've got a base, you've got to be in the leadership of that base because that's all that counts in the Communist party, who's in the leadership. You have no other way to reach and influence people except through the leadership. But I suppose it was emotions more than politics that affected a lot of our decisions not to be in the leadership, not to be in the district board. As I say, we stayed in the district committee. But while technically, the district committee is supposed to be the leading body between conventions, actually, it has no more to say about policy than the national committee has. The body that makes decisions is the small operative leadership that handles the day--to--day work. I mentioned about Al Lannon, and it's really significant only again because of mythologies, the way mythologies arise and have their own life. Al died about two months or so after the convention. He'd been a very sick man for many years, had a very serious heart condition probably twenty years before he came here. But as I say, here was a man who had been part of the ultra--Left grouping in the party that was later expelled, who had been expelled at one point in the Northern California district for violating party decisions and refusing to meet and discuss his role with the party leadership there. But because around Czechoslovakia he had risen to the fore and defended the Soviet Union and had played this agitational soapbox role, when he died all this period of his party history, which by party standards would be considered objectionable and wrong and sad and tragic, all was totally erased, absolutely eliminated, and articles were written in Political Affairs and the Daily World and books were written lauding him as the exemplar of the real working--class revolutionary. As I say, only for that one reason: the fact that at this moment of crisis he had held firm the banner of the Soviet Union as the barometer of absolute good within the world communist movement.

1.42. TAPE NUMBER: XXI, SIDE ONE OCTOBER 30, 1973

HEALEY

At that '69 convention--and this is what is considered the second session of the Southern California '69 convention that I'm talking about, the session that followed the national convention and dealt with the questions of local policy and local leadership (not local policy in the sense of L.A. policy but how the collective leadership in the Southern California district estimated the national questions and its thinking on questions)--I gave that report on behalf of the Southern California district board. It was a speech--one of the longest I've ever given in the party--in which I attempted to deal historically with the problems of the party both on questions of form and content; by "form" I'm referring specifically to the questions of democratic centralism, how decisions are made, and the interaction of that on the actual decisions themselves, on their content. It was a very sharp and very, very critical speech. As I say, it was somewhat of a historical overview. I was particularly interested in documenting this question of the interrelationship between the form of how decisions are made and the content. This is important because a lot of people had thought that my main criticisms with the party had been based and are currently based on the fact that I didn't agree with a particular decision. That really is not the basic issue and never was. Much more important to me was this question of how a decision was arrived at, because that is the more fundamental question that at least provides some method of guaranteeing that whatever the finished policy is, it does represent what the bulk of the membership understands and wants to deal with. Then I did what is considered totally improper in the party (although as I've indicated before, these questions of propriety and impropriety had never been much of a concern of mine, even when I understood why they were supposed to be proper or improper in the first place): I quoted past speeches of Gus Hall's, who was there representing the national office, indicating the swerves, the back and forth positions, the looseness of the political estimates, their imprecision, and quite frequently therefore the total inaccuracy as far as relating to what any reality appeared to be at any one point. I have already mentioned to you how when he was campaigning for the post of general secretary he had met with our board and had assured us that he agreed with our position (that the past approach toward internationalism, which defined one's attitude to the Soviet Union as the beginning and end of that definition, was no longer a proper one with the existence of fourteen socialist countries), and I included that in the speech. As I will indicate later, that has some relevancy. Maybe I'd better indicate it now just for the purpose of coherency. Since I left the party, the new organizer of the party here, Arnold Lockshin, delivered a report which was mimeographed and sent out to all the clubs, entitled "Ideology." It is an attempt to go through all my convention speeches and single out what he considers the examples of my historic revisionism or anti--Sovietism or whatever, how I'm against motherhood. What he did with that particular question of Gus's meeting with our board before 1959 was to quote the paragraph in which I stated that our district leadership felt the need for a proper new definition of proletarian internationalism, but then he left out the last sentence, which was, "And Gus Hall said he fully agreed with us." [laughter] I found that kind of typically revealing of the way you rewrite history. Anyway, as I say, it was a very critical thing. Now, one thing I did try to do was to go back far beyond Gus Hall's own reign (which started in 1959), in order to indicate that it was not a personal attack. This was a question of political methodology that I was dealing with. I very carefully, as a matter of fact, took most of the examples--although not all of them--from things that had been prevalent in the party as our line starting thirty years before that. But, as I say, I did do the thing that is considered totally outrageous, and that was to quote him by name on the things he had said. For instance, [I mentioned] a wire he sent to Johnson in the name of the party when Kennedy was assassinated, pledging the loyalty and support of the Communist party if Johnson carried out the same kind of policies that Kennedy had done which made Kennedy such a heroic figure, a figure whom the American people had so respected and followed. And then I said, "And this is being said about a president who organized the Bay of Pigs invasion"--I gave other examples which did not follow through consistently on any struggle of equality and so forth--and here's the Communist party's general secretary pledging our loyalty to such a person, or to his successor, Johnson, if he carries out these fine qualities. Of course, as I say, this is improper because there's an [attitude] present in most of the Communist parties--not all anymore; it used to be general in every Communist party, but many parties have emancipated themselves from this mythology-- that the party itself is never wrong, and that means that the current general secretary, who is still the general secretary symbolizing the party, is never wrong. If at any time the party admits a mistake, it is not that the party was wrong, but that an individual was wrong, and then you get rid of that individual. You only say that after you've gotten rid of the individual, usually. Then all the sins of what happened during that individual's tenure become solely personalized. As a result, there are no political lessons that are learned for the party as a whole and for the membership. And I'm particularly stressing the question of the membership because, you know, there is an old saying that has a certain degree of validity, that the rank and file usually deserves the kind of leadership it gets. In other words, if it is not politically conscious and organized, then its leadership is going to be of a certain character. That's true in the labor movement, it's true of other organisms as well, .and it's true of the party. So some of my criticisms were also a criticism of people who speak in the name of Marxism--Leninism without making any real struggle to understand not just Marxism--Leninism as a theory, but as it operates politically in the functioning of a political organization. Well, Gus just went beserk when he gave his answering speech. His whole answer could really be summarized by his denunciation that, quote, "There is nothing that the Communist party has ever done that Dorothy Healey approves of." That was the constantly reiterated chant. At any rate, after that convention was over there was, as I have indicated before, a new district committee elected in which at least 55 percent of the people associated themselves with my position. But we had all individually arrived at the conclusion--well, not all, but most of us had arrived at the conclusion--that we did not want to be on the district executive board. However, we were anxious to be of as much help as we could in seeing that a leadership, a district executive board, was elected that was as reasonably competent as was possible to find within the district here. I had very long meetings with Danny Rubin, the national org secretary, who stayed after Gus left after the convention, making proposals as to which people, from my knowledge of them over the past twenty--five years, were competent and able to do something. That was really a very painful spectacle because most of the people who were anxious to be in the district board were not the most competent people, and the most competent people were determined that they wouldn't be. As a matter of fact, the only really competent person who stayed in the new leadership was Ben Dobbs, who had been the org secretary for most of the years that I had been chairman. We'd had a really remarkable relationship. We had known one another since we were children (I think we first met in 1931), and in the period that we worked together in the party leadership here in Southern California it was really quite unusual, in the sense that Ben, the man, was in the secondary position and I, the woman, was in the primary position; yet at no time did that ever cause any disturbance in our relationship. I think it not only was unusual for that period; it would be unusual for this period or any other period, that there was just not the slightest reaction on his part. In other words, I'm really quite admiring of his own role and activity. He was certainly without any question, as far as the whole country was concerned, the most competent organization secretary of any district, and far superior to most, or of anybody really that they had in the national office. But he felt very strongly that he wanted--he was as critical as I was; he and I shared all the opinions. As a matter of fact, the noteworthy thing about our leadership--and I'm not talking about his and mine; I'm talking about our whole collective, not only the district board but the district committee--was that over all these years because we'd taken every major question for discussion, because we did not try to cram through decisions, we didn't try to get a vote, to get a majority decision which would bind the minority to carry it out; we were more interested in getting a consensus through discussion, a position that would most nearly approximate everyone's opinion, or as many as could be--the leadership here was united. The only person I can think of in the district leadership who consistently was not in agreement with us was Bill Taylor, who always took a position that he thought would either anticipate what the national leadership position would be or followed it after it was made. To a lesser extent--well, it was more true of Bill than of anyone else, but otherwise we were united. But Ben felt that while he was part of the general agreement and continues today to be part of the same general feeling, he thought it was still possible to carry on a struggle in the leadership on these questions, as they affected both Southern California and the country as a whole. I think at this point he probably feels that there is very limited possibility of any effectiveness, even though he is still a member of the district board. For a few months after that convention, I simply functioned within my club. I had joined a club; I'd become a member of a club made up, with the exception of myself, of young people.

GARDNER

What club was that?

HEALEY

The name of it now is Venceremos. The name of it then was Ho Chi Minh. The change took place because the club got so big that it had to split in half. After great debate, the other half took over the name Ho Chi Minh, and the half I remained with became the Venceremos club. These were mostly young people whom I had either recruited into the party or had worked with very closely for the few years they'd been in. But I had an idea in the back of my mind also as to why I was doing it: it was not entirely guileless as to why I joined that particular club. At that time the party constitution read that a person could only be expelled if their club brought the charges against them and voted to expel the person, or the highest committee that you were a member of [did so]. I wanted to be in a club where no matter what happened on the higher committee, the club was at least made up of people who were willing to listen, who would debate and would question. I want to emphasize that the club was not of one opinion, by any means. A lot of the young people either agreed or wanted to agree more than anything else with the national leadership. It's a natural thing. When you're young, you don't want to belong to an organization that you have to question or challenge. It's all right when you're older and have an independent base on which to make your judgment, but a young person wants the sense of identification and pure approval, and approval of the whole, if possible. But as I say, I knew that generally speaking, at least on questions of the kind that would be likely to bring about charges against me by the national leadership, the club would act only in consideration with what it thought the real facts were, and not because they were being pressured or because the national leadership was demanding it or anything else.

GARDNER

How long were you with that club?

HEALEY

Oh, well, I think probably from 1968 to 1973.

GARDNER

And was there a club before that, or how did that work?

HEALEY

Oh, yes, there's always--and there had been youth clubs before that, but. ...

GARDNER

You haven't really gone into that in much detail, the different clubs you've been in. Could we take it aside?

HEALEY

Sure. Well, I don't want to go back all the way to all the clubs I've been in because I've been in a lot of clubs, all the way back to 1928.

GARDNER

Well, we talked about some of those, your affiliation with the YCL and so forth.

HEALEY

Well. . .

GARDNER

Maybe if you go backwards it would be easier.

HEALEY

I'm trying to remember--it's very difficult to remember, frankly, because most of my activity in the years when I was in the leadership was not through a club, although I'd always attended a club meeting.

GARDNER

Well. How are clubs organized?

HEALEY

The clubs are based on one of three categories. The most important club in the party theoretically is the shop club, that is, all the Communists who work in one factory. I say "theoretically" because there's not very many of those. There never have been an awful lot. But related to the shop club is the industrial club: if there aren't enough people in one factory, then people who work in the same industry. The second type of club is called the community club. That's based on the political subdivision, where you live. And third are our special clubs like cultural clubs or professional clubs, made up of people in the same type of careers. During the twenty--five years I was in the leadership, of course, I met with hundreds of clubs. That was a good deal of my work, meeting with clubs, although Benny did a great deal of that, too, because all during the years I was in the leadership I insisted on maintaining my contacts and relationships with non--Communists, and spent a great deal more time with that than I did with the internal party.

GARDNER

How many clubs would there be, and how large would each club be?

HEALEY

Well, they vary. Usually--in the last twenty--five years they would average around fifteen or twenty members, because that would fit into a home. After that you had to find halls, and that was never either a convenient thing, nor did people like to do it because of what they considered security problems. Actually, it wouldn't have made any difference as far as their security is concerned. The FBI would sit outside and tap the meeting that was in a home. They didn't need to rely on the stool pigeon to inform them. But people felt that there was more security; when people feel a thing strongly, that becomes something you've got to reckon with. I would say the average--sized club is around twelve members. Most clubs meet once every two weeks. Most clubs used to have a small executive [committee] of the club that was responsible primarily for planning the agenda so that people would have something organized when they'd come, planning the educationals. And in the better days of the party, the club chairman was one who knew the community, who knew the community leaders, who knew who to go to talk to in case some big mass event came up. Furthermore, in past days--this is no longer true--the clubs were always very much involved in community life. Many clubs put out community bulletins in the name of the party addressed to the community issues. Literature was sold house to house, as well as the newspapers. There were very few clubs that weren't just intimately connected with whatever the issues were that involved and concerned the residents of a particular area. And then, of course, in addition, the clubs would bring to the community national and international issues that might not be indigenous to that community but which were part of the questions on the party's program.

GARDNER

So, how many clubs approximately would you say there are right now?

HEALEY

Well, that depends on how big the party is. Right now I'd say they're probably thirty clubs maximum, probably not that many that function. At one point there were 300 clubs. At any rate, from '69 until sometime in 1970, this is mainly what I was doing. I also continued, of course, to speak on KPFK and to speak publicly wherever I was invited. They couldn't find a local person to be the organizer of the party here. Bill Taylor wanted to be named it very much, but the national office was as much in agreement as the L.A. people were that he didn't have the capacity for doing it, although the national office was very grateful for what they considered his staunchness in always taking their position on every question. But even they at that point realized that he was neither an organizer nor a teacher. More than anything else it required continuity. [tape recorder turned off] So they brought in a young man--not so young--by the name of Lou Diskin from Chicago to be the organizer. Lou's past experiences had been mainly in the bookstore in Chicago. He was a very nice man--I liked him very much personally-- but he was almost immediately over his head in the activities here in Southern California because he'd never had to deal with questions as the organizer before. This was a district that was used to a certain style of work, and particularly of public work, a public relationship of the party. Almost immediately his relations with Bill Taylor-- who, while he wasn't made the organizer, was still the representative of the national office here--became even sharper than mine had been because while Bill and I rarely agreed politically, personally we always got along well. He was always good--natured and amiable until his own personal interests as to his title or his role or the prestige he had came into account. But Lou and he were almost immediately at odds personally as well as politically. But Lou begged me and begged me to take some sort of party assignment. We discussed it for a long time. The first thing I agreed to do was around the question of Angela Davis, her arrest and the campaign for her. It was a very difficult situation. First of all, the person who was in charge of the campaign for the national office at that time was still in Los Angeles (Angela was in jail in New York) and was Franklin Alexander. While Franklin and I had been very close during the years that I was the organizer of the party--I had been his big defender against the older people who were outraged either by his language or by his activity--there was quite a marked shift in his relationship with me when I was no longer the district organizer. But far more important from the beginning was the question of trying to develop a campaign that would first of all be an organized campaign, not just one of these amorphous defense committees in which a few Communists make lots of speeches and have the names of non--Communists on the letterhead, but rather to really mobilize and organize people around the issue. The media had made Angela a household name. That's a very important and unusual thing for defense cases. Usually you spend years trying to get the name of the victim or victims popularly known so that people are even aware that there is a case of repression (that was true with the Scottsboro case, as it was true with Tom Mooney; it was true with every case that we'd ever worked on). And here was a defendant who was, as I say, already a household name because of television. But the task was to find a way, I thought, to make that support or awareness meaningful--not just signing one's name, but being a part of an organized action around her case. This is where there were great difficulties that I ran into with Franklin. What happened is that after a meeting had been called here in L.A., a big public conference to set up the Angela Davis defense committee, the continuations committee that was elected to follow through was 99 percent Black. Franklin, who was the man in charge, took off to go to New York, not for very good reasons, and the first meeting was taking place, I remember, on a Wednesday night. I was left as the only person from the party in this meeting of otherwise totally Black people, people who were not sympathetic to the Communist party and who were very sensitive to the question of whether the party was trying to use the fact that Angela was Black, and who were determined that this was going to be Black--led. It was a very uncomfortable position. When Franklin came back the following Saturday, we had a party meeting at his and Kendra's house where he and Kendra were both present, along with a number of other comrades who were active in the campaign. I became very critical of the fact that he had taken off just two hours before the meeting was to take place on a Wednesday and left me there with absolutely no--there had been no discussion with any of these other people as to what would happen in the meeting. You cannot be fast and loose with a mass campaign. You've started something; you've got to live with it. It became a very heated argument between us, and he became very abusive, personally abusive. And I did something I'd never done in my life before: I just got up and walked out of the meeting. It was clear that there was no sense to me in trying to argue it. He was not interested in discussing the problem. As I look back, he was probably feeling very uncomfortable because of what he had done and shouldn't have. But also, because of the fact that I wasn't the organizer of the party any longer, he didn't feel any compulsion to have to even debate the question. So for some few weeks after that, I simply helped out with the local people where I could on the Angela Davis campaign--I met with a number of the committees that were set up--but no longer with the overall top committee. And then Diskin came to see me again and particularly wanted me to work on the peace activity. But in between this, I had been planning to start a journal of contemporary Marxism, one that for some time I had hoped would reprint the debates that were taking place in other parties around the world, which nobody in this country even knows about, including in the Communist party--the articles that were in the Italian Communist materials, the Japanese party, and others. I had gotten a number of people interested in the project. An organization that had been set up ten years earlier, Discussions Unlimited, agreed to become the sponsor of it, and a number of people--I'd written to people, maybe ten or fifteen people throughout the country, and had received donations to start it. I had made no secret about this, that I was planning to do it. All of a sudden I get a call from New York insisting that I come to attend a meeting of the Political Committee to discuss my work. So I go back and attend the meeting, and the first thing they want to take up with me are stories that they have heard of who's appeared on my program. This was mainly being done--although the questions, the accusations were being made against me by Gus, it became clear in the course of this large meeting that the main ones pushing and claiming that they had facts were Carl Winter and Hy Lumer. They were charging that I had put on representatives of the Israeli Zionist movement on my program. I said, well, first of all, if I wanted to, there'd be nothing wrong with it as far as I'm concerned. If I can't debate the issues of Zionism with the Zionists, then what the hell have I been doing all these years? I do not only interview people with whose opinion I agree. The program is a program of controversy and not of just my opinion. But secondly, it happens to be untrue. I haven't done it. As a matter of fact, I told them, the only foreigners I've had on my program have been Soviet Communists. Twice I'd put on visiting Soviet representatives of one kind or another. Actually they weren't very good. I didn't like the programs because at that point I was not pressing them on difficult questions, and they were "puff" interviews, which I dislike doing with anybody.

GARDNER

Well, who were they referring to, then?

HEALEY

I have no idea of where the story even started from and why they were so convinced. But this was quite typical. I don't know--did I tell you about the accusation, that Gus charged me with after Czechoslovakia, how I'm supposed to have been in West Germany? Well, maybe I ought to stop and put this in as a parenthesis. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, at one of the local meetings that was being held here that Gus Hall came to attend for the national [office], he charged that he had received very, very special information that I had gone to West Germany, and while in West Germany I had phoned Al Richmond, who was in Prague. I said, "Well, first of all, I've never been in West Germany in my life. Secondly, it's very easy to find out I haven't been abroad in the period you're talking about, 1968. I didn't leave the United States. And third, I never called Al Richmond while he was in Prague." So on all three counts--you know, it was crazy. I knew where he was getting his story and what it was about, and for a couple of hours I just enjoyed myself by just telling him he was an ass. Then I finally told him where and how I was sure the story had started. Ben was very critical of me for telling him the actual facts of what had happened. He said, "Let him go on saying this nonsense." But I was still feeling that I--to the general secretary, you have to feel responsible. I said what had happened is that I had called Prague from Los Angeles to talk to George Wheeler, who was at that time the People's World correspondent in Prague and who was also a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Czechoslovak Academy, to warn him that the Militant, the paper of the Socialist Workers party, had reproduced his open letter to our party, to the American party. George had written a very passionate letter, because he was a member of this party, the American party, pointing out the indecencies and injustices and the inaccuracies of their reportage in the Daily World. The Militant had somehow gotten a copy of it and had reprinted it. Knowing what the feeling is about Trotskyists--not just here but in every country--I was very worried about his security (what would happen to him?) and I wanted to warn him about it so he could be protected. What had happened is that either his daughter's father--in--law or his son's father--in--law--I never was quite sure--was a former American Communist who had been deported in the late forties, a man by the name of [Peter] Harrisades. First he'd been in Hungary, and then when the Hungarian events of 1956 took place, he had fled to Czechoslovakia. He was working for the World Federation of Trade Unions. I had met him while I was in Prague visiting the Wheelers, and after about ten minutes had decided he was an ass of the kind I'd met plenty of in the United States and I didn't want to waste any time. He was just simply an echo of whatever the Soviet policy was. It was just totally useless to debate questions with him, or even ask questions about what he was doing, or why, because you got no coherent response. Harrisades had obviously been in George Wheeler's home when I called him, and Harrisades had notified Gus Hall that I had made this phone call, but he didn't get it straight, because Harrisades is not the brightest of men or one of the most accurate, and all he knew was that somehow or other a phone call had come from me to Prague. Of course, he knew I hadn't called Al Richmond. I think what just happened is that in transmission of the information it got garbled and the story became my being in West Germany. So this meeting in New York of the Political Committee, first accusing me of things I'd done on the program, as I say, I found very amusing because it was so similar to this other thing of the phone call. I had not had the Zionists on. Oh, there was another thing that they'd messed up on this question of the radio program. I had had on a local guy from the Committee to Aid Soviet Jews, some jerk--I've forgotten his name; he's very prominent, all the time in speaking about this. He's a Lithuanian himself who came here, I think, in the fifties, maybe earlier. Cy Frumkin. I'd had him on, debated him, and had, I think, effectively exposed him as an Israeli agent, that he didn't in the least concern himself with Soviet Jews--he couldn't have cared less. It was simply a way of helping Israel to needle and attack the Soviet Union in an attempt to force a change in the Soviet position in the Mideast. This was just a handle to use. If he'd been concerned with Soviet Jews, he'd also have been concerned with what was happening to Jews in other countries. Just at the time I had him on my program there was a big outbreak of anti--Semitism in Argentina, and I kept saying, "Well, what do you do about that? Not a damn thing. You don't care. People's lives are in danger. You don't care. It's just a political needle." So this was really what again in New York they'd messed up. Their communicants here in Los Angeles had messed up who or what it was, and this was it. Then they wanted to know, what about this journal that I planned to put out? So I told them about it. I should tell you first that I already knew before I went to New York that I was probably not going to be able to put out the journal. Two things had happened. One, the Italian party had temporarily ceased publishing translations of its articles, and, two, I had found that it was precisely in the realm of translation that the biggest difficulties would come, that there was such an enormous wealth of material that would have to be translated that the few people I had who had agreed to act as volunteer translators simply would not have been able to handle it. Technically we couldn't do it. But I was being very mischievous; so when I described the journal, I didn't mention at all the fact that it didn't appear as if it was possible to do it. I just described what I wanted to do and what people with whom I was working wanted to do. Well, they just went really berserk. "You mean to say that you would print the opinions of a party that we didn't agree with?" I said, "Well, of course I would. First of all, as I've already indicated to you, I don't think agreement is the prerequisite either for debate or for printing anything or speaking to anyone. Rather, it is, is there something worthwhile being said that should be taken into account in trying to develop the questions of Marxism?" Well, they kept pressing on this question more than anything else, that I would be printing articles of parties with whom they were not in agreement or with whom they didn't even have relations, as the case may be-- in other words, parties who were critical of the Soviet Union is what they were talking about. They finally passed a decision unanimously that in effect was forbidding me to print this publication as long as I was in the party. I didn't say anything. I didn't even tell them then that I was not going to be able to go ahead with it, that I just couldn't get the translating resources, As a matter of fact, I still think it's a great idea, but it could probably only be done if it was linked up with a university where you'd have graduate students doing the translations, because it was just such a wealth of material otherwise. So then they made a motion that I go on the national party payroll in charge of peace work for the West Coast, for the party. I had been participating, of course, it was just because of my general concern as a Communist, as a human being, for the issues of the war in Vietnam, that I'd been attending meetings of the peace activities here. I said, no, at that point I would not even consider going on the party payroll.

GARDNER

Why?

HEALEY

Well, because of the way it was being done then. It was not a principle question. I mean, God knows I'd been on the party payroll twenty--five years before that. But at that point, the way they were doing it was simply a bribe: "Don't do this journal and we'll put you on the party payroll." I just wasn't going to do that. Anyway, I wasn't spending full time on the peace activities, but I was attending meetings. However, two, three, four months later, whenever it was, the first great escalation of Nixon took place. What was it? The invasion of Laos took place in February [1969], I guess. I then started to spend a great deal more time on the peace activities. As a matter of fact, I was spending full time on it. There were very interesting problems taking place in the peace movement. The first thing that was happening--not just at that particular point really, but going back even further--was the enormous difficulty that the peace movement was having in going beyond demonstrations as the only visible sign of opposition to the war. Either there was a total lack of memory or an inability to do it, but the fact remained that the most important growth of the peace movement came after the teach--ins in the universities, In my opinion the reason for that growth that came after the teach--ins was that the teach--ins provided the first thoughtful critique of the war, the first nationwide attempt with large numbers of people to provide factual information that the antiwar critics could use in going out to organize. I say this got forgotten because in the subsequent years, when the whole activity revolved around two demonstrations a year, in the spring and in the fall--they were always very big and very mammoth-- gradually there was a deterioration of the quality of the speeches, both at the demonstrations and at the activities on the campus and whatnot. The speeches simply became chants, rhetoric, slogans, devoid of factual material. So that was one problem. They seemingly could not find ways in which to have a continuity of mass education in more than the slogans. Secondly, because there were no mass organizations to base themselves on, the organized peace movements became really based on a very narrow handful of individuals who headed things like Women's Strike for Peace or the Quakers, the Unitarians, an increasingly diminshing number of representatives of organized groups, and a lot more of just individuals who would or would not come in terms of continuity of meetings. I mean, sometimes they'd be there, sometimes not, but this was not their main concern. And that problem was never overcome. I think that some of their problems stemmed from the heritage of McCarthyism, that while people were willing to go to a demonstration, they were not willing to join an organization. They were fearful of what joining an organization would mean. Some of it stemmed from the presence of the--I'll call it the know--nothingism of the sixties, the fear of organization, the fear of leadership, the distortions of the fight against bureaucracy by not having any leadership; you then avoided the problem of bureaucracy, they thought. Actually, as I think I've indicated to you earlier, my own opinion is that's the way for the greatest bureaucracy to function because there's no structure, so that the dominant individual who's around, or the individuals around, almost unchallenged, can do almost anything. The third problem was the question of the relations with the Socialist Workers Party, with the Trotskyists. This was an interesting aspect of the radical movement because until the sixties, the Trotskyists in the country had never been anything more than one or two hundred people of not too much consequence in any movement. They had a slight base in Detroit in the auto industry, they had had a significant base in Minneapolis through the Teamster strike, but that was about it. But with the coming of the sixties, they really did one thing that was important and commendable, in my opinion, and that was to recognize the significance of the student upsurge. They totally eliminated every other question from their consciousness but this of the campuses, really poured all their activity and focus on it, and got some limited immediate successes out of it. But in the peace movement, they had originally, in the mid--fifties, set up throughout the country committees called, the name of the city, Committee Against the War in Vietnam. I had attended several of those meetings of their group, of the committee for which they were mainly responsible, in '65, '66, that period. It was very clearly a manipulative thing by them, but the fact is that in the absence of anybody else having community--based stuff, they were there. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] There was in existence at this point, or just before this, another one of these coalitions called the National Mobilization, which was based nationally on the pacifist organizations and a number of both religious and lay people, some few academics and some few trade unionists, the representatives of the various political trends in the country and whatnot. There'd been a great deal of discussion going on that the single issue approach of the peace movement was making it difficult for allies to come from the Black community and the Chicano community, or the poor, the welfare people; that while they were against the war, they were also terribly involved and concerned with their own immediate problems. Inasmuch as all those participating in the antiwar movement were in agreement that the fight against the war was at the same time a fight against these domestic evils, [it was argued that] the movement should broaden out and instead of simply being focused only on the issue of "Stop the war in Vietnam," had to include these issues, these domestic issues. Well, the Trots were violently opposed to that. The main reason why they were opposed to it, I think, was very aptly put by David McReynolds, the representative of the War Resisters League, who'd said that the reason they were opposed to a single issue was that when people started to fight against the war and then started to realize that the issues were linked up to domestic issues, then the SWP would come forward and say, "Well, if you want to fight all those issues, you join the SWP." And they wanted to keep it that way so that they could recruit those who started to go beyond.

1.43. TAPE NUMBER: XXI, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 7, 1973

GARDNER

As we left off five weeks ago, we were talking about the dissolution of the peace movement in the 1970s and the role of the Trotskyites.

HEALEY

The fragmenting of it more than anything else. It was really a very tragic fragmenting because while, as I've indicated to you in discussing every aspect of the social struggle of that period of the sixties primarily and the beginning of the seventies, all of it had been of a somewhat amorphous character in the sense that mass organizations didn't result from it, there were nevertheless an increasing number of human beings who became more conscious of the basic social factors that were present in any of the social struggles, whether it was women's liberation or Black liberation, Chicano liberation, the fight against the war in Vietnam, and so forth--although I would generally say that the fight against the war in Vietnam had been only second to (and maybe equal to) the fight for Black liberation as the spark that was igniting the movements of that period. So that even before the Trotskyists split the National Mobilization and formed their own organization, the peace movement even at its best had this individual character to it because it was not based upon mass organized movements which individuals would then represent when they came on the peace movement [which would then in turn] influence them further. But with the split of the Trotskyites, it became an even more tragic picture. The Trots, as I say, ostensibly did it on the ground that the peace question should stay as a single issue, that it should not be related to domestic issues. But that was really a political subterfuge because the fact is that they were using that movement as they did later with gay liberation and Chicano liberation, women's liberation, anything that came along--they were trending; they were following the trends and trying to latch onto any movement simply in order to show that the SWP was the only organization that was all--inclusive. If people wanted to fight against the war, that was all right, but if you wanted to go further, you had to join the SWP. So their policy was that each movement, whether it was peace or Chicanos or Blacks or women, whatever it was, to keep each thing as a separated isolated thing away from one another, so that then the cadre from those organizations would join the SWP as the coherent whole, as the totality of the social process, and not only the immediate thing. The National Mobilization people, which included the Peace Action Council here in Los Angeles, ultimately formed a group known as the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice, which was their attempt to unify the domestic issue with the international issue. The leadership of it, which was predominantly from the old pacifist movement, church movement--but not exclusive of the other groups; the other groups were included--was really making a very valiant effort particularly to involve the welfare rights people, the movements on the domestic issues. Their feeling was that precisely as these movements would see what appeared to be a predominantly white middle--class peace movement react to the domestic questions of oppression and exploitation, they in turn would participate more organically within the peace movement itself. Well, actually nobody had too much success in either direction in being able to do that. The People's Coalition and the Peace Action Council, which was based on the same kind of organized affiliation membership--in other words, people representing organizations--was really a pretty superficial relationship nationally and locally for a number of reasons. One reason is that an organization like Welfare Rights [Organization]--and I use them only as illustrative of the whole problem--has to have as its predominant concern welfare rights. It is interested in the other coalitions as they add strength to its own fight, but it is not going to--or at least it never did, and neither did any of the other constituent organizations-- really mobilize their own membership on behalf of the other issues of the movement, of the coalition. The second and the more compelling reason is that really nobody, including even Welfare Rights Organization, really had tight organizations that they could represent, not even if they wanted to. Well, it became increasingly obvious in the Peace Action Council here in L.A., and as I say, at that time I was representing the party in that. . . . (Just parenthetically, there's a byplay on that. My predecessor there had been Bob Klonsky. But while everybody privately knew that Bob was a Communist, he refused to appear publicly as the representative of the party. It was one of these really nonsensical, incongruous relationships that developed where a spurious kind of "security"--in quotation marks--comes to the individual who acts that way. I suppose he thought that it would help him get jobs if he weren't known publicly as a Communist, even though, as I say, everybody knew that he was a Communist. But of course that kind of idea is just nonsense. The only ones you're fooling are the people with whom you're working. You're not fooling the FBI or those agencies that try to discriminate against Communists. You're only fooling--and you're not even fooling them--the individuals with whom you're working.) But anyway, I had, as I said, agreed to represent the party in the Peace Action Council. I'd been pressed very hard to do that by the national office of the party, particularly by Gus Hall. To this day I'm not exactly sure why he was pressing so hard that I should do it. (I don't even want to speculate on his motives because it's not too significant one way or the other.) But it became clear to me through the most turbulent period-- and that was both the invasion of Laos and then the later invasion of Cambodia--that these "coalition" organizations (and I put the word "coalition" in quotes for reasons that I have already indicated, but I will still come back to it and elaborate a little more because it's so important as far as the future of American politics is concerned) it was very clear to me that the capacity of the Peace Action Council or of the People's Coalition to really build a coalition that represented diverse trends and interests and organizations was totally circumscribed by the fact that nobody had mass organizations to begin with. Really, you cannot understand the way in which the sixties whimpered out of life, the diminishing role in the sense of any significant capacity to challenge the society, to do anything as far as the American political scene was concerned, without placing, I think, the kind of emphasis I'm giving on this absence of a mass--organized character through which millions of people could participate. The Trots were solely concerned with two things-- first, a demonstration in the spring; secondly, a demonstration in the fall--and all the activities were simply a preparation one way or the other for them. In many cases they had a certain astuteness in the sense that because they were always in organization and preparation for these two demonstrations, they were also always in the driver's seat when they took place as to controlling and defining the character of the demonstrations, who would speak and how long they'd speak and so forth. They raised hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars from people who believed that this was a big legitimate independent peace movement. A further sign of their opportunism, I might add, again just parenthetically, is that they who have always made as the starting point of their differences with the Communist party and other sectors of the radical movement their disdain and contempt for and rejection of anything to do with what is defined as "bourgeois politics"--in other words, anything to do with the liberals in the Democratic party-- every demonstration they called, they would always start by going to those Democratic party liberals to get them to become the sponsors of the next demonstration, as long as it was an off--election year. On an election year, they wouldn't call any demonstrations because then they were spending all their time running their candidates. All I'm really indicating is the really tragic opportunism of the SWP, because while they did gain some status among students for the first time in their lives, the important lesson to be learned as revolutionaries--in the first place, of integrity, integrity to the people to whom you're appealing--is one that they have yet really to absorb and understand. It is not, again, a question of bourgeois morality. It is a question that unless people can trust you, they're not going to follow your line and your politics.

GARDNER

Who were some of the leaders locally, nationally?

HEALEY

On the Peace Action Council, the most important leader was Irving Sarnoff, who had been its initiator. I'm not disclosing anything confidential when I tell you that he had been a member of the Communist party until 1961 and then left the party. When he originally left, he left primarily because of the McCarran Act. He was very active in the railroad union, the railway brotherhood [United Brotherhood of Railway Employees] and felt that it was necessary for him to be able to function independently. I think in later years he also developed some serious political differences. He was a very dedicated and devoted man, but also a very stubborn man, and it was very difficult to get him to understand the meaning of developing a collective--as an example, having the Peace Action Council work through a number of people assuming responsibility and learning through the responsibility how to build and lead organizations. All too often he'd operate out of his own hip pocket. The knowledge would be in his mind but not in others'. The weaknesses that he had were the kind of weaknesses that are characteristic of the shape of the movement, of the fact that there wasn't a strong movement that would of necessity have compelled collective action and responsibility back to the collective. Other people of importance all during the period: one of the staunchest was a woman by the name of Sophie Silver, a woman who had worked in the needle trades all her life as a worker and as a union leader and organizer. She was a member of the Communist party. She devoted herself full--time to whatever activities could be carried on. Don Kalish, the head of the philosophy department-- at that time he was chairman of the philosophy department; I don't think he is now--at UCLA, was one of the most dedicated and selfless people I have watched in the peace movement. He would become totally exasperated by what he would see in the activities of the organized parties, of either the SWP or the CP.

GARDNER

He was not involved in...

HEALEY

Oh, never, no, no, never. As a matter of fact, I think he came very late to even an awareness of organized protest. I don't think until probably 1965 did he ever in his life engage in any kind of political action. And the peace movement was really the be--all and end--all to him as to what had to be done. His hatred of the war in Vietnam was just enormous. Herb and Shirley Magidson were two others who were very, very dedicated, selfless people in this movement. Pat Arnold, who headed the Peace Action Council, the peace committee in the Valley. The names really are legion almost. These people represent to me the human beings who regardless of any other kind of pressure, including boredom--you know, it's the subjective pressures that are worse than the repressions that come from the ruling class--would continue the activities, the zealous, day--to--day activities.

GARDNER

Who were the SWP people?

HEALEY

Well, they changed a great deal. The SWP had a policy of rotating its people from city to city. I think they felt that that was the way they got experience. One never knew from week to week who was coming in representing them in any of the activities. I just have a couple of memories of some of the run--ins with them. One was a rather amusing one, ironic. At the time of the invasion of Laos, at least the first known invasion--of course, at this time we did not know of the secret bombings that were going on--well, the peace movement always did know, but nobody else would believe it, and of course Nixon always denied it--a special ad hoc committee was set up. I don't remember the name of the committee any longer because ad hoc committees were always being set up. It was organized primarily around just this one issue, out of either Laos or Cambodia, whichever that particular movement was. The Trots came to that first meeting, and what they did was again typical of adolescent politics. The meetings were supposedly based, as always, on individual voting. Policy was made by how individuals would vote on particular motions. At the first meeting, in a church in downtown L.A., they mobilized and brought together probably thirty, forty youngsters who voted as a block on everything they did. The group that had initiated the ad hoc committee was trying to organize a demonstration for May 20, I believe it was, at Exposition Park. The Trots had had a national decision of the SWP-- now, they [had formed] a separate peace movement which took the name of the [National] Peace Action Council, which was another bit of perfidy, just so that people who didn't know the difference would think that they were identical [with the Peace Action Council]--to call a nationwide demonstration on May 30, the Memorial Day holiday. They were determined that no matter what happened, they were going to win that. Everybody else was saying, "You can't call two demonstrations within a two--week period. It's nonsense. It's silly." But because they had physically mobilized these additional people, they won the vote that there would be both demonstrations. Of course, the people who didn't represent any such organized viewpoint were just outraged. I remember particularly Don Duncan was there, the guy who had been in the Green Berets and then broke and became an antiwar activist. The vetsi were just starting to organize, and they were just furious. I mean, really everybody who wasn't part of the SWP--influenced group was outraged by it. Herb and Shirley Magidson called a meeting at their home of all those who had formed the original ad hoc committee in an attempt to undo the vote of the SWP grouping. The SWP organizer for the city--as I say, I don't remember his name--found out about the meeting and came to it. Of course there, where they hadn't been able to mobilize their forces, they were outvoted because the people who were there--the Women's Strike for Peace, Another Mother for Peace, the Quakers, who always played a very important role--all of the really independent forces simply voted the SWP guy down. He was just outraged. And after the meeting he came over to me--I played a very minor role in this; I really had been neither occupied nor involved very much in it--after the meeting was over, he came over to me, and he said, "Once again you have used a pickaxe and tried to put it into the brain of the Trotskyist movement." [laughter] As I say, the only reason I remember it was the drama of it. But then what they did was publicly to call another meeting of whatever the ad hoc coalition was, pack the meeting with their people again, and call for the second demonstration. Well, it turned out that, of course, when they won the vote, they didn't win anything because they didn't have any independent strength to organize anything. So they used the name to go ahead and organize the second demonstration, but nobody came to it -- a hundred people at the most. Another character involved at that time--I'm talking still about the SWP forces -- was a man by the name of Milt Zaslow, who had been a long--time member of the SWP but in the 1952--53 period had left with a group known as the Cochranites. This was formed around a man by the name of Bert Cochran. A big internal fight had taken place in the SWP in regard to their estimates as to what the future was going to hold. Milt had been one of those who disagreed with the dominant position, and a whole group of them were expelled. Nevertheless, Milt still considered himself a loyal Trotskyist, and he had organized a group known as Liberation Union, whose main job was to be a white supporting agent for the Black Panther party. At the same time, he was teaching classes on, quote, "Marxism," and really acting as an agency for recruiting for the SWP. The irony of it is that when he himself applied for readmission to the SWP, he was rejected. They wouldn't take him back because of his having been part of the group which had left in '53. What amuses me about all of them--amuse, [I mean a] kind of amusement with the irony and both the bathos and the pathos of it, the ridiculousness of it--was that none of the movements realized how much they resemble one another, how much alike the SWP and the CP are in terms of internal organization, because they base themselves on the same distortions of Marxism--Leninism. So as I say, Zaslow rather stands out as an example of that kind of idiocy on the part of the SWP. His current ideas, as he told me last week, are that the Fourth International is still correct, but that he, who has just come back from Europe interviewing the European Trotskyists, he agrees with them, that the American Trotskyist movement is betraying the spirit of Trotsky. All very much of a nothingness, I assure you. But I then came to the conclusion that it was really not proper for me to be representing the Communist party in the PAC, for one thing because to represent the party I would have had to be meeting with the party leadership to have their collective judgment as to what our position should be in the peace movement, not just my independent judgment. I was not about to start going to those kind of meetings too often. Secondly, it was misleading in the sense that people just took for granted that I did represent the current Communist party thinking, and while I did not at any point politically differentiate myself from what the line of the party was, I was certainly not going to advance it. There was a misleading picture that was being presented to the minds of most people that there was simply a continuity between the party that I had been leading and the party that was present today in Los Angeles. So that for a period of two or three months, I guess, I had no regular assignment. Then Lou Diskin came to see me and asked me if I would go back and work with the Angela Davis committee because it was in just dire straits. There was very little hot activity coming out of it, but more than that, there were very great tensions and collisions between the personnel working within the Los Angeles office. And I agreed to do that. So for a period of around six months, actually until her acquittal, I spent practically full time working with the predominantly Black leadership in the Central Avenue office. I didn't have much to do with the rest of the committee, the UW Arts and Crafts committee or the other community committees. I worked mainly with the Black youths who were in the Angela Davis committee, [doing] what to me was the most important thing, being of as much help [as possible] on the question of developing people who would understand the techniques of organization, the things that had to be done in order to build. Of course, just generally, I then became again very much more aware than I had been in the preceding year of the, really, very divided character of the national Angela Davis committee. On one hand, here was a defense committee that had a defendant who was probably the best known that the country had known as far as a radical case for thirty years, forty years--probably better known than any, because in past years there's never been television, and television transformed all aspects of politics, including the immediacy with which people knew about and heard about cases and their ability to personalize it. They could see Angela Davis as a human being on television, and it had a great effect, particularly as far as Black people were concerned. So you had this interesting irony of, on the one hand, Black people who, I would say, in their overwhelming numbers were very sympathetic and supportive as far as Angela, along with a great deal of support as far as the white liberal community was concerned. And yet this was the poorest--organized defense that I have known. It's true, large sums of money were raised, very large sums of money were raised, that allowed the committee to hire a lawyer whom I think is one of the most able lawyers in the United States, Leo Branton, Jr. There is no question that Leo's handling of Angela's trial was, I think, a major factor in her subsequent acquittal. There were some interesting byplays in that, too, which I think it would not hurt to have recorded. Leo called me one day--he'd come back from San Jose every weekend to be with his family--and asked me to come over to see him. He was quite disturbed over the fact that either shortly before George Jackson's death or immediately after--I guess it was before George Jackson's death--the state had found a letter in his cell which Angela Davis had written to him. Court permission had been granted for Angela and George to have a meeting inside the prison together, ostensibly to help exchange ideas on the legal questions that were confronting both of them around her case. In other words, her case had started because of George Jackson's defense. But while they were meeting--they considered themselves very much in love with one another--and even though the guards were watching and even though the two lawyers were there, they had evidently engaged in some very intimate relations, as was evidenced by the fact of this letter which Angela wrote George when she got back to her own cell in San Rafael (or San Jose by that time). It was a very long letter filled with the most passionate type of rhetoric that one could imagine, the most uninhibited rhetoric. [Leo] showed me the letter and said, "You know, if the government's successful in introducing this, we're just going to be in a hell of a spot, because of its uninhibited character." He was going to try to fight to keep it out, but how much of it he could keep out he wasn't sure. I suggested that he let me have a copy of it, and I would take it around to various writers I knew and see what could be done as far as making this into something having great human quality to it, something that could not have the same connotation of community outrage. Well, I took it to Dalton Trumbo, and Trumbo did just a really brilliant job. What he did was to juxtapose it to the Song of Solomon. As a result, the language of Angela's letter to George, which appeared to have this very vivid sexual connotation--well, not connotation; explicity--when juxtaposed with the Song of Solomon really didn't sound too much different. So then when Leo went back to court, he was able to get a great deal of it stricken on the ground that it was irrelevant, and for the part that wasn't, he used Dalton's juxtaposition of it with the Song of Solomon to show that it was simply of the same character. What could be considered ignoble about the love of one human being for another, irrespective of the graphic language used to describe it? But the things that were just driving me crazy about the case, as I say, as an organizer, was the fact that one could not get a national bulletin out that would keep the committees throughout the United States regularly informed as to what was happening in the case, that one did not have a constant supply of materials available to be distributed to masses of people, to be taken house to house, in order to get organization. As you can see, always my preoccupation has been not just with the issue itself, but also with how do human beings become organized, how do they get in motion, how through the course of that struggle do they broaden out their awareness of the general society. But the national office, which was led by Charlene Mitchell and Franklin Alexander, brother and sister, and a young man by the name of Rob Baker, a young Black guy from UCLA who was supposed to be an expert on writing and getting things out (originally, when the case first broke, I had called him and asked him to come into it; I had known him through my son at UCLA; he was TA--ing at UCLA)--they just couldn't get material out. I never did know what the committee was doing half the time, and nationally we could get nothing from them one way or the other. It had a very devastating effect on these young inexperienced people with whom I was working because all the money that was collected was always sent to San Francisco, which was where they had the national headquarters. So there were never the funds available to do that job here; one was dependent on San Francisco, and it just didn't come. I mention it really only because of the question of mythologies that developed, because to the minds of many people--many Communists--this defense of Angela was a model defense. Angela thinks so. She didn't think so in the beginning. I think I mentioned that she called me to come up to see her when she was in San Rafael and complained bitterly about the conduct of the defense, particularly of Franklin Alexander. But when she came out on bail, when she was herself more involved, I think she was very much taken in by the enormous newspaper and magazine publicity that was coming. But it didn't come because the committee organized it, which is what would have had to happen in previous years. It came because, as I say, of the kind of communication there was. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] The mythology that this was a tremendously well organized mass campaign was just a lot of nonsense, because throughout the country every committee was having precisely the same problems as this little committee had here. This, as I say, had nothing to do with the fact of great sums of money which could be raised. That was true. But if the important thing is not only the issue, the case itself, but organizing people, then it didn't have that effect, although it did have the effect that because of Angela many young Black people joined the party--elsewhere, not in this city, but in other cities, I understand. The other part was to make her an international symbol. And of course that did happen. What's very amusing to me is that--well, let's strike that. I'm not going to go into that because that's part of the things that, as I say, I don't feel comfortable dealing with around what has taken place. But its immediate effect on Angela was first of all that she, who had been so critical of party policy on so many of the same questions that influenced me and others, was convinced that, number one, she owed her life to Franklin and Charlene and Kendra, that they had worked day and night and devoted themselves to the committee that mobilized support. Secondly, she owed her life to the party. Thirdly, she owed her life to the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries that had all the publicity in their countries about her. As a result, as she herself admitted to me a year later when I saw her when she came back from her trip to the socialist countries, at first she was very much aware of the fact that she was adopting positions that she wasn't really terribly comfortable with, simply out of gratitude. My own opinion is that, as is true of other people, imperceptibly you then start to believe the things you start to say. You almost have to convince yourself that you really do believe it because otherwise the ambivalence would be too sharp and terrible. And Angela had had no real significant revolutionary past to draw on, no experiences to draw on to give her an independent judgment through which to compare what she was saying. I mean, when she'd say such nonsense as that anybody who was arrested in a socialist country was automatically a counterrevolutionary, you had an example of it, you know, because she would never have said such a thing five years earlier. She would have known better. But anyone who would say that clearly had made up their mind as to what direction they would go. I should add further that another big influence on her was Cuba, which of all the socialist countries is the one she feels closest to. This is, quote, "her country." From the beginning she has felt that way. With the change in the Cuban government's position, Fidel's position toward the Soviet Union--where four or five years ago he'd been very independent and critical when he wanted to be, independent on politics, in the last few years his position has been identical with that of the Soviet Union's; and I can understand the pressures (I mean, after all, without the Soviet Union, Cuba wouldn't live; there's no question of the impact that that has)--but because they had that position, this influenced her further. Again, it's important only insofar as it illuminates--if it illuminates at all--this question of the expression of consciousness, of revolutionaries, of what they think, and how they think it, and why they think it. The question of methodology, whether the thing which you teach in the classroom, the rigorous critical approach toward any phenomenon, whether you use it only as you are examining capitalist phenomenon, but then disregard that critical approach when you examine our side, our life, our society, meaning the socialist world or the Communist movement. Let's see, what else happened in that period? I'm letting things get all blurred. Well, then came the 1972 convention of the Communist party. And this, too, was quite an experience for the young people in the party. I'm talking now primarily about the youth in Los Angeles. There is supposed to be, as I've indicated, before every convention of the party, a three--month period of organized preconvention discussion, where the draft resolution of the party is discussed, other resolutions are discussed, and where, first of all, anything you write is supposed to be printed at that point. There's no holds barred; every policy is up for reconsideration, and new resolutions can be brought in on any question. Well, my club started to have that kind of organized discussion. We were probably one of the few clubs I would say that started to do it in a very serious way. What happened is that those young people got an enormous education in how to read between the lines of resolutions--what do resolutions really represent, what do they say? Because for most people, they read the words--first of all, they always sound alike. It takes an expert to know what the nuances are. Secondly, the significance of any one particular approach as contrasted to another is not made clear, at least, not in the American party's resolutions. There's a great blurring over of major questions of what policy approaches should be.

GARDNER

Is this a local convention you're talking about?

HEALEY

No, this was a national convention.

GARDNER

At New York, as usual?

HEALEY

Yes, this was to be in New York. But first there were always the local conventions in every city and state that preceded it. Well, my club was particularly. . . . One of the things I remember my club was outraged about was the resolution on Black liberation, which to all intents and purposes eliminated the question of national oppression and made it almost entirely a question of class exploitation that was present as far as Blacks were concerned. It was a rather ironic scene at the [local] convention when my club introduced a resolution. Of course, my club was practically on a boycott list because of me, because I was in that club. The rest of the leadership and many of the clubs were always terrified of any resolution they'd bring in, being sure that there was something terribly bad about what was inside of them, simply because of me. Of course, that was just sheer nonsense. At any rate, this one became a dramatic fight at the convention because when the club introduced the resolution, Bill Taylor made the motion to table it, even though in past years he had always been the one to fight the hardest on this, the national aspect of oppression. And the convention did [table it], but I was interested in the debate that preceded it before he made his motion. The fact that after all these years, old people--I'm not talking about the youth now, but old--time Communists. . . . A woman by the name of Clara Lutz stands out in my mind as representing this, a dedicated, enormously dedicated woman, but even though she'd been in the party fifty years, she had no more awareness of what Marxism represents one way or the other than if it had been rheumatism. I remember her speech at this convention on this resolution saying, "But how can you talk about the national question and the national character of Black oppression, because that means you're talking about the Black bourgeoisie, and we're a working--class party and all we talk about is the working class," meaning that all those years-- and the party had had this approach on the national question from 1930 on--all those years of talk had meant nothing to her. She had learned nothing from it at all. As I say again, it's a minor aspect that illuminated the lack of any real understanding of what is supposed to make a revolutionary party unique, its capacity to utilize Marxism as a scientific approach and not as something that you mutter through like the Stations of the Cross, as if you were paying homage to Christ. But there was one ironic thing that also happened there. Danny Rubin was there representing the national office. Here had been this very long period where I had been, as I say, in effect a pariah. It was clear that he was going out of his way, and other people with him, to ask that I run as a delegate to go to the national convention. And I didn't want to go to the national convention.

GARDNER

Why was that?

HEALEY

The only reason I can conclude is that they were still going on the old illusions about me that if they offered me things like trips to New York, just as they had done when they sent me to Germany as a delegate in 1967, that then I would be, quote, "a good girl." I would be grateful and not raise these disturbing questions of policy any longer. It was also clear that they wanted me to continue to be on this district committee, which I considered a total waste of time. But not only did I consider it a waste of time; many other people who shared my viewpoint also considered it a waste of time. There was almost an all--night session of what is called the presiding committee--that's a committee elected at the beginning of the convention, usually made up of the executive board members, the district executive board members, who were supposed to make the proposals for each day's actions. They also act as a nominating committee, both for delegates to go to the convention and for the incoming leadership that is to be elected. And they were putting great pressure on me, Danny particularly, that I should not only run for [the leadership, but] that I should go as a delegate on what is called a "preferred list." You see, when the nominations are made on the ballot, it has to be a secret ballot, but what happens is that the list that is proposed by the presiding committee is given a priority. It is placed together as--it's called a "preferred list." Then other people can make nominations from the floor, but almost never does anybody who's not on the preferred list get elected. It's a very rare thing when that happens. They wanted me to be on the preferred list, and they wanted me to stay on the district committee. It was on a Saturday night at the Yablon Center until about one--thirty or two in the morning, and the whole thing was an attempt to pressure me to both go as a delegate and to remain on the district leadership. I have a hunch that part of the factor influencing the national office as well was a certain degree of pressure that was probably coming to them via my Soviet comrades, because Peggy Dennis--who is a separate thing that ought to be talked about, a separate individual, the widow of the general secretary of the party and a very important Communist in her own right--had been in the Soviet Union a few months earlier to visit her son, T. Timofeyev, who was raised there. While she was there, she had talked to the two Soviet comrades who were on the American desk of the international department of the Central Committee. The main comrade had particularly said to her that he thought it was simply tragic that the American party did not find the best way to utilize my talents and my experience. She had been somewhat surprised at this because she took for granted that they shared the viewpoint which all the others had about me.

1.44. TAPE NUMBER: XXII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 7, 1973

HEALEY

Quite possibly the national people were attempting to show the Soviet comrades that they were making efforts to be conciliatory; at least, toward me. But again, of course, as I say, to me the thing was preposterous because I was not interested in individual titles, or individual honors, or individual prestige, or trips, or recognition, or any of the things that become a very pervasive influence within the party. I was interested in policy, what policies we followed. It was clear from the convention resolution and from all the materials that the polices were not in any way going to be critically examined; the reality wasn't going to be reexamined. Just as one example, not only on this Black liberation resolution: the previous resolution had used a characterization that the American working class had become radicalized, and I had fought against that at the time on the ground that it is a disgrace to Marxism to so define the American working class. That it's militant is true, but radicalized has a different connotation to a Marxist. It represents already that the class is conscious of being a class and capable of independently fighting as a class; if you use that kind of characterization, you have to then have a different set of policies that fit a more radical, advanced class position. It was clear that in this resolution in 1972 in this year that nobody was about to examine what they'd been saying before. While they didn't use that language any longer, that it was radicalized, they weren't going to look back and say, "Why did we say it in the first place?" As I say, the whole total atmosphere on every question that came up. ... It was clear first of all that the bulk of the convention delegates--outside of a handful of older people and then the youth, the young people--were not going to question (they could have said anything and the convention delegates would have voted for it), that there was just absolutely no way in which anybody was going to question anything that came from the national office, or as it was expressed through even the local leadership. As a matter of fact, one of the things that also stands out in that convention is that Lou Diskin, the [L.A.] organizer--who, while he would never in his life, in all his life, think of publicly standing up and questioning or challenging the national line, nevertheless was and is an honest man, in my opinion--he had given a report to that convention that was very, very critical of what the local leadership had failed to do in the period of the two years that he had been here. There was not one word of discussion on that because it didn't suit the purposes of the national and the rest of the leadership, who were furious at him for doing that, [because of] this mindless optimism which, as I've told you, has operated ever since Gus Hall came into the leadership, the Panglossian approach: this is the best of all possible worlds and therefore this is the best of all possible parties; you never critically examine anything except somebody else, never your own work. But I just became more and more convinced that I [would be] acting out a charade if I either agreed to go as a delegate to the national convention, or [even just] to remain in the district leadership. I assure you, they did not want me back in the national leadership. That was not in their mind; they wanted me out of that. The National Committee meetings after I left simply were meetings of acclamation. Nobody ever disagreed with anything of any significance. So on Sunday morning when the acceptance speeches were to be made, I simply stood up and said--the presiding committee had met till one--thirty; I had spent the rest of the night thinking and debating about whether to accept--I declined on the ground that it was simply a charade, that there was nothing of significance that could possibly be done by my presence, either in New York at the national convention or locally by staying in the district committee. But what I did not know was going to happen is that a whole number of the older party members who were on the district committee--Nemmy Sparks, Sadie Duroshkin, Sophie Silver, Flo Kushner, among others--also declined to be nominated for the district committee. They had come to their independent judgment that it was just a sheer waste of time. Then the most important Chicano comrade in Los Angeles, and in the country, in my opinion, the brightest and most able, also refused to accept on the district committee.

GARDNER

Who was that?

HEALEY

Well, I don't feel free to mention his name because I don't know that he would want it mentioned. Following him, another Chicano comrade who was in the Teamsters also declined to stand. They were motivated in refusing to stay on because of what they considered-- and they were correct in so considering--the shabby treatment that was being given to the resolution on Mexican liberation which they had prepared. But, of course, in the minds of the local and national leadership, it looked like a conspiracy, a faction, that I had organized people to decline to serve. It was really totally untrue. As a matter of fact, I thought some of those older people ought to stay on because even though I thought it was a waste of time, nevertheless sometime it might be important. It turned out it could have been important later, about three months after the convention was over, when the national office--when Henry Winston forced through a motion in this district electing Bill Taylor as chairman of the district. It was a very cynical act of both political patronage, Tammany Hall--type patronage, and opportunism. Certainly, I knew from my own personal knowledge that Gus Hall and the other national leaders of the party had nothing but contempt for Bill. They considered him a well--meaning, amiable man who could always be depended on to fight for their position. Whatever that position might be didn't matter; he'd fight for that position. But they knew that with all his well--meaningness, he was incapable of carrying through any organization. They had tried to persuade Ben Dobbs. Lou Diskin was insistent on leaving here. One of the reasons he insisted on leaving here is that he simply could not function with Bill Taylor, who really had a veto power by virtue of his relations with Henry Winston; also, because he was Black, he charged anybody who disagreed with him with racism, white chauvinism. Lou was fed up; he couldn't do anything. They were asking him to come East to be in charge of international publishers; so he was going to get out, and he was delighted to leave. But he had originally fought tooth and nail in New York--he told me the story himself before he left--against Bill Taylor being made the chairman. He knew what that would represent to the party. As I say, they asked Ben Dobbs in effect to become the organizer of the party, but to allow Bill to have this title of chairman, although Ben and/or Lou, whoever would stay, would be the actual organizer, the actual head of the party. Ben absolutely wouldn't go through the mockery of it. Lou finally caved in to the national pressure and agreed that it should happen. It's linked to this question of our not accepting to be on the district committee that I mentioned earlier only by the fact that when that new district committee was assembled--while there were two or three young people on it who were independent and would quote their own minds as they saw each issue and the older people knew the truth of Bill's incompetency (as I say, he's personally a very amiable man; it's just politically that he's a very sad man, not very capable)--he and his associates were nevertheless able to stand up and carry through just a really nonsensical tirade that during the twenty--five years, twenty years, he'd been here in L.A., he had always been discriminated against in the leadership because he was Black, that this was only a final recognition of his great leadership qualities, to make him chairman. Well, if any of us had been there, they couldn't have gotten away with that. I therefore have sometimes regretted that all of us declined to serve on the committee. But that's kind of silly because it didn't affect history much one way or the other. As I say, it's such a minor footnote to anything of any significance. It was a little hurtful as far as some of the older comrades not staying on. They were really moved by deep emotion at that moment, because even though that body is very meaningless in making policy--it just doesn't ever have anything to do with making policy--at least they felt they were in contact with others in the city, they could hear what was going on, and it gave them a little more feeling of identification. For some of the older people, as I say, it was probably a little sad that they didn't stay on. But for most of us--for people like Nemmy Sparks, Flo Kushner, and myself, and the Chicano comrades I've mentioned--we were all delighted that we no longer had the obligation to attend this monthly meeting of sheer nonsense and bombast.

GARDNER

We've come then pretty much about to the point that we started the interview.

HEALEY

Yes, with the question of Al Richmond's book and what have you.

GARDNER

Well, then let's stay on the chronology and talk about your conversations of last night.

HEALEY

I think I left two or three weeks before Al Richmond did, but motivated by the same [issues], the immediate thing triggering off the question being the motion passed by this district that prohibited me from discussing his book in any way except as "a weapon in the hands of the class enemy," to quote Gus Hall's language. Since that time, I had found myself in a rather ambivalent position, and it was ambivalent as far as my own thinking was concerned. On the one hand, here I had left the party, and yet I found myself advising young people to stay in the party, and older people as well. Mainly my reason, as I think I've indicated to you, is that I have a very strong feeling that if people are to be effective, they do have to be collectively associated together, to get the strength that comes from a collective association. There are weaknesses to that--there are pitfalls to it--but nevertheless, its dominant characteristic is a positive one. I had no illusions. I made it very clear to all of them that [while] they could [not] carry on a struggle internally inside of the party that would effectively change the party nationally or locally, nevertheless, in the very process of debating party policy, they would acquire greater facility and knowledge themselves of what Marxism should represent, of how a revolutionary party should function. I would say that to them, and I also said it publicly in my speeches after I left the party. Yet I did feel ambivalent because it wasn't entirely a truthful estimate of my judgment of what was going on, because the fight is such a hopeless fight, at least for the immediate period, that a great deal of time is just spent on nothing, trying to fight a hopeless fight. An example of that is the fact that before I left the party--I don't know whether I mentioned this. . . . Well, I should mention that in the '72 elections, while in the beginning the party was running its own campaign, nevertheless it was trying to carry out a policy that, while stimulating support for Gus Hall and Jarvis Tyner, also had as its approach the recognition that there was a difference between those forces supporting Nixon and those forces supporting McGovern, and that the party would have an outstretched relationship toward the kind of movements that were relating to McGovern, thereby differentiating, of course, between the two. But they suddenly switched in September, and I think the reason for the switch was that by this time the negotiations were going on between Nixon and the Soviet Union. In a meeting of the National Council in September in New York, which we didn't hear of or find out about until late October, there suddenly appeared a change in which no differentiation was made between McGovern and Nixon; they were placed together as equal capitalist candidates, As I say, it was clear that a line was being changed, but nobody was debating it. In December of 1972 Gus Hall made a report to the National Committee entitled "The Lame Duck," supposedly an analysis of the '72 elections. It was an analysis that based itself on the following facts: Number one, that Nixon hadn't really won a landslide, because only a small percentage of people eligible to vote had actually voted. Now, that's true, but it was also true in 1948 when Truman was elected and when Henry Wallace got a very small vote. The same percentage, an identical percentage of people eligible to vote, voted in '48 as voted in '72. We didn't draw any of the big conclusions in '48 that Gus Hall was drawing in '72, that Nixon was actually a minority candidate, a minority president, that he had not received any vindication, any mandate, any big vote. Secondly, the Nixon victory was put on the basis that McGovern had gone to the right, that he had lost his inde--pendent character of speaking out and had gone to the right. Of course, I would say in answer to that--not only I, but my own club said this as well in our resolutions, which were never printed, criticizing this position--that if that were true, well, how do you account for the fact that the left candidates received such small votes? If the people didn't want to vote for McGovern because he'd gone too far to the right, why didn't they just vote for the left candidates? There were more left candidates on the ballot in 1972 than in any period for thirty years in this country. And yet the total vote received by all of the left candidates didn't come to 100,000 votes. The third thing that he said, in terms of the Communist party's candidacy, was that tens of millions of people had been influenced by his campaign. I'm not even going to comment on that. It's such a self--serving, nonsensical thing, [but it] was accepted with absolute sobriety as a matter of faith and virtue by the bulk of the party membership. At any rate, the main thing, however, of this speech "The Lame Duck" was that Gus claimed in his speech that the line of the party had been wrong for thirty years before that in differentiating between Democratic and Republican party candidates, and that from now on this was ended. Now, this is a very, very important significant political question. As you know, I had very often been critical of what I felt was the party's too uncritical approach toward Democratic party candidates, that while I happened to be one who still feels that one has to differentiate between the Republican and the Democratic parties, my criticism of the New Left was that they did not see that as far as the base of those two parties was concerned, there was a difference, that the resolutions passed by the California Democratic Council were not the same as the resolutions passed by the California Republican Assembly, and that if you were looking for allies in the fight against social oppression and exploitation, clearly you were not going to go to the Republicans, you were going to go to Democrats. Also it made a hell of a big difference how capitalism was choosing to run. For instance, if you were a defendant in a case, it made a lot of difference whether it was a Supreme Court that was a Douglas Supreme Court or a Supreme Court that was the current Supreme Court, a Burger Supreme Court. But what was most astounding was that Gus said in this report of his that in the course of the discussion, people could not pick and choose what parts of his report they wanted to elect to agree with or to disagree with, that it was a package deal. They had to accept the whole thing or not at all. I understand that there was not one voice raised at the national committee meeting that said, "Hey, what you are really in effect saying is that our line has been wrong for thirty--five years, since the Seventh World Congress in effect. And nobody's debating it one way or the other. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, but you debate it at least. You don't have as fundamental a change as that. ..." Again all it is illustrative of is that you could say anything if you were the leader of the party and nobody was going to argue it. Well, we started to raise hell over the fact that this was a violation of democratic centralism, even as they interpret it, that no basic line of convention can be changed by a National Committee--this past line had been the line of the convention--and that before it could happen there had to be a referendum among the membership. So they sent out a letter. They recognized that maybe technically they had been wrong, and they sent out a letter saying that there would be a three--month discussion in the clubs. Every club was to discuss it, pass a resolution, then there'd be a vote taken approving this new line. Well, I would say that 98 percent of the clubs never discussed it, that of those few who did and who rejected the line of this "The Lame Duck"--and that's the line it's called by because that was the name of the pamphlet that printed Gus Hall's report--their votes against it were never tabulated. The resolutions that were written against it were never printed in the party discussion bulletins, and it was again just this total rejection of even the most minimum kind of things of party democracy that had operated in the party in past years. Also by this time they were--I don't know, did I mention their estimates and reactions to Nixon's visit to Moscow as compared to the visits to China?

GARDNER

No, you didn't.

HEALEY

Well, I should mention it because this also involved the further attacks on me by the national office. As you know, after the mining of the [North Vietnamese] harbors, first Nixon visited Peking. Now, on the one hand, there's no question of the fact that this marked an enormous change in the cold war posture. But it was also clear that the main thing that was of importance then was what this did to the peace movement in the United States, because of the war in Vietnam, the fact that Peking would agree to accept Nixon to come as a visitor. First of all, the peace movement almost disappeared overnight. A great head of steam had been built up, both in Congress and in the people's movement generally; Congress was really only reflective of the mood of the people against the bombings of North Vietnam. With Nixon's going to China, every "sophisticated," in quotes, opinion was that clearly China was doing this because Nixon had made the agreement that they'd stop the bombing and that the trip would end the war; China would never think of letting Nixon come if the administration wasn't going to have to change its policy in Vietnam. Well, of course, it didn't change its policy in Vietnam. Now, the party denounced this trip to Peking in the most vitriolic language. Mao was betraying the Vietnamese; he was betraying the world socialist movement; it was counterrevolutionary, etc. Then a few months later, after the mining of the harbors of Haiphong and so forth in Vietnam, Nixon goes to Moscow. The party comes out with an editorial in the newspaper [People’s] World applauding this as the single greatest act of peace the world has ever known. What was, of course, also taking place was that in both China and in the Soviet Union, these were the only two countries that Nixon traveled to where there were not mass demonstrations against him because of the war in Vietnam. The shame of it, that this--when Nixon went to Europe/ there were huge demonstrations against him, against American policy in Vietnam. But when he went to the Soviet Union and to China, there were no demonstrations against him. Well, on my program on KPFK I read aloud the World editorial praising his trip to the Soviet Union as the "greatest single act of peace"--on the part of the Soviet Union, of course, not Nixon--that it showed the brilliance of the Soviet Union's international leadership. And I spoke in no uncertain terms of my opinion of the disgrace of this, the disgrace to internationalism, that the Soviet Union would tolerate such a thing while their ships are being tied up by the mining. But secondly, the more significant factor that appeared was that U.S. imperialism was better able to utilize the contradictions existing between the two socialist countries than the socialist countries could utilize the contradictions existing within imperialism, that this was the single most significant thing that we had to reckon with. Well, I can assure you the national people went wild. Shortly after that, this broadcast of mine was followed by a broadcast I made on behalf of the Czechoslovak citizens who had been arrested in Prague because they distributed leaflets telling people what their rights were on the election laws. That was then followed at the party's National Committee meeting with Helen Winter making a speech which I think I've mentioned already, denouncing me as violating the democratic centralism. All of which leads up to the fact that, as I say, I left the party, but always resisting any [temptation] that was present, always present, to take other people out with me, which I refused to do. The question was raised quite often by people, why I didn't stay and fight and make them expel me. This was particularly, I know, my friend and comrade Gil Green's position, that I should force them to expel me. He didn't think they would; they would not dare. I answered that if I stayed and carried on that fight, I'd have to organize a group of Communists to fight it, and that then when I lost, as ultimately I would, those other people would, of necessity, have to leave. The fact is that then I would have to be responsible for providing political leadership to those who left. Quite frankly, I didn't want to. That was part of the ambivalence I felt, that whether they were young or old, it didn't really matter to me. The fact was that I'm fifty--nine, I'd been an organizer for forty--five years of my life, and that I wanted to do other things besides be an organizer. I wanted to take the time to think and to analyze, to read and to utilize whatever experiences I'd accumulated. I thought then, and still think, that the job of organizing has got to be done by a new generation. It doesn't matter how much people of my generation think that we are free of the heritage of the past, you don't shake that off so easily. Young people can look at a reality with a greater degree of realism than old people, and that, as I say, regardless of their conviction that they are maintaining a fresh position, that they are au courant with what is new and vital in the world. Well, at the meeting of the National Council last week, which would be the first week of December, the motion was made to expel both Al Richmond and myself from the party. That's an almost unheard--of thing, to expel people after they have resigned. But the reason given was, first, that I had attended a meeting in New York called by Arthur Kinoy and others who were discussing how to start a new mass people's party against capitalism (the Communist party interpreted this as a challenge to the Communist party, that I was going to organize something that would be an opponent to them); secondly, that from the interview in Ramparts magazine, it was clear that Communist party members were still calling me and in contact with me, and they were determined to try to stop that; and, as far as Al Richmond was concerned, that he had written a review of George Wheeler's book in that same issue of Ramparts. George Wheeler had written a book on Czechoslovakia entitled The Human Face of Socialism; the Political Economy of Change [in Czechoslovakia]. It's the first book that really attempts to deal with the economic problems of building socialism and their effect on political life. I don't know what other--I mean, within two weeks, I will know all the other things that they said, why they were proposing the expulsions. This is all I know as of this date, one day after I received the information. I received it very indirectly. The party leadership, I assure you, didn't notify me of it.

GARDNER

Describe the way you were notified.

HEALEY

Well, I wasn't notified officially. What happened is that Rose Chernin, who was one of the older comrades in the party, got a call from a friend of ours, a comrade in New York, who told her that she had heard the story, that the story was already going around New York. Rose called me to say, "Have you heard?" I called one of the comrades I know [Gil Green] who's a member of the National Council in New York to verify it last night, Thursday night, and was told that while he was not present when it happened, he had heard that it took place and the reasons for it. I then called Al Richmond about eleven o'clock last night and told him. He had not heard a word about it, although he had seen people since they got back from New York. None of them had had the decency to tell him of this. He's quite outraged, because, you see, the difference between the expulsion and the resignation is this question of nonassociation. People are not supposed to talk to you any longer; people are not supposed to have any relationship with you at all. You are considered an enemy, an enemy of the working class, an enemy of the party, an enemy of everything else. Part of the further irony of it is that a month ago the National Guardian invited me to make a trip to China. I had responded saying, of course, I'd be delighted to go, but I didn't want to go under false pretenses. If I went, I would still insist on an independent judgment; I would not come back and say, "I have seen the future and it works." They wrote an article attacking me, that I was still a pro--Sovieteer, that I didn't understand that the Soviet Union was no longer a socialist country, and I refused to attack the Soviet Union. A week later, the Militant came out with an article with a headline saying, "Al Richmond and Dorothy Healey Leave Communist Party but Remain Stalinists." And now here comes the action of--I still use the expression "my own party." I find it very difficult not to use that expression. There are a couple of things that I haven't even indicated, you know, this discussion about my own family during this period. First, my own mother, who is a charter member of the party, as I've indicated, but who probably preceded me in being critical of things in the party: she's really, as I think I've indicated to you before, a very remarkable woman. She's eighty--nine and remains as vital in her hatred of capitalism now as she did when she was sixteen and first discovered about socialism from listening to J. Stitt Wilson, the first Socialist mayor of Berkeley. She also played a very important role for me to be able to function, in that during the years that my son was growing up—she in the front house, me in the back house with my son—she was always available to be with him during the period that I was in jail or was away or anything else. I am enormously indebted to her. I could never have had the independence of functioning without her as the grandma, but also politically in terms of her capacity to maintain an independent judgment. My son graduated from Reed College in 1966. I think I've mentioned the fact that he had received a scholarship, a National Science Fellowship, to Tulane.

GARDNER

You mentioned it to me, not to the tape recorder.

HEALEY

Oh, well, then, I'd better tell the tape. He had received a fellowship and had elected to go to Tulane because he wanted to see the South. He had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed with his degree in mathematics. He tells me the Phi Beta Kappa is totally meaningless and he was horribly offended by the fact that I sent away and got the plaque that describes it and keep it in my living room. He says to me very patronizingly, "You just don't understand, Mom, that those things are totally meaningless. They have no significance, either insofar as your education or your knowledge is concerned. They're just accidental things that happen and have no meaning. You shouldn't be a typical fatuous mother." But I am. At any rate, he arrived in Tulane to find that his fellowship had been cancelled. One charge was that he was my son, and the second charge, that he had carried on independent radical activities at Reed College. It was a very interesting reaction in the Tulane faculty, in the first place, in the math faculty, which organized 100 percent behind him in support of him, and in the university itself, including the president's office.

GARDNER

So it was the NSF itself which was cutting off the funds, not Tulane.

HEALEY

Yes. He had appealed the decision to HEW [the Department of Health, Education and Welfare], which was the granting authority, and while pending appeal, the university supplied the funds for his fellowship. As I say, I thought it was a very remarkable response, even though I should say he despised Tulane. He became convinced that no one has really marked up the toll that racism has taken on white people in the South, what it has reduced them to as human beings. Even though his relationships with the math department [were good]—his own professors loved him—he had just real contempt and horror of what he saw as far as the white population was concerned. He appealed the decision. The ACLU handled the case in Washington; he went up to the hearing. There was a two-day hearing. I don't remember all the names of the hearing officers except that I remember one of them had been the former head of the Internal Revenue Service under Truman; another was the brother of the head of Planned Parenthood, Guttmacher--I can't remember the name; then there were two professors of law from two different universities. Again, it was significant in that there was a unanimous decision. He was placed on the stand and testified. The questions they kept probing him with were his own activities and his own thinking. He had been marked 4-F in the draft because of his politics; they kept probing whether this wasn't dishonest because he kept insisting he was not a pacifist. They asked him, "Why didn't you apply for CO [conscientious objector] status?" He said, "Because that would simply release somebody else to go fight, and I was not about to do that. I would have fought in World War II. I would have believed that was a just war. This is an unjust war, and I couldn't do it." They were trying to show that he had gotten it by deceit.

GARDNER

Well, how was the 4-F granted, then?

HEALEY

On the ground of his undesirable politics. At any rate, when the final decision came down—and it's really a remarkable decision, signed unanimously by all the hearing officers—they said, first of all, as far as his relationship with his mother, that they did not believe in guilt by relationship, that the fact that his mother was a Communist did not mean that he should be held guilty. And secondly, that as far as his own politics were concerned—and here they referred to the question of his attitude toward the war—that he had drawn on the Nuremberg decisions as justification for his position, and who could not say that future history would not validate his judgment? Mind you, this is an official governmental, quasigovernmental body. To me it was again always interesting for a sidelight: try to explain to a European Marxist on the question of the character of a capitalist state that these people representing the United States government as hearing officers unanimously ruled that this young man was eligible to get back his fellowship, which he did, in spite of all the politics that were involved. There was quite a lot of newspaper publicity about it. Originally, as a matter of fact, his fellowship had probably been challenged because someone of the columnists—I don't even remember who, somebody in the South—had written a column denouncing him.

GARDNER

Probably Ralph De Toledano or someone.

HEALEY

Someone like that. Denouncing the fact that this son of a Communist leader had been given a government scholarship. But Richard was active in politics at Tulane as well, although there wasn't an awful lot at that point. But he participated, helped organize antiwar demonstrations, as he had done at Reed, actions around the question of equality and so forth.

GARDNER

What year was he down there?

HEALEY

He was there in 1966 and '67. In '68 he came back and went into UCLA. What was, of course, terribly important to me was the fact that the breadth of his interests—I mean, on the one hand, intellectually, I think he is a better Marxist in terms of his independent reading and analytical capacities of what he has read of Marx and Marxist literature than many Communists, but also the fact that he continued to be very active in mass campaigns, the peace movement on campus and so forth. As a human being, as a man, all of the experiences of his childhood, all the experiences of his early youth—really, he had taken an enormous pressure—had given him a vigor and a strength, a knowledge of himself, of his own identity, that bore him in good stead. He was not one who went through great introspection to figure out what was the meaning of his life. He knew what he considered the meaning of his life to be and how to utilize it. He is today very active in the New American Movement. He got his PhD from UCLA finally last week, and he is now in Chicago on another postdoc fellowship in sociology. He had gone into math primarily as a result, I think, of my pressures when he was fourteen and fifteen, that he should go into fields, first of all, that taught him to think scientifically (that he could read the humanities by himself), but secondly, that he should be in fields where his livelihood would not be as jeopardized as they would be in social studies. But while he was very good in math, he never really wanted to be in it. Finally he got his doctorate in statistics. He had transferred from differential algebra to statistics, constantly edging away from that which was abstract toward that which allowed him to deal with human problems and society as a whole. As far as my own personal life is concerned during all this period, as far as the question of family, my family was simply my son and my mother. My brother and my two sisters were all a very close family, but politically we are not very much in agreement with one another, although I should say in justice to my brother that while he violently and vehementally disagreed with me in my politics, during the Smith Act case when he [worked at] Cedars of Lebanon, he insisted on putting up the bail for me and, as a result, lost an appointment as chief of staff of the anesthesia department. That was 1952, don't forget.

GARDNER

I know. I was going to say that at that time there was no recourse.

HEALEY

Yeah. But simply, again, I tell the story only to indicate the principled character of the man. Not because he ever agreed with me, because he hasn't. He considers it just a waste of his sister's life. And that really brings us up to date.

GARDNER

Well, since we have a little bit, I'll ask you a couple of things. This is just my own personal curiosity How about your husbands, your three husbands? Where are they all now?

HEALEY

Well, the first is one of the officials of the warehouse local [International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union] here in Los Angeles, Lou Sherman. I rarely see him.

GARDNER

Is he still involved in party affairs at all?

HEALEY

Oh, no, no. He left the party thirty-five years ago, maybe forty years ago. My second husband was Don Healey, Richard's father. A very, very fine man, very honorable man, who had been a very important guy in politics here in Los Angeles in the thirties. He'd been the head of Labor's Non-Partisan League, very influential and active. He left the party about 1956 or '57, mainly because he felt that the debates and discussions were so abstract and unimportant that he could see no sense in continuing. My third husband, Slim Connelly, who was the head of the CIO, and the head of the Los Angeles Industrial Union Council, just kind of really drifted out of the party more than ever having left it, just drifted, and is in retirement now. Both Slim and Don and I have retained very close friendships and ties. I see them constantly—well, I shouldn't say "constantly" because I talk to them on the phone more often than I see them, as the fact is. But the relationship is very warm arid very friendly.

GARDNER

What is Don Healey doing now?

HEALEY

Well, Don is also retired now. He has been very sick, has very serious, I think, kidney problems. So he has not been active in politics for some time. But both of them retain what we would call a "class viewpoint." Both of them consider that they are for socialism and against capitalism. I must say that in the periods since Slim and I were divorced, which was in 1958, there has been no other suitor for my hand. [laughter] I have always felt a great deal of sympathy actually for the men who were married to me. They suffered a great deal more than I did. It was a very difficult thing for them. It had a great effect, really, on their lives, since. . . With Don, who was active in mass activities, he felt very-anytime he started to do anything, even years after we were divorced, there was always great publicity over the fact that he was my husband. It really made his life very difficult. Slim's life was made difficult for a different reason, and that was a more masculine reason. Here he had been a very top leader of the labor movement, of the CIO, played an enormously independent and significant role, and yet after he married me, he became known as Mr. Healey. It was really an intolerable position that he was placed in, and he suffered a great deal from it; he was very unhappy over it, although I don't know that he would necessarily say that. That's my judgment of it.

1.45. TAPE NUMBER: XXII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 20, 1973

HEALEY

I think that the major significance of anything that I have been discussing with you in these very, very, very prolonged sessions is really what comes through implicitly far more than explicitly, and that is the paradox of a human being—and I say "a human being" because I think that I was a very typical Communist in most respects—the paradox of a human being who is totally dedicated to the question of revolution, believes without any reservation that one is a Marxist (or a "Marxist-Leninist," depending on the fashion of the moment), and yet who rarely in the course of really day-and-night activity (and that's what the bulk of the years of activity in the Communist party represented) stopped to analyze the meaning of that activity, or was even terribly concerned with the significance of policy that was being proposed by the party at any one point, as related to the goal of revolution. Now, there are a lot of reasons for this, and because these are things that are not ever dealt with in histories of parties or on questions of theory and practice of Marxism, I think it would be worthwhile to comment on them. One of the reasons is the sheer volume of activity that goes on. You cannot live the kind of life that most of us lived as Communist activists, which was almost a total immersion in daily activities, you cannot go six and sometimes seven days a week, fourteen to fifteen hours a day—and have much time for political introspection. Much less do you have time for any real reading. You have therefore the very, I find, perplexing problem of how do you build a revolutionary movement, a revolutionary party, which must contain within itself all those who recognize the total uselessness of capitalism—its degradation and its horror, its inherent antiquarian role in the society— and simultaneously present, defend, debate, and explore the scientific questions which again supposedly are inherent within the very fact of being a Marxist? Because if any one thing should characterize Marxism more than any of the so-called universally valid laws, more even than all of the generalizations, it would be the question of methodology, of rigorous criticism of existing concrete situations. And yet in my experience—and my experience is not limited just to the United States but is far more general than that, traveling around to other parties and seeing how they function—it is really a minority of the party who do either have the time or the capacity to do the necessary studying, the necessary research, the necessary intellectual work which would make one equipped to be able to challenge it. As I say, partly one is too busy when one is an activist to even think about the question, but there is a second factor which is probably more compelling and even more persuasive as far as its impact on the party, and that is the belief in the inevitability of socialism, which in the Communist party operates with a very close resemblance to the religiosity of the church. I used to scoff at that as being—and I think I told you in past interviews—as being something that I found intolerable. And yet as I have gotten older, I have begun to understand more the overwhelming need that people generally have, the non-Communist has, for religion, and the overwhelming need that Communists have, that revolutionaries have, for a comparable approach, a faith. And it is almost a faith in a supernatural—although no Communist would ever recognize it or believe that that's possible, would dispute it vehemently--but it's a faith in a supernatural, and that supernatural is History (with a capital H) which operates really independently of what human beings do about the history. Now, the fact that this is at total variance with Marxism is another one of the ironies that I've commented on before. And yet there are, as I say, two important lessons I think that arise from this, if I'm at all accurate. One is a far greater understanding on the part of Marxists as to why religion as Religion (with a capital R) maintains itself, and sustains itself, and endures through all the challenges of science and rational analysis and logic and everything else. Marx really put his finger on it, although I don't think he thought it would endure as long as—yes, he did. I shouldn't say that. He did think it would. [He felt] that the only thing that could possibly conquer that would be that type of society in which the capacity of human beings to dominate nature would be so obvious and evident and fulfilling that there would no longer be this need for the supernatural. But in the first place his comment that religion was necessary, that it was the sigh of the oppressed in an otherwise heartless world, necessary for human beings to be able to tolerate their existence because they knew that somewhere, somehow, someplace a better world was going to exist. And all right, so that would be an afterworld, when one is dead, but nevertheless it was there. And for many Communists, the same approach is present, the belief that, "Well, we are not very strong now, we're not very influential, and we're not very persuasive. Certainly the overwhelming challenge of a revolution taking place in an industrially advanced country, what would have been considered the prerequisite by Marx and Engels (they would have taken it for granted that that's where it had to take place)—the fact is that to date none has ever occurred." The only way you can tolerate that reality, the reality not only of the lack of any significant influence of your own movement—or, for instance, if you were an Italian (where they have great influence, but always keep at the edge of victory and never go over it, never actually lead a revolution; you are influential and effective and in many cases even decisive, but you don't lead a socialist revolution, you don't transform the existing society)—I guess I would say that even there this belief [is necessary], that, "Well, today we haven't, but tomorrow we will, because this is the way History must operate." Now, totally neglected in this approach, of course, is the fact that, as I say, not only does history only operate through human beings who understand and are able to move and do something about their situation, but equally important is the fact [represented in] Lenin's repeated statements, which are more often ignored than paid attention to, that a crisis by itself will not destroy capitalism, that unless there is a revolutionary force capable of being able to act and utilize that crisis, capitalism can sustain crises indefinitely, that just as the Middle Ages existed for centuries, so capitalism in its crises can exist for centuries. And, as I say, dependent upon the capacity to end that, the only alternative is a conscious, sentient body capable of such effective mass influence that it can decisively overthrow the, quote, "existing social conditions."

GARDNER

It's interesting to talk about faith—let me interrupt you. I hope I don't take you off your train of thought. But in talking about faith, at the same time, what I get, I think, almost more implicitly than explicitly from what you're saying is that in terms of the world's preference to believe in afterlife, the idea of postponing the revolution is almost better than actually putting it through today, because that way it's the same sort of pie-in-the-sky that religion would offer.

HEALEY

No, it's not that it's better than putting it through today, because I think Communists would want to put it through today if possible. But you can tolerate the fact that you are not capable of putting it through today on the ground that it ultimately and inevitably will come. In other words, inevitability plays precisely the same role for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Communists—and I'm talking about communists with a small C as well as with a capital C—as the belief in the afterworld plays for the Christian or almost any religious person who believes in an afterworld. If you aren't successful today, tomorrow you will be. And tomorrow you will be inevitably; there is no way that it can be changed. I'm always amused, for instance, by the Maoists who chant the thoughts of Mao. One of the aphorisms he has in that little Red Book [Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung] is that socialism is inevitable, independent of man's will. Well, of course, that's just nonsense, because if it's independent of man's will, it's not going to happen. It can only happen through man's will, man being used generically, of course.

GARDNER

I've got one more question, then I'll. . . .

HEALEY

No, no. Please. Go ahead.

GARDNER

What I'm intrigued by—since we're still under the idea of faith and religion and religiosity and so forth, is the fact that communism attracted so many Jews to the movement, particularly in the twenties and thirties, but still in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and the New Left as well. Do you think that there's any correlation to the fact that the Jewish religion really offers no afterlife? This is a very left-field question.

HEALEY

It's a very interesting question. It's one I never thought about at all, although there's always been a lot of discussion over why proportionately there are such a much larger number of Jewish revolutionaries than there are of others. It may have a correlation that I've never thought about.

GARDNER

What sort of reasons are usually given then? I'll take my correlation back and save that for a sociology text.

HEALEY

Well, one of the reasons given is the emphasis among Jews, as almost a cultural question, on the need for education. Clearly, as one begins to acquire an education in its broadest sense, in the sense of a capacity to look at a world with a degree of reality and not through an a priori definition, one becomes a revolutionary. Partly, of course, it's the nature of the oppression of Jewish people, although that really isn't a good enough explanation because Jews who haven't felt that oppression have become revolutionaries, too. I've never thought about it. I'd want to think more about whether there is a connection between that. I think you may have hit on something that is very important. By the way, there is an interesting parenthetical comment on that question, the role of Jews in the Communist party. There's only Communist party I know of in the world, outside of Israel, where a Jew is a general secretary of the party, and that's in Australia. For instance, in the United States there was always kind of a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that a Jew would never be general secretary. And that has always held true.

GARDNER

Why is that?

HEALEY

Outside of Jay Lovestone, who was one of Jay Lovestone, who was one of the founders of the party. I think it was partly the question of the "Americanization," in quotes, of the Communist party.

GARDNER

Sort of public relations.

HEALEY

Yeah, but that couldn't, obviously, explain it all, because it happened in periods where we were totally contemptuous of, quote, "public relations," of what we looked like publicly. Again, it's one of the unexamined questions that another generation may be apt to look at with a clearer eye as to why that's true. That has been true, as I say, since Ruthenberg's death, and not just for our party. Laurie Aarons, the general secretary of the Communist party of Australia, is the only one I know of anywhere in the world. Now, I may be wrong, there may be others that I have never even heard of. But I rather question it. But this question of mystique, this question of religiosity, is then transferred from the sphere of Marxism directly to the question of the role of the Communist party, Not only, therefore, do you find present the scientific rigor of Marxism, its essence, its capacity to analyze a contemporary world and at least approximate a theory about it, but there's almost a natural transference then to the organization through which hopefully the revolution will be made, or at least through which it will be led. The same kind of mystique operates to defend and define the nature and character of the Communist party. That's why throughout the world Communist party, it is a very rare party that ever admits that the party as such was wrong. An individual, a leader of the party, can be wrong, but the party itself is never wrong. Again, you find that— I don't care which party you look at, whether you read the Soviet Union's history or the current Chinese party's histories, they're all exactly the same in that. Now today it's Lin Piao who made the mistakes of the cultural revolution, but the party was right. The same, as I say, is true with almost every party. But this mystique of the party is a very important one, because it provides— and I come again to the religious comparison—a fundamentalism, if one were to use the religious counterpart. It is not even a Catholic church where you find a Vatican II taking place. It would really be the Bible Belt fundamentalism that is in store, where the questions of the functioning and the role of the party are taken as articles of faith which cannot be questioned or challenged or probed about. And that's—as I say, I come back to my own life. I know how pervasive that feeling is. I look back over all those years of activity when it never would have occurred to me, not once, to make a correlation between setbacks or retreats which we had and the fact that the party was always right. So that what one really finds today—and again, it's almost worldwide, with only a few exceptions of a few parties that are at least aware of the problem and therefore trying to do something about it—is a simplistic conception of the revolutionary party as representing not only omnipotence but omniscience in every aspect of human life. It's really just absolutely almost grotesque in that—in two things: one, in its characterization and definition of the role of the party; but equally so as it defines the role of the individual Communist leader. Of course, it's on the latter that I can trace the effect most concretely because again I only have to look within myself to see how I operated, the things I did with a sweep of my hand, the activity. Well, let me explain it. As I say, the party in every sphere of thought and action— whether it's politics or culture or aesthetics generally, whether it's philosophy, whether it's history, doesn't make any difference what the subject is—the leadership of the party as a collective and then again the individual leader (and here I'm talking on a national scale of the general secretary, and in the areas, the person known usually as the district organizer) is supposed to be an authority on all these questions, capable of providing dicta that are authoritative for the party. It stems, as I say, from this view of the party as representing at any one point the collective wisdom of Marxism-Leninism. Now, at a later point, I want to talk about how the vulgarizations of democratic centralism and Marxism help contribute to that. But at this point I just want to mention its effects more than the history of how it happened. But again, coming back to its effect on the individual: In a sense the role is almost forced upon you by the way in which the party members regard you as an officer, as a leader of the party. And it brings back this religious reference because in a sense you are the pastor of the flock. You are supposed to be capable of discussing questions of aesthetics with the people working in the cultural field on one day, and the next day arbitrate the differences between a husband and a wife; to meet with a group of trade unionists in the afternoon to discuss tactics within a particular industry, and to meet with a group of economists the next day and give an authoritative party judgment on their work, even though they have the specialty and you don't.

GARDNER

That is almost like a priest. [laughter]

HEALEY

Of course. Of course. Well, there's one or two ways in which you can react to that. Sometimes you react in one of those two ways, but you can also find yourself reacting in both ways simultaneously with a real ambivalence present, either consciously or unconsciously. I don't want to say that—and again, I'm thinking of my own—what happened inside of my head, my heart, as I became a party leader and had this role, assumed this role. I say "assumed the role": I keep thinking of [Wladyslaw] Gomulka, the head of the Polish party government, after the Twentieth Congress, when, in reference to Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin, he said what, to me, are very poignant and sad words, that, "In a sense, we all became little Stalins." Little Stalins in the sense of our authoritative role. So I said there were two reactions, at least two—probably far more, but I'm talking again of how as I look back I reacted to it. On the one hand, it's a healthy reaction in the sense that the pressures that are placed upon you to pass judgment on things force you, if you're halfway honest, to constantly acquire new knowledge that you didn't have before. At least, I'm the kind of human being that would not have independently gone out to read long documents and materials, for instance, on aesthetics, unless there'd been a demand for it, the pressure for it. The fact that I had to meet with people who were concerned with that meant that if I was going to meet with them, I had to know something at least about what they were talking. So in that sense, the sense that you're always standing on tiptoe to reach up to be able to fulfill the responsibility, it is a good, healthy pressure, an important one that willy-nilly forces you to acquire certain either latent talents or unexplored knowledge. The other part of it, of course, is that you become pompous. And it doesn't make any difference what your personality is, what your temperament may be, in regard to that. That role is forced upon you in being the supreme arbiter; when you speak, you are representing the collective wisdom of the party. You are a "leader." You find yourself making judgments—sweeping judgments, judgments that affect the life and well-being of people with whom you're in contact all the time—without the capacity that should allow you to make any reasonable judgment about it. I deal with this latter question, its effect on the individual, because it's one of the most neglected questions in all the writings about the Communist party and about communism. It's not that it hasn't been written about. I mean, all these so-called biographies—well, not so-called biographies, they are biographies—written by Robert Payne and [Robert] Conquest and all these people about Lenin and so forth, clearly attempt to deal with some of these problems. But they can't be dealt with adequately without the knowledge of the nuances, the intimacies of the relationship within a communist movement that these biographers simply don't have. But then, as I say, there's the other part that is, again, not a subjective question. Now I'm talking about the quality of the kind of leadership that the party has, although that is a question that warrants separate inquiry and investigation. I'm talking about some of the generalizations that I've seen operating in so many parties. I'm referring, for instance, to the fact that there are thousands upon thousands and thousands of Communists, generations of Communists, selfless, self-sacrificing, dedicated, I would say some of the most beautiful people the world will ever know; but that doesn't mean they ever read a word of Marx or Engels or anybody else, except maybe writings of the current leader of the Communist party, maybe. But even those who have read. ... I mean, most people, most Communists—many Communists; I shouldn't say "most"—many Communists in the thirties and the forties and fifties went to party schools, party classes where they learned "Marxism." Now, they learned some very essential questions—that there are two major classes in society (the ruling class and a working class) or the essence of a main contradiction (socialized labor and private appropriation). They learned some articles of faith, in other words. No, I can't use that word in this connection. They learned some articles of reality, actually. The fact that those articles were only the skeleton upon which a theory and a philosophy can be developed was never really clear.

GARDNER

It's like learning theorems without learning the way they are [to be employed].

HEALEY

Exactly. Exactly. And yet, here again, I think I make a mistake of impatience in not understanding this delicate role of faith, how intangible a thing it is. It's nonsense to believe that within a capitalist society, and even for generations after, maybe even in a socialist society, that all human beings are going to be either desirous of or capable of the intellectual analysis. (And I use the word intellectual in its loosest sense. I'm talking about the capacity really for independent thinking and analysis.) Therefore the need of people for this faith, for the fact that—Gramsci compares it with the Catholic Church (and he's right, it seems to me) that the people, the large numbers of what in an organization is called "the rank and file" (I've always hated that phrase when used about the party, but it's there) may not be able to answer or debate sophisticated attacks on Marxism or on the party, but they take comfort out of the fact that they know their "leaders" can do it. Well, that's true, there is that belief. And when you disturb that faith that maybe their leaders aren't so smart, maybe their leaders don't know everything, as I did, and don't offer a substitute for it, then you've robbed people of something that is very, very important without giving something in its place.

GARDNER

Which comes to the question, is it a matter of rationality or belief?

HEALEY

Well, but that's the thing: you've got to have both, is what I'm trying to say. Until you have reached that point of communism, that long-off stage of society where you have a society that has developed a general capacity for human rationality, you can't dispense with the other. Well, then you have things that developed in the practices of the Communist party that need to be dealt with separately. As a matter of fact, I often toy with the idea of one of the books I'd like to write. I'm never going to do it, but that I think about.

GARDNER

Just say it all here and you won't have to. [laughter]

HEALEY

Well, it requires far more research tha I'm willing to do. But I was thinking of one which would be almost like a mystery story, tracing through the history of the world Communist movement as it was first expressed through the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the history of how certain theories became vulgarized to a point where Marx would never recognize them as having any resemblance to what he would define as Marxism, and how [certain concepts] from the writings of Marx or Lenin, as the case may be, were totally omitted, just in all the thousands and millions of words that have been written popularizing Marxism and Leninism, these concepts of theirs totally omitted. But, as I say, [it would be] almost like a mystery story in the sense of the clues you would have to look for to find when and how things happened, and why they happened as they did. Again, you have to have both an intimate knowledge of what was happening in the Communist party at a particular moment and a knowledge of the writings of Marx and Lenin to know why at certain points these kind of occurrences took place. Did I ever mention to you, for instance, the example of the attack on Sidney Hook in 1932?

GARDNER

I don't think you went into it in detail.

HEALEY

Well, about 1931, 1932, Stalin opened up a big fight in the Soviet Union on what he called the "falsifiers of history." One of the aspects of that fight was to prove that no one except Lenin had ever fought against revisionism in the pre-1917 period, and particularly no one except Lenin had fought against the opportunism of the Second International. Of course, that's just sheer nonsense because the fact is that if the revolution had not been successful in 1917, the volumes of Lenin sould never have been published, because before 1917, while Lenin was an important personage within the Second International, he was hardly a decisive one and hardly a well-known one, and his writings were certainly not read outside of Russia, or very rarely read outside of Russia. Well, at the same time that this was happening in * Russia, Sidney Hook wrote a book called Toward the Under standing of Karl Marx. In that book he made the mistake of linking Rosa Luxemburg with Lenin as the two people who had so passionately fought against both revisionism and opportunism in the Second International, and particularly in the German Social Democratic party. He was referring particualrly to [Eduard] Bernstein. Well, the party started an attack on him, although at that time he was very close to the party. I don't know if he was actually in it, but I know he was very close to it. He was chairman of the committee for the election of Earl Browder as president in 1932, and he worked very, very closely with the party.

GARDNER

What is he now, a professor at NYU?

HEALEY

Yes. Well, I'm not sure if he's at NYU. I know he was a professor. The book itself was not a bad presentation of the theories of Marxism. You can certainly find weaknesses in it, but I don't know anything that's ever been written that one couldn't find that in, when you talk about trying to popularize theory. Well, first V.J. Jerome leveled a vitriolic attack upon Sidney Hook. It was a very dishonest attack, in that he deliberately distorted what Hook had to say. Just one example: Hook placed in quotation marks Bernstein's approach, the classical definition of revisionism, that the ends are nothing, the means are everything. In other words, the ends are nothing, it is the day-to-day struggle that is important. Hook placed this in quotation marks, and then out of quotation marks answered it as to why this was wrong.

GARDNER

What did Hook say?

HEALEY

Well, the fact that this is a denial of Marxism in the most important sense, in that unless you have the long-range goal of socialism, the day-to-day struggle simply ends up in reformism. It cannot lead to anything but patching and darning the capitalist system. V.J. Jerome takes the paragraph that's within quotation marks, removes the quotation marks, and attributes that approach to Sidney Hook. He has other things he's attacking as well, but that's one of the ones that's stayed in my memory. Well, Sidney Hook writes a, quote, "Dear Comrades" letter to The Communist, the magazine of the party, protesting the attack on his book. The next couple of issues are taken up with a reply by Earl Browder: on the one hand, he corrects some of the silliest errors of V.J., but continuing the attack against Hook. Now, as I say, nobody mentioned the fact that this was coincidental with Stalin's attack in the Soviet Union, which in effect became an attack on Rosa Luxemburg's role. And here's where [you need] the political detective theory: you have to be aware of that, plus you have to be aware of the fact that for the first time the Young Communist League, which every year for years on January 15 had had rallies which were known as Lenin-[Karl] Liebknecht-Luxemburg rallies—that was I think the birth date or the death date (I've forgotten which) of the three of them—that all of a sudden those disappeared; the Young Communist League stopped having them. The word "Rosa Luxemburg" became a dirty word in the party, with no explanation. Nobody ever said anything about it.

GARDNER

Were you aware of any of these?

HEALEY

I was totally unaware of it, totally unaware. It is only as I go back and read these materials that I then become aware of the meaning of them, what they represented. The example I give as to why you have to have some intimate knowledge of the daily life of the party is that other people can get hold of these issues of The Communist and of Sidney Hook's book and compare what was happening, and other people could even relate it to Stalin's attack. But unless you were a member of the Young Communist League, you wouldn't be aware of the fact that not only did those Lenin-Liebknecht-Luxemburg rallies just stop without a word of explanation; there was no longer any mention of Luxemburg's name in the Communist movement. She was the forgotten human being. The only time her name was ever mentioned was when you read anything that Lenin wrote about the national question, where he criticized her and attacked her approach.

GARDNER

Sidney Hook became quite a virulent anti-Communist.

HEALEY

A virulent anti-Communist. And really an anti-Marxist. Not just an anti-Communist, but an anti-Marxist as well. Again, a parentheses, just because of that comment of yours. This question of looking inside of oneself to try to trace one's own reactions: How do I feel about something? Why do I feel the way I feel about it? When I got the news that I'd been expelled from the party four months after I'd resigned, and then when last week I heard the kind of allegations that were made at the national office where my expulsion was voted unanimously, I could watch my own reaction. My first response is to start this—you know, retaliate with the same weapons they use, to disclose things or say things that ultimately would have to lead me into a position of being, quote, "anti-party." It really leads to this question that has been so lacking historically—it is the most difficult thing to acquire—that is, the question of balance: How do you view phenomena? How do you examine both objective and subjective questions that you have to deal with as policy questions? For instance, coming back to this specific thing, how do I guarantee that my subjective reactions in regard to this explusion don't dominate my objective estimates of the role of the party and/or of individuals? Of course, there are no such guarantees except the constant probing that one must do within one's own self, [always asking whether] this represents as close as one can get to an accurate estimate of what one has seen and known and its effect. You see, there are very honest, legitimate problems that every Communist party faces in trying to do the most difficult thing that there is to do, that is, to develop a policy that both relates to what is present in the surrounding environment today, while doing it in a way that links towards a future perspective; to develop a policy that allows you to deal with human beings at their current level of understanding and development, but to do it in such a way that the logic of that policy that you've developed for the todays leads towards a further knowledge and a further consciousness, a greater sophistication on the part of masses of people as to their surroundings. People now discuss the question of policy really with the utmost absurdity. The charges of either revisionism and/or dogmatism are thrown around as if at any point you're dealing with deliberate misleaders or deliberate traitors. That's rarely so. Occasionally that is so, but it is not a common occurrence in a Communist party, that that's what has happened, or in any revolutionary movement. What has happened is this inability to do what the Manifesto first defined as the task of the communist movement, to link the here and nows with the tomorrows. But there's a reason for that. I'm certainly not original in saying that that's the problem. But I think the reason for it is not understood; I have not seen it elaborated very often, if at all. The reason is that when you were dealing with anything besides a little sect, a tiny little group of people, when you were dealing with large numbers of people and through them, hopefully, with tens of thousands and millions of people, your policy has to be formulated in such a way that they can understand it and act upon it, carry it into life. Therefore of necessity you overstate aspects of that current situation, overstate them in the sense that you don't deal with the nuances that are present at any one point in your analysis. You can only deal in large, vast ways with a policy. When you're hoping to shape that conscious activity of people, you've got to make it a dramatic, sharp attack. The very meaning of a polemic—and this is what we were all brought up on, with Marx and Engels—is a one-sided approach. When you're polemicizing, you are both to a certain extent exaggerating and overstating your own position, and you are certainly not doing justice, usually, to your opponent's position. (Here, again in parentheses, ordinarily in the way generations have been brought up, you never read the opponent's position that Marx or Engels or Lenin were polemicizing with anyway. You only read what they said about them and took for granted that that was the only truth there was, what they said about them. I don't suppose one Communist in 100,000 ever read a book by Kautsky or knew anything about what the Mensheviks had to say for themselves, or any other person whom the great Marxists were polemicizing against.) But a party has to do—I say "has to do," almost has to do: I don't think it has to do it, but it is almost compelled to do— this overstatement, this one-sided version of the policy, in order to move large numbers of people into action. But in the course of doing that, you neglect not only the nuances of that real situation today, but the fact that—let me go back to the New Deal period, the fact that yes, there was a Liberty League, and yes, there were America Firsters, and yes, there was this opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal, but at the same time, Roosevelt was there to defend capitalism. Now, you have to deal with both those very complicated thoughts. And that is where part of the problem comes, in trying to develop both a policy that provides that bridge, that link between the todays and the tomorrows, and also one that helps to educate first of all your own cadre, but through them the millions, into the ability to be able to see more than one thing at a time, to be able to see the relationship between what is present doday and what potentially could be present tomorrow if certain A-B-C-D-E-F's are followed.

1.46. TAPE NUMBER: XXIII, SIDE ONE DECEMBER 20, 1973

GARDNER

The question I asked off-tape, which I'll repeat for the record: You mentioned that as a party official, working really in the streets, there was very little time for reading and so forth; yet at the same time you're one of the best-read and most literate people I've met. You have a houseful of books and pamphlets, even though you've divested yourself of quite a few of them already. Now, is it because the orientation of your reading was towards Marxism that you maintain this, that you were unable to get a broader perspective?

HEALEY

Well, first of all, there are two different periods of my life that are at stake on this question of reading. First, when I was a child, I was an omnivorous reader. I read everything. I'm talking now about till the age of fourteen or fifteen when I became very much the activist. So that I had one advantage, and that was that I read quickly and easily and loved it. I loved books. I was raised in an atmosphere that I inherited from my mother of great reverence for the printed word. That’s one reason I held onto so many thousands of pamphlets that other people threw away—because you couldn't destroy the printed word. It was unheard of. I mean, if it was in print, you kept it. But really what was true, what I was getting at, is that, first of all, when I was reading Marx, or Lenin, or Stalin (which was far more common in the thirties than reading the other two), I was reading them only in one way. First of all, I was reading very superficially, which again was not uncharacteristic of the period, although other people read far more critically than I did. I mean, there were people who were far more knowledgeable, without any question—and remain so—than I am. I would read superficially [so as just] to understand, to try to get an immediate understanding of what main question was being dealt with. I never read critically. Whatever I read of any of their writings was gospel to me. I mean, even what I didn't understand was as much gospel as what I did. [laughter] But actually, the biggest portion of the reading of Marxist writings came when I became a party official in 1945, and that was after, what? about eighteen years of the mass activity. So that that's one part of it. The other part of it is that my reading was very narrow and still is. There are just huge areas of knowledge about which I have absolutely no comprehension.

GARDNER

Name some of them. I can't imagine what they would be.

HEALEY

Well, theories of knowledge, as an example. You know, you can use all the words for them, the philosophical words like epistemology and cognition. But more generally what I'm getting at is—and this is where I do terribly regret the lack of a college education. Just as a normal, natural thing, a college student with any degree of intellectual curiosity is exposed to a wide range of accumulated knowledge, some of which may be important, some of which may be trivial. But there's an organized structure, you are at least aware of the existence of a vast body of human knowledge. Let me confess to something with a great deal of chagrin, and I do it again because I'm not unique; there's nothing sui generis about my experiences because they reflect such a typical attitude. In the early fifties, as part of the research I was doing for our Smith Act trial, I started to read Zechariah Chafee, who was probably one of the outstanding bourgeois experts on constitutional law and constitutional theories. I was utterly astounded at what he had to say in regard to the questions. It was totally at variance with my kind of thinking that only the Communists understood and dealt with certain questions of, quote, "academic freedom" or "constitutional rights" and so forth. But also, it totally upset this neat little theory that I and most of the Communists had on the nature of what we call bourgeois ideology. You see, to us, only what we write has truth to it. Anyone who's not a Marxist can't write anything that has truth to it. We never learn the meaning—I mean, we could repeat like parrots the phrase Lenin wrote about Marx, that Marxism was based on the contributions it had made by the English economists and the German philosophers and the French something or other (I've forgotten the other [socialists]). There are three categories of Marxism, which all of us learned by heart. We never learned the intrinsic importance of the methodology of Marx and Lenin, their capacity to read their contemporaries and extract from them those elements of value that contributed to enlarge Marxism. We didn't understand—I think I made the crack to you once before that the greatest Marxist who ever lived had never read a word of Marx. So that even today, although, as I say, after 1945 I was forced into having to read more than I had read before because of my post as a party officer, there are still just huge chunks of important aspects of thinking, of accumulated knowledge, things that have been validated that are totally outside my ken. Now, this is related a little bit to this point about the question of the character of the party, because I say really quite honestly to you, it is the rare human being who can be a Marx or a Lenin or an Engels, the rare person who is capable of absorbing—on the one hand, a Marx who taught himself how to read Spanish in order to write a series of articles for the New York Tribune on what was taking place in Spain, or a man like Engels who read everything on military science. These are rare human beings. And most of us are not rare human beings. Therefore the very idea—that's part of this pretentiousness of the party that I'm talking about—the idea that a current leadership, any current leadership of the party, either its general secretary or its collective leadership, is going to be capable of being onmiscient on every aspect of human life is sheer nonsense. Now, maybe I'm saying that to rationalize and justify the fact that I don't know so many things that I ought to know as a rational human being of fifty-nine. But I think there is nevertheless a great deal of truth in what I'm saying, that it is sheer nonsense to believe that most human beings are going to be capable of doing that. Therefore, knowing that, all the more reason why a Communist party which has to encompass people of varying degrees of comprehension and intellectual capacity has to find a way to do what is not done, and that is to make room in its leadership for those intellectuals who have the disciplines of a particular field. But rather than do that, what we have done with our intellectuals, in a sense, is to prostitute their talents and their knowledge. Because their job is in the main—there are very rare exceptions, and usually they become heretics or go through terrible periods, like [Georg] Lukacs in Hungary, where one day they're politically respectable and the next they're not; one day they're a heretic, the next day they're considered all right—their job is to provide the rationale, the explanation, for whatever current tactics the party considers necessary. They see themselves either as the echo of the party leadership, simply reflecting and repeating in their field whatever the party leadership with its cumulative judgment has come to, or providing the materials that allow the leadership to make judgments on a thing, but not in any independent sense. I think this is the greatest tragedy of all, because it's such a terrible waste. But more than that, it has led to what I think is a crisis of Marxism—and not only of the Communist parties, because this is true whether you're a Communist or a Trotskyist or a Maoist or anything else--the crisis of Marxism in the world today, crisis in the sense that there have not emerged those necessary generalizations from human practice which enlighten the road ahead, which teach you anything. Part of this is the pressures of an unworthy character, of a non-Marxist character. I'm thinking now of Chile, where the current chant of both the Chilean Communist party and of all the Communist parties, in the United States and others, is that this is not the time to examine the mistakes that were made, this is only the time to rally support against the junta. You know, this is such a bald-faced denial of Marxism. And yet it is chanted by everybody. (I want to deal as a separate thing with what I think are the distortions and absurdities that have been made of Marxism.) But sticking still with the questions of the party and how the party came to be viewed, on the one hand, as the surrogate for the working class, [able to] speak in the name of the whole class, and, secondly, how one transferred to the party the conviction of this omniscience that was granted to Marxism, just one example on how one's daily functions as a Communist was affected by this: that's the question of how we read and studied What Is to Be Done, written by Lenin in 1902. Let me just give the generalization that I draw from this fact, that covers a vast amount of so-called party theory and policy; namely, the constant elevation of things that are momentary and temporary which have to be done by a party into something which is permanent where it wasn't meant to be permanent. So What Is to Be Done is used by every Communist party as its Bible. Here's a book, as I say, written in 1902 by Lenin, under very concrete, very specific circumstances, [at a time when] there were sectors of the Russian movement who were declaiming their idea that the economic struggle by itself would spontaneously generate socialist consciousness. It was against this that Lenin polemicized; he defined it as economism. So then you have developed throughout the years—and you see it particularly present in some of the sectors of the Left today—the idea that the struggle for wage demands is economism, which is nonsense. That's not what Lenin was talking about. He was polemicizing against just one aspect. He was not saying, “Don't fight for economic conditions.” He was saying that the fight for the economic conditions by themselves will not generate socialist consciousness, that beside that, alongside of that economic fight, there has to be a revolutionary party that brings to the working class the meaning of those economic struggles. But more importantly, as to the nature and character of the party, was the fact that he was writing—and he's very specific, you know; it's not that he wasn't being clear—the fact that he's talking about the building of a revolutionary party in a czarist country where there is no legality, where the only trade unions that exist are the ones formed by the Russian Social Democratic party (which was the name of the revolutionary party there). He constantly makes references in What Is to Be Done to the example of the German party to show the difference, that in that party which can function legally, what he is proposing for the functioning of a party would not be the way to do it. But I'll be goddamned if generations of Communists were not brought up and schooled and tutored to believe that what he was writing about the nature and character of a party to meet a czarist totalitarian regime was precisely the way in which a party should form in other countries. As a matter of fact, a term was coined for it. It was called—Lenin started, quote, "the party of a new type," meaning a party that of necessity in its conditions at the time he was writing not only functioned illegally but had to be a party almost totally centralized, with very little democracy in the concept of democratic centralism because clearly you could not, under conditions of the illegality, call together large numbers of people to debate policy. But to add to the, quote, “mystery” as to why certain things became deified in the party, in 1907 or 1908, Lenin wrote an article entitled "Preface to Twelve Years Later." It was a collection of the pamphlets he'd written in the preceding twelve years. In it he gets very specific and says, and I'm quoting him now, "To treat that pamphlet"— meaning What Is to Be Done—"apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite and now long-past period in the development of our party is wrong." He says, "What Is to Be Done was a controversial correction of economists' distortions, and it would be wrong to regard the pamphlet in any other light." But no Communist party that I know of ever dealt with his later writings of 1908 where he corrects this overdistortion that he admits he was one-sided about in 1902, or the fact that what he was writing in 1902 doesn't hold for 1908.

GARDNER

Why is the 1902 accepted as gospel and not the 1908?

HEALEY

Because it suited the purposes of the Communist party, partly. This was the rise of Stalinism—and again, that's a generic term more than meaning just Stalin as the individual. But nobody looks at the reality, even around this question of democratic centralism, which is the most sacred article of faith in the Communist party. As I've already explained in past interviews around my own situation, it has come to mean simply [that] the minority always subordinates itself to the majority, and the party moves in unity, and you must never publicly discuss disagreements. Jesus Christ, all you have to do is read the collected works of Lenin to know that even in the middle of the civil war, even in the preparations for the revolution, they were publicly debating their differences; not privately but in Pravda the differences between the Bolshevik leaders as to whether there should be a revolution were being debated publicly. In the worst periods after the revolution, When they were in desperate conditions as to whether they could survive another day, their differences were publicly debated.

GARDNER

At what point did that end?

HEALEY

It ended with Lenin's death. It ended . . .

GARDNER

. . . under Stalin-Trotsky.

HEALEY

Yeah, the Stalin-Trotsky period entered into it; I'd say in about 1927-28, you saw the first real effect of the ending of it. In other words, there were still portions of it public, but not much. This question has such significance and importance, and I have discussed it with you in so many past interviews—very dear friends of mine really think I exaggerate the question of the need of democracy in the party or in a socialist country. Even my son, with whom I'm the closest politically, as you know, and whom I respect enormously, says, “But, Mom, isn't it true that if you agreed with a particular decision, you wouldn't be so upset about the way that decision was arrived at? You wouldn't care so much about the democracy?” Or my comrade Gil Green, with whom I'm in constant communication, who's still a member of the National Council of the party, who says, "I think you make too much of the question of democracy as a central thing." To my son I answer that, no, it is not whether or not I agree with a particular decision that bothers me. Or to Gil, no, I do not think that the question of democracy is a secondary or peripheral question to the main question; I genuinely and honestly believe that it is the central question as far as methodology. If you're going to overcome this problem that I mentioned earlier of vast numbers of Communists who are devoted and self-sacrificing and dedicated but who don't acquire greater facilities in becoming independent Marxist thinkers, you can only do that if they are involved in policy debates. Why didn't I, when I read in the early thirties the party policy decisions, ever question whether they were right or wrong? I had no idea there was an alternative to what was being suggested. I had no knowledge that there were debates on those formulations. Therefore I had no knowledge that those formulations on policy had any particular significance one way or the other. But if I had known and heard of and been aware of the kind of debates, then clearly I would have been much more prone to take them as a significant serious thing that I had to be concerned with. And if through me, as a Communist cadre, you reach the masses of people I'm influencing, they in turn become aware of this question and become capable of making the decision. Therefore to me the central question is not whether I do or do not agree only with a particular decision. Far more important, how was that decision arrived at? And I repeat again, if the party is not viewed as the last word but only as the vehicle through which the working class will ultimately achieve a socialist revolution, then clearly the debates have to be the property of workers because you want them to see the processes you've gone through to arrive at policy. Or again, an example of what was temporary being made permanent. I don't know whether I mentioned this; I probably haven't. If I have, just please stop me. One of the penalties of growing old is that you don't remember how often you repeat yourself.

GARDNER

The transcript won't lie. [laughter]

HEALEY

I may regret that fact that it doesn't. I must admit to you, I have a real horror of ever seeing this when it's transcribed. I have an abhorrence of what I've—things I've written before and looked at them now, and I say, "Jesus, did I really say that?" It doesn't seem possible. [laughter] See, the big difference I think between Lenin. . . . And I quote Lenin not because I think he was always right, as I'll indicate when I talk about what I think are some of the great vulgarizations of Marxism. I think Lenin contributed to some of those distortions and vulgarizations of Marxism. But Lenin had one attribute that I think was really remarkable and tragically very unique, and that was a great honesty and candor in speaking not only to the party but to the masses of people. In 1921, the Tenth Congress of the CPSU for the first time made a compulsory elimination of factions within the party. Now, this was something very new, because the whole history of the Bolshevik party had been a history of factions. It was very blunt about explaining why. It had reached a point where civil war was going on (the Kronstadt rebellion had just taken place while the congress was meeting). And the party could not at that point further engage in these kind of debates—as I say, they were never inner-party debates; they were always public (anybody could read them)—which kept them so divided, that, surrounded as they were, they had to have a diminishing of these constant regroupments and factions and so forth that kept them in such turmoil. But Lenin was very blunt that this is a temporary question, not a permanent question. And to make up for what he called a loss of democracy, the party was to print 100,000 copies of the workers' oppositions' materials, so people would know about it. He insisted that his opponents be placed on the Central Committee, that their resignations not be accepted when they were defeated, because he wanted, he knew there had to be that conflict of ideas if you were going to get closer to what kind of correct policy you need. I'll bet he's the only outstanding leader who, in spite of the enormous respect in which he was held, was voted down time after time on important questions. Like the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. I think I counted once in the backnotes of the Works six, seven times when he was voted down. Actually, his policy only finally triumphed because a group of the opponents to his policy of making peace with Germany, including Trotsky, abstained from the final votes so that by a narrow margin he squeaked though. Today that would be unheard of. Few general secretaries would be voted down today in any party without their simultaneous removal that I'm aware of. Not only that, but a virtue is made in all the Communist parties today that every decision is arrived at unanimously. But no decisions were arrived at unanimously during his period. For instance, I think the vote was twenty-eight to nine at the Seventh Congress of the party where the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was approved. Unanimity was not seen as the most desirable thing, and yet of course that's part of the legend that has grown today. Well, there are other characteristics of the party today that don't stem from these kinds of questions, although, yes, they are spin-offs really from all of these things. I was thinking of such things as—and again here I don't speak for other parties; I don't know whether this is true elsewhere, but I know it's true in the American party—the fact that once you become a party functionary, once you become a full-time worker of the party, you have a job for life, as long as you don't question or challenge accepted positions. The judgments are no longer made on whether you produce, are you an effective leader, do you actually change and influence the environment in which you're working and do something effective, which is the elementary thing of a Communist. That's no longer the criteria. People can go on for years—everybody knows they're bumbling idiots and fools and incompetents—and yet never be challenged, their work never tested or asked about. And these are supposed to be the elementary prerequisites of a Communist party: to test the work of the leadership. What I'm getting at is that when this lack of democracy becomes accepted, when even good, fine people start to think it's a very secondary question and not central to the functioning of a party, then all these other attributes creep in as well, all these other characteristics of bureaucratic centralism creep in. And so imperceptibly--maybe not so imperceptibly for some—but I'm talking now about people who are reasonably honest intellectually--you start to trim your sails, you start to accommodate yourself to policies that you may not be in agreement with. Because as long as that happens, nobody's going to question what you're doing; nobody's going to say, "Hey, what's going on in your field of work? How are you acquitting yourself of your responsibility?" It's kind of a quid pro quo that is adopted. And that to me is the most—I guess here is where my old activist nature comes back, comes into play--that to me is the most tragic result of the present status of the Communist party in the United States, that this could be; no matter what policy they had, they couldn't carry it out (doesn't make any difference whether it's a good or a bad one) because of the incompetence that operates generally. And it operates, as I say, because overall the dominant thing is, "Don't challenge, because if you challenge you become known as a heretic, as antiparty; you're too negative." I'm thinking of all the adjectives thrown at me all through the years I was in the national leadership.

GARDNER

Isn't this a natural crisis of an institution, its succumbing to bureaucracy? Is there any way that an institution can avoid that?

HEALEY

Sure. First of all, of course, this is the problem again, the question of the dialectical balance. This is the problem. Yes, organizations in themselves produce bureaucracy. Why? Because you cannot function in any organization, whether it's the PTA or a trade union or the Communist party, without developing a core of people who are going to be responsible for the day-to-day leadership of that organization. So you have to recognize that that is the problem. But what is the way in which you institutionalize safeguards against the bureaucracy's being both so centralized and so self-perpetuating? The only safeguard is this question of democracy, that in fact policy cannot be arrived at until it has been debated by the entire party, both privately and publicly (and I put in the "publicly," but I'll even forego it if that were necessary, if it were debated by the entire party). Secondly, the leadership has to be responsible and report back on its work to its constituencies. In other words, if you are responsible for a field of work-trade union work or Chicano, Black liberation—what have you accomplished in the course of a week? What have you done? What's the checkup? Now, these are supposed to be truisms of party functioning. Every party pays lip service to this. And yet this is precisely what then becomes a fatality. You don't do that because then you're going to step on the toes of some other people who each have their own little duchy; that operates, as I say, with a quid pro quo. You can go ahead and do these things, and I'll go ahead and do mine. [laughter] As a matter of fact, the supreme irony of my expulsion was that the committee that was named to bring in the recommendation at the national office, I just found out who it was. It was made up of Bill Taylor, Mickey Lima, and Jim Jackson, three people with whom I've had the most violent debates in the course of the last twenty-five years, who have a personal hatred of me that goes beyond any political disagreements; and in good sense, with at least two of them, it's because I have challenged their lack of capacity, their lack of productivity, their lack of doing things.

GARDNER

Now, this brings up, to go back to what we were talking about on the other side, the question of faith and infallibility again, because if the rank and file does require a sort of steady leadership who just recite maxims to them to keep them in the right place, then a bureaucracy is almost necessary, or at least some steady leadership is necessary, so that they will have something in which to have faith.

HEALEY

Yes, but it isn't as inevitable, to use that dreadful word, an inevitable thing that a leadership has to become a perpetuated bureaucracy. As I say, there are safeguards against that. You see, this is part again—I started to talk about the contradictions of organization. You cannot challenge capitalism without revolutionary organization. Nor can you challenge it unless you have a disciplined organization that is capable of subordinating differences of opinion to one major policy. But all that has meaning only if both that question of that leadership and that policy is constantly examined. It constantly has to be responsive back to an always increasingly knowledgeable membership. But a membership can always be increasingly knowledgeable only if it's privy to the debates, if it knows what alternatives there are beyond it. There's no difference between the democracy in the Communist party and the same needs for that democracy in a socialist country.

GARDNER

But then doesn't the rank and file have to go beyond the maxims? And then you're requiring something that, as we said before, is really beyond the scope right now,

HEALEY

But you never know what the scope of the human being can be. I have absolute confidence—I really have; I'm not exaggerating my feeling—in the capacity of human beings to develop tomorrow what they didn't have today, to develop talents, to develop knowledge, abilities. That's precisely—but clearly, it's not an immediate thing. Now, that doesn't mean that I think again that every individual is going to be a virtuoso. I mean, there are not a lot of Leonardo da Vincis in the world; there aren't a lot of—well, who else was encyclopedic in knowledge? Diderot. All right, there aren't. But each of us has far more than we are ever tested to have to produce. And if the party were functioning with a proper balance of democratic centralism--first of all, then, when decisions are made, if you've helped to produce them, if you've been part of it, if you're [then] outvoted, you're willing to accept being a minority, to test out and carry out what the majority vote, because it has been a thing that you have participated in. But when it is simply handed down to you, superimposed on you without any knowledge of what it means one way or the other, then why should you? See, that question of the role of the individual and the collective is a very difficult one. There isn't a blueprint that defines once and for all how you handle it, any more than there is a blueprint that defines once and for all how you reconcile the short-term needs of a policy against the long-term requirements of strategy. There just isn't any way on this latter question in which ahead of time you can decide whether you are sacrificing the long-term needs of the working class if you agree to this or that policy except your constant, constant, constant examination of what you're doing and how it affects your long-range strategic goal of revolution, or whatever it may be if you're in a socialist country or something else. So the same thing is true on the individual and the collective. You have to start with the proposition that those of us brought up in a capitalist society always do have the predisposition to bourgeois individualism—not individuality, but individualism: "I think," "I said," "I believe," "my opinion," as being the important thing. Clearly you can't build a revolutionary movement if that is the dominant question. But [neither can you] when you have its antithesis, its antithesis being no matter what the collective decides or how they decided it, I must subordinate my opinion to it. Because once you have that, you have then just zombies. You don't have sentient revolutionaries, the decisive prerequisite for transforming society. Marx talked about the fact that it is only through practice, through activity, through struggle, that men change their nature; that's why he kept saying history is nothing but human beings acting upon things, and it is through their acting upon it that they become transformed and capable of other things. The same thing is true of the communist. It is as we act upon these questions of policy and test them and think about them and debate them that we become the revolutionaries capable of leading anybody to anything. Therefore, there never really reaches the point, or should never reach a point for the honest revolutionary, when he or she can say, "Well, now I've solved this problem"—for instance—"of my relationship to the collective, how I fight for my position and when I give in, when I subordinate as a minority outvoted to a majority." As I say, in America it doesn't mean anything because the membership isn't consulted on anything anyway. But I'm thinking of parties that are more democratic, like the Italian party or the Australian party. There, however, they never reach that point where you can say that you yield responsibility for your judgments on integrity and principle. Well, that means there's always going to be a divine tension. And that's a good thing, that's a fine thing, that's a healthy thing, both for the individual and the organization, to have to be always searching, "Am I right or wrong?" Now, the answer to that that's always given, again, from What Is to Be Done is, "We're not a debating society. And that's true. A Communist party that spent all its time simply debating policy would never change anything. There does have to be a time when debate stops and action starts. But you have to make a separation between which kinds of things debate stops on, and what it is that you can never stop debate on. Lenin was very specific on how he made the differentiation, but no party anywhere accepts that definition of his or even talks about it. He says on questions of continuing world impact you can't stop the debate. The world's going on, of course. He says, where you stop the debate is on the specific questions of action, "Do we or do we not support a particular candidate?" It has a date period to it, an action connected to it. On that, after you've been outvoted, you subordinate your opinion to the majority. And afterwards you examine who was right or who was wrong. But there are, of course, interrelated with this—with this question, as with every other Goddamned question that deals with society, with theory, with life, there's no dividing line between organization as organization and theory, ideology and the conceptualized generalizations of the practice. Here's where I think I've had reference probably repeatedly now—I don't remember anymore what the hell we ever talked about in all these long previous tapes— on the vulgarization of Marxism that took place. It took place even while the old man Marx was still alive. It gave place to his famous jest, "I am not a Marxist," as he saw what his followers were doing. But just without elaborating at this point—although at a later point I would—I will give you just some examples of what I call the really deathly vulgarizations that have taken place that have played such havoc in every Communist party of the world, without exception. Well, the most famous, the best known, is the question of economic determinism, the idea that Marx and Engels ever believed that all questions were solved simply because of the economic questions of the way in which society was organized, the mode of production and the classes that derived from that. Engels wrote a letter trying to correct that, only the correction never caught up with the one-sidedness. Engels said in this letter—several letters, as a matter of fact, to [Conrad] Schmidt and whatnot—that he and Marx were to blame for this overexaggerated emphasis on the economic motive because in the haste of the polemic and the sweep of it, they did not always have time, he said, to fill out the full picture and generalization. But it's really ironic that even though this was printed, this letter of his, long ago, the fact is that not only do our enemies, the opponents of Marxism, constantly vulgarize Marxism by dealing with it as vulgarized economic determinism, but "Marxists" and "Communists," in quotes, do the same thing. In other words, the correction never caught up with the overstatement. Flowing from that and part of it is the distortion that's been made of a very famous and often quoted statement of Marx that comes from his preface to the Critique of Political Economy in which he says that man's being determines his consciousness. That has always been interpreted to mean that the way in which men and women earn their livings, the economic situation in which they find themselves, their class origin, determine how they—and for the class as a whole, how that class—will think. Now, that's not at all what Marx was getting at, I think. When I read that famous paragraph of his, I think all that Marx was saying--and I say "all" with quotation marks because it's a very profound "all"—was that in each society with its own defined mode of production, within that particular mode of production there is generated a consciousness that is unique to and peculiar to that mode of production. In short, if you live under a capitalist society, you accept the idea of capitalism as the divine rule that has a right to rule, just as the peasant accepted the divine right of kings. Well, because that has been vulgarized to just this sweeping generalization—you'll find it in Communist party writings all over the world—there then develops the most vulgar sociologism that results from it, the idea that your consciousness (and when I say "you", I'm not talking about an individual "you"; I'm talking of a mass consciousness, the class conscious- ness) is determined by only one factor of human life, how you're earning your living. That's true as a starting point but. . . .

1.47. TAPE NUMBER: XXIII, SIDE TWO DECEMBER 20, 1973

HEALEY

Clearly, if the only question of concern, the dominant question, was the way in which one earns one's living, if all the questions of human thought and political activity and consciousness could be excluded, then the question of exploitation would be so obvious. But I would say the number-one problem of Marxism is the question of consciousness. How do you carry out political activity that helps to destroy the mystique of capitalist ideology? Or—and the socialist society faces the same problem—socialist ideology, so it can move on to communism? How do human beings by the millions become aware of the mythologies with which they're surrounded? And if it was as simple as this question of your "class status," then the problem wouldn't be as incredible as it is. What are the factors that enter into it outside of the power-fulness, the potency of bourgeois ideology, or the ideology of any society? The questions of human psychology, of what makes people tick, about which really we Marxists have not made many creative contributions. I'm going to comment on "Why not?" in a moment, because it's another example of our resting with what was said 100 years ago as if it were the last word of scientific discovery 100 years later. But one is not only a worker. One may be a woman; one may be Black; one may be a Catholic. There are so many contradictions within that working class itself which operate and interact on one another. Jesus, you only have to look at Ireland, where one set of white religious workers [is fighting] to the death another set of white religious workers. It isn't even a color question, which there is in the United States, the history of slavery which so divided the working class in our country and diminished its capacity for class consciousness. There you have Middle Ages obscurantism surviving as a dominant factor in the 1970s, so that the same two guys can be in a shipyard during the day and go home and get a bomb out to fight one another at night. You get these Goddamned—and here's where I think Lenin helped to contribute to what I call the vulgar sociologism—these sweeping generalizations about working-class psychology as opposed to the petty bourgeoisie and this, that, and the other. Well, there's always some validity to it. The problem is what happens when you overextend that concept as it has been overextended, as I think he did in too many of his writings. You get a mystique, you get a picture of. ... After all, what was Marx talking about in regard to the role of the working class? He was talking about the potential when that class becomes conscious and then moves in the name of all the society, not just for the working class but for all of society. Well, there were other factors, too. See, one of the reasons why the great emphasis on the role of the working class was made both by Marx and Lenin was one side of a very profound dialectical truth. The one side is that it is true that the factory produces a discipline among workers, that others, intellectuals and others, don't have. You have to be at work on time; you have to produce certain things. You acquire these traits, and they're very important things to acquire, these habits of discipline. But they also have a dialectical opposite: they breed an acceptance of authority; they breed an acceptance of order from above; they breed an acceptance of what is and always must be because that's the way it's operated. If you don't keep pointing out the duality of the contradiction--and sometimes it may be more than a duality; there are many aspects of a contradiction—and you see only the one aspect, then you can't provide a correct policy because you're not addressing yourself to real live human beings. I mentioned earlier about this question of psychology, how little we communists, we Marxists, know about what makes human beings tick. Now, partly that's because again--and I don't want to overstate the problem; being brought up as a communist, I also have a tendency to overstatement, to one-sided statement coming from the polemical heritage with which we grew up—well, in one of Marx's "Theses on [Ludwig] Feuerbach" he made the statement, something to the effect that human essence is the tout ensemble of the society, the total picture of the society, reflects the society. Now, as a generalization, it's a very profound generalization—in other words, that the human being does not exist on an island independent of his surrounding society. Of course, he's going to reflect overall societal pressures. But as a total statement as to what makes human beings tick and what the human essence is, it's hardly sufficient. Yet even as late as just a couple years ago I read an article in the World Marxist Review written by a French Communist repeating this as the last word on psychology. Well, it enters back again into this question of the functioning of Communist parties. Again, I mentioned to you my knowledge that certainly the personality hatreds between Foster and Browder had more to do with Browder's being expelled than anything that Browder did. Browder had treated Foster in a most contemptuous manner when he was general secretary, and, by God, Foster got his revenge. The same thing was true with Trotsky and Stalin. Certainly I know it's true as far as Mao and Khrushchev. When Stalin died, Mao took for granted that he would be considered the senior Marxist, the Marxist of the world movement.

GARDNER

Could I interrupt here just to clarify some basic points concerning the evolution of ideology? I think Marxism and Leninism will come out, and have started to come out, but as we've mentioned, the first great conflict and the first closing-up was Stalin-Trotsky. Can you explain what the conflict was between the two, what the difference in attitude was and how each one interpreted Marxism and Leninism? (Without going on for the next eight days.)

HEALEY

You'd have to go on for the next eight days because you'd have to differentiate between what purported to be the differences and what actually were the differences. And that's an enormous subject in itself.

GARDNER

Couldn't you sum it up briefly now?

HEALEY

Well, if you summed it up briefly, what purported to be the differences was the opinion of Trotsky that socialism could not be built in the Soviet Union by itself, that there would have to be revolutions in other major countries, that a backward country like Russia could not possibly go to socialism by itself; [as opposed to] Stalin's statement that while socialism could not be completed in one country, nevertheless you had to start building socialism in one country because there weren't going to be revolutions in the other countries. Now, I'm vulgarizing to a great extent, because there was a history there of differences that had existed long before, not just between Trotsky and Stalin but between Trotsky and the other Bolsheviks and particularly with Lenin.

GARDNER

For example?

HEALEY

Oh, God. I guess maybe one famous example is Trotsky's role in 1912 when he participated with those whom Lenin called the Liquidators. It was a question of how the party would function balanced between an illegal and a legal party. Lenin's language about Trotsky all the way through until 1917, by the way—I don't think he ever said one kind word about him. He uses the most vehement, perjorative language in describing his contempt and hatred. He called him every name known. On no one did he use worse epithets than on Trotsky. The last big battle with them all was in 1920, the fight on the question of the definition of the role of the trade unions. Trotsky demanded that the trade unions should, in effect, be utilized in a military sense as the Red Army had been. Lenin fought vehemently against this. As a matter of fact, that's when he first used in answer to Trotsky what is a very important dialectical truth. He said something about how the trade unions had to be organizations that defended the workers against their own state. Again, this combination. It is their own state, and yet they have to defend themselves against it. Why? Because the state has to be concerned with the long-range programs of investment and planning. How do you accumulate capital for large-scale industrialization? The union has to be concerned with the short-term needs of the worker. They want to see today what they need, what they want, what they feel essential. So there has to be. ... In Marxist language this would not be considered an antagonistic contradiction; this is a friendly contradiction that can be solved by the understanding of the conflicting needs. But here again is where institutions come in. It's the same question as bureaucracy. Lenin saw the unions as having to be independent in order to carry on this necessary struggle with their own state— not a bosses' state, their own state. You should also know that in the last two or three years of Lenin's life, it was clear that he was becoming more aware of Stalin's bureaucracy, of Stalin's deceits and manipulation. There's a book entitled Lenin's Last Struggle by a man by the name of [Moshe] Lewin. As I do with all footnotes, I researched all his footnotes to see how accurate he was, and discovered that he had just taken his book bodily out of the last three volumes of the Collected Works of Lenin. I can therefore vouch for its accuracy as reflecting what was really taking place in the battle between Lenin and Stalin, which is not a very much known thing. I would say that 90 percent of—not just communists again; I mean Maoists, everybody—ignores this, as if it had never happened. And yet the sharpest struggles were taking place between Lenin and Stalin, not between Stalin and Trotsky at that last period of Lenin's. As a matter of fact, Lenin suggested to Trotsky that they should have a bloc together at the Congress to oppose Stalin. However, on the other side, let me say that I think that the Trotskyists totally misunderstand and distort what is called Lenin's Last Will, where he talks about the need to remove Stalin as general secretary because he is too rude and does not have the right elements for a general secretary. He also says about Trotsky, however. . . . First of all, he says, "Don't hold his non-Bolshevik past against him." I find that amusing when the Trotskyites today sell their pamphlets calling themselves "the party of Trotsky and Lenin," when Trotsky didn't join the Bolshevik party until August of 1917. Lenin said that in a kind of a kindly way because the old Bolsheviks as a group didn't have any use for Trotsky. Lenin was the only one who had the foresight not to allow his personal dislikes of the past to hang over into the future. What was important to Lenin was always the job that needed to be done, and you worked with anybody that was capable and effective in doing it. But then he goes on with what I think is a more important warning, and that is against what he calls Trotsky's tendency to administrative methods to solve problems, in other words, administrative methods along the lines of his approach to the trade unions: you militarize them, then you don't have the problem of ideology and debate and whatnot. That's why, in a very ironic sense, in my opinion Stalin simply carried out Trotsky's own approaches; if Trotsky had won and Stalin had lost, I don't think you would have had any essential difference in the history of what took place in those sad periods. I think it would have been done with far more deftness than Stalin did it, but I don't think Trotsky would have produced a qualitatively different situation. Now, as to what he would have done in regard to the world situation, because that's part of the accusation that was made against him--and with some truth, when you read his early writings of the earliest periods, 1920 and '21, where in a sense he is proposing that the Red Army should be used to help stimulate revolutions in other countries—I'm not prepared to say that that's really what he either thought or would have done if he had been triumphant, although I was brought up to believe that that's what he thought and would have done. My own personal opinion regarding him is that he was such a vainglorious man that no matter how capable he was—and he was a very capable man, a very enormously knowledgeable one—that vainglory, like a peacock, just ate into everything of his political relationships. It goes back again to this question of human psychology, about which we know so little and about which we have such contempt. See, again it comes to this oversweep of the polemic. We are correct to denounce those historians who would make of history simply the role of the great man in history as deciding all questions, ignoring the social relationships within a society that generate change. But we went to the other extreme, and that was to deny the role of the individual in being decisive. Christ knows, if Lenin hadn't lived in 1917, in my opinion there would not have been a Russian revolution on November 7, 1917. He had to fight every moment of the way when he came back, starting with the April Theses, to convince them of the need of going beyond the bourgeois democratic revolution of [Alexander] Kerensky.

GARDNER

Who did Lenin envision, since he had misgivings about both Stalin and Trotsky? Did he have anyone else in mind?

HEALEY

Well, he believed generally that there had to be built up a collective.

GARDNER

He felt that the two would. . . .

HEALEY

Not just those two, but others. He talked about Bukharin; he says Bukharin is "the darling of the party." His problem is he doesn't understand—he is very theoretically well developed, but he doesn't understand dialectics sufficiently. Lenin genuinely believed that the only answer was more and more people being brought and involved into leadership, into important positions that would counteract the tendencies that Stalin had. But the last two years of his life were very tragic years. As you read his letters and his memos of those last two years, that great brain imprisoned really in the physical disabilities of not being able to communicate, seeing what was taking place, recognizing how Stalin was trying to fence him off from contact with and communication with the party—God, what a sense of enormous frustration must have overcome him at those points! You can't read those last few volumes of his works without sensing this. But some other examples of the same theoretical problems: you know, I've always been fascinated by the way in which Lenin dealt with the questions of violent versus peaceful transformation of society in 1917 as compared with the way he dealt with them in 1922. It's important both for the subject itself, but also again as to the question of how Marxists should view concretely the circumstances operating at any one time when they read the writings of Lenin or Marx or anybody else and examine the problems they had to address themselves to at any one point. What were the surrounding circumstances and the problems around which policy had to be devised? In 1917 the biggest problem that Lenin had to confront both within the Russian party as well as within the Second International, with all the world Marxists, was this question of violent versus peaceful. Now, here one thing that is of great importance is that when you read all Lenin's writings in 1917 you are struck with the enormous flexibility of the man in regard to what tactic to use, whether it is going to be violent or peaceful. He changed his position and the party changed its position at least four times in the course of 1917. He always had one prerequisite: how much violence was being used by the established state against the revolutionary movement? There were times there between April and July when he kept saying the revolution could be peaceful, because, he said, at this point we are the freest nation in the world. There was no violence being used against the Bolsheviks or the trade unions or anything. Then come the July days, and he drops the slogan as the repression starts, the attacks start. He revives it again in September for a brief period, that again we can have a peaceful revolution. But aside from the chronology of this, what is fascinating is the [shift in argument] between the materials he was writing in 1917 [and those of 1922]. In 1917, in both State and Revolution and The Proletarian Dictatorship and the Renegade Kautsky, he took Karl Marx's statement that a peaceful revolution was possible in England, the United States, and Holland, but discounted its [validity] for 1917 on the ground that the period in which Marx was writing was a period before these capitalist states had become militarized and bureaucrat!zed. He says, in 1917, "But that is no longer true. They are now militarized and bureaucratized, and therefore Marx's exception would no longer hold true." Now, aside from the question of whether Lenin was accurate in 1917, or even whether Marx was accurate in 1870—and I think Marx was more accurate than Lenin, because while England didn't have a big standing army, for Christ's sake, its navy was the strongest in the world; and certainly it had already developed a civil service bureaucracy that was of no mean consequence in shaping institutions and habits and whatnot—but leave aside that question as to whether or not they were accurate; the fact is that in 1922 in a big debate Lenin was having with Bukharin on the question of the New Economic Policy, in an article entitled "The Tax in Kind," he comes back to this question of why Marx made the exception of England, the United States, and Holland, and he doesn't even raise any of the questions he's raised in 1917. He raises entirely different questions as to why Marx made the exception, and among them—I don't remember them all now—but among them many important questions in terms of relevance for today. He says, in those countries the working class was more predominant in numbers than the peasantry. Not true, he says, of Russia, but true of those countries. Secondly, the long training and the democratic tradition of those countries. Not true, he says, in Russia. Third, the long-established habit of the British bourgeoisie for compromise. They would be willing to be bought off if they saw the revolutionary pressures upon them. Not true, he says, in Russia. Again, why the difference? Because in 1917 he was confronting one set of circumstances in which he had to advance and make dominant one set of arguments. In 1922 he is confronting another set, where in effect they are retreating, the Soviet Union, from, quote, "war communism." They are making concessions to the bourgeoisie in order to live, in order to establish themselves, to keep themselves alive. And so because he was always a man who was concerned with the concrete situation, his arguments are totally different. But I have never read in any book, either by communists or noncommunists, by Marxists or non-Marxists, anything that compares these two sets of definitions as examples of what is meant by concreteness being essential for valid policy, and therefore essential for studying; that when you're reading the books of anybody that purports to deal with political action, political theory, you've got to examine the circumstances in which they wrote their policy. It's not an abstraction to be memorized, and you cross yourself as you go through the Stations of the Cross— for all times these are the things to be done. As I say, those are really not the most important examples one could give. They're simply examples that readily come to mind of distortions that have their own life, that maintain a continuity. If you were to pick up any of the current radical writings of the new young revolutionary groups— of the Maoists, for instance (the Revolutionary Union, the October League, the National Guardian; that's the Maoist side) or the Communist party and the Young Workers Liberation League—when it comes to the question of the discussion on peaceful versus violent, the state and so forth, all you would find are the references to State and Revolution or The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, never anything to what he said in 1922. (And by the way, I should add the Trotskyists. They read exactly the same way as everybody else does.) I mean, it's sufficient unto the day as the brilliance displayed therein. No examination why on that day that line is the uppermost. And this is really so ironic because the most important thing that Marxism tries to teach its supporters is the question of dialectical change, that nothing is static. And yet we are the very ones who persist in superimposing upon the most important questions—namely, thought, thinking, policy, analysis--almost a condition of stasis, of permanency of approach. We thereby rob Marxism of its most indispensable quality, its ongoing capacity to look at reality and penetrate that reality. I guess it's the thing about which I feel the most vehement because I know the toll it takes on us. Chile is only one example of the tragedy that happens when you don't examine where a current line takes you. In Chile's case, you're just the opposite of the deification of the past because one of the things that runs through everything of Lenin's and Marx's is that you've got to dismantle the capitalist state; you can't just use it as it is. In other words, you can't use that army as it is constituted under capitalism; you've got to have a revolutionary army. So therefore here, politically, the charge would be one of opportunism or revisionism, in still believing that the military was, quote, "going to be neutral," would maintain that neutrality, rather than seeing it as an arm of the ruling class, of the exploiting class.

GARDNER

Doesn't that say something about the possibility of having a popularly elected communist government rather than one coming to power by means of a revolution?

HEALEY

Well, the possibility. . . .

GARDNER

It seems to say that it's not a ...

HEALEY

. . . impossibility.

GARDNER

Well, it's a possibility, certainly, but at the same time it creates a negative situation for whoever is elected because he doesn't have the tools of revolution in hand but must deal with the. . .

HEALEY

Then he'd have to deal with that particular concrete situation. That's why, on the question of Chile, it seems to me that the discussions I've read and heard about are not concrete enough again. You have to deal with Chile as Chile and not long-range conclusions from it. Why? First of all, because you had something totally unexpected as far as any Marxist was concerned, as far as history. That was that you win the executive but you don't win the legislative. I mean, after all, that's what's supposed to be the thing where the people's will is first felt, in the popularly elected representatives, not in the executive, which is supposed to be the representation of the ruling class. Secondly, the question to ask in Chile—and I think it has to be asked—should [Salvador] Allende and the Popular Unity government have taken power, taken the office in 1971? They had won only 36 percent of the vote. Now, by Chilean law the parliament was supposed to elect him as president because it was more than the split votes of the other parties. But in order to get them to agree to carry out their own law, he and the Popular Unity government had to make written agreements, concessions to observe bourgeois legality, to observe the, quote, "independence of the military," not to interfere with that and with the judiciary and so forth. Well, they obviously operated on their belief that if they came to power—and it was a very limited power that Allende and the government had (they didn't have the supreme court; they didn't have the military; they didn't have the police)—obviously, they believed that in the course of time, because of this semineutral tradition of the Chilean military of not interfering, that any revolts against them would come from the extralegal, fascist groups on the right, and that the military would then play its traditional role of putting it down. They were clearly doing one thing that is absolutely valid: that's bargaining for time, extending their capacity to consolidate and extend their influence, to win over that middle sector which they clearly didn't have. Well, among other things, first of all the ruling class learns from history just as much as we do, you know. Sometimes more, and faster. So that all those left groups, like the Trots, that now say that the Popular Unity government should have set up "dual power," as was true in the Russian revolution, of armed workers and peasants—they don't understand that the ruling class knows the meaning of that, too. The first step they would have taken towards that, and the military would have acted even before it did. As a matter of fact, it was the fact that there were more arms coming into the hands of workers that was, I think, one reason why they acted when they did. Secondly, you are faced with something totally unique in Chile, a very fascinating problem, and that is, you saw a national strike under counterrevolutionary auspices for counterrevolutionary purposes. By national I mean a strike that crossed class lines. You saw the Chilean miners, the copper miners, these so-called independent truckers that were being, of course, subsidized by the CIA, the rich, the professionals, uniting together and producing economic chaos, economic anarchy in the state, making it impossible for the government to function. This is supposed to be our weapon. They used it. And the lesson of that polarization, that they had the professionals and the middle class, is a very important lesson for us to grapple with and understand, the need for winning them as allies to your struggle, which again means tempo and time of how you proceed with the revolution. You see, on the question of whether or not there can be an electoral victory, no one really [believes]—I don't know of any Communist who really believes, and I don't think the Communist party there believed—that a socialist revolution is simply a question of how many electoral votes you get. What was believed is that if you can utilize the instrument of the state to facilitate the revolutionary struggle, that then is more or less peaceful. As a matter of fact, when counterrevolution breaks out, then you theoretically have the right to use that instrument of the state to crush the counterrevolution, as in the iRussian] civil war. Same proposition. They are then the rebels against the constituted authority. But the tragedy is that, as in Spain, there's a new element that enters in, and that is advanced military technology. All those people on the left who talk about how Allende and the party should have armed the workers, armed them with what? So they had repeating rifles; they had automatic repeating rifles. But you're up against advanced military technology; you're up against jets and you're up against. . . . Now, before, Marxist-Leninists always believed that part of the struggle of a civil war meant your ability to capture the weaponry—first of all, the ability to split the military; secondly, your ability to capture and struggle with the more advanced weaponry that the state possessed.

GARDNER

Which worked in Russia.

HEALEY

It worked in Russia. It worked in China. It worked in Vietnam. But there you've got to look at terrain, which is important. In Russia and China you didn't have a centralized government that could control the entire country. You didn't have "civil society," the term that Gramsci uses in China and Russia, a network of institutions that mobilized people on behalf of the ruling class. You had the authority of a state: that was the rule that you had in China and Russia. But in Chile you had what you have in other countries as well, and that is long-established institutions and traditions that perpetuate capitalist rule. So you've got to have more than just the state apparatus. You've got to be able to defeat their ideological hegemony over the minds of the people. And that's why—and I'm really not sure. I really am very tentative in my thinking. While I think Allende made many mistakes—"Allende," I use him only [symbolically]; I mean, obviously he didn't act alone—the Communist party, the sectors of the Socialist party [made many mistakes] in not getting rid of those generals, in not challenging, because if people are going to die, it's much better to die fighting than to die being crushed as they're crushed now. And although avoiding civil war at all costs, which is what they were trying to do, can lead to a far greater tragedy than what civil war would mean, on the other hand, you do have the responsibility when you're in power of trying to have the most advantageous positions for that struggle for power to take place. Clearly that's what they were banking on—that's what they were gambling on—that they could keep those generals neutralized way beyond the time when they could. And they didn't. But I come back again, as I say, to my question, which is whether they should have taken power in the first place. Should they have taken the executive, the presidency, when in order to get it, they had to commit themselves to compromises which would prevent and inhibit their going ahead with any significant step of going further. What did they need it for? As the party of opposition, they would have been dominant. They would have been the balance of power, without the responsibility of that goddamned state. What good did that do them at that point without having the majority behind them?

GARDNER

But then, by the same token, couldn't they have been equally crushed had they not been in power?

HEALEY

Well, there would have been again, of course, histories of even those. At that point, yes, it could have happened. You can't answer that, no, that it wouldn't have happened.

GARDNER

I guess they're just less of a target.

HEALEY

It's a question, as I say—well, that's where the concreteness comes. You have to know much more than I know about all the nuances of Chilean relationships to be able to do it. Or let's take another argument about which one needs far more knowledge and information than at least anyone I've talked to seems to have. The Miristas, the MIR [the Revolutionary Left Movement] and others of the Left were pushing very fast from the very beginning for faster methods of confiscating property with lands and the factories. The party was accused of opportunism there because they resisted it in many cases. But I'm not at all sure the party and Allende were wrong. Premature movement means polarizing a sector that you can still win. But economically, more importantly, it's not profitable. You are taking over, for instance, industries that really you don't need at that point—they're not essential; they're not the dominant sectors of the economy—before you're equipped to operate them effectively. And of course there's the question of geography. It's true the sighty-one party conference of 1960 said that geography was no longer a question of importance, where a revolution takes place. And it's true that with Cuba, as a result of the 1961 Bay of Pigs thing and the compromises between Khrushchev and Kennedy, you have a socialist state existing ninety miles from imperialism. But when you look at the geography of Chile, first of all, how much—who among her neighbors outside of Peru was sympathetic? There was Bolivia, for example, which was certainly counterrevolutionary against anything that Chile did. The capacity of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries to make up for the U.S. blockade of the economy. I don't know the answer for that. As I say, there are so goddamned many factors. But it seems to me the big thing American revolutionaries have to be concerned with...As I say, I think the debate between peaceful and violent is such a silly debate because when a revolutionary situation takes place in the United States, we're not going to be able to talk in terms of the present relationship of forces. It can only be talked of in terms of where a Left has developed mass authority, when millions of people who no longer will live in the old way accept the leadership of a revolutionary movement and participate with it, or move themselves in action against the old way of living, and when the old can no longer operate in the old way--who knows what tactics will be necessary then? At any rate, those terms really always should be qualified with the words "more or less violent" or "more or less peaceful," because at no time are they one or the other exclusively anyway. And, as I say, what was originally meant by the polemic against peaceful development was simply the idea that 51 percent of a vote would [never] automatically mean that you would have a socialist government. Nobody ever really believed that. [The idea was] that through utilizing the electoral arena you helped mobilize a conscious, organized force capable then of answering the violence of the ruling class with its own popular violence, capable of meeting it, and of course that means again being able to influence military sectors, being able to influence in a military way. But I would say one thing is called into question by Chile, and I'd sure love to be hearing the debates in the Italian and French parties where it matters—in the American party, it doesn't matter so much—and that is both parties have the same kind of an approach that we have to what's called an antimonopoly coalition, a kind of a transitional government that would be comparable to the Popular Unity government of Chile. And I'd sure love to hear the discussions going on in those parties as to what lessons they've learned from Chile, what they do or don't say in regard to the Chilean experiences as far as strategic goals are concerned. I would say for us that more relevant question we have to consider. . . . Well, of course, I've always felt, as I think I've indicated to you, that there's no blueprint that says that we have to go through an antimonopoly coalition, the election of an antimonopoly government, before we have a socialist revolution. This country may proceed directly to a socialist revolution. Secondly, I think the energy crisis is something that a lot of revolutionaries ought to be giving a great deal more thought to in terms of strategic goals. An advanced technology is far more vulnerable to disruptions of its economy than a backward peasant economy or a semifeudal economy like Russia and China.

GARDNER

Yet it's the semifeudal economies that have had the most important revolutions, Cuba included.

HEALEY

That's right. That's alone where they've taken place, except with Czechoslovakia. But I think enough revolutionary movements aren't giving thought to, first of all, the development of a cadre trained on questions of technology, that know all there is to know about computer programming and how and when, and how not, they can function, that understand the questions of energy, including such questions as electric grids and telephonic communications and all that kind of thing. We're dealing with a society that is vulnerable in a different way than the vulnerability of the semifeudal or colonial countries. But nobody in the revolutionary movement is talking about those questions yet. And yet strategically they raise whole new questions as far as the road to socialism is concerned, including the developing, as I say, of trained cadres in those fields of a highly specialized sort. Now, that's not in substitution of reaching masses of people, because no policies can ever be substituted for that, unless you're going to have a dictatorship from the top again, of technologists, and who wants that? But to find the way to combine that mass consciousness and the need for revolution with a specialized knowledge of the vulnerability of the system—in other words, you may not have the guns to fight the system, but if you have the masses behind you, then questions of how you can utilize the knowledge of the economy—of what makes this economy tick—of its technology can become very important. Maybe you can't meet them with guns, but you sure can meet them with technology that counters their technology. I'd have to elaborate on that. It's the sort of thing that requires a far greater degree of sophisticated debate and knowledge than has taken place.

1.48. TAPE NUMBER: XXIV, SIDE ONE JANUARY 11, 1974

HEALEY

We'll have to backtrack a little just in regard to the question of history and chronology in order to include a resolution that was passed by the combined meetings of the National Council and the Central Committee of the party on December 2, 1973, a resolution, passed unanimously, that expelled Al Richmond and me from the party some five months almost after we had resigned. I think it might be worthwhile to just read the statement because in itself it represents a far more important problem than anything in regard to the personal fate of either Al or me. And I'll explain why I think the significance is more than that. The copy I have has a statement on it, "For immediate release," and is dated December 21. However, that "For immediate release" has no significance because neither the Daily World nor the People's World have even printed a word of it, and none of it, of course, was sent out to the commercial media or any left press anywhere. My suspicion is that it was simply a statement for the party members in order to— it's comparable to excommunication in the Catholic Church. When you're expelled, there's supposed to be nonassociation after that; so it was meant to notify every party member not to have contact with us, but secondly also to notify the parties abroad, and most particularly in the Soviet Union, of what action they took.

GARDNER

Have you felt any of the aftermath? Has your phone stopped ringing?

HEALEY

No, I personally haven't. There has been some aftermath in the sense that my mother, who is still a member of the party, and as you know is a charter member— many people who used to call her, the older people, don't call her anymore, which is ironic inasmuch as she still is in the party. Her own party club--she's been ill for several months and couldn't go to the meetings—her own party club doesn't even get in contact with her. So that the irony is that she has felt it. I not only haven't felt it, but, well, the very fact that I have the statement...! assure you the party didn't send me the statement; individual Communists sent it to me. Although the statement was passed unanimously in New York, in Southern California at the district committee the vote was ten for it and five against it. It would have been even higher against it except that Ben Dobbs, who was the executive secretary of the party for twenty-five years and probably my closest coworker, finally resigned from the party with this as just kind of a final straw. It was not the only thing, but just a culmination of events. So that he wasn't at the district committee meeting; he resigned three days earlier. Two young people resigned from the district committee in protest on the morning of the meeting before the vote was taken, so they didn't vote. And two others who would have voted against it were in Delano with the farm workers' delegation. So that their attempt to, quote, "straighten out Los Angeles," has clearly had no more effect. The statement says—as I say, dateline New York, December 21: "The Communist party today announced the explusion of Al Richmond of San Francisco, California, and Dorothy Healey of Los Angeles, California. The statement issued by Communist party officers here said that Richmond and Healey were expelled on December 2, 1973, at a joint meeting of the Communist party Central Committee and National Council. Both Communist party organs adopted a resolution drafted and unanimously recommended by a subcommittee of four impaneled by the Central Committee. The subcommittee members were Arnold Johnson and James E. Jackson of New York City, and William Taylor of Los Angeles, and A.J. Lima of San Francisco. "The resolution, adopted after discussion, follows: 'By the authority vested in it by the constitution of the Communist Party, USA, and in accord with Article VI, Section 10; Article VII, Section 1; and Article VIII, Section 1, of the Constitution, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, USA, meeting in regular session this December 2, 1973, votes to expel Al Richmond and Dorothy Healey from membership and from all committees of the party and to nullify all titles of authority heretofore extended to them. Of particular relevance to the behavior of Richmond and Healey is Article VII, Section 1, of the Constitution, which declares: "A member has the right within the party organization to express openly and uphold his or her opinion or differences on any question as long as the party organization has not adopted a decision. This may be accomplished in meetings of the party organizations and in authorized publications. After a decision, a party member has the right to appeal successively to the next higher body, including the national conventions. Members have the right to reserve their opinion in the event of disagreement with a decision, but at the same time they have the duty to carry out the majority decision." Dorothy Healey and Al Richmond have engaged in struggle against the Marxist-Leninist norms of the party's political policies, organizational principles, and such fundamental ideological concepts as proletarian internationalism over a long period of time. At various times, they have championed right-revisionist and left-revisionist positions which would have led to the distortion of the essential Leninist character of the party and paved the way for its liquidation as a socialist vanguard party of the United States working class. "'Well known is Richmond's persistent championship of the threatened counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia. In defiance of the decisions of the National Committee of the CPUSA, which had declared its solidarity with the loyal defenders of socialism in Czechoslovakia and denounced the forces of counterrevolution and capitalist restoration, Richmond waged a struggle in and out of the party in an effort to gain support of his position. Richmond has continued to struggle throughout the five years since the defeated counterrevolution, as is evident in his recently published writing. This writing also contains slurs and slanders on the experience and role of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in the world revolutionary process in general, and in guiding the building of socialism in the Soviet Union in particular. "'Healey's opposition to the party's position on Czechoslovakia and other party decisions is also well known. In addition, Healey mocks and scorns the Marxist-Leninist concept of "the class approach" to the solution of social and political problems. Recently Healey has come out for the formation of some non-party type of organization to engage in "socialist dialogue and debate." "'Thus, over a long period of time both Richmond and Healey have violated the party's fundamental organizational principle of democratic centralism, not only refusing to carry out the majority decisions adopted by higher bodies of the party, but actively struggling to impose their disagreements on the party, and thereby to prevent implementation of the party's decisions. Although authorized by the constitution to use administrative dis-cliplinary measure against such behavior, the party leadership chose to deal with Richmond and Healey by methods of political struggle. The leadership of the two districts, the Central Committee, and CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall personally made special efforts to extend every opportunity for Richmond and Healey to correct their views. Assignments were given to each in order to help them rethink their erroneous positions and play useful roles in the movement. However, Richmond and Healey were undeterred by these efforts and have persisted in their struggle against the policies of the party. "'In anticipation of being expelled for their flagrant violation of party principles, both recently announced their resignation to the press. They resigned, Healey explained to the capitalist press, in order not to be shut off from contact with party members with whom they were associated. She asserted that she remains "a Communist, albeit without a party." The Central Committee brands her self-designated status of "Communist without a party" as another fraudulent attempt to sustain contacts with party members for furthering anti-party activities and aims. Thus, the challenge of Healey and Richmond to basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism has taken on a more openly anti-working-class, anti-Soviet and anti-party course. They continue to seek factional support for their positions within the party, while building associations with known anti-Communist forces. They express pride in their new credits with the capitalist media and publishing houses. Therefore, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, USA, characterizes the position and role of Dorothy Healey and Al Richmond as anti-party, and adopts this resolution for their expulsion.’” End of statement. Well, just a few things in regard to the matters they deal with in the resolution, dealing first with the questions of the party constitution. As you can see, there's nothing in that party constitution that was quoted that has anything to say about expelling anybody after they have resigned from the party. Now, this is important, because the Leninist concept of the party is that it is a voluntary organization. Clearly, you are free to join or free to leave. That is what the meaning of voluntary means. Yet in this case, as I say, four or five months after both of us resigned, we were expelled. Secondly, in regard to the particular Article VII, Section 1, of the constitution which they quote, this is one that is typically "Catch-22." They say that one has the right to express openly and uphold opinions of differences on any question as long as the party organization has not adopted a decision. Now, first, in regard to that, one of the sharpest attacks against me came when I publicly protested the arrests of the forty-six Czechoslovaks last year on KPFK—that was August 1973, I believe—something on which, as far as I know, the Communist party of the United States had not taken a position. But that made no difference because implicit is the fact that their position is that you don't disagree with any position of either the Soviet Union or any socialist country that follows the Soviet Union's position. So that, in fact, your right of free speech as long as the party organization has not adopted a decision is nonexistent. Secondly, they say that one can express the differences in authorized publications. The only problem is, as Al Richmond's answer to the review of his book in Political Affairs shows—they refused to print that review on the ground that it was frivolous and nonsubstantial. In other words, if they don't think your comments have relevancy, they won't print them anyway. So that your right to even protest within the party is strictly up to their personal decisions and judgments. Well, it's nonsense to [say] that we have engaged in struggle against "the Marxist-Leninist norms of the party's political policies, organizational principles, and such fundamental ideological concepts as proletarian internationalism, over a long period of time." Because here what you have is the very heart of the problem which I've discussed with you in previous interviews, of how one defines those concepts—none of which are absolutes, all of which are relative—relating to time, place, period and circumstances. It is precisely the fact that the party at this point defines these questions as absolutes, most of them derived from principles during the period of Stalinism in the world communist movement, that we have challenged—or at least, I have; Al has not. I have certainly challenged what I consider distortions of basic Marxism-Leninism. I don't know what they mean by "the right-revisionist and left-revisionist positions" that we've championed, evidently simultaneously. We're obviously politically ambidextrous.

GARDNER

Could you name a few on either side? [laughter]

HEALEY

Yes, I could name what they would consider as representing one or the other, but, again, it doesn't matter because those are really very subjective definitions. It depends what the party leadership at any one moment declares is the proper line, and then of course anything that is different from that proper line can be easily termed either right or left. I'm really most angry and outraged by the paragraph on Al Richmond, in which it says that Al conducted a struggle against the party's position for five years after the National Committee's decision. [tape recorder turned off] The fact is that Al, until his book was published last year, had not carried out any struggle either within the party or out of the party in regard to the questions of Czechoslovakia. And this is particularly known by Mickey Lima--"A.J. Lima"—who was part of the subcommittee that brought in the resolution, and is very typical again of Mickey Lima, who likes to parade within his own district to the young people as a champion of challenge to the national policies, you know, independent in his thinking, but who in my experience has been, under the bluff exterior of this independent thinker, one of the most distasteful of human beings in the rapidity with which his position can change depending on what the national office, Gus Hall in particular, wants one way or the other. I'm amused by one phrase they use in regard to Richmond. They say, "Well known is Richmond's persistent championship. . . ." I'm amused because when I was in the Soviet Union in 1961 I asked some of the Communist leaders there why they persisted in using the phrase "It is well known" on things that weren't particularly well known. And the comrade grinned and said, "Well, Dorothy, whenever you see that, what that means is we're not terribly sure of our facts on it and we don't have much documentation. When we use that, we figure that that will simply dismiss all speculation on it." This is very typical of the same thing. Their statement that I mock and scorn the Marxist-Leninist concept of the class approach to the solution of social and political problems derives from the comments I made in the interview in Ramparts magazine where I said the party totally misuses the question of a class approach from a Marxist point of view, in that they reduce Marxism to a simple form, to a sociologism of economic determinism, and that to them a class approach is really the most vulgar kind of question as to how the working class will or will not benefit economically from something, that everything that comes from the working class—they talk about the working class as if it were some monolithic force that was an independent entity and already had achieved class consciousness, which of course in our country is nonsense. Then it says I have come out recently for the formation of some nonparty type of organization to engage in socialist dialogue and debate. This is one of the things where it transcends the question of any attack on me but is more important in what it represents as far as the party's approach towards what is considered either a united front or a united Left to fight against reaction. What they're referring to is my attendance at the meeting in New York initiated by Arthur Kinoy, the vice-chairperson of the National Lawyers' Guild and long-time radical lawyer, professor of law at Rutgers University—his and other people's attempt to try to form some kind of a new, quote, "mass people's party against capitalism." What they're referring to here is simply—their information is not terribly accurate: All I did—on the second day of the conference, when they were discussing what steps they should take between now and the founding convention of such an organization, I said that one of the preliminaries for that was gathering together the existing radical collectives and left organizations in the country to start debating and discussing the differences that exist within them and between them. What, as I said, is significant in this, as well as in Henry Winston's report to the Central Committee at the same time as this resolution was passed, his attack on Arthur Kinoy and on the concept of a new organization, is the incredible sectarianism that is involved in the approach in that anything of the Left which the Communist party itself does not initiate and determine is going to be attacked as being something anti-working-class or antiparty or anti-anything-else and simply dismissed. And this is really a very sad thing because more and more the party will be isolated from any currents that are not directly under the party's own leadership and control. One sees the signs of that even in things the party initiates and controls, in that two different new "organizations"—and I put organizations in quotes because neither one of them has much organizational strength—are examples. The one was a national conference called to set up a new organization in which Angela Davis, Charlene Mitchell, and others were the initiators. Well, there were 1,000 people at that conference, but the fact is that because the party was so determined to control it, very few of the non-Communists remained to participate the day after the conference was over. The same thing happened with the new "organization"—again in quotes—set up just a few months ago. It had a very long title, something to do with fighting against imperialism in Africa, and Franklin Alexander was the main mover and is the main spokesperson for it now. The same thing happened. A lot of people show up—1,000 people again showed up, but again the party so tightly controlled it that those who weren't ready to accept the party's leadership didn't continue with it a day afterwards. So you call these national conferences—at enormous expense, I might say; you don't travel around this country cheaply—and after you've called them, all you have really is an echo chamber for yourself. As I say, I relate this to this resolution because I have heard from those who attended this meeting of the Central Committee that this was one of the biggest attacks against me, the fact that I had been at this gathering in New York with Arthur Kinoy and Dave Dellinger and others that attended.

GARDNER

There's a certain scholasticism that strikes me here that reminds me of the Christian sects in the fourth and fifth century, things like that, the arguments over Manichaeism, the monks each sitting in their own monasteries battling it out, and if a monk would associate with another monastery, that was. . . . There's an almost frightening similarity there. What I'm trying to say, I guess—it's obvious in a way—is that it seems to be over-intellectualized, overscholasticized to a great degree, isn't it?

HEALEY

Well, really what it is—and your first comment I think is very relevant and very perceptive, because as you become more sectarian and do not fulfill a Marxist-Leninist approach, a Marxist approach in terms of the rigor that is demanded in statements and analyses and hypotheses and so forth, the comparison between the party and/or Marxism and religiosity becomes more marked, The characteristics start to resemble—they're interchangeable almost. (And I'll indicate in a minute where that's even true as far as the people who voted for this.) The acceptance on faith of things rather than any even questioning or challenging them. As I say, you've touched on the most important thing. That is the real social tragedy, not what it means to me personally, but what it means to an organization that I have loved and that means a great deal, not just in my life, but which potentially should mean a great deal in the life of the country if there is to be an effective fight against capitalism and for a socialist alternative. This paragraph—going back to the resolution—about how the party leadership chose to deal with us by methods of political struggle and how "the leadership of the two districts and Gus Hall in person made special efforts to extend every opportunity for us to correct our views," et cetera-- All that is, of course, just sheer absolutely unmitigated nonsense. I don't think that Gus Hall— Well, first of all, even in the years when I was the primary leader in this area, Gus Hall would avoid any real discussion with me personally. He would use the big meetings to attack my views, but when we would meet together he would just simply be awkward and ill at ease and uncomfortable, very obviously and clearly. In the years since 1969, when I left the leadership, there has absolutely not been any occasion when we've had more than three or four or five minutes of mumbled talk between one another. It really is just fantastic. And the same thing is true as far as, you know, "the leaderships have tried to do certain things and extend every opportunity to correct their views," et cetera.

GARDNER

Was some of the power struggle because Gus Hall feared the fact that you had a lot of followers and had been around the party for such a long time?

HEALEY

Well, in the sense that I just simply could not be the kind of person that he prefers, that he wants to work with and surrounds himself with, that is, one who simply takes for granted that as general secretary he is omniscient and omnipotent. His attitude toward me is no different than his attitude was, for instance, towards someone like Bob Thompson, a long-time Communist leader who died in 1965. He did everything in the world—Bob was national executive secretary of the party for years, after Gus Hall came in—and Gus did everything to get rid of him because (although he and I didn't see eye to eye on many questions) Bob was not a person to simply follow anybody's instructions. He thought. He was a thoughtful. . .

GARDNER

He was the war hero, wasn't he?

HEALEY

That's right, he was the war hero. But this is true; there are dozens of people like this that Gus simply cannot tolerate that kind of association with. And the ones who stayed in the leadership, the old-timers like Carl Winter, Helen Winter, Jim Jackson, Hy Lumer—there's kind of a quid pro quo that they operate. It's like a number of feudal duchies: he doesn't interfere with the way they operate, and they don't interfere with the way he operates. When they have big differences among themselves, they don't let the Central Committee ever know about it. Those differences are kept strictly among themselves. The best example of that is the speech that Gus gave to the Central Committee a year ago last December, in 1972, entitled "The Lame Duck," where he totally rejected, with a sweeping generalization, the electoral policy followed by the party more or less since 1935, since the Seventh World Congress. Now, I know that neither Carl Winter nor Jim Jackson, both of whose politics go to the right, agreed with that speech of Gus Hall's. But neither one of them would think of standing up in a Central Committee meeting, which again theoretically is the major policy-making body between conventions, in order to disagree with him in front of the Central Committee. You have this sweeping change of policy, and not one person in that Central Committee meeting in 1972 asked a question or challenged a dismissal of a line that the party had followed for thirty-five, forty years before. Nobody said boo. As I say, Gus is more extreme and demanding in silencing any questioning than any party leader I've known in the past. Although none of them were exactly known for encouraging expressions of differences, Gus has gone further than any I've known in silencing any differences. The other nonsense of these things: well, first of all, they contradict their own original statement when we resigned. They say in this new document, "In anticipation of being expelled for their flagrant violation of party principles, both recently announced their resignation from the party." First of all, as I say, it wasn't so recent. But secondly, they issued a statement that the People's World carried at the time of my resignation stating that it was just absolutely untrue that there was any thought of expelling us, that this was the farthest thing from their mind. Now, of course, because it suits their purposes, they just totally reject their own past statement and have a new statement. As far as this question of "continuing to seek factional support for their positions within the party while building associations with known anti-Communist forces," well, first of all, neither of us had tried to seek any factional support within the party. If I'd wanted to seek factional support, I wouldn't have resigned. I would have organized and built a factional movement to fight against expulsion, if there were any danger of that, and at least [have tried] to advance my theory and my own positions. I would not have urged other people to remain within, nor would I have—well, I just simply would not have conducted myself as I have since I left. For instance, Bob Abernathy's KNBC program has three or four times called and asked me to come on his program to be interviewed. I refused to do it, because in his case I think that what he really wants is for me to attack the party. I'm simply not going to engage in that kind of nonsense. I'm not going to build up or utilize the anti-Communist nonsense that already exists in this country by discussing this kind of question in a forum where I could not explain the differentiations, the nuances of the political courses involved.

GARDNER

On the other hand, couldn't you say just that?

HEALEY

Well, I have said that.

GARDNER

No, I mean on an interview program.

HEALEY

Yes, I probably could, but it's a very difficult problem, to be able to do it and still be honest. At a later time, I may accept some of those invitations. I just really haven't been anxious to. There's just one ironic note. "They expressed pride in their new credits with the capitalist media and publishing houses." The only one who's ever expressed any pride in that is Gus Hall in his speech "The Lame Duck," where he boasts about the meeting he had with the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times and goes on in great vulgar detail about how important that makes him, as well as all the radio and television interviews and whatnot. As a matter of fact, as a further irony, I just got an article from Hawaii, an interview that Gus gave in October. I hadn't seen it before. (He's not the only one interviewed; it's also Danny Rubin and others who were interviewed. It's done by a Washington Post writer, William Breether; I got a copy of it from the Honolulu Advertiser, dated October 4, 1973.) And the concluding paragraph—most of it is just a boast of how strong and important and relevant the party is and how it has so much among the young people and whatnot, but in regard to Al Richmond's and my resignation, Gus gives the following answer: "'There is such a thing as getting tired,' he said, 'just getting tired of the struggle. And instead of having the courage to say that, you know, you find a kind of excuse. I think that's kind of a human thing.’” Meanwhile, here I am being expelled because I wasn't tired, because I'd gone to meetings and continued to try to participate with people. What's not mentioned is the fact they brought up in the meeting, that I'd been attending these Coalition for the Restoration of Democracy in Chile meetings and whatnot, all of which they construed as being against the party. So the expulsion is not, as he says in the Washington Post, because I'm tired, but because I wasn't tired enough to suit their purposes. The other sad thing over and beyond the sectarianism and the further religiosity, another example really of the religiosity, is the fact that this passed unanimously. Now, I talked to a young woman here who is a member of the National Council, whom I recruited into the party, a woman by the name of Tamu, who was chairman of the Che-Lumumba Club. (I should say more properly she says I recruited her into the party; I would simply say I helped recruit her in the party. There are others that certainly participated, most particularly Kendra and Franklin Alexander.) She tried to describe the meeting to me when she first came back, that the national leaders had reported on all kinds of things I was supposed to have done. Her statement was confirmed: I called Bill Taylor to ask him what it was all about and he reported on meetings I was supposed to have attended, as an example, in Santa Cruz. I'd never been to a meeting in Santa Cruz in my life. He reported on a person who left the party some twenty-five years ago with whom I'm supposed to have met, a Merle Brodsky. I haven't seen Merle Brodsky in twenty-five years. Factually, just total inaccuracies. And Tarau said to me, "You know," she said, "I was really upset when I heard that resolution, the proposals to expel you. But I figured, after all, they must know what they're doing. They're the leadership. They must have the facts, and I just don't have them. And so," she said, "I went ahead and voted for it, but I'm very ashamed of myself for it. And," she said, "I'm going to go to the district committee meeting on Saturday, and I'm going to stand up and say how I've been misled." I should say parenthetically that I had shown her each fact was absolutely untrue, that it was just lies. She said, "Well, I'm going to go to that district committee meeting on Saturday and say that I was taken in by my faith in them, that the leaders knew what they were doing, that they were honest and so forth. [I will] not be a part of it." But when that district committee meeting took place on Saturday, she stood up and made a big speech about how unity of the party is essential, the party can't grow as long as all these disturbances still take place around my name, and that the only way to stop it is to stop associating with me. What really happened, though, as I say, that has significance. . . . Angela Davis voted for this. Bettina Aptheker. And I use those two names because Bettina, for instance, prides herself on having an independent position. For instance, she told me two years ago how she continues when she's asked about Czechoslovakia, to speak out her own opinion in public speeches opposing the intervention. And yet she voted for it. Angela, who sent me the message while she was in the San Rafael jail, asked me to come up to see her because she wanted to leave the party, and whom I convinced that she had to remain—she couldn't leave in the middle of this case; it would just be too devastating to the party if she moved to take that action—Angela voted for it. I know she doesn't believe or think these things. But I keep remembering two things that I think, as I say, have overall relevance on this question. The first is a statement that I think I've told you about which Ben Davis made after the National Committee had had the Khrushchev speech on Stalin read aloud to us. In the meeting afterwards, Ben stood up and said, "Dear comrades, we should all remember that if we had been in power, we would have done the same things in killing our comrades with whom we disagreed." There is that pressure and that push, that you don't challenge, you don't ask questions. I can look back on my life, the expulsions I voted for--I'm thinking particularly of Roy Hudson's, knowing that it was all a lot of nonsense—there was no reason to expel him—and yet I went along because if I challenged it. . . .

GARDNER

When was that?

HEALEY

That was about 1951, 1950, probably. It was at the time of the great hysteria over the supposed Tito spies within the world communist movement. So as I told Tamu when she called me, I said, "Oh, I can understand why you voted as you did. I have done comparable things in my history, and it's taken me a long time to understand how outrageous those things are and what they represent and why one shouldn't be a party to it." As I say, if you want to understand things that happen in the socialist countries, this is—I mean, here where the party doesn't have power, all it can do is expel. Clearly, if I were living in a country where the party was in power, I would not just be expelled; I would be in jail, if not worse. But I think, as I say, the fact that nobody asked any questions, that people whom I know were in contact, for instance, with Arthur Kinoy and the group, who disagreed with Henry Winston's blanket condemnation of it, [that they didn't speak up], that anything is looked upon as an opponent if it is simply something that the party doesn't control—these things are far more important than the personal effect on my life. The effect on Al may be a little sharper; I don't know. I don't know how many people he sees in Northern California. But as far as Los Angeles is concerned, I really don't know of anybody whom I care to associate with from the party from the past who has stopped any association with me for the present. The beat example is that after the district committee meeting two weeks ago where this resolution was voted on, immediately after it was over, the phone started ringing with people telling me what had happened at the meeting, and their indignation.

GARDNER

Considering it as a tactic or a style, as you say, a way of life really within the socialist movement, is this necessary as part of growing pains, do you think? Or is it the fatal flaw?

HEALEY

No. I think it is a fatal flaw. Though it's not unique to the Communist party: the Socialist Workers party operates exactly the same way. I think what it all stems from is a worldwide acceptance—"worldwide"? well, not in every party; every party's not identical, but in this country on the part of the Communist party and the Socialist Workers party and others who consider themselves Leninist vanguards—a total distortion of Lenin's concepts of a party, what Lenin had to say, or any attempt to think through or prove through what the nature of a vanguard party could or should be in an advanced capitalist country as distinct from that of a backward czarist country. Simply the inability to either conduct public debate—which was the hallmark, really, of the old Bolshevik party (everything was public and anybody could know what was said, in terms of political positions)—or to tolerate dissent. Because, as I say, dissent is first labeled as heresy, and then it is labeled as counterrevolution. When you label it counterrevolution, that allows you then to deal with it as if it represented the enemy, the class enemy, and anything you then do is justified. That's all on the chronology then. Back to some of the overall generalizations and theory, the problems of Marxism. This is really related in a way to those overall questions as well.

GARDNER

Well, it does tie in also in the sense that— let me ask another question which might bridge it in a way. Might the result of a stage like this be a sort of acculturation in the sense of making philosophy into a system that exists according to humankind? In other words, to come back to the religious comparison, it's not unlike the same things that happened with Christianity and Islam, where as long as they were machines of war, they were able to proselytize. Their own philosophies didn't really stand up by themselves, but as soon as they got tied in to crusades, religious warfare, suddenly they became--well, they conquered whatever parts of the world they were setting out to conquer.

HEALEY

Well, I don't know that I'd use that comparison. I think more relevant is the question of the acceptance of millions of people of a priori definitions of reality that have nothing to do with reality—in other words, the role of faith in religion and the role of faith in being a communist. Now, in the first aspect, it's understandable as regards religion. Why? Because that's supposed to deal with the afterworld primarily, when you're dead. Therefore all you can go on is faith. You certainly can't prove scientifically that there is such a thing as an afterlife. You can't prove there is a God; you can't prove anything about a supernatural. So that the only way you can hold the allegiance of millions upon millions of people is simply by blind faith, the faith in something that isn't, the faith in something that can't be identified or established. It becomes very real. The communist movement does that, where it does it—it doesn't do it everywhere, but where it does it--by requiring faith in policies and institutions. In other words, you have to have faith in the Communist party as a thing in itself, that it is always right and can never be wrong, because it, quote, "follows the laws of society," as if those laws of society, of capitalism and/or of socialism, operate in the same conditions as the laws of nature, which can be checked empirically and tested. But you cannot do that with laws that are really, in the main, as Marx kept explaining, merely tendencies of something to operate under given conditions. But there is also the other question. In the Bible there's a phrase, "Thy will, not mine, be done, O Lord. Thy will, not mine, be done. You know, I suffer on the cross," or something. When you find someone like Angela or Franklin or Bettina Aptheker voting for this kind of nonsense, that's what you're finding. They think they're being very revolutionary by subordinating their own knowledge, their own minds, to what they consider the greater good of the party. And that's the other part of the tragedy of it. Now, of course, it immediately rises to my mind—and I've had an interesting two weeks thinking about it—my own response to this kind of thing. I've always been puzzled by people who left the party for whatever reasons—sometimes good, sometimes bad reasons—so many of whom did become anti-Communists. In fact. Not because the party defined them as such, but whose actions objectively and subjectively became that. They felt it. They hated the party. I was somewhat aghast to notice that my first reaction when I read this was almost the same kind of fury and indignation and hatred as. . . . Almost a feeling, "I know those people. I know every one of those people who voted for this, and I know so many things about all of them, and I could use the word bums for what some of them are. By God, they're not going to get away with this." Well, that was a very momentary reaction. It didn't last very long, because here, again, one's dealing with something that is far more important and far more complex than the question of subjective responses to it. When I used to say that the party was greater than the sum total of its parts, what I meant by that was that the party had to be viewed in a relative way, that you couldn't judge it by what it was at any particular point. You had to see its potential for being something other than it was at that point. And I would still, in a way, say the same thing. I must say I don't have much optimism that this particular party will necessarily overcome its attitude of having a franchise from the Soviet Union to operate on its behalf in the United States, which affords [the leadership] a great many perquisites that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have, including an enormous number of people who can travel abroad without any cost and get great tributes, or the honorary doctorates that are handed out to people like Jim Jackson, Claude Lightfoot, and Will Weinstone. (I notice that the first two use the title "Dr." now in identifying themselves, [laughter] These doctorates they get at either Leipzig or Moscow, they're about as worthwhile as a high school diploma, if one had one.) As I say, the last two weeks I've had to think over and over again my own attitudes and how I would express them and how I would feel about them. Although I think the party would be simply delighted to have me become an anti-Communist in the full sense of the word, I would be betraying my own thinking and my own heritage if I were to do that. I would then be doing exactly what they, in their vulgarized approaches towards people, think is essential. I just simply am not going to. I hope I am not going to fall into that kind of ridiculous trap, mainly because it does betray what is far more important than these momentary episodes, and that is the long-range significance of what is potentially a revolutionary movement where what is essential is fidelity to Marxism (I'm thinking now in terms of its methodology, not in terms of any one particular concept or conclusion). Furthermore, I used to say all during the years that I still stayed in, even though I was in such sharp disagreement, that my loyalty was not—that as far as I was concerned, Gus Hall and company were not the Communist party. The Communist party belonged to me as much as it did to them—more so, probably, because I had fought in its ranks longer than any of them.

1.49. TAPE NUMBER: XXIV, SIDE TWO JANUARY 11, 1974

HEALEY

So, if I was accurate before in saying that Gus Hall and company are not the Communist party, I'm just as accurate today when I say that what this present Central Committee does in its leadership—and the acceptance of it by lots of the members—is really irrelevant to what it can be, should be, needs to be, if it's going to become any kind of an effective revolutionary instrument in this country. To react any other way is really to give it a dignity and a meaning that at this particular point, if I can quote [John] Ehrlichman and [H.R. "Bob"] Haldeman, at this particular point in time in history, it doesn't warrant having. [tape recorder turned off] Partly this problem also refers to one of the things I can vaguely remember we talked about the last time you were here, and that is the big difficulty that is faced by any party in the wide range and latitude of thinking and capacity for any kind of analysis of the membership of the party and/or the masses whom you want to influence. Again, I'm relating back to this question of faith because it's such a highly significant question in all of the movements, all of the parties. If I were to single it out, I'd make it the number-one question. Even the people here in Los Angeles, the young people who voted for and accepted this resolution or if they didn't vote for it, because they weren't at the meeting, would have accepted it, they need to be able to feel this question of the total accuracy of anything—but here what I'm getting at, the point is, even though in their own knowledge they know it's not true. . . . One of the things we talked about last time was the question of consciousness as it has to do with Marxism; I described how Marx had defined ideology in the beginning as false consciousness, the gap between reality and how people visualize that reality, their acceptance of a whole body of ideas that are totally false as far as either their own lives and/or their society around them, because they accept the mythologies of the ruling class. Now, Marxists are very familiar with this. But what Marxists have never really done thoughtfully or carefully enough is to study the way in which we have developed our own false consciousness, our own body of fraud, of a priori judgments, of definitions, which may have absolutely nothing to do at any one point with reality, with that objective world; and yet we accept it as a body of thought, accept it without question as being true, because it's what we've always said and always believed. This is really probably the most important problem of all, important twofold. One, I don't think we are going to increase our capacity, our facility in dealing with the question of the false consciousness that capitalism breeds unless we are also able to deal with our own false consciousness, with the difference between the way we perceive reality and that reality itself. The two propositions are really interrelated. You can't, for instance, find the most effective way of dealing with the reality of capitalism and the way in which masses of people see that reality falsely unless you're capable of going beyond an ideological definition for yourself, and in this case I'm using the word ideology simply in the way in which Marx used it, as false consciousness.

GARDNER

Is it possible to have an ideology or a system of belief—I guess it's the same thing—without faith? I think that may be the next question. Because in a sense, capitalism and communism are theoretically economic in basis. Yet at the same time capitalism depended very strongly on Protestantism to grow. It had to be combined with a faith that what you were getting in this world was really getting you whatever it was getting you. So can faith really be separated from this, do you think?

HEALEY

Well, I place the word faith in two different categories. For a communist, for a Marxist, I would use the word confidence rather than faith. Confidence in this regard, just to illustrate the point: a confidence that the working class can become conscious of the reality of its class position in society and therefore capable of helping to transform the society. That's different from faith in that it operates first of all on a relative scale. It sees the obstacles to that class acquiring it. It is based really on what it recognizes as the inexorable pressures that are always present upon that class through exploitation, that never cease. Capitalism can reform— it can offer this palliative and then another—but the basic things that create the crises of capitalism are always going to be present as long as capitalism exists. It's a question of the confidence that these operations are going to continue, in other words, exploitation will continue as long as the means of production are owned by a number of private people instead of being publicly owned and operated by those who produce the wealth. That's one kind. I mean, you can use the word faith. As I say, I think the more precise word would be confidence.

GARDNER

But it has deteriorated into faith. That's what I mean.

HEALEY

Well, that's true.

GARDNER

Is it possible to avoid?

HEALEY

Well, for large sections of people, no, it isn't possible. It isn't possible for the reason that we talked about before, and that is the inability of many people to read and analyze and study. A revolutionary party has to be made up of all kinds of people, including those kinds of people. But if it only has those kinds of people and nothing else, then of course it cannot grow. Now again, if you want the religious analogy, Gramsci, the Italian Communist, makes the comparison of the church and party in this way. He says that in the Catholic Church, the Jesuits are entrusted with the very delicate job of adjusting the dogma to take account of whatever changes are taking place scientifically in the world, but to do it in such a way, to have the changes be so imperceptible, that only the initiate recognize that it is happening, but the faith of the millions is left undisturbed. Now, that's a comparable problem in the party. I gave you the example some years ago when we started these interviews, [laughter] of what happened when Gene Dennis made a speech in 1956 saying that the line of the party had been wrong for so many years. It just absolutely outraged most of our membership, who didn't want to believe that such a thing was possible, even though it was one of the boldest and most courageous actions that any party leader ever took. They didn't want that. They wanted to believe, and clearly had the need to believe, that while an individual can be wrong, the party as an entity, as a totality, could never be wrong. As I say, the trap is if what is ignored is—and here I have to use the phrase—the dialectical processes through which a larger number of people become aware of the real world, of the reality of that world, of the limitations of past positions, of the limitations of past thought. If there isn't that constant struggle to increase the competency and proficiency of revolutionaries in dealing with that reality, if there is simply the acceptance and only the initiate can know and understand the truth, then first of all you can only develop an elitism. Only the precious few can have the brains to understand it. Which is nonsense. Because that leap that human beings can make into scientific thought--I mean, the potentials are enormous of how many people can make it, but they can't make it unless there is a channel open which provides the kind of pressure that forces people to confront a reality and to recognize it as it is and not as one has previously defined it or accepted it. Now, actually the problem of consciousness is probably the most difficult problem which Marxist thought, Marxist theory, Marxist politics, the revolutionary movement has to confront. There has always been the assumption both implicit and explicit in Marxist writers, all the great Marxist writers, that mass consciousness changes in the course of struggle, that as people participate around immediately and easily perceived needs, that in that struggle they become conscious of the limitation of the surrounding environment and ultimately reach revolutionary consciousness, which requires the elimination of the surrounding environment, the transcending of it to a new system of society, a revolution. Now, one sees in practice among various groups that consider themselves Marxists very differing interpretations and applications of that concept. I was just reading this week an article of the Socialist Labor party in its Weekly People in which they scorn the idea of reforms as being just outright anti-Marxism, that what is required, they say, is for people to be around who continue to educate the workers and find out the fallaciousness of their thinking, and that then the workers will accept new thinking. Well, that is why we've always laughed at the Socialist Labor party, that its program today is the same as it was in 1890, because of their contempt for what they call the struggle for reforms. You see it in modern form. I just received an article through the People's Translation Service of a statement made by a group of French feminists who consider themselves revolutionary, who make the flat statement in regard to the fight for abortions that it's ridiculous to try to fight to reform male-run institutions in France, that it's totally impossible, that they can't change it, and therefore all you can do is continue to violate the laws. Now, the fact is that all they had to do was look across the Atlantic to the United States and they would have seen that as a result of the enormous struggles that have been waged in this country, those, quote, "man-made" institutions, those laws, were changed, so that now the ease with which women can get abortions is greater than at any time in history, and certainly it would represent in a country like France the most enormous kind of step forward. And it is possible to be done. Yet the reality that there already exists a country in which [the pro-abortionists] have won, where the Supreme Court decision validated [their position], those facts are just totally ignored by these French feminists who consider themselves, as I say, revolutionary because they have the definition that the institutions are run and made by men and therefore men will never let them change. In other words, you don't have to be a member of the Communist party to have the a priori answer all ready to define the reality. But the more difficult problem is the question of how you find the balance between the struggle for reforms through which people will struggle for immediate things (and in the course of it recognize the limitation of the capitalist environment), coupled with that vision of the socialist alternative. I think that we have developed a kind of mystical faith—and I think this is true worldwide of most of the Communist parties—in this concept of ours, that as people struggle around immediate things they transform their consciousness. That's true for some, of course, but the fact is that the history of capitalism is replete with enormously militant struggles on the part of the working class in western capitalist countries, including the United States, tremendously militant struggles, but those struggles did not produce the kind of class consciousness that Marx defined as [that moment] when the class recognizes itself as representing a separate class from all others in society, one that has to react to the total societal injustices and change the economic system. So that is one question, the question of consciousness, the belief that the quantitative changes will produce a qualitative leap into revolutionary consciousness, which I think needs far more exploration and study. And that's tied as well with other concepts of what makes human beings tick. I am not discussing these in any hierarchical order, in any order of priority or importance, because it really isn't possible to separate them out. You can start at almost any one angle of these kind of questions, and they would take you into all the related questions. An example of the related questions: the uniqueness about Marxism should lie in the fact that Marxist theory is dependent upon practice to test the validity of its theory; secondly, that new theory really arises as a result of the generalizations arrived at from practice, from activities that have been carried out. Well, the obstacle to doing that in our world, our contemporary world, is twofold. On the one hand, you have those who proclaim themselves as Marxists but who are not identified with any organization of any kind. Now, they have a certain independence of thought as a result of it (I'm thinking of people like Marcuse or Paul Sweezy, people for whom I would have respect in terms of their integrity), but because they are not related to any organization they have absolutely no feeling of responsibility that the theories they are spinning have to be carried out by human beings and therefore have to have some degree of coherence and relationship to any organized constituency so that they can move that constituency. On the other hand, you have the intellectuals within the Communist party, who, as I think I've mentioned in past interviews, consider it a noble vindication of democratic centralism that they [override] their oxtfn competencies acquired through study in order simply to provide the rationale for every momentary change of tactics of the Communist party, therefore doing violence to their own knowledge and their own competency as a result, in effect becoming almost intellectual whores—I mean, not because they're necessarily going to get something from it, but they think it is very noble that they are subordinating themselves. Now, there is always that narrow delicate line; again, history doesn't give one any written insurance blanks that are filled out that tell you how to avoid that kind of problem. On the one hand, as I say, I'm thinking now of the independent radicals or of people like those on the magazine Telos, the philosophical journal that is so abstract because they don't have to deal with problems of organization; therefore, their philosophical concepts are never challenged or tested. But it is also true that all these kinds of people do have a kind of "independence"--and I put that in quotation marks—that others within the party don't have because they don't have to adjust their positions to any current line. On the other hand, before anything else, Marxisir is a theorty of revolution, the program of revolution. And so the revolutionary who is not a member of any organized movement is not really being a very good Marxist. You know the famous phrase of Marx, that now is the time not just to interpret the world but to change the world. Obviously you don't change the world by individual brilliant analyses. You change the world through collective organization and activity with those who think roughly the same way as you do. So the point I'm making is again this question of a balance between intellectual integrity, competence, and capacity, and the subordination of the individual—the necessary subordination of individualism (not individuality, but individualism), in which all one is concerned with is one's own ideas and not the way in which an effective collective striking force is able to be strengthened. Now, that same problem of balance. Balance, balance, balance. If I were to single out the one most difficult— you know, the thing that flows from the questions of consciousness and all the other questions of policy and program, it would be this question of balance. What I mean by that is the ability to reconcile what appear to be not necessarily identical questions, to reconcile them again in a dialectical way, the recognition that what is today will not be tomorrow. You've got to make your policy based on what is today, or you can't ever reach that tomorrow. So how do you find the way to take into account the variables introduced into life as a result of intervention by masses of people, see what the long-range change can be, and yet do it in such a way that it is linked with the here and now, with the consciousness of the people who have to move now if that human variable is to be transformed? I could give a dozen different examples of this problem as it expresses itself in organized form in the Communist party. The most famous is—not the most famous; there are so many, maybe I'll just give ones that illustrate what I'm talking about, with the understanding that they're by no means complete—the Nazi-Soviet pact. To be able to differentiate and recognize and explain and defend the diplomatic needs of the Soviet Union in trying to forestall what was clearly a pattern of the capitalist countries to force a Nazi-Soviet war, and to gain time, whatever time could be gained diplomatically, by that agreement, to make that clear to masses of people, millions of people, so that they could understand both what capitalist governments are doing in their diplomacy and why the Soviet Union does what it does. . . . But not to make it your political line. In other words, you explain it but don't make a line out of it, that there's no difference, in effect, between the Nazis and, say, the British imperialists, that they're all the same, which is what all the Communist parties did throughout the world after that pact. Or a big fight we had, Gus Hall and I, in about 1965 at a National Committee meeting, where Gus, in discussing the pressures of the war in Vietnam, said, "There is absolutely no question that the skids are greased for all social legislation in the congress, that you cannot prosecute this kind of imperialist war and still allow for progressive social legislation to be passed." I argued against it on the ground that while in a long-range sense that's absolutely true, it is not true in a short-term sense. If you substitute your long-range analysis for what is in the short term the reality, then you cannot mobilize a struggle, a fight, because you cannot fit a political program that approximates that reality. Well, it just happens to be that in "65 Congress, as you remember, passed more social legislation than had been done since the New Deal days—the War on Poverty, all these other acts that were passed then. Now, in the long run what Gus had to say had truth. It was just not true for the short terra. Now, when we lack that balanced estimate, first of all, we are always dealing with a "crisis" theory of capitalism, that it's always on its last legs. You only have to look at the titles of Gus's last few speeches. "The House of Imperialism is Crumbling"; "Capitalism is on Its Last Legs"—every speech is entitled the same thing— to see what sheer nonsense. ... If people really read and listened and paid attention to what those words say and what he's saying, even the most devout would have to be a little bit skeptical because all they have to do is look around them and they see that while, again, in a historic sense imperialism is in a less secure position than it was say twenty-five years ago, in the immediate sense it has enormous reserves, enormous resiliency, enormous strength. Now, therefore the question of policy is a very real one. If you predicate your policy on what you see in the long run but you make it for today, people will laugh at you. If you cannot place in a popular enough way the relationship between the here-and-nows and that tomorrow, you cannot lead a revolutionary movement adequately or accurately. Now, it is also true that the concepts of Marxism make account for giant leaps forward and changes of mass consciousness. Lenin talks, for instance, about the fact that there are certain periods in history where one day or one week may accomplish what twenty years of normal history would ordinarily take. That, of course, is absolutely true. But one doesn't know what that boiling point will be, nor when it's reached, nor how it's reached, because, again, you're not dealing with laboratory experiments; you're dealing with human beings. The variables that are present there are so enormous that each party and each organization has its own difficulties, its own problems, in developing those policies that are based on the hope to do in life what Lenin talked about so easily in words when he used the term, "One spark can start a prairie fire," to know what issues can so galvanize and transform people. I have a feeling this energy crisis could be one of the greatest things in terms of mass consciousness. I mean, we already know from the polls that people recognize that the oil corporations and the government are collaborating in a gigantic deceit and fraud. But if that could be now transformed into a huge awareness, "Why should those kind of utilities that human beings depend on and need—everybody has to have them—be privately owned in the first place? Why shouldn't those be owned by the people, the wealth belong to the people? The oil is part of the people's resources. By what right can a handful of men commandeer the people's resources to make huge profits on artificial scarcities?" But that again is part of the problem both of finding the way to reach millions in a language that is comprehensible, and simultaneously of projecting those kind of programs and policies that force them into struggle and equip them to fight against what the government and the oil corporations are doing which affects every single individual's life in this country. It isn't enough simply to point out the mendacity that is present in the oil corporation stuff or the Nixon administration. You have to also be able to point out alternatives and actions, activities that can be carried on so people will then learn for themselves what a gigantic fraud the propaganda of the monopolies is, and what alternatives would be feasible. Now, there are other questions which have to do with this question of reality. In putting away papers this morning, I ran across a minority report I gave at the national convention in 1969 that again confirms--and here I use the term "Catch-22"—the party's definition of democratic centralism as a Catch-22. When Party Affairs printed the full proceedings of that convention, this minority report of mine, which was officially given and authorized by the resolutions committee and then authorized by the convention, [this report] wasn't mentioned at all in the proceedings; there was not even an allusion to it. What it had to deal with was the draft resolution that had been submitted by all of the world parties that were going to attend the conference in Moscow in 1969. There had been, oh, fifteen, eighteen, twenty parties participating in what were called the preparatory meetings in Budapest, preparing this draft resolution, which was then submitted to the parties throughout the world, those who were going to attend, for discussion. When I read the resolution that was handed to us, I pointed out that all that this resolution really was, was a catalog of events without any analysis, totally devoid of analysis, that the whole—all the trends that were present in the world, both in the capitalist world and the socialist world and in the so-called Third World countries—was simply reportage. I said that I thought that one of the reasons for this—and I called it a "bland estimate"—was that we have come to believe that this is the way to be positive, not to be negative and cynical. And then I said, "But I would suggest that this approach reduces us to becoming the Norman Vincent Peales of the left wing, writing about the power of positive thinking as if that would transform reality. It should not be, in my judgment, negative thinking to discuss the problems and difficulties which confront us on the world scene or at home. On the contrary, it is only as we discuss these problems that we find solutions. The resolution of the preparatory committee for the world conference is an example of the power of positive thinking. I have no objection to it as far as its facts. It is written so that few would object to it. It is an amiable description of some features of this period. But it avoids the complex questions of the new reality on which the communist parties of the world are in disagreement, either in the analysis that is given on the problems or in the answers which are given on a few questions. It is a resolution of diplomats, not a blunt Communist confrontation on controversy. Obviously, this reflects the type of limited unity present even among those who will be in Moscow on June 6, 1969, a unity achieved by avoiding the areas of disagreement. "Inasmuch as all these questions are connected, Lenin's definition of proletarian internationalism has special relevancy for Communists in the United States." (And here, parenthetically, I want to say the reason I wanted to read this to you is that, as you'll remember in the statement expelling me, as in all the other attacks, I'm always charged with not being truly a proletarian internationalist. And all they mean by that is that I don't uncritically accept anything the Soviet Union does.) "Lenin's definition was, and I'm quoting now, 'There is one and only one kind of real internationalism, and that is working wholeheartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one's own country, and supporting this struggle, this and only this line, in every country without exception.’” (That is the test that he gave. And he did this, by the way, after the Russian revolution.) I said, "If we apply this kind of thinking to our responsibility, for instance to the national liberation struggles, this means that for their consistent advance there must be a weakening of imperialism in the capitalist countries. Otherwise the national liberation movement will grind to a halt or will go into bypaths or detours. In the resolution, we are given the example of Cuba and Vietnam as proof of the fact that socialism now plays the dominant role in the world. Now, both examples are, of course, tremendous truths that there are vital forces in the world to defeat imperialism. But Korea and China in 1953 also prevented a U.S. military victory. The difference between Korea and Vietnam is that South Vietnam has a powerful liberation movement which was not present in South Korea. But this was not the first time that imperialism was defeated. The Russian revolution provided that service many years earlier." (They're using the example of Vietnam as the proof that the world socialist system is now the dominant factor in all of world society. I'm saying that's just not true. You're wiping out the strength of capitalism and imperialism.) "Furthermore, it has not been a capitalist country which has been bombed for over three years"—and I'm referring to North Vietnam—"but a socialist country. If socialism is this triumphant on a world scale, this powerful, then how can one explain that the United States can bomb North Vietnam with impunity? Certainly the assistance provided by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries has been of decisive significance. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a socialist country can be and is being attacked with no military danger to the United States as a result. Now, one cannot have an argument both ways. That is, you can't use the continued existence of Cuba and the presence of the struggle of Vietnam as proof of the dominance of world socialism, and yet simultaneously ignore the meaning of the war against North Vietnam. "Further, in the panel that we held on the resolutions committee, Comrade Jackson"—Jim Jackson—"cited Indonesia as an example of how there was both good and bad even in defeats. He stated that even now Indonesia belongs to the Indonesians. But that is not true. The United States and other imperialist interests have regained their influence in the industries which had formerly been nationalized. The CIA has a far freer hand than under Sukarno. Jim Jackson further illustrated his theory by describing what has occurred in Peru. But he neglected to mention that a major reason why the Hickenlooper Act was not used by the United States to cut off Peru's sugar quota after it nationalized U.S. industries was that the [W.R.] Grace interests, the maritime industry, owned 60 percent of the sugar industry there and therefore it would not serve U.S. interests to do that. The same kind of argumentation is used around the Mideast, that the failure of Israel to overthrow the Egyptian and Syrian governments was a defeat for imperialism, and that anti-imperialism has been strengthened there. In other words, a military defeat is now a political victory. "In 1964, in his Yalta memorandum, Comrade Togliatti said, and here I quote him, 'We regard with a certain pessimism the perspectives of the present situation internationally and within our country. The situation is worse than that facing us two or three years ago. Today there comes an even more serious danger from the United States.’ Now, this was said by Togliatti before the bombing of North Vietnam, before the fall of Nkrumah in Ghana, before the Greek military dictatorship, before the Indonesian massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists, the coup in Brazil, the growth of the ultra-Right in the United States, and so forth. "Comrade Gus Hall says that a negative estimate -leads to tactics of retreat. The problem, I would suggest, is not in a negative or a positive estimate. It lies in making an objective estimate. Communists should not be such weak people that they need evangelical enthusiasm to determine tactics for victory. Obviously, if one looked solely at the defeats suffered in the last decade, one would not have this kind of objective estimate. Of course, one must take into account the strength that has been present, that is displayed by Vietnam in the continued struggle. I agree with Comrade Gus Hall that it is opportunism for a communist to be anti-Soviet. I have defended the Soviet Union in vociferous debates against right-wing speakers, against social democrats and others. But there is another type of opportunism to be guarded against, and that is one which looks solely to one's status in the world Communist movement and ignores Lenin's own definition of the primary struggle against one's bourgeoisie." (And I should explain here that that made Gus even madder because, of course, what goes on is that all that Gus Hall or Jim Jackson or these others care about is how they're thought of by the Soviet Union and others. Whether or not it leads to any advance in the United States is really unimportant. But do they get greater prestige internationally by their policies? And by "internationally" I mean in the Soviet Union.) "There is the opportunism which fears contending views being read within one's own party. How else can one explain that Santiago Carrillo's article is not reprinted in Political Affairs for every comrade to read?" (And here I'm referring to the general secretary of the Spanish Communist party, who wrote a brilliant article in the Spanish Communist paper on why the problems of the fourteen socialist countries are present and what approach should be taken. In our party this article of his was just hidden. Unless we here in L.A. had mimeographed it, nobody could have read it.) "In the resolutions committee meeting, when I suggested that we pass a resolution that Carrillo's article be printed, some comrades asked, 'How can we ask it to be printed if we don't know if we agree with it?' But that's precisely the point—not whether one agrees with it or not. The point is to acquaint oneself directly with the viewpoints of others. "Comrade Gus Hall denies that there is such a thing as a concept of limited sovereignty of socialist countries" (and this is in regard to Czechoslovakia). "I would refer him to the Pravda editorial on the Warsaw troops going into Czechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union's speech at the United Nations, or Brezhnev's speech at the Polish party congress, all of which in effect define the question of limited sovereignty for every socialist country." (What that means is their sovereignty is limited by how that policy is defined by the Soviet Union.) "What is the question here? Do the wider interests of the common defense of socialism override the principles of autonomy of Communist parties and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of socialist states? The common defense of socialism must rely on the combination of the political, economic, and military strength of the socialist countries and the struggles of the international working class, the peace movements and the national liberation movements. Weaponry and strategic positions, important as they are, are not enough. The morale, consciousness and fighting spirit of the people must be included." (And what I'm saying here is that you cannot impose socialism in Czechoslovakia defined by the Soviet Union on the bayonets of the Soviet Red Army.) "Furthermore, who must decide when the duty to intervene exists, whether socialism is endangered in a country? Will every party or group of parties be free to judge whether intervention is justified? Clearly that's not true. Little Bulgaria may not agree with what the big Soviet Union does, but it's not going to be able to intervene. To be consistent, our party program, which continues to call for the autonomy and independence of every party and country, should, with this present position that we now have, add the following: 'We are for this independence unless other socialist countries think we are in danger of ideological subversion, in which case they can militarily intervene in our country.' "I have profound confidence that in an ideological battle between the ideas of socialism and imperialism, socialist consciousness and ideology will triumph. If the military might of imperialism threatens the socialist world, the strength of the socialist world will be such as to be able to be the effective winner. If any socialist country is threatened, then the mighty Soviet Union can do what it did for Cuba in 1962, thousands and thousands of miles away, and that is to guarantee its safety without military intervention." What I clearly was getting at—and you can see why the speech was never printed nor referred to and also why there is a particular hatred of me from Jim Jackson, Gus Hall and others in the leadership—it comes back to this question of the reality. Because when you deal—for instance, at that 1969 world conference of the Communist parties that met, it became really almost a farce because first of all they had to avoid all the disagreements of the western Communist parties. Then the Soviet Union, although it had promised it would not do so, made that occasion a great one for attacking China. And those parties who didn't want to further polarize the world communist movement between the Chinese and the Soviets were furious that the agreement not to do so had been violated. But there was no real investigation of what the differences were and why they were, because again the controversial questions are, just by agreement, set aside and not debated. I could give many more examples of what happened at that conference. You issue documents then that are simply diplomatic ones. You read all of the documents signed by parties sending delegations to one another, and they sound as if they're written by a bunch of bourgeois diplomats, not by revolutionaries. This then starts to degrade the whole concept of Marxism as a live, vital tool. You can't play these kind of games and still develop that sharp, critical, striking independent vigor that Marxism demands of its supporters. And that's why, as I say, this question of balance— I come back to it again—sure, if one only looked, say, in the last decade of the sixties, at only the defeats that we suffered on a world scale, sure, you can't get an accurate estimate either. But to ignore those defeats and not draw lessons from them, then you get no further estimate. Why did it happen? And it's the same way with Chile. The American Communist party now has the position, as does the Chilean party—incorrectly, in my opinion— "This is not the time to discuss why the defeat happened, why the coup was able to succeed. Now we just want unity." Well, if you don't discuss why you lost, obviously you cannot then make corrections in order to guarantee victory next time. Well, there isn't a single instance of political life and of theoretical life where this question of balance, of looking at all of the facets of a phenomenon, is not absolutely essential if one is to find a political policy and develop a theory that does advance a revolutionary movement.

1.50. TAPE NUMBER: XXV, SIDE ONE JANUARY 21, 1974

HEALEY

We were talking in the previous sessions about the fact that many of the questions that relate to the party as an organization are not unique to the party; they are problems that are characteristic of any organization. That includes the questions of the contradiction that is inescapable, that you cannot in any way influence anything in an environment without organized effort, and yet the moment you join an organization you may of necessity have to yield your own individual judgment. Because clearly if everyone only exercises an individual judgment and there is no subordinating of that individual judgment to a majority opinion, then there isn't going to be any progress in anything. That goes, as I said before, as much for a PTA as it does for a revolutionary organization. There has to be, in any organization, the recognition, the consciousness, that the sacrifices one makes in order to be in that organization are worthwhile. In other words, in order to sustain an organization—any organization, again, doesn't make any difference what it is— there has to be a core of people who are willing to do only the activities essential for the operation of the organization, the maintenance of the organization. But every organization—and this is a well-known sociological fact (I giggle when I use the word "well-known" because of the way in which the Soviet Union and party leadership hearings use it, "well-known" meaning that they're not sure but they take for granted that if they say it often enough, people will assume it's well known. . . .) But it is a rather well known sociological fact that organizations have two characteristics. The primary one is that which they're in business for, that which they're organized for. In the case of the party, of course, that should constitute the capacity to educate, propagandize, and organize the majority of Americans on the need for a socialist revolution. The secondary one is the question of the maintenance and perpetuation of the organization. Now, here again there is what in Marxist language we call the dialectical contradiction, namely, that unless there is kept uppermost the primary goal— namely, revolution—there is a tendency, just through the pressure of the day-to-day maintenance of the organization, for that secondary goal (namely, its preservation, perpetuation, and continuance) to become the dominating thing. And when that happens, what you have, in effect, is a bureaucracy, and, in the case of the party—at least, in my experience in the last twenty-five to thirty years—a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. Let me give some examples of what I mean by this which have generalized significance and are not just a question of only the party or only ray own experiences. One of the characteristics of an organization where the primary goal is kept dominant is the capacity to change its personnel, its leadership, whenever the need is there, either because of incapacity, incompetence, the-square-peg-in-the- round- hole phenomenon, whatever the reason may be. One of the sure signs that the organization has allowed the secondary characteristic to become dominant—namely, its perpetuation—is when you see, first of all, an inability or incapacity or unwillingness or rejection of the examination of individual leaders and the responsibility that an individual has. And I use the term leadership when I am talking about the Communist party as representing anything from the club level through to the national level. In my experience, at least—and this is particularly true on the national level, which is understandable—the farther away from the membership the leadership is, the less is known as to what any individual in the party leadership does or doesn't do. It's really an incredible thing, how totally unaware the majority of party members are as to the individual responsibility, capacity, thinking of any individual national leader. They have absolutely no idea of any national leader's function. And that's really not only true of the membership; I'd even estimate that a majority of the National Committee at any one point won't necessarily know unless they're functioning directly in New York. Well, when you have, as we have had in the Communist party, a situation where there's a core of people who have been in that leadership for thirty to forty years— in some cases even longer--when the only way in which any change was made was either through death (as in the case of Ben Davis, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Dennis), or when the changes have been made because of sharp political differences that have arisen (and in this case I'm talking about where people have either left the party, or, as in the case of Browder, where the whole focus of all the errors of the past was placed on their shoulders and they were expelled). But outside of those individuals, the overwhelming bulk of the top national leadership has had an incredible identity. No matter how critical the party may be at any one point of what its past line has been, there is never called into question, "Well, what did these people who were in the leadership during the period that is under criticism have to say or do?" Well, that's one thing. But even more than that, as I say, is the question of just the daily operation of the assignment, of the task, of the particular role that an individual leader has. But the questions have never been asked, to my knowledge of the history of the leadership of the party, "Can that individual function? Does he or she carry through the minimum requirements of what that responsibility calls for?" Now, I'll not only give examples of the continuity of the people that I'm thinking of, but I'll also give some examples where, even when it's known that people are incompetent, political reasons will maintain them in office. But just in terms of the continuity of leadership: I'm thinking of Jim Jackson, Carl Winter, Hy Lumer, Gus Hall, Henry Winston. The names are legion, really—legion in the sense that you could find the continuity present in all periods of the party's activity.

GARDNER

Is this avoidable?

HEALEY

Sure, it's avoidable. It is avoidable by what is supposed to be considered a Leninist method of work, which is always talked about but never carried through. It's avoidable by the frequent practice of the checkup on decisions, the frank communist criticism of where people do or do not function, the recognition that people may have very good talents in one direction and be totally incapable in another—that of course would be the most modest check—but above all by what should be considered the essential part, if democratic centralism was fulfilled, and that is the reportage of the leadership in the stewardship of any leading body back to its constituency, to the next body below it. This is never done. In all the years I was on the National Committee, I never heard a report from the national secretariat to the political committee—the terms are almost interchangeable—as to what they did or when they did it or how they did it or why they did it. That's just as far as the collective. And as far as the individual is concerned, there'd occasionally be reports scheduled in the National Executive Board on an individual campaign or activity, but it was always a pro forma thing; it was always done for the effect. I can't remember any time when there was ever any very probing examination of why an assignment which was given was not carried out. The method of election of the National Committee adds to this, because the outgoing leadership during the period of the convention is usually elected to be what is called a presiding committee. That's the body that is supposed to make the recommendations for actions during a convention. Technically the National Committee ceases to function on the day a convention opens, inasmuch as a convention is the highest body of the party. But that national leadership, now named the presiding committee for the purposes of the convention, is the body that mainly makes the recommendations for the incoming National Committee to be elected. And what you have operating in the party, except in moments of great political crisis when the practice is challenged by the membership, is what is called a preferred list of people who are nominated. Anybody can be nominated, but placed on the ballot first is the slate that is proposed by the presiding committee, really by the outgoing National Committee. And by no great magic, the same names are on it that are those who are making the proposals, [laughter] And because the membership has absolutely no way of knowing what one or another individual national leader does or doesn't do in the way of performance of activity, or even what the individual's thinking is, the only thing the membership can do is follow the preferred list. And, you know, this whole question of faith in the leadership, "They know what they're doing"—therefore, you just almost automatically reelect the same people over and over again.

GARDNER

What is the basis for the structure? Is that Leninist? Is that the idea in theory?

HEALEY

Well, the idea is that you elect representatives to a higher body, who in turn elect representatives to a higher body, who in turn elect the national leadership. Now, in an area where everybody knows everyone else, there's more likelihood that the membership will have a little bit more knowledge as to whether people function. But even here in Los Angeles, I know that the bulk of our membership really knew very little about what individual members of the executive board in Los Angeles did or didn't do. I'm not talking now really of their particular thinking on questions—whether they followed one line or another—but whether they just carried through a minimum competency. Let me give some examples just from Los Angeles of two different people, one white, one Black. The white guy that I'm thinking of, Harry Hunt, has been in the party for probably forty years, an old-time trade unionist, and he likes to consider himself the voice of the working class, that he represents the true, authentic voice of the advanced revolutionary workers speaking out. An extraordinarily self-righteous human being, convinced that he and he alone of anybody that functions as a Communist is a proper Communist. Now, I've known him since about 1947 or '48, since he moved back to Los Angeles. He had been living first in Chicago and then San Diego. I have never known him ever to recruit anybody into the party. I've never known him to even sell a subscription to the People's World. He has lots of trade union contacts—he's busy screwing around and talks to them individually—but I've never known him to influence them to take any more radical or challenging positions than any nice, honest, good trade unionist who was being faithful just as a trade unionist would carry through anyway. And yet there's this mythology of his being this authentic voice of the working class. [laughter] Of course, what's interesting is that the people in that trade-union section, those old-timers, they knew he didn't function when he was the organizer of the trade union section of the party, that he was just a bombastic man who always gave big long speeches but didn't himself do any actual work. But in spite of that, when conventions would be held, they would not get up to criticize him for this. They would say it privately, but they would not say it on the floor of the convention. Or another example is the current [L.A.] chairman of the party, Bill Taylor, a Black comrade who's been in the party (and the YCL) since about '27 or '28. Now, he came here in 1949; before that he'd worked with the party in Connecticut and Baltimore and Washington, D.C., almost always full time. Now, every place he's worked, everyone knows that he really is not a very competent man. He's a very nice person--except when his own self-interests are concerned; if his toes get stepped on, then he isn't. But generally he's a very amiable human being, but simply not a competent human being. In his way, he is the counterpart of Harry. And this knowledge, for instance, about his lack of competency is better known even in the national office than it is in our own membership. Now, around him, for instance, one of the problems that impeded any real. ... I mean, there have been long battles with him in this district during the years when I was here, and of course that's one of the things that's now said about me, that I was, quote, "a racist" because I was always challenging him and fighting with him. What I kept always trying to convince him of was that when there is criticism, honest criticism, leveled at one by one's coworkers, that this is not a punishment for one's sin. This is really one of the greatest contributions the party can make to people, because we aren't really the best judges of our own effectiveness. We know our intent, but, as Lenin once wrote in a letter to Maxim Gorky, the world never judges us by our own intent, by what we know of the purity of our motive. They judge us, and can only judge us, by the objective results of what we do. And so in all the course of, say, twenty, twenty-five years, there were these very sharp battles in the board on the question of his work. Harry Hunt wasn't a member of the board; that's why I don't include him in the same category as I do Bill. Bill would just absolutely go berserk when he was criticized, would always charge that it was white chauvinism that was motivating it. I used to, both privately and publicly when the case came up—publicly in the sense of at conventions or party conferences— used to keep pointing out in a very general sense (in the large meetings I would not get as specific as I would in the small meetings) that this unwillingness to accept any criticism really would only hurt the individual. Because you cannot grow without pressure. People don't develop talents—they don't develop whatever latent possibilities they have--without some pressure, unless one's a unique individual, a self-starter all by oneself, which is most unusual. But, as I say, the national people were far more aware even than the local people of Bill's weaknesses. And yet two years ago the national people here in Los Angeles forced through the top leadership—the membership was never aware of it or consulted—a decision to give him this title of chairman, with the recognition, they said, that he wouldn't really be chairman (he'd just have a title) and that whoever was the executive secretary or the other title would really be the person politically responsible for the work. Of course, everybody knows ahead of time that's not going to work; it doesn't function. Once a person has a title, they have some automatic responsibility that goes with it. Now, they did it partly to reward him for his loyalty to the national office during the inner-party fights, that no matter what they said, he would do it without question or challenging. And partly because they didn't know what else to do with him: Here was an old-timer, been in the party a long time, a Black Communist. Every assignment he's had, he hasn't been able to fulfill. Well, then the answer is, you kick him upstairs even further, where he's further removed from defined responsibility—which is just the opposite, of course, from the way it ought to be. But the same examples could be given nationally of dozens of people, white, Black, and Chicano. And my point is that what has happened over this period of time—and I would say most particularly during Gus Hall's regime, more so than at any other time in the party's history—is that this secondary characteristic of organizational self-perpetuation has become an end in itself, the reason for existence, and has consumed, devoured the capacity of the party to be a revolutionary organization in the sense of effectiveness in challenging the status quo. Because clearly, ineffective, incompetent people, no matter how "pure" their hearts may be, how dedicated they may be, are not going to be able to effectuate any meaningful change. They can't build mass movements; they can't relate to what is new. They can't increase the capacity of the leadership qualities of the party to be a vanguard, to influence, far beyond its own numbers, millions of people in their lives. As I say, this is one of the factors, one of the aspects of the party that I find the saddest, because when this becomes such a dominant question, then, well, it really doesn't make any difference what line any organization has—it's incompetent and incapable of carrying it out.

GARDNER

Well, under the ground rules, though, isn't it almost automatically self-perpetuating, comparing it, say, to the seniority system in the U.S. government? As long as you have a system in which longevity becomes one of the requirements to remain a Brahmin, it's really impossible to keep any meaningful dialogue going between top and bottom, isn't it?

HEALEY

Well, but that's where, as I say, what were considered the Leninist concepts of organization obviated against that.

GARDNER

How? In what way?

HEALEY

Well, specifically, for instance, on the question of responsibility for work. If the individual within a collective and that collective itself have to report back on what they have actually done in carrying out assignments from week to week, then the lack of competency is known, or the presence of competency, as the case may be. Then when a convention takes place, people have some idea who to vote for and why to vote for them. Then it isn't an automatic thing. Secondly, even before conventions take place, if there is this kind of constant, consistent checkup on responsibility, on work performed, the finding of assignments in which that individual would be best qualified would be the dominant question. Not what title a person has, not whether they have whatever are supposed to be the privileges that come from higher positions, but the ability to have a team that is capable of producing would be the dominant question. As I say, if the Leninist concepts of democratic centralism were in fact fulfilled, these things would be met to some degree. Now, I'm not saying—I don't think there'll ever be a time when the concepts by themselves will always be operative, because in this case, as in every other case, the concepts have to be interpreted by living people. Living people have a tendency to interpret them for their own benefit, as will suit their purpose, which is what I think has very definitely happened with the party, that there has been this vulgarization and debasement of Marxist theory, or Marxist-Leninist theory. There is more talk about Lenin and less carrying through of Leninist concepts than at any time in its history. There is the other problem, too. There is this recent scientific discussion going on about these studies—where was it?—at Yale by this psychologist on pain, where they test out the willingness of people to apply what they think is extraordinary electric voltage to people who were supposed to respond to questions and give the right answer to the right question. If they didn't, the person "giving the test" was supposed to increase the voltage [to a point] that appeared to be, although it wasn't in fact, of just extraordinarily high voltage, and seemingly very painful. And good people, honest people, you know, nice people, were pressing those buttons, seemingly applying great torture—they didn't know that there was no such thing, they thought it was really doing it. This Yale psychologist insisted that the reason for it is the habit of people to obey leaders. It's a gruesome theory, and I really am no judge as to how scientifically competent the test was, how much it could judge. But again from my own experience, I know this habit of people: for the same reason they want to believe in a God, they want to believe in their leaders. A feeling of certainty, that you're able to answer the doubts and the hesitancies and whatnot, as well as the belief that these leaders do possess some inward fount of knowledge that you don't have access to, but they do, and that therefore you follow them when they say to do something. And when you find that happening in a revolutionary organization, just as you find it operating in society, all that really demonstrates is if that organization's revolutionary or not. All organizations have a certain general rhythm of activity that is not significant to just one and separate from the others. All of them more or less reflect the same laws of organization, the methods and the contradictions of organization. The only way in which the negative aspect can really be overcome is just by the greatest attention to the democratic functions of the organization, which includes, as I say, individual responsibility. Then it has another effect. (I may have mentioned this, and if I have, please stop me.) But I think of people whom I've known very well; I think of someone like Carl Winter. Carl Winter is a very, very bright man, but long ago, Carl made up his mind that the only way of being a revolutionary, a good Communist, was the totally Stalinist way—he had worked in the Soviet Union in the thirties in the Communist International—and that meant that you totally eliminate questioning in your own mind of any possible challenge to a particular line or policy or activity. Well, he and I were very, very close friends, and I probably know him as a human being better than I know many others in the national leadership. And over the years I've watched what happened to this really inherently bright man: the capacity to think starts in itself to become reduced. It's almost in an inverse ratio to your lack of questioning, your capacity for later questioning when you want to. In a sense, one becomes a zombie, incapable of independent thought; you've yielded so much of your own integrity and your own thinking in the name of the greater truth for so long that you can't recapture it when you want to. It just isn't there available at all times. It's another one of those things that if not utilized can wither away. I am, as you can see, rather intrigued by both the generalizations that apply to all organizations and those that I've seen specifically applied within the party. One reason I am is because I think that a lot of nonsense is said by anticommunists who themselves use a double standard in the way they judge the party and the way they judge any other organization. When in the party majority rule is supposed to dominate and the minority subordinate itself to the majority, that's considered just outrageous. But the fact is, almost all organizations function that way, and it's taken for granted that this is a necessary way of functioning. Of course, the same thing is true about bureaucracy. People see the bureaucracy of a party, but they don't see the same operation functioning either in corporations or in the U.S. government or in the Democratic party or in the ADA or—and certainly, as far as the other organizations on the left are concerned, the same problems are present for all of those organizations.

GARDNER

Isn't mere survival one of the reasons for this, the fact that these sorts of things have to be perpetuated in order that groups can even survive?

HEALEY

You're absolutely right. And that's again why what I define as the dialectical balance is necessary. It is absolutely necessary for that secondary characteristic of self-perpetuation to be present. But the question of balance comes in so that you don't make that the primary thing, because then you forget why you're organized in the first place, and then imperceptibly survival becomes not just the survival of the organization but the survival of the individual leader as representing the organization. I don't have any question in my mind that Gus Hall and Henry Winston believe that without them the party would be nothing, and that their method of survival is therefore for the good of the party, just as I always thought that the saddest (because it was the truest) word of Khrushchev's speech about Stalin was the last sentence, that everything he did, he thought he was doing in the name of socialism, that he was convinced that all of those tragic things that accompanied his regime in the party were indispensable for the survival of the socialist system, that otherwise it would have been crushed. And that's again why I come back to that Lenin letter to Gorky, that the world doesn't really judge you by your intent but only through the objective results of your activity. If that became understood and practiced, then the idea that (a) the party is essential as a channel through which a revolutionary struggle can take place; from that (b) there then follows the idea that you therefore speak in the name of the working class, that you're a surrogate for the class, and that you don't have to consult the working class to do that, you just speak in their name; and from that, the idea that (c) particular leaders at any one point are the party. These things all flow together very quickly and easily. I'm sure you find it in the university where any president or any head of a department or anybody else is convinced that whatever they do, they're doing it for the greater good of the system, of the university, of the department or discipline, whatever it may be. Of course, in addition to the question of balance, of being able to constantly examine that objectively and critically, which means the participation of others who don't share your position and viewpoint, a sense of humor is always helpful, too. That's something not terribly present in any human endeavor.

GARDNER

On the question of balances, though, do you think it can be achieved under this system of centralization that you've described as the Leninist principle? It seems to me that during the Stalin era, it was easy enough for all the followers of communism to rationalize that, yes, all wisdom did reside in Stalin, and whatever he was doing was right. As long as there is that central setup, where everybody is looking up at the leaders who are making decisions for them, isn't it almost impossible to have a real check, a real balance?

HEALEY

Yeah, I think that's true. Of course, that was the virtue of the Prague Spring and Prague Summer of 1968, the Czechoslovakian experiments: that for the first time, a Communist party in power—it would also have been the first time for a Communist party out of power--a Communist party in power, leading a society, was challenging precisely that question.

GARDNER

In what way did they challenge it?

HEALEY

Well, they challenged it first of all on the most important and significant question, the role of the Communist party, that its role was to influence and persuade and convince, not to lay down dicta, not to make the decisions for everybody in the society. That was one way. Secondly, to democratize even the party, to get away from the situation which actually does prevail: that is, that the operative leadership of the party is never the so-called "elected" either Central Committee or National Committee. It's always the smallest operative body that has the responsibility for the day-to-day activity that is the real leadership. You look at the question of the United States, if we had a socialist America. The kind of economic as well as political centralization that was present in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution was almost inevitable; I think that had to be. You had a tremendously backward economy, an 80 percent illiterate population. You had a relative handful of people dedicated to revolutionary change; they would have just been inundated by the wave of ignorance, if nothing else, that was present in that society. Czarist society had not built up a cultured, knowledgeable people, so that, to begin with, economic centralization was necessary (I'm not arguing the extent of it, but the concept of it). They had to do in just a few decades what it took capitalism centuries to do, that is, to build up a capital investment capable of massive, long-term building of heavy industry. And even insofar as the party is concerned, one could make an argument that some degree of centralization was necessary, although here it's important to note. . . . There's a current debate going on, I notice, around [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn’s latest book, The Gulag Archipelago, where there's a text on Lenin as being the man responsible for bringing in terror. The Los Angeles Times today interviewed Isaac Don Levine, this man who's made a profession and a livelihood for forty-five years as a professional anti-Sovieteer . . .

GARDNER

I was just going to ask you about that.

HEALEY

... as the expert on Lenin. Of course, it's really preposterous, because if anyone were to really make a study, say, of the Tenth Congress of the CPSU that took place in 1921, the Congress in the middle of a civil war and the Kronstadt uprising, where for the first time formal actions were taken to limit inner- party democracy because—and it was being very bluntly said—"We cannot afford the interminable public debate when we are being inundated and surrounded and overwhelmed by our enemies" (not ideological enemies, physical enemies who were invading the country and so forth). If anybody really studied that entire congress, they would find on Lenin's part the most scrupulous care for the rights of people who disagreed with him, his insistence that it was precisely those people who disagreed with him who had to remain on the Central Committee because he didn't want a Central Committee just made up of yes-men. I mean, Lenin's probably the only head of a party in the history of the party who could be voted down ten, twenty times in a row. (It never could happen after his death. A general secretary was omniscient; you never voted down a general secretary.) Or in Lenin's approach on the question of human life: When Kiev fell to the Bolsheviks--that was the last battle of the civil war-Lenin issued a pronouncement that that must mean the end of capital punishment as a method in the Soviet Union. There would no longer be capital punishment. This was in 1920 or '21, somewhere around in there, '21 probably. He hated the whole thing of capital punishment. But did that mean, on the other hand, that he did not propose violence against those who were identified as counterrevolutionaries, as enemies? No. But, you know, here knowledge of history is important, and again, I would make the same parallel as I'm making in regard to the questions of the strengths and weaknesses of the Communist party. We are not a unique organism separated from other organizations in society; the same thing is true of a socialist society and of Lenin in the first place. I'm thinking here, for instance, of the writings of Thomas Jefferson after the [Reign of] Terror and the French Revolution, in which Thomas Jefferson used phrases that are really haunting today, when you think of how relevant they are, such as: "Yes, there were innocent people killed during the Terror. But that wasn't the important or the significant thing because in some cases it was almost unavoidable if the revolution was to be carried through." He then used the phrase which I find evocative of this period: "There will have to be posthumous rehabilitation of those who were innocent and who were killed unjustly," but that you cannot judge the revolution and the need of that Terror on the basis that even innocent people got killed. Or Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee [at King Arthur's Court], who in describing the same period of the French Revolution says all the sorrow goes for that relatively short period of French history, the French Terror, when maybe a few thousand people were killed. But no one gives thought to the greater violence that went on for centuries and that filled the graveyards of France with the bones of the peasantry. For centuries that's where the real violence was. And of course, that's true in this question of the attacks on Lenin by Solzhenitsyn. I don't think it's any accident that—I'm using a party cliche when I use that phrase; that's always a well-known phrase like "well-known"; "It is no accident that," we always say—but I don't think it is any accident that Solzhenitsyn, in his open letter which the New York Review of Books printed, that he attacks Western liberals for linking up the terror under the Greek fascist dictatorship or the South Vietnam dictatorship with the defense of himself and other dissenters in the Soviet Union. He attacks Western liberals for doing that on the ground that none of those other things is as terrible as what happens to people like him and [Andrei] Sakharov and others in the Soviet Union. Well, in the first place, it's preposterous, even insofar as the degree of the violence, because if Solzhenitsyn knew anything about the Western world, which he doesn't know much of, he'd know that the degree of violence in the Greek dictatorship or South Vietnam dictatorship is a qualitatively higher degree of violence. He is not in jail, and he is living very comfortably, as is Sakharov. Now, don't misunderstand me; I think they have a right to write foolish, stupid things and not be punished for it. But that doesn't mean that I have to agree that what they have to say is very bright. I think Solzhenitsyn1s a great novelist, and so was Tolstoy. Tolstoy's politics were as bad as Solzhenitsyn’s. And, too, as I say, the comparison that he makes, the inclusion of Lenin, would indicate that really in this, as in lots of other things, it just has to do with political estimates as differentiated from literary qualities, literary gifts. He has little knowledge of the movements of history or of society and the way in which society changes. What makes it important is that, of course, the revolutionary always has to weigh the question--for instance, on the question of violence, every action has to be weighed to make sure that what is being done is not being justified by History (with a capital H), when in reality it is a violation of what you're fighting for, that is, the kind of society in which each human individual is free by virtue of the fact that all are free. Now, those kind of problems shouldn't be present in a socialist America, however, because they are the problems of backward socialist societies which, first of all, don't have an advanced economy, which capitalist America has; but secondly, none of which have a history of democracy in their past. Therefore, they're not the primary questions that spiritually, culturally, intellectually have motivated millions, not just the rare individuals who have dedicated themselves to these concepts. But people here, although the democracy's not fulfilled under capitalism, are at least taught the words of it, even though those same individuals don't see the difference between the lack of the reality in their life and the rhetoric, the words of democracy. I would say a socialist America, if it is to be genuinely socialist, would not be faced even as a problem with many of the kind of problems, most of the problems, which China and the Soviet Union or any of the other countries had. Our problems will be different. Think, ask yourself for the moment, how will one guarantee in a socialist America the elimination of racism? In our society, racism is almost an integral part of the institutions, the ideology, the thinking, the reactions of people, as, say, anti-Semitism is for a European country. Well, clearly, mass education and mass persuasion is the most important thing. The elimination of any privileges that come from having a white skin as compared with not having it would have to be included. But it is going to be a very prolonged struggle. And I would not exclude the possibility that the coercive, violent instruments of the state will have to be used to jail the bigots who will not under any conditions forsake the expression of their bigotry in violent action against Blacks and/or others. One could give other examples of where there will undoubtedly be—you know, socialism is not the final answer. Socialism is only a transition from a capitalist society to that long-range communist society. That takes longer, the attaining of the communist society in which human beings are capable of functioning without a government because they have attained that self discipline. But it will be reached much more quickly in America than in any of the other socialist countries because, again, the economic base will provide the material basis for just giant strides forward in people's minds, how they view reality.

1.51. TAPE NUMBER: XXV, SIDE TWO JANUARY 21, 1974

HEALEY

When you have an abundance of the economy, which is really the first prerequisite for a communist society as distinct from a socialist society, then for instance the old command, "Thou shalt not steal," which is supposed to be the moral and ethical paradigm for all societies, for the first time can become fulfilled. Because what would be the need to steal when you know that there is no way in which what you need is not going to be fulfilled, that when you're old, you're not going to have to worry? The ability to change professions, to change i skills, to find out which is the most fulfilling and challenging to you, will be there. Therefore I think Lenin placed it the best: all of the ethical concepts that motivated society for thousands of years will for the first time be capable of fulfillment. All that socialism really does is provide the prerequisites to go to a new level of society, to a higher plateau. In itself it is not the solution; it is only the prerequisite for finding the solutions. And there's never going to be a time when society is without contradiction. Communism will not mean the end of challenge, of contradiction, of conflict. All it will represent is a knowledgeable people capable of dealing both with nature and with society in a way that guarantees for the first time the fulfillment of the individual, because—and this is one of the heavy emphases of Marx—the individual can only be genuinely fulfilled insofar as the rest of society is fulfilled. You cannot get your own private fulfillment if your fellow man is being oppressed or deprived of fulfillment.

GARDNER

The first question that comes to mind as a result of what you said: it's interesting to envision a future in that sense. What changes do you see for the Communist party in America? Taking where we are right now, where the Communist party is in America right now, what changes is it going to have to undergo to become a butterfly?

HEALEY

Well, really, it would have to undergo enormous changes, and I don't think it's capable of undergoing them without some extraordinary external and internal pressure meeting. In order to be effective, it would first of all have to be genuinely autonomous and independent. By that I mean it would have to be capable of functioning and developing its policy not on what it thinks the Soviet Union's requirements are, but rather on what it thinks the requirements in this country are. Sometimes that might coincide, but it may not always coincide. When it doesn't, then the party has to be capable of saying so. I give that as an example because, as you know, there are a spate of new Maoist organizations—the October League, the Revolutionary Union-and I would say the same thing about them as I'm saying about the Communist party. They can't function as long as China is their mirror image. Secondly, I think that there has to be a drastic re-evaluation and reexamination of (a) how policy is made; (b) the nature and structure of organization that is best suited to the American scene. Not that which Lenin wrote about in 1903 for a czarist country, but that which our now-over-fifty years of experience on the American scene as a revolutionary party, what those experiences lead us to conclude as to the most effective method of building a revolutionary organization. To illustrate it, as an example, probably a million people—no one really knows— have passed through the party, joined and then left. And I would think one of the reasons for the high turnover in membership in the thirties particularly, when so many joined, is really the extraordinary demands that are placed upon being a Communist. I'm talking now as far as time is concerned, and the subordination of everything else to the requirement of the revolutionary struggle. Well, I think that some awareness of, again, the question of balance, of how you both constantly encourage this sense of self-dedication as well as the recognition that the human personality cannot flourish with only one aspect of the personality being fulfilled, namely, the political: that human beings are better revolutionaries if they are rounded personalities. I am an example of the one-sidedness of that, where my whole life has been totally, except for the question of being a mother, totally [oriented] around the question of the political responsibilities and pressures. But I would say even more importantly than any of that would be the question of democracy in the party, democracy in the sense of the development of all these constant processes of development, of more and more people being equipped to capably, independently, thoughtfully examine a current reality and come out with a policy that is commensurate with its needs. And that is the most difficult problem of all: a policy that you base on the here-and-nows, but which moves from the here-and-nows to the tomorrows, to that socialist perspective. That really has to include, in my opinion, an entirely new look at the structure of American politics. It is really amazing how little first-hand knowledge there is as to how America ticks in its political superstructure. There are a lot of phrases and generalizations made. I'll give you just one quick example, again illustrative without being in any way exhaustive of the problem. The Supreme Court today, on this very date, handed down a decision that had to do with the rights of women who are pregnant, a very advanced decision. I just received in the mail on this same day an article put out by the People's Translation Service from a group of French— well, they call themselves "revolutionary women"—who state that they will refuse to fight for abortion reform in France because the state is a man-made, masculine institution, and to think that there's going to be any progress under such circumstances is ridiculous, you've just got to overthrow the state. Now, clearly, if those French women would just look across the waters at the United States, they would see that in this capitalist institution, in this man-dominated society, nevertheless some significant changes took place as far as the status of women. Now, the revolutionary knows those changes are not going basically to change the oppression of women, but they are going to alter the framework of that oppression. And that's important. We don't disdain that. That's a very important thing for women, that this takes place. The danger would be if we looked on it as a thing that then solved the problem. But to reject it out of hand is equally nonsense. And because we don't look at the reality, we can't look at the reality in terms of, say, electoral politics. Just a simple little fact that in California a liberal Republican cannot run for office because that liberal Republican cannot get through a Republican primary. If the Republican could get through the Republican primary, he could probably win an election, because the Democrats are conservative enough that they would unite together with the liberal Republicans—there wouldn't be too much difference between them—and elect that person. Senator [Thomas] Kuchel was an example of the person who couldn't survive a Republican primary, could have been elected otherwise. Similarly, it's very dubious for a very conservative Democrat to get through a Democratic primary. In the primary, all Democrats have to sound left of center, have to sound very liberal.

GARDNER

And then in the election they have to sound right of center.

HEALEY

And in the election they go to the right. But you've got to understand, you can't just make what is only partially a truism, that both parties are interchangeable, that they are identical. They are and they aren't. And the revolutionary has to be able to differentiate where they are from where they're not. That means looking at the reality and dealing with it as a reality. That doesn't mean having any illusions that either party's ever going to be a revolutionary party; that's not what they're there for. But it does mean also not making the silly leftist error of putting them in the same category as interchangeable entities because they're not that, either. And again, analysis. As a matter of fact, I think I told you, if I were to write a book, I'd make the title of the book—I'd take a phrase out of the Communist song, The International, and I'd turn it around. [No, actually] I'd use it as it is. The phrase goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." Well, I would make the title of my book, Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us, because my argument would be that just as we Communists recognize that capitalism operates through the false consciousness that it gives the majority of people who aren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives and see it through a false ideology, so the same thing happens with Marxists: that is, that without being aware of it, they, too, substitute a false consciousness for a real consciousness. So that a Communist party, if it's to be a real revolutionary party, has to be able to constantly keep alive that challenging, questioning and probing of the real scene around it, in order to make sure that it is approximating the reality that exists as closely as it can. Our theory never will quite match the reality, but at least one strives to approximate it, to see what is the substance, and not just the form.

GARDNER

Can this Communist party be the party of revolution in America?

HEALEY

This present Communist party? Well, it can't as it is presently constituted, no. I think it's the most heartbreaking thing for anyone who has spent a lifetime in it, to recognize that that is true. But as it is presently constituted, as it is presently led, as its present interpretation of its own tradition is, it cannot be anything but an ever-increasingly pure sect. But I think that is just as much true of the Progressive Labor, the Socialist Workers party, of everything.

GARDNER

Let me stop you here. Could we go through some of those subgroups? This is a question I've been wanting to ask you to get into the manuscript somewhere, for future reference and for historians of the present. Divide all these groups up into their proper teams and their proper areas on the Left. It confuses the hell out of me, walking up Bruin Walk at UCLA, just to see all the different factions. [noise of helicopter circling overhead throughout this section]

HEALEY

Well, I would say they all have one general characteristic. First of all, just to name those that I'm familiar with: The Socialist Workers party, the Spartacists, and the—what the hell is that other?— there's another Trotskyist group that puts out the bulletin: Workers' League. These are the three main Trotskyist groups. The history of their inner splits among themselves is as esoteric as anything in the world.

GARDNER

Why is this helicopter flying overhead, by the way?

HEALEY

That's a police helicopter. It's looking for someone. You're in a Black area, where the police helicopter's always overhead.

GARDNER

Another interesting note for future historians.

HEALEY

I don't even notice it anymore, as you notice. I'm so used to it. It circles around and around. Okay, that's one set of organizations, the Trotskyists.

GARDNER

And we've discussed what the Trotskyists are basically when we were talking about them.

HEALEY

Then there's the Maoist organizations. The two dominant Maoist organizations are the Revolutionary Union and the October League, with the National Guardian at this point being more the October League Maoist voice than it is that of the Revolutionary Union.

GARDNER

At what point did the National Guardian move over there?

HEALEY

About two years ago. I think it's as sad and poverty-stricken intellectually as the Daily World; just its frame of reference is different. But as I say, it isn't only the dependence on a foreign country to do your thing for you. The SWP doesn't have that, and yet it's poverty-stricken. There is not one issue that could ever come up that you couldn't ahead of time predict what the SWP's answer's going to be to it; and that's going to be a vulgarized Marxist answer. They're going to find some economic thing that will show really—like Watergate, for instance, their analysis of Watergate. It's just, "This [represents] the evils of capitalism as a whole." Well, that's true. It just doesn't happen to be enough. Watergate represents something very specific within the overall picture of capitalist corruption. And to be able to deal with the contradictions within the ranks of the ruling class that produced a Watergate, the Trots are just not capable of that, because it doesn't fit that little blueprint, that definition of reality. Then there's PL, Progressive Labor. Progressive Labor started as an offshoot, a split from the Communist party in 1960, led by Milt Rosen and Morty Scherr. Milt was a member of the National Committee of the party, and Morty was a New York functionary of the party. In 1961 the immediate reason was around the response of the party to the McCarran Act. Not many people are aware of this, but the line that they took was that the party should dissolve—this was after the Supreme Court had upheld the overall validity of the McCarran Act—that the party should dissolve and form other organizations that would not immediately be challenged by the government, so that we wouldn't all go to jail, because it looked like we were all immediately on the way to jail. It's an example really of an opportunist capitulation to the pressures of capitalism, even though you give it left-sounding language, But actually, by this time, the split between China and the Soviet Union and Albania had been [apparent] for about two years, and at that point they were representing the Chinese-Albanian line, and for several years they were the primary organizations through which the Chinese line was being expressed in the United States. Then about three years ago, after an enormous inner struggle, the majority line, led by Milt Rosen, [became that of] placing China in the same category as the Soviet Union— that they were both betraying the revolution. As I read their materials now, I think they're really a slogan-happy crowd. They're not the only ones. It's also true of the Maoist groups. These slogans have become a substitute for analysis. Just again, as a current example: under the leadership of the October League, a group of the young left organizations, independent organizations, called for the impeachment of Nixon. Now, there already is a coalition around the impeachment of Nixon which includes a significant number of organizations here in Los Angeles. And why you need a separate left-Left coalition within that overall—I mean, not within it, because they're a separate coalition from it—I don't understand. But what made me think of it is that they have one slogan—"Dump Nixon." Those two words are supposed to indicate you have a more revolutionary approach than those who call for the impeachment of Nixon. I guess. That's the only conclusion I can come to. Yesterday you saw the silly spectacle of two different impeachment rallies taking place—one on the West Side, one downtown—instead of one joint activity taking place. They follow the example too much of the. . . . Mao once came up a few years ago, or in the name of Mao, with the dialectical definition of the need of, "One must always split into two." It's a very involved theoretical debate which I won't go into. But at that time I thought that obviously the amoeba must be the most revolutionary organization of all because that was his definition of a good revolutionary, that one always splits into two, meaning the justification of splitting. I thought of that yesterday when I saw two different impeachment actions taking place, the impression that there are so many millions already prepared to move that you can't afford the luxury of separating and dividing rather than uniting. You must see not that one splits into two, but rather how you get the two into the one, which is at this point an essential quality of the struggle. Then there's something that in the East is much more significant than it is out here, and that's the National Labor Committees, which again is—the leader of it, Lynn Marcus, is a stockbroker, a fifty-year-old stockbroker, who used to be in the Socialist Workers Party. Their idea is to be the storm troopers of the Left. They take it upon themselves to beat up and physically attack members of the party or others whom they consider obstacles to true revolution. They've not only sent Communists to the hospital, they've sent Trotskyists, anybody who is not on their own line.

GARDNER

Which is . . . ? [laughter]

HEALEY

It's another—which is that you've got to have revolution right away.

GARDNER

And you do so by destroying the other. . .

HEALEY

Of course. You destroy other organizations.

GARDNER

How about IS?

HEALEY

Oh, I forgot IS [International Socialists]. Well, they just had a split. They're one of the Trotskyist groups, too. They're one of the oldest of the splits; they split in 1940. They first split off from the Socialist Workers party while Trotsky was still alive, a group led by James Burnham, who's now one of the editors of National Review, and Max Schachtman, who died two years ago, who were then the leaders of the opposition within the SWP. One of the arguments of their opposition was around how you estimate the position you take in regard to the Soviet-Finnish War and the Soviet Union, with Trotsky and the SWP majority insisting that--on this definition that seems to say a lot, but in life means nothing— Trotsky and the majority insisting that the economy of the Soviet Union is still "a workers' economy," and therefore you have to defend it (albeit it is being betrayed by its political superstructure, the government), but that you must still always have the slogan, "Defend the Soviet Union." The only trouble with that is that whenever push comes to shove, I don't think anybody has ever seen anything that the SWP ever put out that has any defense of the Soviet Union. In all the years I've read their stuff, it's always simply a vitriolic attack. But the opposition, led by Burnham and Schachtman, wanted to go even further in its attack of the Soviet Union, and they came up with a definition, as distinct from Trotsky's (that the Soviet Union is a worker state but a bureaucratically distorted one). They wanted to define it as no longer even a worker state but a state of bureaucratic collectivism. Actually, I think a lot of the struggle, although that doesn't appear except when you read between the lines, is really the internal battles on leadership between Jim Cannon and Max Schachtman and others. At any rate— I don't remember any longer. I could look it up easily enough, what their original name was, the Schachtman group when they left the SWP. Eventually Schachtman led his group of Trotskyists back into the old socialist party, the Social Democratic Labor Federation. Those who opposed that were mainly led by a man by the name of Hal Draper, who lives in Berkeley, a librarian at UC Berkeley, who formed the International Socialists. They had this lovely convenient line, a policy that always reminds me of Albert Camus. Their position is that you attack both the socialist world and imperialism equally, as equal menaces and equal dangers. As I say, what's the name of that philosophical ass that stays suspended between two bales of hay? [laughter] I don't remember. It's a very convenient line. You attack imperialism, but you also say, "On the other hand, those others are just as bad." They just had a split about six months ago, and there's probably maybe fifty or a hundred at the most left of them. The split is now known as the Revolutionary Socialist Alliance, I think it is, a group that either walked out or were expelled, depending on who you talk to, as to what happened to them.

GARDNER

Okay. At UCLA that leaves Fanshen.

HEALEY

Well, Fanshen was originally a genuinely independent group of both faculty and some graduates, some undergraduate students, who wanted to form a radical organization in which to function. Because their main line was always, "How do you bring off-campus issues into the campus?" and never, "What are the campus issues that you use to try to build a mass movement on campus around the issues that people see affecting their own lives immediately?" they have had quite a difficult time finding an identity. And I hear— I don't know if this is true—that the most influential part of the leadership is now with the Revolutionary Union, that Fanshen has become more and more dominated by the RU and is kind of a front for them. I don't think that includes all its members, because I know people who are not anywhere close to RU who are in it. I think it probably is true of the active leadership.

GARDNER

Where has SDS gone?

HEALEY

That's mainly controlled—almost entirely controlled—by Progressive Labor. When the split in SDS took place in 1969, PL was left with the nominal control of it, and it's maintained it because nobody else has cared a damn, nobody goes in to challenge it. It is really just a small cadre group on some campuses throughout the country that initiates--for instance, at UCLA, they both take a very leading part in the fight against the Violence Center [Center for the Study of Violence Reduction]. But it's not again a mass vehicle.

GARDNER

Any left, any others?

HEALEY

I think that's the main ones. Then there are new organizations developing. One that I think is the most interesting that's come on the scene is the New American Movement, which was formed about three years ago, mainly by the veterans of the 1960s, the graduates of the SDS and whatnot, most of them not on campus but intellectual workers. I've been following them for about three years now, and I find them the most interesting, both because they—well, for instance, at their first two or three big meetings the IS had gone into the organization to try to capture it, and it was making as the article of faith the outright condemnation of all fourteen socialist countries. The New American Movement ideologically, politically defeated them, and instead used a formulation that I think is far more scientific, that is, recognizing that the fourteen socialist countries are noncapitalist, that they are an advance in this slow stage of human development away from capitalism, but reserving also the right to be critical of any one of the fourteen while supporting the fourteen generally against capitalism, reserving the right to be critical of any one of the fourteen when they feel it necessary. They have been carrying on a very energetic discussion on questions of Marxism and Leninism, on questions of American history, on approaches towards current topical questions, the energy crisis, the food crisis, impeachment, and the whole question of electoral activities. I don't happen to agree with any of the main protagonists in that argument, but at least their debates are very good. And they have done something else: the kind of relationships they struggle with among themselves, between themselves, are of a very candid, open, and warm character. The attempt to take some of the best out of the sixties, that quality that said, "Look, you can't just talk about a new world; you've got to start living a life that reflects the new qualities." The New American Movement has at least made the effort on that. As I say, of all the new groups—and I don't know whether it'll last five years or three years or what will happen to it—but of all the new groups that have emerged, I am more impressed with what they've been able to do than any other group. Then there are hundreds of independent radical collectives throughout the country, both in trade unions and factories, on campuses and communities, law firms—just literally hundreds. Among Chicanes it's a rather confusing situation, mainly because there really isn't any overall unified force. The [United] Farm Workers are certainly the most important as far as an organization, and yet they are not accepted as leadership by the more radical Chicanos in the community. But organizations like Los Tres have developed some limited influence in the Chicano community. CASA is another that has. And I would say that on the campuses there is developing for the first time a significant body of scholarship of Chicano Studies. And what that indicates is that for the first time there are enough Chicanos in college to develop a body of intellectuals capable of doing the research of the generalizations and the writing, even insofar as history is concerned. This is indispensable for developing a movement of a people for national expression. In the Black community the real tragedy is that outside of Oakland—and I don't even know what now exists in Oakland—but I know that outside of Oakland the Black Panther party is nonexistent, to all intents and purposes, as any effectual force. While again there are tiny handfuls of African nationalist groups and others of this kind, BSUs and whatnot, none of them have any significant stature even on the campus or in the community. Tragically, what is still dominant as far as the community and the campus is concerned is the separatism, the feeling that Blacks and Chicanes and whites must be in separate organizations, can find points of agreement and unity to unite on but not organic unity. The only ones who overcome that problem are the organized revolutionary groups like the Communist party, the October League, the Revolutionary Union. In these groups there will be found Blacks and Chicanos and Asians in the party in the various organizations. But that is not true of any of the independent organizations.

GARDNER

Now, the next question that I have, thinking of all these groups and listening to the descriptions of all these groups—I’ll make it a two-part question. Are any of these groups capable of leading America into a revolution?

HEALEY

No.

GARDNER

Okay. Part two, what would it take? Now, Chile, of course, came to communism peacefully through the electorate.

HEALEY

Not communism.

GARDNER

Well, it elected a Communist. . . .

HEALEY

A socialist.

GARDNER

Okay. But that turned into a fiasco. How could any revolution be brought about in America, do you think? Or could it?

HEALEY

Well, I think I may have said to you once before, again quoting Lenin, that to try to decide what a future revolutionary transition will be before you have accumulated the human beings capable of doing that—I'm talking about the millions of people necessary for a revolution— Lenin said, was like generals talking about how to win a war without having first recruited an army.

GARDNER

Well, how do you recruit that army?

HEALEY

That really is the important question. But first let me come back just to the question you asked of revolution. How will a revolution take place? The kind of factors that you have to consider for that future period when a revolutionary situation is present. . . . Marxists have always been pretty precise as to what constitutes a revolutionary situation: namely, the inability of the ruling class to rule any longer in the old way; and secondly, the unwillingness, the refusal of the ruled to be ruled any longer in the old way. That is the revolutionary situation. And that's important; let me spend just a minute on that. It's important to understand why that kind of an approach is made. We do not think revolutions are made just simply on the basis of a minority's determination that the old is already past, that capitalism is outmoded. We think that revolutions are made at the time of the conjuncture of what may be a political-social-economic crisis—it may be just a political crisis; it may be just a social crisis; no one knows ahead of time (and again, I quote from Lenin), "the spark that can start a prairie fire." You cannot anticipate what will be that catalyst at the particular moment which will cause millions of people to say, "I'm willing to die rather than live any longer in the way I'm living. This is intolerable and I will not tolerate it." You don't make revolutions unless you have reached that point. Secondly, people don't reach that point of recognition unless there is an active minority that has been operating all the time, educating and organizing to convince people of the need for that. Now, education and organization should not be taken in a technical sense. By education, I'm not simply speaking about classes or leaflets or newspapers that point out the reality of exploitation and oppression or link up the energy crisis today with the preposterousness of the situation in which a handful of men can control the natural resources that should belong to all the people, and decide under what conditions those people will live, and make the decisions in a sense unilaterally. But through the active minority—and that's why a vanguard party is supposed to be important—education comes not only through the lecture and the writing of articles and books and pamphlets that expose the conditions of capitalist life, but as well through the conditions of struggle that people go through on the here-and-now issues which both teach them what organized strength can do and also show them the limitation of what their reforms are as long as capitalism remains. They can improve this or that, but they can't basically change the conditions of their lives. So that those two characteristics of revolution that I named require not just sitting back and waiting for the conjuncture to take place, but helping to produce the conditions which make that conjuncture happen, and knowing what to do about it when it does. I emphasize that because capitalism can be on its last legs for millions of years—I don't mean that literally, but for centuries, just as the Middle Ages endured for centuries. I always laugh because Gus Hall keeps writing pamphlets that have titles like "The House of Imperialism Is Crumbling" and "Capitalism Is Dying": capitalism has been in that situation now for seventy years, but it still maintains itself, and will maintain itself, until there is a viable alternative. Now, what are the other things you have to think about in regard to revolution? Well, partly you have to consider the world situation. Clearly, if other capitalist countries in Europe or Japan have gone socialist, then the possibility of a peaceful change in this country is far greater than it would be otherwise, because then there would be a great limitation on the ability of U.S. capitalism to draw strength, including armed strength, from abroad to crush any domestic change. You would also have to consider the strength of the organized alternative to capitalist rule. Now, that includes an electoral perspective, but it doesn't limit itself to that. The election acts more or less like a barometer. (Because this was the tragedy of Chile. If you're going to go into that kind of electoral situation, you cannot do it by ahead of time foreclosing the necessary changes to make a revolution secure, to make the election mean something. What happened in Chile was that in order to get the vote of the congress to make him president after he got 37 percent of the election in 1970, Allende agreed ahead of time not to in any way—and I put it in quotation marks—"violate" the constitutional requirements of, say, the way the military operated. Well, here was this Popular Unity government elected with a minority of the vote. The Supreme Court is in the hands of your oppressor, of the exploiter. The military is controlled and dominated by U.S. imperialism. You still have all the newspapers and radio stations, most of whom are operating in the interests of the past, not the present and not the tomorrow. If you leave all those things unchanged, then all you're doing is building up inevitably your doom, because there is one less mainstay that hasn't yet been challenged. They're not going to give up their privileges peacefully, no matter how much the election shows the people want change. They will not do it; the old ruling class will not yield its privileges.) So that in the United States you'd have to consider how strong you were, not just as far as an electoral victory, but how strong you were as far as the independent movements, mass organized movements of the people and the revolutionary party or parties, because there might well be more than one party that would be operating as a revolutionary party, so that you'd be able to forestall the violence of the Pentagon and of the Rockefellers, Duponts, Mellons, Fords, et al. That i would be the question. You can't answer that question now. All you can say is these are the things you would advocate doing, but you cannot make an absolute prediction because it depends on what are the relationships of forces at the time of that revolutionary struggle. If you have sufficient strength outside of the Congress to back up the strength you have in the Congress and the executive if you win that, then you can move peacefully— relatively peacefully. If you can't, then you have another problem. Now, of course, no Communist party has yet spoken publicly on what is really a very decisive question of a capitalist country. The alternative to peaceful transition is, of course, what is known as violent. But that's just another way of saying civil war. And the question is, can you have a civil war in a country unless you are able (a) to split the military, or (b) to be in a position to capture their arms, or (c) have the equivalent of the sophisticated weaponry that the military has. Because to talk of civil war in an advanced capitalist country without any one of those three operating is just sheer suicide. But again, even that, you cannot tell, you cannot define—at least, I don't think you can—you cannot predict the exact elements that will be operating in that future revolutionary situation; your capacity, for instance, to split the military, your capacity to influence it, to be able to win over sectors of it. All that you really know is that if you win any kind of an electoral victory, your chance of doing anything is only going to be as good as [your ability to] utilize, if necessary, the force of the state that you now lead against those who would illegally try to overthrow it. This is what Allende could not do. [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

I think one of the most important things of your life—and I don't think we really touched on it enough—is that you've achieved quite a bit as a woman in America during a period when women in America were largely nonachievers. (Now, this is a very broad question, and you could probably talk about it for two hours.) I'd be interested in your comments about the role of women in America, some of the problems that you yourself had, and just the situation in general as it's different today, perhaps.

HEALEY

Well, maybe I can illustrate it best by a story.

GARDNER

We'll turn over the tape.

1.52. TAPE NUMBER: XXVI, SIDE ONE FEBRUARY 4, 1974

GARDNER

We'll come back to what we were just talking about concerning China and so forth later. But to start with, let's—as we were mentioning, last time we left off with an open-ended question about the role of women and your own perception of your own role.

HEALEY

Well, I must admit that the question left me somewhat flustered, partly because the experiences of being a woman organizer and, in quotes, "leader" really impinge upon very deep and not too well explored feelings, personal feelings. Not too well explored because as I think back on what we've talked about, or as I think back on what the experiences themselves represented, there is one continuity that is present in my life since I was a child which really only as a result of all your questions and all this discussion I've even become conscious of, and that is an eminently deliberate throttling of the instinct to ask why, to ask why about things that happen to one personally, not to be very introspective, constantly to maintain a facade of exuberance and ebullience. As a matter of fact, I think that one of the reasons for garrulity is that when you talk a great deal, you don't have to reveal very much. And it's been very rare in my life that I've ever discussed with anyone, including my mother, with whom I'm extraordinarily close, questions that were directly related to my personal feelings, whether it was a relationship with a boy or later a man, or whether it was questions of the effect of male chauvinism upon my own activity. Anything that I felt was related to innermost feelings I just shied away from, and as I say, not just simply through not verbalizing them, but in not even thinking about them, and not allowing myself to think about them. I'm not sure even now why that characteristic was present from, as I say, as far back as I can remember as a little girl. It may have had something to do with the enormous frequency with which we moved, the fact that I never established roots in any one area or community, school, and therefore I always felt something of an outsider in regard to being accepted by my peers. I don't have any conscious memory of that affecting me. As I think I told you, I've seen its effect upon my brother and sister, who were older than I am. But regardless of the fact of why it developed, that it was there and is there is very real. The only exception really to this was to some extent my son, with whom I discuss all questions with much greater candor than I've ever done with anyone. But also I think probably it's a more common condition than is recognized—the unwillingness really to subject one's own psyche to too close an examination. In that, I'm probably not too different from others. But when I start to think about the answer to your questions—this is a very convoluted introduction to it—it's really hard for me to respond with any depth because now, in retrospect, I'm very much aware of the complexities of being a woman in a movement in which the question of social oppression and the question of male chauvinism are— well, it's tacitly recognized, but not explicitly, and it was not ever really thought about. Therefore the retrospection might yield an insight, but I'm emphasizing that that is a hindsight-insight and not one that was present at the time the events took place, because generally speaking, what the current women's liberation focuses on was certainly present in all the years I was active, and yet again I think, as I've indicated, I was very characteristic of those women who either ignored it or were unaware of it, who simply persisted in defining a struggle, while probably most of us [remained] unconscious of the psychological, at least, dimensions of that struggle. The only time I really became aware of the presence of male chauvinism as a serious problem--though even at that point I can't say that I ever thought about it to any degree; it was just a casual observation that it was there—was when I came into the party leadership after 1945. And that's a strange thing, because certainly I would have taken for granted that the party would have been the most emancipated as far as dominance of this type of chauvinism is concerned, male superiority. And that recognition was enhanced in 1949 when I became chairman, because as was quite often said to me then, "We're used to women as org secretaries, but certainly not as the pivotal person in the leadership." Well, if I were to summarize the problem, I would say, first of all, that I would not have advised women who wanted some degree of emotional stability, quote, "personal fulfillment," to do what I did, to live the life I lived. Because the problem of reconciling the competing claims of a husband and later a child with the demands of a movement is simply an incredible act. The pressures upon men, for instance—and this is particularly true after 1945, in relationship to any personal identification with me—are just simply enormous, and I really have only great sympathy for my two husbands of that period: Don Healey, Richard's father, from 194- ...my God! I don't even remember what year we got married; I remember when we got divorced, which was 1946; and then Slim Connelly till 1957. Let me illustrate their plight because it's not unimportant. Don had been a leader of Labor's Non-Partisan League here in Southern California, a very important man in the focus of left politics, left-liberal politics (because the time when he was active was a period of great strength as far as the left was concerned, when its influence on just the liberal aspect of politics was significant). While he was in the army, the insistence that I become the secretary of the Los Angeles party came up. This was, as I said, in "45. I phoned him--he was in Fort Selma, [Alabama]—to tell him about the demand that I accept this post, which I didn't want (I wanted to stay as I was) but which they wanted me to take. He was very, very distressed about it, but without spelling out why he was distressed. The reason that he was distressed is that he knew that when he came back to civilian life, of necessity the fact that I was a public party leader as distinct from being a public Communist would have a great effect on what he would be doing politically. But he insisted that I should do what I felt was necessary and not let myself be inhibited by that. But when he came back he did find that at least in his feelings—whether objectively that was true, whether it would have made any difference as far as what he could have done, we will never know—it inhibited him in trying even to find out, the consciousness of this relationship. Of course, in subsequent years, even after we were divorced, any activity he went into was immediately in the papers headlining him as "Dorothy Healey's Former Husband," and that was supposed to be enough to identify him for all time. The problem was even harder for Slim because Slim, in the first place, had never at any time had to face the question of a wife as being anywhere near as publicly or privately as significant as his role. He had been the first state president of the California State CIO and a secretary of the Los Angeles CIO Council, one of the initial organizers of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild, and again a very prominent personality. Well, the adjustment for him to being the husband of Dorothy Healey was even worse that it was for poor Don. Lots of it was added to by the stupidity and insensitivity of people who would come over here to the house and talk about problems and would simply address themselves to me. He'd be sitting here in the room with an equal capacity to discuss those same problems, and people wouldn't even look in his direction when they were talking. He was an extraordinarily sensitive human being anyway. I think that's usually a characteristic of people who are themselves very insensitive to other people's feelings, and Slim was famous for his insensitivity to how others felt—very, very unkind and. ...

GARDNER

Is that so?

HEALEY

Oh, yeah. His reputation was a well-deserved one for lack of concern, a lack of empathy with others, of any kind. But nevertheless, as I say, within his framework, where he'd started from and what could be expected of him, the pressures on him as my husband were simply enormous. Actually, those are societal pressures because they don't conform to what the identity of a husband-wife relationship should be, taking for granted the definition of the wife as the supportive role, the secondary role, with any decisions to be made being around the dominant role of the husband.

GARDNER

I don't want to interrupt you because you're going along so personally. But how would you compare this to other relationships that you saw in your associates? Because there are many women who are in, if not equivalent roles, very similar ones.

HEALEY

Well, first of all, there weren't very many women in equivalent roles.

GARDNER

But similar ones, weren't there? The ones from up north, for example.

HEALEY

Well, I was just going to say, California has always had the strangeness—and I never did know why— the uniqueness of having more women in the leadership than any other place in the country. But they [did not always] face comparable problems. Both Louise and Oleta married men who were just absolutely delighted by the fact that their wives were the significant women that they were, and who neither potentially nor actually compared [themselves] to the status of their wives. The capacity, that's really the word I'm thinking of: neither one of them came anywhere near approximating their wives. And I think it was true with Betty Gannett nationally. She was a national leader of the party. Most of the situations were such that the wives of national or state leaders of the party were just the equivalents of what Louise Todd's husband or Oleta Yates's husband were. In other words, delighted to accept the role of being "supportive."

GARDNER

So your problem was that you chose men who were outstanding enough in their ways that they wouldn't accept that role.

HEALEY

Well, I shouldn't say "wouldn't accept the role," because with neither of them did they ever say or—although Slim, of course, was obviously an unhappy guy, and this problem of the relationship with me was just one aspect of it. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] But really the only point I'm trying to make is that the problem is equally difficult on the man as it is on the woman, with the exception of the fact that it is taken for granted that there should be an understanding of the difficulty that men have in that kind of role, whereas there is not—or has not been Until lately—any idea or consciousness of the fact of what it does to women. Now, the problem with being a mother was a different one, and I don't—did we ever talk about this?

GARDNER

Not to any great extent. To a small degree. You have spoken lovingly on many occasions.

HEALEY

I was absolutely determined that my son would not grow up to become a person who would feel he'd been orphaned by the party. I'd seen it in ray youth, in my contemporaries who felt that way about their parents, and I just wouldn't have any part of it.

GARDNER

Let me interrupt you to ask how about you in relation to your parents, for example?

HEALEY

Well, my father, as I think I've indicated, was never political. My mother was, but not to the point where she was away from us a great deal. Her children were her main outlet for the years when we were growing up. She was always there. She certainly has been the dominant influence as between my parents—as a matter of fact, a very significant influence in my life and in all her children's lives. She's a very dominating woman...

GARDNER

You wouldn't know it. [laughter]

HEALEY

. . . whose emphasis on values haunts her children to this day. Even my brother and sister, who are not political—my older brother and older sister— who have a comfortable income, any time they have to go to an expensive restaurant, which they do frequently, always have a twinge because of knowing what Mama would say about wasting money on frivolities. [laughter] But, no, I had no such feeling growing up with my parents.

GARDNER

Back to Richard then.

HEALEY

Well, as I say, I was just determined on this, but it was not a very hard choice to make because from the moment he was born he assumed an importance in my life that, as you have noted, has never diminished. When I went back to work, first with the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers and then later for the party, I just made no bones of the fact that at certain hours I was going to leave, either pick up Richard at the nursery, or that there were certain times that I was just not available. I'd pick him up at the nursery at three-thirty in the afternoon because too long would be too hard on him at the age of four. It didn't make any difference what activities or what meetings were going on, what was happening, I was going to leave and pick him up, and everybody knew it. In the evening I just wouldn't answer the phone between five and seven, because that was his time. And on weekends one of the two days, either Saturday or Sunday, depending on when I didn't have a meeting, was his day, and he knew it, and, as I say, my coworkers knew it. (The only thing I've always said to other women who were coming into activity was, "Don't wait for the consciousness of your special problems to develop in the minds of your coworkers to help you out. You define them, and you see that they're carried out, because it'll never happen otherwise.") Everybody knew that this was the priority as far as I was concerned in those years when he needed it. Now, there were certain things that were unavoidable, When I'd go to jail, obviously, I was not around.

GARDNER

I was going to say that during that period of, I guess, the early fifties, when you described your sort of living underground, that must have been a very difficult period for him.

HEALEY

It was very difficult. I wasn't aware of how difficult even until later. That had a strange effect on him which I'm interested in; I don't understand it entirely. As I look back, I'm terribly conscious of my inadequacies because of this problem of not being available always and other problems, just human fallibility. In a certain sense, all the pressures really made him develop an inner strength that was not dependent on surrounding circumstances, a reliance, a self-reliance. It was either that or go under, and fortunately it was that. But the point really that I'm making is that it never crossed my mind that there was anything particularly difficult about subordinating other needs, including just the needs of being myself for a while, of relaxation, of just recharging my own batteries, as far as Richard was concerned. I took that for granted. I would not take that for granted where a man was concerned. But again, not because I really thought it through or debated it within myself, and that's what I'm rebuking myself for at this point, that I never explored the question internally as to what I should or shouldn't do.

GARDNER

So you never really analyzed your role as a woman.

HEALEY

No.

GARDNER

You just really played it more or less as it went.

HEALEY

Yeah, and I'm very critical of that. I'm critical in the first place of myself, that I wasn't more sensitive to the problem; and I'm critical of an atmosphere, of an environment which was not conducive to any such exploration. But then, you know, I am not one to regret things very much. [laughter] I always think that's the greatest waste of time in the world to spend one's time on useless regrets. But I have said to young women in the past years, long before {the current movement], in the forties and fifties, I've said to them that they have to think of the problems, as I say, without even thinking myself so much as to what they were, but being aware in a general dimension that it was not a life that I would necessarily recommend for private, quote, "happiness," whatever that may be.

GARDNER

Well, what was your consciousness of the situation of women, then, during the progression of years? Were you visualizing really a struggle that was, as you cited of your mother's attitude, sort of all- pervasive, or did you feel that there was a special problem?

HEALEY

I'm glad you separated it, because I never felt it, no. That is, I never felt it myself. I would speak about, for instance, the question of economic discrimination against women, but the parameters of the social oppression I just really wasn't particularly concerned with. I think I mentioned to you, as an example of my obtuseness on that problem, that when I was nominated for international vice-president of UCAPAWA in 1938 or '39, whenever it was, and one of the nominating speeches laid great stress on the fact that I was a woman and that the international executive board should include a woman, that I was resentful of it; I felt it was a put-down. I should be nominated because I was as capable as any man was, and that was the sole test that should be made. The idea of a special approach to guarantee the overcoming of inequality was beyond my comprehension as far as women; I recognized it as far as Blacks and Chicanes, but not as far as women. However, when I read the materials of the party in the thirties and forties and fifties and recall the mass activities that were carried out, [I realize that] there was far greater discussion about women than I'm indicating in this reference, but always as it applied either to questions of child care (about which a great deal was written and mass activities and campaigns carried on that go far beyond and exceed anything that's done today) or about economic inequalities. And then there was always the emphasis on the role of women in fighting against the high cost of living, against war, etc., as the ones who primarily felt the outrages. There were women's organizations that we initiated and influenced: the League of Women Shoppers in the thirties, the League of American Women in the forties. Some of the material that we issued then is worth looking at again; it's useful, relevant. And I think that women who were in the leadership of the party were far more thoughtful about this question than I was, far more aware and far more ready to do battle on the questions of male supremacy, for example, Claudia Jones, a Black woman leader who was deported from the United States in the 1950s.

GARDNER

To where?

HEALEY

To England. She was born in the West Indies as a British subject. I remember her big fights on this question and her awareness of the fact that she was a woman—a really extraordinarily intelligent and beautiful woman--what a second-class citizenship nevertheless she had even politically. Everybody knew both what the discrimination was as regards Betty Gannett, and also the effect it had on her personality of it. The first part, the discrimination: here was a woman who certainly outmatched most of the men who were in the leadership of the party in terms of her knowledge of Marxism, in terms of her capacity of teaching classes, of writing, and so forth; again, a woman of considerable attainment, all self-educated, whose greatest cross to bear was the fact that she was never, or almost never till the end of her life, almost till the end of her life, elected to leading bodies. Now, I don't know which came first, her unpleasant personal mannerisms, like—oh, I can't even describe them, I'm not going to try. . . . I'm not sure which came first, the unpleasant mannerisms as a result of this treatment which she was terribly bitter about, or the treatment as a result of her unpleasant mannerisms. I know women also didn't want to elect her, didn't want to be identified in supporting her, because of her unpleasant personality. And she really reflected another aspect of what is still present as far as minorities, including women, are concerned, and that is her competitiveness against other women. That's always the penalty that is present; when people are advanced as tokens, or if there's not full equality in the total sense, then the person coming from a minority has to kind of knock down the one that's there in order to advance individually. That was present with her, and I guess to one degree or another with a number of us.

GARDNER

Are there significant changes at all? Now, you've limited it pretty much now as far as personal experience goes to your life and to the party. Now, what about the rest of the world as you perceived it? I mean, the rest of the world generally: things in America and so on.

HEALEY

You'll have to be still more specific.

GARDNER

As to the role of women, taking what you perceived from the time that you started out.

HEALEY

Well, you've got to separate what I perceived and what was, because my perception and the reality were not necessarily the same at all.

GARDNER

In other words, you really had no conception of certain types of discrimination at that time.

HEALEY

Well, I was aware of them, but always in an abstract sense. I mean, I was aware of them as part of the societal evils that had to be overcome, but not with any real grasp of their depth, of their significance, of their having an independence of their own as far as all of the total evils of the society.

GARDNER

Have things changed now, do you think, for women, or is there still a general tokenism around?

HEALEY

Oh, yes. Both questions can be answered yes, because they're not in contradiction with one another. There is an enormous change as far as the comprehension and defining of the problem. Now, you can't answer any problem until the questions are raised in such a way that it becomes increasingly difficult, at least for people in influential positions, to avoid the question; I think the women's liberation movement has done an enormous job in that regard of raising the question that confronts everybody, the existence of the oppression. I say that without discussing what I think are the awkwardnesses of some of the positions of the women's liberation, the overstatement, the overrhetoricizing of positions, the posing of women's liberation as against the general emancipation of all humanity, which some feminists do. Or the question of—one of the things that distresses me a lot, because I spend so much time talking to young women, is their making a political question out of sexual preferences, so that some young women I know have gone into lesbian relationships, not because they wanted to in a sense of physiological and biological or psychological desire but because politically they thought this equaled emancipation, equality. This I am just outraged over because of what I see, what that represents. But leaving the elaboration of that question aside, the fact is that the women's liberation movement—whatever that amorphous, unorganized expression is—has done far more than any of its predecessors in exploring the full totality of the oppression— economically, socially, psychologically, and so forth. As to whether the situation has changed a great deal, well, clearly, of course, there have been significant changes. The Supreme Court's decision on abortions was a reflection and result of what the women's movement accomplished, making this an acceptable decision. That decision couldn't have taken place twenty years ago. But what's very hard to define as far as my own relationship with this is concerned, back on the personal level, is the toll that was taken by virtue of the status of women, taken on me. And again, it's only significant as it applies to me as it illustrates a general condition. I would say I'm very typical again—that until this current liberation movement started, talking about these things, mine was the reaction of most women: that you didn't consider that what was happening was a general problem; it was a private individual thing, and what good was it to dwell upon it? I think that one thing that illustrates that further is when my son left Los Angeles to go to Reed College. I had urged him for years that when he was old enough to go to college he must go away from L.A., because I am, like my mother, a very strong personality, that if he stayed here and went to college here I would be going to college with him in a sense, vicariously, absorbing his experiences, that his best bet was to go get out of the city, which he did with great joy. He went to Reed College. I can remember when he left, a kind of sigh of relief. That's just the irony of it. Here I am so absolutely fatuously related to this boy—this man; he's thirty now—but, nevertheless, a kind of sigh of relief. I no longer had to be anything else but myself. I didn't have to mother first or set aside all our questions. I'd cheerfully forsaken the role of wife, so this was the last personal, in that sense, kind of hold I had.

GARDNER

You know, that does bring up a significant question to me. You use the phrase that at least you could "be yourself." In a sense, that same selfness could be found equally through being a mother, for example, or through being married, couldn't it, or is that impossible?

HEALEY

Well, dialectically speaking, if you'll permit me, [laughter] obviously they're not contradictory relationships. If viewed properly and in a society that made provision for it, those relationships would all be very healthy, very important interacting relationships that provided for the greatest kind of fulfillment. I want to emphasize that, because, again, I really am very scornful of the infancy of the leftism that derides the question of a woman being a mother and feeling that there's anything particularly important in that. I say it's one of the most exciting, rewarding relationships in the world. My only regret is that I didn't have more, not that I had one. But nevertheless, because of the society, under the circumstances of how we live today, under these circumstances, if there is any other call upon you, if there's anything else that you are doing, then clearly you are ambivalent and divided and tired, particularly because in both capacities, as an organizer and as a mother, you are called upon to make primary the needs of others and secondary whatever needs you may have, and that includes the question of relaxation or purely private things. In both capacities the same pressure is upon you, and I think probably that may be one reason why I say when the need of being a full-time mother went away, the relief came. It's like—well, any mother will appreciate it. What happens when your child, when your baby goes to bed? No matter how you adore that baby, oh, Lord, when the baby's asleep, what blessed relief! [laughter] Now, as far as other effects on my life of just being a woman, well, there is the factor that—and again, I think it has to be understood why it is that for instance in some fifteen years I have never had to rebuff a man because no man's even asked me for a date. One's got to understand why. I know: aside from any other factor, in the back of any man's mind would be the idea that if he went to a show, for instance, at the end of the show I'd subject the evening to a political analysis as to what was present. [laughter] I'm really very sympathetic to the problem. In my own case it has not been a matter of unhappiness for me. I lived a very, very, very full life as a youngster in personal relations. Granted that a good deal of that was in order to prove to myself that, by God, I was "attractive," quote—again, those pressures of having to prove your femininity. At least there's been the fortunate result—I think it's fortunate because it suits my temperament—that I love living alone. I love not being subject to anyone else's needs, desires, pleasures, whims, anything else. That is not true for other people. Everyone has their own temperamental needs, and it just happens to suit mine—in addition to which, of course, I really haven't had time until lately to even think about what being alone represents, so that as of this time all I can say is that I feel personally happy. I'm politically very unhappy, what I see going on in the country. But as a woman I don't feel any barriers to either happiness or fulfillment. [tape recorder turned off]

GARDNER

You started to tell me before we turned on the tape about your invitations to travel to China, and I thought it might be interesting to put these in the record.

HEALEY

Well, the first invitation I received was last September through Irwin Silber, the editor of the Guardian. Irwin wrote me and asked if I would consider making an application to go. I promptly replied, "Why, yes, I'd be delighted to go," but I didn't want to go under false pretenses. I would not go and come back and say, "I have seen the future and it works," that the same critical intelligence that I'd had in regard to the Soviet Union I would have in regard to China. The result of that was, of course, that no invitation came, and just a few weeks later there appeared a column in the National Guardian, written by Irwin Silber, attacking me as being a pro-Sovieteer, that I didn't understand the dimensions of the problem of the Soviet Union. And in his sense, he's absolutely right, because of course he takes the Chinese line that the Soviet Union is a capitalist, social-imperialist country, no longer socialist, and I don't take that position. He also refused me the right to reply to his column. What he did, to be more precise: when I phoned and asked if I could write a reply to his attack on me, he said, "Well, you go ahead and write it, and if we like it, maybe we'll run it." I said, "Oh, go to hell," and hung up. Because that's exactly of course what the Daily World is. However, last week the U.S.-China Friendship Association asked me to write a political biography— or biography, period (evidently that's the way in which you go on one of these delegations)—to go to China this year. It's interesting in that it comes from the local people—all of them have known me, we've known one another, many years—with whom I've publicly debated the questions of China, both in forums and on KPFK. They know my position very well in regard to the socialist countries, including China, and yet the fact that they still would make the invitation I find very interesting, and I'm not sure I fully understand why they're doing it. But I know that it would never come from the Soviet Union, and I would hope that it's not coming from China in that they think that I will then accept their position either in regards to themselves or in regards to the Soviet Union, because my opinions are not up for grabs that way.

GARDNER

So you wouldn't accept?

HEALEY

Oh, I would accept as long as it was understood that I'm not going to ...

GARDNER

... be fatuous.

HEALEY

That's right. I'm not going to go over there and see socialism through the windows of a limousine or a tour and think that I've seen the reality of Chinese society. Obviously, when you don't speak the language, when you're not on your own, you're seeing one aspect that is valid, but you're not seeing the totality.

GARDNER

What is the organization? Can you describe that for awhile?

HEALEY

The [U.S.-China] Friendship Association? Oh, it's the counterpart of the U.S.-Soviet Friendship Association (which has been in existence since the twenties), an organization designed to focus attention on the cultural, political, social, economic development of China, to bring to a U.S. audience the accomplishments of their society.

GARDNER

Do you have any idea where you would go if you went? Or is it just very open-ended right now?

HEALEY

I don't have any idea if they're actually going to go through with the invitation. I sent in the political—again, I've used the wrong words—I sent in the biography, but of course a biography for me (as you know by this time, poor man) means mainly a political recitation. I don't know. I know that they're aware of my status, of course. What they'll do I really don't know.* *This trip eventually fell through.

1.53. TAPE NUMBER: XXVI, SIDE TWO FEBRUARY 4, 1974

HEALEY

As I told you last time, about four or five months after Al Richmond and I left the party, the Central Committee and the National Council of the party expelled us by a unanimous vote, and I read that statement to you. On January 22, Al and I sent a joint letter to the Central Committee on that expulsion, which we are also sending out to other places throughout the country, most particularly to party members, because party members will never know through party channels that we've ever written this. I think it might be worthwhile to include it in this, primarily again its importance being not because of us but because of the question of the political posture of the party and its approach towards social and political questions in the country today. The letter follows: "To the Central Committee, Communist Party, U.S.A., 23 West Twenty-sixth Street, New York, New York, 10010. "Dear Comrades: The resolution decreeing our expulsion from the Communist Party, U.S.A., says that the Central Committee acted "by the authority vested in it by the constitution of the CPUSA and in accord with Article VI, Section 10; Article VII, Section 1; and Article VIII, Section 1." Presumably this conspicuous display of constitutional citations is intended to endow the action with an aura of 'legality.' Let us dispose of this issue before getting into the politics. The Central Committee acted some five months after our resignations from the CPUSA, and the first legal question is, how can people be expelled from an organization in which they no longer hold membership? If the answer is that the resignations were never formally accepted, then legality is beset by other difficulties: the party constitution prescribes that in disciplinary proceedings there be formal notice of specific charges, a hearing or trial, appeal and so on. There was not even the pretense of honoring these provisions. In the circumstances, two basic alternatives existed: either we were nonmembers and therefore not subject to expulsion, or we were members and therefore entitled to the due process spelled out in the party constitution. On either ground, the Central Committee exhibited utter contempt for the legality it now invokes. In terms of the application of due process, we were treated as nonmembers; only for the purposes of expulsion was there a presumption of membership. For this sort of legality the Central Committee would have been better advised to cite not the party constitution but the novel Catch-22. "It might well be that you do not care how such shabby treatment of party legality impresses the party membership and others. But the party is associated with the world movement, which includes parties that command state power, and this fact should have given you some pause. If in the public mind you are often held accountable for what other parties do, by the same token what you do reflects upon other parties. You should have been concerned, therefore, with the possible effects of your behavior upon the American public view of the worldwide integrity and credibility of communist and socialist state observance of legality. "We turn now to the politics of your action. Last September 1, the leadership of the party's Northern California district published a lengthy statement on Richmond's resignation. In substance, the statement tacitly if reluctantly recognized the resignation as a fact. It contained no hint or suggestion of expulsion or of any proceeding leading to it. Earlier, in July, the Southern California district party leadership issued a statement on Healey's resignation, which said explicitly, 'There was no move to expel Dorothy Healey.' Now, your resolution says we resigned "in anticipation of being expelled,' although the earlier official statements imputed no such anticipation and asserted either implicitly or explicitly that there were no grounds for such anticipation. "This inconsistency aside, the more important question is, what happened between July or September and December to impel the Central Committee into its curious action? This critical issue is smothered in the resolution's verbiage. However, in private conversation, the two California representatives on the Central Committee's expulsion subcommittee informed us that the primary reason for the action was our association with persons who are exploring the possibilities of a new organization of the Left in the United States. This information was indirectly corroborated by the vehement hostility directed at this potential left formation in Henry Winston's report to the same Central Committee meeting that voted our expulsion. But in the resolution only one sentence refers to this most important matter, and the ordinary reader might easily lose that one sentence in that terrifying thicket of jargon and gibberish. That one sentence says, 'Recently, Healey has come out for the formation of some nonparty type of organization to engage in socialist dialogue and debate.' Only a Catch-22 logic endows the Central Committee with the organizational authority to govern the association of nonparty members by subjecting them to a punitive discipline after they have severed their association with the party, especially when this severance was made public so that no one would labor under any misapprehension about their party status. "We do not pursue this point so as to get at the political substance of this particular matter. It is a characteristic of the U.S. scene that many persons who think of themselves as left do not express their political conviction through organizational association. Most of these people of the Left remain unorganized because, for one reason or another, good or bad, they are not attracted to the existing organizations, including the CP. In this sense, a certain organizational vacuum exists. Inevitably there have been, are, and will be efforts to fill this vacuum. It is definitely not excluded, but sooner or later one of these efforts may succeed in creating a viable organization of the Left. Your attitude toward such efforts and toward such other forces of the Left in general represents a stark contrast with the prevailing direction of Communist parties in other capitalist countries. Their policy has been distinguished by initiative and energy in striving for cooperation and unity with other forces and currents on the Left on the only basis that makes such initiatives credible, respect for the autonomy and integrity of these other forces. But your policy has been distinguished by an almost paranoid reflex that regards every other left force which is not a product of Communist party initiative or does not accept Communist party hegemony as a competitor that must be throttled or destroyed. Clearly, in other countries, too, the existence of diverse left forces reflects a competition for leadership and support. But Communist parties, some of which are immeasurably stronger than the one in the United States, do not conclude therefore that the logic of competition is the destruction of the competitors, that the desirable and feasible alternative to competition is monopoly. On the contrary, they seek to place this competition within the framework of unity for common objectives, and they declare that for them such cooperation is not just a temporary expedient but rather a working relationship they will strive to maintain through the socialist revolution and the development of socialist society. But your practical working policy in left politics clings to the premise of being the one and only party now and in the future. To the degree that your actions carry weight, you assume a grave responsibility before history for carrying the Communist party into being an instrument for the disunity of the Left. This responsibility is magnified because of the weakness and dispersal of the American Left, which was tragically illustrated by left inability to launch a viable and effective initiative in the Watergate crisis. "Our actions as individuals are insignificant in this larger context. So was your action insofar as it was directed against us as individuals. It does assume a larger meaning, however, because our expulsion is a symbolic act in your destructive war against other left forces, that is, against left unity. It is your prerogative, of course, to make your own estimate of various forces and currents on the left. This is not the issue. The issue is that specific estimates flow from an overall policy, and your overall policy is not for left unity; it is tinged with paranoid fear and hostility that preclude unity. Our expulsions are only symptomatic of this malignant ailment. "On another plane also, although the action was directed against us, its real targets were others. When we resigned from the party, despite any Central Committee delusions about its own omnipotence, we placed ourselves beyond the purview of its organizational discipline. But this is not so for people in the party. For us, the ex post facto expulsions were vindictive, petty, and somewhat absurd reprisals. For members of the party they constitute a warning of far greater immediacy. Unfortunately, this logic of the expulsions was exemplified in the proceedings that attended them. In a body as large as the party's National Council, which was granted the privilege of concurring in the Central Committee resolution, we know there were a number of people who had questions, doubts, reservations or disagreements. They remained silent. We recall that after the Earl Browder episode and once more after the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress revelations, all sorts of party members vowed that never again would for the revolutionary transformation of society and for the they hoard and conceal their questions and reservations beneath mental mattresses. But now, when that atmosphere has been recreated in which hidden reservations grow like mushrooms in a dank darkness, our expulsions were designed to reinforce this regime of deadly and deadening conformity by silence. "As against the implications of our expulsions for left unity and the party's internal regime, some other questions posed by the resolution are petty. In the interest of brevity, we will not deal with some falsifications, with flights from reason, with the meretricious use of such labels as 'anti-working-class' and 'anti-Soviet,' or with your awkward attempt to deny in effect our right to voluntarily disassociate from the party, and the damage this does to the very important principle that a Communist party is a voluntary association. "You take exception to Healey's self-designation as 'a communist, albeit without a party.' In your narrow bureaucratic vision, this declaration is demeaned into just another 'fraudulent attempt to sustain contacts with party members." This capacity you display for so quickly reducing things to the mean and petty measure of your own factional obsessions tells more about you than it does about us. That self-designation is validated by a lifetime of conviction, struggle and action. We stand by that conviction. We continue the struggle creation of the more rational, just, and humane social order. The privilege to do that is not yours to grant or deny. 'Comradely yours, Dorothy Healey and Al Richmond.'

GARDNER

And who gets that?

HEALEY

That was sent to the Central Committee of the Communist party of the United States.

GARDNER

Will it be publicized at all elsewhere?

HEALEY

Well, I sent a copy of it to Liberation magazine, a copy to the L.A. Free Press, and then I mailed them out to individual party members and others who were close throughout the country. It will never be published in the party press, no, [laughter] nor will the Central Committee as a whole ever see a copy of it. It will only be seen by the immediate officers in the New York office.

GARDNER

Well, you don't think it'll be circulated? You don't think they'll be reading Liberation magazine, then?

HEALEY

Well, some do, a few do. Not very many, no. Very few.

GARDNER

Is that so? What are your thoughts now in relation to that letter and your role vis-a-vis the party?

HEALEY

Well, actually, the action hasn't changed anything in my thinking. I am not going to do what they predict is inevitable to happen. Their prediction is part and parcel of the vulgarized Marxism with which they view all questions as being "objectively preordained." Their picture of human beings is really one of people simply manipulated by objective circumstances—whether they're aware of it or not—incapable of the capacity to define one's own environment and perspectives. So that I am not going to turn—I hope--into an antiparty person. I'm not going to seek for utilizing those weapons which I would consider illegal in my sense of the word.

GARDNER

Unethical.

HEALEY

That's right. To say to them or to do things publicly that reveal questions that I consider peripheral or secondary or personal in regard to the functioning of the party. Nor do I intend to do anything that's going to add to the mindless anticommunisirt that already exists in the United States. God forbid I should add to it! No, I'm going to continue to find ways to further explore questions of Marxism as it approximates a current reality, in other words, the methodology of Marxism and not the biblical text of Marxism. I'm going to try to do whatever I can to help other groups who want to join together to find organizational alternatives, to find an alternative to capitalism in a mass way, to present socialism as a viable concept, a real meaningful concept to the crisis of capitalism. Their expulsion action has changed very little in my life at this point; I don't know what it'll do in the future in regard to people who are still members of the party. Gus Hall was here two weeks ago in L.A. speaking at a membership meeting of the party. He'd come clearly for the purpose of doing a further attack on me; hopefully, he thought to isolate people in the party from seeing me.

GARDNER

And of course your contacts passed this news along to you.

HEALEY

Oh, they called me immediately. Five minutes after the meeting was over my phone started ringing; it continued all night long. At this point it's had very little effect. I'm not saying that it won't as they continue. For lots of reasons. It's a very difficult thing to fly in the face of a continuing campaign of nonassociation with me, and I won't be surprised if some individuals who are close to me now may not diminish their relationship. I will be very sympathetic if they feel they must; I mean, I can well understand it. There have already been some amusing things in regard to that. I don't know whether I've told you the story: Tamu, who is the chairman of Che-Lumumba Club and a member of this National Council of the party, voted for my expulsion. When she came back she phoned me to tell me about it; she was so apologetic and so nice about it. . .

GARDNER

You did mention it.

HEALEY

I did. And how after all the discussion of it she then went before the district committee to speak in favor of it. Well, she called me last Monday night—I hadn't heard from her in four weeks, I guess—and asked me if I wanted her to come over and stay with my mother so I could get out of the house a little bit, as if nothing had happened at all. [laughter] My mother gets very bitter and very personal. I keep telling her she's an Old Testament Jew in these regards, you know: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

GARDNER

And an expulsion for an expulsion.

HEALEY

Yeah, and Mama says, "Don't you let that woman come in my house." And I said, "Oh, Mama, when I was Tamu's age, I would have done the same thing Tamu did. I would have voted for an expulsion, too, on the premises that the leadership knows what they're doing. I wouldn't have been any different." And that's true.

GARDNER

You mentioned last time, though, that your mother had been having some trouble with her own friends. Has that let up a little bit?

HEALEY

Well, finally. She pressed and pressed, mainly with a sense of irony more than anything else, that they should come over and register her again. That's supposed to be a yearly thing—every year you renew your membership through this process of registration. Finally the club chairman came over and went through the process of doing it. It was obviously a pro forma thing, because I notice that he didn't ask her for her past dues, and you cannot be registered without paying your past dues. I didn't say anything to her about it, but clearly they are not taking it very significantly.

GARDNER

Oh, so in other words they're not going to be really. . .

HEALEY

Well, she is in no condition anyway to go to meetings, doesn't want to go to meetings. She's far more critical actually—well, I mean, not more critical; she's more bitter about these things than I am. They press more heavily on her. The personal aspects of it press more bitterly on her than they do on me. But that's also a difference in temperament. She used to be called "Old Regrets" when we were growing up because she was always so conscious of things that she failed to do as a mother or in any other capacity. And I, as you know, don't have that temperament. I'm much more optimistic in my perspectives.

GARDNER

Now, I'm trying in some way to work out some vague parallel to some of the other major expulsions that have taken place in the Communist party—Browder, Gates, things like that. And in a sense, of course, the fact that the Communist party is so much smaller now than it was in those days makes the expulsion-resignation less cataclysmic. And also the fact that you and Al Richmond, neither one of you was at the time in the position that Browder and Gates were in at the time that they were dropped. Do you think, though, that there will be any major effect on the party as a result of this whole crisis?

HEALEY

No, I don't think so. I think that here in Los Angeles there will be—there has been and will continue to be—but not elsewhere. I saw a letter that Carl Blolce wrote a young friend of mine [Jo Wilkinson] who had written in to the People's World protesting the way the People's World handled the expulsion. His reply—and he specified that he's replying not as editor of the People's World but as a member of the Central Committee—the exact language he used was that Richmond and Healey's expulsion "did not cause a ripple in Northern California." Now, of course, the fact that a man like Al Richmond, who has been part of the party leadership there since 1938, could be expelled without it causing a ripple tells more again, as the letter says, about the party, what kind of party it is today, than it tells about Al's significant relationship to the party or the impact. Or again another example of why these things have diminished effect: I said that Gus had been here in L.A. to speak to a closed meeting of the party membership, closed in the sense it was by invitation only to party members, no one else, no public meeting. The form of the meeting was that he spoke for—before he started to speak, he asked that questions be sent up to him in writing, which of course gave him then the option of which questions he wants to answer and which ones he doesn't—oh, probably two hours again is what they said; and the first hour was another one of his round-the-world journeys of metaphorical abstractions, always on the theme that we were winning all over the world, everything is great, the party's stronger in the U.S. than it's ever been in its history, and everything is better. As I say, [he's] the Norman Vincent Peale of the left wing, the poor man's Norman Vincent Peale. And then the last part of the speech was devoted to a really scurrilous, dishonest attack upon Al and me. He used such things, little tricks, as taking sentences out of convention speeches and, without elaborating on what they were about, reading them to document that historically all our lives we'd been anti-Soviet and anti-working-class and against motherhood— political motherhood. [laughter]

GARDNER

What's the equivalent of apple pie? [laughter]

HEALEY

Yeah, exactly. Now, first, the effect of that was that people who didn't already feel that way were just further disenchanted and outraged and alienated. But what is really more important is not this cute little trick that he played but that a national leader of the Communist party can come into L.A. after not being here for eighteen months, and his sole contact with the membership is—as it always is with Gus Hall—to lecture at them and make a speech, but not to sit and listen to their responses, their experiences, their opinions on any question. In other words, communication's always one-way with Gus. He's always pontificating to the comrades. And actually, nobody was disturbed by that, including the people who so identify with me. Either they never knew the alternative of leaders of the party—and this was always just taken for taken for granted as a style of work, that when you came into an area, the main thing you were going to get is what you got from listening to the experiences of people and their activity. After all, you're not doing those activities; you can't as a leader. It is the party membership which is in contact with what goes on in GM or in the community in a mass organization. And the only way you can learn is to listen to what their experiences have been. So the young people have never seen a party leader do that from the national office. And the old people have just forgotten that this was ever a method; or if they haven't forgotten, they're not going to speak about it because it would then place them in jeopardy, or at least make them unpopular. But I consider that far more important than the kind of attacks he made on me. The only other thing it does is that as a result of the attacks which I gather he's doing all over the country, of taking my convention reports and taking little sentences to demonstrate his historic proof, I've decided to make a cheap reprinting of all those convention speeches and radio speeches that were controversial and call it "The Other Side of Communist Party History."* Those things should be a matter of political record, and they are the kind of things which, when historians write about the party, they never understand and never deal with, anyway. So perhaps in the end his visit is good.

GARDNER

When Gus Hall finally leaves his now-hallowed position, do you think there'll be some change as a result of that?

HEALEY

No, not because of his leaving, no. There may be improvements in the style of work. I mean, I really don't. . . .

GARDNER

But you don't think the attitude will change.

HEALEY

No. Not the methodology, not the approaches on questions. I mean, let me say this: I don't foreclose change. You can't preclude change in anything that includes human beings. But his leaving would not be the thing—that is, if he just simply left because of *This pamphlet was never, in fact, written. death or age or something. If he left because there was a political upheaval in the party again, then it would mean something. But I see no sign of that taking place, no reason to believe it could even take place.

GARDNER

Well, we seem to have reached that point now. Is there any sort of summation that you'd like to deliver, any reflections on what sort of fruit our discussions have borne, or anything like that?

HEALEY

Well, as I've indicated to you over and over again, it's my own dissatisfaction with these discussions, that one tends to remember some things and forget others, and that, in particular, one remembers what one has said and forgets the cogent arguments which may have been made against one's own position: you remember where life may have demonstrated the validity of your position; you forget where life may have proven how wrong you were. In other words, what I'm saying is that oral history is important and yet it can by no means replace the independent research that is essential for history. I'm particularly conscious of this in reading Staughton Lynd and other of the new young historians' writings about "history from below," their belief that this is a total answer to how history should be written. It's not. I think the understanding of that is terribly important. It has a validity, it is significant, but it registers just one aspect of validity and is not the total history that has to be researched and understood and debated and argued about if it is to have any relevance. And of course, in ray opinion, history only has meaning if it does have relevancy to the new generation, to a new struggle.

GARDNER

This is a very theoretical question, admittedly, but in what way would you improve on the technique, if it could be done? Or is the technique limited by its own definition?

HEALEY

Well, it requires two things that are enormously difficult to do. It requires first of all that the interviewee has to do a considerable amount of personal research before the interviews take place. As just one example—now before I give the example, let me qualify it by saying I can't speak about interviews that cover other fields of activity, of human experience. But in regard to activities, of the kind that I lived through, the example is, I think again, not personal but general. When you realize that a revolutionary struggle encompasses such a variety of activity, one would have to do years of this kind of discussion to reflect with any degree of fidelity the facets of that activity. I could give you a dozen examples of our collective activity, for instance, around questions of discrimination, important, terribly important, because they indicate the kind of pioneering activity carried on in small communities and organizations, the constant fight on these issues that help to shape and influence a later acceptance or change of consciousness. Now, it could be dramatized around the stories of the fight around Mother Ingram going to prison and her sons, or a dozen different cases, hundreds of cases, picket lines on hiring in front of banks and Sears, Roebuck here in the ghetto when they didn't hire Blacks. That's just one illustration, and I could do it on almost every facet of existence. But clearly, to do that, the person who's giving the interview would have to refresh [his or her] memory. You can't remember what the social environment was for every stage of what was going on, what big things were dominating. You don't set the social scene, in other words, accurately. Now, the interviewer also has a responsibility of comparable proportions. Clearly, if one is doing nothing else but that one interview, say, for several years, then the interviewer can properly equip himself or herself for the job of doing that kind of research that provides for the most insightful questions. But clearly no one is going to do those kind of interviews, neither the person whom you're interviewing nor the interviewer. You would do nothing else. So that's really, as I see it, the limitation and the problem. And I know no way in which you could overcome it.

GARDNER

Well, it's a nice ideal. (I'll just keep recording this on tape because it's a nice theoretical discussion.) Perhaps one solution is the sort of thing that we did, as you were talking about before, around the Freedom Riders, whereby an interview is done immediately after an event. And if something like that could have been done throughout your entire life, for example, where, say, for one month every year three or four interviews would have been carried on, where you could then sum up what the situation was during that year and then sort of towards the—of course, this implies resources that are beyond the means of practically any organization.

HEALEY

In addition to even the resource of having a month out of each year to take to tell it. That's the problem. I don't know, really. I think the main thing is really just to recognize that there are limitations, say, try to define the limitation as well as one can in each circumstance—because, as I say, I don't think that all circumstances are interchangeable, fungible commodities-and as well as one can, overcome whatever limitations, whatever inherent handicaps there are to the process. I am self-critical over the fact that I really myself didn't take greater time in preparation. I could have done it with far greater ease than you or other people could have done it because I kept so much material— I'm surrounded by materials—but I didn't.

GARDNER

Well, let me ask one sort of final question. I meant to ask it last time, but I guess I didn't get to it because we got on to another subject. What do you consider your own greatest contribution in your forty-five years of activism?

HEALEY

[silence]

GARDNER

Did I stump you?

HEALEY

Yes. [laughter] I guess my stubbornness, stubbornness as a two-front struggle—both as resisting any pressures from capitalism to in any way influence my life, and stubbornness within my own associations within the party and the YCL, my own environment, to go along, to accept uncritically, to be just an applauder, one of the gang, a nice kid. So I'd just say stubbornness is probably the main contribution.

GARDNER

Thank you very much, I've had a wonderful time.

HEALEY

Thank you, Joel. [laughter]

1.54. TAPE NUMBER: XXVII, SIDE ONE MARCH 7, 1974

GARDNER

I guess—don't giggle; that's not fair.

HEALEY

I'm just thinking, my God, so many chapters!

GARDNER

Well, I guess I'll just let you start off and exchange as it comes up, since this is your own individual conclusion.

HEALEY

Well, there's one very subjective reaction that I have to this, and that is that in a sense it sounds as if the period dealing with my membership in the Communist party, the forty-five years of membership, and this summing-up sort of thing that we've been doing for so long, also marks the end of my life, and that's a rather distressing view. [laughter] One doesn't mind doing that sort of thing when you're in your eighties and saying, you know, any further independent activity is rather ruled out. But while it is certainly true that the forty-five years that I spent in the party represented the most important part of my life, not only because of the span of years but because of the enormous amount that I learned from my activity. . . . That's an important question for people to understand, that really in joining together with others with any degree of dedication or commitment, what the individual gains from it is so much greater than anything the individual can possibly give: the additional cubits that are added to one's stature, the constant thrusting after being capable to answer things that you never would have thought of in a million years or cared about under ordinary pursuits, the acquiring of knowledge that would never be within one's purview ordinarily. For these things, without any question, I feel only a very great sense of gratitude to the party. But what I find sad is that none of the aspects of history--either formal history as it was taught in schools and colleges and universities, or the history written by the organizations themselves or their main participants (you know, the autobiographies that personalities within the radical movement have written, the independent historiography on radical questions)—what is unfortunate is that the most important thing about history, it seems to me, is its relevance to another generation, to unsolved problems, its capacity to provide a continuity that is meaningful. There isn't really much use in having accumulated experiences unless there is some equipment, some preparation, for extracting from those experiences relevant generalizations, conclusions which in some way help another generation in the task of tackling social problems. But the general problem of historiography when it deals with the radical movement— and I'm now leaving aside the obvious, the worst examples, the formal histories that are taught, written by bourgeois historians who have the a priori viewpoint that they're going to prove either the craziness, the wackiness, the foreign agent charge, whatever it may be; they're all prepared as defenders of the status quo, people in a profession part of whose responsibility, whether implicit or explicit, is to pass on the values of the establishment-dismissing those, because one recognizes ahead of time that bias, what I'm talking about now are the honest researchers who don't necessarily enter into it with an a priori definition (although that's hard to escape in a human being: most people have a philosophy, whether they're aware of it or not, and seek to extract from a huge volume of facts those particular facts that will substantiate their theory). Nevertheless, within that framework, the problem is that those independent historians who look, for instance, only at what the top personalities were saying and writing and doing--in other words, what appears to be the official policy of the Communist party—are leaving out entirely the fact that for the bulk of the party's membership (and this is both a factual statement and a critical statement, but nevertheless a real problem), the official line, the official policy at any one point was always secondary to the enormous amount of activity that was being carried out. Very few of the activists whom I have worked with, the organizers with whom I've worked—and I'm not talking now of the period when I was in the party's leadership but in all the preceding years—examined their activity with an eye as to what was the, quote, "official line." It was not that we were contemptuous of that official line; it was simply that, number one, there was so much activity to do, so much work to do, that one didn't have a whole lot of time to be introspective about it or to relate it back to, quote, "what was the line," to think about one's experiences as confirming or invalidating the line. There was, secondly, the question that in the course of the activity there was this attitude that, well, the leadership makes the big decisions, you know, what you do about war and peace, but you're making the real decisions about how you organize people and how you get them to change their consciousness. Well, let me give just one example as far as this question of historiography. Probably one of the most controversial questions within the Left concerning the party's activity was the question of its electoral line, its approach toward electoral politics. For most independent, quote, "radical" historians, they simply content themselves with the written word as it appeared either in party resolutions—which some of them researched, but a lot didn't—or mostly they would deal with the speeches of whoever was the general secretary of the party, what the general secretary of the party had to say at any one point, or other very well known and important party leaders. But what they leave out is that that's only one facet of party history and the electoral activity. For instance, in the late thirties, simultaneously with the approach of the party toward the building of a people's front, a democratic front, an alliance of all those who were, quote, "oppressed" or in any way in antagonism to the dominant monopoly control—in addition to that policy, which was a coalition policy, a united front policy, there was the party's independent role, which meant that tens of thousands of Communists were running as Communist party candidates in offices throughout the country. And yet I have yet to find a history of the party that even starts to deal with that question. Clearly unless one sees that facet of party activity in the electoral arena, one is not seeing the total picture. Or secondly, those independent historians, the, quote, "radicals," who castigate the party that we didn't talk enough about socialism in the thirties—in the late thirties; they all recognize that there was that in the early thirties—that in the late thirties we submerged our own approach on socialism in the interests of the building of this coalition: now, it is true that the general thrust of the party's line, of its overall line, was the recognition (and I think a valid recognition) that a socialist revolution was not the order of the day, that while there was mass discontent, it was not a discontent with capitalism per se but with immediate conditions as they affected large sectors of the population. But when historians then conclude, as they have, that the party didn't talk about socialism at all, again, what they're neglecting and what is an important factor are the millions of pieces of literature that we sold. Our membership was totally geared up for selling literature. I mean, no party member ever bought a single pamphlet just for oneself to read. You always bought ten to sell to ten people. By the millions that kind of pamphlets, the popular pamphlets, were sold, and they dealt with socialism. By the millions leaflets were distributed which talked about a socialist alternative. Really, what the historians don't deal with—and I'm talking now about radical historians—is the problem of a revolutionary party in a nonrevolutionary situation. That is the most complicated problem which every party really faces without exception, parties with splendid leadership and parties with mediocre leadership. That constitutes the overwhelming problem, how you maintain the balance of fighting for immediate questions and still present the socialist vision. Well, that's one comment I just wanted to make in regard to the question of the kind of research that has to be done before the historians can be content with the idea that they have produced anything of historical value. I use the word historians in its broadest sense. I'm not so much only interested in the historians of academia. I'm talking now about those who do independent production outside of that. That's a vast body of writing which in itself needs to be examined because that was present in the kind of historiography that we produced in the thirties, the forties, the fifties, and—well, mostly ending then.

GARDNER

But doesn't what passes for history really end up being the sum of all the histories that are written? In other words, as complex as things are nowadays, can anybody really write a definitive history of anything?

HEALEY

Well, that's a very difficult thing to do because in order to write a definitive history, you can't only deal, for instance, with the activities of the Communist party or of the labor movement of the period. You've got to try also to deal with the surrounding environment, the framework in which that organization functioned, whether it was a union or a party, the problems which objectively had to be met. So it is difficult. But let me give an example of what I'm getting at that could be done, and that is for researchers to be aware of the vast body of material that they never bother researching, the kind of outlines, for instance, that were being used at workers' schools to teach Marxism, which are both good and dreadful but which have to be looked at if you want an idea of what was the theoretical presentation of the party on Marxism, Leninism or any—I use the party because it was the largest and most significant organization, but that would be true for any kind of history dealing with the radical movement. Or secondly, the mass organizations or centers that the party initiated and was mainly responsible for which produced their own materials and had their own logic of development: if you don't look at those things, you also don't see a very significant sector of party life. And finally again, back on the question of even oral history: I think, for instance, of my own reluctance to deal in talking to you all this time, all these tapes, to deal with what I know I've indicated but I haven't spelled out, with what I know was an important factor, and that is simply the personalities, the human beings who were involved, the things that don't appear anywhere, aren't written anywhere. And yet the reluctance that even I would have, a great reluctance, in talking about the specifics that I know of on these personalities, whether it was a question of great dedication and honest people, beautiful people, or whether it was chicanery and opportunism and mediocrity that was being enshrined in posts where nobody could ever challenge anyone.

GARDNER

I think you have expressed yourself fairly well on those subjects. [laughter]

HEALEY

Yeah, but without alluding to the personalities really involved. And believe me, whatever I may have said, there is just an enormous amount that I left unsaid.

GARDNER

Well, let's start saying it, then.

HEALEY

No, no, because there is a reason why one is unwilling to do it. And yet it is a shame, actually, because if we had the truth, or even now could know the truth of what really, for instance, took place in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, or if one really knew what was happening in China as far as the personalities involved are concerned, it would be very helpful. Now, Marxists tend to subsume all that under the [contention] that those are so unimportant, so peripheral to the major social issues that produce the great clashes. I mean, for instance, the Chinese simply dismiss all that and claim that there are always two lines in conflict, and one line is right and one line is wrong. Therefore you have them constantly rewriting history to have new villains that nobody ever thought of as villains during the previous period but who suddenly emerge, like first Liu Shao-ch'i, and now Lin Piao, you know, poor Lin Piao linked with Confucius. (Just parenthetically, one of the things that amuses me about that is that it was Mao, not Lin Piao or Liu Shao-ch'i, who made famous a statement which I thought at the time was a disgraceful statement, that the mind of the Chinese peasant was like a blank sheet of paper on which anything could be written. As I say, I thought that was a disgraceful statement. But now, of course, it's proven how ridiculous it is, because if it was such a blank sheet of paper, then the theories and philosophy of Confucius who lived, what? in 656 B.C. or something [actually 551-479 B.C.]. ... As a matter of fact—I'm going off the subject, but I'm just so exasperated. I just read the last issue of the National Guardian last night, which deals with what is the real meaning of the fight against Confucius. The Guardian has become the foremost Maoist publication in the United States. So the reason for the attack on Confucius, they argue, is that he didn't write from a working-class viewpoint. A working-class viewpoint for 656 B.C.! It's just hysterical. But that's part of the thing that we've talked about so much, the way in which those who have their "favorite socialist country" have to tailor their common sense to fit the ins and outs of whatever is the current line.) But back, as I say, on this other question. There are really important and, I think, substantial reasons why no one who has any degree of integrity would really be willing to discuss in any significant detail the personalities. As I say, that is an unfortunate thing because it leaves the personalities involved in the revolutionary movement in a one-dimensional way. One really doesn't know what makes them tick one way or the other, or why they thought as they did, or why they didn't think as they didn't. But I don't know any way to get over it, and again it fits into this caution I'm giving regarding history. The historian has to at least be aware that there is more than is on the surface. Whether it is possible to get at other independent information, I doubt very much—I think it's very rare that one could get it all—but he should at least be aware of the fact that it's something to be found. Now, as far as ray own summing up of this chapter of my life, at this point my greatest feeling is just a feeling of an enormous compassion for what I see taking place in the party, and knowledge of the total—I see no factors operating today within the party that are going to provide any significant challenge to what has become almost an absence of political analysis, of political theory, of a Marxist methodology. And I'm saddened by it because I think that actually the party should have provided, could have provided, would have provided the best instrument for the continuity of revolutionary challenge in the future, in the present and in the future. And I don't, at least for any immediate period, see that happening. As far as I personally am concerned, I'm currently engaged in trying to help the New American Movement get organized here, mainly because of all the new independent organizations that have sprung up in the last few years, it is the only one that offers at least a potential—I don't think much more than that, but a potential—for the nonorganized radicals to gather together. And there are far more nonorganized radicals in the country than there are organized. I want to, in some minimum way, participate with them in doing that, even though I shudder at the thought of undertaking all the tedious activities that go into building an organization, the interminable meetings, the incredible amount of patience that is required, because you can't substitute your experience for other people acquiring their own experience, and so you in a sense relive everything that you've lived before. That feeling of d£ja vu is not one that I'd recommend for excitement or euphoria; it doesn't provide that. But it is a question of a feeling of responsibility, a feeling of responsibility in the sense that the only meaning to one's life is the same as the only meaning to history, whether it offers any relevance to today's and tomorrow's problems and is not something that you tuck away and say, "Well, now I can forget politics." Because for a revolutionary, that's impossible. There are a couple of other things that probably could be inserted in sections of this interminable session that has gone on. I really sympathize with you. I don't know how you've tolerated my wanderings, but. . . .

GARDNER

Well, for the record, I've enjoyed it immensely. That's for future historians. [laughter]

HEALEY

I don't know that I've really ever talked about the penalty that people associated with me have paid because of my role. I think I mentioned my estimate of its impact upon my son, and also the fact that my stepfather, Dan Nestor, was deported and lost his social security. . . .

GARDNER

You've never mentioned it. Would you like to tell that story?

HEALEY

In 1954 or '55—the worst of the Cold War period, the McCarthy hysteria—my stepfather, who had come to this country in 1914 . . .

GARDNER

From where?

HEALEY

. . . from Bulgaria, was deported back to Bulgaria. And the main reason really was that he was my stepfather. I mean, he was a very mild man who really played no significant role in any kind of activity.

GARDNER

Was he a party member?

HEALEY

He had been. But he really was an anarcho-syndicalist-quasi-Marxist. He was really much more influenced by . . .

GARDNER

. . . his Balkan heritage. [laughter]

HEALEY

Exactly. But he'd lived in the country since 1914, had been married to my mother since, I think, 1933 or "34, but had had a previous marriage with two children born in this country. Once he was deported to Bulgaria— he was in his sixties—they took away his social security. After all, remember, social security is deducted from your own wages, not just what the employer puts in; it's also deducted from your own wages as well. So it was simply a confiscation of all his accumulated wages taken away on the ground that if you were deported for being a subversive, you lose your property rights in the social security. It's not an unimportant case in terms of juridical history, Nestor against the United States.* A brother-in-law of mine, Ed Newman, who had never been a Communist, married to my little sister, was on the board of education in Hayward, a lawyer. He was recalled from the board of education, and the main thing used against him was the fact that he was ray brother-in-law and had refused to repudiate me, still maintained a relationship with me. Now, some of my relatives did refuse. I have a cousin, Harold Shire, very wealthy, who opened up some kind of defense plant—I don't remember what it was, never did know or care.

GARDNER

Sold scrap iron in Japan.

HEALEY

Yeah. And the damned whole side of the family, my mother's sister [Rose], from that point on they never talked to us, never called us, never saw them again. *The United States won the case. But I'm talking now about the penalty of those who refused to do that, who just either out of decency--mostly out of decency and also family feeling—refused to do it. I think I mentioned the fact that my brother lost a post because of putting up the bail for me in the Smith Act, although he hated my activities.

GARDNER

That was in a hospital, wasn't it?

HEALEY

Yes, in Cedars of Lebanon. You know, he didn't like them at all. I mention all this simply that—you know, the well-known truism, and it's well known because it is a truism, because it affects everyone—that of course no individual escapes the problem of the relationships that accrue in one's life and the burdens they have, not because of anything they've done but simply by virtue of their family relationship to you. As I say, it should be noted that the ferocity of the attack, in this case against my relatives, although the problem could be duplicated by the hundreds, is also a part of the social history of that period and should not be ignored. Finally on this question of what you asked me which started my becoming introspective—the question of being a woman. I have a feeling that I probably overstated the problem somewhat. I don't quite remember, but my feeling after you'd left was that I had overstated the problem. It is not that there were not as significant dimensions to the problem of a woman Communist or a woman trade- union organizer in all that period as there are today. It is true that while we were certainly not as conscious of the totality of the impact of male supremacy upon all organizations and individuals—I don't want to give the impression that the party didn't do anything on this question. I think I did [give that impression], and that wouldn't be accurate, because really up until 1960 there was a not-unimportant body of literature that would have to be extracted from the resolutions and things of that kind, [resolutions] which were passed on the question and movements that were started, activities. I think really my problem—and it is probably comparable to the same thing as far as Blacks or Chicanos are concerned—my problem is that I was one of the women in the general leadership of the party, and we resented and reacted against being part, for instance, of women's commissions, of being regarded as women ourselves, because we knew it meant second-class status in the party. I don't think--I'm not saying we were conscious—well, probably we were more conscious than I'm even thinking of. All I remember is a feeling of aversion that this was a way of ghettoizing women, to put them on women's commissions.

GARDNER

Well, see, I think that's the point in a lot of ways behind what you said last time, so you shouldn't feel guilty about it, in the sense that there has to be a [distinction made] between what the philosophy was, the party's own fight for women's equality up and down the line, and the actual role of women in the party.

HEALEY

You're very perceptive.

GARDNER

Well, I just reread last week's transcript, which helps. What you did go into in a great deal—and if you'd like to comment more now, you can, but you did cover it well—was your own role as a party member and as a woman. [phone rings; tape recorder turned off] Since we're putting things into perspective and making it sort of a summing-up, I think it might be useful to look at the whole forty-five years, if you see what I mean, almost historiographically, in terms of the progression and the changes and so forth and so on.

HEALEY

Well, as I say, you've got to remember that from the time I was about ten years old or twelve at the most, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be what is today called a professional revolutionary. I didn't use those terms when I was young, but what I meant by it then and what I mean by it today is the total dedication towards the one question of the fight against capitalism. That was always the dominant motivating factor in all those years, and remains so today. Yesterday's Los Angeles Times had an article by some capitalist figure on the editorial page about how great capitalism really is and what the profit system provides, and I get just as outraged and indignant and furious now as I did forty years ago. [laughter] Or an article in the New York Times describing what's going on among old people who've worked all their lives and can't live today under what they're getting. I get just as violent in my feelings now.

GARDNER

But what perspectives have changed, and how have they changed?

HEALEY

Well, I would say the major change is in my belated awareness of the significance of Marxist theory, the importance of theory and what it represents, and I'm bothered by that because I see the same problem being reproduced today. I looked through a hundred outlines that we had during the thirties and the forties for all the schools that we had on Marxism, and I know that the bulk of people got their knowledge of Marxism not by independent reading of Marx and Engels and Lenin but from what they were—you know, excerpts from chapters that they read for a class. So that the vulgarization of Marxist theory, the institutionalizing of it, that's really the problem, the institutionalizing of it in the sense that it was used by organizations to justify whatever tactical move they were making, whatever the policy was at any point. While some of that is almost inescapable, nevertheless imperceptibly what it does—and then finally very perceptibly—is to distort not only the methodology of Marxism, which is its most important characteristic, its usefulness as an analytical tool, but the very conclusions, the thinking of the great theoreticians of Marxism. I look back in my own mind, my own activity, and I'm somewhat horrified by the fact that it wasn't until the forties, after some twenty years almost—well, not quite twenty, about eighteen years—of activity, that there started to be a connection to me between the theory and the practice, that I saw that this wasn't just a vulgar cliche, that "theory enlightens practice," that it had meaning. So if I were to single out the overwhelming feeling I have at this point for what I have learned in this aspect of my life, it is precisely that. There is no substitute for the independent wrestling within one's own mind with the concepts and the methodology of Marxism. Well, I don't know how you bridge the problem that a large bulk of the people who become revolutionaries are not going to be students of Marxism in the sense of independent reading. They are satisfied with what is really still a very important question, and that is the basic formulas, you know, the question of working-class struggle against capitalism, the need of a socialist revolution, but they're impatient with what they consider theoretical discussion. It's too abstract and seemingly unrelated to their life. The fact that that is true really should only provide a challenge as to how one makes these concepts meaningful to the activist. Now, the other part of it is—and I don't think I was sui generis in this—that even though I had been an omnivorous reader all my life, a lot of the writings of Marx or Lenin only had meaning to me after I had accumulated long years of practical experience. Before that, it was simply interesting to read as history, for instance, or interesting to read because it was stimulating as far as what the writer was saying, not because it had anything to say to me about what I thought ought to be done. It was only after I had accumulated, as I say, years and years and years of practical experience that it suddenly occurred to me in reading these books that what really was being talked about was my activity, and I had not paid any attention to it. Again, I don't know the answer of how you find a symmetry, a balance for the activist and the theorist that does provide the unity. Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, defines the party as the collective intellectual in which the activist and the theoretician are united in organic unity; each then takes on the characteristics of the other through the organizational unity. But that's easier said than done. I mean, in theory that's desirable; in life, it doesn't happen as readily as that. But I would say that's one of the unsolved lessons that my activity places before me as a continuing challenge. I watch it, for instance, in this--I told you I've been helping this New American Movement. I watched the clash of these new young people who are independent radicals coming to try to organize something new, the clash between those who felt that the only thing that's valid is what are you doing today (mass actions, demonstrations, how you mobilize), and those who want to study and think and probe into the theory. And you've got to have both; furthermore, there's no wall that separates the one from the other, because as I've indicated, the activist can become the theoretician, the theoretician can become the activist. But the processes which a movement has to go through to acomplish that. ... I once used the example, the comparison of a revolutionary movement to something like an orchestra: lots of different instruments are essential, and they're not going to be identical or interchangeable. Hopefully, all you're going to want is that they're all playing the same tune. But nevertheless, you do have to have the objective of trying to have each one of those instruments aware of and knowledgeable of the uniqueness of the other instruments. I mean, that at least is the minimum that has to be strived for so that the activist doesn't just have a contempt for the theoretical discussion on the ground that, "Ach— that's a lot of hot air, who cares?" On the other hand, the theoretician has to realize that a theoretician who is divorced from having to carry through organized activities to change anything really is not a theoretician. The great merit of Marx and Engels and Lenin is that they were practical revolutionaries. They were doing something, and that's what influenced their writings.

GARDNER

Along that line—this is partially parenthetical and may be opening up a whole other kettle of fish this late in the interview, but I think it follows from what you've been saying. Isn't it probably that the American Communist party, over the years, has been more intellectual than actually activist?

HEALEY

Oh, no.

GARDNER

That even the activists have really been intellectuals down the line?

HEALEY

Unh-unh, on the contrary. It's just the opposite. I'd say the fact is that there are very—well, let me use a different word than intellectuals. Let me say there is very little intellectuality within the party in the last two decades. Well, the last decade particularly.

GARDNER

Well, up to then.

HEALEY

There was a little bit more, as you can see by just reading the enormous amount of literature that came out that did have something to say. I mean, there was a pioneering as far as the history of black people and the meaning of that; there was a pioneering even as far as women are concerned—all these things, on an intellectual basis. But what I'm more concerned with than intellectuals as intellectuals, although it's not an unimportant question, is. . . . Let me again just repeat what I have probably already said to you, and that is that the biggest problem really that the American party has had, it shares with Americans generally, and that is an anti-intellectual feeling, a contempt for intellectuals. Therefore what you have is one of two things. Either you had people who are semiskilled intellectuals who don't really acquire a competency in their own field, or you had people like Herb Aptheker who were highly skilled but used their skills to justify every turn and twist of party policy so that the question of integrity (not in a bourgeois sense but in a revolutionary sense) got lost. And yet—that comes back to the problem of the relationship of an individual in a collective, which is the most difficult and complicated dialectical relationship of all, subordinating the individual to the collective needs and yet not betraying one's own individual responsibility for what one does. And again, that balance—I don't have a nice answer. As I say, I wish, for instance, that students would learn to respect the kind of diligent, hard work that a Marx and an Engels and a Lenin put in to becoming Marxist leaders: the hours that were spent, the years that were spent in research, in acquiring a competence and a skill in it. Just as one example, Marx was asked to write for the New York Tribune on Spain. In order to do that, he spent a considerable time, just independent research on Spain in order to do a journalist's job of writing about Spain. So that's one aspect. But the other aspect is what I define as intellectuality, which is not a question of intellectuals because some of the best, quote, "intellectuals" I know are those who have no academic preparation. Al Richmond is an example—has a high school education—or Gil Green. I mean, you can go by the dozens.

GARDNER

Or just talking in terms of education, because certainly. . .

HEALEY

But there is an education that's needed to become a really skilled specialist in any field. I mean, it's not—I shouldn't put it that way—it isn't always absolutely essential, but oh, Jesus, does it help!

GARDNER

Sure. Sure. But I think what I meant when I said "intellectual"—well, I think more in terms of yourself in the sense that you're completely self-taught. But you are an omnivorous reader. You're tremendously articulate, and you can speak easily on a lot of different subjects. In other words, your mind really has kept active, I think in terms of the theoretician, I suppose, as opposed to the activist. It's a difficult contrast.

HEALEY

Well, I would say that really the essential problem is, again, this question of not regarding Marxism as a finished body of thought. I think it's an attitude maybe that I'm trying to define rather than a subtle number of ABCDEF—you know—definitive statements, because I don't have those. Let me give an example again from the methodology. No one draws a lesson, or very few people draw a lesson from the way in which Marx dealt with his contemporaries, how he was able to extract that which was valid from a body of thinking [even though] the total body of thinking might be nonsense in Marx's opinion, or invalid. But there was a valid kernel in what he was reading that he could extract, and it became part of Marxist thinking. Tragically, the Marxists who followed him, his descendants, lost that capacity. Either we did the easy thing, which was to attack our opponents on their weakest points and leave alone their strongest points, or we did an equally intellectually ignominious thing, which is to ignore them entirely, or what they had to say, so that we didn't stay au courant as far as new thinking was concerned, what was coming out from specialists and intellectuals, what was being written. If they weren't Marxists, we just with a wave of our hand ignored whatever empirical data, for instance, they had accumulated, or even whatever new theoretical conclusions they might have. This is alien to Marxism—or, I should say, should be alien to Marxism. And yet it is in my knowledge, at least for my party, a standard operating procedure. And of course you cannot develop Marxism when you have that attitude. Again, I can look inside of my own head and trace my reactions on that exact question, how when I was a youngster I read Trotsky, for instance, simply to find new things that I could use to expose Trotskyism. I didn't read Trotsky to see if there was an illuminating concept, a presentation that enhanced my knowledge. And that was true of the way I read any noncommunist piece of work. It took me years to overcome that, years to be able to read something and get excited by one kernel of thought which I didn't know anything at all about, and which opened up a whole new area of thought for me and helped to enlighten my practice, helped to make the practice more important. I think maybe what is required is an irreverence that maybe is necessary, the recognition that we don't have the last word and don't know, that we aren't infallible . . . and a respect for ideas cum ideas.

GARDNER

Well, does that sum it all up?

HEALEY

I think so.

GARDNER

Well, thank you very much.

HEALEY

Thank you, Joel, for your patience. [laughter]

GARDNER

I loved it.