Paul Jarrico

In a chain of events that began in 1947, the self-styled guardians of democracy who sat on the House Un-American Activities Committee have managed to reach out from their graves to kill 82-year-old screenwriter Paul Jarrico, precisely 50 years after they arranged his blacklisting by Hollywood’s studios (“Writer Dies After Long-Awaited Triumph,” Oct. 30). Had there been no HUAC, no hearings, Jarrico would not have been driving home, as he was, from a Motion Picture Academy blacklist remembrance ceremony, which would not have taken place. He might not have plowed his car into that tree and would be alive today. At the very least, he might have died a happier man.

I can only hope that in Paul Jarrico, the blacklist has claimed its last victim.

AVIE HERN

Los Angeles

According to your article, Jarrico joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and remained an “active member” until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev exposed Josef Stalin as a mass murderer, evidence that his continued membership was interrelated with his view of the Soviet system. Yet Stalin’s use of terror and mass murder, as exhibited in his purges of the Communist Party during the 1930s, through the so-called Moscow trials, was exposed by Arthur Koestler, a former Communist himself, in his classic novel “Darkness at Noon,” published in 1940.

In 1939, Stalin entered into an alliance with Hitler, agreeing to the partition of Poland between Germany and Russia and also allowing Stalin to have a free hand in the eastern Baltics. This German-Russian alliance resulted in the American Communist Party reversing its anti-Nazi policy and preaching peace with Germany, showing the party to be nothing more than a tool of the Soviets. When Hitler subsequently double-crossed Stalin and invaded Russia, they, of course, switched their position.

These events, plus the post-World War II Russian occupation and control of various Eastern European countries, apparently didn’t sufficiently bother Jarrico, since he remained a member of the party.

JOHN HAGGERTY

Woodland Hills