‘Red Scare’ Files

Thank you for your thoughtful April 18 editorial regarding the need to release “Red scare” files. I am the daughter of Robert Rossen, writer-director-producer of such award-winning films as “All the King’s Men” and “The Hustler,” and a man haunted, tracked and much vilified by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as well as by the American Communist Party. I am writing a book about being a child of that time. It took me four years to access my father’s FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act, and I have read them and will use them with no intention of legal suit.

State Senate President Pro Tem John L. Burton may well conclude that the state files contain little more than “garbage . . . drivel (and) the rankest form of hearsay.” The same may be said for the FBI files I have accessed. But they inform my life and that of others like me, and they inform those times. In the name of clarity, truth, history and scholarship, not to mention my personal right to complete my life’s journey in peace, these files must be released.

CAROL EVE ROSSEN

Sherman Oaks