Casualty of the Red Scare Leaves Legacy of Integrity, Love

Joan, he said, there is something you should know.

Their courtship had been swift. They had met in the spring of 1960 at a gathering of the peace group SANE. He told her he was married and his wife was ill. He next called her the day John F. Kennedy was elected president; his wife had died over the summer.

Now, three weeks later, Melvin Barnet wanted to ask for her hand.

But first, he wanted her to know.

Barnet, a copy editor at The New York Times, had been called to appear before a congressional subcommittee in 1955. He testified that he had not been a communist since 1942. To other questions--Had he ever been a communist? Could he finger others?--he took the Fifth Amendment.

When he left the stand, a letter awaited him at the Times’ Washington bureau. He had been fired.

Now, he asked: Could Joan marry a casualty of the Red Scare?

“I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve got a guy with integrity,’ ” she recalls.

She married him, of course. And they lived together until his death June 17. He was 83, and more than half of his life had been lived in the wake of that July morning when he refused to name names.

Like others caught up in the McCarthy era, he moved on, rebuilt his life, grew old. They are dying now, and their stories are fading into the history of the century.

Thin, rumpled and bespectacled, Barnet was a New York intellectual. “He had a great intelligence, a questioning mind,” says John Hess, a veteran New York newsman who worked with him on the financial desk.

Barnet was reared in Yonkers, N.Y., the son of an executive for the company that owned Macy’s. At Harvard he majored in English and the classics, and his thesis on Shakespeare won honors.

Then he joined the staff of the Brooklyn Eagle, and in 1937 he joined the Communist Party as well. His reasons are not known. Then, as now, membership was legal, though Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) and others would later say that it was disloyal.

Many joined in response to the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936; the party was seen as a bulwark against fascism. Others saw communism as the solution to injustice and to the poverty of a world mired in Depression.

The Eagle had its own communist cell. It also had a vigorous unit of the American Newspaper Guild, and Barnet was on the front lines.

During a 1937 strike, he went to jail when he encountered a fellow worker on the street and called him a scab for continuing to work. And he picketed Abraham & Straus--a department store owned by his father’s company--for advertising in the Eagle during the strike.

“He got a kick out of that,” Joan Barnet says.

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Barnet left the Communist Party in 1940, according to a 1991 interview with author Griffin Fariello. His reasons, again, are unknown, though many American communists were disillusioned by Josef Stalin’s 1939 nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler.

Barnet joined the Army and worked in the Signal Corps. At Iwo Jima, his widow says, while others raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi, he found time to teach himself Greek so he could read the classics.

In 1954, he went to work at the Times. And he might have stayed for the rest of his career, except for two things: the rise of the Red Scare, and the confessions of one Winston Burdett.

Burdett was Barnet’s colleague and comrade at the Eagle. They roomed together, and Burdett was Barnet’s best man at his 1937 wedding.

Burdett had gone on to work for two diverse organizations: CBS, as a correspondent, and the Soviet Union, as a spy. “He was a very bad spy,” says Joan Barnet. Most of his derring-do involved waiting on street corners for contacts who never showed up.

But in 1955, Burdett went before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and told all.

“In his testimony, he spoke well of us,” Barnet later said. “We were the cream of the earth, doing the best we could. He didn’t exaggerate our involvement. He was as honest as could be, considering he was peaching on everybody he knew.”

Joan Barnet reaches into a stack of papers in her Brooklyn apartment and pulls out a yellowed document--the subpoena her husband received. “Pursuant to lawful authority, YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED to appear,” it says.

He met with Times executives, and, after some reticence, he told all. As a party member, “I went to meetings, I left the Daily Worker on subway seats, I advanced to the best of my ability the communist line,” he said.

The Timesmen seemed satisfied with his candor, but they warned him that he had to “satisfy the committee that you are cooperating,” he later recalled.

Evidently, his testimony did not meet this standard.

“The course of conduct which you have followed since your name was first mentioned in this connection culminating in your action today has caused The Times to lose confidence in you as a member of its news staff,” wrote publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

John Hess disputes this. “He was the most cultivated and intelligent guy I knew at the Times, and they had total confidence in him. They were just embarrassed.”

In 1998, Times spokeswoman Nancy Nielsen says the newspaper has no more comment on the firing. No executives remain from that time, and the current publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., was just 3 years old when Barnet was cashiered.

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Barnet fought to be reinstated, but not everyone at the Guild wanted to file a grievance on his behalf. In the end, nothing was done, and Barnet’s career in daily journalism was finished.

His wife was an accountant, and they had put away some money. So Barnet went to Florida to harvest oranges (“He was the worst orange picker in Florida,” says Joan) and signed up to cook on a shrimp boat (“He was fired because he was poisoning the poor sailors”).

He edited books for vanity publishers. Then he went to work for William Douglas McAdams, an advertising agency that published medical newspapers and magazines and had hired others who lost their jobs during the McCarthy era.

He worked there until he retired in 1978 as associate editor of the Medical Tribune. By that time, he was legally blind; in kindness, his bosses had kept him on long after he could see well enough to work.

At home, he became a father at age 52. His son, Michael, says Barnet’s past was not a fixture of the present: “It was something that happened a long time ago, and it wasn’t very nice, but they didn’t dwell upon it.”

For a time, his father refused to buy the Times. And he once wrote the newspaper a letter asking for an apology, but there was no response.

He and Joan demonstrated against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. For many years, they went to the annual dinner of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which had taken up his case.

But mostly, he played chess and Scrabble, read his beloved classics, indulged in wordplay (when his son lost weight while being breast fed, he suggested that “the more of the bust, the less of the Buster.”) At age 60, despite failing eyesight, he took up water-skiing with his son.

He died of kidney failure after three years of dialysis. He left a wife, a son, two grandchildren--and a legacy.

Michael Cross-Barnet is a copy editor at the Torrance Daily Breeze, but he says he inherited far more than a calling from his father: “How rare it is to have the example of someone whose character and principles were tested in that way.”

“He gave me so much,” says the son.