Witch hunt

Roy M. BREWER’S version of why the Arthur Miller/Elia Kazan film project was never produced (Letters, Sept. 14) illustrates how quick anti-communists were in the ‘40s and ‘50s to see criticism and dissent as pro-communist.

Brewer “didn’t want to assist anything that would help the Communist Party gain ground, at home or abroad.” Among anti-communists, that “anything” included a lot of hurtful wrongdoing. Sometimes it was downright inane.

In 1948, I was fired from a radio station in a Montana college town for a letter in the local paper that criticized a political cartoon of Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace sitting on the lap of the Russian Bear. I was told that I was helping the communists.

During my last three college years I was investigated off and on by the FBI, and I was able to identify who most of the informants were who were quoted in my file -- friends and acquaintances -- who never told me about talking with J. Edgar Hoover’s boys.

There was one exception. She worked in the college’s registrar’s office and was asked by FBI agents how I was doing. (“Pretty much straight A’s,” they were told, enough to classify me as a pointy-headed commie-sympathizer and worthy of continued surveillance.)

I fired off a letter to J. Edgar demanding to know if and why his boys were snooping on me. Two nervous agents appeared at my door to piously deny that any such thing was going on.

My FBI file always seemed available to prospective employers in the ‘50s and who knows how long after. And simply having one was enough for some to shun me and my wife.

Tom Robischonv

Los Angeles