Double life revealed: writer, FBI suspect

“The Gordon File” is the uncanny story of two men: respected veteran screenwriter and producer Bernard Gordon and his double, as abstracted by the FBI in the labyrinth of its hidden files. Two men, two Americas.

Call the man Gordon. Call the FBI construct, “Bernard Willis Gordon, Bureau File 100-335648,” born to a Jewish-Russian immigrant family, a radical student at City College of New York, Hollywood screenwriter and union activist, Communist Party member and, from the point of view of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a “subversive.” He would be hounded for more than four decades, at home and abroad, along with his family and friends.

This is the plot and the scenario of a superpower during the Cold War. The G-men are the hunters, No. 100-335648 is the hunted. But, as all good screenwriters know, every plot has a hidden, human narrative.

So close the other eye and a parallax POV blinks into focus; behold a flesh-and-blood boy and man. Call him Bernie Gordon: the filmmaker who grew up during the Great Depression, fell in love with motion pictures and followed his passion to Hollywood, where, with his new wife, he became an equally passionate defender of the wretched here and around the world -- the Scottsboro Boys, the victims of the Spanish Civil War -- and a vocal opponent of anti-Semitism, lynch mobs, witch hunts. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would sum up this montage of protest and resistance as “premature anti-fascism.”

That, Gordon writes in this memoir, is how there came to be two Bernard Gordons: one, a vibrant young screenwriter, the other a freeze-dried fabrication, a number, a dossier, black marks on white paper. A man on a blacklist.

Yet the authentic Bernard Gordon was not quite canceled out. He left the country to write and produce successful, well-made films -- he had to write under other names. The fugitive was able to outlast the secret police and has written, in his ninth decade, a lively, ironic and understated record of the two Gordons, complete with page after page of the word salad that is his blacked out FBI file. Gordon begins his book with James Madison’s prophetic 1822 warning that a democracy that censors and hunts down its free speakers and artists is “but a Prologue to a Farce or Tragedy; or, perhaps, both.” He ends it with a shocking image -- mathematically measured -- of the so-called “blacklist,” which is not a list at all but 575,000 linear feet of dossiers -- more than 100 miles of shelves buried in the bowels of the massive tomb of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. In those miles of files lie the ghosts of Gordon and millions of other souls, including Albert Einstein and virtually every major scientist and artist of our age.

The former fugitive’s wit is shrewd, his identity intact. He clung to the truth. The government’s Gordon, the golem, is dead and buried in the bottomless bureaucracy of lies. In the great unequal struggle between the behemoth of the state and the naked protagonist, between plot and narrative, the narrative has bled through -- as in a work of art. The man has prevailed; the state that spied on its citizens has been shamed. And shame, Karl Marx wrote, is the “only revolutionary emotion.”

Donald Freed is a playwright and historian who teaches in USC’s professional writing program. His forthcoming novel is “Every Third House.”