I am a Red-diaper baby (now pushing 70!) whose father was black-listed from his ever-so-sensitive job as a public school music teacher in Detroit. He had also been a CPUSA member from about 1933 to 1943. His real "crime was to help organize the American Federation of teachers in the '30s, at a time and place where union activity was dangerous (this was the Detroit of Father Coughlin and the Silver Shirts, a home-grown group of Fascists).

The Hollywood Ten were practically members of our household when I was 10. Less welcome were the FBI agents who regularly harrassed my mother, who had become a citizen as a minor when her father was naturalized (they came from Ukraine in 1921, when she was 6). She had no derivative papers to prove her status, and deportations were not unknown at the time.

My best friend in the 5th grade was the son of a CPUSA official who was hiding from an indictment -- in the vain hope that when things cooled down he could get a fair trial. Eventually he turned himself in and did hos 3 years in Milan Federal. Meantime, every few weeks a pair of Hoover's best would "shadow" us, a couple of 11--tear-olds on our way to Brady Elementary School, in a yellow convertible with the top down.

By the time HUAC came to town with a summons for my father, I was in high school, and a found out later that most of the teachers sympathized but were afraid to say anything. The only one who actually was harrassed was my then 7-year-okd sister, who was taunted by classmates who undoubtedly picked up their cues from their families' dinner conversations.

MY father "testified", took the 5th Amendment 30+ times and was fired. He went into the roofing business with my ubcle and did quite well as a capitalist.

May parents worst sin I think was idealism and naivete, and eventually my father received a citation from the City Council for his work in advancing race relations. None of the horror stories about Communists found any support in our lives, in fact we came out of it quite well. Indeed, circumstance had me back in Detroit in 1969 when I was hanging around an inner city church (ministered by a Harvard Divinity grad who was a Mayflower descendant) that was home to a number of radical groups and I got my picture taken by a Red Squad cop leaving the building, quite proud that I had made it into the files on my own and not just as my father's son.

I've managed to go on without having my life shadowed all that much by these memories, although I know some who did not get off so easily. I have a particular contempt for people like David Horowitz who took their paranoid extremism from the far Left to the far Right, maintaining their style of discourse --- frothing hysteria --- intact. Like those who easily transferred their demonization of Communism to Islam with scarcely a pause for breath.

I like to call myself a passionate centrist. That means I'll probably be swallowed up by the absolutists on all sides, convinced that they alone have the solution to all societies ills. I do fear for the future of my grand-daughter, even though her parents are quite prosperous (irony of ironies, my son who was my Dad's favorite is a rising Wall Street attorney) .

To anyone who is interested, I realize this is somewhat risky, but I have written a short biographical piece about my father that I will email to anyone who is interested in more details. My address is

jprfrog@aol.com

BTW, although McCarthy was the loudest nad most loutish of the Red-baiters, IMHO he was not the worst. That probably goes to Pat McCarran of Nevada, or James Eastland of Mississippi (ch. of Judiciary Committee) or HUAC (actually HCUA) members like John Rankin (D-KKK) or J Parnell Thomas who ended up doing time for embezzlement. And let's not forget Richard M Nixon, who rose from humble congressman in 1946 to VP in 1952 using the same sleazy tactics, or J Edgar Hoover (who denied the existence of the Mafia because as a compulsive gambler he was probably in hock to it) and his buddy Roy Cohn. "Scoundrel Time" indeed!

PS to Joe: save your insults. Stalin did in 1953 and the other Joe in 1957. The Chinese are our friends now.

The US was first blackmailed into supporting the French in Vietnam by de Gaulle, who used French support for NATO as a bargaining chip. But as the commitment grew (and the puppet S. Vietnamese "government" became more unstable and corrupt) domestic US politics came into play.

We were still suffering from the excesses of McCarthyism (whiuch among other things drove all the people who had real knowledge of Southeast Asia out of the government...see Halberstam "The Best and the Brightest"); the China Lobby was vociferous ("Who lost China?" etc.)and according to Tuchman ("March of Folly"), LBJ in particular called the right wing here "the great beast to be feared". The same drove Nixon (in addition to the role of election politics), always covering the right flank. The fact that we were there was the reason why we had to stay there. Why else would LBJ have sacrificed his liberal domestic agenda?

Some of this sounds familiar. Although the way in which we became involved was quite different, the final result is pretty much the same: occupying a basically hostile population because of fear on the domestic front. And had we "won" by pulverizing the North, what would have changed? Instead of an insurgency in the South we would have had one in the entire country, and might have been there another 20+ years.

The quote from Gen. Giap that I remember is that when Henry the K pointed out that we had never lost a battle, he said "True, but irrelevant."