Fresh Air - Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'

Episode Date: March 29, 2025

Hanif Kureishi began his new memoir just days after a fall left him paralyzed. He describes being completely dependent on others — and the sense of purpose he's gained from writing. The memoir is called Shattered.David Bianculli reviews the British series Ludwig.Writer Clay Risen describes a political movement which destroyed the careers of thousands of teachers, civil servants and artists whose beliefs or associations were deemed un-American. His book, Red Scare, is about post-World War II America, but he says there's a throughline connecting that era to our current political moment.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Penguin Random House with Everything is Tuberculosis. Best-selling author John Green tells the story of a young TB patient in Sierra Leone and systems of injustice fueling the world's deadliest infectious disease. Available where books and audiobooks are sold. From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terri Gross with Fresh Air Weekend. Today, how life can change in a second. Hanif Kureishi's writing career got off to a remarkable start after briefly writing Porn to Make a Living.

His first screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, was nominated for an Oscar. In 2022, he fell, lost consciousness, and when he came to, he saw these objects he didn't recognize until he realized they were his hands. But I had no agency over them. I thought that they were, you know, sort of live creatures, curled, live creatures. We'll talk about life before and after the fall.

Also, journalist Clay Risen takes us back to the anti-communist frenzy of the post-World War II era. Risen sees a through line running from that era to our own. And TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new mystery series Ludwig. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This message comes from Wwise, the app for doing things in other currencies. Sending or spending money abroad, hidden fees may be taking a cut. With WISE, you can convert between up to 40 currencies at the mid-market

exchange rate. Visit WISE.com. TNCs apply. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Mint Mobile took what's wrong with wireless and made it right. They offer premium wireless plans for less, and all plans include high-speed data, unlimited talk and text, and nationwide coverage. See for yourself at MintMobile.com slash Switch. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. I first became aware of Hanif Kureishi when the 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette was released. He was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay about a side of contemporary England that had rarely been explored on screen. Pakistani immigrants and their children. The film was a lively romantic comedy about gay

love, family, racism, and punk rock. It was directed by Stephen Friars and co-star Daniel Day-Lewis as a young man in a relationship with the son of a Pakistani immigrant. Qureshi has since written other screenplays and novels, including The Buddha of Suburbia. His new memoir called Shattered begins in 2020 after a fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms or legs. He describes being unrecognizable to himself, disconnected from his body, totally dependent

on others, feeling helpless and humiliated, dealing with rage, envying other people who could do even basic things like scratch and itch. While spending too much time on his back staring at the ceiling, he reflected on earlier periods of his life. He shares those reflections in his book. He spent a year in hospitals before he was able to return home with round-the-clock caregivers. He started writing the memoir just days after the accident by dictating to one of his sons. The book's narrative is

occasionally interrupted by asides like, "'Excuse me for a moment. I must have an enema now.'" Qureshi is the son of a British mother and a father who emigrated from Pakistan in the late 1940s. Hanif Qureshi, welcome back to Fresh Air. We first spoke in 1990 on Fresh Air and you've gone on two times since then. So welcome back. How are you now? Like how much movement do you have now? Um, I'm thrashing my arm about a bit now as I speak to you But I can't use my fingers. I can't grip I couldn't pick up a Pen or anything like that. I can move my shoulder. I can move my legs a bit. Obviously. I'm in a wheelchair I can't stand up, but I can't actually use my hands. So I'm around the clock dependent, as you put it earlier.

But I'm stronger than I was, and I have physio every day, and so I'm stretched out, I move a bit. But I think this is pretty much where I'm going to remain from now on. And physio is physical therapy. Yeah, I have the physio every day. Someone comes to the house and I stand up in a standing machine and they stretch me out and manipulate my fingers and my feet and so on. So I don't deteriorate.

That's the main thing. I don't want to get worse. I'm doing a lot of stuff at the moment. This morning I was writing here at my kitchen table with my son Carlo doing my blog. We're writing a movie based on my memoir Shattered. So, you know, it's a full working day for me. And your arm is strong enough to maneuver the controls of your motorized wheelchair? Yeah, I buzz around my house. I can go out on the street, obviously with somebody

else and I can go up and down the road into coffee shops and I have lunch and I can do stuff so it's not as bad as it might have have been So I'm trying to figure out what happened. You were dizzy and then you woke up in a pool of blood Yeah, you know, that's the story I've been unwell with a stomach infection and I've been taking a lot of painkillers and antibiotics and Suppositories all kinds of other stuff. So I was very weak So I was at Isabella's apartment in Rome. Isabel was your partner, now wife? Yeah, about to become wife actually. Okay. No one else wants me now. And then I felt faint. I put my head between my legs as you're

supposed to do. And then I blacked out and I think what happened was I stood up at that moment and I took some steps across the room and then I felt absolutely flat bang on my face and I broke my neck or damaged my spine very badly and when I woke up I was in a pool of blood and I was unable to move my hands or any other part of my body I could still speak. You write about how it initially felt to feel disconnected from your body to see your hand and not feel connected to your hand. You're right I had become divorced from myself. Would it be okay to ask you to describe what

that felt like, that sense of disconnection from your own body? Well, in the beginning it's very odd because you're upside down on your head, you're bleeding from your forehead, and then I saw these objects out of the corner of my eye and I didn't know what they were. And then I began to realize that they were my it was my hands but I had no agency over them I thought that they were you know sort of live creatures curled live creatures and then I became convinced that I was gonna die and eventually I was sort of suffocated. You started writing your memoir just days after the accident by dictating it. Was writing especially important to you? I know you're a writer. I know you're very dedicated to writing. Your life has centered around writing

and family. But was it helpful to distance yourself from kind of removing yourself from what was happening so you could look at what was happening, examine it, and describe it? It was really because when I was in the ICU in Rome, I was just a body to the nurses, to the doctors. I was in the medical industrial complex and they were working on me and doing stuff to me and

you know washing me and feeding me and then I had an operation and so on. But I wasn't really a person, I had lost myself really. And the way that I could remind myself of who I was, a writer with a history, a person in the world was to start writing again. So I started writing to my long-suffering partner Isabella who would sit at the end of the bed tapping into her phone and I started to issue statements or blogs about exactly what was happening to me. And then Carlo, my son, he put the blogs on Thubstack, where I had an account

and then he started putting them on Twitter and so on and they started to go around and people started paying attention and the figures went up and up and up so I did one one day then I did one the next day and one the next day. At that point even though I was really ill and really bombed out of my head on painkillers and so on, I was writing a blog every single day about my condition and it was very exciting that people were interested in what I had

to say and what had happened to me. And then people started to write pieces about me in the New York Times and in Australia and India and so on. So it was a very strange period because, you know, I was completely done for, alone, lying in hospital, full of drugs and tubes. And my material was going very quickly around the world and increasing numbers of people were interested in what I was saying. And that really cheered me up. I had something to do.

I had a platform. And I was back as a writer, which is what I am, which secures my identity. Your partner, Isabella, spent every day during visiting hours in the hospital with you. And you were hospitalized for about a year and one time when she was brushing your teeth and you felt like a helpless baby and a tyrant, two really conflicting, maybe not so conflicting, can you describe both of those feelings?

I think what you say is very interesting because a baby is a tyrant. Yeah, I was thinking that as I said it. I remember a phrase from some writer or another who described, who says, the fascist face of the baby. I've had three babies and I can tell you that there are times when they are like fascists, when they overwhelm you. And then suddenly I was in that situation again. I was helpless in bed I couldn't feed myself brush my teeth or do anything

I was entirely dependent on other people and I hated being so dependent So I suddenly became aware of that in order to get anything done, I had to demand things. I have to ask people to do things for me. And it's embarrassing to have to do that all the time. If I'm in my kitchen and Isabella is cooking and then she does the shopping and then she has to feed me, then she has to wash up, there's nothing I can do to help her and it's shameful and embarrassing. And so the nature of our relationship was completely transformed by this accident where I am entirely

dependent on other people and also profoundly ashamed that I'm not able to do what I could do before. The only way to get around this is to enjoy it, and to enjoy the conversations you have with other people, to enjoy their generosity, to enjoy the love that they have for you and how they like to help you and to serve you. So it's a big kind of emotional and intellectual turnaround I'm just describing here from being an independent,

you know, person with agency in the world who can do stuff to becoming this tyrannical baby that I am here now talking to you. You have paid caregivers too, right? Yeah, I have one person 24 seven who lives in the house who looks after me and then carers who come in one in the morning to wash me and get me dressed and ready for the street and then in the evening someone who helps put me to bed and cleans me and gets me ready for the night. So they're paid to do this, that's their job, that's what they're trained to do. Do you feel guilty or embarrassed or humiliated

when they're helping you? I've felt all those things as you have to adjust to a new life. One day I was an ordinary normal person walking about the world doing stuff. The next day, and this may happen to many of us, to all of us, to all of us. You are entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers for your life and it is a big

adjustment and at the beginning it is very humiliating, you feel really embarrassed. People touch you all the time, strangers come into my house every single day and they touch me, they turn me over, they talk above me as if I'm not there. And my circumstances have entirely changed. But I have to say you get over it. You once accused Isabella of going all Betty Davis on you, making it seem like she was the one being the tyrant. That's harsh. What brought that on? Well, I think at the beginning, there was a lot of anger, you know, from me mostly.

When you have your life as it were, your normal life, your ordinary life, snatched away from you by an illness, as I say, as will happen to so many of us, you are absolutely furious and you become furious with the people around you. You become furious with your life. You can't believe this horror has happened to you. It's a contingent, random thing that's happened to you just out of the blue, you know. I'll give you some examples. When I was in hospital in North London in the rehab,

I was on a ward of accidents. Everybody on the ward had had an accident. One guy had dived into an empty swimming pool by mistake. Another guy had fallen down the stairs while drinking a glass of wine. Another guy had fallen over his rake in his garden, just tripped over it and fell down and broke his neck and was paralyzed. So we all had these random rather contingent accidents which suddenly in a moment completely changed your life forever and there's no going back. That is absolutely enraging.

You think, you know, why couldn't I have been doing something else at that moment, you know? Why did that moment occur to me? Why have I been chosen? What have I done wrong? You go through all these terrible, awful thoughts about who has done this to you and why it's happened. And it makes you an angry person.

So I think there are moments, quite rightly, where you deserve to feel angry, but it's tough on the people around you. If you're just joining us, my guest is screenwriter, novelist and playwright, Hanif Kureishi. His new memoir is called Shattered. It's about the year he spent in hospitals after the fall that injured his spinal cord, leaving him unable to move his arms and legs. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Your father was an immigrant, and I don't want to get into that a little bit later,

but I just want to talk about the contrast between the racial ethnic aspects of the hospital in Italy where you had your accident, and in London, the hospitals you eventually moved to, because you're from London, your partner's from Italy. So in Italy, just about everybody who worked in the hospital was white. When you went to hospitals in London, all the therapists and nurses, they were all people of color, often immigrants,

and you were the only person here who speaks standard middle English was you. When I was in Rome, in the hospital, everyone was white. You never saw a person of color. It's the only monocultural country, Italy really, in Europe. And Isabella says that I'm wrong about that, that's beginning to change, but I didn't see any people of color in the hospitals in, in Italy, really.

And then of course you come to London around the corner from here, where I am in West London now. And obviously the whole of our huge NHS is run by people from all over the world. And it's just incredible to lie in bed, to be changed and washed by someone. And you have these incredible conversations with somebody from Africa, from the Philippines, from South Africa, India, Pakistan, and so on.

It's incredible stew and great multiracial, multicultural society. But one of the things you become aware of, certainly in these British hospitals, is our dependence in Britain on immigration and other races, that the place, the hospitals, none of it, it wouldn't function at all without immigration, even recent immigration, to be honest.

There were a lot of people who had recently come from the Philippines, people who had come from Africa and so on. And I began to realize that since we had Brexit, which was the breakup with Europe, that we were now importing people from other parts of the world in order to run the NHS. That's the National Health Service. Yeah, that's indeed, yeah. And in America as well, you know, in the US, so many health care workers, including caregivers and aides, are recent immigrants or, you know, immigrants who've been here for, you know, a longer time.

Oh, and so many people who take care of children are also immigrants. And yet, there's this strong anti-immigrant feeling in America, as I'm sure you know, and I think in England as well, right? It's a terrible dilemma really for Britain because originally our country was almost entirely dependent on the empire. Before 1945, Britain had this huge worldwide empire from which most of its wealth was derived. And now, as a smaller society, we are entirely dependent on immigrants in order to look after a slowly aging population. And if you saw the hospitals and the care homes and the transport system and so on here,

you'd see it's entirely run by immigrants. But of course, it's hated, that dependency by people, and they wish to end it, to go back to being an entirely Caucasian society. But that can't happen. And so there's a kind of deadlock in British society between those who want to hate immigrants and the rest of us who realize that without immigrants the NHS for instance would break down, it just wouldn't work at all. And the NHS and our social system is understaffed as it is.

The nurses and doctors in the hospitals in which I spent a year were complaining all the time about they didn't have enough people to work there. So this is a real deadlock and a real problem because it's really fun to hate on immigrants. People really enjoy it. They're the one group of people in society that you can hate. And it's an absurdity because they're the one group in society in which you're entirely dependent and without whom your society would go down into a darkness. Your father emigrated to Britain in the late 1940s from Pakistan. Was he from a Muslim

family? My understanding is he was relatively secular. My dad came from Bombay in India. He came from a Muslim Muslim family but they were a secular family then, they were an upper middle-class wealthy intellectual family. My dad came to England to study law. So many you know members of the wealthy middle class from India like Gandhi and Jinnah and so on, great figures from India, they all came to the West to be educated and then normally they would return to India to run the country. But my dad met my mom, he got married and he stayed in the UK and wanted to be British, he wanted to be an Englishman

in fact and he liked England, he loved England and he always wanted to stay here. Now, I thought he came from Pakistan. My family moved to Pakistan after partition. All my many uncles and aunts and cousins and so on, they moved from India to Pakistan to be safe in Pakistan, which is a Muslim state. Yeah, and partition happened in, was it 1947? When India basically divided into two with Pakistan becoming a new Muslim state. Yep, that's the story.

My dad came to the UK around that time, so he didn't go to Pakistan, and he stayed in Britain, but he worked in the Pakistan embassy. And so became Pakistani even though he hadn't actually been to Pakistan. It sounds like an odd thing, but it's the case. I see. So what was it like for him and then for you as being his son to be part of a new wave of immigrants?

Is it fair to say England was largely white at the time? England was largely white, but I think the immigrant ethic is probably like the immigrant ethic in the United States, you know? That you were coming to a new country and it would be a new start for you. It was a clean slate. You would get educated You could bring up your kids, you know, Britain was a really civilized well-organized law-abiding Country and he just left the chaos of India. You remember after partition and my dad thought it was fantastic

You get free education you go to the doctor the dentist. We had the welfare state It was a rising standard of living in the 1960s, there was the Beatles, there was pop. My dad saw it as a great opportunity for us, his kids, to do really well. Of course, at that time in Britain, particularly where I was in South London, there was a lot of violence, there was a lot of racism, there were a lot of attacks on people like us of colour and we were terrified of that and we used to run and have to hide and my father was frightened and so on. It was quite tough and rough but on the whole my father was really pleased that he had come to Britain and given us the chance as his kids to grow up in Britain

and to do well. He thought it was a great opportunity for us. And he believed that I, his son, could become a significant writer. You know, that the world was our oyster. There were opportunities in Britain. And to be honest, he was right about that. I mean, when I was a young man, there were not many Asian artists in pop or photography

or in the arts, people from South Asia at all. And there were certainly no writers really apart from V.S. Naipaul, writers of color who were successful in England. But we changed it all, you know, other writers like Salman Rushdie and of course Sadie Smith and so on. And the whole scene has changed and opened out now. And there's been a huge unfurling of these really really really talented people from South Asia. Well I want to thank you so much for talking with us and for sharing so much of your life. Beautiful questions I really enjoyed it thanks. Hennaf Qureshi's new memoir is called Shattered. The streaming service Britbox has a new mystery series called Ludwig starring David Mitchell

as a very improbable yet effective investigator. Our TV critic David Bianculli says everything about this new series is charming, surprising, delightful and refreshingly lighthearted. Here's his review. In the U.S., murder mystery series built around eccentric but intrepid investigators have been around forever. And the best of them, from Columbo to Sherlock, have made an indelible mark on TV history. Currently, we have such shows as Elsbeth, Matlock, and Only Murders in the Building,

all of which playfully present crimes solved by people with unusual but ultimately lovable personalities. A new Brit box import, a mystery series called Ludwig, is even lighter and flat out fun to watch. Created and written by Mark Brotherhood, it arrives with one of the most original and captivating variations on the entire TV mystery genre. Here are the basics.

Two very intelligent children, identical twins John and James, grow up sharing their youth with a best friend Lucy. After the twins are traumatized by the sudden abandonment by their father, their lives take different paths. James becomes a police inspector and marries Lucy. John, who's got just as keen a mind but has become isolated and reclusive, ends up designing and publishing all sorts of puzzles. And then, after John goes missing while working on a case, Lucy contacts his twin brother,

her old friend, and begs him to visit her. When he does, she hits him with a very bizarre request. John is played by David Mitchell from Peep Show. Lucy is played by Anna Maxwell Martin from Good Omens. Which brings me to the big favor. Lucy, I'm not sure. Just a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, Just... Okay, so I went into his home office looking for clues as to what he might have been working on and there's nothing. He's been hidden in there for two months, nothing to show for it.

Now, either he took his files and Tati Orange Notebook with him or it's in his other office. The one at the police station. Now, I can't access that. In fact, the only person that can is James. Or... somebody who looks remarkably like him. No!

It's nothing. It's easy. It is in and out. Are you...? No! Absolutely not! I've been there. I know the layout. You won't have to talk to anybody. Really? And if they talk to me? Just stick to small talk. Just keep walking. What small talk? Have you heard my small talk? This, right now, is about as good as it gets!

Look, I've met most of his colleagues. I mean, I can brief you on all of them. Certainly enough to get you through a piddly little visit to the office, just there and back. Lucy, stop! That would be illegal! Reluctantly, John goes to the police station, pretending to be his brother. But before he can look for clues there, he's taken to a nearby office building, the scene

of a freshly committed murder. The only possible suspects, the ones still on site, are isolated in a conference room. And John, whom his colleagues think is James, is expected to crack the case. At first, he freaks. But then, he imagines it as a type of puzzle, his specialty, and starts writing things enthusiastically on a whiteboard, running down the variables. Okay, so, what we're looking at here is a concatenation of syllogisms, obviously. A series of statements and propositions, one of which will be false, but which we can weed out via a process of cross-reference and deductive reason.

It's a logic puzzle. In this room, we have seven subjects or suspects. I will label you A to G for simplicity. Three definitive facts, presumably connected. The fire door alarm, the phone call and the murder itself. Unlabeled then 1 to 3. Plus of course the alleged movements of everyone in this column within the time scale of the factual events contained in this one,

which we'll put into a third column of seven, T to Z. this one, which we'll put into a third column of 7, t to z. So, C was exiting the elevator in the foyer at the same time as D was leaving by the front. Both statements confirm the other, which means that neither C nor D could have been present at factual events 1 and 2, so we can cross those off, which naturally means we can also put crosses here and here and here since this dictates that A and E could not have been present at that location at that time or else they would have crossed with C or D. Do you follow? No. The first season of Ludwig contains six episodes which show John continuing to impersonate his brother while trying to solve his disappearance.

He's also faced with a different murder case, or different puzzle, each week, which he tackles while working with and fooling his colleagues. It's a strong ensemble, led by Depo Ola as his new partner and Garen Howell, who plays Dennis Whitaker on the pit, as a young member of his team. And the guest stars are valuable too, especially the great Derek Jacobi in a later episode. For Ludwig to work, the mysteries have to be clever, the clues have to be credible but not obvious,

and the performances have to be enjoyable. Check, check, check. As John and Lucy, David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin are loads of fun, especially when they're together. And the style of the show is infectious and almost musical. The series is called Ludwig for a reason, which it reveals in time. And that connection allows for plenty of music from the Beethoven canon, which is heard often

and winningly. From start to finish, Ludwig is a winner and I'm happy to report it's not really finished yet. The producers already have committed to a season two which makes me smile almost as much as watching Ludwig. David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed Ludwig which is now streaming on BritBox. Coming up, New York Times reporter Clay Risen talks about his new book, Red Scare,

Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. And he describes the through line from that era to our own. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Terry Gross. Dave Davies has our next interview. Here's Dave.

In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet Communism in America. The group would attract tens of thousands of members and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutemen is one of many told in a new book by our guest journalist and historian Clay Risen. Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most

often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration, leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail and he writes that there's a through line to be found from that era to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at the New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.

Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 20-20 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. There's a lot of detail in this book but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor. And one of the strands you say was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives

about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal, you know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc. Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take? Yeah, I think it's important to remember that the New Deal was more than just a set of policies. It was a whole culture that was ushered in in the 1930s. One that was broadly progressive, cosmopolitan, pluralist. You saw rights advances for all sorts of people who up until then really hadn't had a chance. And the opposition

was economic. There were certainly a lot of people who criticized Roosevelt on, you know, tax policy, regulation. You know, this tended to come from the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of cultural opposition, a lot of anger over the idea that America was moving away from a society that was rooted in, they didn't say it this way, but a white patriarchy in a kind of vision of a small town America in a fundamentally religious Christian Protestant worldview. And this was all linked together for a lot of people, for a lot of critics, that it was both, there was this culture, but there was also this economic change and government assertion going on through the New Deal.

And so it became exacerbated or sort of blown up into, for some people, a monster that was taking over all of America. Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union, and that was connected to a communist presence in the United States.

And we should note that, you know, while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right? Yeah, absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that 40s, right? Yeah. Absolutely. And another aspect of the 1930s that was both motivating for a lot of people, but also seeding a backlash was that the left was very fluid. So that you had people toward the center, as well as people on the far left, on the Communist Party and other radicals who saw themselves as part of a united front,

a popular front. And whether that was in foreign policy, domestic policy, there was a sense that we're all working on this together. And so there was a lot of cross-mixing and that became a problem for the people who then went into government jobs. And after the war, when communism started to be seen as this threat, suddenly any affiliation that they may have had a decade earlier became this scarlet letter that could be used as a way of targeting them and blacklisting them,

whether they were in the government or education or in Hollywood, I mean, name an industry or a sector. And there was an element of the Red Scare going on. But also to your point, I mean, one of the reasons why the Red Scare happened when it did was that as much as there was a sentiment against New Deal America, New Deal culture in the 30s, it really didn't find a purchase. Roosevelt was very popular, The Depression was on.

Then the war was on. And it was really only after that when a lot of people wanted to get back to normal. There was a lot of fear over not being able to do that because of the communist threat abroad. And so it was sort of a ripe moment for opportunists and ideologues to pick up that culture conflict of the 30s and give it this injection of real fear of another world war. You know, I often think of the excesses of, you know, the Red Scare as being driven by, you know, congressional hearings, people demanding loyalty statements and the like.

But Harry Truman, the Democratic president who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually pretty active on this front as well. Tell us why he embraced this idea of asking citizens to commit to loyalty hosts and the like. Matthew 20.10 Yeah, look, Truman, when he came into office, at the tail end of World War II, one of the first things he had to do was decide to drop the atomic bomb and then deal with Stalin. I mean, he was thrown right into the deep end. And there was an immediately obvious need to reinforce Europe, to commit billions of dollars to shoring up their economies and societies so that the Soviet Union couldn't continue its press westward

and take over more countries than it had. And there was a pivotal meeting with key State Department officials, key Senate leaders, in which Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously told Truman that, hey, I'll do what I can, I'm gonna help you out, but you have to scare the hell out of them, right? And essentially make communism out to be the biggest baddie. And, you know, there was obviously a strong case for that. So Truman gave a speech to a joint session of Congress where he explained what was ahead and made out a very strong case for a maximalist assertion of US effort abroad. But part of that was also talking about the limitless threat of communism. And

so then it became incumbent on him to do something about communists domestically. And here he was sort of in a trap because he didn't really believe there was much of a threat, but there were particularly Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress who did say there was a domestic threat and J. Edgar Hoover said there was a threat and truth be told there was very good evidence that there had been espionage in the US government, turned out to be true, that the Soviets were funneling money through the Communist Party. So Truman implemented the loyalty oath largely because he thought it would be a sop to these folks and wouldn't do anything. It wasn't a big deal.

He was wrong in that. You know, some of the most memorable sounds and images of the Red Scare comes from hearings on the movie industry. You know, these hearings were extensively covered by the media, and you can see the film of this, and like, reporters jammed all around the witness table, you know, right in the faces of the witnesses. And, you know, TV coverage wasn't really a thing yet,

but back then, movies and theaters would often, before the movie is shown, open with newsreels of, you know, stuff going on, and hearings of the the House of American Activities Committee appeared in them, which is why some of this film footage is preserved. And I thought we would listen to a little clip here. This is a piece of testimony from Hollywood screenwriter Howard Lawson. Let's listen. Are you a member of the Communist Party? Or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? The question of communism is in no way related to this inquiry,

which is an attempt to get control of the screen and to invade the basic rights of American citizens in all fields. The question here relates not only to the question of my membership in any political organization, but this committee is attempting to establish the right, which is historically denied to any committee of this sort. We're going to get the answer to that question if we have to stay here for a week. Are you a member of the Communist Party, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? It's unfortunate and tragic that I have to teach this committee the basic principles of Americanism.

That's not the question. That's not the question. The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? I'm framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to a question which invades his... absolutely invades me. Then you deny to... you refuse to answer that question. Is that correct? I have told you that I will offer my beliefs, my affiliations and everything else to the American public and they will know where I stand as they do from what I have written. Stand away from the stand. I have written for Americanism for many years and I shall continue. Stand away from the stand. Fight for the Bill of Rights. I stand with this man away from the stand. And with about 35 wraps of the gavel there, boy. Intense stuff. This is the House of American Activities Committee, Howard Lawson, who himself was actually a

member of the Communist Party, right? He was. He was. And that's why, well, I mean, I think he stood on principle, but everyone knew what the answer was. He wasn't a secret communist. Everyone knew that he was in charge of the Communist Party in Hollywood, but he refused to answer on principled grounds.

Right. We haven't talked about Joe McCarthy. He was certainly the shining knight of the anti-communist crusade. A senator from Wisconsin who made many speeches beginning in 1950 claiming to have lists of communists in the State Department or the Defense Department or whatever but never really seemed to come up with much credible evidences that run lasted till about 1954 when he was embarrassed in a really dramatic Senate hearing and was then censured by his colleagues at the Senate. It struck me when I read particularly the way he interacted with Republicans, that this in some ways reminds me of Donald Trump. Not completely, but you know the firing from the hip with accusations that he couldn't prove, and

the fact that a lot of Republicans in Congress didn't particularly respect him, didn't think he was credible, but wouldn't challenge him, right? Yeah, I think for two reasons. I mean, first of all, he was useful. He was willing to go after Democrats in a way that they didn't quite feel comfortable doing. There was still a real order of decorum in the Senate that he violated very clearly. And so you have someone like Robert Taft, who was the Senate Majority Leader, the Mr. Republican in the Senate.

He would never do something like what McCarthy did, but he very openly defended McCarthy and coached McCarthy on how to perform. And he was just that guy who was willing to say things that no one else did and land punches. But at the same time, they were also a little afraid of him because if you turned against him, he would make an example out of you. The best example of that is Margaret Chase Smith, who was a senator from Maine. And relatively early on, this is in the summer of 1950, she gave a speech on the floor of the Senate and said, look, what he's doing is un-American.

This is unacceptable. And she got a few people to sign on. Ultimately, they all dropped out. And as soon as he could, McCarthy, I mean, McCarthy went after her immediately. But as soon as he got a committee position after 1952, she happened to be on his committee and he demoted her and sort of exiled her from any position of power. And you know, that became a cautionary tale for a lot of other senators and it took a

long time before anyone was willing to stand up and say, this man is unacceptable. You know, it's fascinating story that you tell here and it did kind of have an end, right? It lasted about a decade, I guess. And there are really two things that seemed to help close the door on this frenzy of anti-communism. One was Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower. What did he do?

Matthew Feeney Eisenhower is an interesting character in this story because he definitely, I think, drew a line and said anything beyond this is unacceptable in terms of anti-communist activity. And certainly, McCarthy was in that beyond the pale category. But there were a lot of things that he did allow. And he had his own version of a much more aggressive loyalty test than Truman did. He also oversaw and reinforced what today is called the lavender scare, in which anti-communism or fear, allegations of subversion were used to fire hundreds of

gay men from the federal government, mostly in the state department. And so Eisenhower tolerated a lot of stuff that today we would look at and say that's disgusting that he would be for that. But he should get some credit for saying, and I believe that, you know, there was a point at which this wasn't going to go further. And I think, at least I make the argument, that for him, he was trying to essentially just dry out the Red Scare and run it out. And that he believed, like Truman believed, that fundamentally, you know, the American

people were not radicals. The American people are pragmatic, centrist, and that they would come to their senses with good, strong hand at the tiller, very straight and narrow leadership that he would provide. That was his idea. And he also, behind the scenes, went after McCarthy. It took him a while, probably too long, but he ultimately did go after McCarthy and really cut his legs out from under him. We're going through a remarkable transition in national policy now with the Trump administration and you write in the book that you think you see a through line from the events in the Red Scare to our current political moment.

What do you see is the relevance of these events to for us understanding from the events in the Red Scare to our current political moment. What do you see as the relevance of these events for us understanding what's happening now? Yeah, well, I think first of all, it's just basic parallels. We see a lot of the same animus toward ideas we don't like, we see, or that some people don't like, we see the same willingness to use oppressive measures to silence those views or to silence those organizations or people that we disagree with. And so it's a reminder that what happened

during the Red Scare can be repeated. So I think there's that. But I think there's also something more causal in the sense that, you know, after McCarthy fell and after Warren pared back the tools of the Red Scare, there was a hard kernel of people who continued to believe in the cause. And these were people who funneled into groups like the John Birch Society and in other sort of similar very far right organizations who believed that McCarthy was a martyr and that there was this cabal of anti-American elites running the government. And that didn't stop just because the Red Scare did. And it pops up

here and there throughout subsequent American history. And there's a through line. You can even, you know, you can chart organizational relationships, intellectual influences through the Goldwater movement, through the Buchananite populist movement of the 90s. And I think very clearly you can see it today. Clay Risen, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thank you very much, Dave. Journalist Clay Risen spoke with Fresh much for speaking with us. Thank you very much, Dave. Journalist Clay Risen spoke with Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Risen is a reporter and editor for the New York Times

and author of the new book, Red Scare, Blacklist, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. This episode of Fresh Air Weekend was produced by Thea Challener. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Marie Boldenado, Lauren Krenzel, Theresa Madden, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman.

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