Ed Wallace:
I am old enough to remember the 1950′s, to have read around in the history and literature from them, and to have talked extensively through the years with men and women older than I who remembered them. There is no possible comparison now to those years. They featured exactly the same overwrought hysteria that you find in this venue. The major difference was that it gripped the entire country.
And the insidious thing about it was that there were real NKVD spies who did real damage. They simply were not under every rosebush. Nor were they run by supermen who could corrupt an entire country without anybody knowing about it. The counterespionage, in quiet, by those agencies charged with it was justified. The hysteria was not.
There was not just one man saying “I know the names!”. There were scores of them–in every walk of life and not just in Hollywood. None that I know of who were victimized by them made major feature films by fronting 35 million dollars of their own money and reaping gross revenues on the scale of The Passion.
There were also none victimzed who received multimillion dollar settlements, like Steven Hatfill, for having their lives and career ruined by investigations conducted in press conferences, rather than in properly confidential FBI offices.
They cowered in anonymous jobs in constant fear for their livelihood at best and bagged groceries at worst. And died doing so.
That was a blacklist. Not this.
