Earlier, by Pat Buchanan: They WERE Communists—Dalton Trumbo Had It Coming
I truly sympathize with those dealing with losing — it’s not easy — but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity.
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) November 9, 2020
Remember when liberals used to go on and on about how the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1950s, during which Stalinist screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo had to work under pseudonyms, was the worst thing ever?
Trumbo’s most famous novel, the anti-war Johnny Got His Gun, about a vet who had lost all 4 limbs in the war, was written in 1938 but published in September 1939, when the Communist Party USA was suddenly in a pacifist mood due to the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939. From Wikipedia:
Serialized in the Daily Worker in March 1940, published by the Communist Party USA to which Trumbo belonged, the book became “a rally point for the political left” which had opposed involvement in World War II during the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939-1941) when the USSR maintained a non aggression pact with Nazi Germany. Shortly after the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Trumbo and his publishers decided to suspend reprinting the book until the end of the war, due to the Communist Party USA’s support for the war so long as the US was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany.
In his introduction to a 1959 reprinting, Trumbo describes receiving letters from right-wing isolationists requesting copies of the book when it was out of print. Trumbo contacted the FBI and turned these letters over to them. Trumbo regretted this decision, which he later called “foolish,” after two FBI agents showed up at his home and it became clear that “their interest lay not in the letters but in me.”
Swell guy.
