Don't ignore documentaries. On Sept. 19, PBS TV stations
nationwide will show, on the "P.O.V." show, a new film, "KPFA On
The Air," which necessarily includes that station's treatment of
the Sixties. A decade ago there was a film whose title is
self-explanatory, "Berkeley in the Sixties". Earlier, there were
three on the HUAC hearing in San Francisco in 1960. Two were
actually made to respond to the first of them. The response films
were the ACLU's pedestrian "Operation Correction" and Robert
Cohen's docudrama-style "House Committee on Un-American
Activities," actually a very good movie despite its deliberately
deadpan title. The film they were produced to answer, which had
enormous impact in bringing the student movement into existence,
was "Operation Abolition," the FBI-HUAC version of what happened
at the HUAC hearing in San Francisco in 1960. I describe it as
follows in my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER, Creative Arts,
Berkeley, 1999:
"The film, 'Operation Abolition,' was given enormous
audiences -- 18 million total -- by the cooperation of the
largest corporations and the nation's police departments. It
briefly made me a national figure among youth. My testimony often
had an effect opposite from that intended by the film-makers.
Thirty-five years later, an aging San Francisco street poet told
me that he, a student in Minnesota, went with his buddy, named
Zimmerman, to see the film. It turned them against the
Establishment. His friend became known to the world as Bob Dylan.
"All this [reference is to unquoted preceding passages] was
actually a lull before the storm that burst of the heads of
students and myself with the first showing of 'Operation
Abolition.'....A mysterious Washington company produced the movie
within two months of the events. HUAC filed it as a report to
Congress, thus protecting it against libel suits. It needed that
protection, because it was an outrageous piece of falsification
by editing. Time sequences were reversed so as to suggest, for
example, that Longshoremen's Union president Harry Bridges had
incited the students to riot. In fact he was having lunch in a
restaurant and didn't get to City Hall until the police riot was
over. 'Police riot' is a phrase the students invented to describe
the events that occurred. The movie libeled individuals,
including me, referring to me as a Communist. I had left the
party three years earlier, before moving to California, a fact
the FBI unquestionably knew. The courts had already found the
designation 'Communist' damaging in a libel suit by a TV
personality. I had, under pain of perjury had I testified
falsely, denied Communist membership at the HUAC hearing,
although in very careful phrasing so it could not imply
condemnation of anyone who did choose to be a member of the
party."
"The first two showings of 'Operation Abolition' were on TV in
Los Angeles, introduced by a former governor of California....I
responded with a letter accusing the show and those associated
with the film of defamation of character, slander, and libel. My
letter was read on a subsequent broadcast in that TV show....The
host said, in the course of a long tirade: 'William is the fellow
that before this House Committee said that he was very proud when
people walked up to him on the street and congratulated him as
the man who killed Joe McCarthy...And he called the members of
the Committee that were sitting in San Francisco Judases....It's
high time that the Congress of the United States enacted
legislation that would protect the committees from such abuse as
was...directed toward it by William Mandel and Archie Brown of
the Longshoremen's Union....By next year there will be some
protection afforded the Committee so these men can be cited for
contempt when they act in such a manner and dunked into the pokey
for an extended period of time.'"
"...another letter from the same viewer [who had provided me
the quoted passage] made the matter seem more serious: 'You seem
to have been selected out of many candidates to receive Tom's
right-wing ire. Last night, Aug. 23, Tom commented on a
photostatic copy of KPFK's Folio...He read a series of the titles
of your programs....It could possibly have serious
repercussions....He has devoted followers....I don't really think
I'm exaggerating the effect on his rabidly patriotic and
conservative followers.'"
"'Operation Abolition' had its first showing in our area at
the end of September....The showing had been on that same public
TV station, KQED, that had just taken me off the air. It was
presented...by Caspar Weinberger, later President Reagan's
super-hawk Secreaty of Defense. I wrote the station that I would
sue KQED-TV for libel unless it ran my full testimony, which
contradicts the film script. The results were triumphant and
hilarious. My full testimony was available only in audio form.
Weinberger sat at a desk and said that...he had shown a film
containing a portion of the testimony of William Mandel, and that
the audience would now hear Mr. Mandel's full testimony. And so
for fifteen mnutes the future most-powerful cabinet member sat
stone-faced under a huge blow-up portrait of me the producer had
provided, as I ripped into HUAC. I'd love to have a print of that
broadcast"
"The letter from Los Angeles about that TV show was the first
of a steady stream I received from all over the country for years
to come about 'Operation Abolition.' People would see me in the
film, be outraged, decide I could help them in their efforts to
fight the Committee and the local reactionaries who were
promoting it, and wrote me either for suggestions or to come and
speak. My home address was in the official proceedings of the
hearing, which were widely circulated by both sides."
"In 1962 Stanford students asked me to debate on campus a Dr.
Fred Scharz, an Australian resident in the U.S. who was the
founder and head of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade....The
strategy was to ride my drawing power because of 'Operation
Abolition,' and to mousetrap me with the proposed subject:
'Resolved: That Communist Professors Should Be fired,' with me
taking the negative."
"In September 1964 [my son] Bob was to be one of four
veterans of the Mississippi voting-registration effort to address
the Democratic State Committee of California in Sacramento in
support of a resolution favoring the Freedom Democratic Party in
Mississippi over the racist official party. A newsman asked him
in unfriendly fashion whether he was the son of the Mandel of
'Operation Abolition.'"
"1964 marked the beginning of the highest wave of student
activism in thirty years. Tens of thousands of students had seen
'Operation Abolition,' in which my defiance of the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) invariably brought
applause. They essentially adopted me. Here was a rare bird:
someone their parents' age who was not content to color within
the lines." (pp. 368-394, passim).
William Mandel
Jeffrey Apfel wrote:
>
> Martin Blank wrote:
>
> > Jeffrey Apfel wrote:
> >
> > > radman wrote:
> > >
> > >
You may find of interest website www.BillMandel.net.
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