FW: Careful: The FB-eye may be watching

[Craven, Jim]

I would urge all to visit Bill Mandel's website and listen to his testimony
before the witch-hunters of HUAC in 1960. This testimony took a lot of
courage and is the kind of courage and contributions that constitute the
broad "shoulders" on which younger activists stand today.

When I was eight years old, in 1954, my mother did not allow TV in our house
(partly because we were poor and partly because she saw it as an instrument
that would take me away from love of reading). One day I came home and there
was a TV in the house. Of course, as a child, I was thinking about being
able to watch "Terry and the Pirates" and other such shows. But my mother
had got the TV for another purpose: the Army-McCarthy Hearings were about to
be broadcast live and she wanted me to see the faces of evil up close; I did
and I learned well. That was one of the greatest contributions to my
education that my parents ever gave me.

I'll be ordering Bill Mandel's book.

Jim Craven




No one has to talk to the FBI. Period. During the McCarthy era, they tried
by waiting at the doorstep of my apartment building. On one occasion, they
phoned, and said: "We want to talk to you." I replied: "But I don't want to
talk to YOU," and slammed down the phone. They did come to my door in my
absence, when the Rosenbergs were in the death house, and said to my wife:
"If your husband won't cooperate, he'll be a defendant in a major case."
That had lifelong psychiatric consequences upon at least one of my children
and stressed me to the point of making life very unpleasant for them, they
told me when they were adults, decades later.
   I took it for granted my phone was tapped. As soon as that particular
phone call ended, I phoned literally everyone I knew and repeated it to
them, so they would know that if I disappeared I had been disappeared. That
worked. They didn't bother me again.
   All the foregoing is spelled out in the chapter, "One on One With Sen.
Joe McCarthy" in my autobiography.
   Anything whatever you say to them can be used to build a circumstantial
case against you or anyone whatever or any place whatever (bookstore,
library, coffee shop). What they don't know can't hurt you or anyone else.
   "Confidential" interview? Hogwash. You are a free citizen who can talk to
anyone about anything.
                       Bill


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The title of my autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard
Zinn), is based on my demolition of Sen. Joe McCarthy and later of HUAC in
hearings of 1953 and 1960. It is a history of how the American people fought
to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s (I'm 86) employing the form
of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious
movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR
and Cuba, civil rights South and North, women's liberation [my late wife
appears on 50 pages], 37 years on Pacifica Radio [where I reinvented talk
radio, of whose previous existence I had been unaware], civil liberties, and
opposition to anti-Semitism and to Zionism. You may hear/see my testimony
before the three different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees
[used in six films and a play]) on my website, http://www.billmandel.net  I
am the author of five books in my academic field, have taught at UC
Berkeley, and earlier held a postdoctoral fellowship, by invitation, at
Stanford's Hoover Institution.
 The book may be ordered through all normal sources. For an autographed
copy, send me $24 at 4466 View Pl.,#106, Oakland, CA. 94611
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