TRUMBO Page 20

  Trumbo learned firsthand of the FBI’s interest in members of the Communist Party shortly before he joined up. (“You must remember that at this time the secretary of the Communist Party of Los Angeles was secretly working for the FBI.”) The incident, which he described at length in his introduction to the Ace paperback edition of Johnny Got His Gun, had to do with some odd correspondence he had been receiving from certain readers of the book. He found that because of the antiwar message of the book, it had suddenly become useful as propaganda to the far right in America as Axis fortunes began to fail. Anti-Semitic and native fascist groups put on a big push for an early peace, demanding that Hitler be offered a conditional peace. Trumbo was understandably distressed that he and his book had been embraced by such as these—so distressed that he did something imprudent: he invited the FBI to come and take a look at this correspondence, some of which he was sure bordered on the treasonous. They came, all right, “a beautifully matched pair of investigators,” but it turned out that they were far more interested in Dalton Trumbo, his left-wing opinions and activities, than in his right-wing fans. He realized then that he must have been the object of their scrutiny for quite some time. In the letter he wrote them following the incident (actually only a draft written but never sent), he objected to the interrogation he had been put through and set out to account, point by point, for his shift from the antiwar attitude of Johnny Got His Gun to his then militant support of the war effort, which included a recent pamphlet urging the establishment of a second land front in Europe in relief of Russia.

  That pamphlet was not the only war writing he did. He became deeply involved, as did most of the movie writers who stayed behind, in the production of the apparently never-ending stream of war propaganda that issued from Hollywood for all official sources. He was a member, as were most active members of the Screen Writers Guild, of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a sort of clearinghouse to provide writers for every war-related project and purpose for which they might be needed.

  Trumbo did more than his share of work of all kinds for the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, but eventually he found his calling as a speechwriter, the old Western Slope Rhetorical Champion coming to the fore once again. And it was this talent that led him into one of the most unusual episodes of his wartime years: his service for the American delegation to the United Nations Founding Conference in San Francisco in 1945. It all came about rather suddenly when Trumbo was waiting to hear from the Army Air Force whether or not he had been accepted as one of a group of writers who were to be taken into the war zone for a firsthand look at combat. When a long-distance call came through to him one night then, he expected that it was the Department of the Army at the other end, telephoning the permission he had been waiting for. Instead, it was Walter Wanger, the motion picture producer. He was calling from the first United Nations Conference and asking Trumbo’s help. The problem was putting together a proper speech for Secretary of State Edward L. Stettinius to deliver to the Assembly. Nobody there could write, Wanger said. Could Trumbo come up at once?

  He flew up the next morning. Wanger, who had arranged for the travel priority and Trumbo’s accommodations with the American delegation, was anything but a radical. As a young man he had been a junior member of the American delegation to the World War I peace conference at Versailles. And although he had come out to Hollywood immediately afterward, he had always kept his hand in politically and was an official member now of the American delegation to the UN Conference. He had no idea of Trumbo’s politics—or, if he did, must have felt they didn’t matter.

  Trumbo spent the first night at the Mark Hopkins Hotel and met members of the delegation, which included Thomas K. Finletter and, by the rarest sort of coincidence, Trumbo’s old Delta Tau Delta roommate from the University of Colorado, Llewellyn Thompson. “It was a reunion after many, many years,” Trumbo said. “Wally [Thompson] and I talked at great length. Obviously none of them knew anything about my political tendencies.” And probably a good thing, too.

  The next day he was moved into quarters with the delegation in the Hotel Fairmont. “I was given a room on the fourth or fifth floor, between [John Foster] Dulles and [Harold] Stassen. It was a rather weird sensation to get off the elevator and look down the hall and see white-gaitered MPs standing guard in front of each room, and then, walking down that hall, to hear typewriters going behind each door. I went into my room, and for some reason I looked under the blankets in the closet, and I found two copies of the People’s World [the West Coast Communist weekly]. Now, this obviously wasn’t a plant on me. The previous occupant of that room had read the People’s World and left two copies there. But the People’s World was the last thing in the world I wanted in the room, so I went into the bathroom, and I carefully tore both copies up and burned them and dropped them down the toilet to get rid of them.

  “I worked for Tom Finletter, for example, sometimes for whole days. We corresponded later on, and afterwards he became secretary of the air force, I believe.”

  The problem Trumbo had been summoned to work on was the admission of Argentina. The Fascist government of Juan Perón had sympathized with Germany all through the war. The speech Trumbo was called in to work on was intended to be an appeal to be delivered by Secretary of State Stettinius over the head of Perón to the people of Argentina. As such, of course, it had to be both carefully and passionately phrased.

  In a few days of intensive work there in the Fairmont, Trumbo solved the problems and finished a draft of the speech that was acceptable to everyone present in San Francisco. “I have a copy of the original speech as it came back among my papers at the university,” said Trumbo. It is now probably the only copy of it in existence. “Finletter and I went to the top of the hotel where they had cable machines, mixer machines, and we received our speech, approved by the President. I have it in that form. I kept it. Two days later, when the Argentine foreign minister had been in town for a week, he had a good idea of what was up. But it was Nelson Rockefeller who gave it the shaft. He was able to stop the speech, which was pretty tough, and we had to go back with it, and the speech was rewritten—though not by me. Rockefeller even brought his own speechwriters in to work on the new, tame version in which they practically welcomed Perón with open arms. I got out of there as quickly as I could.

  “It was interesting that within two years I was on the witness stand before the Committee. Then, of course, Wally Thompson was in a much higher position indeed, and Stettinius was rector of the University of Virginia, I believe. I had worked closely with all of them. And there I was on the witness stand. If I had been willing to play it chicken-shit, I could have said, ‘What do you mean I’m unpatriotic? Didn’t I do this? and this? and this?’ But I didn’t say that, and I made no attempt to get in touch with any of them from that time forward. However, Otto Preminger and his wife were in Moscow many years later while Wally [Llewellyn Thompson] was ambassador there, and they had dinner there at the embassy. My name came up, and Wally said to Otto, ‘You know, that man saved my career. If he had mentioned my name or sent me a letter, I would have been through.’”

  The three from the San Francisco UN Conference were not the only names he could have used. George MacKinnon, with whom he had grown up in Grand Junction and who became a judge in the United States Court of Appeals, was serving his only term in Congress when Trumbo appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As a congressman from Minnesota—even a freshman congressman—MacKinnon would have been in a better position than almost anyone to put in a word for him at the Committee. Did he? No. “I didn’t go to the hearing room that day Dalton was up,” Judge MacKinnon told me. “And he made no effort to contact me while he was here in Washington.”

  Hubert Gallagher, the boyhood friend who had even worked with Orus Trumbo in Benge’s Shoe Store, was on Truman’s staff in the Executive Office of the White House when Trumbo made his appearance before the Committee. Gallagher told me when I talked with him that he had been
deeply ashamed ever since that he had failed to contact Trumbo when he was in Washington. He felt he had let him down: “I talked it over with the people I worked with, and they pointed out that if I had gone out to visit him I would be tagged and watched closely from then on. I didn’t want to lose my clearance, so I let it go. It’s been on my conscience, I can tell you. You see, just a couple of years before that he had been through Washington on publicity for that movie of his, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. We had a great old time then. I remember he even insisted I come along partway with him on the trip to New York, so I rode with him as far as Baltimore in his drawing room on the old Congressional. Would you believe it? We downed four Scotches between Washington and Baltimore.” Gallagher laughed, remembering. “They had to pour me off the train. That was just three years before all that Un-American business. I was ready enough to share his good fortune with him, but when the crunch came, I let him down. I’ve had to live with that ever since.”

  I had wondered about Thomas K. Finletter’s impressions of Dalton Trumbo from the San Francisco UN Conference. The two men worked very closely and for extended periods during that time—“for whole days,” as Trumbo remembered. And of course, had Finletter’s memory begun to fade, it would have been refreshed rather dramatically when, in less than two years’ time, Trumbo’s name appeared in the headlines.

  I was encouraged when I talked to Thomas Finletter on the telephone and told him why I wanted to see him.

  “I’m writing a book about Dalton Trumbo,” I told him. “And I understand that he worked with you at the UN Founding Conference in San Francisco in 1945. Could you talk to me about that?”

  “Yes,” he said, “certainly.”

  The name of Thomas K. Finletter is one at least familiar to anyone of my generation. He is one of those men who seemed always to have held prominent positions in successive Democratic administrations. Like most such men, he was from a socially prominent Eastern family—the Finletters are from Philadelphia. Born in 1893, he grew up there, attended the University of Pennsylvania, and married a daughter of Walter Damrosch, then the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, he began the practice of law in New York City and eventually became a highly successful corporation laywer there. Among his posts in a long public life which began in 1941 were a number in the State Department during the war; he attended the UN Conference at San Francisco as a special consultant. Following that, he was minister to Great Britain in charge of the Marshall Plan mission; and from 1950 to 1953, under Truman, he was secretary of the air force. With time out during the Eisenhower years, he returned to government service as the United States ambassador to NATO, under Kennedy and Johnson, from 1961 to 1965.

  At the age of eighty-one, Thomas Finletter looked fifteen years younger. He was bald but what hair he had left was dark. Erect and positive in his movements, he indicated where I might sit, a secretarial table opposite him, and took a place himself at his desk. He then turned his direct, rather cold gaze upon me and indicated with a slight inclination of his head that I might begin asking questions. I inquired about his role at the United Nations Founding Conference.

  “My own role?” he echoed. “It was very minor. It was advisory, I suppose, more in the nature of personal contact. I was not even a member of the American delegation to the conference.”

  “A consultant?” I prompted.

  “Was that the title? Yes, I suppose so.”

  “How well do you remember Dalton Trumbo?”

  He fixed me with a stare. “I do not remember him at all.”

  “Really? But…”

  “It’s all been so long ago that I’ve forgotten most of the details. I did stay there during the conference, yes, but as to the details, I remember very little.”

  Why had he let me come? If he wasn’t going to talk about Trumbo, what was the point in talking to me at all? I decided to press as delicately as I was able. “Dalton Trumbo came to the San Francisco Conference to help in the writing of a speech,” I said. “He came at the invitation of Walter Wanger, the motion picture producer. Do you remember Walter Wanger being there?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Finletter, “I remember Walter Wanger.”

  “Llewellyn Thompson, too. Mr. Trumbo worked with him there, and he knew him from earlier. They were fraternity brothers in college.”

  “I remember him, of course. I knew all the American delegation. But I don’t remember Llewellyn Thompson’s role in the San Francisco Conference.”

  “I was also told that he—that Dalton Trumbo—worked with you,” I persisted. “The speech that he helped write, did a draft on, you would say, concerned the problem of the admission of Argentina. You recall the problem?”

  “Yes,” he conceded, “I recall there was a problem.”

  “Wasn’t that your area? Weren’t you more or less responsible for that?”

  He shook his head and frowned deprecatingly. “I doubt that I had such authority as that.”

  “Then you don’t recall working with Mr. Trumbo on that?”

  “I have already said, I do not remember Dalton Trumbo at all.”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  Once more he directed that level gaze at me. “No. Who is Dalton Trumbo.” I have omitted the question mark in the interest of stenographic accuracy, for there was never a question asked with less curiosity. I told him briefly of Trumbo’s reputation as a novelist and screenwriter, that he was a Communist at the time of the San Francisco Conference, and of his subsequent blacklisting. He waited until I was through, then nodded curtly and rose. The interview was over.

  On the way out, for want of something to say, I remarked that I knew of his books—this was true; I had read one and looked through another in preparation for the interview. “Are you doing any writing now?” I asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he said.

  “Not your memoirs, I hope.” In less than a minute I was in the elevator on my way down to the street.

  Why? Why had Thomas K. Finletter changed his mind about talking to me? Was he afraid that at even this late date his name would be dirtied if he were to acknowledge his association with a Communist at so crucial an occasion as the founding of the United Nations? If Finletter was a man who had played a role in the shaping of the modern world, he was certainly also a man who had been shaped by it. His attitudes were fundamentally those of the embattled Cold Warrior, the liberal in public life trying carefully to pick his way between the excesses of American isolationist conservatism on the one hand, and on the other, the very real threat offered by Stalinist communism abroad. Such men had, since the McCarthy era and well before, been judged by the company they kept; it was not surprising that he should be reluctant to admit working with a member of the Communist Party, even though he had had no knowledge of his politics at the time.

  While Trumbo was at the UN Conference in San Francisco, the word he had been awaiting from the Army Air Force on the tour of the Pacific War Zone came through. He was to report in a few days’ time for transportation. A list of basic items he was to bring along on the trip yielded one surprise and very nearly caused a crisis. He had no passport. A rush priority was put on his application, and the passport was actually delivered to him from Washington in Stettinius’s pouch.

  Most of the civilians who were traveling in Trumbo’s party were writers like himself—that is, novelists, screenwriters, and feature writers, rather than news correspondents. The reasoning behind this was that since it looked as though the war with Japan would last for many years more (the war in Europe had just ended), there would probably be plenty of time for novels and films to be written, and it would be best to have them accurate in their depiction of combat and service life. Trumbo was chosen because he had already written a film that pleased the Air Corps immensely, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Of the writers who accompanied him, however, he recalls only one: the mystery writer George Harmon Coxe, whom he heartily disliked.

  There was a good deal of war left for Tr
umbo to see during the six weeks he spent in the Pacific—and in fact, he saw quite a lot. He was in on one island invasion, one of the last amphibious assaults of the war, the invasion of Balikpapan. It was a combined Australian-American operation of some importance, for its purpose was to cut Japan off from one of her last sources of oil. The crude oil pumped from this South Borneo island was said to be so pure and rich that it could be used as diesel fuel just as it came from the wells. The assault was mounted July 1, 1945. For some days before the island had been under continual bombardment, but the Japanese were, as always, very well dug in. The Australian soldiers who were landed by the American amphibian teams came under very heavy artillery and mortar fire. It took them most of the day to secure the beach and begin to move inland. The party of correspondents set out for the beach only fifteen minutes after the operation had begun and hit Balikpapan between the first and second waves of assault troops. They stayed for the duration of the brief campaign and were, of course, under fire through nearly all of it, though back far enough that none of their number was so much as wounded.

  Later that month Trumbo came under fire once again during a combat mission he flew with a B-25 crew against targets in the southern islands of Japan. During the course of this episode he had his only real close call of his four weeks in the Pacific. Bad weather kept them circling the island of Kyushu, waiting for it to clear so they could make a run over their primary target, all the while under antiaircraft fire from the ground.