Matusow: Boomerang Boy

But cruel are the times, when we are traitors

And do not know ourselves, when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea

Each way and move.

What is a traitor?

Why, one that swears and lies.

And be all traitors that do so?

Every one that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.

And must they all be hanged that swear and lie?

Every one. Who must hang them? Why, the honest men.

Then the liars and swearers are fools, for there are liars and swearers now to beat the

honest men, and hang them up.

MACBETH, IV, 2.

Unless man is to drop to all fours, backbones roundabout need a bit of stiffening. In some measure, perhaps, this generally seedy book* written by a rather seedy, no longer quite-so-young, young man may supply it. Not, let us hope, with all the results that the publishers, sponsors, and perhaps even author of the book anticipate, but we will come to that later. At the outset it is only fair to give the book its due. I know of nothing else in print which illustrates so graphically the kind of menagerie that is turned loose when society starts persecuting people for what it supposes they think rather than prosecuting them for what they do.

No argument previously advanced for repeal of the Smith Act (or the equally nefarious Humphrey “Communist Control” Act) is quite so eloquent, it seems to me, as that which emerges from Matusow’s story of how the problem of linking Alexander Trachtenberg with Vishinsky’s book was solved—the account beginning with that weird conference with Roy Cohn in a crowded, overheated sedan parked with the engine running on East River Drive and ending in the U.S. District Court of New York. Or, as an obscene footnote on obscene times, I give you the depressing picture of the President of Queens College mounting the stairs to Matusow’s cold-water Greenwich Village flat and the subsequent lunch at the hamburger joint around the corner. “Here I was, a professional witnessinformer, being sought out by the distinguished president of a college. My self-esteem climbed to new heights.”

The fact that much of this book has been in the headlines and that it is written in the style and with the values behind those headlines, simply with a reverse twist, renders long sections of it stale and dull. It is this, no doubt, that gives particular vividness to some of its incidental passages. Yet there is a touch of artistry ...