She, of course, was the famed playwright ( The Little Foxes ; Watch on the Rhine , etc.); he was a rising star in the State Department, specializing in Asia. They met in 1944 and began an affair which, surviving a bruising encounter with McCarthyism due to Hellman's alleged Communism, continued on and off till her death in 1984. Efficiently written and solidly based on the letters the pair wrote each other, this is the entwined story of their affair and their involvement with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the FBI, the Passport Office and the State Department Security Office. Hellman may have been a member of the Communist Party, briefly, in her youth, but as we see here, she was not a Communist "in any significant sense," nor was she, as J. Edgar Hoover thought, disloyal to the U.S. Despite his impeccable record, Melby was fired by John Foster Dulles, a classic case of "guilt" by association. Through these two cases, Newman ( Recognition of Communist China ) has neatly recapped the Cold War hysteria of the time.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this exhaustive, perhaps overlong book, Newman examines how, in 1953, the brilliant, dedicated U.S. Foreign Service officer John Melby was ousted from his job and career for refusing to renounce publicly his long-time friend and lover, suspected Communist playwright Lillian Hellman. Based on recently desensitized government documents and Melby's own correspondence to Hellman (she destroyed hers to him), this study fills a gap she left intentionally in Scoundrel Time yet offers no new insight into Hellman, the subject of several new biographies (e.g., Carl Rollyson's Lillian Hellman, LJ 4/15/88). It serves best as a glimpse of the hysteria and vengefulness of the McCarthy era.
- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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