Word: fathered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book is finally out, and it turns out to be far more personal than that. It is a candid and powerful inquiry into his parents, their union activities during the 1940s and their secret membership in the Communist Party. As Bernstein explains to his father, "It's a very personal book. It's not a history book at all." In fact, it is a book about writing a book, a book about Bernstein writing the book that his parents did not want him to write...
...childhood thrown into turmoil by the early postwar Red scares, he has created a new genre -- what might be called the investigative memoir. It combines the journalistic thrill of Watergate with the emotional punch of that most basic of literary themes, a boy's search to understand his father...
Bernstein, who was born in 1944, recounts his Washington childhood in a family of politically progressive Jews. Upon returning from the Army at the end of World War II, his father Alfred became active as an organizer for the United Public Workers of America, a left-wing union representing federal employees. After President Truman, in an effort to satisfy political pressures, issued the loyalty order of 1947, the elder Bernstein's life was dominated by defending public workers summoned before the loyalty boards and accused of being Communists...
...stamps, proud wearer of an I LIKE IKE button -- and a marginal student who eventually skipped college to become a newspaper copy clerk. He also, quite understandably, became interested in whether his parents had actually been Communists. When he was eight, he first blurted out the question to his father. "I remember the silence that followed and my not daring to look at him," Bernstein writes. "My question offered no escape; there is no Fifth Amendment for eight-year-olds." His father tried to skirt the question, speaking instead about the irrelevance of party membership and the persecution of progressives...
...answer, deftly treated, is that both his parents had been, for a short period, party members. Therein lies the main source of tension throughout the book: grappling with his father's wish that he not reveal their secret. "You're going to prove McCarthy right, because all he was saying was that the system was loaded with Communists," says his father. "And he was right...