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From: “Jesse Lemisch” utopia1@attglobal.net Date: October 20, 2006 12:12:57 AM EDT To: lbo-talk@lbo-talk.org Subject: Herbert Aptheker: A False Memory Syndrome Redux?

Debate about Bettina Aptheker’s fine memoir-history, Intimate
Politics has been in process for over two weeks on various lists/ sites: History News Network, History of American Communism, Sixties,
Radical History, and belatedly, on Portside, the . “discussion and
debate service” of the Committees of Correspondence, a descendant of
the US Communist Party. (Portside hid from the subject as an earlier
generation hid from Khruschev’s revelations about Stalin.)

It’s tragic that discussion should begin on so smart a list as LBO
with the above subject heading. In debate so far, there has been a
solid mostly male wall (including right wingers who detested
Communist Party theoreticianHerbert Aptheker but whose sexual
politics trumped their anti-Communism), from David Horowitz to
Communists and former Communists, united in seeking to focus on how
that vixen, Bettina, either seduced her father at the age of three,
or has, in order to sell books, invented a memory of Herbert sexually
molesting her for a number of years; how he would never be proved
guilty in a court of law (as if the law was friendly to women in this
situation), or that this is another “he said, she said situation,” so
we can never know (as if historians had never dealt with partial and
conflicting evidence); and how sad it is that she reveals this after
he is dead (as if it would have been nicer for her to reveal this
while he was alive), or as if historians had to prove guilt beyond a
shadow of a doubt. We have heard that Herbert (who I knew for some
forty years and defended in a noted academic freedom case) was too
much of a gentleman to fuck his three year-old daughter (this reminds
me of Dumas Malone, the biographer of Jefferson, telling his graduate
class at Columbia in 1957-1958 that Jefferson was too much of a
gentleman to have sex with a slave) — in short, the entire arsenal
of archaic bigoted views about the lives of women, masked as
psychology, views which some of us thought had fallen into various
dustbins, but which seem to be thriving, both on left and right �
even, so far, on LBO.

The “false recovered memory” line is inapplicable. This is not the
childcare false memory stuff that was dealt with in various areas of
the literature and in Ofra Bikel’s PBS documentary (e.g. McMartin pre- school). This is a not a case of little children being manipulated by
shrinks: Bettina is a woman in her sixties, who retrieved painful
memories while in her sixties, and has placed them in a fine volume
which contains excellent accounts of growing up Communist, the
Berkeley Free Speech Movement, breaking with the Party, coming out a
s a lesbian. Sometimes I have felt that I am, along with Christoper
Phelps, one of the few people in this debate who has actually read
this gripping book. Those who debate about its meaning ought to read it.

I have written extensively about the book and about its reception,
including: “About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations,” History
News Network, October 4: www.hnn.us/articles/30519.html.); “Shhh!
Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker,” History News Network, October 8:
www.hnn.us/articles/30522.html; and “Portside as Soviet Journalism,”
Historians of American Communism list, October 17; History News
Network, October 17: www.hnn.us/roundup/entries/30882.html. Below is
the second of these articles:

10-08-06

Shhh! Don’t Talk about Herbert Aptheker

By Jesse Lemisch

Mr. Lemisch is Professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is the author of:
On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in the
American Historical Profession (1975) and “If Howard Cosell can Teach
at Yale, Why Can’t Herbert Aptheker?” (1976). He can be reached at:
utopia1@attglobal.net.

Public talk vs. private talk. If we consider, first, the volume of
off-list private e-mail that I have received since History News
Network published my “About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations”
on October 4, and second, some noticeable gaps in what is otherwise
more publicly available on-line � all this leads me to the conclusion
that a general public silence by Old Leftists in response to the
report of Herbert Aptheker’s sexual molestation of his daughter
Bettina may be writing another chapter in the strange history of
American Communism. Fellow Red Diaper Babies and many former
Communists seem to want to sweep this under the rug � or, may I say,
airbrush it � as if there had never been a Women’s Liberation
Movement, and it had never occurred to anybody that there might be a
connection between the personal and the political, or � as Bettina
puts it in her memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought
for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, Emeryville
California, 2006), “the personal reveals the political� relations of
power are often enacted in moments of intimacy” (p. 31).

The reeling first reactions to the revelations seem almost a mini- version of the first reactions to Khruschev’s 1956 Secret Speech on
the crimes of Stalin. I am also seeing a lot of male gender
solidarity: men of all political persuasions, including many
historians, are exercising more skepticism towards female than male
testimony; some right-wingers are weeping crocodile tears for the
unjustly accused Herbert who they otherwise detested. That vixen,
Bettina! (Next they will accuse her of seducing Herbert when she was
three � as Herbert accused her of attempting at a later point; p. 526
in Intimate Politics.) There is a tendency on the right to rally to
Herbert’s support because of an increasingly puritanical sexual
politics that sides with the male in such episodes: gender solidarity
trumps politics, even solidarity with a Communist. (Very few women
have so far taken this position, although Clare Spark derogates
Bettina’s claims about Herbert because, says Spark, the claims are
congruent with feminist anti-patriarchy. This would be like
dismissing a Marxist’s specific claims of experiencing class
injustice on grounds that Marxists are always peddling class injustice.)

It should be reported that somebody (not I) sent a copy of Chris [topher] Phelps’s article on Bettina’s memoir to Portside around
Sunday or Monday October 3-4. Portside, which manages in any case to
do a good job of finding things on its own, is the normally fairly
catholic and inclusive “discussion and debate” list of the Committees
of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the sane wing of the
former CP. As of this writing, nothing about this matter has been
posted there, although Portside has posted various items about what
we might call merely bourgeois molestation scandals. Famous Red
Diaper types have been strangely silent about the important issues
raised by Bettina, presumably dismissing it as a merely private
matter. It sounds like a case of keeping dirty linen out of the
laundromat. A friend who is an ex-CPer sees Portside’s silence as
tending “to confirm my sense that the habits of hypocrisy, and the
refusal to deal with women’s experience, have survived intact from
the CP itself.”

It may shed some additional light on Portside’s action � or non- action � to note that Bettina’s parents and others urged her to join
the Committees of Correspondence � which Herbert had named, in
imitation of the Committees of Correspondence of the American
Revolution — but that, as she writes, “I had no inclination to do
so� I was through with Communist politics�” (p. 495). (One friend,
formerly in the Party, speculates that Bettina may have little
sympathy among former CPers because she left the Party, as they see
it, “too soon” � although it was 1981; p. 406ff.)

Here are some of the things pouring into my inbox:

Why, I’ve been asked repeatedly, did Bettina wait to say these things
until her parents Herbert and Fay were dead and couldn’t answer? This
answers itself. The question seems to be rooted in the same sort of
emotional deficit that I mentioned in my earlier piece. Although I
can see arguments on both sides, I am astounded by criticism of a
daughter’s decision not to confront her parents with this. (In fact,
Bettina did indeed confront Herbert with it while he was still alive,
and according to Bettina, Fay had been unaware of it: p. 522ff.) The
situation reminds me of a story about a left organization’s statement
about the Middle East which condemned Israel. One member of the group
endorsed the statement but asked, comically, whether it would be
possible to defer publication until her parents died. There’s no
final answer as to which is the best way to handle a situation like
this, but it’s weird that people should attack Bettina for a decision
that any of us might well make.

I find myself in frequent dialogue with my dear mother around much
milder questions that I nonetheless couldn’t bring myself to ask when
she was alive. (”Why was it that the only book you ever tried to keep
me from reading was Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic The Well of
Loneliness, and what coded message were you sending in your oft- repeated story of how she and you, ‘Blackie’ and ‘Whitey,’ with your
platinum hair, were ‘the cynosure of all eyes’ as you strode down
Eighth Street together in the thirties?” Naomi Weisstein tells me
that she has heard that Blackie and Whitey are reading this in West
Heaven, and saying, “How sad, we didn’t do It back then, and now we
are incorporeal.” Later, at about the time when my mother was running
for a minor office on the American Labor Party ticket, she protested
against the Bayside Communist Club’s consignment of females to a kind
of women’s auxiliary, like the American Legion.) The rest of these
people who are demanding that Bettina confront her parents in life
apparently don’t have this problem, and forthrightly confront their
own parents with their various deviances right away, lest the parents
die before the children work up the courage. They sit around the
Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving dinner table, and as Dad carves the
turkey, they ask, “Dad, why did you do that to me? Mom, why did you
let him?”

“Recovered memory” is unreliable, these people tell me. Granted. The
fine PBS-Frontline Ofra Bikel documentaries some years back about the
alleged sexual abuse in child care (”Little Rascals,” McMartin Pre- School) rightly challenged this kind of testimony, and there was much
criticism elsewhere in the literature. But I do believe that the
agenda of this challenge is sometimes to deny, in a more general way,
childhood sexual molestation. Naomi Weisstein, author of “Psychology
Constructs the Female” tells me that Freud Himself was back and forth
on this, and finally yielded to conservative pressures in denying his
earlier claims that such existed, retreating to the position that
children only had fantasies of sexual abuse. (Note that with Bettina,
we are dealing with an academic in her 60s, and although being an
academic is hardly proof against lying, this is certainly not the
stereotypical false accusing child, drooling and mewling about night- time visits from Ol’ Beelzebub.) There is no doubt whatsoever that
such horrors as this do exist, and in abundance.

“Tell me the truth, Jesse, do you really believe Bettina’s tale?”
writes one old friend, again off-list. Should we believe those who
make claims like Bettina’s? The recurring denial that has come to me
from a range of people from left to right is that it’s another “he
said, she said” situation, and nobody will ever know the truth. What
is this, Mike Tyson? Deeply confused about the difference between
history and the law, historian Mel Dubofsky writes, “Bettina’s
recovered memories are less than convincing evidence and certainly
would not suffice in a court of law.” (Mel also gives us a left
version of an old gentleman’s club argument: “Personally, I find it
hard to believe that the Herbert Aptheker whom I met 40 odd years ago
was a pedophile, let alone an incestuous one.”) I think what we have
here is a case of Molestation Denial, utterly uninformed by feminist
values. (Disclosure: like Mel, I was in touch with Herbert on and off
for about forty years, most notably in defending him, together with
Staughton Lynd, Marv Gettleman and others, in the Aptheker vs. Yale
events of 1975-76, and earlier at the 1969 meeting of the American
Historical Association where he lectured me fruitlessly over lunch on
the dangers of “adventurism” in the organization. I may have met Fay
once. I have never met nor had contact with Bettina.)

We seek rigor in the social sciences. Of course, we cannot predict
with absolute certainty what the accurate explanation will be in any
one particular case. But we do have solid data on the vast under- reporting of such activities, the shame and stigma involved in
reporting them (Bettina speaks of her “fear and shame” p. 4), and the
pervasiveness of such behavior. (Ask your female friends/relatives,
and don’t be too shy to ask about Uncle Hymie’s dandling them on his
lap, and how Aunt Rose let it happen, again and again. Oy vey.) Thus
rigor in the social sciences dictates an openness to such charges
rather than a dismissal which is in fact rooted in the retrograde
sexual politics that are floating around like a toxic cloud in these
bad times. It’s preposterous � and ultimately ideological � to say
that we historians can’t resolve contradictions in the sources:
that’s what we do for a living. One historian who has written me has
unknowingly put himself out of work with his remark, “I don’t know
how this [Bettina’s claim] can be discussed or debated in any
reasonable manner when only one party to the past in question may be
subject to query.” Wow, if you have testimony from only one party to
a disputed past event, you’re on permanent sabbatical. And it’s only
October.

It’s been my experience in history that expression of methodological
concerns, though entirely legitimate, is often a mask for
ideologically based political disagreement. People challenge the
methodology when they don’t like the interpretation. Yes, I am indeed
arguing that it is sound social science to begin with the assumption
that claims of sexual molestation have a significant likelihood of
being true, and must be confirmed or disconfirmed by other contextual
evidence. Selective skepticism of the sort we are seeing is usually
ideologically driven. The contextual evidence on Bettina, including
her lack of animus, the understanding way in which she presents this,
and much else � including the bold-face factors offered just above �
all this comes down on the side of credibility. Phelps sees in
Bettina’s account an absence of rancor and sees her book as “a mature
and, ultimately, redemptive work.” As we have seen, she did confront
Herbert with this. After some resistance on his part, he apologized,
in his way, and she forgave him, compassionately (pp. 522-529). And
as I am about to send this off, I see that Bettina will be giving a
paper at the American Studies Association annual meeting this week on
“‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: Keeping the Communist Party Straight,
1940s-1970s.” Good for Bettina, working at the intersection between
history and her own experience, and talking about it. We should all
talk about it. No more airbrushing.

Bettina’s book, available in paperback, is about much more than this.
It is moving, dramatic and often comical, an extraordinary memoir
both for those who lived through those times and for younger people
who will better understand from it what those times and events were
about. Nobody, including me, will agree with it completely � I think
her admitted “cold fury” at Herbert leads her to belittle and
ridicule some of his positive accomplishments, although he does
appear to have been in many ways a terribly mean person. But Intimate
Politics is positively gripping, on Herbert as well as Bettina, on
the CP, conflict within it, some of it directly between father and
daughter (particularly on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968), Bettina’s movement away from it, her resignation and the
family conflict around it, Bettina’s awakening to feminism and to her
lesbianism, the Free Speech Movement and its aftermath. With the re- release of Warren Beatty’s Reds, maybe somebody will see the dramatic
possibilities in this and make a movie out of it. Meantime, everybody
in the left and feminism, as well as opponents of the left and
feminism, should read this powerful book.

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