The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby

by Robert P. Newman

Book Overview

Lillian Hellman's memoirs are as notable for what they omit as for what they reveal. In An Unfinished Woman (1969), she notes that, although she kept an extensive diary of her Moscow trip in the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807818151
• ISBN13: 9780807818152
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 392 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

More little-known Post-WWII and Cold War History...

Robert Newman not only leads up to his highly praised history of the Owen Lattimore story and the influence of the "China Lobby" with this account, but gives much denied credit as well to the history of the left which had been censored, denied, and castigated... Included is a little-known quote from Lillian Hellman in her opening remarks to the Waldorf Peace Conference in 1949, which she co-organized. The Waldorf Conference was a credit to the post-WWII anticolonialist peace movement fueled by the activism of the radicalism of the 30s. This social/political/cultural movement included among others Hellman and W.E.B. DuBois, who founded the Peace Information Center in 1950 and circulated the Stockholm Peace Petition at a time when the Soviet Union was allegedly running a "peace offensive" and at a time when anyone who promoted peace or who criticized U.S. policy must therefore be viewed as being an agent of a foreign govt. in the McCarthy hysteria. Not only was anyone associated with those promoting peace at risk of suspicion, but also anyone who showed any independent thinking regarding foreign policy, no matter how extensive the institutional experience (as in Melby's case) or how well-founded the logic. This was the case with John Melby, chief editor of the China White Paper which acknowledged the inevitable failure of the KMT and the subsequent "loss of China." Just as anyone associated with the Waldorf Conference was eventually brought before HUAC and/or blacklisted, so anyone associated with authorship of the China White Paper was subjected to loyalty security board hearings and their careers ruined, but for different cause. The irony of this book is that it illustrates how the relationship of Melby and Hellman resulted in a collision of these two very different worlds of thought, intellectual culture, career, and experience.