 Good afternoon and welcome to the William and G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, and a pleasure to welcome you. I'm pleased that you could join us for today's program, whether you're here in the theater or joining us through our Facebook or YouTube channels. Before we hear from David Moranis about his new book, A Good American Family, The Red Scare and My Father, I'd like to let you know about two other programs coming up soon. Tonight at 7 p.m. in connection with our new exhibit, Rightfully Hers, American Women in the Vote, we'll host a panel discussion entitled Women in the Vote, the 19th Amendment, Power, Media, and the Making of a Movement. And tomorrow at noon we'll show part one of Ken Burns' documentary, Not for Ourselves Alone, the story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Part two will be shown on May 24th. Check our website at archives.gov, sign up at the table outside the theater to get email updates. You'll also find information about other National Archives programs and exhibits. And another way to get more involved with the National Archives is to become a member of the National Archives Foundation. This foundation supports our education and outreach activities. Visit their website, archivesfoundation.org to learn more about the foundation and join online. The Book of Good American Family opens at a hearing of the House Committee on American Activities. David Marinus' father, Elliot, is testifying and asked to read a prepared statement. He has denied that opportunity, but the type statement eventually finds its way into the National Archives among the records of the committee. Every day in our research rooms across the country, people make discoveries in the records that answer questions for them or perhaps lead to more questions. The discovery of this document in 2015 had deep resonance for David Marinus. He writes in chapter one, it is invariably thrilling to discover an illuminating document during the research process of writing a book. But in this case, that sensation was overtaken by pangs of a son's regret. Even if most research discoveries don't have this level of personal connection, the act of seeing and reading original documents often creates an instant connection to the historical authors and to a particular time in the past. Among the billions of pages of documents and photographs in the National Archives are countless stories, sometimes the famous figures more often of ordinary people trying to live their lives but often having to cope with disruptive circumstances. It's part of our mission of access to help people find their stories. Today we're here to learn about the story of the Marinus family during the Cold War and the Red Scare, a story with pieces found in archives, libraries, and memory. David Marinus is a New York Times bestselling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians and Visiting Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University. He's been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than 40 years as an editor and writer. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton. In 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times including for one of his books they marched into sunlight. He's won many other major writing awards including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lucas Book Prize, and the Frank Fruit E-Book Award. A good American family is his 12th book. Please welcome David Marinus. Thank you, David. It's a pleasure to be here at the National Archives where, as David pointed out, really this book sort of took its first life. I can't describe to you the depth of feeling that I had when I opened the box from the hearing on Communism in the Detroit area in 1952 and saw a file that said, Elliott Marinus and opened that file and saw the three page type statement that my father wanted to deliver to the committee but was denied that chance because he would only be allowed to speak on his own if he sought absolution and was contrite and named names which he did not do. So the chairman of the committee, John Stevens Wood, said you can file it with us and it was filed and for 63 some years no one had looked at it until I did. It was buried in history and it was a very powerful statement but what struck me first were not the words but the typography of statement of Elliott Marinus. I knew my father as a hunting pack typist on old typewriters. He would pound away and the keys would stick and he'd cross out tees and make them ours and in this case the S of statement stuck and it went up half a notch and it was when I saw that what I call the imperfect S that here I was 65 years old and the real feeling of what my father had endured washed over me for the first time. I was only not quite three years old when he was called before the committee. By the time I was of any sort of consciousness my father had moved on. He taught me all the lessons that I've applied in my own writing and journalism career not to fall for any rigid ideology, to search for the truth wherever it takes me, to be open to people of all persuasions, to hate racism but not the racist. A lot of lessons that he taught me came later and I didn't know the back story of what he'd endured. It was sort of a shadow in our family's lives. I knew that he had been fired from a job. I knew that he had struggled for five years until we bounced around to eight moves and finally ended up in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1957 Joe McCarthy, the symbol of that era had just died. The Braves were on their way to winning the World Series. I was turning eight years old and living near the Vilas Park Zoo and life seemed good. And from then on our lives were very different and my father did not talk about what had happened earlier. Very seldom would he even allude to that period. So I knew that I couldn't write this book, not that I couldn't write it but that I wouldn't write it while he was, while my parents were still alive. I had many other things to do and I know that he didn't really want to talk about it. Once a few decades ago I tried pathetically to write a novel about some part of this and I interviewed him for it and he was not forthcoming so that was the last I thought about it until 2015 when I started to become obsessed with this story and realized that here I'd spent much of my career investigating, researching people who started out as strangers to me, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente and after many years of research they became more familiar. In this case I would be starting out with two people in particular, my mother and father who were very intimately familiar to me and I was afraid that by the time I was done they would seem like strangers. That did not happen. I grew a greater appreciation for my parents in this process and for the complexities of American life and for the secrets of our family and probably every family in one way or another. It didn't start out as a reason for me to understand myself but in many ways that's how it ended up. The research for this book took me not only here to this great archive but to 12 or 13 archives around the country to the New York Public Library to the Tamament Library at NYU, to the Georgia Historical Society, to the Bentley Historical Library in Michigan, the University of Michigan Public Library, the Detroit Public Library all over the country finding out what I needed to to put this story into its proper context. It's not a memoir in any sense although my family, the Marinus family is at the center of it, the thread that runs from the beginning to the end but I really wanted to try to understand what had happened to my father, my mother, my family, and America during this very difficult period. I started it before Donald Trump was elected president. I started it before all of the sort of controversies of the last few years. I found echoes as I was going along the use of fear as a political weapon, the demonization of certain groups, questions about who is entitled to be called an American. All of those issues that we are struggling with right now were evident in the 1950s in the Red Scare and really have been played out in various cycles throughout American history. So I did a book in 2003 about Vietnam in the 60s and it was right when the Iraq war was starting. I didn't set out to make it a parable of the Iraq war but these echoes of history always repeat themselves even though the circumstances are always different and you can't draw every lesson from one era to another but there are certain themes that do redone. Along with going to the archives, the first I talk about the four legs of the table and anything I do in writing a book and the first leg of that table is go there wherever there is. So in this case of course I meant going to Detroit and Ann Arbor quite a bit and while I was in Ann Arbor I really started to see what the center of the book could be which was the University of Michigan. Everything sort of evolved from there. My father grew up in Brooklyn, went to Abraham Lincoln High School where his principal carried around a pocket edition of Emerson's essays in his back pocket. It was a school led by very progressive and intellectual teachers, many of them Jewish who had master's degrees and some PhDs who were because of quotas couldn't teach in universities at that point. They were teaching at Abraham Lincoln High School. He went from there to the University of Michigan following in the footsteps of another Abraham Lincoln grad, Arthur Miller, the great playwright who went from Lincoln to Michigan largely for the same reasons to write for the Michigan Daily and to try to win the Hopwood Prize, one of the most prestigious writing prizes at any university that also paid some money and helped all of these students pay for their tuition. By the time my father got there there was another family in Ann Arbor, the Cummins family. My mother was Mary Cummins. Her older brother Bob Cummins was also at the Michigan Daily writing with Arthur Miller and with several other really excellent writers who went on to renown. Bob was radicalized at the University of Michigan coming out of the Depression, looking at the racial injustice in the world and became a member of the Young Communist League. I liken sort of the radicalism of the late 1930s to what was happening in the mid and late 1960s where students were looking at the world in different perspectives and different measures of idealism and disillusionment with the government. In any case, when my uncle Bob graduated in June 1937, he and two of his classmates went to New York, boarded a ship to France, took a train across France, climbed over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain to fight with the loyalists, the Republicans against Franco and Hitler and Mussolini in the Spanish Civil War, which was in so many ways the precursor to World War II and also sort of an incubator for all of the different isms of the 20th century. Anarchism, communism, fascism, liberalism all were at play in different ways in that very complex war. Of those three students from Michigan that went there, Bob Cummins, Elmond Service and Ralph Nefis, Nefis who had been Arthur Miller's best friend at the University of Michigan and in fact Arthur Miller drove Nefis to New York as he was about to start his journey. Miller wanted to go fight in Spain himself but said he knew he was going to be a famous playwright someday and he didn't want to get killed there. So he drove Nefis and said that on that drive he looked over at his friend and thought I'm looking at a dead man. It turned out he was right. Nefis was captured by Franco's troops, held in a cathedral in Alcaniz and executed. One of the most moving moments of my reporting, my wife and I went to Spain and retraced my uncle's roots and went to Alcaniz and went up the winding hills up to the cathedral on the top of the town and walked into that cathedral and seven decades later it still felt like a dungeon of death. You could feel the presence of the Spanish Civil War all of those decades later. Bob Cummins, my uncle and Elmond Service survived. They went back to the University of Michigan after the International Brigades were sent home. The Student Union there held a big celebration for them. 400 people came, at least. One of them was Bob Cummins' little sister, Mary Cummins, my mother, 18 years old. And another was Elliot Marinus, then the editorial editor of the Michigan Daily. And it's at that meeting, that celebration where my parents met. It all sort of comes together there. My father, after leaving the University of Michigan, took a job on the Detroit Times and then quickly enlisted in the military after Pearl Harbor. He was already considered a radical and was investigated by military intelligence when he applied for officer candidate school. His superior officers thought he was an excellent candidate and they put him in the officer candidate school even as he was being investigated. But what happened to many radicals in World War II was they really set off to isolated posts or, as what happened with my father eventually, were made commanders of all black units. This was still a segregated military. And the officers for the black units were white. They were often either southern racists because the military thought that southern whites would know how to get along with blacks and deal with them, even if in bad ways. Or northern radicals. My father fit that bill. One of the great discoveries of my book was reading the 150 letters that my father wrote to my mother while he was training and going across the Pacific to Okinawa with that black salvage and repair company. And the pride that he took in what he was doing and how he saw that his soldiers who were treated as second class citizens and yet fighting for democracy considered that they were getting a fair shake from their commander. You could see him building the pride of that unit through these letters. He came home six years later, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, called Un-American. The chairman of the committee, John Stevens Wood of Georgia, had voted against every civil rights bill for decades and for the poll tax. The black citizens in his hometown of the several hundred, five were able to vote. He took pride in the fact that they all voted for him, not realizing that there was no other choice. He had been a member of the Klan as a young man, joined the Ku Klux Klan. And in the most sort of stunning discovery of my investigation of Wood, there was a famous case in Georgia, actually in the country in 1913 called the lynching of Leo Frank. Leo Frank was a Jewish industrialist. He ran a pencil company in Atlanta. He'd come from the north. He was considered by the Southerners, a carpet bagger. He was accused of murdering a 13-year-old girl in his manufacturing plant. It was a frame-up. But he was convicted and sentenced to death. It became such a big story that the New York Times covered it every day in the Chicago Tribune. It was a national story. And it became clear over the course of the reporting that he was innocent. The governor under pressure commuted his death sentence, but not his sentence. And the powers that be in Marietta, Georgia, were so infuriated by this commutation of his death sentence that they organized to break him out of the state prison and drive him back down toward Marietta and lynch him, which they did. The mastermind of that lynching was a judge named Newt Morris. And Newt Morris' chief disciple was John Stevens Wood, the same man who decades later would call my father un-American, my father had been the commander of an all-black unit. That's sort of the central tension of what is a mean to be American? Who defines it and why? And how? Throughout that, you know, as I was investigating my father in that period, there were many times when I would shake my head and say, what were you thinking? It's easy and retrospect to say that. He was an idealist who was motivated by the the great depression, the economic inequalities of that, and by his search for racial justice in an unjust world. But of course, at various times, he was, as he would say, stubborn in his ignorance about the paranoia and murderous intent of the Soviet Union, and it took him a while to to see that. And, you know, as his son, to see his rationalizations for that, whether they were essays in the Michigan Daily defending somehow the Nazi Soviet Pact of 1939, or the invasion of Finland by Russia, or various things, it would sort of boggle my mind. But I would also see in those essays his deep love for America. He was not intent on the violent overthrow of this country, which was the foundation of what UX said they were doing, and which what all of the Smith Act convictions of American Communists was driven by. There certainly were Soviet agents in the United States, Americans who were doing the Soviets bidding. My father and mother were not among that number. They were naive and idealistic and for too long believed in a false God, as someone once said. But by 1952, when when you came to Detroit, they were moving on away from that. And the FBI spent the next five years tailing my dad. He was blacklisted for those five years. And everywhere we went, the FBI would follow him 37 FBI agents over the course of those five years, by tailing him. There was a member of that committee who's also a figure in my book named Charles Potter, who was a congressman from Michigan. And Charles Potter was a heroic figure in World War II. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge and lost both legs fighting at the Colmar in the Colmar pocket falling on landmine. And he came back like so many young veterans interested in politics and running as a on an anti-communist ticket like Richard Nixon did in California and many others. He was elected to Congress, put on the House on American Activities Committee, was there the day my father was called before the committee. He was also running for the Senate at that time. And a few months later was elected to the Senate from Michigan and then was put on the subcommittee with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. And it was during that period working with McCarthy that Potter started to see the machinations and exaggerations of what McCarthy was doing. 10 years later, Potter wrote a book called Days of Shame, regretting everything that took place during the McCarthy era in various ways. It was Republicans who stopped the excesses, the hysteria and fear of the 1950s as much as anyone else. It was Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine and a senator from Vermont. And eventually, President Eisenhower, even though in 1952 and earlier he'd sort of used McCarthy for his own purposes. Once McCarthy went after the army in 1954, Eisenhower never liked McCarthy, finally helped turn the tide against that period. The other figure in this book, one of the others is the FBI informant. In 1943, the FBI recruited a working class woman in Detroit named Berenice Baldwin to serve as an FBI informant in the Michigan Communist Party. She was a paid informant. She was not a former communist who had been disillusioned and named names. It was her job to infiltrate the party. She did that for nine years. She'd go to birthday parties and wedding showers and became friends with all with the members of the party. And then nine years later, in 1952, when the when the HUAC came to Detroit, she came in from the cold and named hundreds of names. Their intent at that period was to go after the United Auto Workers Union, Local 600, which was dominated by socialists and communists. And my father happened to be sort of collateral damage, as was my uncle, called before the committee because she had named them and fired from his job. And then the five years of our roaming around in the wilderness started. The statement that I started, that started me on the course of this book, is really a powerful statement about what it means to be an American, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, freedom of the speech and freedom of the press. And I could not put it into better words than my father did with his imperfect deaths in the statement of Elliot Marinus. And I'll close by reading part of that. I was taught as a child and in school that the highest responsibility of citizenship is to defend the principles of the U.S. Constitution and to do my part in securing for the American people the blessings of peace, economic well-being and freedom. I have tried to do that to the very best of my ability. And for doing just that and nothing more, I have been summarily discharged from my job. I have been blacklisted in the newspaper business after 12 years in which my competence and objectivity have never once been questioned. I must sell my home, uproot my family, and upset the tranquility and security of my three small children in the happy formative years of their childhood. But I would rather have my children miss a meal or two now than have them grow up in the gruesome, fear-ridden future for America projected by members of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I don't like to talk about these things, but my Americanism has been questioned. And to properly measure Americanism, you must know the whole pattern of a life. The U.S. Constitution and the spill of rights are not simply musty documents in a library. They have meaning only if they are used. The First Amendment is not only a guarantee of free speech and a free press, it is also an indispensable part of self-government. That's what makes this committee so dangerous, ostensibly designed to protect the government against overthrow by force and violence, that proceeds by force, terror, and threats to overthrow the rights of the American people. This committee reflects no credit on American institutions or ideas. Its attempt to enforce conformity of political or economic thought is a long step toward dictatorship that holds the greatest danger to the American people. In this country we have never acquiesced in the proposition that persons could be punished for their beliefs. Thank you very much, and I'm happy to take questions, and I'm told that once you go to the microphone to do that. Hello. Yes, hi. So back in those days there were people who were former, formally members of the Communist Party. These days basically nobody is part of the Communist Party. And so the right wing is saying Communism and Socialism is identical, which is absurd. But it was that the same case back in the 50s that a socialist and a communist were considered the exact same thing and should be punished for this identically. Yes, I mean that many people were called before Huak or in some way branded as un-American who were not members of the Communist Party but either affiliated with them or were called pinkos or socialists. So it was a conflation of that. You know, in some ways when you try to think about why there was so much fear and hysteria during that period, there are a lot of complex reasons. I mean there was a danger of the Soviet Union. There was a war going on in Korea with North Korea, a communist country. But there was also a political component to that, which was the Republican Party in particular seeing this as an opportunity to undo the great the New Deal. You know, 20 years of democratic government and taking advantage of an anti-communist fervor to go after Democrats, liberals, socialists, and communists and conflate them all in that sense. And in one way or another the country's been dealing with that ever since. So it's part of the political process and it's part reality of the situation then. But yes, it was quite common to to conflate all of those different political persuasions. Yes, sir. So Carl Bernstein also has a book about his parents and their membership in the American Communist Party. Did you confer with him when you were writing your book and how would you differ your book from his? I know Carl Bernstein. He worked at the Washington Post although he left before I got there in 1977. I told him what I was doing. I did not talk to him about his book. I read his book. I didn't want to be influenced by any other book or point of view, but my own. So one major difference of the books is he wrote his book while his parents were still alive. And he would tell you what sort of trouble that created in terms of their relationships. And I was not going to do that for a lot of reasons. But that's one difference. Another is that my book is is not a memoir really. If you read it you'll see that it's it's a history of that era with my family's thread moving through it and his is more personal memoir. Yes, sir. Oh, all right. Oh, I'm sorry. I think you should go back and forth. I'm sorry. My father-in-law, whom I never knew personally, was Edward Pozniak. He was born in Russia and his family fled as Russian Jews in about 1918, 1919, moved to Germany, left Germany when the rise of Nazism became apparent, lived in France briefly, came to the States and was a journalist, knew four languages. He joined the U.S. Army. I'm not sure what branch. The family never talked much about him, but he served through World War II, worked for OSS, the precursor of CIA, but in the early 1950s was accused of being a communist, was called Mr. X by the Washington Post and his name was finally revealed. He lost his job as a journalist, did only freelance work mostly for a Swiss paper thereafter. His wife had worked as a bookstore person for a long time. His children were my late husband was nine at this time. Younger brother John, whom I had hoped to see here today, was just seven, but their family life was very disrupted and it was odd that someone who'd been cleared to be in the army and to work for OSS was then considered to be a communist. There's so many touch points to what you said. One of the interesting facets of the OSS is that they also recruited many veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Abraham Lincoln Brigaders in the early days of the OSS, because they knew they could be effective. So it's sort of an odd situation there, but it was not uncommon for for a communist to be connected to the OSS in that period or people who had been fighting in Spain. And the other part of your story that hits me is I have to say how lucky my family was. There were a lot of families that were disrupted and destroyed by that period and for various reasons, my father's optimism, my mother's perseverance, the particular circumstances that we faced as opposed to others. We were lucky and I understand that and I know that among the many lucky things was Madison Wisconsin, which was a very open-minded community that really saved our family in the end. But thank you. Hello. My name is John McDermid. I went to Sporthmore with your sister Jean and her future husband Michael and they've been my friends ever since. This is the first I've heard of this story about your father and mother with a long friendship with them. And I wonder about when you found out about what was going on and what had gone on with your father and how that sort of moved into your family life. I mean, how did they feel about talking to you children about it and how was it felt in the family? Thank you for that. My sister Jeannie was tremendously supportive of me during this process. I haven't talked about it to my friends for 50 years. Jeannie wouldn't have talked to you about it because basically by the time we got to Madison and we were still very young, that part of our family history was a shadow. It wasn't what we were. Most people in Madison, Wisconsin, my father was beloved there. They didn't know this story. I'm going back there next week and it'll be the first time I'll really tell the full story to a city where he was very highly regarded for decades for a lot of wonderful reasons. I don't think that my sister and my brother and I all knew that there had been a trauma, that my father had been fired and that we had these years where we were bouncing around. My sister in the book describes us as good little Stoics. Because when you're kids, you just go with what's happening. So we moved all these places to my grandparents in Coney Island and then to my grandparents in Ann Arbor and then to Cleveland briefly and then to Iowa and finally arrived in Madison. But I can't think of many times where my brother or my sister and I had long conversations about that experience. I mean about the Communist part of it, about the blacklisting and the HUAC committee hearing. We certainly, probably they more than me because they were of school age, would often talk about the dislocation of having to go to three schools in one year, things like that. And so it affected us in those ways. And it's really not until I wrote this book that I understood how it affected me in different ways. Mostly for the better actually because my father and mother endured something and taught me the lessons of what they had gone through without actually talking about what they'd gone through. Thank you for the question. Whose turn is it now? Yours, yeah. What did your father do in Madison? And could you please help me understand how Wisconsin said McCarthy to Washington and yet Madison was a liberal bastion. My father arrived in, well the story of how he got there is that he was the editor of this little strike paper in the quid cities of Iowa and Illinois, Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline. It was put out by the typographers who were striking against the papers there. And he was so good at his job. He loved everything, layout headlines, reporting, editing. Once a week they would run a column by the editor, the publisher of the Capital Times in Madison, William T. Yevue, who was an old progressive, a friend of the Lefalets came up in that tradition. And Yevue saw this little strike paper that was putting out his column and said, this is great. Who's doing this? And found out it was Elliot Marinus. And when the strike paper folded, he was hired to come to the Capital Times. He came as a reporter, then rose up the ranks as an editor and ended up as the editor of the Capital Times by the time he retired. And was, you know, admired by people of all political persuasions. You know, Tommy Thompson, the governor, was the first person to call me after my father died. Why Wisconsin could send Joe McCarthy and Gaylord Nelson, for instance? It's bipolar. It's always had that, you know. I mean, it's always gone back and forth. It has the elements of conservatism and the elements of progressivism both there. And it's, even though it was really a state far ahead of its time in terms of progressive government, it also had this reactionary force as well. Well, that's actually not a question to ask in the past tense, but the present tense. How is it keeping it now? It's more, I mean, through Republican administrations, it was very well supported. McCarthy was in Washington. The governors, the Republican governors of Wisconsin tended to be more mainstream moderates. So the funding was only threatened in the Walker administration, really. That's quite a question. Okay. Hi. Yes, sir. I enjoyed your talk a lot. I had really two questions. One, which is the, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can. One is the more serious question is, you made an interesting statement that I believe and strongly is history always repeats itself in various ways, not exact ways. I always say it's like, history repeats like a bad meal, unfortunately. And I see some parallels between what's going on today, the base hatreds and the stereotyping of the McCarthy era. I actually tend to be a pessimist, so I see it as even worse today in the sense that there seems to be lockstep within the Republican Party in terms of, you know, which there wasn't during the McCarthy era. I wanted to see, first of all, since you opened it up with the statement about that, do you see parallels? I have two questions. Well, the other is a personal one. The, do you see parallels between now and the McCarthy era? And do you see any optimism? Well, I do see parallels as I, I'm sorry, I want to give these speeches. I forget what I've said at which place. So if I repeat myself, forgive me. But the huge difference is McCarthy was a senator and Donald Trump is a president. And so the level of power at that is quite exponentially different. And another difference is that there were Republicans who stood up against McCarthy, and we haven't seen that so far in this instance. But as I said earlier, the echoes are there in terms of the use of fear as a political weapon and the questions of who is an American and how is that defined? So I see those definitely repeating. So my father was an optimist. I have to say that a lot of what you might call quote unquote old leftists either turned into neocons and staunch anti conservatives or were embittered in disillusion. And somehow my father came through it as an optimist and open minded liberal. And he inculcated that optimism in his children. So I've always been an optimist, but I have to say that my optimism has never been more challenged than it is right now. The Irving crystal was one of those you were mentioning. It was the kindness. Right. And there were a number of those, but he comes to mind. Yes. And because I see his son all the time. The other the other quick question I had was about your father. Did he ever totally break from the Communist Party a lot after the 56 kind of broken by then the FBI documents show from 1952 to 1958. They were tracking my father. And every report that I read would say we have no no one has said there's any connection between him and the Communist Party. It's not in my book, but my brother told me a story about my mother in 1956 listening to the radio hearing the about the execution of Imre Nagi and tears rolling down her eyes as she was ironing a shirt. And I don't think that was because she was already disillusioned about the Soviet Union. I think it was just sort of the last reminder to her of what how sour her idealism had turned by her belief in something that was false. Thank you very much. Thank you. How would your book have differed had you not found your father's imperfect s statement? And how did that statement actually affect your understanding of yourself, your understanding of your family? I think it would have differed superficially structurally, first of all, because I build the tension of the book starting with it and then waiting until near the end to deliver it as a full chapter so that by the time you read it, you know the as he says the whole pattern of a life to define Americanism. You know the pattern of the lives of the people who were accusing of being un-American. So it certainly landed that weight to everything else that structurally that I and substantively of the book. So thank God for the National Archives is what I would say. And for all archives, I mean I you know all of my books are are built on primary documents first and to find that was was just essential. Thank you. Thank you very much.