Harvey Matusow: I Led Twelve Lives
Ingatestone, Essex — Harvey Matusow? ? Wasn’t he the guy who…?
Anybody over 30 will remember Harvey Matusow as that sharp, clean-cut kid from the Bronx who starred 20 years ago in Senator Joe McCarthy’s traveling circus and Commie witch hunt. As a professed ex-Communist, Matusow rode the crest of the anti-Red hysteria in Fifties America, pointing the stubby finger of guilt-by-association at hundreds of his former Comrades as well as a few complete strangers. People went to jail behind that finger.
But then in 1955, Matusow did an acrobatic flip-flop. Calling himself a “perpetual and habitual liar,” he claimed that he’d undergone a “deep religious experience” and recanted on four years of finking for the FBI and Congressional committees.
The Feds were understandably annoyed. Some Communists got retrials, but more important, the political pogrom of the McCarthys and Eastlands and Welkers somehow lost its credibility. As Murray Kempton wrote in 1955 in the New York Post: “Harvey Matusow … has done what no respectable person could do; he has shown up the last ten years of respectable anti-communism.” But the government got its own back, convicted Harvey of perjury and sentenced him to the federal slammer for five years.
Fade out on youthful Harvey Matusow going into the federal pen at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, generally despised by the left and right alike and dissolve — 16 years later — to a modestly eccentric cottage in suburban Essex County, 22 miles from London. Now 45, fatter, a permanent resident in Britain and an uncle-figure to the London underground, Matusow has made a whole new career for himself over here as an entrepreneur, broadcaster, writer, oddball and musician.
It’s a long way and a long time from the hearing rooms of the Senate Internal Security Committee to Ingatestone, but Matusow solidly bridged the gap. Hanging amid a faintly bizarre decor, which could be described as electronically dadaistic, is a framed copy of US Senate resolution 131 ordering that proceedings be taken against Matusow for contempt of Congress. And Matusow, for all of the new tacks he’s taken in the last dozen years, can’t resist poking the ashes and warming his hands in the feeble glow of notoriety.
For Harvey, in a book he’s writing entitled The Matusow Case, is claiming that he never was a fink for the FBI and the Committees after all. Instead, he maintains, all the time he was doing “investigative reporting” on a one-man campaign to subvert the right-wing crusaders. In January, 1950, Matusow claims, before he ever volunteered his services to the FBI he made out an affidavit to this effect, had it notarized unread (by his father) and put it away in a safe-deposit box to be used “in the event of my death.”
So, Matusow claims, all those years of playing Joe McCarthy’s personal hand puppet, all those names named, all the fear he put into the hearts of former friends and associates, all that sincere and penitent contrition he showed when he recanted were part of an act, a personal, fantastic, singlehanded attack on the most powerful forces in America at the time. And False Witness, the book in which he spelled out his fall into evil and resurrection, was a load of bullshit.
But Harvey doesn’t give a damn whether we believe it or not. He says his publisher and others have seen it, but he won’t publish a photostat of the affidavit in his book. “I say this document exists,” he says belligerently. “Take it or leave it; it’s up to you. I’m not going to get involved in the pedantic cross-examination of trivia.”
Trivia? But Harvey, to come out 20 years later, change your entire story, claim the existence of a vital document and then refuse to prove that the document exists, what does that do to your credibility?
Matusow has an answer for that one. “I’m not saying that I’m a credible person. I couldn’t give a hoot if anybody today believes the affidavit existed or didn’t exist. It’s not my problem. I know what happened.”
For a moment it’s tempting to be Big Jim Eastland behind all those microphones. “Harvey Matusow, this magazine orders and directs you to answer…” But Harvey’s not coming off with anything more. He’s even getting a bit pissed off, so maybe it’s time to take a look at the background that produced the Harvey Matusow of 20 years ago and today.
Born in 1926 to a struggling family of Russian Jews in the East Bronx, Harvey Marshall Matusow grew up fast both politically and socially. When he was ten, he was raising money in the streets for veterans of the Spanish Civil War and had been thrown out of a Republican rally at Madison Square Garden for flaunting a Roosevelt poster.
Came World War II and 17-year-old Harvey joined the Army and served in Europe. After the war, he became an actor and about the same time joined the Communist Party of the United States.
Here, Harvey says, he was playing no undercover role. “I was a doctrinal Communist. I read Marx, Lenin, Stalin, all that. I still am. Let’s face it, I believe in social justice, and I believed that it was best represented by the Communist Party of the United States of America.” But one of Harvey’s troubles as a Communist, he says, was that he was too active. Being a Comrade was rapidly becoming a less OK thing to do, and the order of the day was: Go underground. Harvey refused. “It was the worst mistake the Communists ever made. I used to knock on strange doors and say: ‘Hello, I want to tell you about the Communist Party.’ “
Harvey Matusow: I Led Twelve Lives, Page 1 of 5