A Good American Family 1 The Imperfect S I WAS NOT yet three years old and have no memory of anything that happened that day. It was March 12, 1952. My father, Elliott Maraniss, sat at the witness table in Room 740 of the Federal Building in Detroit, where he had been subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. As the questioning neared the end, he asked whether he could read a statement. There were several points he wanted to make about his freedoms as an American citizen, as an army veteran who had commanded an all-black company during World War II, and as a newspaperman. John Stephens Wood of Georgia, chairman of the committee, rejected this request. "We don''t permit statements," Wood said. "If you have one written there, we shall be glad to have it filed with the clerk.

" The chairman''s denial was arbitrary. If a witness was compliant, named names, repented, and humbly sought absolution, then a statement might be allowed. But my father was not compliant. He challenged the committee''s definition of what it meant to be American and invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions about his political activities, so his statement was submitted--unread--to the committee clerk, and from there essentially buried and forgotten. No mention was made of it in newspaper accounts the next day, nor was it included as an addendum to the hearing transcript published by the U.S. Government Printing Office months later. It was just one more document entombed in history, eventually stored in the vast collections of the National Archives in downtown Washington, the same vaulted building that holds original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.

S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights--the foundation trinity of the American idea. By the time I looked at the committee''s old files, sixty-three years had passed since the hearing. My father was dead, as were Chairman Wood and all the other players in that long-ago drama. But the moment came alive to me as soon as I opened a folder in Series 3, Box 32, of the HUAC files and found the statement. Three pages. Typed and dated. When I began reading the first page, it was not the writing that struck me but the physical aspect of the words on the page, starting with the first letter of the first word of the first line: Statement of Elliott Maraniss.

That was the line, though in the original, the capital S of "Statement" jumped up a half-space, as capital letters on manual typewriters sometimes did. And in typing his first name, it looked as though my father twice hit the neighboring r key instead of the t, and rather than x-ing it out or starting over again he had just gone back and typed two t''s over the r''s. The pages that followed were resonant with meaning. My father was trying to explain who he was, what he believed in, and the predicament in which he found himself. But it was the composition of that prosaic first line that hit me hardest, the imperfect S. This seems to be how life often works; the smallest gestures and details can assume the most significance. Now I could place myself in 1952, sitting there in Detroit as my father composed his statement only days after being fired from his newspaper job in the wake of a subpoena and the testimony of an FBI informant who had identified him as a member, or former member, of the local Communist Party. I could see my dad at the typewriter, a place where I had watched him so often in later years.

He was a hunt-and-peck typist, jabbing away at an old dusk-gray upright with his index fingers, a Pall Mall (and later Viceroy) burning beside him in a heavy glass ashtray strewn with half-smoked and twice-smoked cigarette butts. There was a certain violence and velocity, thrilling but harmless, to his typing. He was messy and noisy, accompanying his work with a low, vibrating hum, thinking wordlessly aloud. He punched so hard and fast that ribbons frayed and keys stuck. He slapped the carriage return with the confidence of an old-school newspaperman. He was always making typos and correcting them by x-ing them out or typing over them, like those r''s and t''s. 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. Looking at the typed statement, I started to absorb, finally, what I had never fully allowed myself to feel before: the pain and disorientation of what my father had endured.

For decades I had desensitized myself to what it must have been like for him. I had always considered him in the moment, rarely if ever relating present circumstances to the context of his past. As much as I loved him, I had never tried to put myself in his place during those years when he was in the crucible, living through what must have been the most trying and transformative experience of his life. Until I saw the imperfect S. THE RESEARCH VISITS to the National Archives came at the beginning of my long-overdue attempt to understand what had happened to my father and our family and the country during what has come to be known as the McCarthy era, named for the demagogic senator who emblemized the anticommunist Red Scare fury of the early 1950s. Joseph McCarthy himself enters this story only as a shadowy presence in the background. As far as I can tell, my father never encountered him, and McCarthy never uttered his name. Their connection was more poetic than literal.

McCarthy came from Wisconsin and died in 1957. That is the same year my father emerged from five years of being blacklisted and our family''s fortunes changed for the better when he was hired by the Capital Times in Wisconsin, a progressive Madison newspaper that made its name fighting McCarthy. But even while McCarthy grabbed sensational headlines, the House Un-American Activities Committee, as it was commonly called (hence the acronym HUAC), was closer to the center of it all. Committee members and staff positioned themselves as arbiters, investigators, inquisitors, judges, juries, crusaders, patriots. In Washington and at hearings on the road like the one in Detroit, their intent was to root out and publicly shame people who had been affiliated with the Communist Party. Are you now or have you ever been . ? The assumption was that a party member was indisputably unpatriotically un-American. Un-American--a bland word construction with explosive intent, and peculiarly American at that.

To accuse a citizen of France of being un-French or a Brit of being un-British or a Swiss of being un-Swiss would mean--exactly what? The first impulse might be to conjure up some innocuous stereotype of each country: the un-French not liking food, the un-British disdaining flowers, the un-Swiss afraid of heights. But the un-American label came to connote something more sinister. To be labeled un-American by the committee meant that you were considered subversive, scary, alien, spineless, spiteful, and disdainful of wholesome American traditions. You probably hated apple pie and baseball, but also had no use for democracy and were intent on the violent overthrow of the government. I knew my father as none of those things. By the time I reached political consciousness, he had survived, adjusted, and moved on, rarely looking back. That earlier period, as my older brother, Jim, once explained to me, "was like another life, one that didn''t belong to him anymore at all, just a folly, and it was a dead letter to him, and should stay dead." My father was born in Boston in 1918 and spent most of his childhood years in Brooklyn, but once he left the East Coast to attend college in Michigan he turned into a booster of the people, places, and sensibility of Middle America--of Big Ten universities and glacier lakes with swimming beaches and dairy farmers and black earth and corn on the cob and Tigers or Cubs or White Sox or Braves games on the radio.

When we moved to Madison, he brought with him only a few exotic remnants from his past, including an appetite for bagels and onions and liverwurst and the delight he took in teaching us silly tunes from his New York childhood. The Bowery, the Bowery, they say such things and they do strange things on the Bowery, the Bowery. I''ll never go there anymore. And another that ended Go easy on the monkey wrench, your father was a nut. But his tastes beyond that were decidedly Middle American. He would sit in front of the television set in his big chair in the living room and watch Red Skelton play the country bumpkin Clem Kadiddlehopper and laugh so hard that he''d start coughing. Every time we drove around the curve of Lake Michigan, traveling between Madison and Ann Arbor, he''d have us recite the same ditty: Chicken in a car and the car can''t go. That''s how you spell Chi-ca-go.

In politics and journalism, he taught me to be skeptical but not cynical, to root for underdogs, think for myself, be wary of rigid ideologies, and search for the messy truth wherever it took me. So many better-known figures of the Old Left had taken other paths, either toward neoconservatism and staunch anticommunism or toward bitterness and despair, but he had done neither. He emerged as a liberal but undogmatic optimist. There was no sourness or orthodoxy in him. His favorite essayist was George Orwell, whose leftist politics were accompanied by a clear-eyed assessment of the totalitarian horrors o.