“Blacklisted,” which airs in six half-hour episodes on National Public Radio beginning next month, rivals “The Shadow” for scary listening. Tony Kahn tells his family’s–and the nation’s–chilling story simply by giving voice to the historical record. Using transcripts of HUAC hearings, news shows from the ’50s, letters and diary entries and his father’s 3,000-page FBI file, he dramatizes the years from the first House hearing in 1947 to his father’s death in 1962. (Ron Leibman is the voice of Gordon; Stockard Channing plays his wife, and Carroll O’Connor makes a wonderfully seedy-sounding J. Edgar Hoover.)
Tony still doesn’t know whether his father was a party member–Gordon wouldn’t tell HUAC, and he wouldn’t tell anyone else, either. The family joined him in Mexico for five years, then they all moved to New Hampshire, with Hoover’s operatives trailing them everywhere and faithfully recording their car’s license number. They were so poor the car itself was always a secondhand lemon. Gordon couldn’t work under his own name; he managed to scrape together an income by writing freelance articles for magazines, calling himself “Hugh G. Foster.” There were many dark days. “My despair is so total that I have lost the touch of writing below the glossy surface of magazines,” he wrote to a friend.
Only after Tony studied the record did he fully understand his parents’ moral stance. A lot of what went on in that period had to do with character," he says. “There were a thousand individual moments when people had to choose whether they were going to go along with their fear.” “Blacklisted” is about not going along, and what it cost.
