A good American son

Madison rescued the Maraniss family, but for a long time, the third child, David, didn’t know how or why — not in detail, anyway.

Elliott and Mary Maraniss came from Iowa with four kids in summer 1957. David turned 8 that August. Before long they had a house on Regent Street, four bedrooms and a side porch off the dining room where Elliott would sit and listen to Milwaukee Braves games in his boxer shorts. He was beginning a long and distinguished run up the ladder at The Capital Times newspaper. It was a happy time.

The key word to understanding what happened earlier is Iowa. Why there? Elliott Maraniss was from Brooklyn, the western end of Coney Island. Mary Cummins was from Michigan. She and Elliott met on the campus in Ann Arbor.

Iowa was a port in a nefarious storm that struck in late February 1952, when a 49-year-old grandmother and undercover FBI informant testified in a hearing room in Detroit that Elliott Maraniss was a communist.

Before the sun set that night, Maraniss was fired from his copy editor job on the Detroit Times. Five years of turmoil followed. There were many moves. In Cleveland, an editor heard about what happened in Detroit and fired Elliott from The Plain Dealer.

Then, in summer 1957, salvation. From Bettendorf, Iowa, Elliott wrote a letter to Bill Evjue, founding editor of the Madison newspaper that boldly took on Joe McCarthy over the Wisconsin senator’s insistence that rampant communism was threatening the country from within.

Come for an interview, Evjue replied. The Capital Times hired Elliott for $114 a week. He eventually became the paper’s top editor, and, quite intentionally it seems, never looked back.

“I knew vaguely what had happened,” David Maraniss tells me, when I visit him in Washington, D.C., in advance of the May 14 publication of his new book, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.

“I knew vaguely that he had been called in front of HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee) and blacklisted,” David says. “But my dad didn’t talk about it. My mother didn’t talk about it. It wasn’t part of how I viewed my dad or my mother. It wasn’t part of our lives.”

Maraniss has not lacked other compelling subjects throughout a journalism career that now spans nearly half a century. From a Pulitzer Prize for his Washington Post coverage of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential run to celebrated biographies of Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente and Barack Obama, Maraniss — who with his wife, Linda, now splits time between Washington and Madison — has earned a reputation as one of the country’s best writers of narrative nonfiction.

“David is a genius at reporting, editing and thinking about what he’s covering,” Bob Woodward, the legendary Watergate reporter and author, tells me. He and Maraniss are longtime friends and Post colleagues.

“What always struck me,” Woodward adds, “is the cerebral component that we often don’t associate with journalism. He’s very thoughtful about it, and always interested in the context.”

The new book is a departure in that Maraniss brings his reporting and writing skills to bear on his own family history. There was always the chance he wouldn’t like what he found. David says his older brother, Jim — an emeritus professor of Spanish at Amherst — tried to talk him out of writing the book.

“That’s an exaggeration,” Jim says, adding that his concern was David couldn’t possibly know what their dad and mom were truly thinking in their youthful embrace of communism.

In the end David thought Jim’s questioning him had great value: It made him ask himself why he wanted to do the book, which, as it turns out, is not only about Elliott and Mary Maraniss, but several other lives and issues that intersected in Room 740 of the Federal Building in downtown Detroit on March 12, 1952, the day Elliott, under subpoena, testified in front of HUAC.

The new book asks the question: What does it mean to be a good American? Maraniss profiles the HUAC chairman, John Stephens Wood, who along with being in the U.S. House of Representatives had in the past been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was present at the infamous 1915 lynching of a Jewish man named Leo Frank.

I asked David the question he asked himself about why he was writing the book.

“It’s an important story about America and my family,” he says. He wrote it “to understand myself and understand this country.”

It might be a challenge, but then, he’d faced those before.

Bob Woodward recalls getting a call from Maraniss early during the 1992 presidential race when David was out in the territory, embedded with the Bill Clinton campaign.

“He was a little discouraged,” Woodward says. “The editors kind of didn’t get it. Of course, David did get Clinton. I think my advice was along the lines of, ‘Fuck ‘em.’”

That kind of insouciance is a journalist’s mother’s milk, and Maraniss drank it early.

Elliott took him often to the newspaper office, downtown on Carroll Street. At 16, David started picking his dad up after work.

“It was everything you’d want it to be,” Maraniss says of the Cap Times newsroom, which later moved out to Fish Hatchery Road. “Dirty, lively and exotic.”

Out of West High, where he met Linda — they’ll celebrate 50 years of marriage in August, the same month David turns 70 — Maraniss attended UW-Madison but did not graduate. He wasn’t much of a student, preferring chess games at the Union to class.

Journalism he liked. Maraniss covered high school sports and wrote movie reviews for the Cap Times. Then he worked, circa 1971-72, for WIBA radio, covering city hall and, on weekends, writing the station’s 15-minute newscasts.

“It taught me to write in a way that had a rhythm to it,” Maraniss says. He was in the studio on New Year’s Eve 1972, when Major League Baseball legend Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash. “The listeners must have freaked out,” Maraniss says. “I did an entire newscast just on Clemente.”

In 1974, fearing if they didn’t leave Madison he and Linda would stay forever, David took a scouting trip to the East Coast. He applied at papers in Hartford and Providence, then spent time with relatives in Coney Island. He next interviewed with an editor named Dick Harwood at the Trenton Times, realizing he’d forgotten his clips — stories from Madison that showed his promise — in Coney Island.

He told Harwood, “Look, I left my clips at Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs stand. But if you hire me, I’ll be your best reporter.”

That Christmas Eve, the phone rang in Madison.

“Ho, ho, ho, this is Santa Claus.” It was Harwood. “I can’t pay your way. You get $110 a week.”

They moved to Trenton, a great city to be a reporter. On the same day, there was a riot at the prison, a fire at city hall, and a break at the water filtration plant. Maraniss had five front page stories in the next day’s paper.

Harwood, the man who brought him to Trenton, was on loan from The Washington Post, which owned the Trenton paper. When Harwood returned to the Post in 1977, Maraniss soon joined him.

The Post was still riding the Watergate wave, and it was hard for a reporter to stand out. But Maraniss, covering Maryland politics, had his eye on an upset-minded candidate in the Democratic primary for governor. His name was Harry Hughes and he was a long enough shot that a derisive Baltimore pol called him “a lost ball in tall grass.”

“I found him,” Maraniss says.

Maraniss covered the story as Hughes won both the nomination and governorship. His stock rose at the Post and he took various editing positions, including serving as deputy metro editor under Woodward.

In 1985, David and Linda — along with their two children, Andrew and Sarah — moved to Austin, where David was the Post’s southwest bureau chief. Arkansas was in his coverage area and in 1991, after seeing Gov. (and presidential candidate) Bill Clinton give a speech on C-SPAN, he sent a memo to his Post editors. It was the Harry Hughes thing again.

“I think this guy is going to win. Let me write about him all year.”

They didn’t entirely — Maraniss was assigned for a time to Ross Perot — but soon he was back on Clinton, and his coverage, more than a dozen major pieces looking at Clinton’s life and ideas, was outstanding, worthy of the Pulitzer for national reporting when the awards were announced the following year.

By then, Maraniss was already committed to a Clinton biography. He decided to do the book the day after Clinton won the presidency. That morning Maraniss was staying with other reporters in a shabby hotel on the outskirts of Little Rock. His eyes snapped open before dawn and he said to himself, “I gotta do this. I’m ready.”

First in His Class was a success, and together with the Pulitzer established for Maraniss a freedom he has enjoyed ever since, alternately writing for the Post and researching and writing his books. It’s an enviable — and well-earned — professional circumstance.

Authors will often say that their books are like children, making them reluctant to pick favorites. Reflecting on his, Maraniss mentions that the Lombardi book, When Pride Still Mattered, sold the most. David and Linda call their home in Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood, on a lovely secluded street a cab driver struggled to find, “the Lombardi house.”

Roberto Clemente was “the favorite person I wrote about,” Maraniss says.

He says They Marched Into Sunlight — which looked at two days in October 1967 when the Dow riots in Madison and a horrific battle in Vietnam took place — was the most meaningful to him.

That, and one other: the new book, A Good American Family.

Elliott Maraniss died in 2004, his wife Mary in 2006. David and Linda took their ashes across Lake Michigan on the ferry. They were buried in Ann Arbor.

“After my dad died,” David says, “I knew…” He pauses. “There was something in my subconscious that I was always going to write this story. It didn’t emerge until after he died. I couldn’t write it while he was alive.”

Jim Maraniss, David’s older brother, insisted in the summer of 2006, when the ashes of both parents were buried, that Elliott’s grave marker carry his college nickname: Ace. It got David thinking more about his parents at that time — the late ‘30s to the early ‘50s — and how much he didn’t know.

“It took a while,” David says, “but I started thinking more. Then I got obsessed.”

By 2015, he was after the story in earnest. One early stop was the National Archives in Washington, where he made a breathtaking discovery. When Elliott testified in front of HUAC in March 1952 — taking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination on most questions — he asked to read a statement but was denied. The three pages went into a box, part of the vast HUAC record. David found them, and in that moment the story came alive for him.

“It’s such a powerful statement,” Woodward says. “His dad had a real understanding of the Constitution and the concept of liberty and free speech.”

Maraniss records his thrill in finding the statement in the book’s first chapter. Woodward, with a veteran author’s appreciation for his friend’s narrative pacing, says “What David does then is he holds it back — it appears later in the book.”

Elliott’s statement makes up the whole of Chapter 24.

By then, the reader has been introduced to a large cast of characters, including HUAC members; attorneys; members of the all-black military unit Elliott proudly commanded during World War II; and young journalists on the estimable college newspaper, The Michigan Daily, where Elliott was a star.

Communism attracted many in the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s, especially the young, intellectual and idealistic.

Of his dad’s attraction, David says, “There are certain things I will never understand. I certainly understand all his motivations: racial equality, economic justice, all of that. You could see the roots of that from his high school, the Depression. What’s easier to see in retrospect is the evils of the Soviet system.”

In any case, who was HUAC to try to tell anyone who was a good American, with a chairman like John Stephens Wood.

“The notion,” David says, “that my father, who had been a commander of an all-black unit in World War II, was called un-American by a guy who joined the Klan and then was part of the lynching of Leo Frank kind of says it all.”

It was not Wood, but another HUAC member, Charles Potter, who gave Maraniss the title for his book. “I try to give everyone their humanity,” Maraniss says. “Some deserve more of it than others. [Potter] was kind of a quintessential Main Street Republican but he lost both legs and one of his testicles in the war. So he had a right to whatever he wanted to say about patriotism.”

One thing Potter stated was his amazement that some communists came from “good American families.”

By the time Elliott and Mary Maraniss brought their four children to Madison in 1957, communism was behind them. Elliott’s FBI file — unearthed by David in his research — stated that Elliott was last reported to be a member of the Communist Party in 1947 and attended his last meeting in early February 1952.

“He would talk about it only if you asked specific questions,” Jim Maraniss says. “Which I did occasionally, but I’d usually sort of give up.”

Jim thinks his dad was reluctant to talk about those days not only because he’d moved on. He didn’t want to make a special case of himself. He was a newspaperman now and that was enough.

As David writes near the end of the book, Elliott and Mary Maraniss knew heartbreak — the loss of their youngest daughter, Wendy, in a 1997 automobile accident — but they created in Madison an accomplished, loving family. A good American family.

David and Linda did that, too. Andrew and Sarah have given them four grandchildren. “All joy and very little responsibility,” David says of being a grandfather. The little ones call him “Tappa.”

One day those grandchildren will read the book and learn something of their grandfather’s father.

“What I most admire about my father,” David says, “among many things, is he came out of that experience without bitterness. He didn’t turn into a neo-con[servative], as a lot of old commies did. He didn’t turn into a bitter old man. He came out of it optimistic. Liberal, open to the world. That was a real lesson to me.”

“In the end this book is a love story to Madison,” he adds. “Everything just sort of fell into place once we got there. After all that turmoil, it saved our lives.”

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The conversation continues

Doug Moe will interview David Maraniss about his new book May 28,

7 p.m., at the Central Library. It’s a Wisconsin Book Festival event.