Patricia Bosworth - Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story

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PATRICIA BOSWORTH

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For Tom Palumbo

My father, Bartley C. Crum, right after Truman appointed him to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine, circa December 1945.

Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations

REBECCA WEST

THE NIGHT BEFORE MY father committed suicide, my mother gave a dinner party. Of course the dinner party wasnt mentioned in subsequent accounts of his death. A New York Times headline dated December 11, 1959, read

BARTLEY C. CRUM,

LAWYER, 59, DIES

Acted in Cases Involving

Civil RightsWon Million

in Rita Hayworth Divorce

The obit went on to say hed bought the New York tabloid PM from Marshall Field and was a liberal Republican whod been a Wendell Willkie campaign aide.

The fact that hed killed himself by swallowing an entire bottle of Seconal washed down with whiskey wasnt mentioned either, but then wed kept it a deep dark secret; not even our relatives knew the truth.

Actually, Mama had called some mysterious person at United Press International to hush it upthe same mysterious person my father had telephoned years before when a frat buddy of his had walked into the East River and the family wanted it kept quiet.

My father could do that sort of thing. He knew a lot of people. Earl Warren, Robert Kennedy, Cardinal Spellman, Henry Luce. On the walls of his New York law office there were photographs of himself laughing it up with President Truman and two Secret Service agents in a Chinese restaurant. And on his desk he kept color snapshots of himself with Chaim Weizmann and Golda Meir.

His association with Israeli leaders was referred to in only one eulogy, which appeared in the American Zionist and called him a fighter for justicea man who spent his prime years fighting for a homeland in Palestine for uprooted European Jews.

During the winter of 1946, President Truman had appointed him to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine. The committees task was to discover if it was feasible to allow one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors into the Holy Land. Great Britains foreign minister Ernest Bevin promised hed follow the committees recommendations in spite of an immigration restriction to the contrary.

My father toured filthy, crowded internment camps all over Eastern Europe, interviewing scores of DPs frantic to get to Palestine. He tried to give them reassurances that they would, but he knew that the State Department wanted to protect American oil interests in the Mideast so they secretly supported the Arab campaign to keep the Jews out. And Great Britain secretly supported the Arabs, too.

Later Daddy helped persuade the committee to agree to a policy (supported by Truman) that would issue one hundred thousand immediate-entry certificates to Palestine for the Jewish refugees, and once back in the United States, when the committees recommendations were ignored and Bevin went back on his promise, my father ended any chance of a government career for himself by publicly pointing to what he considered the double-dealing of our State Department and the British foreign office.

He wrote a book about his experiences on the Committee; it was called Behind the Silken Curtain and it was a near best-seller. He would often tell me that his work with the committee was the most rewarding thing hed ever done.

For a long time he approached life with supreme self-confidence and an attitude of entitlement. He glided through experiences seemingly undaunted by disappointments or fears, or even doubts.

He juggled corporate accounts like Crown Zellerbach paper along with pro bono cases: Chinese immigrants, unwed mothers, teachers unjustly fired for refusing to sign loyalty oaths.

Then, at the start of the Cold War in 1947when fear of Communism let loose a wave of political oppression in this country that seems almost incomprehensible todaymy father became one of six lawyers defending the Hollywood Ten, that group of screenwriters and directors accused of larding their films with anti-American propaganda. They had refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee and testify as to their political beliefs.