A Legless Veteran's Struggle
Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, "The Legless Veteran"

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4762
Date Written:  2016-11-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21502

Book review of Robert Goldstein's Discrediting the Red Scare: The Cold War Trials of James Kutcher, "The Legless Veteran".

Abstract: 
-

Excerpt:

Much of the history of the Red Scare is not broadly well-known today.

Many readers may have heard of the "Hollywood Ten," movie screen writers who were blacklisted as Communist Party members or supporters, or seen the film "Trumbo" about one of these screen writers, or be aware of how the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Alger Hiss were caught up in it. But the victims of the Red Scare were not only leaders of the SWP and CP and well-known figures at the time. Many rank-and-file members of these and other organizations were targeted.

This book covers the ten-year struggle by one such individual, James Kutcher, against his own persecution by the U.S. government. He would later write that he was an "ordinary man" with "no special talents" and no special "capacity for leadership." His struggle was finally victorious in 1958, and was important in helping discredit the Red Scare, as the title says.