P aul Berman tells a moving story in Tablet of Joe Clark and his daughter Judith Clark. Growing up in Brooklyn Clark was part of a clique of left-wing Jewish kids. Many of his friends joined a small Trotskyite cult. Joe however joined the Communist Party. As a good Stalinist he cut off all contact with his old friends and did not speak to them for decades.
Meanwhile Joe rose in the ranks of the American Communist Party and became the foreign editor of the Daily Worker. His job was to present world affairs as interpreted by the Soviet Politburo in a way that Communists everywhere could support. That was easy for him because he believed in the Soviet Union.
The crisis for Joe Clark came in 1956 when Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev revealed the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes. The idols fell from Joe’s eyes. He went to visit his old friends many of them now on the editorial board of Dissent the voice of democratic socialism. He confessed that they had been right and he had been wrong. He wanted to start anew and repent.
His old friends welcomed him to the Dissent editorial board and he became the magazine’s expert on Communism. He wrote eviscerating reviews of two sentimental accounts of the American Communist Party.
