McCarthyism and the American Promise.

• Author: Lueders, Bill
• Position: BOOKS - Book review

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father

By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, publication date May 14, 2019

More than halfway through David Maraniss's upcoming book, A Good American Family, appears a photograph, taken in 1950. It pictures exactly what his book's title evokes, gathered on the front steps of a house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. There are adults and there are kids. David, who would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, is a bonnet-wearing infant hoisted by his father.

Four of the men shown in the photo served in World War II. One missed service due to mental illness. "All families are bent by burdens" Maraniss reflects, citing this illness and the fact that one of the women in the photo, his aunt, would die from polio within a year, as emblematic of the "wounds of life." But there is one misfortune that would befall this family that, even decades later, remains inexplicable: Maranisss father, Elliott, and his uncle Bob Cummins would come under suspicion from the U.S. government for being, of all things, un-American.

A Good American Family is Maranisss twelfth book, following biographies he's written on Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clementi, and Vince Lombardi, and his deep-dive examinations of the 1960 Olympics, the city of Detroit, and a month in the life of the Vietnam War, as it played out both in South East Asia and at the University of Wisconsin. His new book recounts how his father, a one-time communist, and his uncle, who joined the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, were both hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, and spent years under the watchful eye of the the nations secret police.

Elliott Maraniss, who died in 2004 at age eighty-six, was a lifelong journalist. "I love everything connected with putting out a paper'' he wrote in a letter to his wife, Mary, during the war, "from gathering the news, writing it, editing it, printing it, and watching it roll off the presses." His professional career began as a copy boy at the New York Post and ended as an editor at The Capital Times, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, after word of the federal government's concern about the dangerous ideas that might lurk in his head got him booted from other jobs and blacklisted from his profession.

As described by his son, in what feels like an honest account, Elliott Maraniss tried to do his part to bring about a better world. During the war, he...