OBITUARY: Howard Fast, R.I.P.(Obituary)

Some years ago the caller identified himself as Howard Fast. We are representatives, he said, you and I, of different faiths, and I would like to dine with you. We did this, and some weeks later he joined the editors for dinner. The friendship did not blossom -- we were indeed apostles of different faiths. I was candid enough to tell him at lunch that if he hadn't left the Communist party I would not have shared dinner with him, inasmuch as the faith I belonged to demurred at social consort with active Communists. He smiled, nodded his head, and told me about when he had resigned.

The famous author of best-selling historical fiction including Citizen Tom Paine and Spartacus had been, no less, the managing editor of the Communist Daily Worker. His work for the party was recognized by, among others, Josef Stalin, who awarded him the Stalin International Peace Prize the very year that Stalin died.

Fast's engrossing story was that when Khrushchev gave his famous 20th Congress speech in 1956, renouncing Stalin and his works, a copy of that speech reached the Daily Worker immediately before the CIA got hold of it. It was released to the press, which would give this revolutionary speech, or perhaps better, this counterrevolutionary speech, front-page attention, even as the historians have done. "There was a dispute in the Daily Worker on whether we should publish a report of Khrushchev's speech," Fast said. "The editor complained that if the Worker went with it, the Communist party of America would lose 10 percent of its membership. I corrected him. We'll lose 90 percent, I predicted.

"And I was right."

Howard Fast too left the Communist party. But when he died on March 12, the long obituary in the New York Times referred (Paragraph #1) to "the blacklisting of the 1950s," to his proclivity for unpopular causes ...