The Looting of Cambodia, Part 2

 

[This is the second part of the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun on 28 June 2026.  As readers of Rick On Theater know, I have a strong interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular.

[Other ROT posts on that subject include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); ”Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).] 

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
(continued)
by Anderson Cooper

[Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT, with Part 1 posted on Wednesday. 8 July.  As always, I recommend that ROTters go back and read the beginning of the transcript before turning to Part 2, below.  (There’s a brief précis of Cambodian history in the afterword to Part 1.)]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

It’s taken a team of Cambodian investigators led by Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, more than 10 years to document the theft of thousands of ancient statues and relics by a British collector named Douglas Latchford. As we reported in 2023, they’ve managed to get some of what he stole back, but many of Cambodia’s greatest treasures are still out there, hidden away in the mansions of millionaires and billionaires, and hiding in plain sight, on display in some of the most prestigious museums around the world.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has one of the most important collections of Cambodian antiquities in the world. But many of the finest pieces on display here in the Southeast Asian art wing . . . are stolen. Like this one. And this one . . . This as well – all passed through the hands of Douglas Latchford. 

Latchford sold this one to the Met in the early 1990s . . . This one he donated. 

Anderson Cooper: Do you think people visiting the Met, know that these were looted? 

Brad Gordon: I think most people walk through the Met, they have no idea those are blood antiquities. They have no idea what– what the history is behind those pieces. They don’t know– the temples they came from. They don’t know the people who were killed to get them here.

Anderson Cooper: The dirt has been brushed off. There’s a little note that says where it came from. Should people believe what’s on that little note?

Brad Gordon: No. Absolutely not.

In 2023, we went with Brad Gordon to see where in Cambodia the Met and other museums’ collections really did come from. 

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible.

This seven-story pyramid is more than 1,000 years old . . . and rises out of the jungle in Koh Ker in northeast Cambodia . . . It’s one of dozens of temples in what was once the capital of an ancient Khmer empire.

Anderson Cooper: –looters have been all over this site for– for decades.

Brad Gordon: Correct. 

Anderson Cooper: Douglas Latchford loved the statuary . . .

Brad Gordon: In love with the beauty, in love with the artistic–

Anderson Cooper: The statues from here are–

Anderson Cooper: –have a distinctive style that he particularly loved?

Brad Gordon: Correct.

And perhaps the most famous statues in that distinctive style that Latchford stole from Koh Ker were nine stone warriors once arranged together in a battle scene. When we were there, seven had been returned to the National Museum in Phnom Penh, including this 500-pound sandstone sculpture — it’s the one Sotheby’s tried to sell in 2011. They’re back on their original pedestals, their ankles reunited with their feet, hacked off by looters.

Anderson Cooper: This was at Sotheby’s. This is at Christie’s.

Hab Touch: Norton Simon’s.

Anderson Cooper: Norton Simon Museum [Pasadena, California]–

Hab Touch [b. 1965] is the secretary of state in Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture. He is working with Brad Gordon to bring back the two Koh Ker statues who’s empty pedestals sit in the museum.

Anderson Cooper: So do you know what are supposed to be on–

Anderson Cooper: You know what are supposed to be here, and you know what’s–

Hab Touch: We know–

Anderson Cooper: –supposed to be here?

Hab Touch: Among nine sculpture, we have seven already. Only two missing.

One of those missing sculptures was discovered in the glossy pages of Architectural Digest in 2008 . . . this mythical army commander and a stunning number of other stolen works . . . were all together in the Palm Beach mansion of the late billionaire George Lindemann [1936-2018; businessman; CEO of a fossil fuel infrastructure and pipeline company] and his wife Frayda [b. 1939]. 

Anderson Cooper: The ancient treasures of Cambodia were sitting in the living room of an incredibly wealthy family in America, in Florida, on display, while people were having cocktails and–

Brad Gordon: The one thing that I’m always struck by is how many people witnessed it and have been silent and continue to be silent today.

The Lindemann’s spent an estimated $20 million building the collection with the help of Douglas Latchford . . . Frayda Lindemann didn’t respond to our request for an interview.

But in Koh Ker . . . we showed her home to two former looters.

Anderson Cooper: What do you think of this house?

It’s a beautiful house, he said, it looks like it belongs to a king.

The former looters pointed out another statue in the Lindemann’s living room they said they helped steal . . . this reclining figure of the Hindu God Vishnu. They said it was dug out of the ground from this exact spot in late 1995.

Anderson Cooper: You’re 100% sure this was taken from here by you and others in 1995?

Lida (translated): Yeah, I’m sure. 

They also identified a number of other statues they say they stole that appear in books published by Douglas Latchford. They say they found this copper statue using a metal detector.

Anderson Cooper: This is Bodhisattva at Ease? 

[In Buddhism, a bodhisattva is a person who has attained, or is striving towards, bodhi (meaning ‘awakening’ or ‘enlightenment’) or Buddhahood. In early Buddhism, the term Bodhisattva is used in texts to refer to Siddhartha Gautama or Gautama Buddha in his previous lives and as a young man in his last life, when he was working towards liberation (nirvana).]

Brad Gordon: Yeah. 

They dug it out of the ground here in 1990. J.P. Labbat, former special agent with Homeland Security, found photos of the statue covered in dirt on Douglas Latchford’s computer. Latchford sold it to the Met in 1992. When we visited, it was still on display.

Anderson Cooper: You were able to get access to some of Latchford’s– emails?

J.P. Labatt: Yes. And in there– there are d– detailed– stories about the manner in which he obtained pieces, the fact that he was having them reassembled– and repaired, that dirt and– and crustaceans were being– cleaned off of them.

Anderson Cooper: They were freshly dug out of the ground?

J.P. Labatt: Fresh. The– these were fresh pieces that he would describe in his emails that needed a level of restoration before he could even attempt to sell them. 

Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019 but died [of complications of Parkinson’s disease in Bangkok at 89] before he could be put on trial. Federal prosecutors in New York however continued tracing his looted artifacts . . . they believe at least 18 of them have landed up at the Met.

Andrea Bayer: I am very involved in our work on provenance.

Andrea Bayer [b. 1957] is deputy director for Collections and Administration at The Met.

Anderson Cooper: The Met has said that they will return objects based upon rigorous evidentiary review. What rigorous evidentiary review was done before acquiring these pieces?

Andrea Bayer: Not enough.

Anderson Cooper: It seems like the Met had a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. They wanted to build up their collection. And nobody was really asking questions where it came from.

Andrea Bayer: For people, many people in the art world, there was a sense of protecting great objects that stood a chance of being destroyed. We no longer feel about it that way.

Under pressure 13 years ago, the Met did return two statues called Kneeling Attendants [10th century; stolen from Koh Ker during the civil war of the 1970s], which had been donated to them by Douglas Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: In 2013, when you returned the kneeling attendants, did you investigate the other items that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I don’t know the answer to that question. I can only pick up the story several years later, when Doug– Douglas Latchford was indicted in 2019, when we immediately and proactively went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and offered our full cooperation.

Anderson Cooper: Well, I can pick up the story actually in 2013, because a spokesman for the Met, said that “No special effort was gonna be made to check the provenances of any other Douglas Latchford donated work.” Why wouldn’t the Met want to look into everything else that Douglas Latchford had brought to this museum?

Andrea Bayer: I can’t speculate about why that didn’t happen.

Anderson Cooper: But no one investigated all the other items that Douglas Latchford gave?

Andrea Bayer: Not to my knowledge.

The Met is not the only major museum with looted Cambodian artifacts, but its collection is one of the largest in the world. In 2023, the museum announced it would create a research team to examine the provenance or acquisition history of all its collections. 

Anderson Cooper: It’s taken 10 years since Douglas Latchford was shown to have given stolen property to the Met, for the Met to set up this provenance team. Why has it taken 10 years?

Andrea Bayer: It was a slow process, I’ll grant you that. It was a slow process, but– I think that the fact that we are– fully engaged now, fully cooperative now is– is our only answer to this really. it’s a moment of reckoning, and we’re ready to do what it takes now– to right whatever the wrong is. 

Anderson Cooper: Four years ago, when Douglas Latchford was indicted by prosecutors, did you set up a team to check the provenance of every Latchford work–

Andrea Bayer: Yes. We started, absolutely we started to dig in right then and there. It’s not easy. I mean the fact that we don’t have much information has to do with the fact that it’s very hard to find the information–

Anderson Cooper: But there’s enough information for federal prosecutors- to charge Douglas Latchford with stealing and looting and trafficking in smuggled items. How much more evidence do you need? You haven’t–

Andrea Bayer: We need–

Anderson Cooper: –returned any of the– any Douglas Latchford-related items since he’s been indicted, and that was four years ago.

Andrea Bayer: But we are on the verge of– of– of returning a number of them.

Anderson Cooper: All of them?

Andrea Bayer: That I can’t say.

Four months after that interview, just two days before we went to air in 2023, prosecutors announced the Met would return 13 antiquities that came through Douglas Latchford.

But the Met has not returned this statue, which was specifically cited in the indictment of Latchford, or this one, which Latchford sold to the Met in 1992.

Cambodia’s Culture Minister called the Met’s announcement a “first step” and says she looks “forward to the return of many more of our treasures.”

Anderson Cooper: Shouldn’t museums have thought twice about buying things that were coming out of Cambodia in– during the genocide and civil war and decades of strife?

J.P. Labatt: And this question that you raise is really– the– the crux of– of what we’re wrestling with. 

J.P. Labatt: You– acquired pieces from a known smuggler who– used a team of looters that the government has interviewed and taken statements from. They have emails which refute the information in your own provenance at the museum. You have items in the museum which were named in the indictment of Latchford that are still there. And so these pieces should go back.

Anderson Cooper: There’s no question.

J.P. Labatt: It’s the right thing to do.

In 2023, the Lindemann family, whose collection was showcased in Architectural Digest, struck a deal with federal authorities . . . voluntarily agreeing to return 33 stolen treasures. In a statement to the New York Times, the Lindemann’s said: “Having purchased these items from dealers that we assumed were reputable, we were saddened to learn how they made their way to the market in the United States.”

Anderson Cooper: Why did the Lindemanns agree to return their collection to Cambodia?

J.P. Labatt: The pieces were dirty. I– I think they finally came around to the– the fact that– Latchford was dirty, their collection was– was all looted pieces. It was obvious. And– and so they– they– decided to surrender them.

We got a peek at what was the Lindemann collection shortly after the deal was done. It was sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. A nation’s living gods and ancestors waiting for a ride home.

Brad Gordon: This is like a whole wing of a museum.

A wing of a museum that only the Lindemann’s and their friends had access to. 

Anderson Cooper: If the Lindemann’s hadn’t published these in Architectural Digest back in 2008?

Brad Gordon: I think there’s a good chance we maybe never would have found it. 

Brad Gordon: We always say, the gods want to come home. We feel like the gods have spoken today. They want to come home.

As one of the biggest crates was being opened . . . waiting eagerly was Muikong Taing and Thyda Long . . . two members of Brad Gordon’s investigative team. This would be their first look at the mythical army commander taken from Koh Ker . . . they were likely the first Cambodians to set eyes on it since Douglas Latchford stole it more than 50 years ago.

Thyda Long: He’s here.

Anderson Cooper: There’s a look in his eyes and on his face.

Thyda Long: It’s much bigger than I expected it to be.

Anderson Cooper: His presence is extraordinary.

Thyda Long: I did not expect to feel this way. 

Even the commander seemed to be smiling. 

Then it was time to see the rarest piece in the Lindemann’s collection. The Cambodian team knelt in reverence as the Hindu god Vishnu [10th century; looted from the Prasat Krachap temple in Koh Ker] was uncrated. Despite all the fuss, he appeared unperturbed . . . reclining in a cosmic slumber. When this statue arrived in Cambodia, it was welcomed as one of the most important ever returned.

Earlier this month, the Met returned two more artifacts to Cambodia following a seizure by the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. The Cambodian government is still demanding the repatriation of 30 others in the Met’s possession.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[With respect to restoration of the ancient artifacts in the Cambodian temples about which Anderson Cooper reports above, looting, aside from its desecration, is an act of vandalism—the willful and malicious damaging of the sculptures. 

[In my coverage of art conservation and preservation on ROT, there are other forms of damage and potential damage against which art conservators and restorers must struggle.  I want to offer a look at another kind of conservation and restoration with which I had personal experience.

[Back in 2007, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., on the conservation and preservation of experimental and innovative art that doesn’t age well or lend itself easily to cleaning.  

[As artists were experimenting with new media and techniques, they never considered how those elements would change over time.  This created sometimes immense challenges for museums and conservators, as well as private owners with fewer resources, long after the artists had probably died. 

[Some years earlier, in 1985, the Hirshhorn had mounted another exhibit in which works modern artists from the museum’s own collection that had undergone conservation treatment were shown.  The conserved pieces were accompanied by photographs depicting what they’d looked like before the treatment.  

[A later Hirshhorn display, in 2003-2004, was “intended to address the interaction of principle, practice, materials, techniques and ideas, which characterizes the preservation and care of contemporary and modern art.”

[I had a serious problem of this nature with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of this issue.  

[The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, a 14th-birthday gift for me from my parents, is one of the most cherished pieces I have and, except when I went to college and the army, I took it with me every time I moved. 

[In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  

[As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  

[I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now just The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building, the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

[At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, so I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did.  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s 1960 purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration.  To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.]

The Looting of Cambodia, Part 1

[This post is the transcript of a 60 Minutes (CBS News) segment originally broadcast on 17 December 2023 and rerun 28 June 2026.  Apparently, I didn’t deem Anderson Cooper’s report worth republishing on Rick On Theater two-and-a-half years ago, but on watching it again last week, I decided it is.  Given my interest in art in general, and in the preservation of art in particular, I can’t explain my first decision.]

“HOW CAMBODIAN ARTIFACTS STOLEN FROM TEMPLES
ENDED UP IN AMERICAN MUSEUMS, PRIVATE COLLECTIONS”
by Anderson Cooper

[Anderson Cooper’s 60 Minutes report, with video, is posted on the CBS News website.  I have split it into two parts for republication on ROT.  The second installment will be posted on Saturday, 11 July. 

[Other posts on ROT that deal with the conservation or preservation of art and antiquities include: “‘How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage‘“ by Jeffrey Brown of PBS News Hour (28 May 2017); “Conserving Modern Art“ (11 December 2018); “‘Smithsonian and U.S. Army join forces to save works of art and culture threatened by war‘“ by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport of PBS News Hour (15 September 2022); “Greenwood Pond: Double Site“ (22 February 2024); “Two Restorations“ (4 November 2024); and “Replicating Classic Art Works“ (21 February 2026).]

Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities

The theft of Cambodia’s cultural treasures . . . thousands of sacred stone, bronze and gold artifacts from religious sites across the country . . . might just be the greatest art heist in history. It began nearly a century ago when Cambodia was colonized by France [the French protectorate lasted from 1863 until 1953, interrupted from 1941 to 1945 during the World War II occupation by Japan] . . . but in the 1970s, 80s and 90s amidst genocide, civil war, and political turmoil – the looting became a global business, much of it run by a British man named Douglas Latchford [1931-2020]. He kept some of it for himself, but much of what his gang of thieves stole, Latchford then sold to wealthy private collectors and some of the most important museums around the world. As we first reported in 2023, Cambodia’s government has spent the last 14 years trying to track it all down . . . and bring their history and heritage home.

Angkor Wat [Khmer for ‘City (or ‘Capital’) of Temples’], with its towering spires, is the glory of Cambodia. Nearly a thousand years old, it’s one of the biggest and most extraordinary religious temples in the world — sprawling across 400 acres. Originally built [1122-1150 CE] to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, it then became a Buddhist temple [ca. 1181 CE], and remains a place of worship today. You can wander here for weeks, lost in a labyrinth of ancient stone corridors and sacred chambers. But the scars of plunder run deep: looters have hacked off the heads of many statues . . . they’ve stolen bodies as well . . . empty pedestals mark where gods and deities once stood . . . on some, only the feet remain.

It’s worse in the rest of Cambodia’s 4,000 temples. Nearly all have been looted. This one is a hundred miles northeast of Angkor Wat . . . on a remote mountain . . . called Sandak [established late 9th century CE].

Brad Gordon: This was hit very heavily by the looting gangs.

Brad Gordon: They found gold, they found statues, they found many, many things.

That’s Brad Gordon, an American lawyer, who’s been working for the Cambodian government for 14 years, tracking down its stolen treasures . . . he brought us to Sandak with his team of investigators, archeologists and art scholars.

Anderson Cooper: This is so cool.

In the temple’s crumbling courtyard, little remains . . . mostly empty pedestals scattered among the Sralao trees.

Anderson Cooper: It’s remarkable to me just how much stuff is just scattered on the ground. 

Brad Gordon: Yes.

Brad Gordon: It’s like a pedestal graveyard.

Anderson Cooper: We’ve all seen in museums these statues with no feet on them, and I don’t think people realize the feet were hacked off. Because in order to steal them, that’s the easiest way to– to get them off the pedestal.

Brad Gordon: And we know when the looters came to sites like this, the first thing they took was the heads. That was the easiest to grab. And then later on maybe they come back and get the torso. But they were not very careful, so they left behind pieces.

For Cambodians, these statues are not just works of art . . . they are sacred deities that hold the souls of their ancestors to whom they ask for guidance and pray . . .

Anderson Cooper: This is incredible. Th– these were all looted.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes, all looted.

Anderson Cooper: All of these heads, like, cut off–

Phoeurng Sackona: And the head was cut off, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona [b. 1959], Cambodia’s minister of culture [2013-present], is in charge of the government’s efforts to track down their stolen gods. We met her in a closely guarded warehouse not far from Angkor Wat . . . ––where more than 6,000 pieces from temples across the country are stored for safekeeping . . . each one sculpted by an artisan from an ancient Khmer Empire . . . that lasted for more than five centuries [802-1431 CE] and spanned Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. 

Anderson Cooper: So the statues have a soul? The statues are– are they living?

Phoeurng Sackona: For us, yes.

Phoeurng Sackona: And we believe that we can talk with them. They will hear. They will see. What do you want? What do you see? What do you do in your life, in your house, outside in the society, also? So that–

Anderson Cooper: They’re watching.

Phoeurng Sackona: They’re watching, everywhere . . .

Phoeurng Sackona’s entire family was killed in the genocide that began in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist group took over, forcing millions of Cambodians into labor camps. Some 2 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, were slaughtered or starved to death. The Khmer Rouge lost power in 1979 [to the invading army of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam], but fighting and instability continued for decades, leaving Cambodia’s temples unprotected and vulnerable . . . easy targets for unscrupulous antiquities dealers like Douglas Latchford.

Anderson Cooper: Who was Douglas Latchford?

Brad Gordon: I would say that he was, in many ways, the mastermind behind the greatest art heist in history.

Anderson Cooper: The greatest art heist in history?

Brad Gordon: Yes, in terms of scope and multitude of crime sites and the enormous amount of statues that were taken out.

Latchford lived in Thailand . . . an enigmatic British businessman . . . he began collecting in the 1960s. He had, it seems, two great loves: Cambodian antiquities and . . . Thai bodybuilders . . . He sponsored Bangkok’s biggest bodybuilding competition, the Latchford Classic [from ca. 2004].

Anderson Cooper: How would you describe him?

Brad Gordon: He was extremely deceptive, I think in many ways, was ruthless. But he hid that behind this incredible façade of charm.

Latchford portrayed himself as a scholar and protector of Cambodia’s culture, a reputation he burnished by donating sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other prestigious institutions. He also published three books filled with the finest examples of Cambodian antiquities [Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art (Art Media Resources, 2004); Khmer Gold Gifts for the Gods (Art Media Resources, 2008); Khmer Bronzes: New Interpretations of the Past (Art Media Resources, 2011)] . . . many of them, it turns out, Latchford had stolen.

Brad Gordon: He was using the books as sales catalogs. You know, he was handing them out. He was using them to sell pieces. And– and he understood a certain psychology of collectors out there that if they see something in a beautiful book, they think it’s legitimate.

Those books have been an invaluable guide for Brad Gordon and his team, helping them compile a database of thousands of missing artifacts. Many of which they didn’t know existed until Latchford published photos of them. 

Gordon’s team got their big break when they met this man in 2012. He was a former Khmer Rouge child soldier and leader of a gang of looters. His name was Toek Tik [ca. 1959-2021; pronounced day duck].

Brad Gordon: That first meeting, I– I didn’t really know who we had met. You know, I knew– I knew that he was important. I knew that many people were telling me he was the best. And I knew that he was feared. 

Anderson Cooper: Why were people afraid of him?

Brad Gordon: You know, over the years, he had killed many people. 

It turned out Toek Tik had worked for decades supplying Douglas Latchford with thousands of treasures . . . and he was amazed to see them again in Latchford’s books.

Brad Gordon: He kept opening the book and going back to the front cover and– and going through and tapping and saying, “I know this one. I know this one. I know this one.” 

Anderson Cooper: And when he says he knew this one, means he– he helped loot the– those ones.

Brad Gordon: That’s what we learned later, yeah.

Toek Tik became a key confidential source for Gordon’s team. They gave him a code name, Lion, to protect his identity. And followed him to dozens of temples where he confessed what he’d found, and how he’d stolen it.

Brad Gordon: He would say to us, “I’m gonna transfer everything in my head to you. I’m gonna tell you everything. Every secret.”

Anderson Cooper: You felt like his memory was very good. It was accurate.

Brad Gordon: Oh it was unbelievable. He remembered the size of everything. Measured against his body. He would use his arm to show us how long a statue was.

Anderson Cooper: Why do you think he wanted to cooperate?

Brad Gordon: You know, he felt tremendously guilty about many things he had done in his life, about the killing, about the looting. And we offered him a road of redemption– a way to do something really good at the end of his life.

They recorded hundreds of hours of Lion’s testimony . . . he explained how gangs of looters would spend weeks at remote temples . . . using shovels, chisels, metal detectors . . . even dynamite . . . to find and dig out treasures. Dozens of men would hoist heavy stone statues onto oxcarts before transporting them across the border . . . into Thailand . . . and into the hands of Douglas Latchford. Lion never met Latchford, but he’d send him photographs of artifacts he could choose from.

Brad Gordon: We hear about them saying, “Oh we had to go to this temple and take a photo. And then sending it back.” You know, my sense is he was shopping. He had a list. The looters knew his priorities.

Like these . . . which came from a temple complex called Koh Ker [koh kay]. The statues from there had a distinctive style that Latchford loved.

It was, however, a dangerous business. Most looters only made enough to buy food for their families. And fighting between rival gangs was common. 

Anderson Cooper: People were killed over these– these antiquities. Do you look at these as blood statues?

Brad Gordon: For sure. They’re blood antiquities. Whenever I see a statue I think about, you know, who died to– to get this out of the ground or get it out of a temple and to– to move it here? So, so much of this looting was done in the shadow of the war, shadow of the genocide. 

It was this 500-pound sandstone warrior from Koh Ker that appeared in a Sotheby’s auction catalog in 2011 that put Douglas Latchford on the radar of U.S. law enforcement. Its feet were missing. And the price tag? An estimated $2-3 million.

J.P. Labbat: When it appeared in the market– there were a number of archaeologists, a number of people who immediately recognized the– the source of the statue as being a specific temple in Cambodia.

Anderson Cooper: It c– came from Koh Ker?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right.

Until he retired in 2023, J.P. Labbat was a special agent on the cultural property, art and antiquities unit with Homeland Security. 

J.P. Labbat: A team from the U.S. Attorney’s Office at the Southern District of New York traveled to Cambodia– to inspect the site where the statue had been removed.

J.P. Labbat: And so the base– was still there with it with the feet still in the ground. And so– they were able to match that base and feet to the statue.

Anderson Cooper: And that was enough evidence to get the statue pulled off the market?

J.P. Labbat: That’s right. 

After years of legal wrangling, Sotheby’s finally agreed to send this stolen warrior back to Cambodia . . .

A ceremony was held welcoming it home . . . and investigators were able to trace its original sale back to Douglas Latchford . . . who was asked about its repatriation in a German documentary in 2014 [Die Spur der Tempelräuber (‘The trail of the temple robbers’; known in English as The Stolen Warriors; nb: film databases like IMDb list the release date as 2015)].

Wolfgang Luck: Is it a good day for Cambodia, or is it a bad day for the art market if these things are coming back? 

Douglas Latchford: It’s a good day for Cambodia, it’s a bad day for the art market.

Law enforcement in New York was closing in on Latchford, but he claimed prosecutors had him all wrong. 

Douglas Latchford: Their imagination has gone wild. They’ve seen too many Indiana Jones films. As far as I know there is no such thing as a smuggling network and I certainly don’t belong to any smuggling network.

Anderson Cooper: The attempted sale of this statue in 2011, was that a turning point in the unraveling of Douglas Latchford?

J.P. Labbat: I would say yes. That case put more of a– focus and a spotlight on him. And then efforts were– were then doubled to, like, really peel back the onion and look into Latchford’s activities.

The testimony of former looters found by Brad Gordon and his team was critical for the U.S. attorney’s case against Latchford. 

Anderson Cooper: How rare is it to actually have access to the looters? To people who actually stole these things 10, 20, 30 years ago.

J.P. Labbat: I know of no other case where– where that’s happened. And– it– it’s quite remarkable to have looters actively assisting a team of investigators to recover artifacts that they had a firsthand in helping remove from the country.

Douglas Latchford was finally indicted by U.S. authorities in 2019 for smuggling, conspiracy, wire fraud and other charges, but he died before he could be put on trial. Brad Gordon eventually convinced Latchford’s family to return his personal collection of stolen treasures . . . Among the first pieces to come home in 2021 was this statue from Koh Ker. Lion, weakened by cancer, came to inspect it in Cambodia’s National Museum to verify it was the same one he’d dug out of the ground.

Brad Gordon: And then he turned to me and he said, “It’s the real statue.” You know, it was a remarkable thing to watch. And just his– his relationship, it– it was living to him.

Anderson Cooper: Do you think he was happy it was back? 

Brad Gordon: Thrilled. So happy, he knew that he had done something good. 

Lion died a few months later . . . but the secrets he revealed continue to bring statues back to Cambodia’s National Museum . . . masterpieces that left the country long before these school children were born.

Anderson Cooper: Does the return of these statues, of these Gods, help some to heal.

Phoeurng Sackona: Yes. To get back the soul of the nation.

Anderson Cooper: The soul of the nation.

Phoeurng Sackona: It’s not only for me– but all of my family who was died [sic] during the war, and for– for all Cambodian people.

There are still many more stolen Cambodian statues and artifacts in museums and private collections around the world. 

When we return, Cambodia’s fight to get those looted relics back.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon and Nadim Roberts. Associate producer, Eliza Costas. Broadcast associate, Grace Conley. Edited by Patrick Lee. 

[I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful.  The Khmer Empire was established in 802 CE and by the 12th century, when most of the temples in the 60 Minutes report were built, was the largest empire in Southeast Asia.  The empire prospered and grew until 1431, when wars with neighboring kingdoms led to the sack of Angkor, the imperial capital. The empire went into decline and existed under the influence of Siam and Annam (now known as Thailand and Vietnam), reduced to little more than a vassal state.

[King Norodom (1834-1904) signed a treaty of protection with France, making the Kingdom of Cambodia a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863 until it gained independence in 1953 under King Norodom Sihanouk (1922-2012).  In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted in a military coup by Lon Nol (1913-85), a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic. 

[Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer.  Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot (1925-98); it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK.  Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.

[On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh, the capital of the country, and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people. 

[By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease.  Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people. 

[After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979 in response to border raids by the Khmer Rouge.  The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh.  He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.

[In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia.  King Sihanouk retook the throne until his abdication in 2004; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni (b. 1953).  The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Manet (b, 1977), in office since 2023.  

[Anderson Cooper left 60 Minutes in May 2026, announcing his departure in People magazine in February 2026.  He explained, “I have little kids now and I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while they still want to spend time with me."  He remains anchor of the CNN broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360.°]

The Blacklist, Part 2

 

[As I stated in the introduction to Part 1 of this post, readers of Rick On Theater will know by now that I consider myself pretty nearly a First Amendment absolutist.  But 75 years ago, during the Second Red Scare, this country’s government and some of its citizens took it upon themselves to punish people for what they thought. The article that started three days ago and finishes below is about that conflict.

[I urge ROTters who are just coming upon “The Blacklist” to go back to Tuesday, 30 June, and read Part 1 before taking up Part 2.  Aside from the information that Mary B. Robinson imparted, I have made some annotations to her text with identifications and explanations that I won’t repeat below.]

“‘UN-AMERICAN’:

THEATRE ARTISTS vs. THE 1950s BLACKLIST”

(continued)

by Mary B. Robinson

[This is the second and final installment of “The Blacklist,” my repost of Mary B. Robinson’s “‘Un-American,’” which was first published in the SDC Journal 14.1 (Winter 2026), the membership publication of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  The article, which I pick up on Rick On Theater where Part 1 left off, is posted online, or through the SDC website.]

A BITTERNESS WITH THE COUNTRY

Actor Madeline Lee [1923-2008; film and stage actress, social activist, and later theatrical producer; married to fellow blacklistee Jack Gilford (m. 1949-90; see Part 1)], one of the seven people Robbins named, described her experience of the day he testified: “Someone called and said, ’Put on your radio––Jerome Robbins is naming you.’ And our phone didn’t ring for three months after that. That’s how scared people were of being in touch with you, probably figuring the FBI had my phone tapped.”

It was a “killingly frightening” time, said actor Phoebe Brand [1907-2004], who had worked with Elia Kazan [see Part 1] and her husband Morris Carnovsky [1897-1992; stage and film actor; one of the founders of the Group Theatre] for 10 years when they were all in the Group Theatre together. Kazan identified both Brand and Carnovsky as members of the Communist Party, as did several others who named names. The Carnovskys had a 10-year-old son at the time, and Madeline Lee and her husband Jack Gilford had small children as well. These four actors––along with hundreds of other theatre artists—did not work in film, radio, or television for many years.

The blacklist was taking its toll on its victims’ personal lives as well as their professional ones––sometimes fatally. Mady Christians [1892-1951; Austrian-born German-American theater and film actress], who had created leading roles in plays such as Watch on the Rhine [1941] and I Remember Mama [1944] and starred in the film of All My Sons [1948], died of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on (her friends believed) by the stress of having been listed in Red Channels and denied work as a result. J. Edward Bromberg [see Part 1] and John Garfield [see Part 1], stalwarts of the Group Theatre who had gone on to success in Hollywood in the 1940s, both died of heart attacks after being listed by Red Channels and targeted by HUAC—Bromberg at the age of 47 and Garfield at 39. (Both had chronic heart problems that “got a lot worse with all the tensions and anxiety,” says Bromberg’s son Conrad [1931-?; playwright and actor (as Conrad Josephs)]. “I don’t say the blacklist killed my father, but it contributed.”) And Philip Loeb [1891-1955; stage, film, and television actor, director, and author], an actor and director who had flourished on Broadway for many decades, died by suicide when General Foods insisted that he be dismissed from his leading role on a long-running television show [“Jake” (1949-51) in The Goldbergs; TV (CBS, NBC; 1949-56)].

In May 1952, playwrights Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman [both Part 1]––both of whom made a considerable portion of their income in film work––were called before HUAC in the same week. Odets defended his own and others’ membership in the Communist Party of the 1930s, invoking the grim realities of the Depression and stating that they had joined “in the honest and real belief that this was some way out of the dilemma in which we found ourselves.” But he also complied when the Committee asked for the names of the other Communist members in the Group Theatre. Because he had not denounced Communism, he was not considered a “friendly” witness by HUAC––but because he had named names, he was reviled by many in the theatre community. Odets felt that he had shown the Committee “the face of a radical,” and was distressed that all anyone seemed to care about was the names. He lived uneasily with that for the rest of his life, dying a decade later at 57.

Lillian Hellman told her lawyer that she was prepared to talk freely about her own Communist past, but she would not name names. Her lawyer informed her that this was a legal impossibility: if a person opted not to take the Fifth Amendment (which allowed them to not incriminate themselves [see Part 1]), they waived their right to not name others. After much strategizing with her team of lawyers, Hellman sent a letter to HUAC several days before her hearing requesting permission to be candid about herself but silent about other people. If the Committee refused, she said, she would be forced to plead the Fifth, since “I am not willing, now or in the future, to bring bad trouble to people who, in my past association with them, were completely innocent of any talk or any action that was disloyal or subversive.” She summed up her beliefs by declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

HUAC denied her request, saying that it was not up to her to set the terms of her hearing, so she invoked the Fifth. But in the course of her time before the Committee, she asked repeatedly to have her letter read aloud, knowing that was the way to make it public. Eventually the HUAC counsel did so while her lawyer passed out copies of it to members of the press in the back of the room. The moral outrage of the letter and the clear way it differentiated between the ethics of talking about oneself versus naming others made Hellman something of a heroine in the New York City theatre world and beyond. In her later years, she kept a book of press clippings about her HUAC testimony on a table near her front door, and wrote a memoir called Scoundrel Time [Little, Brown, 1976] detailing her experience of the blacklist and castigating those who had named names––causing Elia Kazan to remark that she “spent her last fifteen years canonizing herself.”

[Scoundrel Time was the third of three memoirs by Hellman. In an interview on the Public Broadcasting Service’s The Dick Cavett Show in 1979, Mary McCarthy (1912-89; novelist, critic, and political activist) famously said of Hellman that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” McCarthy and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.]

In the spring of 1953, Margaret Webster [see Part 1] was “plunged into fear” when she received a telegram from Senator Joseph McCarthy [see Part 1, especially annotations] ordering her to appear at a private hearing of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a longstanding committee that McCarthy had begun using to investigate alleged Communists. Webster had had very little work since 1950, when she had first been listed in Red Channels, and for a time she had been denied renewal of her passport, though she had successfully appealed that decision. “Your friends began to divide into two groups,” she later wrote, “those who grasped your hand warmly and seemed a little over solicitous, and those who were polite but a trifle evasive and had that ‘no-smoke-without fire’ look in their eyes.” While preparing to sublet her apartment, she was advised to go through her books and get rid of Ten Days That Shook the World, [Boni & Liveright, 1919] John Reed’s firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, and others like it; and “my letters to my mother from Russia in 1935 had best, my friends told me, be burned,” she wrote. “Yes, really.”

[In 1935, Webster traveled to Russia to attend the Moscow Theatre Festival. Because of the prominent role of her mother, British actress Dame May Whitty (1865-1948), in the founding of the British Actors’ Equity Association, Webster served as an official actor-delegate for the London Theatre Council during this trip. She corresponded with her mother in the U.K. during the festival. (Webster’s autobiography Don’t Put Your Daughter on the Stage was published in 1972. See Part 1)]

Though Webster did not plead the Fifth at her hearing, believing that “if the law empowered congressional committees to ask you these questions, it also told you to answer them,” she hoped to be able to avoid talking about others––such as longtime Soviet admirer Paul Robeson [1898-1976; bass-baritone concert artist, actor, collegiate and professional football player, and activist], whom Webster had directed in Othello in 1943. In fact, McCarthy’s real target was the recently established Fulbright Program and Webster had been called as a witness because she had served as a juror for the applications of theatre artists. The hearing itself was anti-climactic but the months leading up to it had taken their toll. A week later, she left for an extended stay in Europe on a ship called the USS Constitution [sic]. “I have never, ever, been so relieved as I was to see the last of the Statue of Liberty,” she wrote 20 years later. Though she directed plays and operas sporadically in the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s, her professional and personal life kept her mostly in the UK from then on, and her feelings of love and pride for the United States were forever changed because of the actions of its federal government.

[Robeson was a staunch, lifelong supporter of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin (1878-1953; leader of the Soviet Union: 1924-53) because of the racism he and other African Americans experienced in the U.S., but which he asserted he didn’t see in the USSR. The Soviet Union was also actively opposed to European colonialism in Africa, a cause which Robeson avidly espoused (though not necessarily for the same reasons).

[Beginning with his first trip in 1934, Robeson visited the Soviet Union frequently to perform, speak, and escape the oppressive racism of Jim Crow America. He may have joined the CPUSA shortly after the war, but there’s no confirmation of this.

[The Fulbright Program, founded in 1946, is a United States cultural exchange program with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of the United States and other countries through the mutual exchange of people, knowledge, and skills. The program has been considered one of the most prestigious scholarships in the United States.

[McCarthy targeted the Fulbright Program because he claimed its educational exchange scholars and administrators were promoting communism and criticizing American values. He alleged that the program funded “America-haters” and left-leaning academics who sympathized with communist ideologies. McCarthy almost certainly didn’t believe the allegations, however; he was using fabricated claims for personal intimidation and media attention.

[Furthernore, Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-95; U.S. Senator from Arkansas: 1945-74; Chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: 1959-74), founder of the program, was one of the few politicians willing to stand up to McCarthy publicly. Attacking Fulbright’s namesake program was a calculated effort to humiliate a political rival and intimidate other lawmakers.]

In June of 1956, Arthur Miller [see also Part 1] was finally called in to testify before HUAC––something he had been expecting for six years since he was first listed in Red Channels. During that time, he had written The Crucible, a play whose lukewarm reception he attributed to its audience’s discomfort with its witch hunting subject matter, and he too had been refused renewal of his passport. The night before his hearing, a representative of the Committee’s chairman reached out to Miller’s lawyer suggesting that the hearing could be cancelled if Miller’s fiancée Marilyn Monroe [1926-62 (m. 1956, div. 1961)] agreed to be photographed shaking hands with the chairman. Miller refused.

He did not plead the Fifth at his hearing, at which one congressman accused him of having gotten a good review for The Crucible in the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker and with “criticizing” Elia Kazan’s appearance before HUAC––not by anything Miller had said but because he had chosen to work with other directors on his last two plays. When he was asked who was present at a meeting of Communist writers he’d attended in the late 1940s, Miller refused to answer, saying “the life of a writer . . . is pretty tough. I wouldn’t make it tougher for anybody. I ask you not to ask me that question. I will tell you anything about myself.”

He was warned that his “moral scruples” were not a legal reason to stay silent about others and that he was placing himself in contempt of Congress. Pressed about two specific people, he repeated, “I have given you my answer.” Eventually he was dismissed and cited for contempt, receiving a 30-day suspended sentence and a $500 fine [$6,200 today]––and experiencing “a bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before,” as he wrote in Timebends, “a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom.”

But though many of the blacklist’s victims experienced fear, bitterness, and grief over what their country had become, the African American actor and singer Paul Robeson did not––he hadn’t believed in the United States as a beacon of freedom in the first place. Robeson was a huge star both nationally and internationally in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as a very vocal admirer of the Soviet Union, where he had first been received with open arms in 1934 after experiencing racist threats while traveling through Hitler’s Berlin.

Though he was never a member of the Communist Party, a speech that Robeson made in Paris after the Second World War, in which he suggested that African Americans should refuse to fight in a potential war against Russia, caused the government to revoke his passport in 1949. When baseball legend Jackie Robinson, folksinger Joshua Daniel White, and other Black celebrities were called before HUAC in the early 1950s, they were not asked to name names––instead, they were required to denounce Paul Robeson and his remarks about Black people owing no allegiance to the U.S.

When he himself was called before the Committee in the spring of 1956, Robeson took the Fifth and then used the opportunity to attack HUAC forcefully and directly in a way rarely seen since the Hollywood Ten. With nothing to lose and no belief in the Committee’s right to question him, he turned his anger fully on the men in front of him.

“I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. And they are not,” he declared. “They are not in Mississippi. And they are not in Montgomery, Alabama. And they are not in Washington. “And that is why I am here today. You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers.”

Asked about his trips to the Soviet Union, he told the Committee that “in Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being.” When asked why he didn’t just stay there, he answered, “Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it, just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

The Committee tried to put further questions to him, but he laughed them off, saying, “This is really ridiculous,” and “Oh, please.” Eventually the chairman was forced to adjourn the hearing, at which point Robeson declared, “You are the non-patriots, you are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

When the chairman repeated that the meeting was adjourned, Robeson shot back, “You should adjourn this forever, that is what I would say.”

By the time Paul Robeson spoke those words in 1956, the process of “adjourning” the Communist hunters’ work had already begun. A number of performing artists determined to fight back sued the newsletter Counterattack, which discontinued Red Channels in the mid-1950s and paid damages for years afterwards. (Its publishers stated, “We never said the ‘facts’ in Red Channels were correct or incorrect. We’ve just reported the public record.”) Joseph McCarthy’s larger-than-life personality and bullying tactics, which kept the radio and television public riveted for several years, began to make him increasingly unpopular. He was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died in 1957. And HUAC kept up its investigations in a desultory way in the late 1950s and beyond but with much less publicity and success, finally disbanding in 1975.

But while HUAC and “McCarthyism” are gone, some of the seeds they planted have gone on to new life. McCarthy’s chief counsel, the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn [1927-86] (known to many as a character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America [1991 two-part play; 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (and many more honors); see my report (11 December 2010)]) was a mentor in the 1970s and ’80s to the young businessman Donald Trump [b. 1946; politician, media personality, and businessman; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029], to whom Cohn imparted his belief that when in trouble, the best course of action was to “deny everything and fight.”

AFTERMATH

The lives of the theatre artists who faced the blacklist in the 1950s were profoundly altered as a consequence of their ordeal. Paul Robeson may have gotten the last word in his stand against HUAC, but his years in the wilderness had taken their toll. After his passport was restored in 1958, he resumed his performing career but went through periods of deep depression and made several suicide attempts. He was institutionalized and given electroshock therapy––a common treatment at the time—and was nearly catatonic in the last years of his life. He died in 1976 at the age of 78. A friend of his said some years later that “the conspiracy of the government to make him a non-person was very successful.”

Some blacklisted theatre artists left the United States and became lifelong expatriates. Bertolt Brecht [1898-1956; German theater practitioner, playwright, and poet], who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape Hitler’s Germany, fled to Switzerland the day after his 1947 HUAC hearing and then to Communist East Berlin in 1949. Joseph Losey [see Part 1], who had directed a number of productions for the Federal Theatre Project as well as the U.S. premiere of Brecht’s Galileo [written 1938; premiere, 1943], moved to Europe in 1952 and became a noted film director there. Sam Wanamaker [1919-93; American actor and director], who’d been performing in England when he found out he’d been blacklisted, simply stayed there—acting, directing, and eventually becoming the leading force behind the creation of the Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London.

[Though Brecht was a dedicated Marxist who supported communist causes, he was never a card-carrying member of the communist party, either before World War II, when it was the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands [KPD]), or after the division of Germany and he lived in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), when it was the the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED]).

[Brecht chose to remain an independent sympathizer rather than a enlisted party member. He maintained an artistic and political autonomy that often frustrated party officials, both in East Berlin and in Moscow.]

Some who had been blacklisted in film and television went on to do their best theatre work. Uta Hagen [see Part 1] gave the performance of a lifetime when she created the role of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962, and she also became a revered acting teacher at the HB Studio [in Greenwich Village, New York] and author of the seminal book Respect for Acting [Macmillan, 1973]. “McCarthy kept me pure,” she said about the fact that she was forced by the blacklist to stay in theatre instead of doing films when her career began to take off in the early 1950s. Morris Carnovsky became a celebrated actor in the plays of Shakespeare in his later years, and called the blacklist a “Shakespearean experience” because “it took in all the extremes of human character.” Zero Mostel [see Part 1] won Tony Awards for his performances in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum [premiere: 1962; Best Actor in a Musical: 1963] and Fiddler on the Roof [premiere: 1964; Best Actor in a Musical: 1965]. He also appeared in the 1976 film The Front as an actor who dies by suicide because he is denied the means of earning his living––a character based on Mostel’s good friend Philip Loeb. The Front’s director Martin Ritt [see Part 1], its screenwriter Walter Bernstein [1919-2021; screenwriter and film producer], and several other actors in it had also all been blacklisted.

[Hagen won the 1951 Tony for Best Actress in a Play for Country Girl and the Special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1999. Mostel also won the 1961 Tony for Best Actor in a Play for Rhinoceros.]

The rift in the theatre community that had been created by the naming of names was never completely healed. Although people on both sides of the divide still worked together, there was lingering guilt on one side and resentment on the other. In 1963, Jerome Robbins [see also Part 1] hired three formerly blacklisted actors for his Broadway production of Brecht’s Mother Courage [1963; the three blacklisted actors were John Randolph (1915-2004), Mike Kellin (1922-83). and Lou Guss (1918-2008)], and cast Conrad Bromberg, the son of J. Edward Bromberg, as Courage’s son Eilif. “Every so often we’d go off in a corner and ask each other, ‘Why do you think we’re here?’” Bromberg says about himself and his fellow actors. They concluded, “Because Jerry felt bad.”

Zero Mostel took to greeting anyone who had named names as “Looselips”––but he also worked on both his hit musicals with Jerome Robbins, who was brought in when Forum was in trouble out of town and who directed and choreographed Fiddler. When Mostel was asked whether he would agree to work with Robbins on Forum, he answered, “We on the left don’t blacklist.” His friend Jack Gilford almost quit the production in protest of Robbins being hired, but his wife Madeline Lee Gilford [1923-2008] (one of Robbins’s victims) persuaded him to move on from what they’d all suffered and stay with the show. “You’re not going to blacklist yourself,” she told him.

Besides damaging the lives of so many theatre artists, did the blacklist change American theatre itself in any way? In 1972, around 100 theatre artists who had been HUAC witnesses––some who had refused to comply and some who had named names––were asked this question in a survey. One playwright spoke for many when he stated his belief that the blacklist ushered in a “general sense of fear” in the theatre: “fear to attack the status quo, fear to assert revolutionary solutions to social ills”––even, he went on to say, fear “to assert that social ills were a proper subject for dramatic treatment.” There were exceptions, and another respondent pointed out that several plays such as The Crucible were written in response to the blacklist. But Arthur Miller was a known and celebrated playwright by then; overall, many believed that a certain self-censorship in the theatre had started in the 1950s and lasted for some time afterward. “What happened to most of us,” wrote director Harold Clurman [1901-80; theater director and drama critic], “was that we came to desire nothing more than to be inconspicuous citizens, with no other thought than to ‘get on.’”

There was another long-term––though indirect––result of the blacklist: the creation of SDC. Director Shepard Traube [1907-83], who worked on Broadway in the 1930s and then went to Los Angeles to direct and produce films in the ’40s, saw the writing on the wall and moved his family back to New York in 1948 to resume working in the more hospitable world of theatre. He was listed in the 1951 edition of Red Channels and called before HUAC in the spring of ’52; he pleaded the Fifth and refused to name names. His daughter Victoria, who was a child at the time, says that she never heard him speak about any of this except for when the Traubes’ nanny expressed her opinion that McCarthy was “a great man.” Traube fired her and explained why to his small daughters.

Like many other directors and producers, Traube went out of his way to hire blacklisted actors. In 1955, he began to work on a project he’d first conceived of 15 years earlier: creating a union for stage directors and choreographers. Among the early supporters of this idea who brought their knowledge and experience to SDC’s 1959 founding were Margaret Webster, Helen Tamiris [see Part 1], and others whose professional lives had been damaged by the blacklist. Some who had named names were also central to this effort: Elia Kazan (in whom Traube had confided his wish to start a directors’ union many years earlier) provided important support, and Jerome Robbins served on SDC’s first interim Board. Out of a broken community, Traube and his colleagues created a new one that nearly 70 years later gives us a collective strength and voice to face the overwhelming challenges of our own time, as theatre artists and American citizens.

“In its clumsy way,” said one respondent in answer to the question about whether the blacklist had changed the theatre itself, the federal government’s persecution of “un-American” theatre artists had served a useful purpose: it “brought home to American theatre people that ‘It Can Happen Here.’”

Author’s Note: Sources consulted in the writing of this article include biographies and memoirs of the theatre artists discussed, plus three indispensable books: Naming Names by Victor Navasky, a comprehensive narrative published in 1980; Broadway and the Blacklist by K. Kevyne Baar, which details the actions of Actors’ Equity and other unions; and The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War by James Shapiro, a 2024 book about HUAC’s targeting of the Federal Theatre Project.

[In reference to the question regarding how, if at all, the McCarthyist communist witch hunt affected the theater that came afterwards, I remind readers of the 1990 flap over the anti-obscenity clause added to NEA grant-acceptance agreements.  It was quickly declared unconstitutional because, as the federal judge stated from the bench, the clause was an “obstacle in the path of the exercise of fundamental speech rights that the Constitution will not tolerate” (UPI 9 Jan. 1991).

[Joseph Papp (1921-91; theatrical producer and director), founder and artistic director of what is now New York City’s Public Theater, labeled it a “loyalty oath” and turned down a substantial grant.  Papp had lost a job in 1958 when HUAC made him a target, so he was very sensitive to the implications.  Choreographer Bella Lewitzky (1916-2004; modern dance choreographer, dancer, and teacher), who brought the suit that led to the ruling, said, “I could not, in good moral conscience, accept the fact that a trampling on the rights of the First Amendment was good or even legal” (Los Angeles Times 15 June 1990). 

[Lewitzky compared Joe McCarthy, who “damage[ed] endless lives,” with Senator Jesse Helms (1921-2008; U.S. Senator from North Carolina: 1973-2003), who launched “destructive attacks on the NEA.”  She concluded, “All (these) incidents take down artists and art.  How many times must history repeat itself?  We must act.  Having been witness, I must act.”

[National Council on the Arts member Roy Goodman (1930-2014), a New York state senator from New York City (1969-2002) and arts patron, called the clause “a loyalty oath reminiscent of the McCarthy era” of anti-communist witch hunts (Deseret News [Salt Lake City, UT] 4 Aug. 1990).  Lloyd Richards (1919-2006; Canadian-American theater director and actor), then dean of the Yale School of Drama (now the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University) and a council member, said, “Fear has been injected into the arts community and threatened to transform the N.E.A. into a ‘National Endowment for the Agreeable’” (New York Times  4  Aug. 1990).  This was nearly 40 years after the HUAC-McCarthy era.

[There are clear echoes in “‘Un-American’” of the stage version of Good Night, and Good Luck, which I watched on CNN about a year ago.  Edward R. Murrow’s battle of words with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (who gets a mention from Robinson) was a big part of the Second Red Scare, the basis for the blacklist.  His “investigations” on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations were parallels to the HUAC probes into the Hollywood figures—and the tactics were identical.

[I’ve been working on a report on that broadcast, but it’s been hard going and I’m not finished yet, unhappily.  When I am, I’ll be sure to put links in that post to this one, and come back and insert links from “The Blacklist” to the play report.

[Mary B. Robinson is a director, teacher, and writer who has directed more than 70 productions in New York City and around the country, taught directing at NYU and Brooklyn College, and written the books To Repair the World: Zelda Fichandler and the Transformation of American Theater and Directing Plays, Directing People: A Collaborative Art.  She served for 15 years on the Executive Board of SDC.]