Does Trump Know What the Word ‘Communist’ Really Means?

When I was a kid living in Washington, D.C. in the 1950’s, my parents had two other married couples who were their friends. One couple was a man named Joe Roth and his wife, I don’t remember the name of the other couple.

But these three couples got together every weekend to play cards, or eat a meal, or just to do what friends like to do.

The men both worked at the Government Printing Office, which was always referred to as the GPO. Like my father, who came down to D.C. from New York to work for the government during the War, these two men had also come down from New York and my parents knew them from some New York connection when they were all living back there before World War II began.

One day these two couples stopped coming by our house and I never saw either of them again. Nothing was ever said as to why they suddenly disappeared and since they weren’t my friends, I noticed their disappearance but didn’t really care.

Many years later, I happened to learn that at some point Senator Joe McCarthy had made a speech in which he claimed that there was a big, Communist ‘cell’ operating within the GPO. This was also around the time that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, were executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York.