William Mandel

William "Bill" Mandel
Born	William Marx Mandel June 4, 1917 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	November 24, 2016 (aged 99) Kensington, California, U.S.
Resting place	Kensington, Ca. (ash-scattering)
Occupations	Author broadcast journalist political activist
Employer(s)	Self; pro bono at KQED TV, KPFA Radio
Known for	Soviet affairs expert, analyst & educator; political activist
Spouse	Tanya Millstein Mandel (1917–2001)
Children	Phyllis, Robert and David
Parent(s)	Max Mandel [born Mordka Gimpel Mandelman], civil engineer; Dora Schachter Mandel
Relatives	Eugene Victor Mandel (brother; electrical engineer, teacher)

William Marx Mandel(June 4, 1917 – November 24, 2016) was an Americanbroadcast journalist,left-wingpolitical activist,and author, best known as aSoviet affairsanalyst. He was born inNew York City.

Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

External videos
The Investigation of William Mandel by Sen. Joseph McCarthyonYouTube,Radical Films

Considered a leadingSovietologistduring the 1940s and 1950s, Mandel was a fellow atStanford University'sHoover Institution,but lost his position there due to the political pressures of theMcCarthy era.He is perhaps best known for standing up to SenatorJoseph McCarthyduring a televised 1953 Senate committee hearingin which Mandel pointedly told the senator, "This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!"

In 1960, Mandel was again subpoenaed, this time by theHouse Un-American Activities Committee.He testified on May 13 in a hearing held at theSan Francisco City Hall.Outside the hearing, hundreds of protesting Bay Area college students were blasted with firehoses and dragged down the marble steps by police officers, leaving some seriously injured.Newsreel cameras recorded Mandel's scathing response to the question posed by Lead Counsel Richard Arens, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?":

Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguishedDixiecratwearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive. My boy of fifteen left this room a few minutes ago in sound health and not jailed, solely because I asked him to be in here to learn something about the procedures of the United States government and one of its committees. Had he been outside where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!

Mandel "spent the remainder of his testimony respectfully telling his inquisitors to go to hell."

Recordings of the hearing were aired repeatedly onKPFAand otherPacifica Radiostations in subsequent years, and "literally represented the final hours of the 1950s" for young people who had come of age in the McCarthy era.Scenes from the hearings and protest were later featured in the award-winning 1990 documentary,Berkeley in the Sixties.

Broadcaster and activist

Mandel began his career as a broadcaster in 1958, with a 15-minute-long weekly broadcast onPacifica RadiostationKPFA-FM inBerkeley,California. Within 6 months he was asked to expand to a half-hour; over a 32-year run, he went to an hour-long weekly program, then back to the half-hour format. Originally calledSoviet Press and Periodicals,the program stayed on the air under various names until 1995, when it was abruptly cancelled by KPFA's national parent organization Pacifica Foundation—which eventually acknowledged that its dismissal first of Rolling Stone co-founder and renowned jazz critic Ralph Gleason and then Mandel was solely out of fear that the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting would cut funding to Pacifica if "leftist" commentators were retained.

Mandel appears in the documentary filmKPFA On the Air(Independent Television Service, 2000). Subsequently, Mandel hosted a weekly show onFree Radio Berkeley.

In his book,In Battle for Peace,the noted Black American scholar and activist Dr.W. E. B. Du Boisreferred to William Mandel's "defense" of him when Du Bois was "under federal indictment for heading the circulation of a peace petition".

Mandel was the only non-student asked by its founders to sit on the Steering Committee of theFree Speech MovementinBerkeley, Californiain the early 1960s.

In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest"pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against theVietnam War.

Mandel's radio program on KPFA was, during its later decades, titledThe Soviet Union: A Closer LookUntil the early 1970s, Mandel was a vocal supporter of the1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakiaon this program. During the 1970s and 1980s he vigorously denied the existence of state-directed anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, disputing from personal experience the decades of scholarly research and the testimonies of Soviet emigres in the Bay Area, dissidents like Nobel prize winner Joseph Brodsky and the quotas on Jewish students.His common refrain during KPFA broadcasts was "the Soviet Union is 100 races living together in harmony". Mandel's denial of Soviet governmental anti-Semitism was maintained as late as his 1985 book "Soviet but not Russian: The Other Peoples of the Soviet Union" which stated that at most 10% of Soviet Jews would want to leave the Soviet Union. Approximately 290,000 Jews left the Soviet Union from 1970 to 1988, when emigration was restricted; over 224,000 left in 1990 alone, the first full year when emigration was liberalized.

In January 1982, Mandel wrote an article in theStanford Dailysupporting thecoupof Polish GeneralW. Jaruzelskiwhich imposedmartial lawas an attempt to crush theSolidarity trade union.

In 1992 he served as the consulting editor to the production of "The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union Trading Cards: From Lenin to Yeltsin," a history of the USSR in the form of a series of baseball cards, written by David Thorpe and illustrated by Greg Copeland.

Mandel died onThanksgiving Day,November 24, 2016 at the age of 99 at his home inKensington, California.

Writings

The introduction to Mandel's autobiography,Saying No To Power,was written by theleft-winghistorianand authorHoward Zinn.The book was praised by, among others, author and senior editor ofThe Black Scholar,Robert L. Allen,musician and activistPete Seegerand poetLawrence Ferlinghetti.

TheHoover InstitutionArchives,Wisconsin Historical Societyand theBancroft Libraryat the University of California have collections of Mandel's papers.

Books

• 'The Soviet Far East and Central Asia', Institute of Pacific Relations, 1944
• A Guide to the Soviet Union,The Dial Press, 1946
• Soviet Marxism and Social Sciencereprint Ramparts Press, 1984,ISBN9780878670970
• Russia Re-Examined,1967
• Soviet Women,Anchor Books, 1975,ISBN9780385032551
• Soviet But Not Russian: The ‘Other’ Peoples of the Soviet Union,Palo Alto, Calif.: University of Alberta Press and Ramparts Press, 1985,ISBN9780878670956
• Saying No To Power,Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1999,ISBN9780887392863

External links

• "Official website".Archived fromthe originalon September 9, 2015.
• William Mandel talks to John Whiting about his life and work,included inMY KPFA: A Historical Footnote (Seventy-five hours of programs and interviews from the 1960s)