Gardner Jackson
To the Editors:
The November issue of The New Criterion has come only belatedly into my hands, but I would like to correct the preposterous portrait of Gardner Jackson in Stephen Koch’s article “Lying for the Truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern.”
The notion that Pat Jackson was “one of the witting Münzenberg men on the scene” during the Sacco-Vanzetti agitation and that at the direction of Münzenberg and his “most senior operatives” he brought Felix Frankfurter and his wife into the case is as ridiculous as Koch’s statement that Jackson came from Wyoming (he came from Colorado) and that he was “lanky” (he was stocky).
Pat Jackson was one of my father’s closest friends, and I knew him well from my childhood to his death in 1965. He was a man of generous and impulsive spirit, temperamentally incapable of dissimulation or discipline. For a time (1934-39) his liberal sympathies were exploited by Lee Pressman, who was indeed a Communist operative (though with no Münzenberg connection); but Jackson was never a Stalinist, and he broke with Pressman in 1939-40. Chapter 2 of Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time, evidently unknown to Stephen Koch, is the classic account of the Jackson-Pressman relationship.
Much of my own education in anti-Communism came from Pat Jackson. When I worked for OWI in Washington in the first years of the war, he invited me to join a dining group of anti-Communist liberals in government agencies who met