John Gates

 ( 1913 Births ) 

The week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Gates enlisted in the U.S. Army. "The Mike Wallace Interview. Guest: John Gates,", January 18, 1958. He was denied the opportunity to serve overseas, and was instead assigned to the 209th Field Artillery in the Aleutian Islands.

In the summer of 1948, Gates was one of 12 "kingpin Commies" (to borrow a colorful contemporary turn of phrase from Time magazine) indicted under the Smith Act for being "dedicated to the Marxist–Leninist principles of the overthrow and destruction of the Government ... by force and violence." Although the Smith Act had been implemented eight years earlier at the time of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact for the altogether different purpose of fighting potential infiltration of America by secret Nazism and communist Sabotage, at the height of the Cold War the existing law was used as a tool against national officials of the Communist Party. Prosecution of the ailing 67-year-old William Z. Foster was eventually dropped, but Gates and ten others were convicted in 1949 and sentenced to five years in prison.

Following his release from prison in 1955, Gates was again appointed editor of the Daily Worker. In that capacity, Gates' editorial policy soon came to set him at odds with the party leadership, he took liberal positions embracing Nikita Khrushchev's criticisms of Joseph Stalin and opposing the Soviet Union's suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Party leaders were particularly upset by his support of Howard Fast, a prominent writer who was quite critical of the Soviet Union and soon after also left the Communist Party.

However, The Daily Worker was in deep trouble with significant losses in circulation due to a general disenchantment with communism, by both workers and intellectuals, and pressure from McCarthyism. Confronted with deep deficits and its inability to control Gates, on December 22, 1957, the Party suspended publication of the paper as a daily, the last daily issue appearing January 13, 1958.

In a January 18, 1958, television interview with Mike Wallace, Gates attempted to illuminate his interlocutor on the nature of the power relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the American communist movement:

You have to understand how and why the followed Moscow's line. It's not a matter that someone gave orders over there and we followed it over here. It's much more subtle than that. We followed that line because we thought it was right. It's more or less like a relationship between two people. One is an aggressive, brilliant personality and the other worships that person, and that person becomes sort of an idol for him and he tends to imitate and ape everything that he does. Well that kind of relationship is a bad relationship for both people."

Following publication of his memoirs, Gates went to work as a senior research assistant for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). In this capacity, Gates helped members with workers' compensation, unemployment, and Social Security claims. He retired from the union in 1987.