House Un-American Activities Committee

He eventually returned to Europe, after the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI began to target him.

A year earlier, Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, had begun a sustained campaign against him, first in magazine articles, then in a March 1948 report that called him “one of the weakest links in our atomic security” and accused him of “knowingly or unknowingly” maintaining ties to Soviet spies.

“I remember when my mother decided to go to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee. The three of us were having dinner — my mother, my father and me,” Powell recalls.

In his off-hours he would haunt the cabarets of Greenwich Village, hanging out with Sahl, Nichols and Elaine May, fellow members of a comic underground who made humor about such topics as virginity, Jewish mothers, the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.

Government entities like the House Un-American Activities Committee and intelligence agencies decided who was allowed to represent the country and whose voices were unwelcome.