Just Words

In an appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, 'including 'and' and 'the'. Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment was not a legitimate conversation on public issues but an attack on her reputation. This intriguing book offers a many-faceted examination of Hellman's infamous suit and explores what it tells us about tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language, and what can and cannot be said in public in America. "Just Words" uses the dramatic life stories of these women to reflect on America's long-running inability to forge a shared public discourse. Alan Ackerman situates the Hellman-McCarthy case in the history of failed American dialogues from the late 1920s to the present, assembling a spellbinding cast of characters from Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss to John Kerry and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth leader John O'Neill. In unraveling the twisted knot of Hellman's dispute with McCarthy, the author considers political, cultural, and literary meanings and delivers a nuanced analysis of the complicated roles of truth and lying in American public life.