Comrades and controversy

In March 1972 the White House received an invitation for the then President Nixon to attend ‘A Salute to Charlie Chaplin’ soon to be held in New York. Nixon’s Deputy Director of Communications Ken Clawson was charged with responding, and his verdict said much about the shadow that Chaplin’s earlier politics had cast by this point. For Clawson, it was ‘inappropriate … to even consider the possibility of having Charlie Chaplin come and meet with the President’. Referring to Chaplin’s decision never to become a US citizen, he went on to note that ‘there was considerable discussion during the 1930s and 1940s about Chaplin’s loyalty to our form of government, much less the government itself’. Besides, Clawson concluded, ‘I don’t think anyone in the country will be able to separate this gigantic artistic talent from Chaplin’s decidedly un-American utterances and stances.’ ¹ Three months out from the Watergate burglary there was something of an irony here. But the persona non grata status afforded to Chaplin by the Nixon White House was, although fading by the early 1970s, merely reflective of what Chaplin’s views over several decades had wrought. Although Clawson did not directly refer to it, this was largely caused by the widespread belief that Chaplin had been, to say the least, soft on communism.