A short obituary for movie legend Kirk Douglas which appeared on the taxpayer-funded Voice of America website mentioned his successful attempt in the late 1950s to end the blacklisting by the Hollywood studios of American writers and actors accused of supporting communism and Soviet Russia.

Many of those writers and actors had done nothing wrong. But a few were indeed Communist Party USA members. Some, including the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize winner Howard Fast — in the early 1940s, the chief news writer and editor of VOA English radio broadcasts — spread Soviet propaganda and disinformation and indirectly facilitated Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II.