FBI Suspected Ray Bradbury of Communist Leanings

Ray Bradbury's criticism of the government got him investigated by the FBI in the 1960s as a suspected Communist sympathizer, according to FBI files obtained by the Huffington Post via a FOIA request. Bradbury was reported to the FBI by screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who years earlier had told the House Un-American Activities Committee he himself was a Communist and informed on 155 supposedly active Hollywood communists. Berkeley told the FBI that science fiction writers in particular were likely to be Communists.

Bradbury's work, specifically, was "definitely slanted against the United States and its capitalistic form of government," Berkeley said, according to the file. He also claimed that sci-fi writers aim to scare people, thus making it "very possible to conduct a Third World War … which the American people would seriously believe could not be won since their morale had been seriously destroyed." Bradbury was definitely no fan of the HUAC; he once took out a full-page ad calling its probes "claptrap and nonsense." Click for more from his file. (More Ray Bradbury stories.)