ACCESS AND SUPPORT
This project has the benefit of being born from the words of those who lived it. Along with research collaborators, Ben Kahn has mined the access he’s been given to archives across the U.S. and in the U.K., as well as the wealth of private material held by the Kahn family, in search of the most compelling first-person accounts related to this tale. This process has yielded a cross-referenced database of:
Diaries, manuscripts, transcripts, and letters.
Photographs, film footage, posters, and ephemera.
Never-heard-before audio recordings of conversations between main characters.
Lending their full support and personal recollections to this effort, the survivors of these events are the three Kahn children:
In order to do this important parable the justice it deserves, Ben is dedicated to complementing this access with a strong sense of authenticity. To keep character composites and depictions of the past on the straight and narrow, he’s enlisted the participation of scholars across the country.
Dr. Ellen Schrecker, Professor of History at Yeshiva University and currently a Frederick Ewen Academic Freedom Fellow at the Tamiment Library at New York University, is the author of Many Are the Crimes, widely admired as one of the definitive histories of the McCarthy Era.
Dr. Athan Theoharis, Professor Emeritus at Marquette University, is the nation's preeminent scholar on the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with a special focus on the Bureau's operation during the McCarthy and Cold War periods.
Robert M. Lichtman is a scholar of the McCarthy Era and the co-author of Deadly Farce: Harvey Matusow and the Informer System in the McCarthy Era, an exhaustively researched history of Harvey Matusow's rise and fall.
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The culmination of this research is a body of work which has been been distilled down to a succinct and compelling outline of the FOOL THEM ONCE narrative, a humanist treatment of its characters, and a fleshed-out rendering of the world which they all inhabit.