William Mandel

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William "Bill" Mandel, born June 4, 1917 in New York City, is a broadcast journalist, political activist, and author of many books, including Soviet Marxism and Social Science, Soviet Women, Soviet But Not Russian, and Saying No To Power.

Considered a leading Sovietologist during the 1940s and 1950s, Mandel was a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, but lost his position there due to the political pressures of the so called "McCarthy era". He is perhaps best known for standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy during a 1953 Senate committee hearing in which Mandel pointedly told the senator, "This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!"^[1]

Mandel began his career as a broadcaster in 1958, with an hour-long weekly program on Pacifica Radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Originally called "Soviet Press and Periodicals", the program stayed on the air under various names until 1995, when it was abruptly cancelled due to internal conflicts at the station.

In his book, In Battle for Peace, the noted Black American scholar and activist Dr. W.E.B. DuBois referred to William Mandel's "defense" of him when DuBois was "under federal indictment for heading the circulation of a peace petition".^[2]

Mandel is also known for his support of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, in the early 1960s. He continues to write and do limited radio broadcasts [see also the March 24, 2004, San Francisco Bay Guardian's article entitled "We Will Not Obey"].

The introduction to Mandel's book Saying No To Power was written by the noted historian and author Howard Zinn. The book received critical acclaim from notables, including author and senior editor of The Black Scholar, Robert L. Allen; renowned musician and activist Pete Seeger; and the internationally respected poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.