Communism Withers, But Gus Hall Hangs Tough

NEW YORK - Anonymous in a city of limousines, a chauffeur-driven Chevrolet sedan arrives each morning at a weathered seven-story building in Manhattan's Chelsea section. The old man who emerges, a rumpled figure in cardigan sweater and knit tie, ambles inside, passing knots of aged workers, then rides a shuddering elevator to the top floor.

Once inside his wood-veneer vault of an office, Gus Hall, the patriarch of American communism, renews his lifelong struggle with capitalism under the frozen glare of Marx and Lenin.

The portraits were gifts to Hall, chairman of the U.S. Communist Party, from old comrades: Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, now dead, and East German party boss Erich Honecker, recently toppled. Once, the three men gathered each year at international congresses as the dominant forces in their national parties. Only Hall, yearning for communism's good old days, remains.

U.S. chairman for 30 years, longer than any living world communist leader, the 79-year-old Hall has never wavered from the official line. Undaunted by his shrunken ranks of American communists, the ceaseless scrutiny of FBI agents and his party's slow fade from public enemy to historic relic, Gus Hall always has been able to turn to the Eastern bloc for ideological consistency.

Now, as epic turmoil in the communist world alters the party line almost daily, Hall and his fellow functionaries show signs of ideological whiplash. Straining to keep up, they praise change in the Soviet Union but cautiously denounce its results.

The rapid pace of upheaval has left them fumbling for answers, alternately blaming the exodus of East Germans on microwave ovens and West German television nudity. Even within their own party, Hall and his circle of elders face efforts by younger cadres and former members to align themselves with Eastern Europe's pro-democracy movement.

``They want gadget socialism, videotapes, microwave ovens, computers, all kinds of gadgets,'' Hall mutters about the disloyal East Germans, then tries to put a positive spin on communism's troubles. ``These pent-up feelings will pass,'' he assures a radio talk-show host calling from Chicago. ``Communism is the next stage of human society - and that includes the United States.''

For public consumption, Hall backs Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his troubled reforms as ``changes that needed to be made.'' He may yearn for the days of Brezhnev as ``the best time of Soviet leadership,'' but Gus Hall is no fool. In a prominent spot on the wall behind his desk, he keeps a framed photograph of himself sharing a laugh with Gorbachev.

Yet it is the author of glasnost himself, according to former U.S. communists, who provided the most galling moment of all. Hall, a tireless traveler to international party congresses, sought to meet with Gorbachev during his most recent stay in Moscow - a favor usually accorded him as America's communist patriarch.

This time, according to ex-communists with contacts inside the party, Hall was rebuffed.

Over the party's 70-year history, many American communists grew disillusioned with constant ideological corrections, either quitting or ending up expelled after each new spasm. But Gus Hall stayed the course, enduring and rationalizing the Moscow show trials, Stalin's 1939 pact with Hitler, the McCarthy era, Khrushchev's rebuke of Stalin, Brezhnev's internal repression and the invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

The ultimate loyalist knows no other life. Policies may change; coalitions may fraction; communism itself may be fraying. But the ordered routine of America's top communist proceeds - for now - as it has for three decades.

Hall is driven each day from his home in a bourgeois Yonkers neighborhood, where he grows organic vegetables and paints pictures of woodpeckers in his spare time. The perquisites, he says, were forced on him years ago. The house, which cost $21,000 when he bought it in 1969, was necessary because no landlord ``would rent to a communist leader.'' The sedan and chauffeur were provided to him by the party after the New York Legislature revoked his license in a fit of red-baiting pique. Since then, he has recovered the license. But driver and car - now equipped with cellular phone - continue to be necessary, Hall says, for ``security reasons.''

After reading the usual ``capitalist house organs,'' Hall faces long days of lectures, meetings and media appearances. Talks with party officials are booked in restaurants and hotel rooms to discourage FBI wiretaps. ``We always assume they are snooping on us,'' Hall said.

The bureau, which once was said to have 1,500 informants in the U.S. party in 1962 (roughly 17 percent of the party's entire membership), continues its surveillance of communist activity, justifying its interest by claiming that the party still acts as a propaganda front for the Soviet bloc.

Interviews require less caution. Eager for exposure, Hall is a frequent guest on radio shows and a regular on the party's own cable broadcast, ``People Before Profit.'' His press aide, Carole Marks, advertises party officials' availability in a national speakers' directory, urging bookers who want to ``make your airwaves crackle'' to present ``real, live Communists on your show!''

Hardly a firebrand, the watery-voiced Hall has appeared on the Phil Donahue and Sally Jessy Raphael television programs to explain the party's views of communist change. ``They know if they want the communist point of view, they can get it from the horse's mouth,'' Hall says.

But his hard-won air time has been overshadowed by the ready access provided to slicker communist personalities like ``Nightline'' regular Vladimir Pozner and Gennady Gerasimov, the spokesman for the Soviet foreign ministry.

Hall's official line is still orthodoxy to the party faithful. Since 1959, when Hall was named national chairman of the U.S. Communist Party, his pronouncements from the national headquarters in New York have been taken as gospel by the comrades in the hinterlands.

Beyond Manhattan, America's communists are a ghostly presence, gathering in force only for ragtag annual May Day parades. Two years ago, the ranks of the Los Angeles party were so thin that they had to import party members from Oakland in Northern California.

The party claims an active membership of 20,000, which is a far cry from its historical high-water mark of nearly 100,000 in the 1940s, the last era of any significant political influence. Even those numbers are in dispute. A 1989 U.S. State Department report describes the party as ``relatively small,'' with no more than 5,000 members. Academic observers of the American left suggest the number is closer to 10,000.

Black people attracted by the party's history of civil-rights stands make up a large constituency, says Gerald Horne, a black-studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There are also elements of 1960s radicals, younger activists and, particularly in California, Latino immigrants.

The largest element, according to observers, comes from a generation of aging Jewish activists who joined decades ago and still faithfully attend ``culture club'' meetings in retirement communities in New York and Miami. They are in great evidence in the dim corridors of the party's national headquarters.

``Many of them, like me, are on Social Security,'' Hall says.

But Hall scoffs at the notion of retirement - forced or otherwise. ``We keep looking at it,'' he says, ``but I don't see myself as a political force leaving.''