Gordon Kahn

Gordon Kahn (1902–1962) was an American writer and screenwriter who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era; he is the father of broadcaster and author Tony Kahn.

Background Gordon Jacques Kahn was born on May 11, 1901, in Szigetvár, Hungary. When he was six years old, he and his parents moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the United States of America. In 1918, Kahn graduated from Townsend Harris High School in New York City. He spent the next year at Yale University, then took up studies at Columbia University He was the first managing editor of The Screen Writer.

Gordon Kahn died age 61 on December 31, 1962, of a heart attack during a snowstorm in Manchester. ) Recent American History (1933)

Legacy Kahn is the subject of his son Tony's 1987 short documentary The Day the Cold War Came Home.

Blacklisted, a docu-drama in six half-hour episodes that first aired on National Public Radio in 1997, chronicles the last fifteen years of Gordon Kahn's life and the fears and ordeal his family experienced. It was written, produced, and narrated by Gordon Kahn's son Tony Kahn. All of the words of Gordon and his wife Barbara were drawn from their writings, diaries, and letters. The words put in the mouth of J. Edgar Hoover were all derived from a confidential 3,000-page FBI surveillance file on Gordon Kahn dated from 1944 to 1962.