People had been through these scares before, and they knew how they went. The House Un-American Activities Committee would subpoena some witnesses and make some headlines. A few Reds would be questioned, and most would confess. The government’s authority would be reestablished, and the country would move one.

And then, asked if he were a Communist, witness Ring Lardner Jr. hesitated – and in that moment helped throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing.

"It is a very simple question," New Jersey Congressman J. Parnell Thomas snapped, angered by the pause. "Anybody would be proud to answer it – any real American would be proud to answer the question. Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?"

"I could answer the question exactly the way you want," the screenwriter mildly replied. "But if I did, I would hate myself in the morning."

Nicely terse dialogue, that (and a good thing too – Thomas had Lardner immediately removed from the hearing). But then Lardner’s life – which ended Oct. 31, at the age of 85 – had always been filled with words.

They had been his father’s livelihood, winning him a brilliant reputation and a house out on Long Island (where F. Scott Fitzgerald came to visit, and convinced young Ring to enroll at Princeton.

They were Lardner’s own livelihood for 60 years as he worked in Hollywood, won Oscars for Woman of the Year (1942) and M*A*S*H* (1970) and turned out a variety of books.

But in the end, the most important word he was ever responsible for was that simple, unspoken "No."

No, I will not take the Fifth, because I have done nothing incriminating. No, I will not answer you, because you do not have the right to ask the question. No, I will not help you to deprive me of my rights, because they are my rights – to espouse whatever politics I care to, to support whatever charities I wish, to have the sort of friends and read the sort of books and think the sort of things I want.

Lardner paid dearly for that "No," as did nine of his similarly stubborn colleagues, all gone now, all members of what came to be called "the Hollywood 10."

Lardner lost his job at Fox and had to sell his house. He was indicted for contempt of Congress and given a year in prison. In 1950, he began serving his sentence in Danbury, Conn. (and, in a coincidence too corny for any movie, found that Congressman Thomas was now a fellow inmate, convicted of payroll fraud).

When Lardner and the other early "unfriendly witnesses" emerged from prison, however, they found that, unlike their persecutor, their sentence was just beginning.

Like countless others who had either refused to give names or been named by others, they were now officially unemployable – "blacklisted" – and would remain so until they confessed their sins and named their fellow sinners.

In this modern Salem, the only way to prove you were innocent was to confess your guilt; the only way to demonstrate your loyalty was to betray your friends.

While Lardner continued to say No, many others said Yes, some out of fear and some out of politics and still others out of an urge to settle old scores.

Some informers, like the right-wing Adolphe Menjou and Ayn Rand, saw it as a way to expose the subversion they always knew lurked nearby. Others, like Sterling Hayden and Larry Parks, did it to save their own skins (and reviled themselves afterward).

Still others, like Elia Kazan, used it to publicly break with a cause they a had already abandoned, insisting that naming names now was pure, righteous patriotism.

Journalism is supposed to be fair, even if it sometimes fails to be objective, and so it is necessary to mention that many of the accused were typically fuzzy-headed utopians, and quite a few were hard-core, doctrinaire Stalinists. Some, like Lardner, were indeed members of the Communist Party, and a number were shamefully silent on Stalin’s own wars on the intellectuals, the Spanish anarchists and the Jews.

And all of that is absolutely beside the point.

Because, ultimately, it did not matter that many of these artists had never gotten closer to the real Russia than a new sable coat or a bit of caviar on toast.

It did not matter that many of those who testified were great artists (like Kazan and Lee J. Cobb), or that many of those who refused to testify were not (although quite a few were cut down just as their careers were beginning, and others made great comebacks once the blacklist paled).

What mattered was that in this country, at that time, these people were denied their rights and pressured to deny them to others.

What mattered was that a generation of far-from-dangerous artists – Lee Grant and Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi and John Randolph, Martin Ritt and Gale Sondergaard, Jeff Corey and Lionel Stander – were cut off from their art, and Americans were cut off from them.

And what matters most of all is that, when the easiest thing would have been to name someone, anyone – even dead people, even made-up people, even people who had already been named – Ring Lardner Jr. and a few other brave witnesses simply said No.

Those who said Yes are best judged by history, and themselves and their victims.

"There were only victims," screenwriter Dalton Trumbo said in 1970, a decade after he had fought his way back from the blacklist, and a new controversy began.

Those who had reclaimed their careers tended to agree it was time to forgive; those who had never gained their momentum found it impossible to forget.

When I met Lardner 20 years ago, at the home of another blacklist survivor, there was not a trace of bitterness in him; when I interviewed the blacklisted writer Abe Polonsky a few years before his death, the very mention of Kazan’s name drove him to hilarious heights of invective.

We who were not there can never say with certainty what path we would have taken, or what attitude we would assume now; it is up to the participants to judge their own colleagues, and themselves.

As for Lardner, his judgment on himself remained as laconic and modest as his celebrated and self-effacing father.

When the blacklist was in force, he fought against it, when he finally began getting credits again, with 1965’s "The Cincinnati Kid," he went calmly back to work.

Praised for his own personal heroism, he always politely demurred.

"We did the only thing that we could do under the circumstances, except behave like complete s—," he would say. "That doesn’t amount to heroism."

But it does, sometimes. And so does just saying No.