Orson Bean was Andrew Breitbart’s father in law.
If you were a TV viewer in the 1960s, you couldn’t not know his name, face and voice. He was everywhere on TV as a panelist on TV game shows like To Tell the Truth, Match Game, $25,000 pyramid, Password, What’s my Line, etc… Current TV viewers probably know him as Roy Bender on Desperate Housewives.
Synapses immediately fired off when I read that he was Breitbart’s father in law. I had a faint memory that Orson Bean was a major leftist in his youth, which turns out to be correct. Orson Bean was one of the people blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s for being pro-union and attending Communist organizing meetings.
Here is a bit more to fill in the gaps:
http://www.thedqtimes.com/pages/castpages/other/orsonbeanblacklistinterview.htm
(DQ Times is a fan site of the TV show Dr Quinn, which Orson Bean acted in)
Orson Bean’s real name is Dallas Frederick Burroughs – he was born in Burlington Vermont, and his father would go on to be head of security at Harvard University. He took up the stage name of Orson Bean, borrowing the Orson from Orson Welles.
Orson Bean had been writing occasional items on Breitbart’s Big Hollywood web site, and it’s well worth reading:
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/author/obean/
Orson is a regular guest on Dennis Miller’s show. Dennis hopes to have him on again soon to discuss Breitbart, once Orson feels comfortable doing so.
As I write this (11:30 am ET on 3/9/12) Orson is in the middle of a full hour with the aforementioned Mr. Miller. Orson revealed that he had a Rush Limbaugh book on his coffee table many yeard back and when Breitbart noticed it, he expressed disgust. “You should read it,” Bean said to his son-in-law. Very interesting stuff.
I really don’t know what to make of any of this.
My somewhat abstract attitude is that back in the “Cold War” days when a Russian would “Defect” to the United States, the CIA would get what they could from him, maybe even use him, but never trust him/her with important secrets. A person who would sell out their country and leave could just as easily return back home and trade any new secrets back….
So I don’t ever trust sudden “conversions”, including Dennis Miller and Michael Savage.
I keep getting hung up on Mary Matalin mothering the spawn of Satan – James Carville. To a lot of people, this national politics is just a game. I have a theory (with nothing to back it up) that their marriage was the result of a bet…. “Hey Mary, tell you what – if George Bush loses, will you marry me and be the mother of my children? Bet?”