Peter Jennings on ABC's "World News Tonight," October 17, 2000:

We missed the death of a notable American this week, so we want to catch up. Gus Hall actually died on Friday. The son of a Minnesota miner became head of the U.S. Communist Party at the height of anti-communist McCarthyism in the late '40s and '50s. He spent eight years in prison and a lifetime in the political wilderness for his views here, but he was a... dignitary in the Soviet Union. Even after his friends there abandoned the cause, Hall never wavered and he was 90.

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