We are a people who do not want to keep much of the past in our heads. It is considered unhealthy in America to remember mistakes, neurotic to think about them, psychotic to dwell on them.

Hellman's papers are held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Hellman denied that the character was based on Gardiner. Endorsing this view the editors of the New Republic wrote that "there are more important questions than Trotsky's guilt".