Herbert Philbrick

On August 16, 1993, Philbrick died at his North Hampton home.

Upon appeal, convictions were upheld in 1951 by the United States Supreme Court in Dennis v. United States. However, in 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio de facto overruled Dennis. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

He went on to write an autobiographical book, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, 'Communist', Counterspy. In addition, a television series called I Led 3 Lives, starring Richard Carlson and Ed Hinton, loosely based on Philbrick's experiences, aired in syndication for three seasons during the 1950s. He received $141,015 in royalties from the show.

Philbrick's Party career came to its end when the Justice Department decided to use him as a witness in the Smith Act prosecutions of the leadership of the Communist Party, in the Foley Square trial. On April 6, 1949, he was called as a witness, testifying about his career and training as a Party activist. His testimony was perhaps most useful in that he demonstrated from the content of the training which he had received that the intent of the Communist Party was to overthrow the government of the United States. The trial took almost a year, and all 11 defendants were convicted.

Philbrick was used by the Party for his advertising skills. Another asset was his public role as a Baptist youth leader. After time spent in local party cells in Wakefield and Malden, Massachusetts, he received training in the fundamentals of Marxism–Leninism and worked for the Party in a variety of front groups. Later he was removed from local party work and assigned to a cell of professionals where his main work consisted of working on the 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign of former U.S. Vice President Henry A. Wallace.

While Philbrick was in the Party, Earl Browder, its General Secretary, who was enthusiastic about wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union, and was looking forward to postwar cooperation and growing acceptance of the Communist party by the American public, dissolved the Communist Party and reconstituted it as the Communist Political Association, apparently intending to set the Party on a reformist course. Philbrick himself made a brief show of opposing this new policy—a masterstroke, as the policy was also opposed by William Z. Foster, longtime Chairman of the Communist Party. Shortly thereafter, in July 1945, as a result of the Duclos letter—a letter by a leading French Communist, which actually was a policy directive that originated in Moscow—the Party turned away from Browderism and again took a Marxist–Leninist line, though not completely abandoning the tactics of the united front.

Herbert Arthur Philbrick (May 11, 1915 – August 16, 1993) was a Boston-area advertising executive who was encouraged by the FBI to infiltrate the Communist Party USA between 1940 and 1949. His autobiography was the basis for the 1950s television series I Led 3 Lives.