Months later, when I came back from Bavaria, I’d undergone an essential change. I was no longer defensive but was determined to reclaim my self-esteem and fear no cabal of old friends turned to enemies. I landed in New York, and the first person I sought was Budd. Despite the fact that Molly had sent me in Munich Bob Anderson’s beautiful new play, Tea and Sympathy, which he wanted me to direct, a stroke of good fortune indeed; despite the fact that I had long since agreed to direct Tennessee’s Camino Real, a lovely dramatic poem which I could immediately and most happily put on the stage, the project with Budd on the waterfront answered a need that was deeper. It was my reply to the beating I’d taken. The emotion I brought back from Bavaria was not a pretty one; it was a desire for revenge. I would turn the tables on those who’d said I’d lost whatever talent I had, that I would never again do anything bold and worthy, that I would now turn conventional and cautious. I was more determined than ever to make a film about the New York harbor and what went on there, thus to show everyone, including myself, that I hadn’t backed away from my convictions and wasn’t to be insulted or bullied again. I was also determined to show my old “comrades,” those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives as they were not. I’d come back to fight.