The Man in the Window

In the raw, early darkness of a Christmas-week evening, Manhattan's slushy 45th Street rustled with the shuffling sound and movement of people. Fifth Avenue's traffic brayed and rumbled close by. But the opened window, 16 floors above the din, was just an anonymous rectangle of light--one of thousands held by the city's glowing towers against the black sky. No one in the streets noticed the man who was silhouetted in its frame. No one saw him start his long, tumbling drop to the street.

He fell on a heap of dirty snow. Passersby stopped, turned, and saw him then; a thin, black-haired man lying broken and dying. The curious gathered, and with them blue-overcoated policemen. Then an ambulance nosed up.

At the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, he was given back his name: his billfold showed that he was Laurence Duggan, 43, of suburban Scarsdale. The routine of police process widened out, reaching for the rest of the story. He was an educated man (Exeter and Harvard '27). He had a wife and four children. He had spent 14 years in the State Department, nine as head of the Latin American Division, four as adviser on political relations. Since 1946 he had held a $15,000-a-year job as president of the Carnegie-financed Institute of International Education, which provided for a flow of exchange students between the U.S. and foreign countries.

An Airplane Ticket. But none of this explained his death. Police, who hurried to the Institute's 16th floor offices, found few clues. Duggan's brown tweed overcoat and his briefcase (which contained a ticket for an airplane trip to Washington the next day) were placed near his desk. His left overshoe was on the floor; he had been wearing only the right one when he fell. Police found no note.

One of the two windows of his office was open. Measuring, the police found that it was raised 28 inches, was 44 inches wide. Its sill was 33 inches above the floor. Was it possible that Duggan, who was slight, but fairly tall (5 ft. 10 in., 140 Ibs.), could have fallen out? How? Or had he jumped? Why?

The police had no quick answers. But when the news of Duggan's death reached Washington, South Dakota's headline-hunting Republican Congressman Karl E. Mundt decided excitedly that he had them all. He called a midnight press conference and made a sensational announcement.

Duggan's name, Mundt said, had cropped up at a secret hearing held by the House Committee on Un-American Activities early in December. At that time, Russian-born Isaac Don Levine, an ex-Hearstling who edits the anti-Communist publication Plain Talk and who collaborated with General W. G. Krivitsky on his memoirs, had made a damaging charge. He said that in 1939 he had heard ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers tell former Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle that Duggan was one of six men from whom Communists had obtained secret documents.

Mundt was asked when the committee would disclose the rest of the six names. His reply put him on a par with J. Parnell Thomas as a stumbling block to a just and objective investigation of Communist activities in the U.S. "We will give them out," he wisecracked, "as they jump out of windows."

Foul Play? The next day the FBI announced that it had questioned Duggan at his home only ten days before his death. It was a "routine" interview, said the FBI.

Then from Washington, onetime Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who had been Duggan's immediate superior in the State Department, sent a telegram to New York's Mayor O'Dwyer which said: "I find it impossible to believe his death was self-inflicted . . . I hope you will [take] every step . . . to find out whether there may not be some other explanation." Mayor O'Dwyer, further spurred by superheated newspaper stories which darkly suggested foul play, put 33 detectives on the case.

Duggan's family believed that he had opened the window to get air, had slipped or fainted, and had fallen. In Scarsdale, his widow, Mrs. Helen Boyd Duggan, a onetime advertising executive, angrily told newsmen: "I deny that my husband had anything to do with Whittaker Chambers or . . . with spying. It's the biggest lot of hooey I ever heard. It just isn't so--any part of it."

Public Servant. Duggan had been in ill health. The family said that he was overworked, had once suffered from ulcers, and still had a weak stomach; he sometimes felt nausea and the need for fresh air. Furthermore, he had not yet fully recovered from a delicate operation for the removal of a spinal disc performed last fall.

Both Welles and former Secretary of State Cordell Hull sprang to Duggan's defense, praised his patriotism. So did dozens of other U.S. citizens. The Columbia Broadcasting System's Edward R. Murrow (who is also chairman of the board of trustees of the Institute of International Education) spoke bitterly over the air after Duggan's death: "A dead man's character is being destroyed . . . Some of the headlines might as well have read, 'Spy Takes Life'. . ."

On the open record, Duggan's career in the State Department was that of a hardworking, conscientious public servant. He had been Under Secretary Welles's lieutenant in plugging for the Good Neighbor policy in Latin America.

Denial. When newsmen caught up with Whittaker Chambers, after yet another session before the New York grand jury investigating Communist activities, he told them that he had never met Duggan, had never received documents from him, had no personal knowledge that he was a Communist. Next day he augmented his statement, without clarifying it, by adding that he had nevertheless "found it necessary to give Duggan's name to Mr. Berle."

So far as hard-digging newsmen were concerned, there was no more solid evidence that Duggan had had knowing contact with Communist espionage. There were indications that he had been friendly with a former State Department official named Noel Field, identified last summer in testimony by Chambers as a member of a Communist apparatus. The New York Daily News quoted Alger Hiss as saying that Duggan was a very good friend of his and that he was a "victim of persecution." Hiss later denied having made the statement.

Torpedo Blast. The charges and countercharges were a torpedo blast to the Un-American Activities Committee, which had taken a new lease on life by proving that its espionage investigation was something more than a "red herring." California's G.O.P. Congressman Richard Nixon beat a quick, strategic retreat via a television broadcast. Said he: "Whittaker Chambers' statement clears Duggan of any implication in the espionage ring." Democratic committee members tore at Mundt like wolves snapping at a fallen fellow. Said Congressman F. Edward Hebert of New Orleans: ". . . a blunder . . . a breach of confidence." Mississippi's loudmouthed old John Rankin cried, self-righteously: "Atrocious."

Attorney General Tom Clark also spoke up. "The evidence [gathered by the FBI] discloses," he said, "that Mr. Duggan was a loyal employee of the United States Government." Later this week on a television program, he added that Duggan had been approached ten years ago by "two persons," but that Duggan had "repulsed them both" and that "we have found no connection between him and any espionage."

His death was still unexplained. At week's end the New York police department made public the result of its special investigation: "Mr. Duggan either accidentally fell or jumped."

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