"It Is the Man"

To the University of North Carolina's scrappy little President Frank Porter Graham, discretion has rarely been the better part of valor. As far back as North Carolina's bloody Gastonia textile strike in 1929, History Professor Graham stuck his academic neck out to fight for a better deal for labor. Over the years, he fought against racial discrimination and restriction of academic freedom. He joined numberless "liberal" committees. Franklin Roosevelt often used him on commissions on social and economic problems.

Some of the committees which Graham joined were Communist-front groups. He sponsored the 1940 and 1941 conferences of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born which is now on Attorney General Tom Clark's list of subversive organizations. In other groups he has joined, Communists have climbed aboard. Most notable of these was the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, of which Graham became the first chairman in 1938. The House Committee on Un-American Activities called it "perhaps the most deviously camouflaged Communist-front organization."

In 1946, Graham became president of the Oak Ridge (Tenn.) Institute of Nuclear Studies, a position in which he was to be given access to confidential U.S. military information. The Security Office of the Atomic Energy Commission took one look at Frank Graham's FBI file, thicker than a metropolitan telephone book, and refused to clear him for access to atomic information. Then the AEC made its own investigation. Last week, it cleared Graham. It was true, the commission conceded, that Graham, in espousing liberal causes, had at times been associated with persons and organizations "influenced by motives or views of Communist derivation." But the commission concluded:

"It must be recognized that it is the man himself the commission is actually concerned with, that the associations are only evidentiary,* and that common sense must be exercised in judging their significance . . . The specific purposes for which he [Graham] had these associations were in keeping with American traditions and principles. Moreover, from the entire record it is clear in Dr. Graham's case that such associations have neither impaired his integrity and independence, nor aroused in him the slightest sympathy for Communism or other anti-democratic or subversive doctrines."

* A new item of bureaucratic gobbledygook defined by Webster as: "relating to, or affording evidence."

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