McCarthy v. Harvard

In a twelfth-floor room of the Federal Building in Boston, stands a large map of the U.S., and above it runs the inscription : "Justice is the guarantee of liberty." At the bottom are the names of distinguished Massachusetts jurists--Cushing, Story, Curtis, Gray, Holmes, Moody, Brandeis, Frankfurter.In front of the map one day last week sat a onetime Wisconsin circuit judge, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, busy in active refutation of rumors that he was going to quit the Communist chase and devote himself to less flamboyant pursuits. McCarthy was in full cry after an old quarry: Associate Physics Professor Wendell H. Furry of Harvard --and, through him, Harvard's new President Nathan M. Pusey, who has refused to fire Furry, and who once sponsored a booklet that denounced McCarthy.

Three times before. Furry had gone before congressional investigating committees, and each time he had used the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions about his Communism. At previous interrogations, Furry said that he had not been a Communist after March 1951, but would not say that he had been one before. Last week, to the evident surprise of the hunter, Furry doubled back on the trail. He had made the discovery, he said, that continued reliance on the Fifth Amendment would "bring undue harm to me and to the great institution with which I am connected."

Prosecution v. Persecution. He had, he now testified, joined the Communist Party in 1938, while teaching at Harvard, and had known five other Communists associated with him in secret radar work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1943 to 1945. But he obdurately refused to name his Red friends of the time. He would divulge the names to a grand jury, but only if convinced that the persons involved were guilty of "substantive crime." Sole judge of such guilt would, of course, be Wendell H. Furry.

McCarthy and Furry played a game with the names of the M.I.T. Communists, identifying them as No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, et al. Furry said No. 1 was now teaching in a U.S. university, No. 2 was in private industry, No. 3 was at a British university. The U.S. Senator and the Har vard professor finally tired of what Furry called "a game of 20 questions." Black v. Grey. Another Harvard-- employee. Leon J. Kamin. research assistant in the department of social relations, had gone around with Communism like a man in a revolving door. He was a party member, he told McCarthy, from November 1945 to January 1946, and again from November 1947 to June 1950, when he suffered his final disillusionment while studying psychology at Harvard. Said McCarthy: "You mean to say Harvard converted you against Communism?" Replied Kamin: Yes, in a sense, by teaching him that the world was not all black, that there "were varying shades of grey." Like Furry, Kamin refused to identify others he had known as Communists.* By their stand, the two witnesses gave McCarthy a chance to 1) threaten them with contempt citations, and 2) continue his feud with Harvard and Pusey. He would, he said, with obvious satisfaction, "hate to decimate the Harvard faculty" by sending Furry and Kamin to jail, but that might be the only way of dealing with "Pusey's Fifth Amendment Communists."* Later, asked by newsmen if he might call Dr. Pusey to testify, McCarthy sneered: "I don't see why. He has already made his position quite clear that he will go on maintaining a privileged sanctuary for Fifth Amendment Communists." Next Week: East Lynn. The following day, it was harder to stay with McCarthy than to avoid him. Three men were ejected from the hearing room, among them a suspended General Electric employee from Lynn, Mass, named Nathaniel Mills.

who was playing a return engagement; he had been thrown out by McCarthy once before. In last week's hearing, Mills arose suddenly in the back of the room and shouted: "McCarthy, I accuse you of conspiring with the company and getting the jobs of General Electric people.'' Most of the other spectators shouted.

"Throw him out!" and five marshals did just that, with Mills still yelling, wriggling, kicking and squirming.

Like any good showman, McCarthy scheduled some comic relief. He brought on one Alexander Gregory, also of Lynn, who protested quietly: "I'm not an evil man. No one in Lynn thinks I am evil." In fact, said Gregory, he had never met an "evil Communist." All the party members he knew were "very gentlemanly, honest, conscientious, security-minded persons." McCarthy was surprisingly gentle toward the gentle Mr. Gregory.

By week's end McCarthy's critics could accurately say that he had again failed to dig up any evidence of actual espionage; on the other hand, he had had an admission that a group of Communists worked on a secret M.I.T. project during the war.

* The Harvard Crimson, in an editorial titled "Mismanaged Heroics," this week called on Furry and Kamin to give the FBI the names of Reds they know. * Harvard's faculty numbers some 3,000; to decimate it, Joe would have to multiply his two by 150.

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