Mismanaged Heroics

Last Friday, Senator McCarthy and his one and one-half man committee brought Wendell Furry in for his fourth public appearance since last March, and Leon Kamin for his second. Their testimony, and lack of it, even more vividly illustrates our previous view, expressed in six editorials over the last year, that an individual called before any congressional committee should speak fully and openly, and that a person who refuses to answer questions about Communist activities or affiliations, of himself or his confederates, is harming both himself and his country. This is especially important for a teacher, since in education's' present uncertain state of public relations, his silence tacitly incriminates his whole university community.

Furry's and Kamin's performances were damaging in every important respect but one. They rid themselves of the Fifth Amendment, whose previous use had given the impression that they might be shielding themselves from prosecution for some crime. Both testified freely about themselves, but for reasons of conscience, refused to talk about others. Both were cited for contempt. In discarding their constitutional armor and gambling on a favorable decision by the courts, Furry and Kamin were at least assuming full responsibility for their moral decisions, instead of placing most of it on the Corporation. As long as they were using the Fifth Amendment, the University had to defend this privilege as well as its own tenure laws, even though it was not actually sure the men had not committed a crime subject to automatic dismissal.

Furry and Kamin are hoping are hoping the courts will hold that Congressional Committees cannot constitutionally ask them to name other people. They may also hope that McCarthy, like Brother Jenner last year in similar cases, will not bother to press contempt charges. If the two wish to risk their personal freedom for a principle, under our system of government they have a right to do it.

But if their refusal was a show of nobility, it was clumsily managed. Furry, for example, counted off five men who had been Communists with him at MIT, and told where they were. This is as good as naming them, for McCarthy will undoubtedly search out every man on the employment list at Furry's particular radar lab. And these men probably will be found. furry, with his naivete and conflict of loyalties, is hardly the person to judge the security of his fellow scientists. Unknown to Furry, they may have been peddling information to the Russians. Whether they are working for the government now or not, they may be mistakenly recruited for classified work again. Frank testimony would clear up these doubts.

So, while their new testimony indicated greater personal integrity and individual responsibility than they showed in previous hearings, the two men touched off all the other evils that result from refusal to cooperate with committees. The slurs about "Harvard's Fifth Amendment Communists' can be turned to taunts about "contemptuous Communists." The strange but evident public desire to learn all about Communist activity during World War II, frustrated by Furry's refusals, will hunger all the more, giving support to the kind of sweeping accusation and newsprint-aimed question which the one and one-half have popularized. And American education, despite its accomplishments, will remain an open target for unscrupulous politicians. The method of Furry and Kamin, then, for all its justified hatred of McCarthy's methods, and honest loyalty towards friends, is actually giving ammunition to the very forces it seeks to halt.

Furry and Kamin should realize this, and give their information to the FBI or the Massachusetts Committee to Investigate Communism. In so doing, they would be following the advice of two other University teachers, both long-standing friends of civil liberties, Zachariah Chafee and Arthur Sutherland, Jr. In a letter to this paper last year, as relevant now as it was then, they gave men like Furry and Kamin this advice:

"He (the witness) has not option to say, 'I do not approve of this Grand Jury or that Congressional Committee; I dislike its members and its objectives; therefore I will not tell it what I know.' The underlying principle to remember . . . is the duty of the citizen to cooperate in government."