Word: chasanows
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Three Brave Men (20th Century-Fox) is based on the famous Chasanow case (TIME, May 10, 1954 et seq.), which in one fell scandal discredited the Navy's existing security program. But are bumbling bureaucrats the villains of the piece? Not at all. "This," the studio declares with unblinking self-gratulation, "is the story the Navy wanted told ... of the lengths to which [governmental] agencies will go to safeguard the sacred rights of individuals ... of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy who has the moral courage to discover and publicly admit his mistake...
When the moviemakers are through polishing up the brass, they tell the story of Bernie Goldsmith (Ernest Borgnine)-which is substantially that of Abraham Chasanow. After 22 years of governmental service. Goldsmith is abruptly suspended as a security risk. When the whispering campaign gets going, he is shunned by his neighbors as a Communist, but his friends rally round and. as a studio release somewhat mysteriously explains, "risk public approbation to defend his name." When his lawyer (Ray Milland) wins a hearing several months later, Goldsmith wins a recommendation for reinstatement. Ruling overruled...
...public indignation meetings, force the Navy (Dean Jagger) to reinvestigate the case. The second look reveals that all the information lodged against Goldsmith was obtained from his personal enemies or from well-known cranks (the studio, boldly risking public approbation, calls them "overzealous patriots"). In the end Goldsmith, like Chasanow, wins back his job, along with full back pay. Whereupon the moviemakers timidly but firmly point the obvious moral: in time of ideological war, when it is perhaps essential for the populace to be armed with intellectual weapons, there are bound to be some casualties. There might be fewer...
Several such blatant examples of inequity were corrected only after embarassing public protest. The Air Force removed Lt. Milo Radulovitch as a reserve officer because his sister was a Communist, and the Navy Department suspended a cartographer, Abraham Chasanow, on the basis of derogatory rumors that were proved baseless. Chasanow's case illustrated the injustice to government employees caused by the operations of the Eisenhower program. Under severe economic and financial hardship during his 13-month suspension, Chasanow was denied an opportunity to confront the witnesses who had testified against...
Lewis' Chasanow series had just won the Pulitzer Prize for the best "national reporting" of the year.* After he winds up his affairs on the News, Reporter Tony Lewis, 28, one of the youngest newsmen ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, plans to become a Washington correspondent for the New York Times...