Word: matusow
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Senator Eastland mentioned that a Communist-assigned bodyguard was staying with Matusow almost every night. "With whom," he asked, "did you spend the other nights?" "It was a lady friend," replied Matusow. He refused to name her, not out of gallantry alone but because "if you force me to tell. I'll never be able to return there." It was "no lady," shouted Eastland, but "a Communist bodyguard." Matusow insisted that it was a lady. "I did," he snapped, "play chess with a lady on Thursday night...
...Matusow was in good voice and-for part of the time-in good humor. On the stand he idly twisted pipe cleaners into animal forms, shaping a dog, a rabbit and a kangaroo. He testified that he had recently invented "an entertaining, nondestructive toy," but he refused, claiming the immunity granted by the Fifth Amendment, to name the manufacturer for fear of hurting the toy's sales. Curious, Senator Herman Welker persisted: What was the toy? A miniature lie detector? "Well," said Matusow coyly, as the hearing-room crowd roared, "I call it a stringless...
Invisible Pull. But the method in Matusow's mendacity showed up like a red light. Asked about the Communist Party conspiracy, he called it "a lot of unfounded hysteria." He charged that investigating committees "forced me and many others" to bear false witness against Communism. In one remarkable sentence, he orated: "I'm for the country, and I'm for God, and therefore, sir, I can't see myself being anti-Communist...
...Matusow, careful to avoid incriminating himself, was thoroughly briefed by attorneys (including Communist Nathan Witt). In one day he invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a dozen times, and, while flaunting his falsehoods, he never once confessed to perjury. Throughout the hearings Communist Hero Matusow revolved like a sort of human yoyo, pulled carefully back and forth by the party's invisible strings...
Events of the past week indicate that the system is even more unhealthy than was previously apparent. First there was the admission, by an Air Force "security risk" firings were actually probationary employees fired for non-security reasons. Still more upsetting were the continued recantations of Harvey Matusow, Marie Natvig, and Lowell Watson, three former $25-a-day witnesses for the Justice Department who now admit that they lied in their incriminating testimony against suspected Communists. Is it this same type of witness, one wonders, that the Department is shielding when it refuses to let an accused employee confront...