YOUTH: Their Sisters & Their Cousins ...

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Michigan's hidebound Representative Fred L. Crawford knows what headlines are made of; last year he proposed that the U.S. order Russia to disarm or be atomized instead. Last week, with a nudge from the Hearst press, he made another headline. Hearst's Washington bureau had discovered that the head of the Commerce Department's Office of Industry Cooperation, John C. Virden, had a 22-year-old daughter working in Washington for Tass, the official Russian news agency.

Crawford got off a letter to Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer demanding Virden's resignation. Three days later, Virden, a quiet, capable Cleveland manufacturer who called himself "almost violently anti-atheist-Marxist," resigned. His dark-eyed daughter Euphemia was indeed employed by Tass, as a clerk and teletypist. An earnest, idealistic girl, she had gone to Sarah Lawrence College, became interested in Marxism. No amount of argument or entreaty from her father had done any good. So far as he (and the FBI) knew, she was not a card-holding Communist. But when she took the Tass job, Virden had declared it an "overt act," and had refused to communicate with her.

Crowed Crawford: "The Virden case is indeed tragic . . . [But] Federal officials having known Red relatives . . . will save themselves and their Government embarrassment by removing themselves."

This week, Ohio's Republican George Bender told the House: "I urge the Department of Commerce to ... demonstrate our confidence in him by inviting [Virden] to remain."