National Affairs: Other Voices

If any loyalty case can have a happy ending, William W. Remington's seemed to have had one. Two years ago, Remington, a boyish-looking Department of Commerce economist, was accused by ex-Communist Courier Elizabeth Bentley of passing wartime secrets to her espionage ring. He was promptly suspended from his $10,330-a-year job. Then the top U.S. loyalty review board studied his case, sent him back to work with $5,000 back pay and a clean bill of health—although his duties had been juggled so that he was burdened with few security decisions. When ex-Spy Bentley repeated her charge on a television show, Remington sued for $100,000 slander, settled out of court, reportedly for $10,000.

Last week 32-year-old Economist Remington learned that the show wasn't over, only the first act. The House Committee on Un-American Activities wanted him to hear excerpts from secret testimony taken from two more ex-Communists: Howard Allen Bridgman, identified as an associate professor at Tufts College in Massachusetts, and Kenneth McConnell, a onetime party organizer. Both had sworn that they knew Remington as a Communist Party member and had sat in cell meetings with him while he worked (during a one-year interlude between his second and third years at Dartmouth) as a messenger for TVA. McConnell recalled that the party had once disciplined Remington for sloppy dressing, had later "induced" him to return to college because Communism needed "educated men as well as workers."

Remington didn't remember McConnell, he told the committee. "I met Bridgman," he added. "If he was a secret Communist I did not know it ... He must have assumed from my [labor union] associations that I was a member of his ilk. I never was . . . And when I say never I mean never, whether at age 3, 18, or 32."

Two days later the committee called Elizabeth Bentley for more secret testimony. Nobody worried too much at this stage whether Remington had been a Communist at age 3 or 18. The question that haunted the committee was whether Remington, at age 32—or the three ex-Communists—had committed perjury.