The Congress: Summer Madness

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In the 28-year history of the House Un-American Activities Committee—more than a quarter-century filled with controversy, color and some pretty interesting characters—Washington had never seen anything quite like last week's hearing. It opened with the noisy appearance in a House caucus room of a young man named Jerry Clyde Rubin, who wore a Revolutionary War uniform and clutched 300 copies of the Declaration of Independence while his woman lawyer screamed, "The police are trying to take away my client's documents!" It never recovered from that tone-setter. From then until adjournment at week's end, the hearing was marked by insults to the committee, vain posturings, ejections by force, arrests and an often unholy din from the audience of 400, many of them hirsute Vietnik types. For sheer summer madness, it set a standard that, hopefully, Washington will be hard put to duplicate.

Quick Controversy. The hearing was called to gather information for a pending bill that would make it a crime, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, to give, solicit or advocate the giving of material aid to "any hostile foreign power"—North Viet Nam, for instance —or to impede the movements of U.S. military personnel and materiel. Some protest groups have collected funds to buy medical supplies for Vietnamese Communists, and on a few occasions have attempted to block troop trains—acts that would be treasonable in war time but are difficult to punish legally in peacetime. Chairman Joe Pool of Texas, sponsor of the bill, and his subcommittee colleagues summoned both the practitioners of these methods and friendly witnesses to appear before them.

The controversy began even before the hearing. The American Civil Liberties Union, which supplied a half-dozen lawyers to represent twelve hostile witnesses, brought suit in Federal Court to prevent the questioning of witnesses on constitutional grounds. The A.C.L.U. charged, even before the hearing opened, that it would exert "an immediate and irreparable chilling effect" on the witnesses' rights under the First Amendment. A longtime challenger of the committee, the A.C.L.U. did not really have much hope of stopping the hearing. But, to nearly everyone's astonishment, District Court Judge Howard Corcoran granted a temporary restraining order to allow a three-judge appeals panel to deal with the constitutional question. Corcoran's action was unprecedented—no judge had ever before enjoined a congressional committee hearing—and it brought a roar of protest from Congressmen. Just before the hearing was to open, a three-judge panel, including Corcoran himself, dissolved the injunction and put off the constitutional question for future deliberation.