The Press: Eastland v. the Times

A fresh wave of subpoenas swept info Manhattan in mid-November in a Senate investigation of Communism in the press, radio and TV. They were prompted by the testimony last summer of CBS Correspondent Winston Burdett that he had been a Communist spy (TIME, July 11). Of 35 subpoenas to secret hearings by the Internal Security Subcommittee, 26 went to past or present employees of the New York Times. Last week the Senate investigators called up 18 witnesses for open hearings—and nine of them were on the Times, and two had just left it. The Times promptly accused the subcommittee's leaders of trying not so much to hunt Communists as to harass the Times for editorial views hostile to their own.

"A Lunkhead." For its opening witness in three days of Washington hearings, the subcommittee, headed by Mississippi Democrat James O. Eastland, called slight, white-haired James Glaser, 56, a copyreader on the Fair-Dealing New York Post. Glaser said that he was a Communist when he worked on a copy desk of the Times, which he quit in 1934 to become managing editor of the Daily Worker at a 35% cut in salary. He told a vivid story of his buffeting in that job (see below). Two years later he worked up "the strength" to quit both the party and the paper, and to stop being "a lunkhead," "chump" and "poor, miserable, tragic fool." A completely cooperative witness, Glaser nevertheless protested that "the sole benefit" of his presence at the hearing was "to make a sort of public spectacle of me, because of the dreadful, terrible mistake I made more than 21 years ago."

Another cooperative witness was Clayton Knowles, 46, who from 1947 to 1954 had been one of the Times's most respected Washington correspondents. Testifying in the marble-columned chamber where he had often worked at the press table, Knowles pleaded "extreme naivete" in having joined the Communist Party in 1937 while working for the Long Island Daily Press. He quit two years later.

Knowles told how he had gone to the FBI with his story in 1954 after his name had been mentioned to the subcommittee.

At that time the Times shifted him from Washington to his present job in New York, where he assembles a daily news summary and index. Though he gave the subcommittee names of his Communist cell mates at the Daily Press in 1937-39—the list was not made public—Knowles said that he knew no Communists on the Times. Missouri's Senator Tom Hennings broke into Knowles's testimony to praise his work as a Washington reporter. Later, Hennings taxed Counsel J. G. Sourwine with not giving subcommittee members advance notice of witnesses, and questioned whether any "useful purpose" was served by embarrassing such long-rehabilitated onetime Communists as Knowles.