INVESTIGATIONS: Out of a Man's Past

Seattle newspapers ran headlines when gentlemanly John Stenhouse, chairman of the suburban Mercer Island school board, last month told a congressional hearing that had summoned him as a witness: "I was a member of the Communist Party." For two painful hours Stenhouse, 47, related the story of his past. The son of a British trader, he had worked at the family business in China until the war, then fled with his American-born wife to Los Angeles, where he tried to sell Chinese antiques. When his business failed, he became a machinist, got...