The Man Who Wrote a Book

The long-run melodrama When Did You Stop Beating Anti-Communists? (Senator Joseph McCarthy, producer, director and star) introduced a new performer last week. He was Reed Harris, 43, deputy administrator of the International Information Administration, which includes the Voice of America. Witness Harris showed a bureaucrat's tendency to engage in long-winded arguments with his pursuers; nevertheless, when the curtain fell, he was still ahead of the bloodhounds.

What made Harris an especially inviting quarry was that back in 1932 he had a hasty, hot-eyed book, King Football, which damned the colleges for turning out "regimented lead soldiers of mediocrity." McCarthy waved a copy before televiewers' eyes, quoted long passages with unconcealed relish. Harris pleaded again & again that he wrote the book 21 years ago, that his opinions changed "as I learned more about life." But McCarthy, who seldom gets his investigating hands on anything so tangible as a book, kept baying at his heels hour after hour. The following exchange is a sample of the McCarthy technique:

McCarthy: We are trying to find the key to this fantastic picture in the Voice. You may not be the key. We do not know . . . Now when do you say you became an antiCommunist?

Harris: I have always been opposed to the Communist Party, to the Soviet-controlled mechanisms . . .

McCarthy: Have you always been antiCommunist? Let us forget about this Soviet mechanism.

Harris: Not as long as that word is defined as it was in those days [meaning] collectivist philosophy even as applied in convents and monasteries . . .

McCarthy: We are not talking about Communism in monasteries and convents.

Harris: I know that, Mr. Chairman, but I have to keep the thing in context . . .

McCarthy: Have you always been opposed to Communism?

Harris: The word as it is [used] today, I certainly have been opposed to, yes.

McCarthy: I asked you if you were opposed to Communism.

Harris: I believe in none of [its] teachings now.

Another McCarthy quarry last week was Roger Lyons, the Voice of America's director of religious programming. Another Voice employee testified that he had heard Lyons was an "atheist." Advised of this hearsay testimony, Lyons promptly hustled down to Washington from his office in New York, testified that very afternoon. Sample dialogue:

McCarthy: You do not claim to belong to any religious group?

Lyons: I do not.

McCarthy: How would you describe yourself? Would you describe yourself as an atheist, agnostic, a Christian or Jewish?

Lyons: I am not an atheist or an agnostic. I believe in God.

McCarthy: Do you think that a man who is in charge of religious programming might do a better job if he belonged to some church himself and were a regular churchgoer?

Lyons: Not necessarily . . . We deal with areas of the world that are largely Buddhist, Moslem, Hindu and so forth ...

Lyons went on to say that he had studied philosophy at Columbia University, theology at Union Theological Seminary. He also volunteered the information that he had studied psychology in Switzerland under associates of world-famed Carl (Psychology of the Unconscious) Jung.

McCarthy promptly demanded: "This professor [Jung] does not go to any church or synagogue?"

"I don't know," said Lyons. If asked what McCarthy had proved by his week of interrogating, a TV watcher might well give the same answer.

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