A Blow for Whom?

In Manhattan's Federal Detention Headquarters one day last week, top-ranking U.S. Communist Robert G. Thompson, 38, stood in the lunch line three days before he was due to go to trial for his two-year flight from a 1949 conspiracy conviction (TIME, Sept. 7). Suddenly a fellow-prisoner behind him raised a length of lead pipe and brought it down twice on Thompson's head. Thompson slumped to the floor, bloody and unconscious.

Guards who seized the man with the pipe discovered that he had Communist connections of another kind in his record. Alexander Pavlovich, 32, a Yugoslav seaman, had jumped ship in Portland, Ore. in 1951 in a desperate effort to remain in the U.S. Picked up for deportation by immigration authorities, he had unsuccessfully pleaded that sure death faced him in Yugoslavia as an opponent of Marshal Tito's Communist regime. His plea for sanctuary was refused for lack of supporting evidence. In custody, he had tried drastic measures, including slashing his wrists with a razor, to prolong his stay. As prison officials figured it, Pavlovich had attacked Thompson in an attempt to get at least a long U.S. jail sentence before a waiting Yugoslav ship took him home.

Thompson, critically hurt, was taken to a hospital, where surgeons worked for hours to save him. While Communist groups shrilly demanded that "political prisoners" be safeguarded against "murderous attacks" in U.S. jails, embarrassed federal men could not even establish that Pavlovich knew who Thompson was when he hit him. Pavlovich was placed in solitary to await U.S. trial, and the ship for Yugoslavia sailed without him.

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